The Musical Legacy of Wartime France 9780520955271

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The Musical Legacy of Wartime France

california studies in 20th-century music Richard Taruskin, General Editor

1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout

The Musical Legacy of Wartime France leslie a. sprout

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sprout, Leslie A. The musical legacy of wartime France / Leslie A. Sprout. pages cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-27530-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-95527-1 (ebook) 1. Music—France—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Music and the war. I. Title. ML270.5.S67 2013 780.944’09044—dc23 2012045796 Manufactured in the United States of America Chapters 2, 3, and 5 appeared in earlier versions in the following publications. Chapter 2: “Unlocking the Mystery of Honegger,” New York Times, Sunday Arts & Leisure section, 29 August 2010; © The New York Times. Chapter 3: “Messiaen, Jolivet, and the Soldier-Composers of Wartime France,” Musical Quarterly 87, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 259–304; © Oxford University Press. Chapter 5: “The 1945 Stravinsky Debates: Nigg, Messiaen, and the Early Cold War in France,” special issue on music and the cold war, Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 85–131; © University of California Press. 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

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1. poulenc’s wartime secrets

1

2. honegger’s postwar rehabilitation

38

3. ignoring jolivet’s testimony, embracing messiaen’s memories

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4. the timeliness of duruflé’s requiem

120

5. from the postwar to the cold war: protesting stravinsky in postwar france

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Notes

185

Bibliography

249

Index

263

Illustrations

figures 1. Political cartoon, Le Monde, 28 January 1997

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2. Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time (Deutsche Grammophon, 2000)

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3. Illustration of music making in the Stalag

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4. Certificate signed by Duruflé upon completion of his Requiem, 21 January 1948

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5. Plainchant for the Introit to the Mass for the Dead (Liber usualis, 1930)

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examples 1. Comparison of Claude Debussy, La Mer, and Francis Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles

21

2. Citations of Alsace et Lorraine in Les Animaux modèles

24

3. Francis Poulenc, Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, “C,” mm. 37–41

28

4. Arthur Honegger, Chant de Libération

52

5. Marly, Druon, and Kessel, Le Chant des Partisans, first stanza, mm. 1–8

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6. Chant de la Délivrance, end of refrain and fanfare, mm. 73–83

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7. Chant de la Délivrance, beginning of verse 1, mm. 8–16

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8. Émile Damais, O Nuit, mm. 85–103

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9. Jean Martinon, Musique d’exil: Mouvement symphonique, op. 31, excerpts

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10. Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, V. “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” mm. 1–11

103

11. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu,” mm. 1–12

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12. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu,” mm. 59–71

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13. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, II. “La complainte du pont de Gien,” refrain, mm. 24–30

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14. Comparison of Introit, Mass for the Dead

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15. Maurice Duruflé, Requiem, op. 9, Introit, mm. 1–7

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16. Comparison of Ubi Caritas, hymn for Vespers on Maundy Thursday

139

17. Comparison of Tantum Ergo, hymn for Feast of Corpus Christi

141

18. Comparison of Sanctus, Mass for the Dead

143

19. Jacques Ibert, Capriccio, mm. 117–22

159

20. Igor Stravinsky, Danses concertantes, III. “Thème varié,” mm. 43–46

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21. Serge Nigg, Piano Concerto no. 1, first movement, excerpts

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tables 1. Uses of Chant de la Délivrance in the soundtrack for Un Ami viendra ce soir

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2. Un Ami viendra ce soir: First montage (details)

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3. Orchestral performances of Honegger’s music in Paris, 1945–1946

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4. AFAA recordings anthology of contemporary French music (1944)

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5. Selected performances of Messiaen’s music in wartime France

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6. Stravinsky Festival programs, Orchestre national (Paris, January–July 1945)

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7. Concert program, Société privée de musique de chambre (Paris, 27 February 1945)

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Preface and Acknowledgments

In 1994 I received a Fulbright grant to join a research group at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris to study French musical life during the Second World War. I arrived in August to a city celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of France’s liberation from German occupation. I assumed that, in exploring the wartime activities of French composers, I would be conducting historical research—writing a case study, as it were, of music, politics, and national identity. Yet, at a Fulbright reception before the research group’s first meeting, two elderly French music lovers insisted to me that no French music had been performed in wartime France. The only music they had heard in occupied Paris, they informed me, was German music played by German military bands. At the same time, French radio stations were marking the anniversary of the liberation by airing commemorative broadcasts of wartime recordings by French ensembles, interspersed with interviews of aging French musicians about their wartime experiences. This startling juxtaposition of denial and homage was the first of several indications that the highly charged circumstances of the Second World War in France—the swift defeat by the German army and the humiliating armistice with Hitler in June 1940, the ordeal of foreign occupation, the moral complexities of France’s wartime Vichy regime, and the unresolved ambiguities of the French Resistance—were still a matter of lively national debate. This book addresses three misconceptions about music in France during the Second World War. The first, expressed to me by the elderly music lovers at the 1994 Fulbright reception, is that French music and musicians played a negligible role in the cultural life of wartime France. The decadeslong reluctance of the French to acknowledge that their compatriots played key roles in any aspect of life in wartime France inspired the historian xi

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Henry Rousso in 1987 to devote an entire book to what he memorably called the “Vichy syndrome”: the postwar French pattern of alternately repressing and obsessing about the traumas of Vichy and the German occupation.1 Although several historians—particularly after Robert O. Paxton’s landmark Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order was published in 1972—have written in detail about life in wartime France, French musical life during the war has been slow to receive scholarly treatment. The 2001 publication La vie musicale sous Vichy, a collection of essays summarizing the findings of the CNRS research group I joined in 1994, was the first comprehensive study of the subject to appear.2 My current book builds on subsequent publications by members of the CNRS research group, including my 2000 doctoral dissertation, in narrating the cultural and political significance of French music during the war. More specifically, I investigate the ways in which both the Vichy regime and the French Resistance were heavily invested in fostering creative expression through contemporary music in wartime France. The second misconception that I address in this book is that we can now, nearly seventy years after the liberation, make definitive moral judgments about the activities of composers who lived and worked in wartime France. Part of the ongoing fascination with France during the Second World War is an intense curiosity about whether well-known figures will turn out to have been heroes or villains, résistants or collaborateurs. Yet, whereas writers who published arguments for or against collaboration with Germany are relatively easy to categorize in this way, there are few people in the performing arts who belonged clearly to either camp. To complicate matters further, most of France’s non-Jewish musicians, actors, and filmmakers— and even a few of the Jewish ones—remained in France throughout the occupation and worked, with German approbation, in institutions that were left intact after the disastrous days of June 1940. The vast majority of French musicians and performers operated in the gray zone that historian Philippe Burrin has described as “accommodation,” or acts that occurred “out of necessity, as the least of all evils, and often necessitated compromise, even if it was not always easy to determine when compromises became compromising.”3 After the war a few prominent figures in each industry whose actions went beyond merely continuing their careers were officially sanctioned for collaboration, such as pianist Alfred Cortot, for his concert tours in Germany and for his administrative work with high-ranking Vichy officials; singer-songwriter Charles Trenet, for having sung in Germany, albeit for French prisoners of war and conscripted factory workers; filmmaker

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Henri-Georges Clouzot, for having made films for the German-owned Continental Films; and actress Arletty, for her public affair with a German officer. Yet their sanctions were highly contested and their alleged misdeeds soon forgiven, with nearly everyone involved resuming successful professional careers within a year or two. Resistance, when it happened, occurred largely behind the scenes, by those—such as Édith Piaf and Roger Désormière—whose very willingness to perform in public for audiences of German soldiers mixed with French civilians in occupied Paris was what gave them cover for their activism on behalf of the persecuted and the displaced. Composers were no different. Like their counterparts in music performance, theater, and film, those who were criticized after the war—most notably, Arthur Honegger—were the ones who had taken the calculated risk of assuming that culture and politics operated in separate spheres. The ones hailed as heroes—led by Francis Poulenc—had been canny enough to foresee that after the war the two spheres would be seen as intricately linked. I discuss what we know about each composer’s choices, how those choices were judged in the decades following the war, and whether those postwar judgments were applied fairly to all concerned. But it is not my intention to pass judgment on those choices. I seek instead to explore the ways in which shifting judgments about those choices have affected what their wartime compositions have meant, and continue to mean, to postwar audiences. Why postwar, and not simply wartime, audiences? Because the third misconception I address in this book is one that I myself held upon my arrival in Paris in August 1994: that the story of French music composed and performed during the Second World War is a story that belongs to the historical past. Composers in wartime France faced difficult, often terrifying choices about how to interact with the Vichy regime as well as with German occupying forces. Postwar ambivalence in France about those choices—and about Vichy in general—has made it difficult, if not impossible, to write objectively about their wartime compositions in the postwar period. By telling both the wartime and postwar histories of these pieces, I show how difficult it is to separate postwar reception from historical narrative about their wartime genesis and, in some cases, first performances. I also show how the postwar repression of the rich musical life of wartime France has impeded our understanding of debates about music and politics in France during the early cold war, for those debates were steeped in subtexts and innuendos about composers’ wartime pasts. Lastly, I demonstrate how repression of the wartime histories of music composed during the war has had unintended political consequences in present-day France.

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In September 1994 the effusive celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation gave way to renewed recriminations about Vichy and the occupation when the journalist Pierre Péan published a new biography of then president François Mitterrand.4 The book caused a stir, for it described not only Mitterrand’s youthful involvement with the Vichy regime, but also his postwar support for former Vichy official René Bousquet, accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the persecution of Jews in France. The controversy was such that Mitterrand defended himself on prime-time television in a ninety-minute interview that raised more questions than it answered.5 After his death in January 1996, several selections from Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem were performed at Mitterrand’s public funeral mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, which was attended by the entire French government and sixty-one heads of state from around the world. One of my earliest research findings had been an official government form, no longer than half a sheet of paper, filled out and signed by Duruflé on 21 January 1948.6 The form indicated that Duruflé’s Requiem had fulfilled his 1941 state commission from Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts. Surely the uncanny appropriateness of this music for Mitterrand’s funeral mass was entirely unintended and, if known, would have been decidedly unwelcome. When the CNRS research group published its findings in 2001, I contributed an article on the Vichy commissions in which I discussed the origins of Duruflé’s Requiem in the government’s wartime program.7 The fact that this article met with an angry denial from Frédéric Blanc, the president of the Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, confirmed for me what the unwitting use of Duruflé’s Requiem at Mitterrand’s funeral mass already suggested: that there was a powerful story to be told not just in the wartime genesis of pieces such as the Requiem, but also in the political and musical implications of that genesis for their performance today. Rousso followed his original study of the Vichy syndrome with three sequels. The Mitterrand controversy in September 1994, the landmark apology in July 1995 by Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, for France’s “collective responsibility” for Vichy’s role in the Holocaust, and the conviction of former Vichy official Maurice Papon in 1998 for crimes against humanity provided Rousso and his coauthor, journalist Éric Conan, with many media debates to discuss.8 My work shares with Rousso and Conan’s the desire to explore the complexities of France’s past and the manifestations of that past in the global present. The political and legal events they discuss have bearings, both direct (such as the use of Duruflé’s Requiem for Mitterrand’s funeral mass) and indirect (such as the stigma of the label

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“Vichy commission” for that same Requiem) on the postwar reception of music composed in wartime France. But the study of the presence of France’s wartime musical compositions in postwar culture necessarily differs from that of politics, literature, and film, for music must be re-created every time it is performed. Musicians often seek to learn about the history of the music they are to perform or record, and music, as an art whose meanings are not always expressed clearly in words or visible symbols, often comes with verbal explanations: preconcert talks, program notes, liner notes, performance reviews. Whether the war experience is highlighted, downplayed, simplified, suppressed, or explored in depth is at stake every time the music is played. What is more, several of the wartime compositions I discuss are audience favorites around the world on a scale vastly exceeding that of French novels or films from or about the war. The most famous of the wartime pieces— Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes, and Poulenc’s Figure humaine—are celebrated in recent recordings for their value as wartime testimonies. One can also currently find commercially available CDs of the wartime works of Georges Auric, Elsa Barraine, Henri Dutilleux, and André Jolivet.9 What sustains interest in these works appears to be not (or not only) the aesthetic appeal of their sounds, however appealing some of them may be, but rather the emotional intensity of their wartime stories. Their stories—of music’s ability to distract, console, resist, incite outrage, and help endure captivity—are universalized for a global audience. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, I expand upon my earlier historical research by addressing two questions: what stories do we tell each other about the music of wartime France, and why should any of these stories, including my own, matter to today’s performers and audiences? For the first question I use reception history, finding the stories in postwar secondary sources and tracing them back to their original tellings, which were often published or recorded as interviews in the decade following the liberation of France. For the second, I propose close readings of musical scores to demonstrate how the historical circumstances of wartime France affected the music that was composed in that time and place. Composers’ responses to their surroundings are bound to be varied, for composers, perhaps more than their counterparts in literature and film, can select the degree to which their music represents particular events in sound. Music can bear witness to harrowing events, but, since music—particularly instrumental music without a written text or program—need not portray specific situations, it can also provide a creative means of escape from one’s surroundings.

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In January 1997, the front page of Le Monde featured a bleakly funny political cartoon that combined French anxieties about the trials of prominent former Vichy officials for wartime crimes with the discovery that artwork stolen from Jewish owners remained in the collections of France’s national museums. In the cartoon, a massive statue of Marshal Pétain draping his arm around a grinning Hitler sits in a dark warehouse, covered with cobwebs. A museum guard at the door comments, “It’s very interesting, this work of art, yet no one is reclaiming it!” (fig. 1). This cartoon encapsulates the ways in which I made some of my most surprising research discoveries. For instance, in March 1995, when I asked to see a score by the little-known composer André Gailhard at the music library of Radio France, an overworked librarian brought me a pile of papers from the library’s closed stacks. She had brought me everything she saw under Gailhard’s name, she told me, to save herself a trip. The score I had requested was now irrelevant, for the librarian had unwittingly unearthed the orchestral score and parts to Gailhard’s Ode à la France blessée (Ode to a wounded France), a 1941 state commission narrating the French war experience in words and music from the official perspective of Vichy’s National Revolution. Gailhard’s Ode had been preserved on the shelves, but it had been omitted from the library’s catalog. More recently, in June 2009, I asked Patrick Le Boeuf, a librarian in the theater arts department of the Bibliothèque nationale, to check screenwriter Bernard Zimmer’s papers for any drafts of the text Zimmer had provided to Honegger for his long-lost secret Resistance song, Chant de Libération. I was stunned when Le Boeuf notified me one week later that Zimmer’s papers contained a score of the piece, missing since its October 1944 premiere amid French recriminations about Honegger’s wartime interactions with German occupying forces. These scores were hidden, as it were, in plain sight—as if, although no one had destroyed them, someone had hoped they would go unnoticed. In their 1994 study Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, Conan and Rousso described the recent obsession with the Vichy regime in France as having distorted France’s postwar exploration of its wartime past by focusing too narrowly on Vichy’s anti-Semitism. This focus, they argued, is not only anachronistic, for most Vichy officials did not see anti-Semitism as central to their own projects, but it also risked marginalizing other forces at play in wartime France, such as the German occupying forces with which the Vichy regime collaborated and the diverse movements of resistance that rose up at different times and with differing motivations.10 In music, heightened awareness of the Holocaust has notably skewed the postwar reception of Messiaen’s Quartet. Although it was composed and premiered in 1941 in a

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figure 1. Political cartoon, Le Monde, 28 January 1997, by Plantu. The caption reads: “It’s very interesting, this work of art, yet no one is reclaiming it!”

German prisoner of war camp, recent recordings and radio broadcasts, in their haste to group Messiaen’s music with that of concentration camp victims and survivors, have passed over crucial differences between Messiaen’s experiences in a prison camp like Stalag VIIIA in Silesia and Viktor Ullmann’s in Theresienstadt.11 It is more common, however, that postwar stories about wartime compositions have focused not on Vichy and its crimes but on the issue of collaboration or resistance. How should we judge, for example, musicians’ decisions to remain public figures when those decisions entailed interactions with German authorities? How do we square that with the postwar celebration of those same public figures as having resisted the Germans? As a result of these preoccupations, the stories of musicians actually marginalized by French anti-Semitic legislation, such as Manuel Rosenthal and Marcel Mihalovici, have themselves been marginalized in postwar accounts. The music world is just beginning to call attention

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to the impact of Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation and persecution on the musicians and composers working in wartime France. The chapters of The Musical Legacy of Wartime France are organized chronologically and thematically. Of all the stories I tell, the story of Poulenc’s music is the most confined to the actual war years. Because his wartime compositions generated interest among all three of the competing political and administrative forces in France—the German occupiers, the Vichy regime, and the Resistance—I use his story in chapter 1 to provide an overview of these forces that serves as background to all five chapters in the book. The stories in chapters 2, 3, and 4 move back and forth between the wartime histories of the works I discuss and their postwar reception. Along with chapter 1, they present parallel explorations of two central issues faced by composers in wartime France: whether to continue one’s career in the face of dramatic political changes; and, if so, then how to negotiate those changes. Chapters 1 and 2, on the music of Poulenc and Honegger, respectively, compare the wartime choices and postwar fates of two of France’s bestknown composers. Both of them made a conscious decision to continue pursuing their careers in occupied Paris, where they enjoyed significant professional success despite the altered political landscape: their major wartime premieres include Poulenc’s ballet Les Animaux modèles at the Opéra and Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes, performed by Charles Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Poulenc emerged from the war years with his reputation intact, finding eager and receptive postwar audiences for Figure humaine, his a cappella choral setting of the Resistance poetry of Paul Éluard, composed in secret in 1943. Honegger’s more controversial wartime choices preceded his composition in early 1944 of Chant de Libération, a song for baritone solo, unison chorus, and orchestra that received one performance in liberated Paris before French musicians imposed a six-month ban on the composer’s music in retaliation for what they regarded as acts of collaboration. I juxtapose Chant de Libération with Chant de la Délivrance (Honegger’s postwar pastiche of a Resistance song) in order to explore the role of Honegger’s music in his postwar rehabilitation. The swiftness of his rehabilitation, moreover, calls into question the seriousness of his wartime offenses. Chapters 3 and 4 take a close look at contrasting postwar narratives about the wartime compositions of two of France’s most devout Catholic composers, Messiaen and Duruflé. If Duruflé’s Requiem is notable for the long postwar denial of its historical connections to wartime France, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time has become emblematic of the

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French wartime experience for today’s listeners—one of whom was even inspired to write a two-hundred-page novel based on the work’s genesis and first performance in captivity.12 In these two chapters I seek to reverse the terms of the postwar debate. In chapter 3 I contrast Messiaen’s Quartet with Jolivet’s musical and verbal documentary Trois Complaintes du soldat to discuss the ways in which the Quartet demonstrates Messiaen’s remarkable ability to write ethereal music that transcends his physical ordeals more than it engages with them. Duruflé, who originally envisioned his Requiem as an organ suite, was commissioned in 1941 specifically to write a symphonic poem, destined for performance by one of occupied Paris’s symphony orchestras, which were receiving state subsidies to promote new French music. In chapter 4 I argue that Duruflé set aside the unfinished organ suite as well as a hypothetical a cappella choral setting in order to fulfill the terms of the commission. The Requiem is unique among his compositions in the symphonically conceived orchestral accompaniment he provided to choral parts that are based only intermittently on plainchant. Thus the work we indelibly associate with the war—Messiaen’s Quartet—is arguably less permeated by the circumstances of its composition than the one—Duruflé’s Requiem—whose connections to its wartime past have long been overlooked or repressed by critics concerned with its “timelessness.” My goal for these chapters is to place each composer’s expressions of religious faith in a dialectical relationship with the impact of his surroundings. Chapter 5, though a postwar story, is one that is nevertheless haunted by France’s wartime past. Paris may have been liberated in August 1944, but the war in France was far from over, both literally—enemy troops were not completely defeated in France until the unconditional surrender of German forces in Europe in May 1945—and figuratively. Although initially the student protests that met the Paris premieres of Stravinsky’s latest works in early 1945 concerned aesthetics—the rejection of Stravinsky’s continued embrace of prewar neoclassicism in his wartime works—rather than politics, the fact that the students chose to heckle works by one of the most prominent composers in prewar France touched a raw nerve among older French composers. In this chapter several of the composers from chapters 1 through 4 make a final appearance: Auric, Poulenc, and Jolivet as music critics, and Messiaen as an influential teacher to the protesters. Stravinsky’s defenders—in particular Auric and Poulenc, both associated with the Resistance during the war—made ominous references to the questionable wartime choices of not only Jolivet, who supported the protesters in print, but also Émile Vuillermoz, who merely showed up at the concerts. At the

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same time, in protesting such vigorous defense of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, Serge Nigg and his classmates were rejecting the very idea of a national musical tradition in France, an idea that the discredited Vichy regime had worked hard to promote. Soon, however, Nigg’s membership in the French Communist Party meant that he would face pressure from the Soviet Union, applied to communist composers worldwide in 1948, to replace “falsely cosmopolitan tendencies” with references to his national heritage. Thus I argue that we risk misconstruing the choices made by French musicians during the cold war if we fail to acknowledge the lingering impact of the occupation on the cultural landscape of early postwar France. The stories each of us tells are shaped, of course, not only by the information available to us, but also by our predilections. In 2009 the historian Timothy Snyder argued that we have overlooked the reasons why Auschwitz—erroneously, in his opinion—is at the center of our Holocaust narratives, as embodied in the now-famous novels of Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel. Snyder reminds his readers that since Auschwitz, unlike the death camps of Treblinka, Bełz˙ec, and Sobibor and the mass open-air massacres in eastern Europe, functioned as both labor and death camp, its inmates had a higher rate of survival. In addition, unlike eastern European survivors living behind the iron curtain, western Europeans who survived Auschwitz were “free to write and publish as they liked” after the war. As for the riveting photographs and films taken at the liberation of Auschwitz, according to Snyder, “they are not the whole story” of German and Soviet mass murder; “sadly, they are not even an introduction.”13 They are, however, the stories we have preferred. It is time to ask why. Musicians, audience members, and scholars are understandably attached to the stories they already know about the music of wartime France. In these pages I offer updated versions in which the detailed information now available is far richer, but at times far darker, than the familiar myths. Recently the art curator Maya Benton, who discovered that the photographer Roman Vishniac presented a misleading portrait of prewar European Jewish life by selecting for postwar publication only stereotypical images of shtetl life, expressed her hope that a forthcoming exhibit of Vishniac’s unpublished work would present a more vivid panorama of a vanished world. “Why are people so attached to the other story?” she remarked to a reporter for the New York Times. “The real story is so much better.”14 Once, after I presented my research on Messiaen’s Quartet to a group of conservatory faculty and students, a professor asked me if I even liked Messiaen’s

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music. In fact, I became enthralled with pieces such as Duruflé’s Requiem, Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes, Messiaen’s Quartet, and Poulenc’s Figure humaine as a musician long before I reexamined them as a scholar. It is my fascination with them as music that has compelled me to look into the complexities often masked by stereotyped narratives of redemption through art. My research has changed not only the way I think about these pieces, but the way I hear them as well. It has also changed my assumptions about the study of music and politics. I hope to show that, in addition to the ways in which political circumstances shape music composition and music in turn shapes politics, politics can continue to influence our perception of musical favorites, and vice versa, long after the sounds of their initial performances have faded. •

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Several people were instrumental in the research, writing, and publication that led to this book. Myriam Chimènes, who in 1994 extended the invitation to me to join the CNRS research group La vie musicale en France pendant la Second Guerre mondiale, has generously provided advice, feedback, and crucial contacts among French musicians and researchers ever since. She also invited me to present my research in Paris numerous times at the CNRS and at a study session at the 1997 Congress of the International Musicological Society in London. Members of the research group gave me invaluable tips along the way. My thanks go to Agnès Callu for advice about the purification files at the Archives nationales; Hélène Eck and Karine Le Bail for sharing their knowledge of sources on France’s wartime radio stations; Guy Krivopissko and Daniel Virieux for meeting with me at the Musée de la Résistance nationale in Champigny-sur-Marne; and Manuela Schwartz for providing me with relevant information on wartime France from German archives. The staff at the music and theater arts divisions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France were patient with my requests for documents and information. I thank Patrick Le Boeuf in particular for his help with the Fonds Bernard Zimmer. I also received welcome help from the staff of the Archives des affaires étrangères at the Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes, the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, the Bibliothèque Jean Maitron at the Centre d’histoire sociale du XXe siècle, the Centre de documentation musicale at Radio France, the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, and the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler. Michèle Noirjean-Linder and Robert Piencikowski were very accommodating during my brief visit to the Paul Sacher Foundation in

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Basel. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French or German are my own. In the United States, Richard Taruskin provided steady support and insightful feedback when I was ready to follow my dissertation with this, its sequel. Thanks to Richard, to Mary Francis and her colleagues at the University of California Press, and to the anonymous peer reviewers for crucial help in revising and publishing the manuscript. Any remaining errors or omissions are, of course, entirely my own. Musicology colleagues Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Peter Schmelz, Joy Calico, Eric Drott, Barbara Milewski, Robert Fallon, Sally Bick, and Chris Murray provided sympathetic and astute feedback on chapter drafts and conference papers. At Drew University I have received valuable support from faculty members Anne Yardley, Norman Lowrey, Trevor Weston, Wendy Kolmar, and Kimberly Rhodes. Special thanks for research assistance go to Kathleen Juliano and her staff in the Interlibrary Loan office at Drew University, and to Ruthann McTyre, head of the Rita Benton Music Library of the University of Iowa, as well as to the students and faculty who participated in the colloquia I gave at those two institutions. My original dissertation research was supported by a Fulbright grant to France; an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society; and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Department of Music, and the Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Later stages of research received welcome financial support from an Old Gold Summer Fellowship for Non-Tenured Faculty at the University of Iowa, from the Office of the CLA Dean at Drew University, and a Wallerstein Partnership grant from the Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict at Drew University. It was enormously helpful to share my work with panel members and audiences at the American Musicological Society’s annual meetings in Columbus, Ohio, in 2002 and Indianapolis in 2010, at sessions chaired, respectively, by Pamela Potter and Laura Silverberg; the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations panel “Old Texts / Modern Music” at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia in 2009, chaired by Jeff Dailey; and the Conference on Music and Politics at the University of Bristol in 2010, organized by Pauline Fairclough. I am especially grateful to Peter Schmelz for having invited me to participate in the panel “Music and Politics in the Early Cold War: Recent Approaches, Future Directions,” sponsored by the AMS Cold War and Music Study Group at the American Musicological Society’s national meeting in Quebec City in 2007. The lively discussion that evening of the panelists (Phil Ford, Danielle

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Fosler-Lussier, Tamara Levitz, Peter Schmelz, and Laura Silverberg) and the audience members elucidated my thinking on Boulez, Nigg, Stravinsky, and the cold war in France. Before I researched the music of wartime France, I played it. As my ideas on twentieth-century French music have evolved, I have often been inspired by the conversations and instruction I received from my piano teachers. Elaine Greenfield introduced me to Debussy’s piano music and, through an unforgettable live performance at the Adamant Music School, Messiaen’s Quartet. Charles Abromavic guided me through learning selections from Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, with which I unwittingly surprised Pierre Petit, then director of the École normale de musique in Paris, when I proposed to play them as my audition for the school in 1988 (at his request I played Schumann instead). Through my teacher there, Françoise Parrot-Hanlet, I met Jean Françaix and pianist Vlado Perlemuter, who held a master class on the music of his teacher, Ravel. Among the memorable performances I attended that year was the November 1988 concert celebrating Messiaen’s eightieth birthday, performed by Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. These early exposures to major figures of twentieth-century French musical life inspired me to select a research topic for my dissertation that would enable me to return to France to study it more closely. Once in the libraries and archives of Paris, I took notes when I came across intriguing information on familiar pieces, such as Messiaen’s Quartet and Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes, that were nevertheless outside the scope of my dissertation research. Those notes were the first steps in writing this book. Last but not least, I owe a great deal to my daughters, Audrey and Lena, for their patience with my more distracted moments over the years of research and writing. I thank them, too, for their tolerance of my research trips to Paris, especially in spring 2010, when my return was delayed by an erupting Icelandic volcano. Those trips were greatly enlivened by the friendship and hospitality of Édith Grua-Étienbled, Hollis Krym, and Nicolas Choussat.

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Poulenc’s Wartime Secrets Poulenc’s choruses . . . have the absence of color of the days we lived through, and the immaterial light of hope. andré schaeffner, “Francis Poulenc, musicien français”

poulenc’s war After France declared war on Germany on 1 September 1939, Francis Poulenc, at forty a veteran of the First World War, had a much easier time as a soldier in the French army than most of his fellow composers. Instead of being forced to sit idle in a field during months of tense anticipation, Poulenc was sent on a goodwill tour by the Administration of Fine Arts with baritone Pierre Bernac to give concerts in January and February 1940 in Portugal, Italy, and Switzerland. When the Germans finally invaded in May 1940, there followed mass surrenders of French soldiers, including Olivier Messiaen, who were subsequently sent to German camps as prisoners of war; thousands of others in central France fought, with André Jolivet, to defend the country against the advancing German troops; some, most notably Jehan Alain, Maurice Jaubert, and Jean Vuillermoz, did not survive the battles.1 Poulenc’s antiaircraft unit, which was called up on 2 June to the relatively safe city of Bordeaux, retreated around one hundred miles east to a small village outside of Cahors. When the two countries signed an armistice on 22 June, Poulenc found himself south of the demarcation line that divided the country into a northern zone occupied by German troops— including Paris and the country’s strategic Atlantic coastlines—and a southern zone nominally in the control of the French government. By midJuly he was demobilized after having served six weeks in uniform. Poulenc took full advantage of the peace and quiet of his idyllic surroundings. He was enchanted with the countryside and inspired by the people he met; in letters to friends he nicknamed the elderly farmers who were his hosts “Philémon and Baucis,” and he described their barn, where he slept with other soldiers, as “very La Fontaine.” “I have faith in the 1

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future, in our ‘team,’ and, what is more, I feel full of music,” he wrote to Bernac on 10 July. “I have come up with a thousand melodies and the overall color of my ballet. Even the absence of a piano has been good for me.”2 Poulenc had given some thought to a ballet based on the fables of Jean de La Fontaine as early as 1937, but it was the defeat of France that gave him the impetus and the opportunity to write the piece. By the time he was able to cross into the occupied zone in early September, he had picked out six fables and sketched most of the score. In choosing to live in the occupied zone, Poulenc had to navigate among the competing demands placed upon prominent civilians there: by the German occupying forces, which sought to promote German music at the expense of French compositions and to encourage collaboration; by the Vichy regime, which balanced the need to defend French culture against German propaganda with not only the necessity of collaboration, but also political pressures to redefine the nation’s cultural heritage along new ideological lines; and by the networks of resistance that gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy’s efforts with suspicion. Narrating the trajectory of Poulenc’s wartime activities provides us, then, with more than just the story of one celebrated composer’s ability not only to survive but to thrive in the adverse circumstances of wartime France. It also gives us the opportunity to explore how the primary agents of those adverse circumstances—German occupiers, Vichy officials, and Resistance agitators—envisioned the role of music, especially new French compositions for the opera and ballet, in their projects and aspirations in wartime France. For the first two years of the German occupation, Poulenc’s activities were typical of most prominent French composers who had escaped capture by the German army. He composed and performed music, organized premieres of his new compositions, and published opinion pieces in the French press. As a composer, Poulenc worked on his largest project, the ballet Les Animaux modèles, from June 1940 to June 1942; by September 1942 he had also written one set of mélodies (Banalités, on the poetry of Apollinaire) and one of chansons (Chansons villageoises, on the stylized, folk-inspired poetry of Maurice Fombeure). Poulenc also agreed to write incidental music for two plays (Léocadia, by Jean Anouilh, and La fille du jardinier, by Charles Exbrayat) and one film (La Duchesse de Langeais, based on a story by Balzac). As a pianist Poulenc’s frequent wartime recitals with Bernac consisted almost exclusively of French mélodies, by his predecessors (Chausson, Debussy, Duparc, Fauré, Ravel) as well as his contemporaries, several of whose works he and Bernac premiered.3 He recorded mélodies by Chausson and Fauré with Bernac in December 1940, with a second wartime recording

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project of Debussy’s vocal music with soprano Lucienne Tragin in 1943.4 Poulenc also played his own music, performing his Concert champêtre with Charles Münch and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in February 1941 and with Gaston Poulet and the Concerts Gabriel Pierné in January 1942.5 As a music critic, Poulenc published three articles in early 1941 on composers who had profoundly influenced French music in the first half of the twentieth century: Stravinsky—he pleaded for more frequent performances of the composer “who honored us by applying for French citizenship”—Ravel, and Chabrier.6 And in May 1942 he praised Debussy for having given young French composers a model of “how to write music that is purely ours, whether it stems from Couperin, Berlioz, or Bizet.”7 In March 1941 Poulenc teamed up with Roger Désormière to unearth Chabrier’s earliest forays into the world of operetta (Fisch-Ton-Kan and Vaucochard et Fils 1er), paired with Rameau’s Les Paladins, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, and Poulenc’s own Aubade. Poulenc’s greatest wartime public success, the premiere of Les Animaux modèles at the Opéra on 8 August 1942, was a turning point. It was an event that implicated all the competing forces in occupied France. For the Vichy regime, although the ballet was not a state commission, it was exactly the kind of new French work that Vichy’s new director of the Administration of Fine Arts, Louis Hautecœur, was seeking to produce with Vichy’s expanded commissions program. It reflected nostalgia for the ancien régime in its setting and themes, and the playful seductiveness of its music was bound to appeal to a wide audience.8 As far as the German occupying forces were concerned, Poulenc’s ballet was premiered in the shadows of the Opéra’s production, one month earlier, of Werner Egk’s Joan de Zarissa, a ballet imposed on the French theater as an example of German superiority in contemporary music. For the Resistance, Les Animaux modèles showed Poulenc, who had joined the Resistance group the Front national des musiciens (FNM) sometime in 1942, using his public persona as a quintessentially French musician as cover for a subtly subversive act. He inserted into the ballet’s score several references to Alsace et Lorraine, a song written in 1871 to protest Germany’s annexation of French territory following the Franco-Prussian War. As a result, Poulenc’s ballet meant many things to many people. The work’s overt references to the time of Louis XIV coexisted with secret references to wounded French pride, while its emphasis on French identity typecast it as less substantial than an analogous German production. In the premiere, Serge Lifar, a notorious collaborator who choreographed the work and danced a leading role, appeared before an audience in which German military personnel were given the best seats, while in the pit, the

