Gstaad Menuhin Festival: Heralding a new era of change

The Gstaad Menuhin Festival started life in 1957 by the great violinist and humanist Yehudi Menuhin. He had been relaxing with his family in the Swiss mountain air of Gstaad, where he had a holiday chalet, and was persuaded by the town’s tourism director Paul Valentin to give local two concerts ‘to enrich the dull summer months’.

In August of that year, Menuhin invited his close musical friends – cellist Maurice Gendron, pianist and composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears – to perform two concerts of Lieder, chamber music and solo Bach with him in the historic 15th-century St Maurice Church (Mauritiuskirche) in the adjoining village of Saanen.

Following Menuhin’s inspiration and ‘vision’, the festival has thrived ever since, showcasing the classical music world’s biggest names, as well as rising young musicians. Established repertoire sits alongside new compositions and premieres, with chamber and orchestral music filling stunning old churches in the nearby villages of Lauenen, Gsteig, Zweisimmen, Vers l’Eglise, Rougement, Château d’Oex.

From 1989 major orchestral and semi-staged opera performances were introduced in the Gstaad Tent, an exhibition hall seating up to 2,000 people. Over the years the Gstaad Menuhin Festival has developed into one of the standout events in the world’s classical music calendar, with some 60 concerts running from mid-July to early-September. In recent years, the festival has attracted artists including Maxim Vengerov, Sir András Schiff, Sol Gabetta, Cecilia Bartoli, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Jonas Kaufmann and Jaap van Zweden.

Following Menuhin’s death in 1999, Christoph Müller – a young cellist from the Basel Chamber Orchestra – was appointed as artistic director. He has developed Menuhin’s ‘vision’, adding a week of events for amateur orchestral players and subsequently the Gstaad Academy, which offers coaching by established ‘greats’ for aspiring young musicians in conducting, vocal, strings and Baroque playing.

Each edition of the festival is given ‘artistic’ themes for its music programmes, drawing on places, nature and human traits for inspiration. In 2018, for instance, the festival paid homage to the Alps – unsurprising due to its location within the Swiss Alps. The programmes within that festival incorporated the impact of mighty Alpine scenery and dramatic surroundings. The region’s stormy weather took centre stage, quoting an 1831 Mendelssohn letter from the nearby village of Boltigen about the mountain thunder, lightning and torrential rain generating respect for mountain weather. Works to highlight the theme that year included Brahms’s First Symphony, with its ‘Alphorn’ melody inspired by the time the composer spent on holiday in Switzerland; Strauss’s Alpine Symphony; Tchaikovsky’s hat tip to Lord Byron’s Alpine drama in his Manfred Symphony; and Mendelssohn’s ‘Swiss’ Symphony. After the festival’s Alps season, it survived the Covid-19 pandemic with imagination and boldness, with a three-year cycle drawing on the musically inspiring cities of ‘Paris’, ‘London’, and in 2022 ‘Vienna’.

‘Paris’ aimed to paint the artistic atmosphere of the ‘City of Light’, its memories and yearnings, expressed by the music of its ‘typically French’ composers. ‘London’, Menuhin’s home for many years, portrayed the city as a hub of music-making throughout history, visited by the great and the good from the European musical world, including Handel, Mozart and Mendelssohn. The season also celebrated the best of British, showcasing the 20th-century musical delights of Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams and Britten. In 2022, the festival celebrated Vienna, the home of so much wonderful music, with the joyous waltzes of Johann Strauss. It also paid homage to Beethoven on his 250th anniversary with a performance of the composer’s only opera Fidelio, as well as a range of Lieder and chamber music by Schubert.

Change: Humility, Transformation, Migration

As the GMF ‘Vienna’ edition was drawing to a close, artistic director Christoph Müller set out his plans for the next three-year cycle, beginning with the 67th edition of the festival in 2023. He and the GMF team noted how much the world had changed since the last three-year cycle had been planned, with social unrest increasing around Europe and beyond, and growing international economic challenges. There are also worldwide threats from climate change, something that is visible in the Alps around Gstaad with the nearby melting Les Diablerets glacier. It’s the first time in living memory a snow-free Alpine pass in the Col de Zanfleuron has emerged. Following the humanistic thinking of the festival’s founding father and guiding spirit, Yehudi Menuhin, Müller expressed the view that music in its own right might not change the world, but it can definitely contribute to it.

Accordingly, the decision was taken to launch a three-year programme, ‘Change’. Each year within the series would focus on a related topic: in 2023 ‘Humility’ (aspects of nature, role models and faith), in 2024 ‘Transformation’ (historical, social, technological and spiritual aspects) and in 2025 ‘Migration’ (music and exile). Each summer the festival would present three or four original programmes reflecting these challenges, under the direction of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, ambassador for the ‘Music for the Planet’ cycle.

Managing director Lukas Wittermann would continue the festival’s ongoing work to reduce its carbon emissions of its entire operation at all events, including office, mobility, audience and artist overnight stays. Since early 2022 the GMF had been analysing its CO2 emissions in collaboration with the ‘myclimate’ foundation, and would monitor the ongoing results closely, with the conclusions serving as the basis of a comprehensive sustainability strategy. However, Müller, Wittermann and the GMF team stressed that none of the above would detract from Menuhin’s ‘vision’ and the long-standing artistic excellence of the festival.

2023 ‘Humility’

Müller’s vision for the 2023 Gstaad Menuhin Festival is for humility to be seen as a virtue – it’s something that runs through much of Menuhin’s approach to life and music-making, instilled in him by his teacher George Enescu.

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach also promotes humility among musicians, with its its universally applicable ideas. Brahms expressed the view that if one studied Bach they would find everything within his music, while Albert Einstein described the B-minor Mass as the greatest artwork of all ages and people. Bach’s music will indeed play a central role in the 2023 festival, coordinated by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with three ‘Music for the Planet’ concerts, and many other fine musicians, including pianists Maria João Pires and Francesco Piemontesi as artists in residence, Jaap van Zweden, Mitsuko Uchida, as well as orchestras including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Israel Philharmonic and the resident Gstaad Festival Orchestra. At the four Academies, conducting will be led by the inspirational Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who is of course well known to UK audiences from her time at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Performances will include works which ask questions about humility to its audiences. Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony – does it show the humility of mankind towards supernatural forces?’ Strauss’s ‘Heldenleben’ – did the ‘hero’ show humility in his closing scenes?; and a semi-staged performance of Puccini’s Tosca – did the painter Cavaradossi in the church show humility?

The 2023 Gstaad Menuhin Festival will run from 14 July to 2 September. The full programme and complete list of outstanding artists can be seen on the GMF website at gstaadmenuhinfestival.ch/en from 12 December 2022, with online tickets available from 20 December 2022 for concerts in the festival Tent, and for other concerts from 1 February 2023.

Desmond Cecil is a representative from the Gstaad Menuhin Festival. He was a Swiss professional violinist in his youth, studying with Max Rostal, before becoming a British diplomat in embassies around the world and being awarded a CMG from the Queen. He does much pro bono work with arts organisations, such as the Gstaad Menuhin Festival. His memoir ‘The Wandering Civil Servant of Stradivarius’ was published by Quartet Books in 2021, and he is donating all royalties to charities to help young musicians (Classical Music Magazine, Spring 2022 – ‘Strings to his bow’).