French song & variety
Pierre Dudan
Pierre Dudan (1916-1984) was born in Moscow to a Russian musician mother and a Vaudois father, Camille Dudan, then a tutor in tsarist Russia. The family fled the Bolshevik revolution in early 1918 and returned to Switzerland. His father became director of the Collège de Montreux from 1926 to 1932: it was therefore in Montreux that Pierre was schooled and fell in love with jazz and song. Having left for Paris at twenty, he became a huge chansonnier, the author of more than seventeen hundred songs, including “Café au lait au lit” and “Clopin-Clopant”, which Yves Montand made famous.
Pierre Dudan: a Montreux man behind “Clopin-Clopant”
A Russian family washed up on Lake Geneva
His father, Camille Dudan, a Vaudois born at Les Charbonnières, had gone to teach in Moscow, where he married Hélène Charmanoff, a Russian pianist. Pierre was born there in 1916. Two years later, the family fled the Bolshevik revolution and returned to Switzerland, the mother not speaking a word of French.
Camille Dudan, a man of letters, first ran the schools of Orbe, then, from 1926 to 1932, the Collège de Montreux. The family thus settled on the Riviera, and young Pierre grew up between Lausanne, where his grandparents lived, and Montreux, where he went to school.
The Collège de Montreux, where the writer was born
It was at the Collège de Montreux that Pierre Dudan took to words. His father ran it, and his French teacher was the writer Maurice Budry. A difficult pupil, a stammerer, in rebellion against all authority, he made up for it with a devouring passion for music: self-taught, he learned piano, trumpet, saxophone, guitar and drums.
Jazz became his horizon. At twenty, in 1936, he left Montreux for Paris with, so the legend goes, forty-five francs in his pocket.
Paris, fame, seventeen hundred songs
In Paris, Dudan moved among the greatest cabarets and rubbed shoulders with Trenet, Chevalier, Piaf, Brel, Brassens. He composed “Café au lait au lit”, a universal hit, and “Clopin-Clopant”, taken up by Yves Montand. He also became a storyteller, a specialist in the Vaudois “Ouin-Ouin” tales.
The war sent him back to Switzerland; he sang for the troops. Then a globe-trotting life: London, Polynesia, and Quebec in 1960. He ended up taking the name of the village of Antagnes, above the Riviera, where he owned a house from 1962. He is credited with more than seventeen hundred songs, and he also wrote novels.
Related places
▸Musée de MontreuxMuseumOpen the place →
The local history museum, from Belle Époque tourism to the town’s musical saga, gold record included.
▸Collège de MontreuxSchool / place of learningOpen the place →
Photo coming soonThe college, built in 1897, where the chansonnier Pierre Dudan was schooled: his father Camille was its director from 1926 to 1932.
