How music changed the destiny of a town
- Location: Fairmont Le Montreux Palace, First Floor
- Dates: July 3 to 18, 2026
- Hours: 4:00 PM – 8:00 PM
How did a small town on the shores of Lake Geneva become a global capital of music? At the heart of this story lies a visionary man, driven by an infectious passion and a rare sense of hospitality: Claude Nobs. The exhibition tells this adventure through objects, audiovisual archives, photographs, and original works, most of which have never been revealed to the public before.
Over the decades, the momentum built by Claude Nobs transformed the town into a unique cultural model: a summer festival that became a worldwide benchmark, bold “pop” events, a legendary recording studio, and a network of major artists drawn to Montreux to perform, record, and sometimes settle down. Nestled between the lake and the mountains, the postcard-perfect setting helped shape the identity and imagination of the town.
fil des décennies, l’élan donné par Claude Nobs transforme la ville en un modèle culturel unique : un festival d’été devenu référence mondiale, des événements « pop » audacieux, un studio d’enregistrement légendaire et un réseau d’artistes majeurs attirés à Montreux pour jouer, enregistrer et, parfois, s’y installer. Entre lac et montagnes, le décor de carte postale contribue à façonner l’identité et l’imaginaire de la ville.
FIRST ROOM: BIRTH OF A MUSICAL ECOSYSTEM
The first room illustrates the diversity of this cultural effervescence, which Claude Nobs spearheaded early on. As an employee of the Montreux Tourist Office from 1964, he gave popular music a place within the Rose d’Or, before founding the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967, followed by pop festivals starting in 1969. Alongside these, the legendary Mountain Studios – later bought by Queen – and the Septembre Musical, the town’s oldest festival dedicated to classical music, completed the picture. The international footprint of the Montreux Jazz Festival was also expressed through its “sister festivals,” events that spread the town’s name from the late 1970s onwards, from Detroit to São Paulo, and from Atlanta to Sapporo.
The public will also discover the creative process behind the Festival’s iconic posters, designed by Keith Haring or Jean Tinguely, through original works, sketches, and previously unseen mock-ups from the archives of Pierre Keller, bequeathed to the Montreux Jazz Festival thanks to a generous donation from QoQa.
SECOND ROOM: A UNIQUE AUDIOVISUAL COLLECTION
Visitors can immerse themselves in a series of concerts filmed at the Montreux Jazz Festival during the 2014 to 2025 editions, thanks to a cutting-edge digital platform inspired by the jukebox, developed by Millenium, a global partner of the Festival.
As early as 1967, Claude Nobs had the visionary idea to immortalize the Festival’s concerts, building over time one of the world’s most precious audiovisual music collections. In 2013, this collection – “The Montreux Jazz Festival, Claude Nobs’ Legacy” – was inscribed into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Today, its preservation and legacy are ensured by the Claude Nobs Foundation and EPFL as part of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. Since 2014, the Montreux Jazz Festival Foundation has perpetuated this tradition by systematically recording its concerts.
The exhibition extends with “Ecouter les photos” an immersive virtual reality experience designed by students from the University of Lausanne in collaboration with EPFL’s Montreux Jazz Digital Project. It creates a dialogue between photographs from the collection of Georges Braunschweig and other Festival official photographers, and audio clips from the Claude Nobs and Montreux Jazz Festival Audiovisual Collections: an unprecedented way to “listen” to images.
Audio clips — Courtesy of Montreux Sounds / RTS (1967-1986); Montreux Sounds (1987-2012); Montreux Sounds / MJFF (2013) under the auspices of the Claude Nobs Foundation.
Video clips — Courtesy of MJFF (2014-2025).
All rights reserved, including those of performing artists, producers, and publishers.
The Montreux Jazz Festival would like to thank the Montreux Archives for their invaluable assistance in organizing this exhibition.
