Royal Plaza

“Clarens! Sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love”

Long before the musicians, it was writers who made Clarens famous. Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the loves of “Julie, or the New Heloise” here, and confided in his “Confessions”: “I needed a lake, and I ended up choosing the one around which my heart has never ceased to wander.”

Half a century later, Lord Byron, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, was moved in turn in “Childe Harold”: “Clarens! Sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love! Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought; thy trees take root in Love.” These rocks, he wrote, offered “a refuge from the worldly shocks”. It is that refuge the composers would come to seek in their turn.

1877-1879: Tchaikovsky’s three stays

At thirty-seven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky fled Russia after a broken marriage. He stayed in Clarens, at the Villa Richelieu guesthouse, from 22 October to 13 November 1877, then from 9 March to 7 April 1878, and one last time during the winter of 1878-1879. Each time he had a piano installed in the salon, facing the lake.

Here, funded by the allowance paid him by his benefactress Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow he would meet only twice, by chance, he composed: his Fourth Symphony, “Fate”; his Violin Concerto in D major, written in less than a month with his beloved friend, the violinist Iosif Kotek; and he pressed on with his operas “Eugene Onegin” and “The Maid of Orleans”.

In his letters he spoke of his happiness at being alone there: “I can only be calm and truly happy when I am alone. And how pleasant it is here just now! What marvellous weather! What a sunset we had today. I could not leave the balcony until it was completely dark.”

From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, and today’s Royal Plaza

Thirty-four years later, Clarens welcomed another giant of Russian music: Igor Stravinsky, who brought “The Rite of Spring” to life there, to the dismay of neighbours exasperated by the composer hammering his piano with the windows open. Two revolutions in music written in the same village.

The Villa Richelieu itself has gone. The site has changed face three times: the guesthouse became the Hôtel Continental, was demolished, then replaced in 1982 by the Hyatt, today the Royal Plaza, west of the Parc Vernex, on Avenue Claude-Nobs. Nothing remains of the salon with its piano, but the view over the lake and the snow-capped peaks, the one that kept Tchaikovsky on the balcony until nightfall, has not changed.