{"id":4061,"date":"2026-06-22T13:50:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T17:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=4061"},"modified":"2026-06-22T13:50:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T17:50:45","slug":"honoring-rachmaninoff-and-dishonoring-wagner-on-lake-lucerne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2026\/06\/honoring-rachmaninoff-and-dishonoring-wagner-on-lake-lucerne.html","title":{"rendered":"Honoring Rachmaninoff and Dishonoring Wagner on Lake Lucerne"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a>
Senar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Switzerland\u2019s idyllic Lake Lucerne, bounded by majestic mountains, was famously the site of two composer\u2019s homes.\u00a0Sergei Rachmaninoff built Senar (an acronym for SErgei and NAtalia Rachmaninoff) on land purchased in 1930. From 1932 until 1939, it was his annual residence from May to August.\u00a0Richard Wagner rented Tribschen, a short boat ride from Lucerne, from 1866 to 1872.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both homes proved ideal retreats. Senar hosted the happiest years of Rachmaninoff\u2019s exile in the West. Wagner, in Swiss exile, enjoyed his happiest years anywhere. Both accommodated large and close-knit households, including children and dogs. Both hosted distinguished visitors. Each furnished a sanctum without becoming cut off from the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senar, built to Rachmaninoff\u2019s specifications, was notably progressive for its time. Its clean lines, its eschewal of clutter and adornment document a Bauhaus influence. Both the house and grounds are spacious. This is where Rachmaninoff envisioned being buried — but his death occurred in wartime and the grave, incongruously, is situated in a cemetery north of New York City. Thanks to the Rachmaninoff Foundation, the house remains largely as Rachmaninoff left it. To the original furnishings, the foundation has added a deft assortment of photographs and memorabilia. The music room includes Rachmaninoff\u2019s piano and his composer\u2019s desk with its pencils, pens, and cigarettes. Visitors stroll the house and grounds as they wish. There is no gift shop.\u00a0\u00a0His friends Alexander and Katherine Swann, in a much-quoted reminiscence, perceived Rachmaninoff as \u201calone in spirit and everlastingly homesick for Russia. The Russian spirit and habits were all-powerful in him.\u201d They also reported that they \u201cpractically never saw him annoyed, displeased, fussing, or excited.\u201d And that \u201che did everything quietly and firmly; hesitation was alien to his nature.\u201d\u00a0Today, Senar palpitates with the composer\u2019s unseen presence. It evokes his implacable poise and sovereign humanity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
Tribschen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Tribschen, centuries old, is a handsome three-story manor house on a hill. As with Senar, the site is close to the water. Though the original furnishings are not preserved, the downstairs rooms are decorated with appropriate paintings and furnishings. The wide staircase is where Wagner\u2019s Siegfried Idyll<\/em> was first performed \u2013 as a surprise birthday gift to his wife Cosima, in bed upstairs with their newborn son Siegfried. This legendary vignette is revived with each performance of the work, in which the slumbering child is sublimely evoked amid whimsical allusions to the heroic exploits of his operatic namesake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wagner\u2019s remarkable Tribschen output additionally included parts of\u00a0Die Meistersinger<\/em>,\u00a0Siegfried,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Gotterdammerung<\/em>. At Senar, Rachmaninoff\u2019s dormant creative gift revived. He there composed his Third Symphony and \u2013 a masterpiece in which the rhythms of American jazz infiltrate a succession of pungent mood pictures — the\u00a0Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini<\/em> (facsimiles of both manuscripts sit on his composer’s table, inviting inspection).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tribschen is administered by the city of Lucerne, which also oversees an adjoining swimming facility.  Leaving the small wooden dock and climbing the path to the house, I was surrounded by sun-bathing youngsters. Inside, I discovered the third floor closed. The entire second floor was devoted to an exhibit titled \u201cWagner Taboo? Jewish Perspectives.\u201d To be sure, Wagner\u2019s anti-Semitism is an inescapable fact and \u2013 alas \u2013 newly pertinent in today\u2019s Europe. It is also an inexhaustible focus of scholarship and debate. Any exhibit attempting to frame it will itself be incomplete and controversial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWagner Taboo?\u201d comprises a series of installations featuring notable Jews, not always musicians, who condoned or condemned Richard Wagner. Additional attention is devoted to Wagner\u2019s notorious 1850 essay \u201cJews in Music\u201d \u2013 a pamphlet both egregious and harmful.  The conductor Hermann Levi, the pianist Carl Tausig, and the soprano Lilli Lehmann, among the most prominent Jews who effusively admired Wagner the man, are all represented. Among the naysayers the curators have chosen Albert Einstein, who hated Wagner\u2019s music, and the tenor Heinrich Sondheim, who refused to sing Wagner and once engaged in a public altercation with him. Though the precise circumstances of this shouting match will never be known, the exhibit implies that Wagner\u2019s antagonism was aroused by Sondheim\u2019s religion.  But this cannot be the whole story. For \u2013 as the exhibit, so far as I could tell, never acknowledges \u2013 Wagner\u2019s wide circle of friends and acquaintances was at all time packed with Jews with whom he maintained warm relationships. This was as much a signature of \u201cWagner and the Jews\u201d as his anti-Semitic rants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWagner Taboo?