Stade de la Saussaz

A stadium found on Google Maps

At first, Elton John was to give two concerts at the Auditorium Stravinski, the festival’s main hall, which seats about four thousand. But demand was such, and his farewell tour’s stage production so imposing, that the Montreux Jazz Festival decided to bring everything together in a single open-air concert.

A big enough venue still had to be found. The festival tracked one down using Google Maps: the modest Stade de la Saussaz, in Chailly, up above Montreux. A fifty-six-metre-long stage was built there, and dozens of buses ferried the audience from the Vevey and Montreux railway stations.

On Saturday 29 June 2019, in crushing heat, Elton John rolled out more than two and a half hours of hits before fifteen thousand three hundred people, revisiting half a century of his career. Tickets for the cancelled second night were honoured for this single date.

The festival’s first giant concert

Renowned for the quality of its welcome and the acoustics of its halls, the Montreux Jazz became, for one evening, an open-air concert promoter like any other, with its buses, car parks and queues. For a festival that is artistically essential but economically fragile, the stakes went beyond the single night: it was a full-scale test.

It was a success, and a first: never, in more than half a century, had the festival staged an open-air concert on this scale. Two years later, in 2021, it did it again in an altogether different setting, by building a stage out on the lake itself.