Swiss Chamber Orchestras 1920-2020

24 November 2020

Switzerland has no Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin. Yet in the 1920s, the country brought about a (forgotten) musical revolution.

It began what would later be called the “Roaring Twenties” — an era of, by and for the avant-garde in art. In classical music at the time, the great romantic orchestras still set the tone.

The Swiss composer and conductor Alexander Schaichet (1887-1964) founded the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (Kammerorchester Zürich) in 1920, the first in the world. In 1926, the Basel chamber orchestra, conducted by Paul Sacher (1906-1999), followed. Sacher also founded the Collegium Musicum Zurich in 1941.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Swiss chamber orchestras also symbolised resistance to European dictatorships. While dictatorships used music to propagate their ideologies, Richard Wagner’s works serving as a notorious example, the chamber orchestras chose a different path.

On the other hand, Chamber orchestras played modern, Baroque, or Renaissance music that did not focus on a single country or national identity.

Moreover, the (small) chamber orchestras often played with changing conductors. These reminded more of Mozart’s lead violinists than of the usually long dominance of conductors of the great symphony orchestras.

The chamber orchestras ventured into musical experiments. Musically, they were and are rather basic democracies. In this respect, it is no coincidence that Switzerland is and was the cradle of chamber orchestras and has been a musical world player ever since.