Seven Nations, One Theatre, One Evening - Eurovision Begins

MAY 15 1956 · 12:00

EBU · 1956 Placement: Institutional debut · Venue: Teatro Kursaal · Host: Lugano, Switzerland · Type: national debut · Broadcast: pre color On the evening of May 24, 1956, seven European broadcasters, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and Italy, pooled their signals through the nascent European Broadcasting Union network and produced a single live musical variety programme from the Teatro Kursaal in Lugano. Each country submitted two songs. A closed jury of national delegates voted, the results were not publicly announced by country, and Lys Assia's 'Refrain' was declared the first winner in front of a small auditorium audience. The event lasted roughly 100 minutes, was presented by Lohengrin Filipello in Italian, and was the first functioning demonstration of live pan-European cultural broadcasting as a technical reality. No full video recording of the broadcast is widely considered to have survived; what exists is reportedly Vincenzo Vicari's photography, a small amount of film footage of Lys Assia's reprise, and audio recordings of the musical performances. The entire institutional edifice of Eurovision, now spanning 60+ years, 50+ countries, and an audience of hundreds of millions, begins in this room, on this evening, with these seven signals. Context The EBU had been founded in 1950 and the Eurovision technical network had been running small-scale broadcasts, royal events, papal ceremonies, sports, for several years. The Song Contest concept was reportedly modelled on Italy's Sanremo Festival and proposed by Marcel Bezençon of Swiss broadcaster SRG SSR as a peacetime cultural demonstration, eleven years after the end of the Second World War. The closed-jury format and two-songs-per-country rule were both used only in 1956 and never repeated. Legacy Lugano 1956 is the institutional origin point of the entire modern Eurovision apparatus and of pan-European live-broadcast culture more broadly. Every rule and ritual, the voting, the host format, the country-by-country running order, the staging, the Eurovision fanfare, either begins here or is built in conscious reference to what began here. Lys Assia's win gave Switzerland a cultural narrative the country has since invoked at every subsequent Eurovision milestone. Mythology The number of participating countries is reportedly sometimes given as eight or nine; the confirmed number is seven. The contest is also sometimes described as having been 'watched by millions', 1956 television penetration in the participating countries was extremely limited and the audience was reportedly small.