When I arrived at the École César Franck, they sent me straight to see the director, Monsieur Guy de Lioncourt, who listened to me playing and said: ‘It’s not bad, but it isn’t very orthodox; I’ll put you in the intermediate class.’ When I got there, exactly the same thing happened. The teacher listened to me and said: ‘That won’t do: where have you come from and who did you work with?’ I replied, ‘Well, I worked by myself’. ‘Yes, well, I can hear that! You’re going down to the beginners’ class!’ So that’s what I did, but it was no bad thing for me, because I came across an extraordinary teacher, enormously gifted, called Geneviève de la Salle: it was exactly what I needed. She gave me a technical foundation I certainly wouldn’t have got from the other teacher, and I’m very grateful to her. When you say you didn’t learn any theory, surely you must have studied harmony and counterpoint? No, very little. I took it for a year at the École César Franck: I got as far as dominant sevenths . . . Later on, I was forced to look into the question seriously again when I entered the competitive examination for the post of professor of organ and harmony and counterpoint at the Angers Conservatoire. For several months, I studied harmony until it was coming out of my ears. The hardest thing was writing without the help of the keyboard. When you think of people like Bach who, without using the keyboard, were a hundred per cent sure of what they were writing, you feel very small indeed . . . 27 ANDRÉ ISOIR
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