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orchestra was conducted by Désormière, one of the founding members of the FNM. In his program notes to accompany the premiere—printed in French and German to accommodate the occupying forces in the audience—Poulenc wrote, “There is no need to summarize fables that everyone knows,” a tongue-in-cheek reminder that the fables, and perhaps also Alsace et Lorraine, were intimately known to the French, but not the German, members of the audience.9 The work’s title had come from Paul Éluard, who was one of the best-known poets of the French Resistance and who had gone into hiding shortly before the ballet’s premiere.10 In many respects Poulenc’s was a typical wartime story. All composers who remained in occupied France had to contend with the same pressures. Several of them achieved public success, thanks in part to the increased funding for contemporary French music provided by Vichy after 1940. More than a few composed secret settings of clandestinely published poetry for postwar performance, as Poulenc did with his 1943 cantata for a cappella double choir, Figure humaine, culminating in his setting of Éluard’s famous clandestine poem, “Liberté.” Where Poulenc’s story is unique is that he not only managed to achieve remarkable wartime success with his reputation intact, but he also dared to express during the war, onstage and in public, his profound dismay about the fate of his country, and he wrote a Resistance piece in secret that found eager and receptive audiences after the war. In this chapter I explore the musical secrets in Les Animaux modèles in the context of the competing agendas of German and French officials for the repertory of the Opéra, epitomized in the juxtaposition of Poulenc’s ballet with Egk’s. I then discuss Poulenc’s subsequent musical secrets: his Violin Sonata, with its overt homage to Federico García Lorca; the Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, settings of clandestinely published poetry by a known member of the Resistance that were nevertheless performed and published in occupied Paris; and the wartime genesis and postwar reception of Figure humaine. Finally, I examine how Poulenc was received after the war as a celebrated national figure through his ability during the war to balance his life as a respected public figure with his composition and performance of musical secrets.

from defeat to renewal: music and the vichy regime In signing an armistice with Germany in June 1940, France faced severe conditions: occupation of the northern three-fifths of the country by German troops, with the costs paid for by France, and the demobilization of the French military, with over one and a half million French soldiers to be

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held in Germany until a peace treaty was signed. In early July 1940 the French parliament met in the resort town of Vichy, just south of the demarcation line between occupied and unoccupied zones, to plan the best way of negotiating a lasting peace. Pierre Laval, a prominent former prime minister in right-wing governments in the 1930s, argued that the country’s institutions needed to be completely reformed in order to gain leverage in peace negotiations with Germany.11 A sweeping majority of ministers and parliamentarians agreed with him, voting the next day to dissolve the parliament, suspend the Republican constitution, and give full powers to the eightyfour-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain, military savior of France during the Great War, the “hero of Verdun,” was now to become the spiritual savior of a nation too weak to defend itself with arms; he appointed Laval, a forceful advocate for collaboration with Germany, his prime minister.12 Few mourned the passing of the Third Republic. On the contrary, people from across the political spectrum embraced the new government’s sweeping vision of reform, under the heading of National Revolution. It was apparent within political circles, however, long before the public became aware of it that the National Revolution was not just about renewal: it was also about revenge. The new regime’s scapegoats were the old enemies of the political right: communists, Freemasons, Jews, and foreigners. The French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, or PCF) had already been dissolved when war was declared in September 1939. By October 1940 Pétain issued decrees that outlawed “secret societies,” forced schoolteachers to take a loyalty oath to the new regime, revoked the citizenship of recently naturalized French citizens, and severely restricted the professions that French Jews could practice.13 Faced with military defeat and economic disarray, the Vichy regime saw the cultural prestige of the country as the salvation of France. “France was not defeated on the battlefield of the arts,” wrote Hautecœur, a university professor and museum curator who was appointed director of the Administration of Fine Arts on 21 July 1940. “Our architecture, our painting, our sculpture, [and] our music continue to inspire admiration.”14 The minister of national education was a politically sensitive post, held by no fewer than six men between 1940 and 1944.15 By contrast, Hautecœur—traditional in his artistic tastes, faithful to Pétain in his social and political views, and nationalist in his defense of French culture—was able to maintain stability in the Administration of Fine Arts until he was replaced in March 1944. The administration under Hautecœur balanced its interests in defending French culture against German propaganda with the pragmatic realities facing a collaborationist regime. He used the Nazi Reich Music Chamber as a model, increasing funding for the composition, performance, publication, and recording of new French music.16

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The combined result was a dramatic increase in public visibility for contemporary composers in wartime France. Government interest in the arts was nothing new in France. Vichy nevertheless differed from its predecessors in the attention it gave to music among all the arts. The allocation for music in the budget of the Administration of Fine Arts increased sharply during the four years of occupation even as the administration’s total budget decreased. As a result, funding for music accounted for more than a third of the total arts budget by 1944.17 Contemporary music was poised to benefit most of all, for what better way could there be to demonstrate the vitality of the nation than in its newest artistic productions? Alongside the increased levels of funding allotted to music, the Administration of Fine Arts proposed that higher sums be given to commissions of new works in both music and the visual arts.18 Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts provided music commissions with their highest level of funding ever in 1941 and maintained it for the duration of the war. Between September 1940 and August 1944 the administration issued sixtyfive commissions to sixty-one French composers and paid them a total of 702,000 francs.19 Although this sum still constituted only a small fraction of the total devoted to generating new works of art, new music had finally found a permanent home in the government budget. Hautecœur had discovered great potential in the music commissions program founded by Georges Huisman, his Popular Front predecessor, in 1938 as a form of unemployment compensation during tough economic times. Where Huisman’s original conception began and ended with the idea of supporting composers in practicing their craft, Hautecœur was concerned with the eventual performance of the new works. In the context of the German occupation of France, it was not sufficient just to stimulate the production of new French music. It was crucial that this new production be demonstrated to a wide audience: to the French themselves, to maintain a sense of pride; to the German soldiers who now formed a large percentage of Parisian audiences; and to the outside world, which was nervously watching France as a case study of life in a Europe ruled by Nazi Germany. Hautecœur saw German interest in attending cultural events in Paris as a unique opportunity to increase the prestige of French culture in Germany. “These men, who came persuaded of our artistic decadence, discovered a modern school of composers, as well as singers, performers, and set designers that proved to them the vitality of our country,” he would write after the war.20 To facilitate the performance of commissioned works in occupied Paris, Hautecœur provided additional grants to pay the copying fees and publication costs of commissioned pieces selected for performance. For this extra

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funding he turned to a new division of the Vichy government, the Office for the Fight against Unemployment (Commissariat à la lutte contre le chômage). In the 1943 budget this office supplied 9.3 million francs to the Administration of Fine Arts to provide work for unemployed artists and musicians, to assist students at the Conservatoire, and to subsidize orchestras and concert series in the provinces.21 Of this sum, approximately 121,000 francs went over the next two years to fifteen different composers to help get their commissioned works performed. More substantial changes in the conception of the commissions program came during 1941, when Hautecœur’s administration expanded its funding to performance institutions in exchange for an increase in the stipulated percentage of programming devoted to French music in general and new French music in particular. The basic requirement to perform works by living French composers had long been part of the state’s funding programs for the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the four Paris orchestras. Jacques Rouché, who as director had been active since 1914 in soliciting new works for the Opéra, had welcomed the commissions program in 1938 (and its first completed opera, Darius Milhaud’s Médée) as a means of overcoming the Opéra’s traditional resistance to new music. The increased percentages of required new French music now meant that all of the state-funded institutions were obliged to embark on a search for new works to perform. Those recently commissioned by the state provided a readily available repertoire. Composers could now expect financial and institutional support for their work, from conception to performance by the country’s most prestigious musicians. In January 1941 the current minister of national education, Jacques Chevalier, signed into law at Vichy more specific directives on how the French opera houses would function.22 Included in that law were requirements to schedule each year at least two evenings at the Opéra and three at the Opéra-Comique that consisted of new productions whose composers and librettists were French. These stipulations posed no difficulties for Rouché, who negotiated the theaters’ reopening with the German occupying forces in August 1940.23 The Opéra-Comique opened its fall 1940 season with Carmen on 22 August, and La Damnation de Faust appeared two days later at the Opéra. An article in Paris-Soir alerted the public that the regular weekly schedule of three operas and one ballet would continue just as before.24 As the head of both theaters (united as the Réunion des Théâtres lyriques nationaux, or RTLN, in January 1939), Rouché resumed his work in reviving French repertoire and looking for new works to produce. Among them were a new Pelléas et Mélisande to mark the fortieth anniversary of the premiere; Fauré’s Pénélope; new ballets by Poulenc, Claude Delvincourt,

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and Maurice Jaubert; and Antigone, by Arthur Honegger and Jean Cocteau. At the same time, Rouché’s attention was focused on the new operas and ballets that might cross his desk through government commissions. Before the end of the war he would stage three commissioned operas and plan two others for 1944–45. With Serge Lifar working as both choreographer and star performer in ballets at the Opéra, the occupation was also a golden age for French ballet both old and new—including two state commissions.25 Although Rouché had put significant effort into new wartime productions of French operas, it was the wartime productions of new French ballets that won unprecedented popularity among Opéra audiences. By 1940 Lifar’s decade of hard work in restoring the corps de ballet at the Opéra to the high standards of the turn of the century had paid off. A choreographer and dancer of great talent and star appeal, Lifar had a large following not only in Paris but across Europe as well. He had convinced Rouché to discontinue the practice of performing ballets and operas on single bills, which he feared gave audiences the impression that ballet was of secondary importance. Having established himself at the Opéra with a mixture of new choreography for beloved old scores and ballets that had been expressly commissioned for him, he maintained both aspects of his work during the war.26 By 1944 the Opéra had produced eight new ballets to recently composed scores by French composers, to which Lifar supplied the choreography and danced, in most cases, the title role. Lifar’s ambition since his appointment at the Opéra in 1930 had been to reestablish the preeminence of French ballet in the European dance world. After the defeat he multiplied his contacts with both French and German authorities in order to maintain the Opéra’s position as the leading institution of European ballet. Left in charge in June 1940 when Rouché retreated south to Cahors with the company in advance of the German army’s arrival in Paris, Lifar followed the advice of both Laval and Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to France, in readying the Opéra to reopen its doors as soon as possible. As nominal head of the prestigious institution, Lifar narrowly avoided having to give Hitler a tour of the premises in the early morning of 23 June, but he soon came into contact with Bernard Radermacher—the personal representative in Paris of Josef Goebbels, head of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, or RMVP) in Berlin—and Goebbels himself, who passed through Paris in early July. Lifar sought to expand upon this early contact by inviting the Reich minister to return to Paris for the reopening of the Opéra in the fall.27 He also arranged for Radermacher to bring reporters to ballet rehearsals, resulting in front-page photos of Lifar and his dancers that publicized the fact that the coming season would be as brilliant as ever.

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After Rouché returned to Paris in the fall and took over the leadership of the Opéra, Lifar focused his energy on ballet and its future in the new Europe. He worked hard to make the connection between his dance renaissance and the heritage of the Romantic masters, outlining the history of French ballet in the past hundred years from Giselle to the present in a series of articles in the new weekly journal, L’Information musicale. Lifar called his own work “neoclassical,” explaining that his desire was to bring together the strict vocabulary of academic ballet from the Romantic era with a modified version of the experimental style to which he had been exposed as a member of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.28 With great fanfare he oversaw an exhibit on Romantic ballet at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1942 in cooperation with the Opéra archives and the Vienna National Library. That year Lifar traveled to Germany on three separate occasions, promoting his pan-European vision of dance with a film entitled Symphonie en blanc that was screened at the RMVP in Berlin. He also proposed to Abel Bonnard, minister of national education, that it was in the national interest to found a new school of choreography. While it was true, he argued, that French ballet had recently regained its status in Europe after decades of decline, the Opéra’s position was precarious as long as he was the only qualified choréauteur available. It was therefore crucial to take advantage of the current enthusiasm of the French public by founding a school that would ensure that Paris would remain the dance capital of the world. Lifar proposed that he himself would be the best candidate to direct such a school, for despite his foreign birth, he was, like the great choréauteurs of the nineteenth century, fully naturalized as a Frenchman.29 The French press enthusiastically embraced the possibility of enhancing the prestige of France by framing Lifar’s successes at the Opéra in nationalist terms. Events like the centenary performance of Giselle using Lifar’s 1932 choreography, and the unveiling of his new choreography of Sylvia— at three acts, his longest work—to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Delibes, gave them a lot to praise in the first half of 1941. Lifar’s newest ballet, Philippe Gaubert’s Le Chevalier et la Damoiselle, was the dance event of the summer. Dance critics applauded Lifar’s efforts to turn away from modernist experimentation in favor of the traditions of academic ballet. Those dancers who were still dazzled by the “religion of choreographic liberty” espoused by Isadora Duncan and others, wrote Henriette Blond in the November 1943 issue of La Chronique de Paris (a monthly journal aspiring to replace the Nouvelle Revue française after it ceased publication in July 1943), were now outnumbered by a younger generation more fascinated by the expressive possibilities of solid technical

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skills than by the “exceedingly dry mechanical asceticism” of years past.30 Moreover, by reviving dance at the Opéra itself, Lifar was at once restoring the glories of a venerable institution and fulfilling his own visions of dance. “Few theaters from around the world can pride themselves on a choreographic repertoire this vast and varied, on a school of dance so well trained and so rich in major works,” gushed Arthur Hoérée at the end of the 1940–41 season. “In this passing of the torch, one has to admit that Serge Lifar has carried the flame entrusted to him higher and further than any other, at a more pressing rate and with the fervor of a priest.”31 Two sumptuous books published in 1943 used copious illustrations and descriptive text to commemorate Lifar’s achievements at the Opéra. The first, Ballets de l’Opéra de Paris, by dance historian Léandre Vaillat, was a chronological survey of French ballet since 1900, with special emphasis on Lifar’s recent work. The second, Serge Lifar à l’Opéra, was a limited-edition art book with large folio sketches of Lifar’s many ballets. Paul Valéry and Jean Cocteau contributed texts to drawings by Lucienne Pageot-Rousseaux in an effort to memorialize the ephemeral art of choreography.32 The music critic Émile Vuillermoz, a staunch supporter of Lifar, praised the “triple academic collaboration” of Valéry, Cocteau, and Lifar for making such a priceless contribution to the libraries of dance lovers everywhere.33 Even those who resented Lifar’s high-profile associations with French and German political figures could not deny the broad appeal of his work. Poulenc’s Les Animaux modèles took its place among the new French ballets choreographed and danced by Lifar with its premiere at the Opéra on 8 August 1942. In writing his new ballet, Poulenc had set out to make its Frenchness as unmistakable as possible. He imagined the fables in a seventeenth-century setting, “the century of Louis XIV, which is also that of Pascal,” because, as he later explained, “no other era in history is more specifically French.”34 The ballet was set in the courtyard of a farm somewhere in Périgord or the Dordogne, a tribute to the region where Poulenc had been stationed in summer 1940. Poulenc gave the fables a pastoral aura of peace and goodwill by framing the story with the sight of the farmers leaving for the fields in the morning at the raising of the curtain, and their return for their noonday meal at the end. The dancers themselves were dressed not as animals but in the style of the gentlemen and ladies at the court of the Sun King. Three of the fables—“The Bear and the Two Schemers,” “Middle Age and Two Possible Wives,” and “Death and the Woodcutter”—concentrated on the foibles of human characters. For the others, Poulenc transformed the animals, already thinly disguised in the original, into actual human beings. In “The Grasshopper and the Ant,”

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the happy-go-lucky grasshopper is a prima donna who is now past her prime, and the besotted beast in “The Lion in Love” is a rake whose seduction of a young girl is thwarted by her irate father. In “The Two Roosters,” Poulenc added a twentieth-century twist by playing on the slang meaning of la poule: the “hens” dance a French cancan, baring their legs in short tutus while wearing a few feathers in their hair. According to Lifar, the decision to humanize the beasts had little in common with the histoires naturelles in vogue after the last war. Instead, the idea was to revive the spirit of the ballets de cour of seventeenth-century France by choreographing the fables “just as they would have been done when La Fontaine was alive.”35 References to the French cultural heritage, and to the grand siècle in particular, permeated every aspect of the ballet’s conception. Poulenc’s music delighted the critics. Honegger wrote that the early influences of Chabrier, Stravinsky, and Satie had been assimilated to such a degree that the composer had made their sounds his own. “At every turn,” he marveled, “a melodic contour or a harmonic progression causes us to say ‘that’s so Poulenc.’ ” Marcel Delannoy detected a kindred spirit in Poulenc’s embrace of demi-caractère, made manifest in the juxtaposition of divertissement and poésie, Chabrier’s tenderness with the grandeur of Stravinsky. Could anyone imagine, he asked, a more appropriate writer for Poulenc than La Fontaine?36 Poulenc’s wartime efforts reflect not only his desire to promote French culture at a time of national crisis, but also a lifelong passion for expressing a distinctly French national identity. Just as he sought in Les Animaux modèles to explore the Frenchness of La Fontaine and the court of Louis XIV, in his songs he selected texts that drew on a wide range of national imagery, from the urban (Poulenc remarked that he chose “Voyage à Paris” in Banalités because “when it comes to Paris, I often cry or sing”) to the rural (he wrote to André Schaeffner that his Chansons villageoises were “Pribaoutki from the Morvan”).37 With Bernac, Poulenc organized thematic programs based on the French repertoire, such as a February 1941 lecturerecital at the Théâtre des Mathurins entitled “Chabrier-Debussy-Poulenc,” and a March 1941 program at the Salle Gaveau in which Poulenc and Bernac performed musical selections in alternation with recitations of French poetry on the theme “Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire and Five of their Musicians: Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré, Debussy, Honegger, Poulenc.” Poulenc’s article on Chabrier was unabashedly rehabilitative: having seen the OpéraComique’s elaborate new production of L’Étoile, Poulenc reported, he was convinced that Chabrier was the clear precursor of several French composers, most of whom were shameless about their disavowal of his influence.

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Not, however, the most esteemed: “Messager was passionate about L’Étoile; Debussy and Ravel recognized a masterpiece. What a consolation!”38 It is hardly surprising, then, that Poulenc’s passionate advocacy for French music and culture should have led him to participate in activities that were specifically aimed at the renewal of France through the promotion of its cultural heritage. His initial public appearance after June 1940 as composer and pianist, performing the premiere of his Sextet for Piano and Winds, took place on 9 December 1940 in a concert of the Association de musique contemporaine. This group was organized by Robert Bernard, who had founded L’Information musicale as a wartime replacement for both Revue musicale and the Guide du concert, and its concerts were held at the new journal’s headquarters.39 The first five concerts of the association in November–December 1940 sought to balance the best of French music written before 1918 with the most promising music of the present day. Works such as Franck’s Piano Quintet, Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, piano pieces by Chabrier, and mélodies by Gounod were juxtaposed with those of Delannoy, Honegger, and Messiaen, and two new works were given premieres: on 25 November, Jean Rivier’s Symphonie en sol majeur (a 1938 state commission), and on 9 December, Poulenc’s Sextet. The message of the concerts was clear. The solid values of French music composed before the First World War would not only provide a foundation for the future; they would also contribute to the shared goals necessary for the formation of a New French School.40 Officially, Poulenc participated in two Vichy administration committees: Henri Rabaud’s Professional Committee of Dramatic Authors, Composers, and Music Editors (Comité professionnel des auteurs dramatiques, compositeurs et éditeurs de la musique) and Alfred Cortot’s Professional Committee of Musical Arts and Private Music Education (Comité professionnel de l’art musical et de l’enseignement libre de la musique).41 However, he was often absent from Paris, preferring his country home in Noizay, in the occupied zone some 140 miles southwest of the capital. And after two years of living under German occupation, Poulenc’s public participation in the renewal of France gradually began to coexist with a number of small but significant gestures of defiance.

challenges from berlin: music and the german occupying forces There was a particular urgency underlying French decisions regarding the performance of contemporary French music during the war. Behind the

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idealized visions of French officials such as Hautecœur and Rouché lay a harsh reality: the French had to act defensively at a time when the nation’s capital and northern three-fifths were occupied by a conquering power. In the summer of 1940, while the French government worked out new laws and policies and made changes in personnel, the German occupying forces moved into their headquarters in Paris. German agencies in Paris consisted of the Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF), which was linked to the Wehrmacht and Goebbels’s RMVP and also had bureaus throughout the provinces; the German embassy (with Otto Abetz as ambassador to France); and the Institut allemand (a cultural center run by Karl Epting). The latter two were attached to the foreign ministry in Berlin.42 By allowing an active and diverse cultural life in occupied France, German officials hoped to encourage collaboration by showing that there was a role for French culture in the new Nazi Europe. They also sought to maintain social order by distracting the population from the hardships of war. The presence of “normal” cultural events served to both stabilize the population and use that stability as evidence of the acceptability of German rule throughout the European continent. By the end of 1940, thirty-four theaters, fourteen music halls, two circuses, six cabarets, and around thirty cinemas had opened their doors in Paris alone.43 By September 1940 the PAF had also created a new French-language radio station, Radio-Paris, which was controlled by the German occupiers but financed entirely by the French state. Radio-Paris broadcast musical performances—which constituted over two-thirds of its broadcast time—alongside pro-German news and opinions.44 Here one could listen to live broadcasts from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées of the Grand Orchestre de Radio-Paris led by France and Germany’s most talented conductors, or hear the orchestra of Raymond Legrand accompanying France’s most famous popular singers. Listings in the station’s weekly magazine Les Ondes advertised programming that was both stellar and diverse: in 1942 alone there were appearances by Maurice Chevalier, Jacques Jansen, Germaine Lubin, Charles Panzéra, and Alfred Cortot; organ recitals by Marcel Dupré broadcast directly from the church of Saint-Sulpice; Wilhelm Mengelberg conducting the orchestra of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam; and the Berlin Philharmonic led by Clemens Krauss.45 After the armistice Vichy’s own state radio station, Radiodiffusion nationale, set up its studios in unoccupied territory in Marseille. Vichy imitated its totalitarian neighbors by coordinating what had previously been independent radio stations into a national network financed by state

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subsidies instead of by advertisements. Since June 1940, however, German occupying authorities controlled the broadcast stations and antennas of the northern occupied zone, including the Paris metropolitan region. Radiodiffusion nationale desperately needed access to Parisian institutions such as the opera houses, orchestras, and music halls to compete with Radio-Paris for listeners. Émile Vuillermoz, who was in charge of programming for the radio in Marseille, wrote a panicked letter to Hautecœur soon after the latter’s appointment at the Administration of Fine Arts, urging him to do something either to enable Radiodiffusion nationale to return to Paris or to come to an understanding with the PAF about broadcast rights from the capital. Since the broadcasts of Radio-Paris were by French people, he stated, the German-sponsored broadcasts, and not those of Vichy, were accepted abroad as the authorized voice of France. Radio-Paris could be heard across Europe; as long as Radiodiffusion nationale was in Marseille, it could not compete. If France was going to collaborate with Germany anyway, Vuillermoz pressed Hautecœur, why not find a more viable solution in tandem with Germany’s own plans?46 In September 1941 Radiodiffusion nationale received an important concession from Germany when it regained the right to broadcast musical productions from Paris twice weekly. That same month the Orchestre national, under the direction of Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, began again to perform live radio broadcasts, first from Marseille and then, after Radiodiffusion nationale relocated to the French capital in March 1943, from Paris. To compete more effectively with Radio-Paris, in August 1943 Vichy increased the musical component of Radiodiffusion nationale from 45 percent of its programming to 60 percent and made sure that only music would be played during the lunch and dinner hours.47 German propaganda agencies organized joint cultural activities uniting French and German artists and intellectuals to symbolize of the virtues of friendship between former enemies. The collaboration of French musicians with German visiting orchestras and opera companies made it less likely that the French would reject the visitors outright. In May 1941 one of the first of several illustrious musical visitors, Herbert von Karajan, traveled to Paris with the Berlin Staatsoper.48 The troupe’s performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, starring the Opéra’s leading soprano, Germaine Lubin, was broadcast by Radio-Paris and made headlines in the French newspapers. The first French woman to have sung the role of Isolde in Bayreuth, Lubin was a great favorite of the public in both France and Germany. Her participation in the Staatsoper’s Paris performance encouraged those who (like Lucien Rebatet in Je suis partout) favored French-German symbiosis

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to read the musical event as transcending national differences, even if the first of the two performances was reserved exclusively for members of the Wehrmacht.49 Other critics concurred that the magnificence of the performance allayed all doubts.50 German officials at the PAF in Paris immediately reported back to Berlin that the success of Tristan was an encouraging sign of the receptiveness of the French to German influence.51 Karajan followed the Staatsoper’s performance with an all-German concert at the Palais de Chaillot, conducting the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss to great acclaim. Although German agencies fostered French cultural activity as part of its desire that life in France appear as normal as possible under German control, there were officials who felt that there ought to be limits on how successful the French should be in terms of cultural prestige. “The task of the bureau must be to pursue German propaganda,” Captain Lucht, chief of the PAF’s division for cultural affairs, announced to his staff in a January 1942 memo, angered by the latest French requests for festivals of French music at home and tours of French artists abroad. Once the Germans had normalized French cultural life, he continued, their ultimate goal should be to create such a strong propaganda campaign on behalf of German culture that the French would be overpowered in every way. Lucht predicted—not inaccurately, as it turned out—that the resolution of the military conflict would lead to an international war of cultural propaganda. The Germans should focus on making conditions so favorable for their own propaganda that there would be no risk of failure after the war. For each tour of French artists abroad, he argued, Germany should be organizing two. If Vichy organized a weeklong festival of French culture, the PAF would celebrate Germany for a month. “From now on,” he concluded, “the concessions we make to the French must be offset by advantages for German cultural propaganda on such a scale that will indisputably substantiate German’s claims to cultural leadership.”52 The PAF took an active interest in the repertoire the French planned to perform at the Opéra, which they saw as the leading musical institution in France. Captain Lucht informed a representative of Vichy’s Ministry of National Education that the Opéra was “a theater with a worldwide reputation that would play a primary artistic role in the Europe of tomorrow.”53 The PAF requisitioned 20 percent of all seats in the theater—at Vichy’s expense— and arranged for others to be sold to German military personnel at half price; it appears that Germans made up roughly half of the audience at most Opéra performances during the occupation.54 It was agreed that Rouché would submit the programs and names of the artists to the PAF one week in advance for

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approval. Initially the PAF forbade the French from presenting any German operas. Heated exchanges followed, in which Rouché argued to both Lucht and Hautecœur that financial ruin would be assured were the Opéra forced to give up the German repertoire.55 In the end only Wagner’s operas were not permitted, “for lack of qualified singers,” according to a German memo.56 They would be reserved, at least initially, for visiting German troupes. German propaganda officials in Paris developed ideas about promoting new German music in France that would complement the directives sent from Berlin. Under the leadership of Fritz Piersig, a music critic from Bremen who arrived in Paris in January 1941, the music department of the cultural division at the PAF became the driving force behind FrenchGerman music cooperation in France.57 Piersig’s semiofficial adviser on contemporary music from both France and Germany was the knowledgeable and well-connected music critic Heinrich Strobel, formerly the editor of the avant-garde music journal Melos and officially stationed during the war as the Paris correspondent for German newspapers and the Germanlanguage Pariser Zeitung.58 While the RMVP had been organizing the impressive tour of the Staatsoper to Paris with its stellar performances of standard repertoire, Piersig began to lay the groundwork for promoting the new works of German composers in France. Shortly after arriving in Paris Piersig wrote to Berlin that the French had themselves expressed the wish to hear new German music, and that the PAF could foster this interest by providing them with publishers’ catalogs and scores. He also met directly with French music critics to stress the importance of reporting on new German music in the French press. Piersig specifically instructed the critics that “objective evaluation of the stylistic and innate features of selected works” would be the most effective in strengthening French interest. By March 1941 the RMVP, having wholeheartedly approved Piersig’s efforts on behalf of contemporary music, was making shipments of the scores that would enable new German music to be performed in Paris.59 The German occupying forces gutted the repertoire of the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique by forbidding them from performing works by Wagner as well as those by Jewish composers such as Offenbach, Dukas, and Milhaud. To make matters worse, the PAF pressured the French to add premieres of new German operas and ballets to their regular repertoire. German officials presented Rouché with a selection of scores, sent from Germany by the RMVP, from which he could choose the ones he would produce.60 During the war, the RTLN produced French premieres of three German operas— Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina in March 1942, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in April 1943, and Werner Egk’s Peer Gynt in October 1943—and

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one ballet, Egk’s Joan von Zarissa, in July 1942, one month before the premiere of Poulenc’s Les Animaux modèles. The French were led to believe that this exchange would be reciprocal: that new French operas would soon be allowed to appear in the repertoire of German opera companies. But this was clearly not the intention of German officials. It took the tireless efforts of both the Ministry of National Education and the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden to goad the RMVP into lifting a ban on French music in Germany that had followed the French declaration of war in September 1939; the ban targeted French music still protected under copyright, affecting living French composers the most.61 When the ban was finally lifted in December 1943, French music was limited to a maximum of one-fourth of the length of any given public performance.62 The end result was that the French public witnessed their state opera houses perform new German works in meticulously prepared French productions that placed them on an equal footing with productions of new works by France’s own composers, with no comparable events honoring living French composers in German theaters or concert halls. With Goebbels’s support Egk himself became a celebrated presence in Paris in July 1942, when he conducted the premiere of Joan at the Opéra and a recording of excerpts by the Opéra orchestra with Gramophone—the first commercial recording made in wartime France by a German musician.63 In interviews with the radio and press in France, Egk generously praised Lifar’s new choreography for the work. On 8 July, two nights before the premiere of his ballet, the Groupe Collaboration held a reception in the foyer of the Opéra-Comique that honored Egk, the German contralto Lore Fischer, and the French pianist Alfred Cortot, who had just returned to Paris from Berlin, where he had performed with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The Groupe Collaboration, made up of what historian Bertram Gordon has called “parlor collaborators,” promoted Franco-German ties through cultural events such as concerts, expositions, and lectures. The president of the group’s music division was Max d’Ollone, director of the Opéra-Comique and professor of composition at the Conservatoire; two composers from the Institut de France, Alfred Bachelet and Florent Schmitt, held the title of président d’honneur.64 One of the music division’s activities was to celebrate the visits of prominent Germans to Paris with gala receptions that facilitated contact with their French counterparts and that were attended by Parisian high society as well as German military personnel. At the 8 July reception, d’Ollone, addressing the crowd, praised the three honorees as “eminent artists” whose current activities worked toward the promotion of “German-French rapprochement.”65

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By all accounts, the new production of Joan de Zarissa overshadowed the Opéra’s latest productions of French ballets. The ballet entered the regular repertoire of the Opéra and subsequently received nineteen more performances before the end of the war. Egk also traveled to Rome to conduct three gala performances of Joan, a work that appeared frequently on the stages of Germany throughout the period.66 But, from the German point of view, the success of Egk’s ballet in Paris was the definitive step establishing German prestige in the world of dance. As Hans Borgelt observed in Musik im Kriege, “If the Opéra, which cultivates the art forms of dance and ballet like no other institution in the world, accepted Joan as part of its permanent repertoire, this signals the recognition of German advances in this area too.”67 Critics in French journals and newspapers found much to praise in Egk’s music for Joan; Honegger, for example, wrote approvingly of Egk’s decision to reject so-called “sterile complexities” and “disappointing neoclassical formulas” for a style he described as “vivid” and “emotionally direct.”68 The German occupying authorities at the PAF betrayed their investment in the success of new German works such as Joan in Paris among French critics such as Honegger by including a discussion of its reception after the premiere of the Opéra’s production of Egk’s Peer Gynt in October 1943 in Spiegel der Französischen Presse, a bimonthly summary of the findings of the Gruppe Presse at the PAF. Egk, the report asserted, was already known to the French public “because of an outstanding production of the ballet Joan de Zarissa, which provided them for the first time with a glimpse at the work of the new generation of German music and left a lasting impression on the public. The experts were eager to become acquainted with Werner Egk as a dramatist and lyricist.” After hearing Peer Gynt, the report continued, “by far the largest group of reviewers, among them the names of wellknown French musicians and theorists, commented in a sympathetic way.”69 The fact that Egk’s ballet owed more to French history and culture than just the tradition of French ballet probably influenced its selection by the PAF for French performance.70 The setting for the ballet’s reenactment of the Don Juan legend is not Spain but fifteenth-century France; three choral interludes are Egk’s settings of the poetry of Charles d’Orléans; and the set design was influenced by the paintings of Jean Fouquet. Egk’s Joan invited comparison with Gaubert’s Le Chevalier et la Damoiselle because of the rich orchestral writing in both scores and their common use of an archaic French setting—featuring, in Gaubert’s ballet, an extended reenactment of a jousting match.71 But when Lifar danced the part of Don Juan, he impressed his audiences with the seriousness of purpose and the magisterial nature of Egk’s music, whose style matched Lifar’s conceptions about

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dance to a remarkable extent. Lifar provided a new original choreography for the Paris production of Joan that he used as a manifesto in dance for his new ideas about “neoclassical” ballet. Whereas German choreographers had relied heavily on pantomime for Joan and other recent ballets, Lifar sought to bring together the dramatic and academic traditions of classical French ballets with the best of recent developments in German expressionism. His new synthesis, a truly “European” art form, was also a tribute to the French ballet masters of the past like Noverre, whose traditions had been overshadowed in his opinion by developments in modern dance. Herein lay the key danger of French productions of new German works at the theaters of the RTLN. If the music of Werner Egk was presented by the French themselves as the embodiment of everything the French hoped to find in their own composers, the only place that left for new French music was a distant second. Reviews of the two summer productions of Egk’s Joan de Zarissa and Poulenc’s Les Animaux modèles appeared side by side in many French journals, inevitably inviting comparison. Isolated signs of protest in the French press confirmed the dominance of new German music at the Opéra in occupied Paris, particularly the music of Egk. For example, when L’Information musicale decided to run a full-page article by Lifar on his choreography for Joan on the front page of its first issue for the fall season (28 August), someone substituted what logically should have been a photo of Egk or Lifar with one of Poulenc. Centered in the middle of the page, the photo bore the caption “Francis Poulenc, whose Les Animaux modèles the Opéra has recently premiered”—this despite the fact that Lifar never mentioned Poulenc once in his detailed and enthusiastic account of Joan.72

musical secret messages: poulenc and the resistance After the August 1942 premiere of Les Animaux modèles, those reviewing the choreography as well as the score of Poulenc’s ballet singled out the episode of “The Two Roosters” for special commentary. “A little ballet in itself,” wrote Ferdinando Reyna for L’Information musicale, praising Lifar’s sense of comedy in the choreography for Lifar’s bellicose rooster and Solange Schwarz’s spirited hen. But Colette, herself a specialist of animal tales, took exception to the way the choreography and the costumes relied on the stereotypes of the music hall. She argued that such frivolity clashed with what she called the “ferociousness” of the music. Poulenc responded to Colette in print to exonerate his collaborators, confessing that all the comic touches had been his idea.73 Indeed, the music of “The Two Roosters” switches abruptly from

