Festival: City of music

Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum.

Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum. But he had visited before, most notably in 1859, when he finished Tristan und Isolde in the Hotel Schweizerhof; but also in 1850, a visit recorded with surprising sympathy by Stravinsky, a late convert to Wagner, when he visited Lucerne for the last time in 1969: ‘I went from Triebschen to the Schwann Hotel for tea. Sitting there — where Wagner, not yet amnestied, followed with watch in hand the first performance of Lohengrin in Weimar — it seemed impossible that my own childhood could be so far away, and impossible that that world of feeling could be extinct, except in me.’