The Queen Elisabeth Musical Competition is the best-known international competition for violin and piano organised in Belgium, and is considered among the best and most demanding in the world. Each competition, organized in principle every four years, attracts some 40 violinists or 85 pianists, from many countries around the world. There is no doubt that winning this contest may have a significant impact on the future course of an artist.
"Competitions are for horses", said Debussy. That was more than a century ago, but his remark is still popular today (especially with musicians who have been unsuccessful in competitions). The question is, it must be admitted, a complex one that can be approached from a variety of angles. It is permissible, moreover, to see it simply from the point of view of those music-lovers to whom the Queen Elisabeth Competition has - for 75 years now - offered such a wide range of emotions. Passion, joy, sadness, identification, dissent, and more, as well as an opportunity to share the experience of ‘great’ music, in a world that has changed so much and in which this ‘great’ music occupies a less prominent position in the everyday world of the media and thus of people generally. The Queen Elisabeth Competition is, for many, a slice of life, an enchanted interlude in which culture seems to make some slight inroads into the gloom cast by crises, rationalisation, epidemics, rain, and conflict.