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the violence of the fight between the two roosters and the dramatic descent of a vulture that plucks the proud victor from the rooftop and carries him off to his death, to the sauciness of the hens when they emerge from the hen house. The frivolous moments also jar with Poulenc’s melodramatic rewriting of the fable, in which the defeated rooster, merely humiliated in La Fontaine’s story, collapsed to the ground, mortally wounded by the duel. Poulenc’s score provides the key as to why the ballet suddenly turns serious in the last of its six fables. As the curious hens approach their fallen beloved leader, the cancan music slows down from sixteenth notes to triplets, in a descending chromatic progression. All of a sudden the rooster who has been left for dead returns to life in a dramatic moment that Poulenc described as an “apotheosis” in the published score. The music for this transformation is no longer Poulenc’s own but is instead drawn from Debussy (ex. 1). The trumpets, horns, and woodwinds intone the unmistakable dotted rhythms from the closing bars of the first movement of La Mer over harmonies that copy Debussy’s vacillation between a major triad with added sixth, and a minor seventh chord a minor third below. The citation is a verbal pun, for midday has arrived not only in Debussy’s movement, entitled “From dawn to midday on the sea,” but also on the set of Les Animaux modèles. As the retreating hens give way to the farmers for the concluding tableau of the ballet, a trumpet echoes the Debussy citation, this time over Poulenc’s own distinctive chord progression. But the use of La Mer in “The Two Roosters” has a deeper symbolic purpose. Poulenc’s decision to have the beloved rooster mortally wounded rather than ashamed, with the boastful victor mercilessly cut down in his moment of triumph, and then to bring the defeated one back to life to the sounds of France’s most beloved composer, turned the fable into an allegory for the current situation in France. As La Fontaine admonishes, “Mere chance overturns what appeared secure / And vaingloriousness may work one’s woe.”74 German hegemony might appear solid, Poulenc’s ballet seems to be saying, but one must not lose hope that France, too, will recover from defeat in the end. Poulenc’s citation of Debussy in August 1942 was not a neutral choice. The Opéra-Comique may have reopened its doors after the defeat with a performance of Carmen, but it was the company’s revival of Pelléas et Mélisande three weeks later on 12 September 1940 that served as a beacon of French cultural pride when all else seemed lost. The production was Désormière’s first Pelléas since his engagement as a conductor for the Opéra-Comique in 1937; it was also the young soprano Irène Joachim’s debut as Mélisande, a role for which she received coaching

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example 1. Comparison of Claude Debussy, La Mer, and Francis Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles. (Ex. 1b: © 1942 Éditions Max Eschig, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. Debussy, La Mer, “De l’aube à midi sur la mer,” mm. 135–37. 8va 3

3

3

3

3

3

più

Très lent

= 72

3

3

3

3

3

3

più

15

più

più

b. Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles, “Les deux coqs,” mm. 300–303. Apothéose du coq bien aimé Tempo du petit jour

8va

8va

éclatant

from Mary Garden, who happened to be in Paris at the time. For Joachim, horrified on opening night by the sight of all the German officers in the audience, performing Debussy was a way of “proving that we were still capable of living through the greatest works of music.”75 For Georges Auric, the circumstances alone rendered it no longer possible for him to retain his youthful antagonistic attitude toward the excesses of debussysme. In his only signed article published during the occupation, Auric wrote for the Nouvelle Revue française, “I listened [to the performance] with an emotion that I can’t exactly define. And, at the same time, everyone else in the hall [listened] with attentiveness and passion . . . [and] grateful enthusiasm.”76

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As a quintessential icon of French culture during a period of national turmoil, Debussy was claimed as a representative both of collaboration and of resistance during the occupation. Supporters of Vichy and collaboration saw Debussy’s youthful admiration of Wagner as representing the renewal of modern French music through the composer’s emulation of German Romanticism; supporters of the Resistance stressed Debussy’s rejection of Wagner in favor of French Classical models such as Couperin and Rameau. All sides marshaled Pelléas et Mélisande as evidence of their respective interpretations.77 When the first complete recording of Pelléas was released by Pathé in January 1942 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the work’s premiere, the sumptuous set of twenty 78-rpm discs elicited universal praise: from members of the Vichy regime (including the future minister of national education, Abel Bonnard, who reviewed the project for L’Information musicale), the collaborationist press (Rebatet called it “a prodigious triumph”), and the PAF (with the comment that the French were entirely justified in regarding the first complete recording of Pelléas as a “remarkable cultural-political and artistic event”).78 Several musicians who rallied around Debussy’s masterpiece and who objected both to German propaganda and the political and cultural changes wrought by Vichy began to organize covertly in the earliest stirrings of a musical resistance movement. Although Désormière met with fellow members of the PCF, Elsa Barraine and Louis Durey, sometime in fall 1940, the first signs of a formal Resistance organization among French musicians surfaced some twelve months later, in September 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union galvanized the PCF. An unsigned directive to Barraine dated July 1942 indicates the existence of a committee, the Comité national du Front national des musiciens (FNM), whose members most likely included, alongside the initial three, Poulenc, Auric, Münch, Roland-Manuel, and Manuel Rosenthal. Membership in the FNM, as in all the covert resistance movements, increased dramatically after the successful Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 resulted in Pétain’s breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States and the German Army subsequently occupying the entire country, for it was now clear that Vichy stood for collaboration with, not merely accommodation to, the Germans. Henri Dutilleux, Honegger, and Joachim probably joined by the end of 1942; other names associated with the FNM but whose date of initial membership remains unclear include Claude Arrieu, Henry Barraud, Jacques Chailley, Monique Haas, Geneviève Joy, and Marcel Mihalovici.79

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A clandestine newsletter, Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, was distributed among fellow musicians from April 1942 until February 1944, at which time it was absorbed by Les Lettres françaises as Le musicien d’aujourd’hui. In a January 1945 article on the FNM, Claude Chamfray named Poulenc (along with Auric, Barraine, Durey, Roland-Manuel, and Rosenthal) as one of the composers involved with the production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui.80 The newsletter published several unsigned exhortations to its readers to act upon their patriotic obligations. “All the wounded and fighting of France,” proclaimed an article in the October 1942 issue, “have the right to ask us to work on behalf of the country, [and] to participate, through our actions, in the great fight for national liberation.” These actions, the article continued, consisted of composers writing new songs and pieces “that celebrate love of country and freedom,” and of performers “seizing every opportunity to inspire patriotism in their listeners.” “But above all,” the article warned, “no collaboration with Radio-Paris, with German concerts, with German journals; no participation in demonstrations of treason!”81 A second article in the same issue listed recent Resistance activities undertaken by musicians: private concerts of the music of Milhaud; violent demonstrations in Lyons and Marseille at performances of the Berlin Philharmonic; musicians in Parisian nightclubs sliding fragments of “La Marseillaise” and the “Marche Lorraine” into their performances; and the sparse attendance of French musicians at a reception for their German counterparts.82 Not mentioned, but in a similar vein, was Édith Piaf’s contemporaneous performance, at the Théâtre de l’ABC in October 1942, of the patriotic hymn “Où sont mes petits copains?” with the stage lit in the colors of the French flag.83 A third article, entitled “Debussy, musicien français,” praised the composer and cited his anti-German writings.84 Poulenc’s citation of La Mer in Les Animaux modèles was a nod to Debussy’s newly enhanced reputation among Resistance members as “Claude de France.” To drive the point home, Poulenc inserted another citation in the ballet that was a classical counterpart to the allusions by jazz musicians described in Musiciens d’aujourd’hui. Poulenc based the theme of the ballet’s fourth section, “The Lion in Love,” on the melody of the refrain of Alsace et Lorraine, a song that was written in 1871 to protest Germany’s annexation of French territory and whose lyrics evoke French defiance: “You shall not have Alsace and Lorraine / And, despite you, we shall remain French” (ex. 2).85 Although he transformed the melody from the original military march into a lyrical tune by removing the dotted rhythms, he otherwise retained the original rhythmic values (notated at twice the duration); his initial adherence to the exact intervals of the

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example 2. Citations of Alsace et Lorraine in Les Animaux modèles. (Ex. 2b and 2c : © 1942 Éditions Max Eschig, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. Tayoux, Villemer, and Nazet, Alsace et Lorraine, refrain, mm. 22–25.

Vous n’au rez pas l’Al sace et la Lor rai ne Et, mal gré vous nous res te rons Fran çais.

b. Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles, “Le Lion amoureux,” trumpet, mm. 39–46.

c. Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles, “Les deux coqs,” violin I, mm. 258–59.

melody in the first measure give way in the next three measures to an approximation of the original melodic contour, followed by four measures of more freely selected pitches. “The Lion in Love” opens with the violins playing the theme, softly and lyrically (très chanté) in D major, after which Poulenc transposed it up a major third three times (returning on the fourth statement to the tonic key) and orchestrated it in contrasting ways. The climactic fifth appearance of the theme is in C major (the same key as the original Alsace et Lorraine) and is played, with accents on every note, by two trumpets and two trombones (marked éclatant), four horns playing in harmony, and doubled Ea and Ba clarinet parts marked fortississimo. Alsace et Lorraine returns in “The Two Roosters” during the saucy mockery of the hens dancing around the fallen rooster. This time Poulenc cites and repeats the first four notes of the original song in a similar rhythm for a much subtler reference than the theme in “The Lion in Love.” The citation appears twice in the same section of “The Two Roosters,” first in a lyrical vein (marked très chanté for the violins, violas, bass clarinet, and English horn), and then, twenty measures later, in a louder, heavily accented, harmonized version for woodwinds and trumpets.86 Just as Poulenc claimed in the program notes to the work’s premiere that any summary of the fables was “superfluous,” perhaps it was equally superfluous to make the citations of Alsace et Lorraine any more obvious, for those who knew

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the song—and, like the orchestral musicians, knew Poulenc’s score—needed no clearer signal of the composer’s intentions. One might assume from the coded allusions in Les Animaux modèles that, as a composer of an orchestral work to accompany a ballet, Poulenc’s ability to make public statements in support of the Resistance was constrained by the absence of any verbal component to the work. Yet, in a situation where every production had to be approved by German censors before being performed in public, the verbal component of plays and films was a distinct impediment to making subversive political statements. The most direct one could be in these media was to write a historical fiction that suggested allegorical parallels with the present day. The two productions most highly praised after the war in this regard are Jean Delannoy’s 1942 film Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire and Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 play Les Mouches. In Delannoy’s film, Pontcarral is a former officer in Napoleon’s army who bravely defies Restoration authorities; in Les Mouches, Orestes avenges the murder of his father, King Agamemnon, by freeing the people of Argos from the unjust and illegitimate rule of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Any postwar allegorical reading of either Delannoy’s film or Sartre’s play, however, is highly speculative, with scant evidence (and this includes press reports of audience applause at Pontcarral’s patriotic pronouncements) that wartime viewers read any political subtext into them, let alone one supportive of the Resistance.87 Although the same could be said for my own allegorical reading of the scenario of Les Animaux modèles, Poulenc’s insertion of a nonverbal citation of a protest song probably known only to his French listeners enabled the composer to show his support for the Resistance in a public performance approved by German censors in a more concrete way than playwrights and filmmakers were able to risk doing at the time. But Poulenc’s citation of Alsace et Lorraine may also have been superfluous in yet another way. In April 1944 the young writer Claude Roy wrote a letter to Poulenc after attending a performance of Les Animaux modèles, which had just been revived for another run. Like Poulenc, Roy had initially reacted to France’s armistice with Germany by becoming involved in Vichy organizations that worked on behalf of French culture. He went to work for Jeune France, an organization founded by Pierre Schaeffer in November 1940 with the support of Vichy’s Office of Youth Affairs (Secrétariat général à la Jeunesse) and that was dedicated to the promotion of French culture among the nation’s young people.88 After the Vichy regime, suspicious of the group’s experimentalist bent, shut down Jeune France in March 1942, both Roy and Schaeffer joined the Resistance.89 When Roy expressed his gratitude to Poulenc for giving him hope in the future, he wrote that, in

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listening to his music, “we know that there will always be a France.” Only a few artists in France, Roy continued, were doing such work, citing the poets Aragon and Éluard, who had been actively working themes of the Resistance into their work in a much more manifest way than Les Animaux modèles. Modestly admitting his ignorance of musical matters, Roy may have missed the musical citations in Les Animaux modèles. It is possible that he knew of, and was indirectly describing in this letter, another of Poulenc’s other musical secrets: Figure humaine, the secret Resistance cantata on the clandestine poetry of Éluard that Poulenc composed in July 1943.90 For the nonverbal reference by Poulenc to an 1871 rallying cry within the orchestral texture of Les Animaux modèles was only the first of four acts of defiance Poulenc committed during the war—a rarity by a composer of his stature. The second was his decision, in the fall of 1942, to base the second movement of his Sonata for Violin and Piano on a line of poetry by Federico García Lorca—“The guitar makes thoughts weep”—and to dedicate the piece to the memory of García Lorca, who was killed by Spanish nationalists in 1936 and whose works were banned in Franco’s Spain.91 Violinist Ginette Neveu, who had requested that Poulenc compose the piece for her, premiered the sonata with Poulenc at the piano on 21 June 1943 at the Concerts de la Pléiade, a musical and literary salon founded in early 1943 by Gaston Gallimard and Denise Tual, who wanted to present works by composers, such as Stravinsky, whose music they felt was not being performed enough in occupied Paris.92 Poulenc’s music had already been performed at three of the group’s first five concerts, but this was the first time for both a premiere of Poulenc’s new music and an appearance of Poulenc as performer. Gallimard articulated the significance, for him and Tual, of Poulenc’s participation in a letter of thanks that highlights Poulenc’s status in occupied Paris at the time: “Your collaboration, your presence, and your advice alone enabled us not only to create a project dear to my heart, but to succeed in it. Without you our initiative would not have had the sense we wanted to give it: that of a demonstration.”93 Poulenc’s dedication of the Violin Sonata to García Lorca was not only known to the audience members at the premiere but was also made public in the press. Before the concert, the weekly arts newspaper Comœdia asked Poulenc to write an article on two upcoming premieres of his music at the Concerts de la Pléiade (the Violin Sonata on 21 June and his Chansons villageoises on the 28th). In response, Poulenc sent a brief commentary in which he mentioned both the work’s dedication and the line of poetry. It was not unusual for French publications to contain references to the works of banned poets such as García Lorca or composers such as Milhaud or

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Schoenberg, even in the case of newspapers, such as Comœdia, that had ties to German occupying authorities.94 But Poulenc did not stop with García Lorca’s name alone, placing him instead next to the name of a Resistance poet currently living and publishing his work in secret. Describing the second movement of the Violin Sonata, he wrote, “This intermezzo is a melancholy improvisation in remembrance of a poet whom I love as much as Apollinaire or Éluard.”95 The subtle effect of Poulenc’s reference to García Lorca and Éluard in the pages of Comœdia is similar to that of the references to Alsace et Lorraine in Les Animaux modèles: easy to miss for those who weren’t paying attention, but unmistakable in its intent for those who were. Poulenc’s third act was more daring, but also more discreet. No press coverage announced the premiere of his Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon in his 8 December 1943 recital with Bernac at the Salle Gaveau; only a small notice in L’Information musicale for the duo performing “the works of Monsigny, Schubert, G. Fauré, E. Chabrier, [and] Fr. Poulenc (premiere).”96 The poems were taken from Aragon’s Les Yeux d’Elsa, a collection published in Switzerland in 1942 and distributed clandestinely in France. By the time Poulenc set them in September and October 1943, Aragon had ceased legal publication and was in hiding in the south of France, working actively in the Resistance; he had also begun publishing clandestine Resistance poetry in France under the pseudonym François la Colère.97 The subjects of the poems are topical. The first, “C,” refers to Les Pontsde-Cé, a town just south of Angers that, with its three bridges spanning an island in the Loire River, has had strategic significance for centuries. On the evening of 19 June 1940, German forces negotiated the peaceful surrender of Angers with the French army in order to pass over the Loire at Les Ponts-de-Cé, whose bridges were among the few in the region not yet destroyed by retreating French troops. As the Germans approached the town, the French blew up the third and final bridge, killing at least one German officer and trapping the German army on the northern banks, where they were forced to locate another crossing downstream.98 Aragon’s regiment fought the Germans in Belgium, was evacuated to Plymouth in the battle of Dunkirk, and traversed the French countryside from Brest east to the forest of Conches (around sixty miles west of Paris) and then south, arriving in Ribérac (fifty miles northeast of Bordeaux) on the day of the armistice. During its retreat the poet had witnessed events such as the skirmishes at Les Ponts-de-Cé.99 His poem alludes to both the events he witnessed and their significance: “I crossed the bridges of Cé / It is there where it all began.” His references to France’s past glory (“A song of bygone days / Tells of a wounded knight”) are mixed with contemporary topical

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example 3. Francis Poulenc, Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, “C,” mm. 37–41. (© 1944 Rouart-Lerolle & Cie / Éditions Salabert, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) Céder

a Tempo

molto portando

subito

O

ma

France,

ô

ma

dé

lais

sé

e

m.g.

subito

Céder

Tempo

J’ai

tra

ver

sé

les

ponts de Céder

Cé.

Céder encore ten.

long

m.g.

details (“The Loire carries my thoughts away / With the overturned cars / And the unprimed weapons / And the ill-dried tears”). The final couplet, which repeats the first line of the poem, leaves little doubt that what began for Aragon on that day was a determination to resist the invaders: “O my France O my forsaken / I crossed the bridges of Cé.”100 Poulenc’s understated musical setting, which reflects the poem’s mixture of shame and pride in the modal mixture of tonic minor and major, undergoes a subtle yet significant shift for the final couplet (ex. 3). The first line of the poem (“I crossed the bridges of Cé”), which is the same as the last line, is set in the opening measures unambiguously in the minor mode, in the tonic key of Aa minor. For the poem’s penultimate line, the singer lingers dramatically on a high Aa marked pianissimo and molto portando, singing the word “forsaken.” Poulenc added suspense to the reappearance of the last line—will it reappear in the minor mode again?—by lingering over a dominant pedal with the telltale flattened third of the minor tonic. But the resolution of the final cadence in the piano is, indeed, to the tonic major, highlighting the poem’s message of personal transformation and determined resistance at Les

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Ponts-de-Cé. Aragon’s second poem set by Poulenc, “Fêtes galantes,” begins as a humorous wordplay about life in Paris during the occupation; Poulenc’s setting matches the poem’s playfulness in a patter-song to be sung “incredibly fast, in the style of a catchy cabaret concert.” We hear the phrase “You see,” followed by sights both ridiculous (noblemen on bicycles) and mundane (kids on the street) but that turn progressively more disturbing (girls “led astray,” corpses passing under bridges), ending in a verbal condemnation— “You see true values in jeopardy / And life swirling by in a slap-dash way”— that Poulenc’s musical setting relentlessly ignores.101 Although Aragon’s “C” has much in common with the words of Jolivet’s “Lament of the Bridge at Gien” in his 1942 Trois Complaintes du soldat (see chapter 3), Aragon’s elliptical poem has a very different subtext. Jolivet’s lyrics tell the story of the unsuccessful efforts of the French army, after two days of fighting, to defend the bridge over the Loire River at Gien. His poem, which alludes to the disastrous and often fatal panic that ensued when civilians fleeing the advancing German army were caught in the crossfire of German and French forces, conformed to the predominant narrative in wartime France of the country’s tragic inability to defend itself. By contrast, Aragon’s subversive reference to a site of a small but successful act of French heroism at Les Ponts-de-Cé was a risky move in a poem published under the poet’s own name, albeit in Switzerland, in 1942, before Aragon had gone into hiding. It was equally daring for Poulenc to set the poem to music and perform it publicly in late 1943. Poulenc’s friend Paul Rouart took the risk of publishing Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon legally in June 1944. Their composition and performance in occupied Paris, especially of “C,” was significant to the leadership of the FNM: Joachim later reported Désormière’s excitement about the song and the fact that audience enthusiasm at the premiere led the performers immediately to repeat it.102 Poulenc’s fourth act of resistance was the most famous: his composition of the a cappella cantata Figure humaine. In a November 1944 interview, Poulenc explained that the initial idea stemmed from a March 1943 request by Henri Screpel, director of the Compagnie des discophiles français, after the performance of Sept chansons (his choral settings of Éluard’s poems from 1936) at the inaugural concert of Concerts de la Pléiade in February 1943.103 Éluard’s poem “Liberté” had become a familiar symbol of the French Resistance after Allied planes dropped bundles of pamphlets containing the text as they flew over occupied France. It was reprinted in four Resistance publications, including one in London in English translation, and it inspired other artists as well, such as Jean Lurçat, who in summer 1943 wove lines from the poem into a tapestry in his atelier in Aubusson.104 Screpel wanted

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Poulenc to set “Liberté” to music for distribution as a recording. After having agreed to set “Liberté,” Poulenc decided to transform the setting of a single poem into a cantata based on a selection of poems from Éluard’s Poésie et Vérité 1942, which he obtained in a Lyons bookstore selling the Swiss edition. The volume was first published in France in 1942 under Éluard’s own name and was reprinted in Switzerland and Algeria in 1943.105 Upon hearing of the project, a choir from Belgium (the Chorale d’Anvers, directed by Louis de Vocht) commissioned the piece for their own performance.106 If the work could not be performed until after the war, that did not stop Poulenc from discussing it, and his pride in the results, with several of his friends and associates. From August to November 1943, he mentioned the work in letters to Bernac, Paul Collaer, Jolivet, Maurice Brianchon, RolandManuel (“ ‘Liberté,’ which ends the work, is, I believe, rather sensational”), and Marie-Blanche de Polignac (“My cantata is done. I must admit to you that I’m proud of it”). He also gave a private performance of the work at the home of Marie–Laure de Noailles on 5 December 1943.107 Rouart published the work in secret in May 1944, one month before his legal publication of Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon; copies were marked “working copy” (épreuve de travail) to evade the censors and were kept hidden until the liberation.108 Although he later added seven shorter poems from Poésie et Vérité 1942 to form the eight movements of Figure humaine, “Liberté,” the final movement of the cantata, stood apart from the rest as Poulenc’s most extensive musical statement on the war. The twenty-one stanzas of Éluard’s poem each consist of a free association on the concept of freedom that ends with the line “I write your name.” The verbal repetition creates a litany whose incantatory character Poulenc emphasized with stepwise melodic shapes that circle back on themselves again and again. At the same time, the progression through the stanzas adds tension by the use of gradually increasing tempo and modulations by rising semitones. At the final, revelatory stanza, in which the object of description—freedom—is at last explicitly named, the tempo suddenly returns to the original pace, for an emphatically articulated cadence on the word “freedom.” Written in a technically challenging choral idiom, Figure humaine is a more substantive musical expression of anguish and hope than the other secret settings of clandestine poetry by Poulenc’s colleagues. For, in contrast to the other FNM composers, whose secret settings expressed political sentiments in musically straightforward idioms, bore moving dedications to the persecuted and the martyred victims of the war, and were scored with an eye to accessibility (solo voice with either piano or orchestral accompaniment), Poulenc had grander musical ambitions for his secret cantata.109

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Those ambitions stemmed at least in part from his longing to be taken more seriously than the composer of playful and frivolous pieces such as the 1924 ballet Les Biches. After the August 1942 premiere of Les Animaux modèles, Poulenc wrote to André Schaeffner that the ballet’s “grrrrrrrrand success” had its cruel moments when people’s praise was tinged with surprise that he was capable of writing such a work: “I suddenly realized that, in the twenty-five years that I have been writing music, there was an entire public that didn’t have much esteem for everything I have been doing.” He was also stung by Charles Koechlin’s private criticism of the ballet after the work’s premiere, and above all by Koechlin’s stated preference for the frivolity of Les Biches; in response, Poulenc complained that Koechlin “was among the rare ones to remain unmoved” by the more serious moments in Les Animaux modèles and that the Opéra orchestra suffered from a lack of string players: “Ever since the prisoners [of war] and the Jews haven’t been replaced, it’s been truly a serious drawback for the music.”110 But Poulenc, having consciously decided to compose a choral setting worthy not only of Éluard’s highly symbolic Resistance poetry but also of the momentous historical moment—the liberation—for which he envisioned the work’s first performance, seems also to have been inspired to write a far more ambitious, technically demanding choral work than he had ever done before.

poulenc at war’s end After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, the musical secrets of the occupation were brought into the open. On 16 September Les Lettres françaises, the formerly clandestine Resistance newspaper that had absorbed Musiciens d’aujourd’hui two months earlier, published an interview with Roland-Manuel that gave a comprehensive overview of the wartime activities of the FNM. Roland-Manuel told of its beginnings in a postrehearsal meeting among Désormière, Barraine, and himself; of the gradual arrival of new members, such as Auric, Delvincourt, Durey, Münch, Poulenc, and Rosenthal; of the dangers that Rosenthal and Barraine faced, the former as a Jew and the latter as a suspected Resistance agent interrogated by the Gestapo; Delvincourt’s noble scheme to protect Conservatoire students from the infamous Service du travail obligatoire (STO), a program by which French men between eighteen and fifty and women between twenty-one and thirty-five could be conscripted to work in German factories in France or Germany;111 and the newsletter they distributed “in order to safeguard the essential traits of French music from the magnificent torrent of German Romanticism.” Roland-Manuel cited Poulenc’s December 1943 performance

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of his settings of Aragon and his composition of Figure humaine, and he promised that these and other musical settings of Resistance poetry would soon be heard in a radio broadcast devoted to “the poets and musicians of the Resistance.”112 Indeed, on 1 November 1944 Tony Aubin conducted the Orchestre radio-symphonique de Paris in a broadcast of the premieres of Barraine’s Avis (Éluard), Durey’s “Ma haine” and “Les deux lumières” (Gabriel Audisio), and Rosenthal’s “Éloignez-vous” (Jean Cassou) and “Tuer” (Éluard) alongside thematically appropriate music by Beethoven, Debussy, Charles Koechlin, and Albéric Magnard.113 Poulenc wrote Figure humaine with the expectation that it would be performed in Paris after the liberation. At least one article in the French press in fall 1944 confirms that the upcoming premiere was an eagerly anticipated occasion. Entitled “Secretly Developed during the Occupation, the Work of Two Great French Artists Will Be Revealed to the World by the Chorale d’Anvers,” the article, which appeared in Ce Soir on 25 November 1944, contained an interview with the composer and indicated a spring 1945 premiere for the cantata.114 But several practical factors worked against a swift performance of the work in France. Despite Poulenc’s efforts to secure funding from the Association française d’action artistique (AFAA), an organization that had been created years earlier to promote French culture around the world, for the Chorale d’Anvers to bring the work to Paris, its plans for the premiere in Belgium as well as a Paris tour were postponed from June to October 1945 before finally being abandoned.115 Poulenc thought for a time that Nadia Boulanger would be able to direct the work, but its technical demands presented a challenge to French choral groups, the most qualified of which (the Chorale Passani, formed by Émile Passani during the war) was out of the question because of its wartime performances for Radio-Paris.116 Meanwhile, Vera Lindsay, a producer at the BBC, traveled to France in fall 1944 to discuss with Poulenc the possibility of the British radio station performing the difficult work.117 Thus the BBC singers’ performance in London of the cantata in English translation on 25 March 1945 became the work’s official premiere. Although Poulenc played the work twice for private audiences in Paris in fall 1944—on 27 November at the home of Marie-Laure de Noailles and 12 December at the home of Denise and Roland Tual—and the BBC performance was rebroadcast in France by Radiodiffusion nationale late at night on the date of its premiere, Figure humaine was not heard live in public in France until 22 May 1947, when Collaer brought the chorus of the Belgian national radio on tour to Paris. In his 1954 interview with Poulenc, Claude Rostand suggested that Figure humaine, which had not been sung in France since the May 1947 perfor-

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mance, was suffering the inevitable neglect of circumstantial works once circumstances changed. Poulenc replied defensively that, although the piece was circumstantial, it was not a commission, implying that the piece was therefore not necessarily tethered to its original circumstances. He then told a revised story of the piece’s genesis that differed in key details from his report to Ce Soir ten years earlier. The idea of writing a secret piece “that one could publish and prepare in secret for performance on the long-awaited day of liberation” came to him in the summer of 1943, he now claimed, after a pilgrimage to Rocamadour, the monastery that had inspired his religious choral works in the 1930s. The scores were sent to the BBC in London as soon as Paris was liberated for a January 1945 premiere even before the war’s end. (He was conflating a January 1945 concert tour with Bernac to London with the premiere of the cantata in March 1945, when he and Bernac had returned for a second London tour.) In this telling, Poulenc’s decision to write Figure humaine was a much more solitary, heroic, and even spiritual act than in his earlier account. Gone are Screpel’s initial request for a setting of “Liberté” and the subsequent commission from the Belgian choir; the London premiere had, despite the ongoing hostilities, been planned from the start; and the scoring of the work for a cappella double choir was to give the work, which Poulenc calls an “act of faith,” a human dimension, despite the technical difficulties it created. “I have faith in the future,” Poulenc remarked, citing swift improvements in choral performance worldwide as a hopeful sign that the work would find wider audiences, despite the fact that he had not written it in the lingua franca of Latin.118 Poulenc’s revised account of the genesis of Figure humaine stemmed partly from his defensiveness that the piece had not received the postwar performances he had hoped for, and partly from his lingering insecurity. The composer concluded his narrative about the cantata to Rostand with the expressed wish that “once people know better all of my choral works, sacred and profane, they will have a more accurate picture of my personality, for they will see that I am not only the lightweight composer . . . of Les Biches and Mouvements perpetuels.”119 But the new narrative also conformed to the image, formed in the immediate postwar period, of Poulenc as France’s most heroic Resistance composer. After the Ce Soir article of November 1944 came an article by Auric about Figure humaine in Les Lettres françaises six days after the work’s 25 March 1945 BBC premiere. Auric’s article begins with a dramatic description of his first encounter with Poulenc’s cantata: “Below us passed German cars. And, at the street corner, police inspectors verified identity cards. We rehearsed, with the anguish and the anger that you might imagine, the latest works by our friends who had been

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hunted, arrested, tortured, or deported.” Auric wrote that he immediately sensed that Figure humaine was a work “whose greatness clearly surpassed everything my friend had already written.” Poulenc’s music enhanced the words of Éluard’s poetry by giving each word “a radiance, a resonance, an irresistible accent.”120 Bitter about those who manufactured excuses for the poor behavior of some musicians during the occupation, Auric wrote that Poulenc’s actions since 1940 were above suspicion: the composer refused to “connive” (ruser) with Vichy or the Germans and performed exclusively French music in his recitals with Bernac.121 For Auric, Poulenc’s cantata was vindication that a contemporary French composer could succeed without using “the formulas of a pseudo-‘modernism’” that he decried in those who were booing Stravinsky’s latest works in spring 1945. For Poulenc, Auric’s praise—that, with Figure humaine, Poulenc, “worthy of his time, has suddenly acquired a humanity that might surprise you but which you will recognize along with me”—was a clear sign of vindication for his efforts to make a name for himself not only as a French patriot but also as a French composer to be taken seriously.122 Rostand, in his review of the first concert devoted entirely to Poulenc’s mélodies, which took place at the Salle Gaveau on 27 April 1945, provided additional encomium. For Rostand, the concert of mélodies, together with the BBC’s recent premiere of Figure humaine, “confirmed for those who could still have had doubts that [Poulenc’s] place is definitely in the highest ranks of great contemporary French composers.” In Rostand’s opinion, Figure humaine and Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon were the “only musical works up to now that are worthy of the recent years of suffering and martyrdom.”123 Two months later, in his overview of the 1944–45 season, Rostand complained, “Clandestinity, in general so fruitful for writers, does not seem to have been so for musicians.” The only exceptions he allowed were premieres of wartime works by Mihalovici, Tibor Harsányi, Messiaen, and Poulenc, only two of which—Mihalovici’s Symphonies pour le temps présent and Poulenc’s Figure humaine—were topical works composed in secret.124 The trend continued in January 1946 with the reinterpretation of Poulenc’s other major wartime work, Les Animaux modèles, by André Schaeffner in the new music journal Contrepoints. In his article, “Francis Poulenc, musicien français,” Schaeffner praised Poulenc’s insight in Les Animaux modèles not only into the essence of the French national character, but also on the necessity of portraying that character as essentially unchanged by the trauma of the defeat. With its “pure charm,” Schaeffner claimed, Les Animaux modèles, despite its differences with the composer’s settings of Apollinaire and Éluard, “takes no less the shape of a manifesto.”125 The unstated motiva-

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tion for the tribute was probably the revival of the ballet at the Opéra at the end of the month, with Serge Peretti replacing Lifar onstage as the lion and the rooster and Christiane Vaussard replacing Schwarz as the ant and the hen.126 For the cantata’s 1947 French premiere, Schaeffner provided a heroic narrative for the work’s genesis in the program notes. “After London, after Brussels, Paris will now get to know this work that was written—and that a few of us were able to hear—during a time when from Poulenc’s window we could see ‘Dressed in green / Dressed in gray’ the inhabitants of Luxembourg.” The citation is from Éluard’s poem “Bêtes et méchants,” published clandestinely in Les Lettres françaises in May 1944;127 the reference is to the Palais de Luxembourg in central Paris, the headquarters of the Luftwaffe during the occupation. “Only material difficulties and the desire that [Poulenc] expressed to hear the work first performed in Belgium,” Schaeffner explained, “prevented the performance in Paris of Figure humaine after the liberation.”128 Reviewers such as Maurice Brillant at L’Aube waxed poetic about the fact that Figure humaine “bloomed” in secret during the occupation, “for beautiful flowers cannot help but grow in greenhouses in hiding, in that dreary and unpleasant climate.” Brillant crowned Poulenc “the perfect type of French musician who, whatever he writes (and we know he writes in a wide variety of genres), writes nothing that is . . . not French. The admirable cantata proves it once again.” And Henri Sauguet, in La Bataille, declared that Poulenc’s use of a choral ensemble gave the work a “collective character”: “We all find a part of ourselves here: the part that is wounded at the same time that it is exalted and consoled by the work of an artist. . . . In this way, Figure humaine will remain a date in this era for all who ask that music be the supreme expression of an emotion.”129 In the immediate postwar period, such unmitigated praise of a prominent public figure was rare. Unlike Honegger, whose wartime choices (as we shall see in chapter 2) were, and continue to be, controversial after the war’s end, Poulenc did nothing during the war for which he could be reproached. In particular, he assiduously avoided participating in any concerts, receptions, published music criticism, radio broadcasts, or voyages organized by the German occupying authorities. At the same time, he was certainly not immune to the exigencies of public life or the opinion of others. His pride in his wartime work even led him to seek public honors— such as a state commission for Les Animaux modèles—that, decades later, others (such as Frédéric Blanc, the president of the Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé) would see as a source of shame.130 In 1996, Benjamin Ivry, alone among the composer’s biographers, called Poulenc’s

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reaction to the occupation “self-centered” because, although troubled by German persecution of the Jews, the composer “did nothing to risk his life and career in order to prevent it.” Ivry pointed out that Poulenc, in his wartime letters, complained that the absence of Jewish musicians had a negative effect on French musical life—comments that could be read as displaying a regrettable lack of concern for the human, and not just the musical, costs of their persecution.131 Ivry also labeled Les Animaux modèles, with its emphasis on French rural life, a “Pétainist work” and drew parallels between the way Poulenc and Picasso, to whom Poulenc dedicated Figure humaine, ignored what was happening around them: “[Picasso’s] main virtue was his concentration on creative productivity at all costs.” Ivry acknowledged, however, that if Poulenc was no hero, “neither did he profit grossly from the arrival of the Germans” and contrasted his wartime choices favorably with those made by Honegger.132 In January 1946, in the same issue of Contrepoints as Schaeffner’s tribute to Poulenc, Henry Barraud—by then the music director at the postwar Radiodiffusion française—wrote a highly personal account of music and resistance in wartime France that put the Resistance acts of French musicians like Poulenc in perspective. The true heroes, wrote Barraud, were those who put their lives directly at risk. Among those who died for the cause after performing daring acts of sabotage was Barraud’s brother, Jean, who was executed by the Germans with forty-nine other Resistance fighters in Bordeaux on 1 August 1944. As for musicians in the Resistance, Barraud continued, “we had the best part of the deal: just enough adventure to enjoy the game without taking great risks, and the internal enrichment that awaited those who voluntarily withdrew from what they lived in their daily lives.”133 Barraud described with melancholy the gratitude he felt that he owed the German occupying forces for forcing him to withdraw from the daily pressures and compromises of French musical life. With no critics, colleagues, or audiences to please, no commissions to dutifully fulfill, and no films to score in haste, Barraud discovered in four years of abstinence the extent to which he had been succumbing to outside forces in his creative work.134 He hoped that, in his return to public life, he would retain his newfound freedom and resist external judgment: “Whenever that judgment touches me, I will keep in the corner of my heart, amid the enduring hatred it has acquired, a spot for gratitude” for the Germans. Consciously or not, Barraud was echoing Jean-Paul Sartre’s provocative declaration on the front page of the first post-liberation issue of Les Lettres françaises, “Never have we been so free as we were under the German occupation.”135 As Susan Rubin Suleiman has argued about

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Sartre, such statements were designed “for people who wish to hear a story of collective heroism—and [Sartre] gives it to them, even if it involves leaving certain things unsaid.”136 It is true that, like Sartre, Poulenc did not withdraw from public life during the occupation. As Schaeffner noted, in many ways Poulenc continued to compose as if nothing had changed. But this was an attitude he shared with almost all the members of the FNM. Ivry cites Durey’s silence during the occupation as the more honorable path, but Durey had already ceased composing as early as 1937 for financial reasons.137 Auric, who withdrew his new music from French concert halls and restricted his published music criticism to unsigned articles in Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, nevertheless composed six film scores during the occupation, including one for the highly successful 1943 film L’Éternel retour. The two conductors in the group, Désormière and Münch, were arguably among the most prominent and successful musicians in occupied Paris. Although they were both obliged, in the service of their positions, to participate in various events sponsored by Vichy and the German occupying forces,138 they were praised during and after the war as patriots for their promotion of French music at the highest artistic level. Yet Poulenc did not merely resist making compromises, openly or in private, with the competing forces in charge in occupied France. He had the status and the panache to perform subtle but highly symbolic acts of resistance that few musicians—and, indeed, few creative artists in any media—dared to do in occupied France. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation, Roland-Manuel, like Barraud, was modest in his assessment of the achievements of the FNM. “Our field of action was limited,” he conceded, “but we gave ourselves over entirely to our task.”139 Indeed, Poulenc’s acts may not have been grand in scale, but, when fashioning his musical secrets, he seems to have given himself over entirely to his task.

