NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Haefliger has made a life out of building music festivals.
A Juilliard-trained violinist, he came up with the idea not long after finishing school to create the Davos Festival in Switzerland for young artists. Then, a quarter century ago, he took over the established, expansive Lucerne Festival, which opens on Friday with a performance by the orchestra he founded.
Now 63, Haefliger has enjoyed rare success in classical music: His long tenure at Lucerne has been defined not only by sustainability and survival through crises like the coronavirus pandemic, but also by enormous growth.
He started the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with the eminent conductor Claudio Abbado; with the iconoclast Pierre Boulez, he created the festival’s academy; when Japan was hit by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 2011, he spearheaded Ark Nova, an inflatable, portable concert hall that brought the festival to Matsushima.
Over time, Haeflinger has lost major collaborators. Abbado died in 2014; Boulez, two years later. Wolfgang Rihm, Boulez’s successor, died last month. (Riccardo Chailly, who took over the Festival Orchestra after Abbado, will lead Rihm’s “Ernster Gesang” at the opening concert.)
“He was quite a strong figure,” Haefliger said of Rihm in a recent phone interview. “The way he saw things and programming was very open. He didn’t remain in his own school and tradition, which is important today in contemporary music.”
Rihm’s contributions to the 2025 festival were settled before his death. That year will also be Haefliger’s farewell; he steps down as artistic and executive director next summer. What comes after that for the academy, and Lucerne in general, will be up to the next leader, Sebastian Nordmann, from the Konzerthaus in Berlin.
Over a recent lunch in New York, Haefliger, who grew up in Germany but has been based in Switzerland for most of his adult life, reflected on his 25 years at the Lucerne Festival, and how building institutions and programs like Ark Nova has “always been a part of me.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: How did you end up founding the Davos Festival out of school?
A: When I passed some of my friends, I said: “Hey, you want to do a festival with me? I think I might have the place.” I went to the town of Davos, where my father was born. I had the idea that I would do a festival with young artists only. I offered a plan for one week, and a budget.
And so it happened, and that was the start of my career. We had a lot of contemporary music, and it was like an anti-festival: anti-establishment, no stars, no Champagne, more improvised, introducing the productions the evening of the performance. Eventually I got a lot of attention in Switzerland and Germany, which led to Lucerne, which was like the complete opposite.
Q: Lucerne may be more old-fashioned, but you have institutionalized putting female conductors and underrepresented composers in front of audiences who most likely just want the classics. What’s interesting and risky about this is that the festival is sustained by private funding.
A: It’s not the case that Switzerland is just a green place where there are artistically no problems. We have conservative audiences, and we have structured the program so we can find everybody’s needs. So, if I have a big sponsor who says, “I want Tchaikovsky,” then I will most likely have something to offer. I think we’ve done over 250 commissions, though.
Q: How did some of your big initiatives at Lucerne come about?
A: I think the changing point for the Lucerne Festival was the new hall [designed by Jean Nouvel and completed in 2000], which inspired the challenge to redefine the festival. The two people I spoke to first were Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez. One day, Claudio said he wanted to do this orchestra, with artist friends that he had worked with at the Berlin Philharmonic and other orchestras. So, I called these people up and asked, “Are you interested?” Those were the shortest phone calls of my life.
Q: Was it difficult to finance?
A: The budget was just 2 million euros (about $2.3 million at the time) more, so it wasn’t an expensive orchestra. It’s never that there’s money first and then the art follows; I still believe that when you have a great artistic culture, the money comes. The academy cost 4 million more, but I found the funders from people, foundations and companies.
Q: How quick were audiences to buy into the Festival Orchestra and academy?
A: Some of them came in quite quickly with Abbado on the program. The academy, maybe, was a little bit more difficult because it was contemporary music. But in the long run it all worked out very well.
Q: What’s the average percentage of capacity sold with tickets?
A: Well, right now we’re around 85%. Before COVID, we were at 93. It’s coming back, but it’s not quite the same.
Q: You canceled just one festival during the pandemic.
A: In the summer of 2020, we had to cancel basically everything. Instead we had, for 10 days, what we called Life Is Life. It was actually fun. We had the Festival Orchestra with Herbert Blomstedt, as lively as ever, and Martha Argerich playing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. We streamed it, and then we had chamber music. Cecilia Bartoli even came.
Q: That wasn’t the only moment of difficulty you’ve had. Last year, when Vladimir Jurowski was conducting the Bayerische Staatsorchester, the performance was stopped by climate demonstrators whom he actually invited to speak rather then send them away.
A: I talked to them, and they were very young people. I think they wanted to do no harm, but some people in the audience were not so happy about it.
Q: But you are in the position of having to please people in the audience, which probably includes sponsors, as well as Jurowski, who is more on the side of the demonstrators.
A: You don’t make everyone happy. You just try to stay calm, get everybody calm, calm down the artist. The audience was upset. There were some people that I talked with even a week later, to calm them down.
Q: Another time when you probably had to placate people close to the festival was in 2019. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that someone in festival management had accused you of bullying, and that the board had commissioned an outside investigation. Within the month, the investigation found no evidence of harassment. Still, it can be difficult to have allegations against you out there in the media.
A: Well, the board was helping a lot.
Q: You didn’t have to deal with sponsors and donors?
A: No, because the board was behind me. I didn’t accept any wrongdoing, and the board addressed the issue.
Q: There is a world in which you could have built the Festival Orchestra and the academy, and been out within 10 years. But you stayed. What kept you at Lucerne?
A: I wanted to keep them up, but then there were other projects. Ark Nova came along, and then there were themes around female conductors and diversity. There was always something pulling me.
Q: Why did 2025 feel like an appropriate time to leave?
A: I was thinking that maybe I could still do something somewhere else, make a mark in a different way with all my experience. Lucerne is beautiful, but I also want to see something else.
Q: What do you see yourself doing?
A: Right now, it’s open.
Q: Do you want to take a break first, or do you want to jump into something new?
A: Ideally? No break. I want to keep going.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
