Yes, I was born there and have always lived there. I studied at Strasbourg University and then later the Conservatoire. The boarding school I went to had an excellent boys choir that sung a lot of sixteenth-century polyphonic music and while there I also became a pianist and organist, taking responsibility for playing for the liturgy. Those were my first musical experiences, but they meant that by the time I came to go rather late to the Conservatoire I already had a well-developed ear in addition to a somewhat empirical technique for conducting a choir, singing and playing the organ. Before going there I went to the University, where I read Literature and later taught Latin and Greek. Later still, when I found the time, came the harpsichord. Those experiences defined what I wanted to do – to be involved with music from the sixteenth century to Schubert.

How important do you feel it has been to your musical life to undertake the study of literature as well as music?

I’m sure that such dual study was important, although I would not have been able to analyse it at the time. But now I recognise its value. An understanding of how and why language evolved also makes me understand how music developed, for example. When we talk about a style, how it was and how it is supposed to be, it involved evolution, but many of those who talked about it at the time did not understand clearly what was happening. They tried to analyse, to make connections such as those between rhetoric and music, but the relationship between music and rhetoric in, say, the sixteenth century is very different to the that of the seventeenth, and so on. People wanted to make connections, but the explanation was not as logical as they would have liked. The degree of rhetoric in a Brandenburg Concerto is far removed from that of a Monteverdi madrigal. So the desire to find relationships created misunderstandings. On the other hand there is the question of rubato, which the seventeenth-century theoretician Tosi described as essential to expression. This very basic problem of the relationship between the melody and the rhythmic structure, between the flexibility and the hidden beat was rarely mentioned, because it was simply too natural to do (as it is in folk music) and too difficult to explain.

When you talk about people who tried to explain, are you thinking of theorists such as Johann Mattheson?