Peter Hagmann's last visit to the Tonhalle Zurich last January was for the young Leonkoro Quartet. The review of the concert in his blog "Mittwochs um zwölf" was typical of him: in his clear, unagitated and elegant language, he not only described what he had heard. He also analysed the aesthetic tradition of this ensemble. And far beyond the question of good or less good, he conveyed the "incredibly compact, warm, sensual tone" and made the "rough edges" of the interpretation tangible.
It was also typical that - after decades of music criticism - he engaged with a young ensemble with undiminished curiosity and openness. Peter Hagmann, born in Basel in 1950, holds a doctorate in musicology and is a qualified organist. He has attended thousands of concerts since 1972, first in his home town and from 1986 as the first music critic for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. From 1989 until his retirement in 2015, he shaped the NZZ's features section as an editor and highly regarded writer throughout the German-speaking world. His knowledge and experience were immense, but even greater was his undiminished enthusiasm and critical interest in everything to do with music after all these years.
This also made him an incorruptible and attentive companion for the musical institutions. Before Ilona Schmiel joined the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft Zürich as artistic director, he visited her in Bonn: "He wanted to know who was coming to Zurich, he wanted to carefully prepare the transition in leadership. That made a deep impression on me right from the start," she says. The contact later went far beyond the encounters at the concert: "In preparation for our CD box set for the 150th anniversary, we spent hours listening through the entire archive together in the radio studio. It was a wonderful exchange with him."
Interested, generous, humorous
Many other members of the orchestra and the management team also had contact with him. Concertmaster Julia Becker remembers a critic "with whom you could really discuss things: He had his opinion, but he was also interested in other perspectives." Together with Michaela Braun, Head of Marketing and Communication, he had planned to try out the new Tonhalle organ, "it's incredibly sad that it won't happen now". Susanne Kübler, music editor of the Tages-Anzeiger for many years before joining the TGZ, did not see him as a competitor, but as a colleague: "When I started, he had already been in the business for twenty years - and was extremely generous when it came to sharing contacts and experience. And even later, when the situation in cultural journalism became increasingly difficult, he was a committed, friendly ally in every respect."
Katharine Jackson, who had known Peter Hagmann for many years as a press officer, remembers the first time they met. "It was in the Tinguely Museum, in the midst of the rotating and rattling works of art: a very tall man, an impressive figure, dressed all in black. When I told him about it years later, he asked: "But I didn't bite, did I?" That too was typical of Peter Hagmann: his quick wit, his humour and his almost youthful mischief, which led him to sit down in the smallest room in the Tonhalle Zurich three years ago for a video for our Advent calendar.