2 Honegger’s Postwar Rehabilitation Honegger’s popularity has never been as great as during those years [of occupation] when Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, La Danse des morts, and the Symphonie pour cordes united audiences in packed concert halls into a single spirit of enthusiasm and hope. harry halbreich, Arthur Honegger

honegger in liberated paris After Paris was liberated from German occupation on 25 August 1944, the city’s inhabitants exuberantly embraced their newfound freedom. For the city’s symphony orchestras, it was time to celebrate the return of both the music and the musicians that had disappeared from their wartime concerts on the basis of race, religion, or nationality. Manuel Rosenthal emerged from years of hiding to conduct the Orchestre national’s first post-liberation concert. Rosenthal had been the orchestra’s assistant conductor until he was drafted as a medic in September 1939. In June 1940 he was taken prisoner by the German army and interned for eight months in Stalag XIA, a German prisoner-of-war camp in Altengrabow, where he was given permission to direct a prisoners’ orchestra. Upon his release in April 1941, he initially sought refuge in Marseille, but he returned to Paris in late summer 1942, when he began working for the Front national des musiciens (FNM), writing articles for its clandestine newsletters and aiding in their distribution.1 In the free concert, broadcast nationwide from Paris on 28 September, Rosenthal and the Orchestre national performed works from France (Hymne à la justice, by Albéric Magnard, Debussy’s La Mer, Darius Milhaud’s Suite provençal), the United Kingdom (Portsmouth Point, by William Walton, and Variations on Cadet Rousselle, by Arnold Bax, John Ireland, and Frank Bridge, arranged by Eugene Goosens), the United States (the finale of Roger Sessions’s Symphony no. 1), and the Soviet Union (Prokofiev’s Suite from The Prodigal Son). To reinforce the program’s symbolic celebration of the wartime Allies, Rosenthal opened the concert by conducting the national anthems of the four countries, having transcribed the Soviet anthem from Radio Moscow and orchestrated it himself for its 38

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first performance in France.2 Conspicuously absent from the French portion of the program was music by composers who had remained in France during the occupation. One month later, on 22 October, another concert offered a different message. Charles Münch, who had championed the music of contemporary composers during his wartime tenure as conductor of the orchestra of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, featured their compositions in the opening concert of his orchestra’s 1944–45 season. Most of his selections were works he had performed with the orchestra during the occupation: Albert Roussel’s Bardit des Francs; Jacques Ibert’s Ouverture de Fête; and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien.3 The one novelty of the program was the premiere of Chant de Libération, a short work for baritone solo, unison chorus, and orchestra by Arthur Honegger to a text by Bernard Zimmer. To Maurice Brillant, who reviewed Münch’s concert for L’Aube, Honegger’s Chant de Libération was a moving masterpiece. Brillant compared its subject and style to François Rude’s La Marseillaise, the 42-foothigh stone relief sculpture that has adorned the Arc de Triomphe in Paris since 1836 and that depicts the rallying of the French people against their foreign enemies after the French Revolution. “To all these merits, [the work] joins that of having been composed starting in 1942. To our joy and honor,” Brillant concluded, “Honegger was a musician of the Resistance. . . . There was no one better than Honegger to write this new ‘bardit’ [incitement to battle] and he owed it to himself to write it.” Brillant reported that the audience’s enthusiastic response to Chant de Libération inspired Münch to conduct an immediate repeat performance.4 Yet no other music critics reviewed the premiere of Honegger’s “bardit”— an abrupt turnaround for the composer who was arguably the most successful in finding performances and favorable press coverage of his music in occupied Paris. The one other critic to review the concert, Claude Rostand, focused on Münch’s impressive interpretation of Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. Of the other pieces, Rostand merely reported that “the first part of the concert was devoted to little-known contemporary works that permitted M. Charles Münch to display his usual dynamism.”5 It was only several months later, in a review of the premiere of Honegger’s ballet L’Appel de la montagne at the Opéra, that Rostand mentioned Chant de Libération in print, and his comments were dismissive. For Rostand, Chant de Libération was merely a foreshadowing of the triviality and vulgarity that he deplored in Honegger’s recent music.6 All other critics instead chose to write that week about other concerts that presented a sharper contrast in both programming and personnel with the

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musical offerings in occupied Paris. Georges Auric, for instance, reviewed the Orchestre national’s Prokofiev festival of 19 October, writing about his pleasure in being able once again to hear Prokofiev’s music and see Rosenthal conduct. And Roland-Manuel discussed the opening concert of the Concerts Colonne that took place on the same day as Münch’s concert, for it marked the return of both the rightful name of the orchestra and its conductor, Paul Paray, from his self-imposed exile in southern France. Roland-Manuel praised Paray as a “patriot” who had fought valiantly for freedom and who “incarnated the Resistance.”7 Paray conducted concert favorites by Jewish composers Mendelssohn (the Violin Concerto and the Symphony no. 3 “Scottish”) and Dukas (L’Apprenti sorcier and La Péri), the performance of whose music had been banned by German authorities in occupied France.8 Münch’s performance of the premiere of Chant de Libération was a continuation of the partnership the two men had shared during the occupation. Münch’s frequent wartime performances of Honegger’s music had been audience favorites at the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Münch’s October 1944 performance of Chant de Libération showed that the conductor could now perform freely the patriotic music that the composer of the majestic and well-received Symphonie pour cordes, written during the occupation and given its French premiere by Münch in June 1942, had composed in secret during the war. Moreover, by featuring Chant de Libération as the one piece on the afternoon’s program that he had not conducted during the occupation, Münch was implicitly defending his own wartime choices. His decision to conduct in his first post-liberation concert the same works of Debussy, Ibert, and Roussel that he had presented during the war suggested that his wartime performances of these works had been acts of defiance. Roland-Manuel said as much in an influential interview about the FNM published in Les Lettres françaises one month earlier, in which he named Münch as one of three conductors, with Paray and Roger Désormière, who had belonged to the Resistance.9 Münch’s support came at a critical time for Honegger. Brillant’s proclamation that Honegger was a “musician of the Resistance” was a highly defensive move, for the composer’s wartime interactions with German occupying authorities had caused him problems even before the Allies arrived in France. Initially, Honegger’s wartime defense of French music in his regular column for Comœdia earned him membership in the FNM. But in November 1941, he agreed to travel to Vienna to attend a weeklong international festival commemorating the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death, an event organized and financed by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, or RMVP). On

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his return to France, Honegger wrote enthusiastic accounts of the festivities for Comœdia; he later penned positive reviews of contemporary German music by Hans Pfitzner, Werner Egk, and Richard Strauss.10 In February 1942 he joined other former delegates to the Vienna festival at a German embassy reception in Paris for Heinz Drewes, the head of the RMVP’s music department in Berlin. By 1943, concerned that Honegger’s dealings with German officials would compromise their membership, the leaders of the FNM asked him to withdraw from the group.11 There is no evidence that Honegger was in any way sympathetic to the ideology of the German occupying forces. Yet he clearly earned professional opportunities through his public support for their propaganda efforts. Honegger’s trip to Vienna coincided with his success in obtaining exit visas for concert tours in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. His attendance at the reception for Drewes was followed by the reappearance of his infamous orchestral evocation of a steam engine, Pacific 231, on the programs of French orchestras despite the work’s status among the Nazis as Honegger’s most “degenerate” piece of music. Shortly afterward, in June and July 1942, French musicians commemorated Honegger’s fiftieth birthday with a weeklong festival, the only such celebration of a living composer in occupied France that was sanctioned by German authorities.12 It did not take long after the liberation for those who, like Honegger, were suspected of having participated in German propaganda efforts in France and abroad to face consequences for their alleged misdeeds. Vigilante justice in the summer and fall of 1944 was followed by official court trials in local tribunals, such as the Paris Court of Justice, starting in October 1944, and the High Court of Justice, formed in March 1945 to try the most senior officials of the Vichy regime.13 Although the FNM prepared for the purge of musicians as early as August 1944, the official purification committees charged with their cases were not formed until spring 1945. Frustrated by the slow pace of judgment, the membership of the FNM had its first (and only) general meeting on 27 September 1944 to discuss the issue with the recently appointed minister of national education (René Capitant), director of fine arts (Jacques Jaujard), and director of theater and music (Édouard Bourdet). A preliminary list of fourteen “obviously compromised” musicians—which did not include Honegger’s name—was published three days later in Les Lettres françaises.14 Performing with German musicians on tour in France, traveling to Germany (or nations annexed by Germany) after the armistice, participating in the broadcasts of Radio-Paris, joining the Groupe Collaboration, and contributing articles to collaborationist newspapers were the primary offenses.

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Among Honegger’s wartime choices, his decision to accept the invitation to attend the 1941 festivities in Vienna was the most controversial both during and after the war. The French contingent—the largest and most prominent of the foreign delegations—was provided with an all-expensepaid trip to attend an event that consisted of political rallies as well as brilliant musical performances.15 Among those the delegates heard perform were Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Requiem, Clemens Krauss the Mass in C Minor, Hans Knappertsbuch Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, and Karl Böhm Le nozze di Figaro and Die Entführung aus dem Serail. They met with Alfred Schlee, the head of Universal Editions, and attended a reception at the villa of Richard Strauss. But they also heard Goebbels preside over a rally at the Staatsoper. Goebbels’s cohost, Baldur von Schirach, the Reich governor of Vienna, opened the festival by invoking Mozart’s relevance to the goals and visions of the German Reich. “It is for the values that Mozart [represents] that we are fighting today,” intoned von Schirach, “and Mozart fights alongside us with the influence of his genius.”16 German propaganda took full advantage of the validation provided by the foreigners, and in particular the French, who traveled to Vienna to participate in the festival. Several articles about the so-called “European” music festival appeared in various editions of the German daily newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter. The first to appear, on 29 November, drew attention to the fact that the “eight hundred out-of-town guests, among them several from foreign countries,” included “a delegation of French musicians” who were taking part “at the invitation of the Reich’s government.” The last, on 7 December, concluded that the visitors would now return to their homes with the indelible impression of the German Reich’s superiority in both cultural and military matters. “This, it seems to us, was the greatest value of the German Reich’s Mozart Week,” asserted the official newspaper of the Nazi Party. “Victory in the current fight can only belong to the one who feels so secure and serene in military battle that he does not forget the care of the Muses amid the noise of weapons.”17 Although the articles did not name any of the individual “guests,” it was the collective willingness of a critical mass of them to join the venture that made their presence useful for German propaganda purposes at home and abroad. In fact, when the French delegation returned to occupied France, most of their members did not neglect the political message of the event in their published music reviews. Robert Bernard, writing for L’Information musicale, called the festival a “moral victory” for the Germans. In Cahiers Franco-Allemands, Guy Ferchault exclaimed that, in this festival, he could

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see the vision of a Europe “that is being built every day under our eyes . . . in the mutual understanding and reciprocal esteem of reconciled nations.” Lucien Rebatet, citing Mozart’s use of Beaumarchais’s play in The Marriage of Figaro, concluded for Je suis partout that “two great peoples whose civilizations overlap in such ways are not made for eternal hostility.” In Honegger’s two reviews for Comœdia he made no such claims. Indeed, the circumstances of the festival intruded only once, in his concluding observation that it was “particularly comforting in these troubled times to see what worship could be given to a pure glory, a gift from the gods to vile humanity.”18 Otherwise, readers of Honegger’s accounts would have been hard put to locate the festival in its politically charged time and place. In arguing that, and acting as if, musical activities were immune from political implication during the occupation, Honegger made himself vulnerable to postwar criticism from those who disagreed. To many, such arguments—and such acts—were shameful collusion with German propaganda. An unsigned article in one of the last clandestine issues of Le musicien d’aujourd’hui stated boldly that to claim, as the German occupiers often did, that music was a “universal language” and therefore had no national identity was to assert that music “had one country, one universe: Germany.” In so doing, the author (probably Auric or Rosenthal) continued, the Germans were putting France’s musicians to work promoting the masterworks of the German nation, “all under the pretext of making up for the supposed inadequacy of French musical culture.”19 When liberation came, the question of whether creative work could in and of itself be considered treasonous when it reinforced enemy propaganda was especially divisive among writers, who, unlike musicians, risked execution for their wartime work. The most controversial case was that of Robert Brasillach, editor of the pro-collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, who was tried and condemned to death for treason in January 1945. Several prominent intellectuals—including François Mauriac, who had worked in the Resistance and had himself been a target of Brasillach’s published attacks—were outraged that intellectual work could lead to execution. When Mauriac circulated a petition for de Gaulle to pardon Brasillach, Honegger signed, along with several illustrious writers (Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, and Jean Cocteau), painters (André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck), and actors (Jean-Louis Barrault). Equally illustrious, however, were those who refused to sign, including Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, and Pablo Picasso.20 Honegger was not the only prominent person signing the petition to be facing postwar criticism for his wartime activities. Like Honegger, Derain and Vlaminck were part of the French delegation for an

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official trip to Germany or its annexed neighbors (in their case, Berlin in 1941, to attend an exhibition by the sculptor Arno Breker); like Honegger, Cocteau had published an enthusiastic review of a visiting German artist (also Breker, for a 1942 exhibition in Paris of his sculpture) in Comœdia.21 What is interesting here is that indignation over Brasillach’s execution united such men with some—Mauriac, most notably—who had made very different choices and met with very different obstacles during the occupation. De Gaulle, unmoved, ordered Brasillach executed by firing squad on 6 February 1945. French resentment of Honegger’s wartime activities had serious repercussions for performances of his music in Paris during the 1944–45 concert season. The most significant casualty was the premiere of a new version of Honegger’s 1935 oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher with a prologue that Claudel had written in August 1940. On 16 August 1944 Claudel sent a letter to Honegger, inquiring as to his whereabouts and proposing that Honegger set the new prologue to music in anticipation of a quick postliberation premiere at the Opéra. But one month later, on 28 September, Claudel wrote again, informing Honegger that Bourdet had asked that Honegger come see him at his office. “Two things bother him,” wrote Claudel. “Your trip to Vienna in ’41, and perhaps your assiduous work for Comœdia and your articles on German composers.” Bourdet’s solution, claimed Claudel, was that Honegger obtain “some kind of certificate of civic duty” from Désormière; he may have known that Bourdet had just met with the general membership of the FNM the day before to discuss their concerns about suspected collaborators. Honegger went to see Bourdet on 10 October, and he wrote to Claudel on 28 November that he had finished the music for the prologue. But in a letter of 22 December, Claudel made it clear to Honegger that Bourdet’s misgivings would prevent “the grand patriotic event that we were dreaming of for Jeanne au bûcher” from taking place, out of fear that “it would generate a storm.” “I am devastated and disgusted,” Claudel wrote rather resentfully, of the “injustice and abominable stupidity” shown to the man whom he considered “the greatest musician of our time.”22 Plans for the gala performance of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher at the Opéra were postponed, first until the end of April 1945, then to the end of May, before being abandoned altogether.23 Bourdet was not alone in his concerns about the possibility of incendiary responses to performances of Honegger’s music in liberated Paris. Henry Barraud, the newly appointed director of music at the French national radio, invited Honegger in a conciliatory letter of 25 December 1944 to come see him on the 27th; Barraud wanted to resolve an impasse between Honegger,

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Pierre Capdevielle (the head of chamber music programming at the radio), and Roland-Manuel (one of the founders of the FNM).24 According to letters Roland-Manuel exchanged with Poulenc in November 1943, RolandManuel had already voiced his concerns during the war to Honegger about his behavior, taking credit for Honegger’s decision to cease writing his regular column for Comœdia in January 1944. As he put it to Poulenc at the time, Roland-Manuel thought that Honegger had “better things to do than [write] fawning reviews.”25 But the meeting with Barraud must not have gone well. In a letter dated 29 December Honegger voiced his frustrations to Claudel: “They don’t want to put me in front of a purification committee because apparently they have nothing to blame me for. But a few very well-meaning colleagues think that ‘in my own interest, it is not advisable to play my music at this time.’ ”26 Poulenc described the situation in a 27 March 1945 letter to Milhaud in California: “In Paris musical life begins again as much as possible, very constrained by questions of purification. . . . No one plays Arthur[’s music] any more for the moment, even though his attitude was not at all serious, in my opinion. The opposition at the Radio was a little too vicious, which I deplore.” By early July 1945, Poulenc could report to Milhaud that Honegger’s music was reappearing on the radio (“as a Swiss composer”), but that the composer continued to “live in isolation after the sort of quarantine caused by his not serious imprudence.”27 Honegger escaped official censure by the purification committees in spring 1945 because, as the child of Swiss immigrants to France, he carried a Swiss passport. Unofficially, no one would play or publish his music in France for six months. It so happens that Chant de Libération was Honegger’s last public premiere in France before the boycott began. The score, never published, was soon lost. In June 2009 I traveled to Paris to do research on Honegger’s wartime compositions at the Bibliothèque nationale. In looking for traces of Chant de Libération, I decided to consult the papers of Bernard Zimmer, the screenwriter and playwright who had written the song’s lyrics. To my surprise, among Zimmer’s papers there was a long-overlooked piano-vocal score of the song. Éditions Salabert had typeset the piece in the fall of 1944, sending a letter to Zimmer two days after the premiere about copyright and royalties for any scores and recordings produced.28 The controversy surrounding Honegger’s wartime activities, however, had evidently dissuaded them from publishing any of the composer’s works until 1947. Although Salabert listed Chant de Libération in its catalog for some time, it never published the song.29

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Honegger’s biographers have long hoped that a rediscovered Chant de Libération would help clear the composer’s name. In his 1953 biography, Delannoy, after describing the negative effects on Honegger of the “anticyclone of the Liberation,” pointedly remarked that, in Honegger’s defense, “Nothing suits a [man like] Honegger better than silence. It is enough for him that his works speak [for themselves].” In 2005, Jacques Tchamkerten prefaced his discussion of Chant de Libération with the assertion, “If our musician (who had several people to support), along with the entire profession, had to compromise for better or for worse with the occupying forces— an exercise made all the more perilous because of his great renown—his cherished ideal of liberty and justice enables us to imagine without difficulty where his sympathies lay.” Harry Halbreich stressed Honegger’s nationality as a citizen of neutral Switzerland, for it meant that, in Halbreich’s opinion, the composer’s “purely diplomatic and passive presence at a few receptions organized by German cultural authorities in Paris certainly did not have the collaborationist significance it would have had for a Frenchman.” In Honegger’s defense, Halbreich provided an extensive excerpt from Brillant’s favorable 1944 review of Chant de Libération in lieu of a description in his 1992 inventory of Honegger’s works.30 The date of composition of Chant de Libération—April 1942, according to Honegger’s own manuscript catalog of his works31—has been critical to the composer’s biographers.32 If accurate, it would mean that Honegger’s musical celebration of the French Resistance predated all other known clandestine musical settings of Resistance texts by at least a year. In addition, since April 1942 coincides with the timing of Honegger’s public association with German propaganda initiatives, the date might also mean, as Honegger’s biographers have suggested, that Honegger was inwardly loyal to the Resistance even as he was outwardly complying with German directives. The details of the piano-vocal score in Zimmer’s papers tell a different story. At the end of the last system of music, the date of April 1942 is followed by a second date, April 1944. It appears that in April 1942 Honegger and Zimmer initially wrote a conventional two-minute song to accompany a film about Joan of Arc that may not have had anything to do with the Resistance. It was not until April 1944 that they covertly transformed the discarded song into a secret Resistance piece. Since the changes they made to the original song postdate Honegger’s 1943 expulsion from the FNM, the score of Chant de Libération sheds light on how Honegger reacted not only to the occupation, but also to the ambivalence he faced in France even before the liberation.

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the score of chant de libération This short, powerful piece, with an abrupt beginning, sets a poem by Bernard Zimmer. The sturdy couplets, simultaneously virile and poignant, are sung by a baritone solo, to which the chorus responds with two “refrains” that have a more martial air. The full and somber orchestral accompaniment is careful not to make its own presence felt; it is only there to support and serve the voices. There is, however, no trace of filler or rhetoric. The discourse is very frank and direct, the piece is entirely clear, concise, vigorous, moving, and powerful: an absolute “triumph.”33

Brillant’s description of Chant de Libération holds up well to an examination of the typeset piano-vocal score of the piece that Éditions Salabert prepared for publication sometime around its October 1944 premiere. The piece is a march in compound duple meter and, at five and a half minutes in duration, is short for a concert work. The orchestra’s role is subdued right from the abrupt start of the piece: after a brief two-measure instrumental introduction, the baritone soloist enters to sing, to an instrumental accompaniment in D minor, the first two of the poem’s ten stanzas in rhymed couplets. After the baritone sings the third stanza over a dominant A pedal, the chorus responds with a refrain of two stanzas in D major; frequent dotted rhythms in the accompaniment, together with the change to the major mode, suggest martial topoi, as does the eight-measure fanfare in the instrumental part that follows the last stanza. The second half of the song, a setting of stanzas six through ten, is essentially a musical repeat of the first; however, the second time through, the soloist sings the refrain with the chorus in unison for a rousing finish. The nuanced use of melody in the third and eighth stanzas, in which irregular phrases are sung over a dominant pedal lasting sixteen measures, adds two brief moments of artistry and suspense to a song that—with most of its melodies in eight-bar phrases, chromatic alterations kept to a minimum, and a written-out repeat—is otherwise designed to be both accessible and memorable. The first five stanzas of the song tell the story of the victory of Joan of Arc over the English forces that had occupied France for twenty years during the Hundred Years’ War—a story with which Honegger was intimately familiar from his oratorio, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. The text progresses from despair in the first two stanzas (“When will our miseries end?”) to premonitions of hope in the third (“Already the winds are changing”), followed by triumph in the last two (“A girl has come from the border; My friends this will work!”). In his musical setting Honegger mirrored this progression with a change of mode—he used D minor for the despair, a dominant pedal on A for the premonitions of hope, and D major for the

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triumphant ending—as well as martial rhythms that illustrate Joan’s improbable military success. In the song’s second half, the five stanzas of text transpose Joan’s triumph to the present day. By strategically retaining not only the structure of the first half of the poem, but also whole lines of text (and even one entire stanza, the third), Zimmer made transparent the parallels between occupied France in the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. When military triumph arrives in stanzas nine and ten, it is brought by “les Godons”—the slang for the English used in the first stanza as a pejorative. They are arriving from England, America, and North Africa bearing banners “covered in stars.” At the end of the first half, the sight of Joan’s approach caused the French to “wake up” their country; at the end of the second, the sight of the Allies inspires the French to “liberate” their land. A final line celebrating patriotic symbols for France (the rooster, church bells) concludes both halves. It is striking that nothing in the song’s first five stanzas indicates that Honegger and Zimmer would need to keep their song a secret. During the occupation, Joan of Arc was a popular symbol of the pious heroism that French propaganda ascribed to Marshal Pétain. One radio commentator even drew a parallel between the voices Joan heard—messages from heaven—and the sound of Pétain’s voice on Radiodiffusion nationale, offering paternal reassurance to his traumatized nation.34 Despite her symbolic appeal to those who advocated resistance to German occupation, Vichy as well as German propaganda used Joan’s historic rout of English occupying forces to encourage the French population to direct their hostility toward the war at Great Britain. Vichy produced propaganda posters emblazoned with sayings such as “In order for France to live we, like Joan of Arc, must drive the English out of Europe,” and, after the Allies bombed Rouen— where the English burned Joan at the stake—images of Joan and the city were emblazoned with the words “Assassins always return to the scene of their crime.”35 Vichy’s Office for the Fight against Unemployment (Commissariat à la lutte contre le chômage) financed a tour of nearly two hundred musicians performing a semistaged production of Honegger’s own oratorio on the subject, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, in twenty-seven cities in southern France in July and August 1941.36 There is indirect evidence that the touring production imposed an anti-British message on the work, even though, as Pascal Lécroart has noted, there is a distinct absence of antiBritish rhetoric in the oratorio itself.37 Rather, the oratorio espouses a universal message of hope, faith, and love that, delivered by the national icon of Saint Joan, appealed to listeners—as it still does today—regardless of their nationality or political affiliation.

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The tour was the third of three events organized by Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France, with the support of Vichy’s Office of Youth Affairs (Secrétariat général à la Jeunesse), to openly celebrate Joan of Arc in the spring and summer of 1941. In the first of these events, to mark the first feast day of Saint Joan (declared a national holiday in 1920) since the armistice on 11 May, Jeune France presented the outdoor spectacle Portique pour une fille de France in sports stadiums in several French cities in the unoccupied zone. It was performed by casts of hundreds to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands; musical numbers, which Schaeffer commissioned from Léo Preger, Yves Baudrier, and Olivier Messiaen, accompanied the pageantry of reenacting Joan’s life and death at the stake.38 Music played a more prominent role in the second of the events: Sainte Jeanne, a concert work for narrator, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra for which Schaeffer commissioned seven composers to each write a segment. The piece was broadcast by the national radio in the unoccupied zone over three days starting on 14 May 1941. Its telling of Joan’s story did not shy away from parallels to the present day, as in the following passage of the text from the second section, Vaucouleurs, by Jean de Beer set to music by Georges Dandelot: “Have at our enemies / Send them out of France . . . Chase them out, good Jeannette / Forward until death / We shall overcome our defeat.”39 Passages such as this one did not prevent Sainte Jeanne from being performed in occupied Paris, where Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire gave its concert premiere on 28 April 1942. A few months later Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire presented Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher together with the French premiere of his Symphonie pour cordes in occupied Paris in a gala performance on 25 June 1942 for the opening concert of the weeklong Honegger celebration. Only the composer’s Swiss nationality prevented Louis Hautecœur at Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts from providing the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire with government subsidies for its performance.40 The oratorio had another performance in occupied Paris on 9 May 1943, the feast day of Joan of Arc, with the composer conducting the Orchestre national shortly after its return to Paris from Marseille. The radio’s weekly newsletter, Radio national, announced the program with a full-page article by Henry Barraud on the work’s celebration of the historical figure “who gives meaning to our entire history and whose light should be sufficiently strong to illuminate the night in which we are wandering.”41 Although in Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher the story of Joan’s military triumph is told in flashback in Claudel’s text, which focuses on

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Joan’s trial and execution, there are moments of defiance in the oratorio similar to those in Sainte Jeanne that paralleled the present-day situation in France. Tchamkerten cites one passage from scene 8, “The King Sets Out for Rheims,” when a peasant calls out, “And isn’t this the time then to take a little sip, now Grinder Trusty’s found once more our little Johnny Grape? And now that half of France has found once more the other half with ev’ry joy of heart?” Later, in scene 9, “The Sword of Joan,” Joan, defiantly reminiscing about her military triumph, shouts, “And when Joan in the month of May mounts on her battle-charger, he’d have to be very cunning, the man who’d dare forbid all of France to march!”42 Such present-day parallels, however, could be interpreted in many different ways. For at least two French critics reviewing the state-sponsored tour of the work in July and August 1941, such moments resonated with the vision of national renewal promoted by Vichy (inspired, in the words of one critic, by “the passion of a humble daughter of France”); another critic suggested that the state send the tour abroad “to show what the soul of France is made of in 1941: [it is] aware of its history and open to hope for the future.”43 Thus musical celebrations of Joan of Arc—even ones with texts that contain references to Joan’s defiance and the country’s rebellion that equal those in Zimmer’s first five stanzas—were not only accepted and promoted by Vichy; they were also tolerated by the German authorities in both unoccupied and occupied zones of France and were still taking place around the same time as Honegger and Zimmer were writing the first half of Chant de Libération, in April 1942. By contrast, the words of the song’s second half contain historical details that postdate April 1942. These include the exact duration of the occupation in stanza 6 as well as the depth of French anger aimed at Marshal Pétain, the “old man” whose “betrayal” of France precedes the text’s condemnation of the German occupiers in stanza 7: Ah! mes amis! Quand finiront nos misères? Depuis quatre ans qu’un vieillard nous a trahis Depuis quatre ans, entendez-vous la colère Crier vengeance au quatre coins du pays? Quand verrons-nous la croix lorraine Fleurir au blanc de nos drapeaux Et chasser ce torchon de haine Qui pend au front des “Gestapos”?44 [Ah, my friends! When will our miseries end? In the four years since an old man betrayed us

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For four years, do you hear the anger Calling for vengeance all over the country? When will we see the cross of Lorraine Blossoming in the white of our flags And chase out that dishrag of hate That hangs in front of the “Gestapo”?]

