Who hasn’t hummed a Vladimir Cosma tune at some point? The tall blonde with a black shoe., Rabbi Jacob, Santa Claus is trash, Wing or thigh, Dinner for idiots., An elephant is very deceptive., The boom, The Ace of Aces… The composer, born in Romania in 1940 and arriving in France at the age of 22, has created more than three hundred film scores. Emblematic of French popular culture, Vladimir Cosma has not forgotten anything of the lean times and rich encounters that shape a destiny.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If I had not learned to play the violin as a child, although I dreamed of playing the piano. Unfortunately, in our apartment in Bucharest there was not enough space to install a piano, which is an instrument richer in harmony than the violin. This forced choice gave me a taste for melody, which is the very theme of music, its backbone. Without a theme you cannot write a symphony or a novel.
You come from a large family of musicians in Romania. Your mother was a composer, your father was a pianist and conductor, your uncle was a composer. Could you have aimed for something other than music?
No, I was doomed to it! I tried several times to move on to another discipline, mathematics for example. But I kept coming back to music, as if drawn by a magnet. Everything around me was music. My father put a violin in my hands when I was 4 years old. I couldn’t have chosen any other path.
At the age of 8, when you start giving concerts, a singular event will have a decisive influence on the child prodigy that you were…
It was a day when I played a concert in there minor by Bach. I was so absorbed in the music that I closed my eyes while I was playing. At the end of the concert, an elderly lady came up to me to ask why I was doing that. It was Cecilia Nitulescu-Lupu, the greatest violin teacher of the time in Romania. I told her that the music was so beautiful that I was carried away. Then she made this rather brutal comment: “It is not up to you to be carried away by the music, but by the audience!” She then explained to me that it would have been better to keep my eyes open because my right arm was not perpendicular to the strings. Her comments were a revelation. The awareness that we do not play music only for ourselves, but above all for others.
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