My mother was a pianist and I studied music with her from the age of three so I could enter the conservatoire [in Ghent, Herreweghe’s birthplace], which it was possible to do at eight years of age. So by the time I was fifteen I had a diploma in piano, and had also studied harmony and all the traditional conservatoire subjects. By then I had contact with music on the one hand at the conservatoire, which is of course a professional school for professional musicians, but at the same time my normal school was a Jesuit school. We had to go to church every day with the school choir, which was of good quality and in the charge of a Jesuit priest who had received conservatoire training. There we sang Schütz, Palestrina, Bach... Very soon I was playing the organ, conducting the choir and I also wrote music for the choir. When I was fifteen or sixteen my interests were therefore very much inclined toward early music, but I was interested in many things, as indeed I still am. I therefore decided to study medicine and psychiatry because I could imagine myself being a psychiatrist and conducting Bach for pleasure, as so many people did at that time. In Belgium early music was then largely in the hands of amateurs, not professionals. So I went to university to study medicine and then psychiatry, but even while still there I founded Collegium Vocale Gent, which formed contacts with Gustav Leonhardt and Harnoncourt. That was at the beginning of the baroque renaissance. By the end of my medical studies, when I was about 24 or 25, my work with Collegium Vocale had become professional—we were making recordings and travelling all over Europe. I therefore decided to make music my profession, and until I was about forty that was mainly early music, like so many others who developed along similar lines. Then I was invited to found a kind of second Collegium Vocale in Paris, La Chapelle Royale, to concentrate on French baroque music. Since then I have lived in Paris.

That’s a very comprehensive résumé! I wonder to what degree, if any, would you say your musical development was influenced by your medical studies, particularly in the instance of psychiatry?

I think one of the things you have to do as a conductor is to try to understand, say, Schumann. No, that’s a bad example because he was crazy! But to be a good artist, or even conductor, everything you come into contact with in life can be helpful—travelling, meeting people, reading—and my experience in medicine and especially psychiatry was helpful in the sense that I had some incredible experiences with human beings during that period that I would not have had in other circumstances. The other thing is that perhaps musicians do not normally undergo enough intellectual building during their studies, that there is insufficient reflection on things in general. University studies can help in that respect, and perhaps even today still play a significant role when I study a score.

My experience in medicine and especially psychiatry was helpful in the sense that I had some incredible experiences with human beings during that period that I would not have had in other circumstances

Do you still practise medicine in any form?

No, no. I never practised medicine. Well, only for a couple of weeks; my father was a doctor and when he went on holiday I filled in for him a couple of times. Of course I worked in a hospital as a psychiatrist during my studies, but, no, I never had a practise.

Those of us principally concerned with early music tend to think of you as “one of us”, but of course this is today far from the truth, for you now divide your time three ways between early music, principally based around Bach, classical and 19th-century music, and contemporary repertoire...

....Yes, but you have to remember that originally the early music movement was very focussed on certain periods of musical history, more precisely the Baroque—Bach, Lully, Marais and so on. And that’s little more than fifty years of music. But two things happened. Firstly, there were people whose interest was in earlier music, Renaissance music, which was fantastic. Then some of those working in baroque music, like me, also became interested in later music like C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven. And so we came to Schubert and other 19th century composers by a process of natural evolution. In fact, I don’t understand why people find it perfectly acceptable for “normal” conductors, so to say, to conduct Debussy, Strauss, Lutoslawski, and of course Beethoven, yet are surprised when people like me do the same. But I think those frontiers are gradually disappearing. After all, conducting is nothing more than standing in front of a group of musicians in rehearsals and concerts and trying to get them to reach a certain musical point. I don’t see why one person should be expected to do that with Bach and another with a different composer. I’m simply interested in music. For a long time one of my problems with baroque music is that I find there is less good music in that period than in other epochs. In the 19th century you have so many great composers, but in my opinion the only really worthwhile music for the forces of the Collegium Vocale is Bach. You can, of course, do Telemann, who is OK, but if a choice has to made between Brahms and Telemann my own is very clear. We did recently do a disc of Graupner, Kuhnau and Bruhns...

...Yes, I was going to mention that, because for me that disc alone contradicts your contention that there is little other worthwhile German baroque music. And surely if we don’t know composers like Telemann, Kuhnau, and Graupner we have no context within which to place Bach.

Of course, that’s absolutely true. And for myself and other musicians it’s very interesting to know Graupner because after hearing such music, which might be lovely or pretty good, you realise just how fantastic Bach is. For that reason from time to time it is our duty to perform the music of such composers. But I’m a musician and hungry for music, music that is as good as possible. The problem is that I’m now conducting a lot of Beethoven, which may not be a very original idea, but the music is just so much better than Graupner. There is bad music, good music, excellent music, and fantastic music. Life being very short, I want to be working with the best music. You cannot do everything and have to focus your attentions. That’s what I want to do now in the baroque field. Take Handel, for example.

Well, Handel is a good example of a baroque composer who is conspicuously absent from your discography.

That’s true. Handel is certainly a good composer, and an English composer [here Herreweghe permits himself a rare smile]...

...We like to think so!

I don’t conduct opera, and for me Handel’s best music is to be found in his operas. You have to possess a special lyric-dramatic talent for the operas, and that’s not me. As for the oratorios, I know they are much loved, but I’m sorry, I just don’t find them very profound or interesting. The music I respond to most is well-written music in parts. With Handel you have one vocal line and a bass line. It can be amazingly effective if you have fantastic singers, but it is neither my main interest, nor my main talent.

