Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) was at once one of the most adored pianists of his time, a composer and a statesman, briefly Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Poland in 1919. From 1899 he lived on the Vaud Riviera, at Riond-Bosson, near Morges. The Riviera owes him a famous act of commitment: during the First World War, it was in Vevey that he founded, with the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, a relief committee for the victims of the war in Poland. An honorary citizen of Morges, Lausanne and Vevey, he gave his name to a boulevard in the latter.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski: the pianist, the president and Vevey

A relief committee founded in Vevey

Rich and famous, Paderewski had bought the Riond-Bosson estate near Morges in 1897, settling there from 1899 and devoting himself to composition. The war turned him away from the piano for a time: in 1914 he founded in Vevey, with the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Nobel laureate in literature, a general relief committee for the victims of the war in Poland, of which he was vice-president (Ville de Vevey ↗). Relayed by a hundred and seventy-four local committees around the world, it raised nearly twenty million Swiss francs. Sienkiewicz himself died in Vevey in 1916.

In 1919 Paderewski became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the young Polish Republic, and signed the Treaty of Versailles on its behalf. The Riviera made him an honorary citizen, Morges and Vevey in 1925, Lausanne in 1933; France would raise him to Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour in 1929. In Vevey, a boulevard bears his name.

Music, from Vevey to the Salle Paderewski

In Vevey, Paderewski had a weighty friend in the mayor Eugène Couvreu, a music lover and cellist, who drew him into several musical events. In 1913, at the Fêtes musicales de Vevey launched by the composer Gustave Doret, he played two pianos with Camille Saint-Saëns: an enlarged photograph of the three men still hangs in the reception of the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes. Doret and Paderewski were bound by a deep friendship.

He also knew how to thank the Riviera: on 6 January 1925 he gave a benefit concert at the Casino du Rivage in Vevey for the victims of floods that had struck Ticino. And in Lausanne, the great concert hall of the Casino de Montbenon bears his name: on 16 December 1938 it was he himself who, with a concert at the cathedral, funded its construction.