It is a week before the Olympics, and the days and nights have become indistinguishable at a red-walled studio in Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, central Paris. Victor le Masne, the Games’ musical director, is putting finishing touches to 12 hours of music to be played by 600 musicians at the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, beginning with Friday’s three-hour procession on the Seine.
There will be no dress rehearsal. “We want it to be totally secret, so it’s just going to be on the day,” he says, which is “amazing” – albeit with significant room for mishaps.
Le Masne has written a score that he says can handle the odd boat-induced delay, but he is hoping for no more unknowns. The French composer, producer and sometime musician who has performed at Coachella, worked on the albums of chanteuse Juliette Armanet, Kavinsky (who wrote the soundtrack to Drive) and cult French rock opera Starmania, but the gig – which is expected to attract 600,000 spectators along the Seine – is about as big as it gets.
“You can’t say no to something that crazy,” the 42-year-old says of the tap on the shoulder he got in spring 2021, while on holiday with his wife in Tanzania. “She was pregnant with our first baby, and that was the vacation before you’re having the baby, so it’s an important vacation. I didn’t take my computer, my piano or anything – I was out of business.”
But when the Olympic Committee called and asked him to write a version of La Marseillaise – the rousing (and bloodthirsty) national anthem – for the handover portion of the Tokyo Games’ closing ceremony, the cogs began whirring.
The deadline was the day after his return. “And so for the whole trip, I was thinking of it every day… [the music was] very strong in my mind, and when I came home, I just sat on my piano for one night, and I played the melody and I changed the whole harmonisation”, including all the chords. Mercifully, “they loved it,” he reflects. “I had fun with it… I took a risk, actually, and it worked, so that is the best feeling.”
As well as jettisoning the lyrics (“They’re coming right into your arms/ To cut the throats of your sons… their impure blood/ Should water our fields”), le Masne’s version is ethereal, filmic. Audiences will have the opportunity to hear it again at the opening ceremony in Paris.
Will traditionalists baulk? “Yes,” he acknowledges. But “honestly, I didn’t do it like a guy who wants to break the rules.” His attempt was not to silence the pride in Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s 1792 revolution anthem, but to imbue it with emotion, he says. “I hope they will feel that it’s honest.”
The magnitude of reworking La Marseillaise in its first large-scale revamp since Hector Berlioz’s 1830 arrangement is not lost on le Masne. “It’s so, so amazing to think that now, my new orchestration, my new harmonisation, will be everywhere this summer… It’s crazy that I’m the next one.”
Excitement is building around the opening ceremony. Organisers have kept the names of star performers under wraps, but last week the official Olympics account teased a guest appearance by a mystery act on X, the social media platform. Lady Gaga, Celine Dion and Aya Nakamura are among those rumored to be on the bill. Gaga arrived in Paris this week.
But there is also an uneasiness surrounding this summer’s Olympics. There have been fears over the cleanliness of the Seine – where multiple water events are to be held – from which swimmers have been banned for 101 years over health risks, leading to multibillion-euro clean-up operations to treat bacteria.
The streets of Paris have also been strangely quiet, with hotels reportedly less than three-quarters full during the competition period, which the hospitality industry has put down to soaring prices and tightened city-wide security.
Le Masne and I meet days after France has been thrust into political uncertainty following the election of a hung parliament; days after that, the prime minister resigned.
It’s “a very scary time,” le Masne says of the current political turmoil. “I’m still scared, because even though the National Front [Marine Le Pen’s right-wing party, now known as the National Rally] didn’t win this time, they’re really there.” The Olympics, he hopes, will provide a necessary reprieve – “a bit of, whoof” – he exhales – “relief, to do an arts thing and a sports thing together, and celebrate the beautiful values [of the country]. It’s going to be good for France.”
Life has been calmer in the studio, where le Masne has had fairly free rein in the year and a half since he took up Olympics duty full time. He is working alongside French actor and director Thomas Jolly – who, serendipitously, was picked to be the opening and closing ceremonies’ artistic director while the pair were collaborating on Starmania. “I must say that I’m enjoying a beautiful freedom, because we trust each other,” says le Masne.
Presenting his work to Jolly and the Olympic Committee was less about “I don’t like this bass line or this string”, and more about analysing the message behind it, he says.
“I put so much storytelling into the music, and I try to put so much sense in what I do, so when I present it to them, it’s not like, Do you like it or not?... It’s more about, do we like the storytelling or not?”
Still, le Masne does want everything note-perfect. After laying down his arrangement of La Marseillaise in the space of a night, he spent three months honing the orchestration.
“I come from the classical world, but also from the pop world, and I really wanted to be legit… I really pushed myself to orchestrate properly, listening to a lot of Ravel, Debussy; all these French composers from the early 20th century.”
Invoking his forebears helped to strengthen the, well, French-ness of the work. Not that it’s ever in doubt. France seems particularly skilled at avoiding Americanisation of its culture.
“French people are a bit cocky, a bit too proud about who they are,” le Masne says. “Sometimes [there’s] too much thinking that French are different or better, but also that’s our identity, and I think there’s something really, really beautiful with it.”
Part of that beauty is to le Masne the diversity of French music, which is “not one person… the rap scene is very vivid in France right now, electronic music is very vivid. Even if the political [scene] is scary sometimes, the diversity in France is really there.”
Will rappers be blazing down the Seine on speedboats, come Friday? “I can’t say much of what we’re going to do because everything needs to be secret,” he says. “For me, it was really important to bring a lot of different styles, so you can expect anything.”
Le Masne tortured himself by watching hours of opening ceremonies past (though the Barcelona 1992 Games had been fondly lodged in his head since childhood). But tinkering in the studio he has all but lived in since the beginning of the summer has proven a better use of time. He is struck by the contrast between the comparative quiet of his day-to-day, versus the imminent global spectacle that will culminate in the Paralympic closing ceremony on September 8.
What’s next? “Starting the 9th of September, I’m going to sleep,” he says, not exactly joking – “but I’m lucky because I’ve got a lot of propositions.” (Helped perhaps by his being described by one writer as a “sound magician”, a moniker he calls “too much”.)
Le Masne won’t be committing to anything for the foreseeable. “I need time to process this as a human being, but also as an artist, but also as a person. This is so big. And it’s important, I think, to take the time to re-centre.”
He is open-minded about that next project when it does come, though: be it albums, tours (his own indie duo has been in retirement for some years), or global sporting events. “It’s a dream,” he says of his career, and his future. “It’s just like a drug.”
The 2024 Olympic Games open in Paris on July 26
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