I read an interview in which you seemed to be saying that you are no longer interested in performing Renaissance music. Is that true?

Only partially and largely for practical reasons. At one time I performed quite a lot of Renaissance music, and Lassus, for example, I consider a genius. And so too Josquin, Morales, Victoria and others I don’t know so well. Ten years ago I could make recordings of these composers, and I certainly don’t reject those recordings, which we made with much love and care. But since then there has been a revolution, with people like my friend Paul Van Nevel spending half of their time in libraries searching for music, reading about it, and putting it into the context of social discourse. Nowadays to do that repertoire seriously you need more information than I have. I cannot try to conduct Bruckner at the same time as spending my time in libraries studying Renaissance music and its sources. Also conducting Renaissance music is not really conducting; ideally you sing with the singers and your main input must be information. But I still find the Renaissance as rich as the 19th-century—in painting, in literature, and of course in music. So although I find the baroque period rather poor, the 19th-century, the 20th-century, and the Renaissance all interest me. When I listen to music for my own pleasure it will be Arab music, Chinese music... or Renaissance music. I never listen to baroque music.

Not even Bach?

Never. I cannot listen to Bach any more!

When I listen to music for my own pleasure it will be Arab music, Chinese music... or Renaissance music. I never listen to baroque music

How interesting. Looking back over the years to your first St. Matthew Passion, do you feel that your approach to performing Bach’s music has changed significantly?

Well, as I’m sure you know we have made a second recording of the St. Matthew and that I think is the answer to your question. I still like the first recording and would not reject it, although I never listen to it. But I think that both singers and instrumental players have made great technical progress in the intervening period. At the time of the earlier recording I was very focussed on style—ornaments, articulation, rhetoric, all that kind of thing, while the instrumentalists were focussed on trying to play in tune. Since then we have all made progress and when I conduct Bach now I’m more interested in what it means. Fifteen years ago I was very concerned with how to speak and pronunciation, but now we have mastered that rhetorical language and try to concentrate on what we are saying. I think that is the principal difference. Of course, the shock of the early recordings cannot now be replicated, because at that time it was so different to the way people normally performed Bach. Some people, incorrectly in my opinion, have said the second recording goes back to a romantic kind of interpretation. Now we are not so concerned with style, more with content.

Speaking of content, Bach’s cantatas were essentially designed as didactic works, “sermons in music” to use Christian Wolff’s expression. Today it is difficult for modern listeners to empathise with some of the sentiments they express, which seem outmoded in the 21st century. How do we overcome this problem and avoid the idea that the cantatas are wonderful music that just happen to have texts attached to them?

For me the texts of the cantatas are absolutely central. There is, of course, a key to interpretation. I have to say that I believe in these texts and am moved by them. People often ask me if I am a believer, whether I’m a Christian and I don’t honestly know the answer to that question. But when I read the texts of the Bach cantatas I can get inside them as much as when I read Proust, Flaubert, Thomas Mann or Renaissance poetry. All these worlds are far from us, but I think that human truth and reality is not to be found especially in today’s ideas. For me modernity is eternal. In other words, I think the texts of Bach’s sacred cantatas are wonderful and I could not perform the cantatas if I did not believe in and feel those texts.

I think it is perhaps not so much the texts themselves as the sentiments they express that I was thinking about. There are not, for example, too many people today in sympathy with the notion of welcoming death as a release from a wicked world.

Well, in my case, yes! When you think about pieces as diverse as Cantata No. 8 [Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben], Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn, or Heidenroslein the theme of all is death. And the central theme of the Bach cantatas is death, in my view a very potent and actual topic.

To return to a more practical level, your progress through the Bach cantatas has been leisurely. Is it your ambition to complete the cycle?

No, not at all. Because so many other people have done so already. Over the years we’ve done, I suppose, two recordings of the cantatas each year. There’s no overall plan to follow Bach’s chronology and we simply say “Now I want to do this or that cantata”. In more recent recordings we’ve tried to find a theme and that’s an idea I’m very happy with. But do all the cantatas? No, I don’t feel the necessity to commit myself to that kind of undertaking. Why do people do so? I don’t understand it.

There is one final question I have to ask, and I imagine that you have perhaps been expecting it. What are your thoughts on the current controversy about performing Bach’s choral works with one voice per part?

Well, my historical information is not good enough to say a great deal on the subject, although I have of course read about it. There are those who claim to have convincing arguments that the Bach cantatas should be done by single voices. I personally don’t understand this when I read the relevant contemporary documents, but I don’t believe there is one Bach any more than there is one Stravinsky or one anyone else. What I mean is that it is obvious that in some of the pre-Leipzig cantatas such as Christ lag in Todes Banden, you immediately feel that they sound better with single voices. So I don’t believe there is one answer, and in the big works like the St. Matthew Passion Bach had many singers at his disposal. As you know he had four choirs in Leipzig and even if the third and fourth choirs were not good enough to sing complex music, the other two were. I have never read any historical document to convince me that Bach’s Leipzig works were generally performed one-to-a-part. Certainly, when I listen to recordings of people working like that I don’t like them because I don’t find them musically interesting. That is not, of course, a conclusive argument, since it may be that one-per-part is the historical truth, but that the performance may not be doing justice to that approach. The other thing is that I cannot conceive the idea of a successful balance being achieved between instruments and a single voice in parts of a work like the Mass in B minor. The acoustic also plays a part: in a small chapel there are many cantatas which might work well with single voices. But the St. Matthew Passion? No.