Felix Mendelssohn

From Chernex to the Dent de Jaman, with Pauline

In the summer of 1831 Mendelssohn was twenty-two and crossed Switzerland mostly on foot. Five years earlier, in 1826, he had composed the celebrated overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the incidental music that would later yield the famous Wedding March. On the heights above Montreux, at Chernex, he stopped “to drink a warm milk” before crossing the Col de Jaman; a young country girl “wearing her Vaud hat”, named Pauline, took his luggage into her carrying basket and walked with him up towards the Dent de Jaman.

They reached Allières around midday; he took his bag back, shook her hand and went down alone, through the meadows, to Château-d’Oex. Of this corner of the world he kept a dazzled memory: “How beautiful the paths of Montreux are! Of all the countries I know, the most beautiful is the canton of Vaud. If God granted me a long old age, that is where I would wish to live” (“Lettres inédites”, 1864).

Swiss melodies in his symphonies

Switzerland had marked his music long before this journey. As a child, in 1821, he had already discovered it on a family stay. Back in Berlin, he slipped tunes heard there into his youthful string symphonies: the Scherzo of the Ninth bears the note “Schweizerlied”, and that of the Eleventh takes up an Emmental wedding song. The Vaud Riviera thus left its mark on the work of one of the greatest Romantics.

Montreux, a magnet for the Romantics

Mendelssohn was not alone. As long as the Alps were taken for a frightening wall, people avoided them; but once the minds of the Enlightenment, Saussure, Haller and Rousseau, had revealed their beauty, Romantic poets and musicians came here in search of inspiration. The boldest challenged the summits, as he did; others preferred the gentleness of the shores, like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss or, before them, Richard Wagner. Brahms, too, loved this lake.