\u201d omits, for instance, the impresario Angelo Neumann, who toured the Ring<\/em> throughout Europe and wrote an affectionate book-length memoir, Recollections of Wagner<\/em>, in which he describes himself reeling at the news of Wagner\u2019s death (\u201cI felt within my soul that a god had left this earth\u201d). Is Albert Einstein, who never met Wagner, a more credible authority? From the panel featuring Leopold Sachse we learn that he directed Ring<\/em> performances at the Met in the 1930s. Far more prominent, in those same performances, were the conductor Artur Bodanzky and the singers Friedrich Schorr and Emanuel List \u2013 all Jews (with Schorr a cantor\u2019s son). The panel for Gustav Mahler cites Mahler\u2019s well-known description of Mime, in the opera Siegfried,<\/em> as a neurotic “Jewish type.\u201c Does this mean that Mahler condemned Wagner? The rest of that Mahler quote, uncited, reads: \u201cI know only one Mime, and that is me. You wouldn\u2019t believe what there is in that part, or what I could make of it.\u201d Notwithstanding the historic premises, notwithstanding the photographs and paintings, Wagner\u2019s own presence at Tribschen is today extinguished except as a fiendish specter requiring urgent remedial attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachmaninoff, too, is a permanent topic of controversy. I\u2019ve never heard anyone accuse him of anti-Semitism. But he has long been reviled in some quarters as a recidivist merchandiser of kitsch. More substantively, his relationship to the contemporary world is complex and elusive. Rachmaninoff was no revanchist snob, only in love with the past. He adored piloting his motorboat. Driving a motor-car, he testified, evinced an \u201cinner clam\u201d resembling the satisfactions of conducting an orchestra. He spoke up for Gershwin, relished Art Tatum, and once wrote that \u201cthe seed of the future music of American lies in a true Negro music.\u201d  His transcription of Tchaikovsky\u2019s \u201cLullaby\u201d \u2013 the last music he wrote \u2013 ends with a bluesy nightclub progression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At home, Rachmaninoff spoke Russian and maintained Russian customs. He took American citizenship belatedly, in 1943. He considered it \u201cdisgraceful\u201d that he never fully mastered English. He courteously adapted yet stayed an interior course anchored by a loving family and loving friends, by servants, a chef, and a chauffeur all of whom were Russian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On rare occasions, American journalists were privileged to glimpse the magnitude of Rachmaninoff\u2019s displacement. In 1926, a New Yorker<\/em> reporter visited his five-story Riverside Drive home and left a description that Senar recapitulates: \u201cWhile waiting for the appearance of one of his daughters, who were always his emissaries, the caller became conscious of a suzerainty of order; of punctilious nobility of a fair, natural elegance.” A year earlier, the Musical Observer<\/em> witnessed an encounter in Rachmaninoff\u2019s Carnegie Hall dressing room. Konstantin Stanislavsky\u2019s Moscow Art Theatre was performing in New York:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe actors and actresses . . . almost surrounded him. Some of the men kissed him and he them in real Russian stye. They exchanged a few words in the tempo of a chant before an altar. Then for a minute or two they spoke not a word. The Moscow players simply looked at the great Moscow musician in reverent silence. Such devotion, such poise, such childlike sincerity, I never saw before . . . Then [the actors] walked away one by one, like so many children . . . The master\u2019s gaze was fixed on them, and he waved at the last actor who looked back as he went out of the door. . . I am not ashamed to admit that the sanctity of this scene moved me to tears. And from the quick movement of his eyelids I could notice that the master\u2019s eyes were not altogether dry either. . . . It was a sacrament.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spurning the modernist thicket, Rachmaninoff the composer was to some cowardly. He could equally be understood as defiant. All this, and more, could generate a timely Rachmaninoff exhibit. It\u2019s the kind of thing the Rachmaninoff Foundation does. Its current projects include a commissioned orchestration of the\u00a0Corelli<\/em>\u00a0Variations and a Zurich Opera “Rachmaninoff Tryptic” comprising the composer’s three one-act operas . At Senar, the foundation presents concerts and lectures (including the talk with music on \u201cRachmaninoff and Nostalgia\u201d that I delivered last Friday). But Senar would not be an appropriate location for an exhibit of any kind \u2013 it would impinge.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Tribschen is not the place to inquire whether Richard Wagner\u2019s operas should be taboo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read a pertinent blog post arguing that Wagner was \u201cnot a monster,\u201d and exploring his personal relationships with Jewish colleagues and friends, click here<\/a><\/strong>.    <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Switzerland\u2019s idyllic Lake Lucerne, bounded by majestic mountains, was famously the site of two composer\u2019s homes.\u00a0Sergei Rachmaninoff built Senar (an acronym for SErgei and NAtalia Rachmaninoff) on land purchased in 1930. From 1932 until 1939, it was his annual residence from May to August.\u00a0Richard Wagner rented Tribschen, a short boat ride from Lucerne, from 1866 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-13v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4061"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4074,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions\/4074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}