Although the French had already begun to lose faith in Vichy by April 1942, their high opinion of Pétain took longer to fade. Most people saw him as a venerated war hero who was a crucial protector of his people against the German invaders. Even the major Resistance groups in both unoccupied and occupied zones initially opposed Germany, not Vichy, Vichy having instigated several of the government reforms for which they had been agitating.45 It was not until the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 and the German army’s subsequent occupation of the entire country that Pétain was exposed as too weak to protect the French. And it was not until the spring of 1944 that the French anticipated the arrival of British and American troops on French soil with the enthusiasm displayed in Zimmer’s final stanzas. The essentially strophic repetition of the music that set stanzas 1–5 for the singing of the second half of the poem could easily have been notated with a repeat sign in the piano-vocal score were it not for Honegger’s addition of a new countermelody to the instrumental part in his setting of stanzas 9 and 10. The countermelody appears in two separate statements (ex. 4). The first statement, lasting twelve measures, consists of four bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” inserted into the middle of eight bars of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Four measures later, the second statement repeats the four measures of “The Star-Spangled Banner” followed by eight measures of “La Marseillaise” in imitation. Thus the music reinforces the political message of the text: the arrival of the British forces in France, with the critical support of American troops, inspired the French to reclaim their freedom in the singing of their banned national anthem. Honegger had already employed this technique in his 1937 soundtrack to Marthe Richard, Spy in the Service of France, a popular biopic about a real-life French prostitute turned World War I spy (for which Zimmer wrote the dialogue). The director Raymond Bernard ended the film with a patriotic montage of historical footage, accompanied by an orchestra playing Honegger’s instrumental quotations of popular French, American, and British songs: the arrival of Allied troops in France (“Over There,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”), French soldiers emerging from the trenches (“Quand Madelon”), celebrations in the streets of Paris (a riotous collage of

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example 4. Chant de Libération. Music by Arthur Honegger; lyrics by Bernard Zimmer. (© 1944 Éditions Salabert, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. First part of countermelody, mm. 122–33. 122

Car

les Go dons

rique

et d’Al ger,

dé bar quent d’Ang le ter

re,

Et

voi là ceux

d’A mé

128

Des

é

toi

les

cri blant leurs ban niè

res

“Ah! Ça ira” and “On dit qu’Dunkerque est mort” layered over “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”), and the victory parade up the Avenue des ChampsÉlysées (“La Marseillaise”).46 The fact that the film was banned in both occupied and unoccupied France after June 1940 as “inciting hatred against Germany” lends extra weight to interpreting Honegger’s reuse of its citations during the war as a gesture of resistance.47 Since the film had been rereleased in French cinemas in September 1939 for the exact same reason it was banned in June 1940, it is possible that at least some listeners in October 1944 had seen it recently enough to catch Honegger’s reference to the film score in Chant de Libération.48 The five-second close-up shot of Rude’s sculpture La Marseillaise right before the Allies’ victory parade reveals that the critic Maurice Brillant was probably one of them. The composer’s sketchbooks provide additional evidence to suggest that the last five stanzas of the text and the countermelodies in the music for the last two stanzas of Chant de Libération were added sometime after the April 1942 composition of the first half of the song.49 In the sketchbook from February 1939 to May 1943, there are nine staves of sketches on one

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example 4 (continued) b. Second part of countermelody, mm. 138–49. 138

Car

les

Go

dons

dé

bar quent d’An gle

voy

ant

ter

re,

142

Et

tous

les

coqs,

les

ap

pro cher,

146

Ont,

d’un

cri,

li

bé

ré

no

tre

ter

re

page on which we can observe Honegger working out first the refrain, then the verse, and finally the transition on the dominant pedal between the two. The page falls among sketches of works that Honegger was composing in fall 1941 and spring 1942: Saluste de Bartas, a set of six mélodies composed in September 1941; the finale of the Symphonie pour cordes, completed in October 1941; and the soundtrack for the film Le Journal tombe à 5 heures, written in April and May 1942. The scansion of the vocal lines and the rare words of Zimmer’s text match the words of stanzas 1 through 5 in the piano-vocal score in Zimmer’s papers. However, for the refrain Honegger used a pink pencil to add the countermelodies that would appear in the final version in stanzas 9 and 10. When Honegger composed the finale of Marthe

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Richard (for which he clearly envisioned the use of the countermelodies right from the start) in 1937, he used a single pencil for countermelody and accompaniment. In Chant de Libération, by contrast, he employed a colored pencil for the countermelodies and left clear traces of erasure in the vocal line when the added countermelodies necessitated changes to the earlier sketches. There are no further sketches for Chant de Libération in Honegger’s next sketchbook, which covered the period from May 1943 to December 1948. In his manuscript catalog, which dates the composition to April 1942, Honegger referred to Chant de Libération as a “song by B. Zimmer for the film.”50 Instead of composing a secret Resistance song in April 1942, then, it seems that Honegger and Zimmer wrote a song about Joan of Arc for a film project that was ultimately abandoned. Although the song does not correspond to any of the film projects we know of for Zimmer or Honegger, separately or together, during the war, in its structure and style it closely resembles other film songs that Honegger had recently composed.51 As Halbreich has pointed out, compound-meter marches are one of the three most common types of songs that Honegger composed for films.52 There is a close resemblance between the first half of Chant de Libération and film songs such as Honegger’s “Chanson de l’Escadrille,” composed for Cessez le feu in 1934 to a text by Joseph Kessel, and “De l’Atlantique au Pacifique” (lyrics by Jean Féline), composed for Nitchevo in 1936: all three songs are marches in compound duple meter, with the earlier two approximately two and one-quarter minutes in duration; and all three begin with a short introduction of two or four measures and have an initial section of text and music, in eight-measure melodic phrases, set in D minor, followed by a second section in D major.53 The addition of a more complex transition between the sections in Chant de Libération, with its irregular phrases and dominant pedal, accounts for the difference in timing between the longer Chant de Libération and its film-score predecessors.54 Thus the rediscovered piano-vocal score of Chant de Libération reveals that Honegger did write a rousingly patriotic composition in secret before the end of the German occupation of France. But it also reveals that he and Zimmer most likely penned its politically subversive elements only after Honegger’s expulsion from the FNM in 1943. An experienced screenwriter who continued to work openly on commercially released films in wartime France, Zimmer was an unusual choice for lyricist of a secret Resistance piece. By the spring of 1944, however, Zimmer was becoming active in the Resistance group Comité de libération du cinéma français.55 The committee’s president, the actor and director Pierre Blanchar, had recently

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worked with Zimmer and Honegger on two wartime films. The warmth of the friendship uniting Blanchar, Zimmer, and Honegger is clearly displayed in two letters Blanchar wrote to Honegger in early 1943.56 It appears likely that, by helping Honegger revise their 1942 film song as a secret Resistance song, Zimmer was helping his colleague atone for his conduct earlier in the war. Honegger’s wartime work for the French film industry was relatively well insulated from the activities that led to his expulsion from the FNM. Recriminations in French film circles after the liberation focused almost exclusively on whether one had worked on the feature films produced by Continental Films, a German-owned production company in France, and to a lesser extent one’s involvement with France-Actualités, a joint French-German newsreel company.57 Although Honegger contributed some music (since lost) to France-Actualités in September 1942, the five feature films, two documentaries, and one cartoon short for which he wrote music during the war were produced by the same French companies that financed the work of French film professionals who, like Zimmer and Blanchar, were simultaneously working openly in the wartime film industry and secretly in the Resistance. Even in spring 1944, before the war had ended, it was easier for film professionals, immune as they were to the internal politics of the concert music world, than for Honegger’s music colleagues to overlook the controversial aspects of Honegger’s wartime past. Yet unlike Honegger, the other composers in the FNM had nothing for which they needed to atone. And unlike Chant de Libération, their secret Resistance pieces were not hastily assembled afterthoughts but original (and risky) settings of clandestinely published poetry by France’s most respected poets. In July 1943, Poulenc composed his Figure humaine, setting eight of Éluard’s poems to music. Éluard’s renewed membership in the Communist Party, leadership role in the Resistance, and publication of clandestine poetry protesting the occupation put his life in danger while earning him widespread admiration. Sometime that same year Auric selected four poems by Éluard, Aragon, and Supervielle for his cycle for voice and piano, Quatre chants de la France malheureuse, which he later orchestrated. The title honors the exiled Supervielle’s collection Poèmes de la France malheureuse, which was published in Argentina in 1941 and Switzerland in 1942 and secretly distributed in France.58 The first and fourth poems set by Auric were among the last by Aragon to be published legally in France before he went into hiding in August 1943; the second was from Supervielle’s collection; and the third is from Éluard’s Sept Poèmes

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d’amour en guerre, which were clandestinely published in 1943 under the pseudonym Jean de Haut.59 The later dates of settings by Claude Arrieu, Elsa Barraine, Louis Durey, Henri Dutilleux, and Rosenthal follow (in most cases) the publication dates of the clandestine poetry that they set. In May 1944 Barraine set Éluard’s Avis for unison chorus and orchestra, the poem having just appeared in the second volume of L’Honneur des poètes; and in July 1944 Arrieu composed a Cantate des Sept Poèmes d’amour en guerre, in which a solo soprano and solo baritone alternate solo parts with orchestral accompaniment. Rosenthal set two poems from Cassou’s 33 sonnets composés au secret (published by Éditions de Minuit in May 1944 under the pseudonym Jean Noir) as Deux Sonnets de Jean Cassou for voice and orchestra in 1944; Dutilleux set one of Cassou’s poems, La Geôle, for baritone and orchestra at about the same time.60 Cassou composed the sonnets in his head during his imprisonment for resistance activities; one of the poems set by Rosenthal is a translation of Die Beide, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which Cassou found printed in a German newspaper left in his cell by one of his guards.61 Shortly before the liberation, Durey began work on a group of four poems by Gabriel Audisio, later entitled Quatre poèmes de minuit, for voice and piano; the poems had been published clandestinely in May 1944 under the pseudonym La Valentine and were inspired by the poet’s incarceration in the notorious prison of Fresnes.62 The settings were Durey’s first musical compositions in seven years. The poems set in these clandestine compositions evoke the wide range of feelings, from despair to hope and from resignation to vengeance, that the inhabitants of France experienced after the armistice. The conflicted emotions of shame and anger pervade several poems such as Éluard’s “Nous ne vous chantons pas,” set by Auric: “Shame of the trains of the tortured [soldiers] / Shame of the words scorched earth / But we are not ashamed of our suffering / But we are not ashamed of being ashamed.” French icons such as Joan of Arc occasionally make an appearance, as in the final stanza of Aragon’s “Richard II Quarante,” also set by Auric: “There was a time for suffering / When Joan came to Vaucouleurs / Ah see how France is cut in pieces / How pale the light was on that day.” The remembrance of the martyred is an important theme: Audisio’s “Leurs noms bénis” cites Goethe as an epigraph (“Who knows their names?”) and promises that those who die forgotten today will be honored tomorrow; the title of Éluard’s “Avis,” which describes the thoughts of a condemned prisoner, refers to the posters, with “Notice” (Avis) printed at the top, that listed the names of hostages held by the Germans.63

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These circumstances are reflected in the dedications: Barraine’s to Georges Dudach, a young resistance fighter working with Aragon who was captured and executed by the Germans in May 1942; Auric’s to Rosenthal; Rosenthal’s to the poet and painter Max Jacob, who died of pneumonia in the transit camp of Drancy in March 1944; and Dutilleux’s to his brother Paul, imprisoned for five years in Stalag VIIIC, a German prisoner-of-war camp in Sagan. By contrast, Honegger dedicated Chant de Libération to Münch’s wife, Geneviève. Honegger’s use of the stock forms of popular film music in Chant de Libération, setting a text clearly written as song lyrics, separates the piece from the more sophisticated musical settings of eloquent Resistance poetry that his former FNM colleagues composed in secret. In addition, none of their texts shares with Zimmer’s lyrics his celebration of the Allied armed forces that came to France’s aid. Historian Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac describes the three central tenets of de Gaulle’s myth of Free France: that, based in London rather than in Vichy, it represented the legitimate French governing body; that it had to resist its powerful allies, Great Britain and the United States, as much as it had to fight Nazi Germany; and that, under its guidance, France had liberated itself.64 Other contemporaneous songs, such as the similarly titled Chant de la libération, composed by Éloi Juif to words by Laurent Commet, gave de Gaulle and the armies of Free France full credit for the liberation (“If we won the war / And defeated the cursed Germans / It’s because of General de Gaulle / And the devotion of his soldiers”). Juif’s and Commet’s song was published and recorded in October 1944, in the very month in which Honegger and Zimmer’s song had its single performance.65 The whole premise of Zimmer’s added stanzas—that the Allied forces who inspired French insurrection in August 1944 were twentieth-century Joan of Arcs—ran directly counter to de Gaulle’s demands that the French now celebrate what they were able, after four years of shame, to accomplish by themselves. So did Honegger’s decision to highlight the Allies’ role through the added countermelodies that quoted their most archetypal patriotic tunes and that alluded to his 1937 film score accompanying images of victorious American and British troops celebrating in Paris. In the finale of Marthe Richard, we see the Allied troops but we hear mostly from the French, with three measures of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” buried amid layers of two French folk songs and followed by a full twenty-eightmeasure rendition of “La Marseillaise.”66 In Chant de Libération the citations of the Allies’ tunes outlast the French national anthem by a factor of two to one. What may have seemed an astute portrayal of the impending

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arrival of the Allies in April 1944 may have come across, in Paris shortly after the liberation, as a political miscalculation. The rediscovered score of Chant de Libération holds two surprises. First, it reveals that the date in the composer’s manuscript catalog is misleading. It was not in April 1942 but actually two years later, in the war’s final months, that Honegger, perhaps realizing that his earlier professional choices might be costly once the Allies arrived, decided to prepare a musical response to the war. Second, it reveals that Honegger’s secret Resistance piece was not a top artistic priority of the composer. Unlike several of his former Resistance colleagues who wrote original settings of eloquent Resistance poetry, Honegger preferred to revise a discarded film song by adding patriotic tunes he recycled from one of his prewar film scores. Yet if this halfhearted effort failed to win over the French in October 1944, it was only a matter of months until they were ready to forgive all but the most ideologically committed wartime collaborators. After all, in pursuing his career during the occupation as if nothing had changed, Honegger had had plenty of company in France.

chant de la délivrance : honegger’s second chance Honegger’s swift rehabilitation followed a second gesture of loyalty from his colleagues in the film industry. On 27 May 1945, a few weeks after Germany’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces, Honegger completed his Hymne de la Délivrance, a Resistance song originally scored for vocal soloist and piano.67 The lyrics that José Bruyr wrote for the new song were quite different from those Zimmer had written for Chant de Libération. They were simpler and more direct, employing the informal tone and expressions of everyday French. More importantly, in contrast to the historical specifics in Zimmer’s text denigrating Pétain and praising the combined efforts of the British, American, and French troops who freed France, Bruyr painted a more generalized picture of national defiance, seen from the point of view of Resistance fighters. In Hymne de la Délivrance, Bruyr’s lyrics were not a formal celebration of the liberation, as Zimmer’s had been in Chant de Libération, but a stylized version of a Resistance song composed and written some nine months after Paris was freed. Bruyr’s text shares its themes and turns of phrase with a handful of Resistance songs that were broadcast by the BBC during the war.68 But Bruyr’s words are most strikingly similar to the lyrics of the most famous of the BBC’s French Resistance songs, Le Chant des Partisans. Composed in

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1943 in London with lyrics by Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon to a melody by Anna Marly (who wrote the original lyrics in Russian), the song was introduced to wartime France via French-language radio broadcasts from London before the Allies invaded France, and from Paris during the liberation. In the months and years to follow, Le Chant des Partisans was sung at Resistance galas and commemorations, and it was made a French national anthem in 1962.69 The lyrics of Le Chant des Partisans, according to Druon, were meant to “glorify the fight, support the fighters and unify them.”70 They use familiar terms—“ami” (friend), “camarade” (comrade)—the first person (“we,” “us”), and the French familiar pronoun “tu” to create a sense of solidarity among all persons singing the song together, literally and figuratively. Bruyr copied this studied use of informality in the pronouns and the terms of address in his own call to arms. In the first line of Hymne de la Délivrance, he makes a direct reference to the first two lines of Le Chant des Partisans by copying one of these terms, “friend,” with the phrase “the country in chains,” from that song’s second line. Bruyr also copied the ideas, if not the text, of one of the most powerful images of Le Chant des Partisans: the assurance in the fourth and last stanza that the Resistance was not only ubiquitous, it was also unstoppable, transcending any one individual’s contribution: “Friend, if you fall, a friend comes out of the shadows to take your place” (Ami, si tu tombes, un ami sort de l’ombre à ta place). Bruyr gives this idea prominence in his refrain: Nous sommes cent, nous serons mille Mille fois mille et davantage Ceux des villages, ceux des villes, ceux des cités et ceux des bourgs Nous serons des millions à n’avoir qu’un amour, Qu’une fierté, qu’une espérance France ta liberté, France ta liberté71 [We are one hundred, we shall be one thousand One thousand times one thousand and more Those from the villages, those from the towns, from the cities and the suburbs We are the millions who have but one love, But one loyalty, one hope France, your liberty. France, your liberty]

Yet, if Bruyr copied words and themes from Le Chant des Partisans, his lyrics for Hymne de la Délivrance, and Honegger’s setting of them, differ in form and complexity from the popular Resistance tune. The lyrics for Le Chant des Partisans are strophic, with four stanzas each consisting of two

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example 5. Marly, Druon, and Kessel, Le Chant des Partisans, first stanza, mm. 1–8. (© 1945 Éditions Raoul Breton. Reprinted by permission.) Tempo de Marche

A

mi,

mi, en tends tu

en tends tu

le vol noir des cor beaux sur nos plai

ces cris sourds du pa ys

qu’on en

chaî

nes

A

ne,

rhymed couplets. Marly’s strophic musical setting of the text retains the simple strophic pattern of the stanzas: by repeating two simple eight-bar melodies twice within each stanza, both music and rhyme scheme create a simple aabb pattern (ex. 5). The first melody outlines, in stepwise motion, the tonic triad from scale degrees 1 to 3, then down to 5; the second melody begins at 3, rises to 5, then descends down one octave to 5. The similarity between the two melodies, themselves each repeated twice, combines with the fourfold strophic repetition of the music to make the melody of the song very easy to remember. In addition, the simplicity and repetitiveness of the musical setting make it possible for listeners to concentrate on the message that the lyrics’ authors sought to convey to them. Instead of the simple strophic repetition of paired rhymed couplets, Bruyr’s lyrics are in a form common to the texts of Honegger’s film score marches of the 1930s and ’40s. The lyrics have four stanzas, each consisting of two rhymed couplets in an abab pattern, with a refrain appearing after the second and fourth stanzas. Honegger matched the lyrics provided by Bruyr with a rendition of the basic form he tended to use for film marches. A short introduction (here of eight measures) leads into an initial two stanzas of text set to music in the minor mode, followed by the refrain in the parallel major; the music is repeated for the next two stanzas and the return of the refrain. Gone is the drama of the middle section of each half of Chant de Libération, in which, for the third and eighth stanzas, the soloist sings a series of irregular phrases over a dominant pedal that creates an extended and suspenseful transition from minor to major mode; gone also is the contrast between the absence of the dotted eighth and sixteenth notes in the setting of the first two stanzas (1–2 and 6–7) of the song and the creation of a new military topos in the last two (4–5 and 9–10). The melodies of Hymne de la Délivrance consist entirely of eight-bar phrases, and the military topoi (especially the dotted rhythms) are present throughout all

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example 6. Chant de la Délivrance (from the film Un Ami viendra ce soir). Lyrics by José Bruyr; music by Arthur Honegger. End of refrain and fanfare, mm. 73–83. (© 1945 Éditions Choudens, rights transferred to Première Music Group. Used by permission of Music Sales Corporation. All rights reserved.) 73

Fran

ce

ta

li

ber

té

78

3

the stanzas before the song concludes, as did Chant de Libération, with an eight-bar fanfare elided with the last measure of the final phrase of the refrain (ex. 6). With its faithful adherence to the model of Honegger’s earlier film score marches, it seems likely that the composer wrote Hymne de la Délivrance with a specific film project in mind. In this case, the film was Un Ami viendra ce soir (A friend will come tonight), Honegger’s first post-liberation work in the French film industry. Honegger met with Raymond Bernard, the film’s director, twice in the month preceding the song’s completion, on 30 April and 17 May, and, in a letter to Maya Sacher dated 13 June 1945, Honegger mentioned among his current projects “a film in the works.”72 The song, in both music and words, was ideally matched with the topic of the film, one of the few produced in postwar France to be based on a fictionalized account of the wartime heroics of the Resistance. In the film, Resistance fighters hide in a remote mental asylum in the French Alps. Disguised as patients, they act out their parts as disturbed individuals by day and pursue sabotage by night. The fact that the Resistance fighters share the asylum with actual patients gives them cover when a suspicious German officer visits the asylum, for it takes the Germans the entire film

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and the help of an undercover German agent disguised as a visiting Swiss psychiatrist to tell them apart. Honegger and Bruyr’s song, eventually renamed Chant de la Délivrance, is used in four places in the film’s soundtrack: the opening credits, two extended montages, and the closing scene (table 1). The first of these montages involves a plot ruse that provides Honegger’s music with a prominent role in the film: the character of Jacques is a composer turned Resistance fighter whose disguise as a mental patient requires him to communicate in music rather than words. For the first forty minutes of the film we are just as much in the dark as the Germans as to who in the asylum is mentally unstable and who is merely displaying irrational behavior as a cover. In the main salon of the asylum, Jacques repeatedly plays a wistful chord progression at the piano to inquire about the beautiful Hélène when she is not in the room or, when she is, to get her attention. Meanwhile, someone unknown to the viewers has managed to smuggle orders to the maquis, the Resistance fighters hiding in the mountains, to set bonfires at midnight for a planned parachute drop from Allied bombers. (The film’s title was the code phrase used during the BBC’s French-language broadcasts to alert the maquis to an impending airdrop of munitions.) Back at the asylum that evening, Hélène returns from a tryst with the Swiss doctor, with whom she is falling in love, only to encounter Jacques playing a mournful nocturne. Now that they are alone, Jacques addresses her in words as well as music, telling her that he fears she is losing interest in what his music has to say to her: “There are words I would like to say to you; words . . .” Hélène interrupts him, responding that this is not the time for those words: “Tonight there are other words we must confide in our hearts. . . . You understand me, don’t you?” Indeed he does, for after a brief moment of silence, Jacques begins to play a march on the piano. Hélène nods approvingly: “Your Chant de la Délivrance. Yes.”73 Honegger and Bruyr’s march thus appears diegetically at a pivotal moment in the film’s plot. Until now the only indications that there may be Resistance fighters hiding among the mental patients have been the suspicions of the German officer, whose loud barking of orders and squinting glares render him as a crude caricature, and the filmed progress of that evening’s orders from the asylum to the mountain hideout of the maquis. When Jacques and Hélène reveal themselves to us as undercover Resistance fighters, they do so in music, with Hélène singing Chant de la Délivrance to Jacques’s piano accompaniment. We now understand the code language they have been sharing: that Jacques, who spoke of how his life “takes on a

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table 1. Uses of Chant de la Délivrance in the soundtrack for Un Ami viendra ce soir

Visuals onscreen 00:00:53– Opening credits 00:01:34 00:42:06– First montage: 00:45:03 Hélène and Jacques in the asylum / the maquis prepare the bonfires in the mountains

Soundtrack

Chant de la Délivrance

Unison male chorus Refrain (wordless) and orchestra Refrain I, Solo piano version; Verse 1 (first 2 unison male chorus lines), Verse 2, (wordless humming) Refrain II, and orchestra; solo Refrain III vocal and piano; unison male chorus and orchestra; orchestral version Orchestral version Verse, Refrain, Verse, Verse (interrupted)

01:50:06– Second montage: 01:52:27 Commandant Gérard’s signal / the maquis descend from the mountains / Hélène is discovered with Brandt’s body 01:54:34– Closing scene: Unison male chorus 01:56:13 The maquis, led by and orchestra Commandant Gérard, enter the village

Verse 1 (first half), Verse 2 (second half), Refrain

different meaning” when Hélène is near, is speaking of political, not (or not exclusively) romantic, devotion. The film’s director, Raymond Bernard, did not film the pair performing the song alone. Instead he created a complex montage that cuts back and forth from their private music making in the asylum’s darkened salon to images of the Resistance fighters diligently carrying out their orders in the dark mountain forests (table 2). The song’s refrain that we (and Hélène) first hear from Jacques’s wordless rendition at the piano segues after eight bars into wordless humming by a unison male chorus with orchestral accompaniment as the scene onscreen shifts to shots of the maquis standing guard and marching past high mountain peaks. Cutting back to the asylum,

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Hélène sings the first half of the song’s first verse, to which the invisible chorus and orchestra respond with the second verse, skipping the refrain for now. The camera lingers, however, on a silent Hélène and Jacques, suggesting that they are hearing in their minds the maquis in the mountains singing the same song at that same moment. The film then cuts to the images Hélène and Jacques must be imagining as well as the appropriate sound effects—the maquis sawing and hauling wood to set up the bonfires—as the voice and image of Hélène briefly interject her spoken rendition of the second verse’s last line about the brave fighters’ anonymity. Finally, chorus and orchestra perform the refrain, now with words, as onscreen the maquis light the bonfires. As the tension mounts—we, along with the fighters onscreen, expect the Allied planes to arrive at any moment—the chorus sings the concluding call to arms, “France, your liberty.” But Hélène gets the last word, repeating the phrase as the scene cuts back to the asylum. Hélène, hearing the planes overhead, smiles at Jacques and announces with satisfaction, “And here they are.” As we listen to the roar of the planes’ engines and watch the Allied bombers make their parachute drop of boxes filled with munitions, in the background the orchestra repeats the song’s refrain, now with its concluding fanfare.74 In this scene from Un Ami viendra ce soir we hear a truncated version of Honegger and Bruyr’s song, altered to fit the dramatic needs of the scene in which it plays such a pivotal role. Whereas the original song began with the first verse in the minor mode and concluded with the major-mode refrain after each of the two verses, the film version in this first montage begins and ends with a wordless rendition of the rousing refrain. By cutting the second half of the first verse and eliding it with the second verse, Honegger was able to provide the film with a single verse and texted refrain within the outer frame of two wordless refrains, creating a short sequence of under three minutes during which we nevertheless hear the refrain three times. The repetition of the major-mode refrain, with its martial rhythms and melody rising to a climactic high F on its final phrase emphasizes the hope and determination we see not only on the faces of the Resistance fighters in the mountains, but also on those of Hélène and Jacques in one of the rare moments when they can cease playing their roles as mental patients and openly share their allegiance as fellow Resistance agents. This vision of hope in the first half of the film is foreshadowed by the use of the major-mode refrain of Chant de la Délivrance in its wordless version for unison male chorus and orchestra as the underscoring of the film’s opening credits.

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table 2. Un Ami viendra ce soir: First montage (details)

Visuals onscreen 00:42:06

Hélène and Jacques at the piano

00:42:15

The maquis stand guard and march in the mountains Hélène and Jacques at the piano

00:42:44

00:43:06 00:43:15 00:43:32

00:43:35 00:44:07 00:44:14

00:44:20

The maquis prepare the bonfires Hélène in profile

The maquis ignite the bonfires Hélène and Jacques at the piano They listen to the sound of the Allied planes overhead Allied planes drop packages

Soundtrack Solo piano, played by Jacques [Hélène: “Your Chant de la Délivrance. Yes.”] Unison male chorus (wordless humming), orchestra Hélène sings to Jacques’s piano accompaniment Unison male chorus, orchestra

[Hélène, speaking over silence: “Without anyone knowing your name.”] Unison male chorus, orchestra [Hélène: “France, your liberty”] Orchestral version [Hélène: “And here they are!”]

00:44:45 00:45:03

Chant de la Délivrance Refrain I (first 8 measures)

Refrain I (the rest) Verse 1 (first 2 lines) Verse 2 (all)

Refrain II

Refrain III

Concluding fanfare The maquis extinguish The music ends the bonfires

The intercutting of the urbane, sophisticated young people who are serving the Resistance from their hideout in the mental hospital with the peasants from the village who camp in the surrounding mountains enacts the aspiration of the Resistance to unite all people in France, regardless of class or creed, in the fight to liberate their country. This aspiration is also

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expressed in Bruyr’s lyrics to the refrain (“From the villages, the towns, the cities, and the suburbs / We shall be millions to have but one love / One pride, one hope / France your liberty, France your liberty”). The scene also seems calculated to rally the French moviegoers who would be watching the film after its April 1946 release, for members of the audience could imagine for a moment that they too had been living a double life during the war, vicariously conceiving whatever their daily lives had been as cover for their own wartime support of the Resistance. What Richard Raskin has written about the postwar popularity of Le Chant des Partisans applies equally well to the use of Chant de la Délivrance in this scene: the song was “a means for transmitting to successive generations a particular image of the maquisards, and a possibility for vicariously experiencing—and for symbolically enrolling oneself in—the French Resistance.”75 The same desire to celebrate the victory was expressed in contemporaneous popular chansons through which the French could collectively assert that their unwavering patriotism awaited only victory for its open expression.76 This hopeful version of Chant de la Délivrance sung by Hélène in visual counterpoint with the maquis as both groups of Resistance fighters prepare for an imminent attack on the German occupying forces is followed in the film’s second half by a more somber nondiegetic montage once the attack has begun and its costs are known. The identity of the mysterious Commandant Gérard, who up to now has been disguised in the asylum as an immoral collaborator, has just been revealed; he gives the signal to his fellow undercover Resistance agents to blow up the Germans’ escape routes and to the maquis to emerge from the mountains with their weapons. A wordless orchestral rendition of Chant de la Délivrance underscores shots of the triumphant maquis capturing the Germans. This time we hear the minor-mode verse three times and the refrain only once as the sight of the determined fighters is paired with the verse’s ominous march, its unheard words emphasizing the hatred that inspired those in the Resistance to risk their lives under harsh conditions (ex. 7): Ami, le pays qu’on enchaîne Jette sa plainte à tous les vents Il faut haïr, Sainte est la haine Serre ta haine entre tes dents77 [Friend, the country that is in chains Casts its lament to all the winds We must hate; hatred is holy Clench your hate between your teeth]

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example 7. Chant de la Délivrance (from the film Un Ami viendra ce soir). Lyrics by José Bruyr; music by Arthur Honegger. Beginning of verse 1, mm. 8–16. (© 1945 Éditions Choudens, rights transferred to Première Music Group. Used by permission of Music Sales Corporation. All rights reserved.) 8

A

mi,

le

pa

ys

qu’on

en chaî

12

ne

Jet

te

sa plainte à tous les

vents

As the orchestra plays, the onscreen images of the maquis shift to a shot of Hélène kneeling over the body of the Swiss psychiatrist. Revealed as an enemy agent, he lies dead in his German uniform, shot by Hélène to prevent him from blowing up the asylum. The orchestra’s third performance of the verse of Chant de la Délivrance is cut abruptly to silence when the asylum’s custodian guides the disoriented Hélène into the salon; this silencing of the music reverses the effect of her entry there the previous evening, when her appearance inspired the film’s first performance of the song. The music pauses for a melodramatic soliloquy that reveals Hélène to be truly insane after the trauma of not only discovering her lover to be a German agent, but also of assassinating him to save her comrades. The film then concludes with images of the maquis, led by the Commandant Gérard, marching to a full choral rendition of Chant de la Délivrance, from verse (the words combining the song’s two verses) to refrain.78 Sacrifices were made: of Hélène’s sanity, and of the lives of two Resistance agents from the asylum. The knowledge of these sacrifices colors our perception of the closing shots of the maquis, the “one thousand times one thousand and more” who are celebrated in the song’s lyrics, and the triumphant march of the Chant de la Délivrance that accompanies them.

