Discover the Summer Festival

“Everything has an end, except the sausage – which has two,” goes a German saying that has even made it into a pop song. Yet a number of musical works have no end at all, rather than one or even two – including such monuments of classical music as Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Bruckner’s Ninth, and Gustav Mahler’s Tenth. Exploring the theme “Open End,” the 2025 Summer Festival will focus on these kinds of works.

The theme also looks at musical works intentionally describing what is without end, the infinite. Take, for example, Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), which attempt to depict eternity in their final bars. Or the endless chains of trills with which Ludwig van Beethoven’s final piano sonata (Op. 111) fades away.

Still other compositions are cyclical or were conceived as works-in-progress. Pierre Boulez, the founder of the Lucerne Festival Academy – who was born exactly 100 years ago and who is a major focus this summer –  offers a prominent example of this with his lifework: he never regarded a composition as complete but always returned to revise his ongoing creations, crafting created alternative versions.

And then there are the works that were continued by others: Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for example, is likely one of the most frequently arranged pieces of classical music. Luciano Berio, in turn, developed a symphonic fragment by Franz Schubert into his orchestral piece Rendering. In any case, you can never reach an end when it comes to great music. Each interpretation opens up new perspectives.

There’s still another reason behind this year’s “Open End” Festival theme: Michael Haefliger will hand on the Festival’s directorship to Sebastian Nordmann at the end of the year – marking not an end, but a smooth transition.