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.