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The more somber tone for Chant de la Délivrance in the film’s concluding scenes is also due to revelations in the second half of the film that the undercover Resistance agents are motivated by their personal experience of racial persecution in France. Hélène, it turns out, is a French Jew who sought shelter at the asylum after having watched the Germans kill her family and having narrowly escaped from a cattle car bound for Germany. When the Swiss psychiatrist is unmasked as a German agent, he tells his captors that he has no qualms about innocent patients dying if the asylum is bombed because the mentally ill are nothing but a wasteful burden on society. Commandant Gérard responds witheringly that, in France, “we only know by hearsay the industrial methods of sterilization, of human vivisection, and above all of the famous extermination camps . . . that place your country at the pinnacle of civilization and culture.”79 Full knowledge of the details of the Germans’ activities was not widespread, or at least not widely believed, in France until after the war’s end.80 More significant than this anachronism is the fact that this scene marked the first time that the German camps and the fate of the Jews who were deported from France were mentioned onscreen in a French film. The dark tone of the film’s second half, and the detailed references to the Holocaust, were a direct result of the harrowing ordeal endured by the film’s screenwriter, Jacques Companeez, in the final years of the occupation. Companeez was a Russian Jewish refugee who immigrated to Berlin as a teenager and arrived in Paris in 1936. After the armistice Companeez fled to Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur, where there was a sizable community of professionals in the French film industry. Several in the French film industry, including immigrants and Jews, stayed in France after the armistice because of the relative safety they found in the Italian-occupied zone of southeastern France as well as their hopes that the French would create a studio system in the Côte d’Azur that would be independent of occupied Paris and would someday rival Hollywood.81 Despite the anti-Semitic restrictions Vichy imposed starting in October 1940 that prohibited Jews from working as directors, producers, screenwriters, or cinematographers, Companeez was able to sell some scenarios without receiving the credits until late 1942.82 After the Germans took control of the area in September 1943 and Companeez’s status as a Jewish foreign national put his life increasingly at risk, he sent his daughter away with her Russian Orthodox nanny and went into hiding in Nice with his wife. After their neighbors were denounced, he fled with his brother-in-law to an empty apartment; in the months that followed, he often went without food. It was under these conditions that he wrote the screenplay for Un Ami viendra ce soir.83

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After the work had a successful run as a play in Paris in June 1945, Companeez and his friend Raymond Bernard began work on the film version in July. Bernard, who had directed Marthe Richard in 1937, was one of France’s best-known directors for his accomplishments in both silent films in the 1920s (Le Miracle des loups, Le Joueur d’échecs) and an epic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1934 in the early sound era. Yet, as a French Jew, Bernard also fled to Juan-les-Pins in 1940 and was excluded by Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation from working in cinema. Although Bernard managed to hide successfully for the duration of the war, first in the south of France and then in the mountainous Vercors region, his family was not spared.84 In a 2006 interview the screenwriter’s daughter, Nina Companeez, drew a direct connection between the wartime experiences of Bernard and her father and the film that they created together in late 1945: “It was written by a Jew, produced by a Jew, directed by a Jew. They had a completely different view of the situation than the rest of the cinematic world.”85 Companeez and Bernard’s collaboration on Un Ami viendra ce soir marked the end of a five-year ban on their work in France. As a pointedly political film written, directed, and produced by men who had recently survived wartime persecution at a time when Honegger was emerging from postwar opprobrium, the project was an unlikely vehicle for Honegger’s return to the French film industry. Yet Bernard and Honegger had a longstanding professional relationship, one that began in 1933–34 with Honegger’s substantial musical contribution to Bernard’s Les Misérables and continued with the work Honegger had done on Marthe Richard in 1937. Honegger had also, with Milhaud, written music in July 1939 for Cavalcade d’amour, Bernard’s last film project before the war. In 1945, Bernard worked with Honegger in his first postwar project despite the recent boycott of his music in France, just as Zimmer had worked with the composer in April 1944 on Chant de Libération despite his recent expulsion from the FNM.86 In both instances Honegger found that his colleagues in the film industry were more able to forgive his wartime choices than were his fellow musicians.

honegger’s rehabilitation and the postwar purification trials In spring 1945, the May performance by the Orchestre national of Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes on an all-Swiss program conducted by Ernest Ansermet, followed by the July premiere of his wartime ballet,

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L’Appel de la montagne, at the Opéra joined early 1945 performances by Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (Nocturne, on 21 January, and the Symphonie pour cordes, on 10 April) to mark the return of his music to the concert halls of Paris.87 Still, performances of Honegger’s works remained relatively rare until the end of the 1945–46 concert season; as the composer complained in his 13 June 1945 letter to Maya Sacher, “Life here is unpleasant; there is a general sense of inertia, no more direction at the Opéra, and a general disorder that means one can’t plan anything or count on anything definitively.”88 But by the time Un Ami viendra ce soir was released in April 1946 (along with the publication of Honegger’s score), Honegger was again finding work in film music and music criticism: the film score for a second fictionalized account of the Resistance (Les Démons de l’aube, for which Honegger and Arthur Hoérée wrote the music in December 1945 and January 1946) and a regular music column in the weekly journal XXème siècle.89 Rosenthal’s first postwar performance of Honegger’s music with the Orchestre national in February and two concerts by Parisian orchestras in May 1946 preceded four Paris performances in November and December 1946 (table 3). Honegger joined the faculty of the École normale de musique in fall 1946 as composition professor, his first formal teaching position. Éditions Salabert, which had published the Symphonie pour cordes and two sets of songs during the war, began publishing his works again in 1946 with Jour de fête suisse (a suite from the ballet L’Appel de la montagne), the Symphonie liturgique, and two songs, with Zimmer, from the 1943 film Un Seul Amour. The 1946–47 season culminated with the delayed Paris premiere on 14 June 1947 of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher with the new prologue, the performance of which had been deemed inadvisable in newly liberated Paris, by the Belgian conductor Louis de Vocht, who had conducted the historic recording of the oratorio in January 1943 and had premiered the new version in Brussels in March 1946. That year Salabert published the new version of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher in orchestral, piano-vocal, and study scores, along with scores of Sérénade à Angélique, the Symphony No. 4 (“Deliciae Basilienses”), and three sets of songs. Honegger’s rehabilitation, after a slow start in Paris’s major concert halls in spring 1945, then in the French film industry in July 1945, in music criticism in November 1945, and finally in the publishing of his major works in spring 1946, also coincided with the formal adjudication of the cases of French composers accused of collaboration. The committee charged with evaluating their cases, the National Purification Committee for Writers, Authors, and Composers (Comité national d’épuration des gens de

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table 3. Orchestral performances of Honegger’s music in Paris, 1945–1946 Date 1945 21 January

Work

Nocturne

10 April

Symphonie pour cordes

10 May

Symphonie pour cordes

9 July

L’Appel de la montagne (premiere)

1946 14 February 12 May

Judith, La Danse des morts Symphonie pour cordes

17 May

Le Roi David

14 November Symphonie liturgique (French premiere) 7 December Sérénade à Angélique (French premiere) 15 December La Danse des morts 19 December

Symphonie pour cordes

Performed by

Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Orchestre national, cond. Ernest Ansermet Opéra, cond. Louis Fourestier

Orchestre national, cond. Manuel Rosenthal Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Concerts Pasdeloup, cond. Albert Wolff Orchestre national, cond. Charles Münch Orchestre national, cond. Tibor Harsányi Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. André Cluytens Orchestre Jane Evrard, cond. Jane Evrard

lettres, auteurs et compositeurs), was formed on 30 May 1945. It had the authority to suspend, for a maximum of two years, any professional activity of an individual found guilty of collaboration, including the editing, publishing, or performance of new works; the publishing of music criticism in newspapers or periodicals; participation in radio broadcasts; and the receipt of royalties.90 Of the composers who were part of the French contingent to the 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, the committee examined the cases of Florent Schmitt and Marcel Delannoy. Schmitt, like Honegger, had attended the festival as a guest of the Institut allemand; Delannoy was part of the official French delegation of the RMVP. Support from prominent FNM members like Claude Delvincourt and Roger Désormière resulted in the dismissal of other cases without trial.91

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On 7 January 1946, the committee found that Schmitt’s participation in the trip to Vienna, together with his presence at a dinner held at the German embassy in Paris and his membership in Groupe Collaboration as honorary president of the music section, displayed an “attitude, which [he] now regrets, that was of a kind to promote the propaganda enterprises of the enemy.” On 6 February 1946, the committee found in Delannoy’s case that his participation in the Vienna trip, his membership in Groupe Collaboration, and his weekly music column in Les Nouveaux Temps, a strongly procollaboration newspaper, had “promoted the propaganda enterprises of the enemy.” The committee suspended Schmitt’s professional activities for one year, dated retroactively to 1 October 1944. Delannoy’s risky decision to mention the names of composers banned in occupied Paris (such as Dukas, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and Rosenthal) in his wartime music criticism, together with a warm letter of thanks sent to him from Rosenthal in 1942, led the committee to grant a lesser suspension of six months, begun retroactively on 15 September 1944. Schmitt wrote to the committee that, although his pro-German attitude had been an error, his consideration of the matter had been from a point of view that was “strictly artistic and in no way political.” Similarly, the attractive vision of artists working together despite the political enmity between their two nations, wrote Delannoy, was what allowed him to become involved in projects whose political implications he was too “foolish” (his own word) to heed.92 The fact that both suspensions were already completed at the time of their pronouncements was due to the committee’s acknowledgment that the music and music criticism of Schmitt and Delannoy, like Honegger’s, had already been informally banned in Paris after the liberation. It is likely that, had Honegger been holding a French passport, he would have been called before the purification commission sometime in early 1946. Like Schmitt and Delannoy, he had gone to Vienna in 1941; like Schmitt, he had attended an event in Paris hosted by the German embassy (and had later dined at the Institut allemand); like Delannoy, he had published a regular music column for a newspaper whose coverage, although much less openly political than Les Nouveaux Temps, had been under the influence of German authorities. In his study of the role of the Institut allemand in the editing of Comœdia, Olivier Gouranton writes that the publication’s stated claims of autonomy hid pragmatic concessions to the Germans in the form of articles praising the cultural activities available in Germany and German-occupied countries.93 Whereas most of Honegger’s articles focused on French music, he also wrote the few pieces published in Comœdia to praise German-sponsored Paris performances of new German

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music. And, like both Schmitt and Delannoy, Honegger’s professional activities had been suspended since the liberation due to a voluntary ban in Paris. Rather than appearing before the commission, however, Honegger quietly resumed his professional activities, starting with Hymne de la Délivrance. By late 1946 he had resumed them all, from music criticism to concert performance and publication. At the same time, Honegger revealed his lingering unease about his status in French music circles in his correspondence to close friends. In December 1945 he complained to Sacher that Paul Collaer had published an article on music since 1940, including musical life in occupied Paris, in Schweizerische Musikzeitung without even mentioning his name, let alone “the performances of Jeanne d’Arc, Danse des morts, the Symphonie pour cordes, Antigone, the Suppliantes, etc.”94 He later expressed his relief to Milhaud upon receiving such an amicable letter from his old friend in exile, having feared that “someone had written unpleasant things to you about me.” Honegger blamed this kind of behavior on the “revision of values” that had taken place not just during the occupation, but also in its wake.95 In Un Ami viendra ce soir, no one is who he or she seems to be: mental patients are Resistance agents, a Swiss doctor is a spy, and the Commandant Gérard masquerades as a despicable collaborator for most of the film. (And then there is the striking resemblance between Honegger and Jacques Clancy, the actor who portrays the character of Jacques, the Resistance composer who purportedly penned Chant de la Délivrance.) Thus it seems both ironic and appropriate that the rehabilitation in France of Honegger, the import of whose wartime activities is still a matter of civil litigation as well as scholarly debate, was preceded—and perhaps even facilitated—by his participation in the production of Un Ami viendra ce soir. Although in private Honegger expressed outrage at French criticism of his wartime activities, he embraced the second chance offered by his friend Bernard to use his Chant de la Délivrance to celebrate publicly the Resistance and the liberation of France.

the postwar creation of a resistance composer In 2003 the Swiss recording company Cascavelle issued a CD entitled Charles Münch: La France résistante, consisting of three historical recordings made in occupied France by Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire: Honegger’s La Danse des morts, recorded in March 1941; his Symphonie pour cordes, recorded in October 1942 and March 1944; and

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Jolivet’s Trois Complaintes du soldat, recorded in October 1943 and March 1944. In the liner notes Philippe Morin asserts that after June 1940, “any act that demonstrated the greatness of French culture and the survival of the nation was deemed somewhat heroic, or at least ‘resistant,’ by any nationalist or patriot.” Morin lists Honegger as one of several musicians who joined the FNM (without mentioning Honegger’s expulsion from the group in 1943) and tells how Ansermet provided Sacher with the score of the Symphonie pour cordes in December 1941 (leaving out that Ansermet was able to get the score from Honegger in Vienna in November because the composer had agreed to attend the Germans’ Mozart festivities as a guest of the Institut allemand).96 The Honegger of the 2003 CD rerelease is a heroic figure, as is the composer who, in 1996, was chosen to adorn the Swiss twenty-franc banknote.97 When Rosenthal, in a 1994 radio interview, referred to Honegger’s 1941 trip to German-occupied Vienna as a voyage to “Germany,” the composer’s daughter Pascale sued, arguing that the reference was libelous to her as well as to her father’s posthumous reputation.98 The lawsuit seems as unnecessary as it was unsuccessful: in the court of public opinion, Honegger has long been forgiven transgressions that his old friend Poulenc insisted in 1945 were “not at all serious” and that Rosenthal himself qualified in the 1994 interview as “an embarrassing mistake” (une maladresse).99 Whereas Honegger’s postwar political songs, Chant de Libération and Chant de la Délivrance, have long been lost or ignored, the works that earned him unprecedented public success during the occupation—Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, La Danse des morts, and the Symphonie pour cordes—have enjoyed steady performances ever since the composer’s rehabilitation in 1946. The long history of interpreting these three works as embodying a spiritual and emotional (if not specifically political) resistance to the German occupation extends back as far as the occupation itself. We have already seen that, although the ambiguity of Joan of Arc made her an attractive symbol to the Germans and the Vichy regime as well as to the Resistance, certain passages in Claudel’s libretto to the 1935 version of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher refer to the sensitive subject of France divided in two by foreign invaders; the prologue that Claudel added to the work in August 1940, and that Honegger set to music in November 1944, specifically addressed that particular anguish with a Biblical allusion to Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 19:6: “Will France remain torn in two forever? What God has united let not man put asunder!”100 Yannick Simon has pointed out a similar passage in the final chorus of the 1938 La Danse des morts: “They will no longer be two people, and they will no longer be divided into two kingdoms, and I will

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save them and purify them of their sins.”101 Occasionally music critics in their wartime reviews drew vague parallels between the texts of these two works and the contemporary situation of occupied France. After the February 1941 performance of La Danse des morts Arthur Hoérée followed his description of the second movement with the observation that its chaotic evocation of the Dance of the Dead, complete with citations of multiple popular tunes (“Sur le pont d’Avignon,” “Nous n’irons plus au bois,” “Dansons la Carmagnole”) was a “premonition of our history: the people, although they have been disciplined, participate in the chaos. They dance but it is not they who lead.”102 And in his review of the June 1942 performance in Paris of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, Bruyr, citing one of the last lines of Joan’s ecstatic reminiscences of her military triumph in scene 9, commented, “I know someone who felt a lump in his throat during the final pages: ‘There is hope, which is strongest!’ ”103 With the Symphonie pour cordes, which was both composed and performed in occupied France (it was written between November 1940 and October 1941 for Sacher and the Basel Chamber Orchestra), the allegorical readings are more specific, encompassing the musical gestures in the absence of any verbal text. At issue is the luminous chorale tune in D major for trumpet ad libitum that emerges in the midst of dense, dissonant string polyphony in D minor at the end of the third and final movement. Wartime music critics who reviewed the June 1942 French premiere tended to interpret the chorale tune as evidence that Honegger had retained aspects of his native Swiss German heritage despite his French upbringing (the tune being distinctly reminiscent of Bach’s chorales).104 It appears that the tradition of interpreting the dissonant polyphony as wartime despair and the chorale tune as wartime defiance did not appear in published form until after the war’s end.105 Wolfram Gerbracht’s March 1947 review in Melos of a performance in Cologne demonstrates both the extent to which postwar critics have explored this allegorical reading and the pitfalls of doing so. Gerbracht’s mistake in dating the piece to May 1940 rather than May 1941 meant that he looked for, and found, traces of a significantly different wartime scenario: The work, written as “symphonie à cordes”—for string orchestra— was published in 1941 but was composed in May 1940, thus in the first days of the German campaign in France. This fact seems to us to meaningfully unlock the content and form of the symphony: here a truly (to employ a frequently misused word) existential work of art has been created, thus a very personal testimony, born in the apocalyptic

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hour at the burning edge of death. From every measure and every note one senses that this magnificent expression could not have been conceived at a writing desk. He who created it was at once prophet and witness, partly a seismograph of still distant tremors, and partly a chronicler of the chaos that was already crashing in.

The fact that Gerbracht heard in Honegger’s symphony the threat of an impending German invasion rather than its depressing aftermath, however, had little effect on his reading of the third movement: “All the demons of the war seem summoned, its great and small terrors let loose on the tormented people. Memories of Callot and Goya come to mind. But then shadows and ghosts scatter: now descends a wind chorale, blessing and redeeming, a comforting light after endless darkness.” Sensing that his reading of the symphony might meet with objections, Gerbracht vigorously defended its accuracy: “Can one dare interpret Honegger’s Second Symphony in this way? We believe: yes. For this music is illustrative— without being literary in the nineteenth-century sense—and extramusical pictures practically impose themselves.”106 It seems to matter little to those who make such claims, then or now, that Honegger himself strenuously objected to this type of reading of the Symphonie pour cordes. When he provided the Basel Chamber Orchestra with a commentary in 1943, Honegger denied any extramusical component to what he insisted was an objective musical composition: “I looked for no program, no literary or philosophical premise [in composing the work]. If this work expresses or inspires emotions, these emotions are presented entirely naturally because I only express my thinking through music and perhaps I am not always aware of this.” Yet Honegger’s concluding statement implies that the composer was aware that people were already making an allegorical connection between the work and the circumstances in which it was composed as he teasingly relates, “As for characteristic details, I can only remember one thing: that I didn’t have any coal and my large workroom, filled with windows, was still very cold at the beginning of 1941.”107 He later repeated the line to Bernard Gavoty, adding, “Of course, there was no connection between this discomfort and the genesis of the work.”108 Nevertheless, among the numerous postwar critics to interpret the Symphonie pour cordes as an allegory of war, several, such as Jacques Lonchampt in 1989, have taken him seriously: “How to escape from the grayness, the intentional absence of color in the polyphony, the brooding anxiety, the cold of the winters and the coldness of the soul during the years of occupation? . . . These are the unforgettable pages that even transcend the times to which they are so passionately linked.”109

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For Honegger’s biographer, Halbreich, the Symphonie pour cordes not only represents the circumstances of wartime France but also protests them. About the timing of the initial sketches in November 1940, Halbreich comments, “Even if France was defeated, Honegger was not. And his presence among [the French], whose life he had shared for so many years, would be to them a powerful moral and spiritual comfort.”110 Halbreich elevates Honegger’s composition of the third movement in May 1941 to the level of the settings of Resistance texts composed by Auric and Poulenc: “Everyone resisted in secret in whatever way possible. . . . Georges Auric abandoned his usual cheeky humor for the seriousness of his Quatre chants de la France malheureuse, in which he notably set the poetry of Aragon, while in two years Francis Poulenc would write his monumental unaccompanied cantata Figure humaine on poems by Paul Éluard, ending with the famous Liberté. But within a few weeks [i.e., in October 1941], Honegger would precede his friends with the victorious chorale for trumpet that crowns his Symphonie pour cordes.”111 Halbreich uses his reading of Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes as a musical Resistance text to justify the composer’s participation in the 1941 trip to Vienna. The reason Honegger took the trip, according to Halbreich, was because it was the only way of getting the score of the Symphonie pour cordes to Sacher in Basel in time for the premiere Sacher had planned on 22 January 1942.112 When Honegger was facing recriminations in post-liberation France and saw French musicians implement a voluntary ban on the performance of his music, he did not address the charges publicly. Privately, however, Honegger prepared a verbal defense of his wartime actions. In a short undated document of around 350 words, he used many of the same justifications that Halbreich gives in his biography of the composer: that the charges stemmed from professional jealousy of his wartime success (“of course those less favored seize the first opportunity to cast aside the offending party”); that, as a Swiss citizen, it would have been easier to return in judgment after the war than to remain voluntarily in occupied France; that traveling to Vienna in 1941 was no different than traveling to other German-occupied cities, such as Paris or Amsterdam (“Going to the enemy’s camp does not automatically mean that one supports his cause”); that his work for Comœdia was “propaganda in favor of French and modern music” and resulted in his membership in the FNM, to which he recruited “several elite members”; and that he misunderstood the purpose to which the music he composed for France-Actualités would be put (“I believed in good faith in a manifestation of resistance”). What is

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noticeably absent is any reference to the music Honegger wrote during the war.113 It is not surprising that he refused to refer to the Symphonie pour cordes as a secret Resistance piece, given his categorical rejection in 1943 of any program whatsoever for the work, but neither does he cite his composition of a certifiable secret Resistance work, Chant de Libération, in his own defense. Whereas Honegger’s omission of his compositional activities from his justification for his wartime activities is probably due to the fact that he saw them as operating in two separate spheres, the end result of his argument is that his music is set apart from the political implications of his actions. When Halbreich justifies Honegger’s 1941 trip to Vienna as necessary to the delivery of the Symphonie pour cordes to Sacher in Switzerland, he sees no inherent contradiction in Honegger cooperating with German propaganda efforts in order to promote a piece that Halbreich reads as music of the Resistance. Yet, paradoxically, one must follow Honegger’s lead in keeping musical compositions such as the Symphonie pour cordes isolated from their composers’ everyday activities if one is to embrace them today as wartime testimonies. With no documentation to the contrary, we can fantasize, alongside Gerbracht, Lonchampt, and numerous other postwar critics, that the progression from despair to transcendence in the third movement of the Symphonie pour cordes had allegorical significance in occupied Paris—and, absent any direct evidence, that this fantasy may indeed have been shared by wartime audiences. We can highlight passages in Claudel’s texts for Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and La Danse des morts that seem to have had new resonance in a France divided by war. But we have no more certainty about the accuracy of these readings than we do about allegorical readings of Jean Delannoy’s 1942 film, Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire, or Sartre’s 1943 play, Les Mouches.114 What the available evidence indicates is that Honegger, like most of his French colleagues, did not openly write any topical works during the war for wartime performance; and that, unlike Poulenc’s celebrated cantata, his one clandestine setting of a Resistance text in Chant de Libération was so poorly received after the liberation that all traces of it disappeared for the next sixty-five years. During the war Honegger was so firmly associated with the prewar political left that in 1942 Lucien Rebatet felt he had to explain, in his glowing review of Symphonie pour cordes for the resolutely fascist Je suis partout, why it was unnecessary “to eternally hold a grudge.” “The political opinions of a painter, a musician, or an actor have no importance when they are not publicly displayed,” argued Rebatet. “All that they ask of a regime is that it allow them to work.”115 Indeed, this was evidently all Honegger

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asked of German occupying authorities, having interacted with them out of professional opportunism, not politics. Shortly before the liberation, Honegger set a political text to music as Chant de Libération. After its failure, he tried again with Hymne de la Délivrance. The texts of these two pieces reflected his long-held political beliefs and loyalty to the French nation. They also strengthened the case for his rehabilitation in liberated France.

3 Ignoring Jolivet’s Testimony, Embracing Messiaen’s Memories The first performance of [the Quartet for the End of Time] at the Stalag in January 1941 has, together with the premiere of The Rite of Spring, become one of the great stories of twentieth-century music. paul griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time

messiaen’s quartet and his wartime captivity Nearly every commentary on Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time tells the story of the composer’s odyssey of defeat and captivity in 1940, the genesis of the work, and its first performance in a German prison camp on 15 January 1941. From biographies to monographs, memoirs, and liner notes, we encounter the same details: the Germans who captured Messiaen in the woods near Nancy and transferred him to Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Silesia; the pocket scores of Berg, Ravel, and Stravinsky that the German guards allowed him to keep; and the chance encounters with a cellist, clarinetist, and violinist that determined the work’s instrumentation. We read, above all, about the premiere of the Quartet on a bitterly cold evening, when Messiaen and his three companions, dressed in mismatched uniforms and wooden clogs and playing an old upright piano with loose keys and a three-stringed cello, mesmerized an audience of five thousand fellow prisoners, German officers, and guards. Messiaen’s own words are frequently used as conclusion to the tale: “Never have I been listened to with so much attention and understanding.”1 The implication of such accounts is that Messiaen’s Quartet is, in some sense, about the composer’s experience of captivity. Take for example Anthony Pople’s close reading of the work in his 1998 monograph for the Cambridge Music Handbooks. Pople begins by carefully narrating Messiaen’s experiences in the prison camp. Although the question of captivity becomes peripheral to the formal analysis that is his central concern, Pople returns to the camp when he concludes his study, for ultimately he locates the work’s power in the grim circumstances of the war: “The [Quartet] is not the only musical work to derive its great power of utterance 80

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figure 2. Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time, Gil Shaham, Paul Meyer, Jian Wang, Myung-Whun Chung. (Deutsche Grammophon CD 289 469 052–2, 2000; cover photo by John Ritter.)

from having been composed in captivity during the Second World War, nor is it the only musical work of consequence to be based on the events of the apocalypse. . . . But it remains a unique document of a great composer at the height of his powers responding to extraordinary circumstances with sustained and magnificent invention.”2 In Pople’s analysis of the Quartet, aesthetics and documentation are inseparable, making it difficult to describe one without referring to the other. Most recent studies of the work share his tendency to juxtapose the two, piquing the interest of the reader while leaving untouched the exact nature of the connection. The trend has carried over to commercial recordings. The cover of a CD released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000 places in the foreground the angel of the Apocalypse, the central figure of the passage from the Revelation of Saint John that inspired Messiaen to write the piece (fig. 2). The barbed-wire fences and guard tower work together with the photo collage’s sepia tones to replace biblical associations with historical ones—if not of prison camps for captured French soldiers, then the nowfamous photographs of German concentration camps. A small black-andwhite photo of a young Messiaen anchors the image even more firmly in the period of the Second World War. The cover’s stress on the historical continues inside the CD’s companion booklet, in which two historical documents take the place of liner notes. The first is Messiaen’s famous preface to the first published score of the Quartet, released by Durand in 1942. For readers who open the booklet after taking

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in the collage on the front cover, Messiaen’s opening reference to his captivity is tantalizingly brief. Following a citation from Revelation, it reads: “Conceived and written during my captivity, the Quartet for the End of Time received its first performance at Stalag VIIIA on 15 January 1941, by Jean Le Boulaire (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet), Étienne Pasquier (cello) and myself at the piano. It was directly inspired by this quotation from Revelation.”3 Messiaen based his preface on the lecture he gave in the prison camp before the premiere, when his main concern was to illuminate the biblical passages that inspired each of the eight movements of the piece. The rest reads like a condensed version of the theory primer to his musical style that he would publish two years later.4 In the Deutsche Grammophon liner notes from 2000, a second document arrives to fill in the gap, for in a 1995 interview, Pasquier spoke in remarkable detail about the camp. After years of relying on Messiaen alone, scholars have seized on this interview with the ninety-one-year-old Pasquier for the wealth of information he provides—and not just because he pointed out that all along the cello had four strings.5 Messiaen’s own ambivalence has been a major stumbling block for commentators who seek to relate the Quartet to the circumstances of the camp. Even when he consented to discuss his captivity on the radio with Antoine Goléa in 1958, Messiaen resisted the notion that what he endured in the camp had any effect on the music he composed there. When Goléa asked him about the talk he gave to his fellow prisoners, Messiaen responded that he made sure to clarify that the reference to the end of time in the title was not to be understood as the passing of time in captivity, but to the abolition of time that the Apocalypse would bring. If there was any play on words, he continued, it was a purely symbolic evocation of musical construction, that is, a reference to his abolition of a regular pulse and experimentation with irregular rhythmic durations in the Quartet. When Goléa pushed Messiaen to focus less on theory and turn instead to the “exceptional circumstances” that, in Goléa’s opinion, must have “played the essential role” in inspiring the Quartet, Messiaen gently contradicted him. “I would instead say that I composed this quartet in order to escape from the snow, the war, captivity, and myself. The greatest benefit that I gained from it was that, in the midst of three hundred thousand prisoners, I was probably the only one who was free.”6 To read the Quartet through the lens of captivity, therefore, is to disregard the composer’s own views on the connection between the two. Yet this is exactly what recent commentaries do. While Pople grants that Messiaen might have been able to concentrate exclusively on theological symbolism,

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he doubts whether the prisoners in the audience would have resisted making direct parallels between the Apocalypse and their own patient wait for judgment and deliverance.7 Rebecca Rischin, whose 2003 For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet meticulously investigates the genesis and premiere of the Quartet, draws the same parallel when describing the premiere: “At a time in which a real-life Apocalypse must have seemed imminent to many, these four men sang of resurrection, leading their audience in a musical prayer.”8 Although he acknowledges that Messiaen “claimed that the title of the . . . Quartet for the End of Time referred not to the circumstance of his captivity but to passages in Revelation,” Christopher Dingle still insists that “the oppressive abundance of unoccupied hours that made up camp life must surely have been instrumental in turning his attention to the passage in Scripture where the entire notion of Time itself is abolished.”9 Indeed, the emotional atmosphere at the first performance that Messiaen attributed to the prisoners’ “attention and understanding” may instead have been the result of a spectacular misunderstanding between the composer and his audience. To judge from the high level of interest by contemporary scholars and musicians in the circumstances surrounding the Quartet, it is a misunderstanding that persists today. There is, however, another interpretation. Pasquier’s correction to the myth of the three-stringed cello suggests that, in our search for wartime stories, we have assumed that all eyewitnesses are credible. Our attraction today to the emotional power of Messiaen’s description of the premiere has distracted us not only from the inconsistencies in his tale, but also from other ways of hearing the presence of war in this complex piece. In our embrace of the Quartet, we have forgotten that Messiaen was far from the only French prisoner of war to have composed music in captivity, and that soldiers who escaped capture, such as André Jolivet, also wrote music before returning to civilian life. The music of numerous French soldiercomposers received performances in German-occupied Paris, where repatriated prisoners in particular were symbols of hope and perseverance for a nation shamed by the swiftness of its military defeat. Yet wartime critics, generally full of praise for the work of soldier-composers, gave the Quartet decidedly mixed reviews. I propose that we pay attention to the voices of listeners in wartime France as we examine the Quartet in the context of music written by other French soldiers. What these listeners had to say about the relationship between music and war has much to teach us about the assumptions that, some seventy years later, we assume they shared with us.

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messiaen’s quartet in occupied paris Our story begins six weeks after the Quartet’s premiere, when Messiaen was released from the prison camp and sent home to France. He spent a few months traveling between the village of Neussargues and the city of Vichy before returning to Paris.10 The new director of the Paris Conservatoire, Claude Delvincourt, was struggling to fill vacancies left by professors who themselves had been taken prisoner, emigrated, or lost their jobs in the wake of new French laws restricting the rights of Jews to work in education and the public sector. By December 1940 the Jewish composer and conductor André Bloch, at age sixty-seven, had been removed from both his teaching post and his job as one of three state inspectors of music education and had been stripped of his retirement pension.11 In April 1941 Delvincourt hired Messiaen to take over Bloch’s harmony class. Yvonne Loriod, a student in Bloch’s class, later recalled the trauma of Bloch’s departure—and the fascination with which she and her classmates responded to Messiaen when he arrived to take over the class.12 After his appointment at the Conservatoire Messiaen quickly resumed the busy schedule of teaching, composing, and performing that had been interrupted since his mobilization over a year and a half before. In returning to Paris, Messiaen had chosen to live in the northern zone of France that was directly occupied by the German army. Many scholars have assumed that this meant a return to a city whose musical life was restricted by the dictates of German propaganda. This has included the assumptions that the ban on public performances of copyrighted French music in Germany was also in effect in occupied France, and that the German persecution of modernist composers at home would have rendered performances of Messiaen’s latest compositions in occupied Paris politically inadvisable.13 Messiaen’s close connection to the Concerts de la Pléiade, a musical and literary salon founded by Gaston Gallimard and Denise Tual, has reinforced such assumptions. Postwar rumors that the series was alone in programming the music of the international avant-garde in wartime Paris, coupled with Tual’s claims to have defied German prohibitions by specifically planning each concert to feature music banned by the Germans, have long been taken at face value. A description of the Concerts de la Pléiade as “a society of momentous importance” founded “during the height of [the] artistic resistance movement” appeared in print as early as December 1944: Tual is cited by Rudolph Dunbar in Tempo as having decided that “it was time to protest, and to protest vigorously, against German propaganda.”14 In her more recent memoirs, Tual recalled, “The Germans had banned all new French music. They had also banned all the musicians who had not returned to France, such as Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Prokofiev, and those who

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lived in the unoccupied zone, such as Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Jean Françaix.”15 In a 2000 article on Messiaen’s “clandestine revenge against the Occupation,” Nigel Simeone reproduced the relevant passages from Tual and concluded that the Concerts de la Pléiade “were to provide an important platform for several leading French composers whose music would otherwise have remained largely unperformed during the Occupation.”16 Yet no such ban on contemporary French music, or modernism in general, ever existed in France. The high-profile premieres of Françaix’s oratorio L’Apocalypse selon Saint Jean (paired with J. S. Bach’s Magnificat) by Münch and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in June 1942, Poulenc’s new ballet, Les Animaux modèles, at the Opéra in August 1942, and the Opéra’s first production of Honegger’s starkly modernist 1927 opera Antigone in January 1943, among numerous others, refute both Tual’s claims that the Germans repressed the work of leading French composers and the conclusions regarding Messiaen that Simeone draws from her assertions.17 In fact, German occupying authorities actually took credit for encouraging the rapid reappearance of French cultural activities in the occupied zone after the armistice. A December 1940 report from the Paris bureau of the Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF) noted with satisfaction, “When artists saw the kind of protection the German authorities granted in all cultural matters, and the kind of patronage they would receive from people in positions responsible for these things, more and more of them returned to their old positions. The [French] authorities were soon urged by the public to do something of their own and to support the German endeavors. Thus one city followed another and one province another, until everywhere cultural life flourished again anew.”18 The ban on copyrighted French music in Germany itself did not even last for the duration of the war. Messiaen’s relationship to the wartime Vichy regime was more complex. His first contact with the regime as a composer came shortly after his return from captivity, when he was commissioned (with Yves Baudrier and Léo Preger) to write incidental music for Portique pour une fille de France, an outdoor spectacle produced by the Vichy organization Jeune France that celebrated the feast day of Joan of Arc on 11 May 1941.19 Messiaen’s letters to his wife, Claire, show that he was tempted to remain in Vichy as an associate of Jeune France because of the proximity it would give him to his wife and son in Neussargues. The prospect of filling a vacancy on the faculty at the Paris Conservatoire, however, proved to be a professional opportunity Messiaen felt he could not pass up.20 Nevertheless, Delvincourt’s decision to hire him scandalized many prominent older composers on the faculty of the Conservatoire.

