This week I’m bringing you the first of my translations of the Radio France Musique series on Jean-Pierre Rampal. These four programmes were broadcast to commemorate his centenary in 2022 and look at his early years in Marseille, moving on to his love of baroque music and premieres of contemporary music, and finally to his career on the international stage.
Each broadcast contains around one and a half hours of music and interviews with Rampal and leading flutists who worked with and were influenced by him. I have translated all the discussion as a single running text and added the programme at the end. In this episode, we hear from Rampal himself, his wife Françoise, and flute players Sylvia Careddu and Philippe Pierlot. It’s a fascinating insight into Rampal’s life and music.
To listen to the broadcast, click the play button which will take you through to the programme website.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Jean-Pierre Rampal, son of Marseille (ep. 1 of 4)
A Radio France Musique podcast series presented by Priscilla Lafitte
There was a time when everyone wanted to play with Jean-Pierre Rampal, whether it was Pierre Boulez in a performance of C.P.E. Bach or Miss Piggy in the Muppet Show.
Jean-Pierre Rampal's name was so well-known to music lovers and the general public alike that Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy invited him to be a guest star on the ultra-popular Muppet show. It’s 1980. Jean-Pierre Rampal tells Miss Piggy that he is more used to playing alone, or to be more precise, he has become accustomed to being a soloist, something not previously expected of a flute player.
Jean-Pierre Rampal is an innovator. He explores the whole repertoire, from Baroque to contemporary. He delights everyone who listens, from the puppets on television to the Emperor of Japan, who invites him to give private concerts at the royal palace.
Today, when I tell friends who are not musically minded that I'm working on the extraordinary life of Jean-Pierre Rampal to mark the centenary of his birth, describing his immense discography and hundreds of concerts a year, many of them confess to not knowing the name. And yet, such was the enthusiasm for Jean-Pierre Rampal's art that in Japan, as in France and the United States, he inspired children around the world to take up the flute.
Rampal: I must say that really we’re talking about the French school. For 50 years, the banner was carried by French flute players: Marcel Moyse, in his time, and others. And that bore fruit.
Interviewer: What is distinctive about this French school?
Rampal: A sort of clarity in the sound, which perhaps comes from the French language which is a light language. We have a particular way of pronouncing certain syllables that are important for the flute, such as the syllable of attack, “tu”. Well, you don’t really say “tu” but you make a gesture which corresponds to the sound “tu”—which is easy in French, but more difficult in other languages, especially for English speakers.
Interviewer: How about the Spanish?
Rampal: Oh yes, they’re ok I guess. But I must say that now there are very good flutists everywhere. You can’t really say there’s a French school anymore; there are very good English, German, American schools, too.
Interviewer: People always say that when you meet musicians, they’re mostly pianists rather than flutists. Is that true?
Rampal: Oh no, not any more, not at all… I'd say these days they’re mostly flutists. The flute is an epidemic, you know. There are countries like Japan where you can hardly move for flute players.
Interviewer: I was talking about France.
Rampal: Even in France it's the same. You know, there are 160 candidates every year for the conservatoire auditions, maybe 170. It’s a catastrophe. Perhaps even more…more every year. It's crazy, an epidemic. In some European countries, like Switzerland for example, you can't open a door without being asked into a room where someone's playing the flute; there's always someone putting their hand up. It’s frightening.
Jean-Pierre Rampal, of course, was not solely responsible for this great epidemic of passion for the flute, but he spread the virus to many—including me [presenter Priscilla Lafitte] among the many amateur flautists who began learning the flute in their teens and who enthusiastically collected his records.
In this series, we'll hear from several flutists who have been influenced by Jean-Pierre Rampal's sound, including Sylvia Careddu, currently principal flute of the Orchestre National de France.
Syvlia Careddu: I first heard Jean-Pierre Rampal at the age of 12. I listened to his recording of the Mozart G major concerto with Maestro Zubin Mehta. It was magnificent. I felt an energy, such a desire to play this concerto and to study it. It was incredible. It was really an experience of vitality. Everyone felt it.
My teacher, Ricardo Ghianni, had followed Jean-Pierre Rampal everywhere when he was young. He had taken part in all the workshops and bought all Jean-Pierre Rampal's CDs even though at the time it was difficult to obtain them. So he lent me this CD and it was like a little jewel, a treasure. He said, "Listen to this, you'll see what the sound of the flute really is."
It was obvious that he had something unusual in his sound, a slightly more focused or more intense vibrato. A varied sound, you might say, though always totally recognizable. I vividly remember being lucky enough to hear him live at a concert in my hometown, Cagliari in Sardinia. He played the 2nd movement of the Poulenc Sonata, and his sound was completely different. As soon as he played the Cantilena, he transformed the sound, transporting us into another mood.
