Pantin Pantine is a project initiated by Gérard Lefèbvre, director of the national conservatoire of Bourgoin-Jallieu, who in 1997 commissioned Romain Didier to write a work that could be sung by children and performed in the orchestra by conservatoire students. Immediately won over by the idea, Romain Didier accepted and asked his long-time collaborator Allain Leprest to write the story and lyrics. The enthusiasm the show aroused led to a recording with Jean-Louis Trintignant as narrator. On 7 April 1998 it was performed at the Olympia, and it has been regularly revived ever since.

 

"It is an ambitious wager that Allain Leprest and Romain Didier take, writing about the death of a child. The result lives up to the challenge: they offer a rare and delicate work that never takes the easy path, deploying treasures of poetry to make us feel how much, beyond our presence, our life matters to others. For who has not dreamed of being there in the hours and days that follow their own passing — slipping into conversations and following the events it sets off, seeing our friends miss us and our enemies lower their guard.

This is the extraordinary experience that Pantin, the little boy on the bicycle, is about to live. Guided by a ferryman — an enigmatic figure who leads him towards the beyond while lingering a while in the school playground — we come to realise that his spirit remains alive at the heart of his school, and that his disappearance will change many things in everyone’s life: in Corbeau and Corbelle, leaders of the rival gang, who will end up reconciling with the band of Little Pantins; and in Pantine, the little friend to whom he had one day offered a pepper sweet, and who had smiled.

We do not disappear; we remain alive as long as someone in the world thinks of us — such is the moral of this beautiful story."