LDV113-4

23 MICHEL BOUVARD Can you tell us how you discovered the works of César Franck? It all started in my own family. My grandfather, Jean Bouvard, born in 1905, only fifteen years after Franck’s death, was an organist in Lyon and a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire there. My great-grandfather had been a violinist in the Lyon orchestra, and said that he had played Wagner’s early operas in the nineteenth century before their Paris premiere! César Franck’s music ran in the family’s blood. My grandfather had studied his organ works with Louis Vierne at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He had also trained with Marcel Dupré, Florent Schmitt, Vincent d’Indy, Paul Dukas, and had contacts with Charles Tournemire and Charles-Marie Widor. Naturally enough, he always talked to me about his teachers, and of course about ‘le Père Franck’. I myself studied the piano and the organ in parallel until the age of twenty, after which I devoted myself wholly to the organ. I’ve always been attracted by the richness of Franck’s style, both in harmonic terms and in the idea of him as a ‘musical architect’. When I was still very young, I used to play the chorale from the Prélude, Choral et Fugue over and over again on the piano. And I was fascinated by the incredible superimposition of the three themes, which was really hard to perform! But it was above all as an organist, later on, that I played his music.