Since 1948 Aix-en-Provence is known throughout the world for its international festival of music. In the space of a few short years the city acquired a renown unprecedented in its history of over two millennia. Mozart in an eighteenth century setting and the warm magic of its midsummer’s nights attracted singers and musicians from all over the world, and audiences in whom Provence lay, like a dreamland, rich with eternal beauty, vineyards, fruit blossoms and fruits, the scents of thyme, lavender and rosemary, tables set in the shade of great plane trees, old stones carved and erected long ago, perched villages, blue skies, secluded Cistercian abbeys, and the Mediterranean cradle, where so much began

The fusion of beauty and intelligence, art and the senses, music and visual beauty proved irresistible. Performers, cognoscenti, and public came to Aix-en-Provence as they went to Salzburg and Edinburgh, in order to bask in refined luxury, a massage for the soul when the body is not simply twitching in the wake of long 0irksome office shiftse magic formula worked. The palace of the archbishop which already housed a magnificent tapestry museum, became an open-air theater during the month of July. Aix-en-Provence itself, Place d’Albertas, Place des Quatre Dauphins, the cathedral, cloisters, convents, courtyards and neighbouring château parks, resounded with music in the twilight and moonlight hours. For fifty years the spell has suspended disbelief, and for fifty years, in the wings, the battle over its cost, its form, the frenzy and the fury of a grandiose undertaking in a half-pint provincial backwater has raged unabated.