Marcus Maroney had a distressing experience:

>I was shocked that I had to find out about [Paul Sacher's] death in the
>newsgroups!!

Here is a belated Obituary to remind us of his influence on 20th Century
music:

   Paul Sacher

   From GUARDIAN May 27th,1999

   He used his vast wealth as a great musical patron, while his own work
   as a conductor reflected the musical history of the century

   By Sibylle Ehrismann

   Paul Sacher, one of the world's richest men, an artist of unusual
   stature, one of the last great musical patrons of our century and
   also a long-time director of the pharmaceuticals giant Hoffman-La
   Roche, has died aged 93.

   Strongly rooted in Switzerland, and above all in his home city of
   Basle, he was also a man of the world and had close contact with
   composers, performers and musicologists from many countries.  Besides
   conducting his two chamber orchestras, with which he brought to light
   and performed old and new music, he was also a guest director in
   Europe's great cultural centres, including London and at the
   Glyndebourne and Aldeburgh festivals.  His unfailing ability to seek
   out quality music, his tireless pioneering spirit and his strong
   commitment to contemporary music were without parallel in Switzerland
   and rare anywhere.

   Paul Sacher did not come from a wealthy background.  He was the first
   child of August Sacher, who worked for a haulage company, and Anna
   Sacher-Durr, the daughter of a Basle country farmer.  It was his
   mother, Sacher once said with a chuckle, who ruled the roost with a
   firm hand.  This headstrong `farming' background from his mother's
   side shaped Sacher's life.  Despite his later wealth he never lost
   the instinct for the simple and the genuine.  And what made this
   unpretentious man into a great musical patron of the 20th century
   was his inspired intuition.

   The now famous family home at Schonenberg in Pratteln, near Basle,
   which the Sachers built in 1936, also reflected the farming background.
   The plans for this grand villa in a rural setting were drawn up by
   Sacher's wife, the sculptor Maja Sacher-Stehlin.  The young widow of
   Emanuel Hoffmann, the heir of the chemical concern Hoffmann-La Roche
   who had died in a road accident at the age of 34, she married Sacher
   in 1934.  Maja Sacher had wanted to be an architect, but this was
   not a career option for women at the time.  She turned to sculpture
   instead.  At Paul Sacher's side, she was not only a friendly and
   witty hostess to the well-known artists who were reg ularly invited
   to Schonenberg, but also a strong-willed patron of the arts in her
   own right with a particular commitment to the avant-garde.

   After marrying Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin, Paul Sacher, trained as a
   violinist, conductor and musicologist, had to involve himself with
   the affairs of the Hoffmann-La Roche concern.  He joined the board
   of directors in 1938 to represent his wife's under-age children from
   her first marriage.  This director's post, which he left only in 1996
   after his 90th birthday, gave Sacher the freedom to pursue his
   world-wide artistic activities and patronage.

   But the then 32-year-old musician could already look back on an
   impressive artistic career.  In 1926 he had founded the Basle Chamber
   Orchestra, one of the world's first chamber orchestras, and two years
   later the Basle Chamber Choir.  In 1931 he had become, at 25, the
   youngest-ever member of the executive committee of the Swiss Musicians'
   Union.  And at 27 he became director of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis,
   founded by him and now with a world-wide reputation, one of the first
   training centres for music-making with authentic period instruments.

   With his own chamber orchestra, Sacher wanted to create a contrast
   to the established concert scene, which was dominated by the classical
   and romantic repertory.  He was particularly interested in unexplored
   early music and madrigals, which he performed with his choir, but
   also in unknown pieces by Mozart and Haydn, which he premiered in
   Switzerland.  The rediscovery of Mozart's cassations, marches and
   serenades as well as the early Mozart and Haydn symphonies was largely
   his work.  Thus the Basle premiere of Mozart's then virtually unknown
   opera Idomeneo on May 13, 1931, under Sacher's direction, helped
   restore this work to its rightful place in the musical canon.

   This pioneering enterprise in the field of early music required a
   tremendous amount of work, since at the time little material was
   available in edited form: manuscripts had to be located and copied,
   the voices separated out, and correct, historically-based indications
   had to be provided.  For this painstaking work Sacher relied on a
   highly talented expert (a `genius', in his words), the music historian
   and teacher, Ina Lohr.

