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 Since
1948 Aix is known throughout the world for its international festival
of music. In the space of a few short years the city acquired a renown
unprecedented in its history of over two millennia. Mozart in an eighteenth
century setting and the warm magic of its midsummer’s nights attracted
singers and musicians from all over the world, and audiences in whom Provence
lay, like a dreamland, rich with eternal beauty, vineyards, fruit blossoms
and fruits, the scents of thyme, lavender and rosemary, tables set in
the shade of great plane trees, old stones carved and erected long ago,
perched villages, blue skies, secluded Cistercian abbeys, and the Mediterranean
cradle, where so much began |
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fusion of beauty and intelligence, art and the senses, music and visual
beauty proved irresistible. Performers, cognoscenti, and public came to
Aix as they went to Salzburg and Edinburgh, in order to bask in refined
luxury, a massage for the soul when the body is not simply twitching in
the wake of long 0irksome office shiftse magic formula worked. The palace
of the archbishop which already housed a magnificent tapestry museum,
became an open-air theater during the month of July. Aix itself, Place
d’Albertas, Place des Quatre Dauphins, the cathedral, cloisters,
convents, courtyards and neighbouring château parks, resounded with
music in the twilight and moonlight hours. For fifty years the spell has
suspended disbelief, and for fifty years, in the wings, the battle over
its cost, its form, the frenzy and the fury of a grandiose undertaking
in a half-pint provincial backwater has raged unabated. |
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it not Mozart, nor is it Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutti, Berlioz or
Beethoven, nor the world’s most prestigious soloists, orchestras,
and conductors who have made the festival what it is today. All
have played a prodigious part in a venture that has weathered the
dread imprecations of accountants and bursars. No arithmetic, however
finely fiddled, will ever determine how much Aix’s national
and international stature today owes to a festival born of a dream
in the post-war years of 1948. What is certain is that, fifty years
after its birth and a long alluring though spurious flirtation with
Mozart and the world’s leading composers and musicians, Aix
has begun a new phase in its musical history. |
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past, Campra and Milhaud, will, thanks to the inspiration of a new
director, Stephane Lissner, receive increased recognition. The newly
founded European Academy of Music, the dynamic Darius Milhaud Conservatory,
and the international renown of a Rip Van Winkle market town that
snoozed through a nineteenth century that produced Cézanne
and Zola, give promise of audible “lendemains qui chantent.
” At the same time, “oh miracle of Enlightenment! ”
the local population is invited to the banquet. Low-priced tickets
are offered to those who, for many years, had to be content to gape
at the elegant parade of estrangers , or worse, of “Parisiens,”
dressed in finery. |
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