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Messiaen’s intensely personal musical language and his innovative approach to teaching tonal harmony as a creative act of composition set him apart from his colleagues, who relied on more traditional teaching methods.21 Despite his new position at the Conservatoire, those in charge of Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts, fearing the implications of modernism for the future of a distinctly French aesthetic, excluded Messiaen from recently expanded state funding opportunities aimed at bolstering new French music against German propaganda, such as the state commissions and the funding for their publication and performance. When the current director of the Administration of Fine Arts, Louis Hautecœur, was director of artistic services at the 1937 International Exposition, he had frequently been at odds with his Popular Front predecessors over the inclusion of modernist artists in the exposition. What Hautecœur objected to in modernism was its individualism, as embodied in what he called the “fashionable myth” of originality, which he saw as a perverse search for difference for its own sake. This search for “what is strange and new,” Hautecœur wrote in a 1929 treatise on contemporary art, was characteristic not of French artists but of the foreigners who participated in the artistic life of Paris after the First World War.22 In the opinion of Vichy bureaucrats like Hautecœur, such art had no place in the programs supported by the Administration of Fine Arts. Aside from his contributions to Portique in 1941, the only government project to include Messiaen’s music was the recorded anthology of contemporary music by French composers produced jointly by the Administration of Fine Arts and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the French Association for the Promotion of the Arts (Association française d’action artistique, or AFAA). In the past the AFAA had organized cultural activities around the world with overseas French embassies and institutes. For the recordings project, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs planned to send out letters to French officials stationed in the major metropolitan areas of the United States, Europe, South America, and the Middle East, asking them to propagate the recordings among the local population through radio broadcasts, library consultation, and group listening sessions. In fall 1943, when the project was in its final stages, the number of countries still in diplomatic contact with Vichy had dwindled. Nevertheless, the ministry received prompt and enthusiastic responses from officials in nine cities across Europe, from Lisbon to Istanbul.23 The AFAA’s goal was to redefine the way that French music of the past forty years was to be represented as a repertoire (table 4). The composers selected for the project ranged from the young (Raymond Gallois-Montbrun,

table 4. AFAA recordings anthology of contemporary French music (1944) Record number AA.1 AA.2 AA.3

AA.4 AA.5

AA.6

AA.7

AA.8

AA.9

AA.10

AA.11 AA.12

Works/Performers Sonatine pour piano Jacqueline Potier, piano Cinq portraits de jeunes filles for solo piano Jean Françaix, piano Mardi-Mercredi from the ballet Un prélude dominical et six pièces à danser pour chaque jour de la semaine Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. François Ruhlman Cigale et Magali: Ouverture de Ballet Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Majeza from Suite sans esprit de Suite, op. 89, and Danse de corde from Trois danses, op. 86 Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Les Offrandes oubliées Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Roger Désormière Variations au Clair de lune for flute, violin, viola, cello, and harp Quintette instrumental Pierre Jamet Pastourelle and Carole from Un Jardin sur l’Oronte Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Lorsque tu dors and Chanson for voice and orchestra Jacques Jansen, accompanied by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Lamento en mi bémol majeur for viola and piano Maurice Vieux, viola; Alexandre Cellier, piano Tambourin from Trois danses, op. 6 Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Gheshas and Fête from Kakémonos Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot

Composer Marcel Landowski Jean Françaix Joseph Guy Ropartz

Francis Casadesus Florent Schmitt

Olivier Messiaen

Paul Pierné

Alfred Bachelet

Raymond GalloisMontbrun

Alexandre Cellier

Maurice Duruflé Antoine Mariotte continued

table 4 (continued) Record number AA.13

AA.14

AA.15 AA.16 AA.17

AA.18 AA.19

AA.20

AA.21

AA.22

AA.23

AA.24

Works/Performers Quatre chansons de Paul Fort for voice and orchestra Charles Panzéra, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Nox, poème chanté for voice and orchestra Janine Micheau, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Intermède pour orchestre à cordes, op. 55 Orchestre Marius-François Gaillard Sonate pour deux flûtes, op. 75 Lucien Lavaillotte and Albert Manouvrier Cinq Moudras for flute, violin, viola, cello, and harp Quintette instrumental Pierre Jamet Prélude et Final pour piano Mme. Clavius-Marius, piano Introduction, Thème et Variations for instrumental quintet Edmée Ortmans-Bach, Lucia Artopoulos, Madeleine Carrière, Suzanne Meynieu, and Yvonne Thibout Quintette pour harpe, deux violons, alto et violoncelle Henriette Renié, Marie-Thérèse Ibos, Lucia Artopoulos, Pierre Pasquier, and Jean Ibos Les petits canards and Si je t’avais connue . . . from Le Livre chantant for voice and orchestra Marthe Ingrand, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Ballade de Naïk for voice and orchestra Jacqueline Courtin, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Ad lucem aeternam for voice and orchestra Hélène Bouvier, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Miroir d’eau from Transparences Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot

Composer Jean Hubeau

André Lavagne

Maurice Jaubert Charles Koechlin Marius-François Gaillard Tony Aubin Jehan Alain

Noël Gallon

Jules Mazelier

Sylvio Lazzari

Max d’Ollone

Jeanne Leleu

table 4 (continued) Record number AA.25

AA.26

AA.27

AA.28

AA.29

AA.30

AA.31

AA.32

Works/Performers Le Bourgeois de Falaise for voice and orchestra Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Roger Désormière Prélude chorégraphique Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Roger Désormière Tarantelle for piano and orchestra Jacques Dupont, accompanied by Orchestre National, cond. Henri Tomasi a. Deux chœurs de printemps for voice, chorus, and orchestra Maria Beronita and the Chorale Yvonne Gouverné, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot b. Le Vent for voice, chorus, and orchestra Pierre Bernac and the Chorale Yvonne Gouverné, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Agrotera for French horn and orchestra Jean Devemy, accompanied by Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Eugène Bigot Symphonie en ré: Lento Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch a. Que lentement passent les heures and Enfant à la poule, aux œufs d’or, for voice and orchestra Irène Joachim, accompanied by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch b. Dans vos viviers, dans vos étangs, Chanson pour un officier de marine, and Chanson de la nageuse nue d’Août, for voice and piano Irène Joachim, accompanied by Yves Nat Suite pour une comédie de Musset Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Roger Désormière

Composer Maurice Thiriet

Claude Delvincourt

Jacques Dupont

Jacques de la Presle

Jacques de la Presle

Francis Bousquet

Georges Dandelot

Yves Nat

Yves Nat

Henry Barraud

continued

table 4 (continued) Record number AA.33

AA.34

AA.35

AA.36

AA.37

AA.38

AA.39

AA.40

Works/Performers Chanson du galérien and Chanson du matelot, for voice and orchestra Roger Bourdin, accompanied by Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Roger Désormière Symphonie: Intermezzo Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Ouverture pour une opérette imaginaire Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Concerto pour piano et orchestre: Finale A. de Gontaut-Biron, accompanied by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Rolande et le mauvais garçon, excerpts from third and fourth acts Georges Thill, accompanied by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Cake-Walk, Danse guerrière, Variation sur les pointes, and Valse, from ballet Entre deux rondes Orchestre de l’Opéra, cond. Louis Fourestier Valse mélancolique and La Foire d’Herbignac, for voice and orchestra Jean Doyen, accompanied by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch Concerto pour orgue et orchestre, op. 31: Intermezzo Marcel Dupré, accompanied by Concerts Gabriel Pierné, cond. Eugène Bigot

Composer Marcel Delannoy

Georges Hugon

Jean Rivier

Henri Sauguet

Henri Rabaud

Marcel SamuelRousseau

Paul Ladmirault

Marcel Dupré

source: Archives des affaires étrangères, Ministère des affaires étrangères et européennes, Paris. Série Guerre 1939–1945. Vichy. Œuvres. Radio: dossier général, 1940–1944.

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age twenty-six) to the elderly (Joseph Guy Ropartz, age seventy-eight); from those who had long been overlooked by performers (Charles Koechlin, Paul Ladmirault, and Alfred Bachelet) to the more familiar (Jean Françaix, Henri Sauguet, and Florent Schmitt); from authors of popular chansons (Jules Mazelier and Yves Nat) to modernist innovators (Messiaen). The selection also included one work (the slow movement of Georges Dandelot’s Symphonie en ré) that had been commissioned by the state. The AFAA also honored the memory of Jehan Alain and Maurice Jaubert, killed while fighting in the failed defense of France against the German invasion in June 1940, by including them posthumously in the project. Messiaen’s Les Offrandes oubliées, performed by Roger Désormière with the orchestra of the Concerts Gabriel Pierné, was by far the most daring aesthetic choice in the set of forty 78-rpm records produced for distribution to French embassies abroad. In spite of the relative absence of government support, Messiaen was extremely successful in securing numerous performances of his music in occupied Paris, from his own organ recitals at La Trinité and the Palais de Chaillot to several chamber music societies, as well as some of France’s most prestigious orchestras (table 5). In addition to frequent performances of his early orchestral works L’Ascension and Les Offrandes oubliées—the former in November 1940, even before Messiaen’s release from captivity— three premieres of Messiaen’s latest compositions (Quartet for the End of Time, Visions de l’Amen, and Les Corps glorieux) took place in Paris between 1941 and 1943. Critics for the city’s major daily newspapers and arts journals did not let the administration’s hostility to modern music prevent them from writing balanced and thoughtful reviews. In Comœdia, Honegger consistently praised Messiaen’s work precisely because he challenged his audience’s assumptions about contemporary music. Honegger applauded Messiaen’s appointment at the Conservatoire, expressing the hope that students would acquire from him a taste for “art that does not conform to complacent expectations.” After hearing the Visions de l’Amen at the Concerts de la Pléiade in May 1943, Honegger urged those responsible for organizing concerts for young people to program this work. The unusual nature of Messiaen’s work, he argued, would stimulate listeners to think for themselves.24 Similarly, when the critic Armand Machabey inaugurated a regular column for L’Information musicale on young French composers in May 1942, he chose Messiaen as his first subject. Machabey took a defensive tone on Messiaen’s behalf, lecturing his readers that, even if Messiaen’s music did not universally inspire sympathy or comprehension, “it demands

table 5. Selected performances of Messiaen’s music in wartime France Concert location and performers I. Chamber Music 23 December 1940

24 June 1941

18 July 1941

17 January 1942

Association de Musique Contemporaine, Salle Chopin Marcelle Bunlet, soprano; Jacques Février, piano Théâtre des Mathurins Olivier Messiaen, piano; Jean Pasquier, violin; André Vacellier, clarinet; Étienne Pasquier, cello; Marcelle Bunlet, soprano “Les Quatre Jeune France” Hôtel de Sagonne Olivier Messiaen, piano; Jean Pasquier, violin; Étienne Pasquier, cello

Private concert at the Paris home of Comte Étienne de Beaumont Olivier Messiaen, piano; Jean Pasquier, violin; André Vacellier, clarinet; Étienne Pasquier, cello 2 December 1942 Private concert at the Paris home of Virginie Bianchini Olivier Messiaen, piano; Jean Pasquier, violin; André Vacellier, clarinet; Étienne Pasquier, cello 22 December Le Triptyque: celebration 1942 of 200th concert

Works performed

Chants de terre et de ciel; works by Couperin, Chabrier, Roussel, and Gabriel Pierné Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, Paris premiere; Thème et variations; 4 mélodies: “Le sourire,” “Vocalise,” “Minuit pile et face,” “Résurrection” “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” from Quatuor pour la fin du Temps; Thème et variations; works by Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Baudrier Quatuor pour la fin du Temps

Quatuor pour la fin du Temps

Thème et variations; works by Schmitt, Delvincourt, Honegger, Sauguet, Suzanne Demarquez, and Robert Bernard

table 5 (continued) Concert location and performers 10 May 1943

22 June 1943

27 October 1943

II. Organ 28 December 1941

15, 17, and 19 November 1943

Concerts de la Pléiade Galérie Charpentier Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, piano Salle Gaveau Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, piano; Marcelle Bunlet, soprano Le Triptyque: Groupe Jeune France Marcelle Bunlet, soprano; Olivier Messiaen, piano

Visions de l’Amen: premiere

Palais de Chaillot Olivier Messiaen, organ

Les Corps glorieux (2 movements): premiere; La Nativité du Seigneur (“Les Mages”); L’Ascension (“Transports de joie”); Apparition de l’Église éternelle Les Corps glorieux: premiere of complete set; Apparition de l’Église éternelle; L’Ascension (“Transports de joie”); Le Banquet celeste; La Nativité du Seigneur

Église de la Trinité Olivier Messiaen, organ

III. Orchestra 8 November 1940 Orchestre symphonique de France, cond. Hubert d’Auriol 11 January 1942

Works performed

“Composers in the Camps” Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, cond. Charles Münch

Visions de l’Amen; Poèmes pour Mi

Poèmes pour Mi; works by Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Baudrier

L’Ascension; Caplet, Les Prières; Jacques Chailley, Cantique au soleil de Saint François d’Assise Les Offrandes oubliées; Martinon, Stalag IX ou Musique d’exil; Thiriet, incidental music to Cocteau, Oedipe-Roi; Roussel, Symphony no. 3 continued

table 5 (continued) Concert location and performers

Works performed

Les Offrandes oubliées; Concert Jeune France works by Honegger, Palais de la Méditerranée, Baudrier, Jaubert, Jolivet, Nice Orchestre symand Daniel Lesur phonique de France, cond. Hubert d’Auriol 21 February 1943 “Music by Prisoners” L’Ascension; Martinon, Sinfoniette, Challine, Concerts Pasdeloup, cond. Sortilèges; Beethoven, Francis Cebron Fidelio overture; Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor 4 March 1942

the most penetrating attention.”25 As the wartime replacement for both the journal Revue musicale and the weekly Guide du concert, L’Information musicale ensured a wide circulation for Machabey’s twenty-six portraits in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France.26 Moreover, Messiaen was of symbolic use to the Vichy government. The German army had captured nearly two million French soldiers in the 1940 invasion, and they were determined to detain them as long as possible as hostages to French collaboration. Of the 1.58 million taken to prison camps in Germany in the fall of 1940, the Vichy government succeeded in negotiating the release of only 222,841 soldiers; close to one million would remain in captivity as late as December 1944.27 Unable to obtain full repatriation, Vichy bargained for the release of prominent artists whose return they could celebrate as symbols of progress in their otherwise futile negotiations with the Third Reich. Messiaen’s renown as a composer, however controversial, secured his early release, along with that of the equally wellknown Pasquier, who nonetheless credited his participation in the premiere of the Quartet as a deciding factor in his repatriation.28 Messiaen’s return to Paris was given national publicity on 25 June 1941, the first anniversary of the armistice with Germany. To honor the solemn occasion, his friend and colleague, Daniel Lesur, hosted a radio show devoted to the music of composers who had been killed or captured in the invasion, including Messiaen; another former prisoner, Maurice Thiriet; Delvincourt, a decorated veteran of the First World War; and Jaubert, who had died in combat

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in June 1940.29 The national broadcast, which aired at five in the afternoon on Radiodiffusion nationale, was a lead-in to the evening’s featured concert, a live performance of Henri Tomasi conducting the Orchestre national in a selection of patriotic French music. Alongside the music of Albéric Magnard, Franck, Schmitt, d’Indy, and Tomasi himself, the concert showcased the premiere of André Gailhard’s La Française: À la gloire du Maréchal, a cantata for tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra that summed up, in three short verses and a refrain, the basic tenets of Vichy’s new political creed, the National Revolution.30 The Paris premiere of the Quartet for the End of Time had taken place one day earlier, on 24 June. Messiaen and Pasquier repeated their performance from the Stalag, now joined by Étienne’s brother Jean on violin and André Vacellier on clarinet. In addition to the Quartet, the audience at the Théâtre des Mathurins heard the composer perform his Thème et variations with Jean Pasquier and four of his mélodies (“Le sourire,” “Vocalise,” “Minuit pile et face,” and “Résurrection”) with soprano Marcelle Bunlet. The Quartet dominated the reviews of the event that appeared in the weeks to follow. Remarkably, despite the politically charged date and the presence of Messiaen and Pasquier as recently repatriated prisoners, the critics scarcely mentioned Messiaen’s captivity. In his regular column for Les Nouveaux Temps, Marcel Delannoy’s brief description of Messiaen composing in the camp as “withdrawing into himself” only serves to underscore the distance wartime critics perceived between the music and the circumstances of its creation.31 Serge Moreux, who declared it was the most striking piece of chamber music to be heard in Paris since Schoenberg’s latest quartet, described the Quartet in L’Information musicale as Messiaen’s invitation “to visit the enchanted garden that he carries within himself, where he delights us with the joy of pure music.”32 In resonance with Messiaen’s stated desire to escape, not depict, his captivity, Moreux omitted mentioning the camp altogether.

music by france’s prisoners of war Even more remarkable is the way the Quartet was passed over when concert organizers, encouraged by Vichy’s Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War (Service diplomatique des prisonniers de guerre), explicitly sought out music written in captivity for performance in occupied Paris. For the Vichy government, the creative work that former prisoners had been able to accomplish in the camps was valuable symbolic proof of the regime’s claims to having secured improvements in the prisoners’ living conditions,

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just as the presence of repatriated prisoners in Paris demonstrated Vichy’s ability to successfully negotiate for their release. Opportunities for creativity and performance were offered to a large number of inmates, and Messiaen’s camp, Stalag VIIIA, was particularly well known for the orchestra, jazz and dance bands, and drama troupe that all performed regularly in the barracks where Messiaen premiered his Quartet. The pages of Le Trait d’union, the free newspaper Vichy distributed to all the camps, are filled with details on the activities taking place in captivity. Published weekly from an office in Berlin, Le Trait d’union was a strong voice in favor of collaboration with Germany. Aside from the reports on camp activities, most of the articles were either translated from items that had already appeared in German daily newspapers, obtained from Vichy’s Service d’Information, or reprinted from collaborationist journals like Cahiers Franco-Allemands. According to one prisoner’s account published in Le Trait d’union in late 1941, in January of that year a Flemish conductor named Van den Plaasche had organized an orchestra of fifteen talented musicians (including Messiaen, Pasquier, and Le Boulaire) to play an eclectic repertoire of classics ranging from the works of Mozart and Ravel to the overtures of operettas and operas comiques. For performances of new works composed in the camps, the article mentions “the miracle of the premiere” of Messiaen’s Quartet alongside the marches and opérettes folkloriques that Fernand Caron, a Belgian composer “full of youth and promise,” had provided for the camp orchestra.33 Another article describes a camp—Stalag IXA, in Ziegenhaim—that could boast of a much larger orchestra of around forty musicians who regularly performed the music of four Conservatoiretrained composers interned there: Thiriet, who conducted the ensemble; Jean Martinon, who also founded a chorale; Michel Warlop; and Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, laureate of the Prix de Rome in 1939. The camp authorities, with donations from Switzerland and Denmark, had provided the camp with instruments and music.34 On 11 January 1942 the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire under Münch became the first of Paris’s four symphony orchestras to devote a concert to the music of repatriated prisoners. The concert, aptly entitled “Composers in the Camps,” consisted of music by Thiriet, Martinon, and Messiaen alongside Albert Roussel’s Symphony no. 3. Thiriet’s incidental music for Jean Cocteau’s Oedipe-Roi was performed with male chorus and Cocteau himself reciting the text; the orchestra gave the Paris premiere of Martinon’s symphonic poem Stalag IX ou musique d’exil; but in Messiaen’s case alone Münch replaced the music the

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composer wrote in captivity with a piece that long predated the war, the 1930 Les Offrandes oubliées.35 While the Quartet’s reduced forces might arguably have made it an awkward fit for such a program, neither the unorthodox scoring of Thiriet’s music nor its lack of direct connection to the topic of captivity was seen as an impediment to its programming for an orchestral concert. Later concert organizers followed suit, either substituting earlier works for the Quartet or, for the grandest of all prisoners’ concerts, omitting Messiaen entirely. This was a benefit gala performed by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire on 17 December 1942 and presided over by two high-ranking Vichy officials: Ambassador Georges Scapini, the head of the Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War, and Maurice Pinot, director of the General Commission of Repatriated Prisoners (Commissariat general aux prisonniers de guerre rapatriés).36 The program consisted of Le Livre pour Jean by Thiriet; Symphonie en sol majeur by Henri Challan, who, like Messiaen, had been appointed a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire upon his release from captivity; O Nuit, for tenor and orchestra, by Émile Damais, an organist from Le Havre; and Psaume CXXIII for tenor and orchestra, by Émile Goué, a math professor who had studied with Koechlin and written a few piano pieces and a string quartet before the war.37 Vichy received permission from the German occupying forces to broadcast the concert over the radio directly to the prison camps in Germany, for of the four composers featured on the concert program, Damais and Goué were still in captivity when the concert was planned. The emotional highlight of the program was the surprise appearance of Damais, who had returned to Paris from Stalag IIB in Hammerstein one week before the concert—just in time to take the podium in his Paris debut. The conductor for the other pieces was Jean Guitton, himself a former prisoner, in his first public appearance. The decision to program music by little-known, even amateur, composers in a concert by France’s most prestigious symphony orchestra was a strategic move to increase publicity for the event. It worked. All major arts journals printed advertisements and sent their music critics to review the concert. The programming of music by someone like Goué was pertinent to the circumstances on a deeper level as well. His was the poignant tale of a simple soldier driven to express his grief, and who shared his emotions musically via radio broadcast with his fellow soldiers. Publicity for the concert in L’Information musicale captured the egalitarian connotations of the event by reproducing a soldier’s sketch of amateur music making from the camps (fig. 3). In a crowded barracks a half-dozen soldiers dressed in

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figure 3. Illustration of music making in the Stalag, L’Information musicale 94 (11 December 1942): 131. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

tattered uniforms and clogs gather around a flutist and violinist who have found space next to their bunks to play a duet for their comrades. Note that the signature of the artist in the bottom right-hand corner is accompanied by the name of his camp. Back in Paris this music was emotionally riveting for a population in which 15 percent of men under the age of forty were incarcerated in Germany. The concert played out the pathos of hearing about captivity from composers who were emissaries from the camps. In their music from the camps, Goué and Damais conveyed the pain and tedium of exile by using the simplest possible means of musical communication. They both set short texts on the subject for solo voice and orchestral accompaniment. Damais set an excerpt from Charles Péguy’s Le Mystère des Saints Innocents, a bleak evocation of military defeat. Example 8 shows how Damais handled Messiaen’s theme of the end of time. The tenor

example 8. Émile Damais, O Nuit, mm. 85–103. (© 1944 Éditions Costallat. Reproduced by permission, A. Leduc et Cie, Paris.) (largement) (bien calme et doux)

84

la

lon

gue

re

tom

bée

88

d’u ne

nuit

é

(comme perdu dans le rêve)

nel

le?

la

lon gue re tom

bée

Très lent

93

nuit

é ter

nel

le? (très doux)

99

ter

(encor plus lent)

(presque sans voix)

3

é ter nel

(sonore mais

)

le?

d’u ne

100

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repeats the final lines of the text—“the lasting effects of an eternal night”—three times over a slow, dreamlike chromatic haze: first as a musical phrase, then as a monotone, and finally, as the music fades to a luminous Ba-major triad, the word “eternal” is uttered as a whisper. Critics such as Guy Ferchault, himself a repatriated prisoner, did not hesitate to read into the piece “the poignant character and the profound anguish of the wait behind barbed wire” when writing their reviews. In L’Information musicale Ferchault stressed that the power of Damais’s piece lay precisely with its ability to bear witness to the prisoners’ experience: for him, O Nuit was “a musical work, certainly, but such a profoundly human testimony to the suffering of these men who are our brothers and who, less fortunate than we, still remain there; [it is a] testimony to the somber night in which they wander and which hope visits so rarely.”38 Messiaen’s erudite abstractions might well have been considered as out of place on the same program as Damais’s literal musical representation. A more appropriate comparison to Messiaen’s Quartet is the music of Martinon, who was trained in both composition and conducting at the Conservatoire before the war. In the symphonic poem Stalag IX ou musique d’exil, premiered at the January 1942 concert with the music of Messiaen and Thiriet, Martinon restricted himself to instruments to address the theme of exile. Despite the absence of a text, Martinon adhered to a narrative model that the audience could easily read as representing the nostalgia felt by an absent soldier. Example 9 consists of the three passages for flute that evoke the sounds of folk tunes.39 They are strategically placed to provide brief respites of calm from otherwise agitated, chromatic orchestral writing. For the flute solo, for instance, the orchestra literally pauses for breath before concluding the piece with fifteen bars of frenzied tutti playing. As Delannoy put it in his review of the premiere, “the few folkloric passages, somewhat ‘superimposed,’ [are] evocative of the countryside, one’s home—paradise lost.”40 In a second piece from the camps entitled Psaume 136: Chant des captifs, Martinon traded nostalgia for righteous anger. Writing for chorus and orchestra this time, he used a text that was so explicit in its calls for God to visit revenge on Babylon for their enslavement and exile of the Jewish people that it had to be cut for the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire’s premiere of the piece on 21 May 1943.41 Thus in the music he wrote in the camps, Martinon rejected a heightened sense of his own personal suffering to instead convey a wider view of the collective experience of captivity. In contrast to Messiaen’s postwar

example 9. Jean Martinon, Musique d’exil: Mouvement symphonique, op. 31, excerpts. (© 1947 Éditions Choudens, rights transferred to Première Music Group. Used by permission of Music Sales Corporation. All rights reserved.) a. Mm. 237–41. 23

Soli

Fl. 3

Soli

3

3

Cl. in B

b. Mm. 268–77. 26

Stesso tempo

Picc.

3

3

3

I

Ob.

Cl. in B 3

6

3

3

3

I

c. Mm. 463–66. rit.

Vivo molto ( = 180)

Fl. 3

dolce

3

3

3

3

3

3

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statements that for him the act of composition was a form of escape, Martinon told a wartime interviewer that his goal was to articulate “the sorrow, outrage, and immense hope” that all prisoners had in common.42 Whereas Messiaen’s Quartet faded from view after its 1941 premiere, Martinon’s Psaume 136: Chant des captifs was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Paris for the best new composition of 1943. It was not for lack of effort on Messiaen’s part. The wartime success of other new pieces, such as the Visions de l’Amen in the summer of 1943, inspired him to petition Tual to program the Quartet in the Concerts de la Pléiade. In a September 1943 letter to Tual Messiaen stressed the fact that the Quartet “was written in captivity, and it’s one of my best things!”43 She ignored his pleas to program the Quartet, even in the Concert de la Pléiade’s own benefit concerts for prisoners of war, preferring to commission a new piece from him instead.44 Apart from private performances in the homes of friends and patrons, however, it was Messiaen’s connections to the group Jeune France, not his status as repatriated prisoner, that resulted in the only public rehearing of the Quartet in occupied Paris: an encore performance of the fifth movement for solo cello and piano (“Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus”) by Messiaen and Pasquier, one month after the premiere, on 18 July 1941.45 Of all the movements in the Quartet, the fifth and the eighth (“Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus”)—the latter for solo violin and piano—have the most in common with the music of exile that composers like Goué, Damais, and Martinon wrote in the camps. The regularity of the rhythmic pulse and the tonal basis of the harmonic progressions also make them the most musically conventional relative to the other movements, which they in fact predate. In these passages, recycled by memory from earlier compositions, Messiaen had yet to abandon the kinds of formal and melodic structures that support narrative interpretation.46 The choice of the fifth movement as an excerpt for the July 1941 encore performance was therefore no accident; it prefigured a practice that continues today. The proximity to vocal writing in the cello melody of the fifth movement, for instance, combined with the exaggeratedly slow tempo—Messiaen marks it “infinitely slow, ecstatic”—create a musical portrait of eternity that in many ways is merely a more sophisticated version of Damais’s techniques (ex. 10). The use of familiar, vocally inspired melodic conventions in these two movements is the closest Messiaen came in the Quartet to inviting the listener to identify emotionally with the composer’s experience, his status as an exiled prisoner whose fate lies outside the bounds of chronological time.

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example 10. Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, V. “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” mm. 1–11. (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) A Infiniment lent, extatique (

= 44 env.)

Vc. (majestueux, recueilli, très expressif )

*

Pno.

5

(etc.) 9

*Cet accent louré doit rester dans la nuance

music, modernism, and testimony Contrary to postwar assumptions about modernism in occupied Paris, the ambivalence the Quartet inspired at its Paris premiere in 1941 was not because of its style. Critics and audiences in Paris readily accepted other modernist works as testimonials to the war, as long as they used music to confront, not escape, the harrowing current events. The most popular was the Trois Complaintes du soldat, a song cycle composed by Jolivet shortly after the armistice. The Trois Complaintes share with Messiaen’s Quartet many of the stylistic attributes that traditionalists like Hautecœur deplored. See, for example, the opening of the first song, with its preponderance of

example 11. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu,” mm. 1–12. (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) simplement 3

Allant

Me voi ci donc sans ar mes

assez pesant, mais piano

et

8va 3

4

nu,

Me voi ci donc sans haine et

mu

8va

7

et.

10

3

3

Me voi ci donc vide et pau vre com me des

A

3

Plus allant et expressif

3

mains d’a bon dan

ce

qui n’ont pas

as sez

don

né.

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tritones and major sevenths, irregular phrasing, and rhythmically disjointed musical texture (ex. 11). Yet unlike Messiaen, Jolivet anchored the Trois Complaintes in a narrative with a text. As the title indicates, in each song the baritone directly adopts the persona of a defeated soldier. Moreover, Jolivet based the texts for his songs on his personal eyewitness account of the defeat: the soldier is, in effect, a stand-in for the composer’s own voice. In June 1940 Jolivet escaped capture by the German army, but he was haunted by the trauma of the defeat and its devastating effects on the civilian population in central France. At the time of the armistice he was in hiding with the twenty-nine survivors from his antitank battalion of eighty-five men in the countryside outside Limoges. Here he wrote the poetry for his three songs as a way to comprehend what had happened to him as a soldier and what these experiences might mean for the country as a whole.47 Jolivet later described the act of writing the texts not only as an effort to “summarize my impressions as a man and as a soldier,” but as a revelation at the moment of great despair: On Sunday 30 June 1940, I went to relax in a field close to a spring. . . . There, with my spirits in complete disarray and utterly destitute materially, I nevertheless regained confidence. And I had to express that confidence. In a few moments I jotted down the essentials of the text in an act of faith, an act of love, an act of hope. . . . After evoking the tragic hours that we had experienced, there came the revelation, to eyes fatigued by so much horror, of divine truth through the splendors of nature.48

In the nineteen lines of text for the first song, “The Lament of the Defeated Soldier,” Jolivet rendered this transformation in verse. The first six lines describe his initial despondence: Me voici donc sans armes et nu, Me voici donc sans haine et muet, Me voici donc vide et pauvre comme des mains d’abondance qui n’ont pas assez donné. Me voici maintenant comme une image inutile de la souffrance de l’Homme, Me voici comme un cœur sans frère, comme un grain de blé sans terre et sans eau. Je suis au milieu de vous, pressés autour de mon corps sans pensée, et vous interrogez mes paupières brûlées;49 [Here I am, then, naked and unarmed, Here I am, then, without hatred and mute, Here I am, then, empty and poor, like the hands of abundance that haven’t given enough.

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Here I am now, like a useless image of the suffering of Mankind, Here I am like a heart without a brother, like a grain of wheat without soil or water. I am in your midst as you press unthinkingly against my body and interrogate my singed eyelids;]

The soldier/Jolivet contemplates his own abject inability to do his job; that is, his powerlessness not only to prevent the German invasion, but also to intervene effectively on behalf of the population he was charged to protect. Vichy’s later promotion of the cause of soldiers captured and taken to Germany only temporarily suppressed the popular association of these men with the most humiliating military disaster the country had ever known. After the liberation of Paris by Allied troops in August 1944, the defeated French soldiers’ prominence in the wartime propaganda of the Vichy regime gave them a dual source of shame, even as the majority of them had yet to return home from captivity.50 In the early days of the defeat, Jolivet, isolated and unaware of the fate of so many of his fellow soldiers, was still able to find solace in his realization that the rebuilding of France was a collective responsibility. If the soldier could share in the suffering of the nation, Jolivet reasoned, he could also participate in its rebirth. The initial four lines of “The Lament of the Defeated Soldier” return as a refrain in the middle of the song, in music as well as text; now, however, instead of ending with a repeat of the dissonant accompaniment, the refrain concludes with the brighter sounds of major thirds and sixths in the treble range of the piano (ex. 12). The final measures contain a crucial reinterpretation of both words and music from the beginning, enacting the very transformation they represent: Et si je suis sans armes et nu, Et si je suis sans haine et muet, Nous serons tous forts et riches comme des mains de misère qui savent tout donner.51 [And if I am naked and unarmed, And if I am without hatred and mute, We shall all be strong and rich like the hands of misery that know how to give all.]

In these three songs Jolivet surprised his wartime listeners with a striking change in style. Prewar experimental scores like Mana and Cinq incantations had given Jolivet a reputation as an uncompromising modernist who valued technical novelty over artistic expression. Robert Bernard, who could have been speaking of Jolivet when he described young French composers in 1930 as suffering from the “deleterious influence of intellectual

example 12. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu,” mm. 59–71. (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) 59

Sans ral.

très affirmé

F

Et

si

je

suis

sans ar

62

mes

et

Poco allarg.

nu,

Et

si je

suis

sans haine et mu et,

Nous se rons

3

65

3

3

tous forts et ri ches com me des mains de mi sè

re

qui

sa

vent tout

Plus vite

68

don

ner. 3

tenu.

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anarchy,” expressed his astonishment in a 1943 review of the Trois Complaintes for Les Nouveaux Temps that they displayed “a direct accent and pared-down style that is surprising from a musician whom one knew as a member of the extreme left in musical politics, an unapologetic researcher into exceptional and aggressive novelty.”52 Technically the music of “The Lament of the Defeated Soldier” does not stray far from Jolivet’s prewar style. The crucial difference is in its mode of representation. Jolivet’s previously controversial use of modernist techniques was now employed programmatically, to illustrate a narrative of transformation from despair to hope. Jolivet went one step further in the second song, “The Lament of the Bridge at Gien.” This song, told in the third person, invites a personal identification on the part of the audience with the soldier on his journey home. (Whether the soldier is returning home from battle, as Jolivet undoubtedly intended in June 1940, or from captivity, as later wartime listeners might have concluded, is left unclear in the text.)53 In the first of three strophes, the soldier en route makes inquiries about his family; the second strophe leads him to despair as a neighbor informs him they have perished: “Disappeared, your wife and children, passing over the bridge at Gien”; but in the third, his children discover and recognize the weeping soldier for an emotional reunion. Gien, a small town of thirty thousand inhabitants, had been the site of a bloody skirmish as French troops tried to defend one of the last remaining bridges over the Loire River from the German army advancing southward from Paris. On the afternoon of 17 June, German soldiers exchanged artillery fire with the French army in the midst of the refugees, causing panic and killing many civilians. After blowing up part of the bridge and withstanding aerial bombings by the Luftwaffe, the French abandoned the ruins of Gien to German soldiers two days later.54 Asked by Goléa in a 1960 radio interview to comment on the connection between the events at Gien and his song, Jolivet, whose battalion had participated in the bridge’s defense, spoke of “Dantesque visions that I shall never forget; all experienced in a hallucinatory state, owing to sleep deprivation and the alcoholic beverages we counted upon to render us impervious.”55 The grim circumstances of the battle at Gien were reflected in Jolivet’s narrative in a way that could not fail to evoke an immediate response in a wartime French audience. Jolivet chose to tell the tale of the soldier arriving in the devastated town in the musical syntax of the population at large. The melodic refrain that recurs after each of the three strophes suggests a folk song with its lilting rhythms in triple compound meter, a conjunct tune that circles the tonic, and repetitive melodic and verbal

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example 13. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, II. “La complainte du pont de Gien,” refrain, mm. 24–30. (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) REFRAIN

1. Bon jour, 2. “A dieu, 3. “Bon jour, B Au mouvt, plus souple

Ma de moi sel le la Fil Ma de moi sel le la Fil Ma de moi sel le la Fil

le, Bon le, A le, bon

jour, dieu, jour,

Mon sieur le Mon sieur le Mon sieur le

La 1re fois - la 2me La 3me fois et plus vite

4

Fils, Fils, Fils,

Bon jour, A dieu, Bon jour,

Bon jour, Ma da me la Mè re, Bon jour à tous, ma dou ce fa mil A dieu, Ma da me la Mè re, A dieu à tous, ma dou ce fa mil Bon jour, Ma da me la Mè re, Bon jour à tous, ma dou ce fa mil

le. le. le.

devices (ex. 13). The refrain is noticeably more consonant than the opening of the first song, although Jolivet has lowered the 6th and 7th degrees of the major scale. Adding chromatic inflections to a folklike strophic melody re-created the “hallucinatory state” in which Jolivet experienced the combat, transposed to the figure, one now both familiar and poignant to his wartime audience, of the shell-shocked defeated soldier / repatriated prisoner. Baritone Pierre Bernac performed the Trois Complaintes numerous times in wartime Paris, first in a two-song version with piano in February 1941, and then as expanded and later orchestrated by Jolivet; Bernac and Münch premiered the orchestrated version with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire on 28 February 1943. Bernac’s subsequent engagements, which included two national broadcasts and a commercial recording, ensured wide exposure for the piece throughout France.56 The immediate success the Trois Complaintes achieved in wartime Paris was due in large part to the act of identification with the soldier that Jolivet

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requested of his listeners. In her 1948 radio interview with the composer, Élie Rabourdin recalled her own experience of the premiere: “My memory of it is like that of an emotion I myself felt personally.”57 Decades later Jolivet spoke to Goléa of his personal goal to communicate to a wider audience, describing the genesis of the work among his fellow soldiers: “It’s possible that I wanted to write music that my comrades in arms could accept, and that unconsciously I was reacting against a certain Byzantinism that struck me as obsolete in the current circumstances.”58 In a 1943 conference talk he gave in occupied Paris, Jolivet related his inspiration for the Trois Complaintes to French tradition, specifically “the forms of liturgical chants that were the result of a French lyrical tradition [that is] over a thousand years old: the form of the sequence in ‘The Lament of the Defeated Soldier,’ the form of the hymn in ‘The Lament of the Bridge at Gien,’ [and] the syllabic psalmody of the rapid recitation at the opening of ‘The Lament to God.’ ” At the conclusion of his talk, he coyly suggested that he may have even written “popular” music. “Yes, I was moved,” he remarked. “The impulse to convey my emotion, God granted me. Does that mean that I wrote a song fit to become popular? You be the judge.”59 Wartime critics did not hesitate to label the songs “popular,” in the sense of deriving from the culture of the general population as well as that of receiving the approbation of a wide audience. Describing “The Lament of the Bridge at Gien” for Comœdia as being in “the emotional, or afflicted, spirit of a popular song,” Honegger commended Jolivet for having made “a clean slate of his elitist flirtations.” In his review for L’Information musicale, José Bruyr punned that the songs, “popular in the best sense of the term . . . are actually on the verge of becoming so,” confidently predicting that the piece would emerge as the most significant musical legacy of the war.60 Thus, despite the complexity of the harmonic language, jagged rhythms, and often unusual musical textures of the songs as a whole, many wartime listeners found it appropriate to listen to the Trois Complaintes in the same egalitarian light as the art emanating from the prisoner-of-war camps, whether it be the amateur music making depicted in figure 3 or the sketches, sculptures, and paintings on display in Paris at gallery shows organized by Scapini and the Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War. As former prisoner Jean Mariat wrote in Les Nouveaux Temps, “In these sketches, wooden Christs, iron coq galois, and portraits (some naive) of Marshal Pétain, [one finds] the strength of centuries past: the sturdy and popular faith that democratic skepticism had sought to destroy in us, and which appears to have been reborn, hardy and powerful, in the intense penance of captivity.”61 The subject was intricately related to, and explicitly reflected in, the style.

