In February 1995, the first Folle Journe de Nantes came out fully armed from the brain of René Martin: a unique way of spreading classical music, breaking with the divide between music lovers, neophytes and music users. The concept immediately appealed, to the point of being adopted almost everywhere, while the Nantes resident exported the formula from Bilbao to Warsaw, from Tokyo to Yekaterinburg. Iconically titled “Origins”, the thirtieth edition (280 concerts in five days and 145,000 tickets on sale) takes place from January 31 to February 4. We met this busy man via video, who has lost none of his energy or his love of the public and of music.
How do you view these three decades of Folle Journee?
La Folle Journee was born in 1995, the first week of February, with Mozart. There were thirty-five concerts, for which 23,300 tickets were sold. The following year, we increased to sixty-five concerts and 34,000 tickets. I did the math: in around thirty editions, we will have welcomed more than three million people (exactly 3,159,000) to Nantes, organized 6,317 concerts and invited 45,250 artists. As for our budget – 4.5 million euros this year – 60% is still entirely devoted to the artistic.
Did you expect such enthusiasm from the outset?
No, but I sensed that a new audience existed. I was struck, in 1993, by the 5,000 young people, of whom I was one, who came to a U2 concert at the Beaujoire stadium in Nantes. I wondered why they didn’t come to listen to my classical music concerts. Then I realized that ultimately many did not have the chance to know Mozart and that it was complicated to have access to this repertoire, the distribution of which essentially relies on specialized radio stations like France Musique. I told myself that I had to create something, that I had to provoke a meeting.
This utopia, this new cultural and social model, was also inspired by cinema…
In 1994 a film was released that really struck me. It’s about Postman (The postman), feature film directed by Michael Radford based on the novel by Antonio Skarmeta, An ardent patience [Seuil, 1987]. We see the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in exile on the island of Salina, to whom a postman, a very simple man, distributes letters. The discovery of words, literature and poetry will change his life. This film attracted 2.5 million spectators. A fairy tale, without sex and without violence. I said to myself: this feature film is an impromptu by Schubert. There had also been, ten years earlier, the phenomenal success ofAmadeus, by Milos Forman, who had generated a rush on the albums of Requiem the Mozart.
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