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Lucerne Festival Theater Project Killed by Vote

An unusual episode in classical music philanthropy — the effort to build a theater for the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland to produce operatic and experimental works — came to an apparent end on Monday when Swiss officials voted it down.

The vote, by members of Lucerne’s cantonal parliament, effectively killed the project. The new theater was a key part of an effort to compete with other major European festivals like those in Salzburg, Austria, and Aix-en-Provence, France.

The project was the vexed beneficiary of one of the largest single donations in classical music history. In 2007, Christof Engelhorn, a wealthy patron, made a pledge that was worth roughly $137 million at the time.

He died before the money was paid, which led to a legal battle over the donation. In 2014, a court in Bermuda, where the trust holding the money was based, ruled that his pledge had been binding, but that the funds did not have to be paid until it was demonstrated that the project could win all necessary government approvals and that its building and operating costs could be covered.

The Salle Modulable foundation seeking to build the theater set to work on a feasibility study and a site was chosen along the shores of Lake Lucerne, next to the festival’s sleek concert hall known as the KKL Luzern.

But the theater’s supporters found themselves working in a difficult political environment in Switzerland, seeking to augment Mr. Engelhorn’s donation with public money at a moment when Swiss officials were grappling with austerity measures and budget cuts. On Monday, Lucerne’s parliament took a vote on a preliminary appropriation, and it failed, 62 to 51.

Plans for the theater, which was to have adjustable walls that could be configured in a variety of ways, were first dreamed up decades ago by the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who saw such spaces as necessary for the kind of multidisciplinary experimental works that were then just coming into vogue. After failing to get the theater built in Paris, Mr. Boulez, who in his last years directed the Lucerne Festival’s modern-music academy, interested the festival in the idea. He died this year.

Hubert Achermann, the chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees, said in a statement that the vote was “shortsighted and discouraging.”

Michael Haefliger, the festival’s executive and artistic director, said that organizers would “actively pursue our current planning vision to include high-class opera productions in the festival in the near future” and that they would seek new partners to try to do so.

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