Royan, April 1966. The capital of contemporary art at the time. Paul Méfano's work Interférences, dedicated to Olivier Messiaen, was premiered there. Paul Méfano, an important composer of contemporary music, died in mid-September. I attended the premiere of Interférences. Among so many others, from Stockhausen to Gilbert Amy and Messiaen. The following year I discovered a young pianist, Michel Beroff, who won 1st prize in the Olivier Messiaen International Competition held here.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                    

The old casino of Royan

Inaugurated in 1960, the casino designed by the architect Ferret has been the venue for the Festival International d'Art Contemporain since 1963. Along with a few friends, we got into the excellent habit of attending the various concerts, exhibitions and conferences that took place there, divided between the rooms of the casino and the nave of the cathedral, whose avant-garde ship's bow architecture is now suffering from the erosion of time.

It was a different era. The festival had been created by Bernard Gachet, an ophthalmologist and town councillor under Admiral Meyer and then J-N de Lipkowski, both friends and political opponents of my father. Masterfully orchestrated by Claude Samuel until 1972, the festival had to close its doors in 1977 due to a lack of support from the new mayor, Tétard. Plans by iconoclastic town planners to demolish the casino came to fruition in 1985.

In its place nowadays is a square. It may be a pleasant place for all pensioners who walk their boredom on a leash, digesting their lunch of kidneys in Madeira sauce, or a meeting place for high-school students wallowing in the lawns, but it's a long way from the world of art, which, in any case, these old wanderers and ignorant young people will never understand. They prefer the staccatos of the so-called classical violin played on the inconsistency of the sand. That's fine too, but you can't build on sand.

     They adopt the words of one of Monteverdi's unsuccessful contemporaries, Giovanni-Maria Artusi (1545-1613), of whom only two or three notes remain that nobody plays any more, warning that: "The new rules that are now in force and new modes that result from them make modern music unpleasant to hear".

After this masterly piece of nonsense, which, incidentally, was a great success - its author's only success - came Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, Schmitt, Messiaen and so many others a few decades and centuries later.

     It's all a question of educating the ear, and while it's true that contemporary music requires a little more intellectual work, if you never listen to it you won't be able to understand it any more than you can appreciate it. Especially if the places where it could assert itself without offering new ones are destroyed.