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By contrast, the musical abstractions of Messiaen’s Quartet were only obliquely related to the texts of Revelation, which themselves were at best distantly symbolic of the composer’s wartime experiences. At the Paris premiere Messiaen alienated most of his otherwise intrigued listeners by reading the biblical commentary he had prepared for the premiere in the camp. In response, critics spent most of their reviews debating the relationship between the religious sentiments expressed in the texts and their musical “illustrations” in the Quartet. Their conflicting views reveal a palpable unease about the relationship between modernism and representation, especially when a narrative text does not necessarily result in a narrative musical structure. In 1985 Paul Griffiths succinctly described the problem: “Messiaen the annotator is not Messiaen the composer, and there may be respects in which the comments [in the preface] misrepresent the music as much as, perhaps, the music misrepresents the vision.”62 In 1941 Honegger saw Messiaen’s textual commentary as supplying an otherwise arid modernist style with the crucial element of sincerity: “Messiaen is no adherent of so-called ‘pure’ music; that is, the gratuitous game of combining sounds.”63 Moreux, however, dismissed the composer’s religious texts as a distraction and a nuisance, defending the music’s right to “purity.” He advised listeners simply to ignore the texts, which he saw as not only irrelevant but also insulting to a musically sophisticated audience.64 On this point Delannoy, a former student of Honegger, emphatically disagreed. “Certain very ‘liberated’ minds confided in me that they didn’t let the composer’s mystical explanations get in the way of listening to the piece. I know him too well to affect this dilettantish attitude.” Yet, while Honegger concluded that the sincerity of Messiaen’s convictions gave the Quartet its emotional power, Delannoy found that same sincerity to be the most alienating aspect of the whole experience. Messiaen, he wrote with exasperation, “seeks to create in his music the power of a personal miracle, and then calmly announces to us that he has succeeded!”65 Caught up in their struggle to relate the Quartet to the symbolism of Revelation, it appears that listeners in Paris completely ignored the possibility that the Quartet bore traces of Messiaen’s captivity. The contrast between their skepticism and the receptiveness we have long associated with the prisoners in the Stalag, however, is not the only indication that postwar commentators may have been perpetuating a version of the Quartet’s original premiere that is more fantasy than reality. More direct evidence comes in a wartime newspaper column in which a former prisoner named Marcel Haedrich published a radically different account of the event. Haedrich recalled that, while some prisoners were clearly fascinated by the piece, most

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responded by exchanging suspicious glances and nervous laughter, especially to the jargon-laden mysticism of Messiaen’s verbal commentary: [Messiaen] knows that his music is weighted with an audacity that is “essentially spiritual, Catholic.” The subject, he says, called out for a new language; impossible to express such an act of faith in a conventional way. “Revolutionary and superhuman” means were necessary. The faces [in the audience] betray concern: where is he going with this? . . . They listen with a little mistrust when, explaining the originality of the quartet, he says, “The modes, which melodically and harmonically achieve a sort of tonal ubiquity, ought to bring the listener closer to eternity in space or the infinite. Unique rhythms, independent of meter, contribute powerfully to the distancing of the temporal dimension.”66

Whereas in 1958 Messiaen took great pains to emphasize the prisoners’ diverse social backgrounds, to Haedrich that diversity was unremarkable. What delighted him was the way social divisions helped re-create the contentious atmosphere of an important Parisian premiere in the most unlikely of places: To explain [the sixth movement], Olivier Messiaen spoke of “irresistible movement, of enormous blocs of purple fury.” The room is divided between passionate approval and incomprehension. “What are these blocks of purple fury?” The question appears on more than one face. The very composition of the audience explains the hesitations, the diversity of the reactions, and what is extraordinary is not to feel it divided, but to rediscover in this prisoners’ barracks the contentious atmosphere of an important premiere: fervor, annoyance, overintellectualized admiration, overhasty condemnation. . . . What marvelous escape!67

In other words, the Quartet represented the normality of Parisian musical life to people trapped in the miserable atmosphere of the German prison camp, and not the other way around.

messiaen’s wartime memories Of course, we will never know what the prisoners in the camp really thought of Messiaen’s Quartet. Approved for publication by Vichy’s Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War and selected for retransmission to the camps two months later via the pages of Le Trait d’union, Haedrich’s account may well be no more reliable than Messiaen’s reminiscences nearly twenty years after the fact.68 Where the two versions coincide is in their descriptions of Messiaen himself. “How far away he seems, suddenly, the

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comrade of every day,” Haedrich wrote of Messiaen. “He is so different from himself, at ease in a world where it will be difficult to follow him. . . . Caught up in his work, he would like to share with everyone the joy he feels at being able to hold its premiere tonight in the camp.”69 Haedrich’s impression of the composer at the premiere is remarkably similar to the first impression that Guy Bernard-Delapierre, a scholar and fellow soldier who was to become a lifelong friend, had of Messiaen in June 1940 after their capture in the fields of eastern France: In his pale and pensive face, his expressions were like a calm sky above all the fray. His faithful comrades surrounded him with a sort of tender deference that I found striking. Among them were Étienne Pasquier, the cellist of the Trio Pasquier; Akoka, an elegant young man who played the clarinet; and a music-hall singer whose name I have forgotten. When the most resourceful among us would finally find, by I don’t know what miracle, a bit of food, I can still see those comrades bringing Messiaen a spoonful of soup or a quart of water, invaluable treasures that he accepted with the indifferent grace of some Hindu anchorite. In spite of his hunger and thirst, he seemed preoccupied, thinking about something else. Something else very pure and very brilliant, moving very slowly in the distance; something that constantly filled his gaze with love and with life. And that something was well beyond thirst, hunger, bitterness, weakness, or despair.70

Pasquier’s inscription on a copy of the small, handwritten program for the premiere, in fact, thanked Messiaen for having made possible this escape for all the prisoners present: “Outside, night, snow, misery. Here, a miracle: the Quartet ‘For the end of time’ transports us to a marvelous Paradise and removes us from this terrible earth.” Le Boulaire, for his part, credited the quartet for taking him on a “grand and magnificent voyage to a marvelous world.”71 Thus it is easy to imagine the composer so absorbed by the performance of his piece that the audience response barely registered, the “attention and understanding” a nostalgic memory of his own pleasure at having his piece performed that night. For in his 1958 interview with Goléa, Messiaen exaggerated and distorted other key elements of the premiere, such as the five thousand people he remembered gathering in a theater whose capacity, according to documents in Polish archives, was less than five hundred; the entire camp held thirty thousand inmates, not three hundred thousand, and less than three thousand of them were on camp grounds at any one time.72 One eyewitness, Charles Jourdanet, remembered an audience of approximately 150 prisoners.73 And there is Pasquier’s insistence that the cello part could not have been played with only three strings. When

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pressed, Pasquier speculated that Messiaen’s mistake was probably a result of the composer’s effort to illustrate the hardships they faced in performing the piece at all.74 Pasquier’s reminiscences of life in the camps differ from Messiaen’s in another crucial detail: namely, the extent to which help from sympathetic German soldiers facilitated the genesis and premiere of the Quartet. In 1958 Messiaen told Goléa that, owing to their respect for music, the Germans let him keep his pocket scores, and that a German officer provided him with the manuscript paper, pencils, and erasers he needed to compose.75 Shortly after Messiaen’s death, Rischin interviewed Loriod and asked her about his interactions with German officers at the camps. Loriod responded that a certain German officer decided to lock Messiaen in the camp latrines with a supply of pencils and paper to force him to compose. “You see what kind of suffering he underwent,” Loriod concluded to Rischin.76 In interviewing Le Boulaire sixteen months later, Rischin asked him if he remembered this guard. Of course, Le Boulaire responded. Yet the man Le Boulaire remembered was no sadist but an unarmed guard, half Belgian and half German, who used his fluency in French not only to help ameliorate conditions for the French prisoners, but also to shield the French Jewish soldiers like Akoka from any mistreatment. David Gorouben, a French Jew in the camp, confirmed the accounts by Le Boulaire and Pasquier that Hauptmann Karl-Albert Brüll was a veritable guardian angel to the French prisoners of war.77 In addition to providing the paper and pencils, Brüll worked with the camp commandant to provide the quartet with instruments, wood to heat the stove during their rehearsals, extra food rations, and even the forged papers that allowed Messiaen and Pasquier to be among the first French prisoners repatriated after the armistice.78 As Le Boulaire declared to Rischin, the German officers “did everything to help us.”79 In all his writing and speaking about the Quartet, however, Messiaen mentioned Brüll by name only once, in a 1991 interview one year before his death.80 And when Brüll tried to make contact with Messiaen in 1968, the composer instructed the concierge of his apartment building to tell Brüll, who had traveled to Paris on business and stood on the street below, that he did not wish to see him.81 Perhaps it was easier for Messiaen to focus retrospectively on the transcendent aspects of the premiere if he suppressed his memories of Brüll and other helpful German officers. However the Quartet was received at its premiere, we know for certain that, with only a single public concert and a published score limited by paper shortages to a print run of one hundred copies,82 the Quartet arguably achieved the least exposure in wartime Paris of any of Messiaen’s most

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recent works. The Quartet faced new obstacles after the war’s end. Initially it was eclipsed by the controversy surrounding the April 1945 premiere of his Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine. The point of contention was, once again, the relationship between Messiaen’s music and the mysticism in the verbal commentary that he provided for the performance. When critics and composers weren’t debating the role of mysticism in Messiaen’s music, they were chastising his students for disrupting the Paris premieres of Stravinsky’s latest compositions. By protesting Stravinsky’s continuing embrace of neoclassicism, Messiaen’s students were also rejecting the deference to history and tradition that had dominated contemporary music in France during the war.83 This new generation enthusiastically embraced modernism as a way to shield themselves from the kinds of musical representations that they now deemed politically and aesthetically suspect. Their admiration for Messiaen was primarily centered on his revolutionary approach to rhythm.84 But Boulez and others harshly criticized as reactionary and in poor taste Messiaen’s stylistic inconsistencies, his lingering reliance on triads, and his tendency to write rhapsodic melodies. The Quartet, despite its introduction of such key concepts as additive rhythmic values and nonretrogradable rhythms, was deemed one of the worst offenders, primarily because of the emotive lyricism of the two slow movements for solo cello and violin. André Hodeir, for example, disdainfully commented that the “effusion of lyricism” of such moments was “inspired by the most dubious sources (one is reminded of Massenet, Tchaikovsky, and at times even of Gershwin)”—all proof of their inadequacy as music of the avant-garde.85 Even Goléa criticized the two movements as ill suited to a depiction of the Apocalypse.86 Throughout the 1950s, when critics and composers published articles and reviews about Messiaen’s music, they drew their examples not from the Quartet, as Messiaen had in his own treatise in 1944, but instead from the more austere music of Visions de l’Amen or the Turangalîla-Symphonie of 1948.87 It was not, in fact, until after Messiaen gave his interview in 1958 that the Quartet obtained its current prominence in the Messiaen literature. For Messiaen’s first biographers, his insistence to Goléa that the Quartet bore no musical traces of captivity was overshadowed by the appeal of his vivid stories of war. Messiaen continued to send mixed messages when he provided additional details in liner notes to the first commercial recordings of the work. In contrast to the brevity of the 1942 preface to the score, in the liner notes from 1957, 1963, and 1969, Messiaen inserted new information about his captivity in each retelling:

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Conceived and written during my captivity, the Quartet for the End of Time received its first performance at Stalag VIIIA on 15 January 1941, by Jean Le Boulaire (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet), Étienne Pasquier (cello), and myself at the piano. Preface to Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Paris: Durand, 1942)

1939: The war. Olivier Messiaen . . . is captured and taken to Stalag VIIIA, in Görlitz, Silesia. He has for companions in captivity a violinist (Jean Le Boulaire), a clarinetist (Henri Akoka), and the famous cellist of the Trio Pasquier, Étienne Pasquier. Despite the absence of a piano, he adds to this ensemble (violin, clarinet, cello) a piano part—and for the four instruments he writes his Quartet for the End of Time. In January 1941, the four musicians are loaned instruments, and on 15 January 1941, the work is given its premiere in Stalag VIIIA before an audience of several thousand French, Polish, and Belgian prisoners from all classes of society: peasants, workers, merchants, writers, doctors, priests, etc.

Liner notes written for release of first recording of the Quartet in 1957, reuniting the four performers from the 1941 Paris premiere (Club français du disque 77)

[The premiere] took place at Görlitz, in Silesia, in a terrible cold. The Stalag was buried in snow. We were thirty thousand prisoners (mostly French, with a few Poles and Belgians). The four performers played on damaged instruments: Étienne Pasquier’s cello had only three strings, the keys of my piano fell straight down and did not come back up. Our outfits were unbelievable: I had been given a green jacket that was completely shredded and I wore wooden clogs. The audience united all classes of society: priests, doctors, merchants, career soldiers, workers, peasants. When I was a prisoner, the lack of food gave me colored dreams: I saw the Angel’s rainbow and strange swirlings of color.88 Liner notes written for release of recording made in 1963 under the direction of the composer (Erato STU 70.156)

Why this choice of text? Perhaps because, in these hours of total privation, the basic forces which control life reasserted themselves. . . . Firstly the rainbow, symbol of the variations of sound-color, of the inner colored visions which I experience when listening to and reading music. In the Stalag, the lack of food made me dream of sound-colors— and one morning, forgetting the horror of the camp, the snow and the wooden drawers which served us for beds, I was lucky enough to see the Northern Lights, extraordinary green and violet drapes folding and unfolding, twisting and turning in the heavens. Liner notes written for release of recording made in 1969 in Paris, EMI (Esprit français) ASD 2470; translated by Paul Crossley for U.S. release, Angel S-36587

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Messiaen also used the liner notes to respond to recent criticism about the two slow movements, defending their “calm and austerity” as “marvelous visions of peace.” All of Messiaen’s major biographers, starting with Pierrette Mari in 1965, have drawn their facts from Messiaen’s interview, his liner notes, and, eventually, each other.89 We can thus trace the current tendency to read the Quartet as a document of war only as far back as the ambivalent association Messiaen himself made some seventeen years after his release. This temporal gap raises two questions. Why did Messiaen start to tell war stories in 1958, and why have commentators on his music been so quick to associate them with his authorial intentions ever since? The answer to the first question, I believe, lies in Messiaen’s own emotional attachment to the piece. Despite his determination to describe the Quartet as transcending its circumstances, we have already seen how he did not hesitate to evoke the Quartet’s connections with his captivity to try to obtain a second performance in 1943.90 By 1958 his evident frustration with postwar criticism and neglect of the piece, together with the belated release of the first commercial recording in 1957, may have led him to provide the piece with a compelling subtext in the emotionally charged circumstances of the war. A 1968 article, “Does a Contemporary Music Exist?” by music critic Marc Pincherle, a fellow former prisoner of war, is evidence that the pull of nostalgia for the powerful expressiveness of music making in the camps was strong several years after the war was over. Pincherle objected to the unanimity with which contemporary composers and critics from Marius Constant to Theodor Adorno condemned “expressiveness, that accursed inheritance from the Romantics,” as inappropriate to contemporary artistic production. Admitting to having “done [his] turn alongside everyone else” in mocking the worn-out cliché of la musique consolatrice, Pincherle recounted how his experience as a prisoner of war in 1940 brought back to life the communal investment and powerful emotions he remembered from the Sunday orchestral concerts of his youth: “Nothing—not reading, not sport, not theater, not card games—would tear us away so quickly and for so long from our unenviable condition than our concerts, which former prisoners still recall today. It is this power to which the musicians who are my subject in this article do not lay claim, apart from a few masters among the greats who do not acquiesce to the banishment of a powerful emotional component from some of their works, no matter how modern their technique.” Pincherle named two examples of such composers: Penderecki (at least in the St. Luke Passion) and Messiaen.91 The vivid details in Messiaen’s postwar accounts suggest an answer to my second question. We have found Messiaen’s tale of endurance through

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artistic creation so attractive that we rarely query their veracity or their relevance. The Quartet has come to represent the plight not only of the captive French soldiers, but of all victims of German persecution, including those of the Holocaust. Witness not only the suggestive barbed wire on the cover of the Deutsche Grammophon CD in figure 2, but also the direct appropriation of the Quartet on a 1997 recording of chamber music performed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: its fifth movement is included on the CD alongside the music of concentration camp victims and survivors.92 And in advertisements for A Voice for the Silenced, a series produced by Classical Public Radio Network on “composers of the Holocaust period,” we are promised music and stories of “imprisoned composers like [Viktor] Ullmann (1898–1944), Hans Krása (1899–1944), Gideon Klein (1919–1945), Pavel Hass (1899–1944), and Olivier Messiaen (1908– 92) [who] shared their creativity and spirit in the barracks of concentration camps like Terezín.”93 The program, which aired on several National Public Radio stations to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day from 2006 to 2010, thus elides Messiaen’s brief term as a captive French soldier in Stalag VIIIA with the experience of Jewish victims at the notorious transit camp where creative artists awaited transfer to German extermination camps. In the 1960s Adorno famously condemned artistic representations of the Holocaust as degrading to the memory of the victims. In his words, the artistic use of the tragedies of the war provided an emotional immediacy that all too often “pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation.”94 The more time passes, however, the more such narratives serve to create an immediacy that is increasingly rare outside of artistic creation. We look to art to give us what fewer and fewer eyewitnesses are present to provide. We are so accustomed to the alienated subjectivity of Messiaen’s Quartet that for us his role as eyewitness alone supplies his music with the emotional catharsis of a representation. If what we really wanted was immediacy, we too would embrace Jolivet’s Trois Complaintes, but they are at once too literal and too dependent on topical references we no longer understand. Paradoxically, it is our very distance from the time and place of the Second World War in France that enables us to interpret Messiaen’s Quartet as an allegory of the French wartime experience, even if it is more accurately viewed as an allegory of escape from, rather than confrontation with, the harrowing circumstances in which the composer found himself in the winter of 1940–41. We are better placed than his wartime listeners to appreciate that, in attempting to transcend rather than to describe his difficult surroundings, Messiaen was inspired to write one of the most powerful and enduring musical compositions of the twentieth century.

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Ultimately, the voices of wartime listeners of the Quartet provide us with a useful reminder that the catharsis we experience in Messiaen’s music today says more about us than it does about the Quartet. They also challenge our long-held assumptions that composing modern music was in itself an act of political resistance in wartime France. Finally, they suggest that we might improve our understanding of modern music like the Quartet if we look beyond the technical innovations we cherish to ponder the stories such pieces may, or may not, tell.

4 The Timeliness of Duruflé’s Requiem Plain-chant and polyphony, dominant ninths and the orchestra of Debussy—without the evidence of an actual performance, Duruflé’s Requiem might appear to be a hotch-potch. But it is the absolute unification in a very personal manner of these seemingly disparate elements that constitutes Duruflé’s chief claim to be taken seriously as a composer. felix aprahamian, “Maurice Duruflé and His Requiem”

vichy’s symphonic commissions and the music of the catholic church In May 1941 Maurice Duruflé received a commission from Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts to write a symphonic poem, for which he was offered ten thousand francs, payable upon completion of the work.1 Reversing the program’s steady decline each year since its inception in 1938, the administration provided ample funds—270,000 francs—to grant a total of seventeen commissions between May and August 1941, the first year of commissions granted under the new regime. The large number of commissions for symphonic poems and symphonies, thirteen in the first year alone, were intended to provide new repertoire for Paris’s four symphony orchestra associations—the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Concerts Lamoureux, Concerts Pasdeloup, and Concerts Gabriel Pierné—and the Orchestre national, for all of which the administration dramatically increased its subsidies in late 1941.2 In exchange, the orchestras were required to increase the percentage of French music they played, to increase their performance of new music by living (or recently deceased) French composers, and to perform the new works on separate programs instead of relegating them to a single concert.3 In his postwar memoirs Louis Hautecœur, director of Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts, praised the work of French orchestras as “a form of propaganda [that was] able to show the occupiers how false the reputation was that French music had in Germany.” He also credited two high-ranking ministers—Yves Bouthillier, Vichy’s secretary of state for national economy and finance, and Jean Berthelot, secretary of state for communications—with having advocated the changes.4 Performances by the four orchestras were popular; the Sunday matinees often sold out. They 120

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were also plentiful. During the occupation they played more than 650 concerts.5 German officials at the Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF) paid attention to their activities, taking notes on the changes in the orchestras’ statutes and funding in their weekly reports on French cultural activities.6 The 1941 commissions, the first awarded by the Vichy regime, were distinguished not only by the increase in their number and their budget, but also by the values and the aspirations of the new state. In the glossy pages of the bimonthly Revue des Beaux-Arts de France—the official journal of the Administration of Fine Arts—Jeanne Laurent, the assistant chief of the administration’s Music Bureau, insisted that the commissions program did not constitute an officially sanctioned aesthetic. “To give composers complete freedom, no aesthetic guidelines have been imposed,” Laurent wrote of the program. “The only obligation on beneficiaries of the program is that they produce an entirely new work. The musicians retain the rights to their music, notably in terms of public performances; the state reserves only the right to have the piece performed on official occasions.”7 Hautecœur, speaking of all the administration’s programs in the journal’s first issue, wrote, “The state has the duty to be eclectic.” Above all, he continued, the state must not act like an amateur collector “who makes known his preference for a certain musician or sculptor.”8 This image of the state as a neutral presence directly contradicted the views of Hautecœur’s predecessor Georges Huisman, who had argued in 1937 that nothing was more dangerous than for the state to attempt to be neutral in artistic matters. Huisman believed that the state should have the “audacity” to choose, without which its artistic judgments were no more worthwhile than those of a botanist indiscriminately collecting specimens.9 Yet, for Vichy’s arts administrators, a pretense to artistic neutrality was crucial in establishing their credibility as a voice independent from the German occupying forces, particularly in publications such as Revue des Beaux-Arts de France, which was cosponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and primarily geared toward a foreign readership. The irony is that it was Vichy officials, and not the Popular Front bureaucrats now maligned in France, who were selective in their funding choices.10 While maintaining the pretense of granting support across the spectrum of French musical life, the Vichy administration concentrated its funding efforts on the composers whose music would best reflect the cultural values of France’s National Revolution. Traditional academic credentials such as the Prix de Rome or a professorship at the Conservatoire were decisive qualifications.11 So was the experience

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of having been captured and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp: nearly all composers released from the camps during the war would receive a commission.12 But academic laurels and military sacrifice were not the only aspects of certain composers’ attractiveness to the commissions committee, which also gave funding priority to composers known primarily for their skills as organists along with their knowledge as specialists of Catholic sacred music of the past and present. Nearly one-third of the seventeen composers chosen in 1941 had solid ties to the Catholic Church: Duruflé, Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, and Gaston Litaize, recent Conservatoire graduates who held posts as organists in Paris churches; Ermend Bonnal, an established organist and composer of religious choral and organ music appointed in March 1942 to succeed Charles Tournemire at the Basilique de Sainte-Clotilde; and Amédée Gastoué, a musicologist at the Schola Cantorum since its inception who specialized in plainchant and was a prolific composer of sacred choral music.13 While all of these composers participated in some way in French musical life outside the boundaries of the sacred, it was their involvement with the music and institutions of the Church that brought them to the attention of the Vichy regime. The decision of the Administration of Fine Arts to fund new music composed by active church musicians—alongside the privileging of religious themes in the commissioning and acquisition of painting and sculpture14—was part of a broader gesture by the Vichy regime to embrace the Catholic Church. For the new state and the ancient Church shared both enemies and goals. Vichy included in its list of grievances against the Third Republic the serious restrictions that had been placed on the Church as part of the Republic’s program to secularize France. The Church applauded new government initiatives that demonstrated the regime’s willingness to remedy the situation: the decree of 3 September 1940, allowing members of religious orders to teach; that of 21 February 1941, legally restoring the rights of assembly for religious orders that had been rescinded in 1901; and that of 8 April 1942, restoring to the Church that portion of its property, confiscated even before the separation of church and state in 1905, that still remained in the hands of the state.15 The regime’s goals of national renewal, its love of ceremony, and its nostalgia for the past found eager support in prominent clergymen who condemned the moral decline of France before the defeat. “Victorious, we would probably have remained the prisoners of our mistakes,” proclaimed Pierre-Marie Gerlier, the cardinal archbishop of Lyons. “By dint of being secularized, France was in danger of dying.”16 The revival of old customs like the Corpus Christi procession from Notre Dame into the streets of Paris in June 1941 symbolized the return of spiritual acts to everyday French life. The reappearance of the crucifix on the walls of French schools alongside

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new portraits of Marshal Pétain underscores the way in which the regime hoped to co-opt religious values in its efforts to reform the nation. Proponents of Catholic sacred music in France spoke out in favor of restoring state subsidies to this neglected aspect of the nation’s heritage. Jules Meunier, maître de chapelle at Sainte-Clotilde and organist at Les Invalides, appealed directly to Pétain for the restoration of the state funding provided to choir schools before the laws of separation. He argued that the state, while providing funds for religious architecture, sculpture, and painting, had left the task of sustaining religious music, the most essential element of the Catholic liturgy, to the clergy alone. France’s choir schools, at one time the custodians of religious music, had suffered; many had been forced to close. In their embodiment of the moral and spiritual goals now shared by the Church and the state, Meunier wrote, the choir schools were central to the “renewal of the spiritual artistic values of the new France.”17 Urged by Marshal Pétain to take action to revive the schools, Hautecœur approved the reinstatement of subsidies in the 1942 budget. To justify this apparent violation of the still-extant laws of separation, the administration stressed the “national interest” in ensuring the schools’ survival because of their vital role in music education in France. Jeanne Laurent pointed out in a report on the Music Bureau’s activities in 1941 and 1942 that musicians with a strong training in liturgical music were well placed to contribute to all aspects of musical life. Among the extant choir schools she praised were those of Lyons, Dijon, and Rouen, noting that this last counted Duruflé and the conductor Paul Paray among its former students.18 Reform of choral singing, in the opinion of musicologist Norbert Dufourcq, was of great importance for the development of French contemporary music. Dufourcq saw the nineteenth-century revival of plainchant initiated by Doms Prosper Guéranger and Joseph Pothier at the Benedictine Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes as the beginning of a renaissance for France’s choir schools, whose repertoire had been progressively degraded in the previous hundred years by “vulgar and bland motets” composed by their maîtres de chapelle. Coinciding with the plainchant revival was the creation of a choral repertoire for both church and concert hall, wrote Dufourcq in a text published after the war. Here he linked the reform of France’s choir schools and the renewed interest in music of the past that required competent choral singing, such as Lully, Bach, and Handel, to the appearance of new compositions that employed choral writing, by Honegger, Jacques de la Presle, and Jean Françaix. He also traced the development of the mass and oratorio from Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Franck to

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Inghelbrecht, Bonnal, and Duruflé, all of whom incorporated plainchant into their compositions.19 Indeed, plainchant played a major role in a spectacle that the Vichy administration sponsored in May 1941 to celebrate the first feast day of Joan of Arc since the armistice. Several performances took place throughout France’s unoccupied zone of Portique pour une fille de France, a spectacle of drama, music, and dance narrating Saint Joan’s rise to glory and demise at the stake. In the 1941 performances of Portique, the Vichy regime’s interest in plainchant as a source for modern concert music for chorus and orchestra was interwoven with its obsession with the Catholic saint, just as the spectacle itself interlaced church and state as military, state, and Church officials appeared side by side among the audiences of thousands that thronged the stadiums in which the performances took place.20 We know from a newspaper review of the Lyons performance that plainchant was prominently featured in the music accompanying the central scene in which Charles VII, with Joan’s help, is crowned king of France. According to the reviewer, Henry Fellot, first Léo Preger provided “a powerful Chant du Bâtisseurs for a cappella chorus in the style of Gregorian chant” for the scene preceding the coronation at Rheims; then, by Yves Baudrier, a “magnificent Marche du cortège du Sacre”; and finally, a “sumptuous and very sonorous Te Deum,” by Olivier Messiaen.21 Although the contributions by Preger and Baudrier remain lost, the recently rediscovered score of Messiaen’s two contributions for a cappella choir—the Te Deum mentioned by Fellot and an Improprères, sung just before Joan is tied to the stake—confirms Fellot’s indication of plainchant’s importance to the event. In Messiaen’s setting of the first fifteen phrases of the Te Deum plainchant from the Liber usualis, he alternated between unison singing of phrases that cite the music as well as the words of the plainchant and freely composed phrases set in three-part harmony.22 Lastly, the one wartime symphonic commission that directly addressed the plight of France from an officially sanctioned perspective focused almost obsessively on the central role of religious faith in French national identity. André Gailhard, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1908 and an old friend of Hautecœur (having been in residence at the Villa Médicis when Hautecœur, one year his senior, was attending the École française in Rome), had already written a patriotic hymn to Pétain: a live performance of his La Française: Hymne au Maréchal was broadcast nationwide on 25 June 1941, the first anniversary of the armistice with Germany.23 Two months later, the Administration of Fine Arts issued a special commission to Gailhard for a symphonic poem to a text by Marc-André Fabre, the coauthor of the lyrics

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for La Française.24 Gailhard fulfilled the commission with his Ode à la France blessée for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.25 The title is undoubtedly a tribute to Ode à la France, the unfinished cantata that Debussy composed during the First World War and that was completed and published posthumously in 1928.26 Whereas in his Ode Debussy dramatized the story of French rebellion against the English occupation in the fifteenth century, Gailhard used musical resources to narrate France’s most recent struggles on a grand scale. In the first of three movements of Gailhard’s Ode, entitled “The Tempest,” one can hear the arrival of the German troops on French soil in the stormy orchestral introduction and a choral lament. A parade of soloists then gives an account of the devastation, from a young woman describing the exodus of refugees from the north, an old man contemplating his house in smoking ruins, a woman burying her two children killed by an air raid, and an orphaned child mourning his mother and father, the latter killed in combat. In the second movement, “The Prayer,” an organ accompanies a tenor soloist while the orchestra sits in silence. The soloist implores God with a simple diatonic tune, its harmonies inflected by major sixths and sevenths. In asking for God to come to France’s aid, the soloist reminds him of his previous emissaries, from Saint Geneviève, whose prayers saved Paris from Attila the Hun in the fifth century, to Saint Joan of Arc (“the virgin of Domrémy”), who chased the English occupying forces out of France in the fifteenth. The not so subtle implication here is that God’s latest emissary is Marshal Pétain. Vichy propaganda, with the support of the Catholic Church, made Pétain an object of veneration: one publication even rewrote the Lord’s Prayer as an invocation of the Marshal.27 God is also an integral part of “The Reawakening,” the third and final movement of the Ode. A C-major trumpet fanfare introduces an inspirational pentatonic hymn to the glorious future of the nation, with the arrival of a new era for France made possible by the strength of its citizens’ religious faith. Gailhard’s use of citations of popular tunes such as “Sur le pont d’Avignon” and the Provençal melody “La Marcho dei Rei” betrays his debt to the Symphonie française of Théodore Dubois, who, in the years immediately preceding World War I, employed French folk tunes as part of a dramatic progression from darkness to victory that culminated in a fanfare of “La Marseillaise.”28 The presence of the familiar tunes in the finale of Gailhard’s work together with the narrative that passes from the tragedy of the opening to the celebratory closing chorus (in which “La Marseillaise” is replaced with a new hymn more appropriate to the France of 1940) creates an updated version of Dubois’s symphony, a powerful aural collage of the

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collective celebration that was to accompany the rebirth of the nation as promised by the Marshal. In August 1942, during the time in which Gailhard was composing his commissioned work, the current minister of national education, Abel Bonnard, made him an official bureaucrat, appointing him as head of music and theater in the Office for the Fight against Unemployment (Commissariat à la lutte contre le chômage). In addition, Gailhard was paid twice as much as initially promised for his symphonic poem by the time of its completion in March 1943, the payments making reference to his composition of a “lyric work.”29 Gailhard’s status as a Vichy public servant, together with the explicitly political message of Ode à la France blessée, confirms that political biases lay beneath the surface of the commissions program during the war, even if time ran out before the Ode could be performed by war’s end.30 For their part, several composers in wartime France joined Gailhard in embracing the value of direct communication with their traumatized national audience. Threatened by German competition even at home, they renewed their faith in their national heritage. For a few, like Jolivet, the changing circumstances resulted in a change of style.31 But for most—and this would include Poulenc and Honegger as well as Duruflé—no change was necessary. This was how they had conceived and written their music all along.

the postwar reception of a vichy commission In choosing to fulfill his 1941 symphonic commission with his Requiem, op. 9, for chorus, organ, and orchestra, