Opening of the Lucerne Festival: Are open ends really open?

A detective was also in the audience. Not a real one, though. Swiss actor Pasquale Aleardi, known as Inspector Dupin in the film adaptations of the Jean-Luc Bannalec crime series, attended the opening of the Lucerne Festival alongside numerous other celebrities. This caused a stir among his fans and promptly prompted them to pull out their phones – but ironically, it also suited the occasion. This evening raised all sorts of questions, and a little detective intuition couldn't hurt to answer them.

On opening day in Lucerne, the focus is not just on the social event, but on the central theme of the respective summer season. It is presented to the audience for the first time, in words and sounds. The words, however, remained vague this time. What could the motto "Open End" mean? Festival director Michael Haefliger and Foundation Board Chairman Markus Hongler apparently didn't want to give anything away too quickly. They preferred to circle around the topic, gleefully throwing around a few meaningful terms like "farewell," "future," "memory," and "new beginning," initially causing questioning glances in the KKL.

The welcoming speech by Federal Councilor Albert Rösti didn't make matters any clearer. He thanked the artistic director on behalf of the cantonal government for his work in Lucerne – as is well known, Haefliger will hand over the festival's leadership to Sebastian Nordmann at the end of the year, after 26 seasons . The Minister of Transport and Communications, however, declined to elaborate on the motto. Instead, he recalled the history of the Lucerne festival tradition, established in 1938; during its history, "always new names" have stood at the helm of the institution – "just like in politics," Rösti joked.

Aha, a clue, thinks the imaginary investigator in the audience – "Open End" actually means continuity. Even and especially in times of change. And didn't Haefliger boldly claim at the beginning that it wasn't so much about his personal farewell to the festival? All more or less deliberately laid red herrings. However, they achieved the goal of sensitizing visitors to the ambiguity of the motto. In truth, the coming weeks until September 14 will be about a paradox: the question of how to end without ending. Or, in the language of theater, how to let the curtain fall without suggesting to the audience that everything has been said.

A paradox as a festival motto – that's new and appealing, but also an intellectual challenge. Fortunately, the music program on the opening evening made the idea much more vivid than the speakers. After all, "open endings" have always been a central theme in music. And not only in famous fragments like Mozart's Requiem or Schubert's "Unfinished," but also in works that are complete, that is, that appear "finished" on the outside. In Lucerne, the way forward is pointed by a composition by Pierre Boulez, the co-founder and first director of the Festival Academy, to whom a special focus is dedicated on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

The ensemble piece "Mémoriale (. . . explosante-fixe. . . Originel)," performed by flautist Jacques Zoon together with eight colleagues from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, takes material from an older work, develops it further, and, in a sense, clothes it anew. It is music about music, very typical of Boulez, which makes it clear that a compositional idea need not always have a single, eternally valid manifestation; any number of other creative interpretations are conceivable.

This idea was also the key to the main work of the opening concert, Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 10, which Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (LFO) performed at the KKL for the first time since 2016. The five-movement piece from 1910 is a fascinating torso. Mahler sketched the symphony from the first to the last bar, but never completed it in a final score. Therefore, at least seven performance versions have been created to date, each of which processes Mahler's rich material in its own unique way—for example, by supplementing the instrumentation—and thus making it playable for a large orchestra. Chailly chose the best-known and still most convincing arrangement, the "Performing Version" by Deryck Cooke.

But what do we hear: Is that really Mahler? This question can hold one's breath for the more than eighty minutes of the performance. All the more so as Chailly's interpretation noticeably sharpens the music with the LFO, which is pushed to its limits but also exceptionally committed. So much so that in places it sounds more radical and progressive than anything with which Schoenberg and his students ushered in musical modernism at the same time.

But Chailly, alongside Simon Rattle the most passionate advocate of such complete performances of the Tenth Symphony for years, clearly has a plan in mind with this uncompromising reading: He wants to shatter the cherished image that sees Mahler merely as a death-seeking late Romantic at the end of an era. Instead, he portrays him as a visionary Expressionist looking toward the future.

This is indeed a novel perspective, one that is not coincidentally heard in Rattle's interpretations of Mahler's late works. And one is thoroughly shaken up in another way this evening as well. The intense emotionality of the performance, which is palpable in Chailly and the musicians, reveals that all involved are also aware of the music's moving biographical background.

It has long been known that the Tenth is a nearly note-for-note record of the life crisis Mahler experienced in the summer of 1910 as a result of his wife Alma's affair with the future Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Only recently has it been discovered that the Mahler couple, in despair over the situation, may have even considered taking poison together .

The discussion about whether one needs to know such private background information about a piece of music is legitimate, but in the case of the Tenth, it's pointless. The avant-garde nature of the work can, in many details, only be explained by the exceptional personal circumstances. Chailly illustrates the magnitude of the crisis in his own way: Before the Tenth, he conducts Mahler's Rückert Lieder in a chamber music-like, refined interpretation with mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča, whose expression is also internalized.

Garanča sings these songs in a dreamy, almost detached manner. Only in "Liebst du um Schönheit," placed at the center of the cycle, does she allow unwavering emotion to shine through. This seems particularly fitting in the context of the program: The enchanting love song was a gift to Alma from the early days of their marriage. Eight years later, the tables had turned; there was no future for the marriage. But Gustav Mahler composed music that nevertheless pointed far into the future and continues to preoccupy the music world today. A memorable version of "Open End."