Jean-Pierre Rampal is the greatest exponent of the French flute school. A whole generation was boundless in its admiration for his musical genius, but it would be more accurate to say that the Rampal school is really the Marseillaise school, and that its leader was called Rampal. Joseph Rampal.
This recording [of Beethoven’s Sonata for Two Flutes] dates from 1951, making it one of Jean-Pierre Rampal's earliest discs. He chose to record this duet with a musician who was at once his alter ego, his teacher, and his father, Joseph Rampal.
Between the wars, Joseph Rampal taught flute in Marseille. He himself studied at the Paris Conservatoire. He was spotted at a competition by the leading figure in flute pedagogy, Marcel Moyse, author of several methods that are still the standard today. Joseph Rampal's pupils have included Maxence Larrieu, Alain Marion and Philippe Pierlot.
Philippe Pierlot: Rampal was an extraordinary man, a very moral man with high standards, a teacher without equal. Of course he worked with other flutists, but he was clearly a disciple of his father. His father was also an extraordinary flute player; he didn't want to make a career as a performer, but he was an outstanding flutist.
Yet Joseph didn't encourage his own son, born in 1922, to play the flute; on the contrary, all Jean-Pierre was interested in at the time were the little sparrows in the garden and the turtles his father had brought him from Morocco. His mother imagined him as a doctor, a family physician.
At the age of 6, Jean-Pierre discovered an old wooden flute, a small soprano flute. His enthusiasm did not go down well with the family; his father thought the instrument sounded out of tune. He decreed that wasn't music, and threw the flute into the wood-burning stove. Jean-Pierre's first flute was consumed by fire.
Jean-Pierre Rampal was consoled by going to the Vichy [music festival] every summer with his father, where music was combined with the pleasures of the thermal springs. He attended many concerts, and was captivated by the violin of Jacques Thibaud, the piano of Alfred Cortot, and the conducting of Bruno Walter and Paul Paray. These stays in Vichy just made it worse. He had an urge for music but his father always pretended to ignore it.
Interviewer: So, your career path is a little unusual: you’re a flutist, a concert soloist, a man from Marseille… and the son of a flute teacher at the Marseille Conservatoire.
Rampal: So, nonetheless, I was still pulled towards the flute… in spite of my father!
Interviewer: Why?
Rampal: At the time, he didn't think I could be a musician at all. The future wasn't very bright for music in those days. Though, in the end, life turned out in such a way for me that he was much happier with that, much happier than if I'd been a doctor. Maybe that wasn’t the case for my mother. She hoped I’d be a surgeon, a surgeon who spent his life at home and not travelling the world.
Joseph Rampal taught his son to play the flute in spite of this. He didn't have enough students in his class at the Marseille conservatoire. He had to recruit at all costs. He talked to every family he met, bought old flutes to repair, and eventually recruited his own son into his class. But perhaps there was a clue that all this may have been premeditated: Jean-Pierre's grandfather had given the teenager a silver flute for Christmas.
Jean-Pierre's teenage life was turned upside down by learning to play the flute. From then on, he got up at 6am, ate his breakfast in a hurry, then walked quickly through the streets of Marseille to the Conservatoire to take a group flute lesson from 7-9am with fifteen other young flutists, before going on to school at the Lycée Thiers a few steps away.
Rampal: I don't think I could have had a better teacher. He didn't let me get away with anything, but he was always very kind. I owe him everything.
From age 13 until he left Marseille during the Second World War, Jean-Pierre Rampal played duets with his father every day. This recording of a Vivaldi concerto for 2 flutes is a testament to this. Thirty years later, this daily practice of playing duets is for him like playing a game, and no doubt is one reason for his great facility: fluent reading, great musicality, effortless technique. His father joked with him for the rest of his life: "Jean, if only you'd worked a little harder, you could have become a great flautist.”
Concert opportunities soon arrived. The Orchestre des Concerts Classiques de Marseille became his new playground, with the help of his father. Joseph Rampal, the Orchestra's principal flute, persuaded conductor Paul Paray to engage him to play Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé to replace the second flute, whio had fallen ill.
In Marseille, Jean-Pierre also found friends of his own. He became friends with pianist Pierre Barbizet and Christian Bourg, a violinist who later chose a career as a doctor. The three of them flocked to cinemas, watching all the Fred Astaire films. They had a passion for the jazz of Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. They scoured sheet music stores for new music and recorded themselves in a store where customers could produce a record. Here is his wife Françoise Rampal's account of these years.
