For the past 40 years the Festival de La Chaise-Dieu has been an attractive place to be for many music lovers and for dozens of world famous artists. Located in the heart of the high plateaus of Haute-Loire, in Southern Auvergne, the little village of La Chaise-Dieu offers a great patrimonial and architectural heritage, especially with the beautiful ancient Benedictine abbey, in which most of the Festival concerts take place.

The story began in 1966, when the first « festival » took place, consisting in a single piano recital given by the famous Hungarian pianist Georgy Cziffra, and organised by a few enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers. At that time, the grand organ of the abbey really was in a poor way, and the pianist decided to dedicate a large part of his concert fee to the restoration of the instrument. Then from 1966 to 1976, the Festival took place every year in the abbey, just for one week-end, and always based on concerts by Georgy Cziffra.

In 1976, Guy Ramona was given the direction of the Festival de La Chaise-Dieu, and started to transform this event step by step, until the Festival was clearly reckoned as one of the most important music festivals in France. Within a few years the number of Festival concerts went from half a dozen to more than fourty, attracting more than 20.000 spectators. During the eighties, the Festival was specially devoted to French music. At the same time the Festival tended to widen its repertoire to sacred music, the abbey being of course an appropriate place. The Festival was at that time one of the earliest and of the most fervent supporters of ancient and baroque music performed on period instruments. Trying to reach genuine rendering, the Festival invited the best specialists and kept programming beautiful forgotten works as well as famous masterpieces. During the nineties the Festival went on innovating, by organizing church operas and concerts with « spatialization », using the different parts of the abbey. Last but not least, the festival aloso produced many CDs, as well as musical scores.

Since 2003, Jean-Michel Mathé has been the new director, willing to ensure continuity, but also to widen the festival prospects and to keep innovating. Clearly focused on sacred music, the Festival repertoire has been also extended to classical music, post-Romantic composers and even 20th century and contemporary works. The right balance between famous and rediscovered works remains a priority, accented by cultural and pedagogical actions, such as workships, masterclasses, school concerts, free concerts, conferences…

For the last few years, the Festival has also started organizing concerts in different great patrimonial venues : Brioude, Ambert, Chamalières-sur-Loire, and Le Puy-en-Velay.