Composer Vladimir Cosma has created more than 300 film scores, including for The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, The Dinner Game and The Party. Born in Romania in 1940, he came to France at the age of 22 and carved out a career that saw him become emblematic of French popular culture. But Cosma has not forgotten the lean years and lucky encounters that forged his destiny.

I wouldn't be where I am today if...

If, as a child, I hadn't learned to play the violin, although I dreamed of playing the piano. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough room in our apartment in Bucharest to install a piano, which is a richer instrument in terms of harmony than the violin. This forced choice gave me a taste for melody, which is the very subject of music, its backbone. Without a subject, you can't write a symphony or a novel.

You come from a large family of musicians in Romania. Your mother was a composer, your father a pianist and conductor, and your uncle a composer. Could you have chosen a career other than music?

No, I was doomed to it in a way! I tried several times to go into another discipline, math for example. But I kept coming back to music, as if attracted by a magnet. Everything around me was music. My father put a violin in my hands at the age of four. I couldn't have chosen any other path.

At the age of eight, just as you were beginning to give concerts, a singular event had a decisive impact on the child prodigy that you were...

It was a day when I was playing a Bach concerto in A minor. I was so engrossed in the music that I closed my eyes as I played. At the end of the concert, an old lady came up to me and asked why I was doing that. It was Cecilia Nitulescu-Lupu, the greatest violin teacher in Romania at the time. I told her that the music was so beautiful that I was carried away. She then remarked, rather bluntly: "It's not up to you to be transported by the music, it's up to the audience to be!" She went on to explain that I should have kept my eyes open because my right arm wasn't perpendicular to the strings. Her remarks were a revelation. The realization that you don't play music just for yourself, but above all for others.

You quickly gained a certain notoriety, thanks in no small part to your compositions. What did people listen to in post-war Communist Romania?

Many great Russian composers, such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev, were passing through. German music was also played a lot, but I wasn't crazy about it. I've never been a big fan of Haydn, Mozart or Wagner. My preference was for French music: Ravel, Fauré, Debussy... I was also very fond of jazz, which was banned in Romania at the time and which we listened to secretly on Voice of America.

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