Klosters Music – Musical tourism

Although Mozart also travelled to Switzerland, it did not influence his work. This may have been due to the fact that he saw the mountains at most from a distance. Who knows if they would have impressed him if he had come closer to them than in Bern. For him, travelling was not an activity of recreation and education, but nothing but the most strenuous part of his child prodigy profession.

Only the generations after him was it allowed to lift one's gaze and let it wander in order to let one's own thoughts have an effect on oneself, which lifted and let one's own thoughts wander. Not only the stoic mountain world, but also folk music, local color and forces of nature had a lasting effect on the musical minds, whether painters, poets or composers. The foreignness they saw did not remain without consequences for artistic production. Artists and hosts, foreigners and locals mutually benefited from what they had not known before.

The nineteenth century is rich in confrontations with experiences in foreign countries, which were not least nature experiences of city dwellers. Whether Mendelssohn's «Hebrides» or Nietzsche's «Zarathustra», whether Byron's «Childe Harold's Pilgrimage», which inspired Berlioz to «Harold en Italie», or Liszt's «Anneés de pèlerinage», the reference to the never before seen and to nature was always unmistakable. Travel and recognition, movement and cognition had become one. Switzerland, as a pioneer of "tourism", has benefited from this, as have those who never tired of describing it as a diverse paradise with occasional hellish crashes.

At the piano, Oliver Schnyder shows the worlds in which Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, who were repeatedly inspired by Switzerland, moved, and Alain Claude Sulzer talks about the discoveries that had to be made in Switzerland.

Works:
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Prelude and Fugue in E minor, op. 35 No. 1
Lieder ohne Worte, op. 62 No. 6 in D major «Frühlingslied»
Lieder ohne Worte, op. 67 No. 2 in F sharp minor

Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
Années de pèlerinage, Première Année («Suisse»), p. 160 No. 6 «Vallée d'Obermann»
Années de pèlerinage, Première Année («Suisse»), p. 160 No. 2 «Au lac de Wallenstadt»
Années de pèlerinage, Première Année («Suisse»), p. 160 No. 9 «Cloches de Genève»

Soloist:
Alain Claude Sulzer, Texts & Reading
Oliver Schnyder, piano