The stunning lakeside city attracted Rachmaninov and Wagner, and is now home to a premier piano festival, writes Stephen Pritchard
MUSICAL DESTINATIONS
Speed excited Rachmaninov. The composer and pianist’s solemn presence on the concert platform hid a personality that rejoiced in the roar of the combustion engine. Beneath that famously austere exterior lurked a love for shiny new saloons, elegant sedans and fast aeroplanes. And when in 1934 he moved his family into their new villa on the north shore of Lake Lucerne he added an additional thrill – a sleek new speedboat.
Like so many other musicians, Rachmaninov was drawn to the beauty of Lucerne and its majestic lake. He honeymooned here in 1902 with his new wife Natalia, and 30 years later, during his restless lifetime exile from his beloved Russia, Lucerne seemed the ideal place to put down roots. He bought a lakeside estate on the Hertenstein promontory, pulled down the old house and built a fine modernist replacement. Today, marking the 150th anniversary of its illustrious owner’s birth, the Bauhaus-style Villa Senar is open to the public for the first time (its name combines the first two letters of Sergei and Natalia, with the ‘r’ for Rachmaninov as a final flourish).
As Fiona Maddocks records in Goodbye Russia, her new book on Rachmaninov’s exile, a fine grand piano stands in his studio, a room at the far corner of the building, down three steps and somewhat out of earshot of the rest of the house. It was a magnificent 60th‑birthday present to the composer from Steinway & Sons.
He was to compose his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini at this instrument, and it’s a cause of immense pride to Numa Bischof Ullmann, the charismatic artistic director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, that the composer’s grandson, Alexander, gave permission for the piano to be moved to the orchestra’s KKL concert hall in 2019 for a special performance and recording of the piece by Behzod Abduraimov, conducted by James Gaffigan. The programme included Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony, also written at Villa Senar.
Ullmann is the prime mover behind the city’s newest winter festival, ‘Le Piano Symphonique’, a celebration of the instrument he describes as ‘the navel of the world of music’. The festival proclaims that ‘symphonies are written on the piano, even operas and pious masses.
