Igor Stravinski

A Russian family settles by the lake

Igor Stravinsky arrived in Clarens at the end of the summer of 1910, with his wife, his two children and two servants. He was twenty-eight and had just had his first great success with “The Firebird”.

He did not settle into a house but moved from address to address: the Pension des Tilleuls, the Hôtel du Châtelard, the Hôtel des Crêtes, then the house “La Pervenche”. He stayed in the region until 1915, before moving to Morges and then to France in 1920. Those five years on the Riviera were the most decisive of his composing life.

A room eight feet square

The work that would tip twentieth-century music on its axis was not written in a drawing room overlooking the lake. Through the winter of 1911-1912, Stravinsky worked in Clarens in a tiny, almost empty room: a closet roughly eight feet square, furnished with a muted upright piano, a table and two chairs.

It was there, in that cupboard, that the hammered rhythms and dissonances of “The Rite of Spring” took shape, after “The Firebird” (1910) and “Petrushka” (1911), his third great ballet.

“Completed in Clarens, March 8, 1913”

On 8 March 1913, Stravinsky finished the complete orchestral score. He signed and dated it in his own hand: “completed in Clarens, March 8, 1913”.

That inscription is what ties the work definitively to Montreux. No plaque would have been enough: it is the manuscript itself that names the town.

The Paris scandal

Eighty-two days later, on 29 May 1913, “The Rite of Spring” was premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, conducted by Pierre Monteux.

The uproar began during the Introduction and swelled as the dancers appeared. It soon became impossible to hear the music. Derisive laughter and din drowned out even the voice of Nijinsky, shouting step numbers to the dancers from the wings. Around forty members of the audience were ejected.

The performance nevertheless ran to the end, the disturbance subsiding during the second part, and the evening closed with curtain calls. The work written in a cupboard in Clarens had just carried music into another century.

On his trail today

In Clarens a street is named rue du Sacre du Printemps, and a plaque marks the Tavel district where Stravinsky worked. The composer’s statue stands in front of the Auditorium Stravinski, the large hall opened in 1993 that bears his name and is the heart of the Montreux Jazz Festival.

His piano, built in Russia around 1880, is kept at the Musée de Montreux, in the room devoted to famous guests and residents.