Paul Sacher

Paul Sacher was born in Basel in April 1906. He studied conducting with Felix Weingartner and musicology with Karl Nef at the University of Basel, and at twenty-one founded the Basel Chamber Orchestra in 1926 — the chamber orchestra that became his primary vehicle for the next sixty-six years. His marriage in 1934 to Maja Stehlin-Hoffmann-La Roche, widow of the founder of the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche, gave him the financial means to commission new works at unprecedented scale.

The list of works he commissioned and premiered runs to roughly two hundred and includes Bartók’s *Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta* (1936) and the *Divertimento* (1939), Stravinsky’s *Concerto in D for strings* (1946), Honegger’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, Strauss’s *Metamorphosen* (1946), Hindemith’s *Concerto for Orchestra*, Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Britten’s *Cantata academica*, Berio’s *Chemins II*, and substantial works by Boulez, Henze, Birtwistle, Lutosławski, Carter, Maderna, Maxwell Davies and many others. He founded the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in 1933 as an institute for the historical performance of early music. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, established in 1973, holds the manuscripts of much of the twentieth-century repertoire he commissioned.

Sacher died in Basel in May 1999 at the age of ninety-three. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his work with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the contemporary repertoire of which he was the leading patron.