Françoise Rampal: He went to the Marseille Conservatoire to study. It was his father, who was a flute teacher in Marseille, who taught him. He graduated in just two years. Afterwards, he told his father “playing the flute is more fun for me than studying medicine, it’s a distraction.” He became friends with other medical students who all had instruments, and he would have fun playing the flute at parties with them. That's how it came about. Then, when the Germans invaded, he learned that they were looking for him to send him to Germany. So he did everything he could to leave Marseille and go to Paris to hide, so they wouldn't find him. He went to see the professor, the director of the Paris Conservatoire, explaining his case and saying: "Well, I'm an amateur, but still, I studied in Marseille.” And the director replied, "Listen, in eight days there's the entrance exam, so I'll let you audition." And Jean-Pierre said, "But I’m telling you I'm just an amateur." But the director told him, "I'll admit you straight away." He walked out with the prize.
The last movement of the César Franck Sonata is redolent of the war years. Jean-Pierre Rampal was playing cat-and-mouse with the Vichy authorities, who wanted to send him to Germany for compulsory labour. He was just 20 in 1942, and his entire generation was conscripted. Rampal spent several months in Châtelguyon, in youth work camps. He managed to get into the junior recruits' orchestra, and was persuaded by a comrade to take the entrance exam for the Paris Conservatoire with him. He received some final advice from his father, who brought him up a Louis Lot silver flute by train from Marseille. Rampal escaped with his new instrument and made his way clandestinely to Paris. He found shelter there, hidden in the crowd, and his acceptance into the Conservatoire's flute class gave him official cover, an alibi for escaping the Germans.
In May 1944, after only four months at the Paris Conservatoire, Jean-Pierre Rampal won first prize, but the war caught up with him. The situation in Marseille worried him. The port had been bombed by the Allies. Wild rumours reached his ears. Rampal crossed the country by train, ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night at 20 rue Brochier, Marseille. His father opened the door, the whole family was safe and sound, and medical school was opening its arms to him. So why become a flutist when a doctor's job is more secure?
Rampal: It was simply because my father is a flautist, and you know, when you're young, some boys like to be like their father and others don't. And for me, my father was my hero. I always wanted to play music and then the flute, because I heard the flute all day long. Of course, it wasn't the only thing I wanted to do. I went on to do my third year of medicine because my parents didn't want me to give up my studies for a career that wasn't considered a sure thing at the time. And I'm glad I did, because in the end I've never regretted having done other studies. You know, it always opens the mind. I don't regret at all the three years of medicine I did even if I don't remember much except the procedures. I was a medical student, so you remember what to do. But then everything else happened.
Next week, we'll see Jean-Pierre Rampal's luck blossom on the streets of Paris.
PROGRAMME
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Concerto for flute
Friedrich Kuhlau
Grand trio concertant for three flutes op 13 n°2 : 1. Allegro non tanto
Jean-Pierre Rampal – Alain Marion - Maxence Larrieu
J.S. Bach
Partita in A minor BWV 1013 : 3. Sarabande
W.A. Mozart
Concerto in G major K 313 : 1 Allegro maestoso
Francis Poulenc
Sonata for flute and piano: 2. Cantilena
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata for two flutes
Joseph Rampal – Jean-Pierre Rampal
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonates pour deux flûtes
Sonata for two flutes
Joseph Rampal – Jean-Pierre Rampal
Joseph Bodin de Boismortier
Concerto for 5 flutes in B minor, op 15 nº4 : 3. Allegro
Jean-Pierre Rampal – Maxence Larrieu – Alain Marion – Joseph Rampal – Marius Beuf
Joseph Bodin de Boismortier
Concerto pour 5 flutes in E minor, op 15 nº6 : 2. Allegro
Jean-Pierre Rampal – Maxence Larrieu – Alain Marion – Joseph Rampal – Marius Beuf
Antoine Reicha
Quartet in D major, op 12 (Sinfonico) : 1. Allegro
Antoine Reicha
Quartet in D major, op 12 (Sinfonico) : 4. Finale
Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto for flute, strings and continuo in C major, RV 533 P 76 : 1.Allegro molto
Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto for flute, strings and continuo in C major, RV 533 P 76 : 2.Largo
Maurice Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé Suite nº2 : Lever du jour
César Franck
Sonate in A major: 4. Allegretto poco mosso
André Jolivet
Cinq Incantations pour flûte seule – « Pour que la moisson soit riche qui naîtra des sillons que le laboureur trace »
Gabriel Fauré
Fantaisie, op 79