Mesdames, Messieurs,

When I came to Paris twenty-four years ago to study music, I found that people were astonished to learn that composers existed in England: it was felt that England was a country of businessmen and sportsmen, and that apart from literature, the arts had little importance in our life. At that period there was nothing surprising about this attitude. During the last part of the nineteenth century, and the start of the twentieth, painting and music which were of major importance in France, were with us almost dead. To find the causes of this I think it is necessary to go a long way back. The spiritual and cultural isolation which the Reformation produced is perhaps one: the nineteenth-century industrial revolution is perhaps another. What is sure is that at the time when France produced painters like Cézanne and Renoir, composers like Fauré, Debussy and Ravel, England, as far as painting and music are concerned, counted for nothing. She lacked a tradition, and her few composers, submerged by waves of Wagner, failed because their works were completely lacking in personality and freshness.