Travel brought them home: composers on the search for identity

An excerpt from the essay “It’s the mix that makes it: music and identity” by Michael Haefliger

If you want to explore your own identity, you must first get to know the identity of others. This is not just a realization arising from today’s globalized world. From Mozart to Mahler, famous composers have found their identity because they discovered a new perspective of themselves reflected in the mirror held up to them by strange surroundings.

Michael Haefliger has been filling the concert halls at the Lucerne Festival for 18 years. © Photo: Marco Borggreve