Still waters run deep in Switzerland

It’s not all about mountains, high finance and punctual trains – dive into Lucerne and you’ll discover plenty more, says Steven King

In Lucerne the other day, though I was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, I stepped into a Chinese restaurant in the old town. The restaurant was empty apart from a chap polishing a wine glass who looked up and asked in perfect English: “Are you perhaps looking for Mr Wagner?”

“I am.”

“He’s just over there,” said the waiter, gesturing with a tilt of his head towards a small, modestly framed picture on the wall.

And so he was. The great Richard Wagner himself, scowling severely and looking a little flushed thanks to the rosy glow cast by the silk lantern-style lighting.

Wagner lived in Lucerne for six years with his mistress Cosima, who became his second wife – they married in Lucerne, in fact – along with their children, stepchildren, a love child or two and a sequence of dogs. Apparently, Wagner, who was always more of a dog person than a people person, would come every afternoon with a shaggy black Newfoundland called Russ to an inn on this site for a glass of wine and a bit of meine Zeit.

In 1959, the inn became the Li Tai Pe, the first Chinese restaurant in Lucerne – to local diners it must have been the culinary equivalent of the Tristan chord. It’s very much to the credit of the management that they continue not only to honour the memory of the august, if complicated, dog-loving, solo-drinking composer, but also to welcome strangers who come to gawp briefly at his likeness with no intention of sitting down to spin a lazy Susan.

It’s things like this that make me so fond of Switzerland. There’s more to it than punctual trains, posh chocolate and numbered bank accounts. This is also the country that gave the world the Red Cross, dadaism and Velcro.

A friend of mine lives 15 minutes or so from St Moritz in a village where rites and rituals that probably predate Christianity, and possibly the period of Roman occupation, are still enthusiastically observed. There, during the festival of Chalandamarz, on March 1, gangs of local boys, tasked with driving away the spirit of winter, rampage through the streets in antique costumes, chanting in the Romansh dialect and making a racket with cowbells known as plumpas. Having worked themselves into a frenzy with all the chanting and plumpa abuse, the kiddies then set about lashing the ground with enormous Indiana Jones-style whips.

In short, Switzerland is a still-watersrun-deep kind of place.

Having said all that, it’s possible that the waters in Lucerne may be somewhat stiller and not quite so deep as those in certain other parts of the country. Lucerne has not, historically, been a hotbed of dissent or upheaval, like Geneva and Zurich. Nor is it noted for its reformers and radicals, with the glorious exception of William Tell – who’d be an even more glorious exception if he’d been real.

In the end, though, such quibbles vanish in the face of the city’s outright gorgeousness. Some say its setting is the loveliest in all Switzerland. The avenue of chestnut trees along one side of the lake; the jagged, snow-hooded perimeter of the Alps looming above the opposite shore. The fairy-tale old town, with its spires, turrets and ancient fortifications, and its extraordinary wooden footbridge, the 600-year-old Kappellbrücke, spanning the River Reuss.

Lucerne’s summer music festival is among the world’s best, but regardless of the time of year, don’t miss the chance to take in a performance at the Jean Nouvel-designed concert hall (kklluzern.ch). The first festival, in 1938, was performed barely 10 minutes away, on the lawns of the house where Wagner and Cosima lived. The house is now a museum (richard-wagner-museum. ch), which, among other things, contains the most famous staircase in musical history – the one where, on Christmas morning 1870, Wagner quietly lined up an orchestra before waking his wife with a new composition, the lustrous, rapturous Siegfried Idyll.

Near the central railway station, the Rosengart Collection of fine art (rosengart.ch) is a treasure trove of late Picassos. Yet more startling, in a way, is the art that covers so many of the walls in the old town. There’s a concentration of murals around Weinmarkt square. My own favourite is on the façade of a 16th-century pharmacy: a vibrant, serpentine design that radiates rude good health, but also bears the maudlin slogan “Amor medicabilis nullius herbis” – a paraphrase of a line by Ovid, meaning, roughly, “There ain’t no cure for love.”

Mount Pilatus glowers over the city and can be reached by the world’s steepest cogwheel railway (pilatus.ch). But for those with a head for serious heights and a taste for the sublime, a day-trip to the Jungfraujoch and the Sphinx Observatory (jungfrau.ch), more than 11,000ft above sea level, is unforgettable.

There’s no better base camp than the Palace hotel – lately reborn as the Mandarin Oriental Palace Luzern – and in particular its Panoramic Rooftop Terrace Suite, whose elevated corner position gives 360-degree views of the whole astonishing panorama.

The Palace opened in 1906, but I doubt it has ever looked so good or felt so fresh as it does today – luminous, airy, delicately scented with bergamot and pine needles. Moving the front door has had a transformative effect. You now enter from one end of the building, not, as in the past, from the middle, so you’ve got practically its whole length stretching out before you.

The characterful belle époque elements have been meticulously preserved. The more time you spend in it, the more you’re likely to appreciate the attention to detail that’s gone into its restoration. You might notice, for example, the way the palette of green, white, salmon-pink and gold in the hotel’s main dining room echoes that of the 16th-century Jesuit Church on Bahnhofstrasse; or how the butterfly joints in many of the bespoke wooden cabinets recall both the origins of the Mandarin Oriental brand in Asia and the actual butterflies that proliferate in the mountains in the summertime.

On my way to Lucerne, I’d spent the night in the Palace’s sister property, the

Mandarin Oriental Geneva. This was supposedly the first new hotel to open in Europe after the Second World War. It’s still remarkable, even in a city full of remarkable hotels. Streamlined mid-century modernism on the outside, luscious art-deco opulence on the inside – tending towards the pharaonic in some of the upper-storey suites. The effect is ageless and cosmopolitan, an impression that’s been enhanced over the years by its excellent restaurants, among them my new favourite, Yakumanka, the lively and laid-back Peruvian cebicheria where I had dinner. It was teeming with locals as well as hotel guests, the food topnotch, the atmosphere terrific.

I suspect the same will be true of the Palace. Though only one of its four restaurants was open at the time of my visit – the eclectic, vegetable-forward MOzern Bar & Brasserie – the other dining spaces looked equally impressive, and there was a palpable sense of ambition and excitement among the staff. Who knows? These new restaurants may yet prove to be as disruptive to the Lucerne dining scene as the Li Tai Pe was when it opened 63 years ago. Not only that, but the Palace is dog-friendly to boot. Wagner would feel right at home.

i Like much of Switzerland, Lucerne is beautiful – but also full of surprises g The Mandarin Oriental Palace Luzern is a great place to base yourself