In winter, migratory birds congregate on Lake Zurich — red-necked grebes, red-crested pochards, yellow-legged gulls and many more. But the lake has an even more exotic winter visitor: a floating big beast that is turquoise, weighs 92 tonnes and glows in the dark.
Every autumn for the past 27 years the Herzbaracke, which bills itself as the “schwimmende Salon Theater”, has brought more than a splash of colour to the otherwise dour cheeks of the reinsurance hub of Europe. From its berth among the waterfowl it attracts visitors with a happy combination of music, laughter and clinking glassware.
As I approach along the quayside, it looks a bit like an overly turreted and unusually lurid cricket pavilion, in search of a pitch. Inside, it spirits its clientele away into Montmartre in the era of Toulouse Lautrec: all Belle Époque flounce but with portholes.
The interior is wood-panelled and Persian-carpeted, lit by a mix of candles, vintage chandeliers and table lamps, some of them frilly, others in coloured glass. The shadows are filled with curiosities: wind-up gramophones, music boxes, barrel organs, stuffed birds, children’s toys, model ships, a samovar and a porcelain cow.
There’s a bar at one end, submerged under a feast of collectibles, and a stage at the other hidden behind velvet drapes. In between them is space for 40 customers, many of them enjoying a four-course dinner, cooked in a kitchen behind the bar and served by waitresses in five-petticoat flamenco dresses. That is followed by the evening’s performance, which these days is mostly music, although there are also poetry evenings and theatrical monologues.
Presiding over everything is Federico Emanuel Pfaffen, in bowler hat and braces. When everyone is assembled he rings the dinner bell and extemporises a wide-ranging, witty speech about love and democracy, before handing over to his partner, Nicole Gabathuler, for details of a menu “so good for you that you will leave this place healthier than when you arrived”.
Then, after the main course (it is good), he introduces the show, on the day of my visit the Albin Brun Quartet (accordion, clarinet, drums and double bass), who play a whimsical blend of Swiss-Bulgarian jazz folk.
Afterwards, over dessert, he tells me that Herzbaracke means “heart attack” in local dialect, a name that came to him when he was struggling with one of its biggest wooden beams during construction. Herzbaracke’s season runs from early November until mid-March on the quay alongside Zurich’s Bellevueplatz. It then moves about 28km along the shore to the harbour in the town of Rapperswil, where the run continues until late April. Towing the theatre, admits Pfaffen, is often a challenge. “There are sometimes big waves,” he says. “It moves so slowly, I feel like Huckleberry Finn [on his raft].”
After Rapperswil it sits on a summer anchorage and Pfaffen heads off to his own summer mooring, a lakeside house in Sweden, to recuperate.
His is a punishing schedule, hosting seven nights a week for five months, working 12 to 14-hour days, trying to turn a profit from a theatre with only 40 seats. “It needs all my energy. I feel as if I have the whole 92 tonnes on my shoulders.”
In years gone by he would sleep onboard, to prevent theft, while leaving the door unlocked. “Robbers here have a sense of honour. If the door is unlocked, they won’t come in.”
Now that he is 76, he’s thinking of handing the heart attack over to someone else. But that doesn’t mean retirement. He is currently building the skeleton of a ship inside a deconsecrated Zurich church that will become a new performance space. Unusual perhaps, but a lot less onerous to run than a theatre that swims.
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Andrew Eames was a guest of Zürich Tourism (zuerich.com) and Swiss International Air Lines (swiss.com). Tickets for Herzbaracke performances cost SFr48 (£42), and the four course dinner from SFr72; see herzbaracke.ch
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