   Sacher's performances of contemporary music also required intensive
   involvement with the score.  In this context it is notable that he
   was as committed to sponsoring composers from the Swiss musical scene,
   internationally rather peripheral, as he was interested in commissioning
   leading foreign composers.  Not only did he premiere works he commis
   sioned, he also put them in the repertory, took them on tour, and
   introduced them to a wider public through radio performances and
   recordings.  And with the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle, which
   possesses unpublished material from many composers, he established
   what is now one of the most important centres for the study of
   20th-century music.

   In his deeply committed work as a conductor, Sacher reflected the
   musical history of our century: from the neo-baroque and classicism
   to 12-tone music and atonality.  Among the many great com posers who
   wrote masterpieces for him were Hindemith, Bartok, Honegger, Martin,
   Burkhard, Stravinsky, Martinu, Krenek, Lutoslawski, Fortner, Henze,
   Rihm, Boulez, Berio, Halffter, Kelterborn, Moret, Dutilleux, Carter,
   Britten and Tippett.  Although he sponsored a wide range of composers,
   Sacher's stylistic preferences were not difficult to detect.  He
   clearly preferred linear composition, tonality and formal discipline,
   but also rhythmic vitality, musicality and sensuous tone-colouring.
   Most of the composers commissioned by him wrote for the musical
   theatre and thus had a good instinct for musical dramaturgy and
   singability.  One of Sacher's primary concerns as a conductor was to
   make the new works accessible and understandable for his audience.
   His programming, his ability subtly to juxtapose old and new works,
   has become legendary.

   Sacher's link with British music is based on his early discovery of
   Henry Purcell.  In 1928, shortly after founding the Basle chamber
   orchestra, he conducted Purcell's music for the tragedy Abdelazer
   and the opera Dido And Aeneas in a single evening.  Dido And Aeneas
   became one of his favourite works, to which he remained loyal with
   regular performances for the rest of his life.  He was a long-time
   close friend of Benjamin Britten, some of whose major works he
   premiered in Switzerland.  As guest conductor of the Collegium Musicum
   Zurich, founded by Sacher in 1941, Britten conducted and performed
   his song cycle Les Illuminations and the atmospheric Serenade for
   Tenor, Horn and Strings, together with Peter Pears.  Michael Tippett's
   Sellinger's Round, a diverti mento for chamber orchestra, was
   commissioned by Sacher.  This has become a widely loved masterpiece.
   But Sacher was also committed to the younger generation of British
   composers.  In the 1980s, for instance, he introduced the unusual
   music of Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle to his Zurich
   public.

   Sacher worked as a guest conductor in Britain on numerous occasions.
   His first artistic contact with the BBC was in 1938, when he conducted
   the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of excerpts from The Face
   of Isaiah by the Swiss composer Willy Burkhard.

   Closer co-operation followed after the second world war and especially
   in the 1950s.  As a guest conductor Sacher introduced the British
   public to the music of Frank Martin, Arthur Honegger, Bohuslav Martinu
   and above all Igor Stravinsky.  On January 2, 1953 he conducted the
   Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the European premiere of the suite
   from Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress; this was only shortly
   after Stravinsky had directed the opera's premiere in Venice.  Sacher
   conducted this work on four occasions at the Glyndebourne Festival
   after 1954.  At Glyndebourne, where he conducted most of his operas,
   he paid tribute to Mozart, his favourite composer, with performances
   of The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute.  Sacher also made his
   mark at the Aldeburgh Festival, in 1971 conducting the English Chamber
   Orchestra in the premiere of Richard Rodney Bennett's Concerto for
   Oboe and String Orchestra, with the Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger as
   soloist.

   Sacher received many honours for his tireless and important efforts,
   above all for contemporary music world-wide.  He once said of them
   in his typical half-serious, half-joking way: `Above all, they make
   you realise you're getting older.'

   His wife died in 1989, and he is survived by their step-children.
   Sibylle Ehrismann Paul Sacher, conductor and composers' patron,
   born April 28, 1906; died May 26, 1999

James Kearney
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