French song & variety
Carlo Boller
A choir director, conductor and composer, Carlo Boller (1896-1952) founded “La Chanson de Montreux” in 1939 and brought it to international renown. The author of more than 450 compositions and arrangements drawn from the popular repertoire, he remains a great figure of choral music in French-speaking Switzerland and rests in the Clarens cemetery.
Carlo Boller: the violinist who became the choral voice of Montreux
A violinist broken by his own hand
Born in Menton in 1896, Charles-Henri Boller, Carlo, spent his youth in Montreux. He was a precocious violinist: at sixteen he already held the solo violin desk in the Kursaal orchestra, under a young conductor named Ernest Ansermet.
But an incurable cramp in his left hand forced him to give up a soloist’s career. Rather than abandon music, he changed doors: he went to study conducting and composition at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, from 1924 to 1932, in the class of Vincent d’Indy.
La Chanson de Montreux
Back on the Riviera, he settled in 1935 at the Villa Sainte-Claire in Montreux, Boller became a sought-after choir director. He led several ensembles in French-speaking Switzerland, from La Tour-de-Peilz to Bulle and Neuchâtel.
In 1939 he founded La Chanson de Montreux, a choir that quickly achieved national and then international fame. His name remains tied to this ensemble, which gave the town a choral voice of its own.
More than 450 works, and the Clarens cemetery
Boller left more than 450 compositions and arrangements, drawn mostly from the popular repertoire. His best-known piece, La Pastorale gruérienne (1946), and his large-scale “festivals” such as the oratorio Images de mon pays made him a central figure of French-Swiss choral music.
He died in Lausanne on 23 January 1952, following an operation. He rests in the Clarens cemetery, above Montreux, where the musicians Nikita Magaloff, Joseph Szigeti and Horatiu Radulescu also lie.
Related places
▸Cimetière de ClarensCemeteryOpen the place →
Photo coming soonThe peaceful cemetery above Clarens where David Richards, the producer of Mountain Studios, rests.