History
1939: The origins
The origins of the Music Chapel rest on two strong personalities: Queen Elisabeth, a violinist keen to help young talents, and Eugène Ysaÿe, one of the greatest violinists and composers of his time. Both wanted to support emerging artists through a highly specialized school and an international competition. The competition has been renowned from the start and was to become the Queen Elisabeth Competition. The Music Chapel was inaugurated on 11 July 1939. It is famous for teaching exceptionally talented young musicians. At the time, the famous critic of the day, Emile Vuillermoz, described the Music Chapel as a sort of “modern Villa Medici.”
After the Second World War, the Music Chapel resumed its role as an educational institution in 1956. Up to 2004, it welcomed a dozen young musicians and composers in residence, each supervised by a professor of their choice, for three-year cycles. Several generations of elite musicians were to stay in the Music Chapel, occupying an eminent place onstage or in higher education.
2004 : An overhaul of the contents
Since 2004, the Chapel has run a more open and more flexible program of excellence for dozens of young musicians from around the world. Pretty quickly, the need
to adapt the accommodation and work infrastructure became an urgent matter
On that year, the Music Chapel undertook a thorough overhaul of its training and professional insertion program. The Music Chapel’s artistic training now rests on three pillars
- Openness: anchored in the Belgian landscape but with an international vocation;
- Flexibility: adapting itself to each young artist’s profile by offering him/her a tailor-made program;
- Excellence: the Masters in Residence – José van Dam, Sophie Koch, Miguel da Silva, Augustin Dumay, Frank Braley, Avedis Kouyoumdjian, Gary Hoffman, Corina Belcea & Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden,– pass on their knowledge to the young talents.
2015: A new laboratory
The inauguration in 2015 of a new wing – a success both architecturally and in terms of the surprising functional possibilities it offered – has enabled the Chapel to work openly in its laboratory and to foster ongoing musical development.
This new arrangement, which made it possible to welcome more young artists in residence either for an extended period of time or on an intermittent basis,
resulted in an unprecedented development of the Chapel’s artistic project with between 60 and 80 artists in residence each year.
This new approach has led to the reinforcement of the following lines: the transmission of knowledge, the joint presence on stage of the young artists and the masters, the “community” projects, and lastly the development of new media (live-streaming and recordings).
2015–16: MuCH Music Season
After the inauguration of the new building in January 2015, the Music Chapel opened a new chapter in its history by launching a season of public concerts in 2015–16. This first season comprised 60 concerts and gave the impetus for all the other activities of the Chapel that followed.
2019–20: 80th Anniversary
In 2019–20 the Music Chapel has celebrated its 80th anniversary with lots of great projects.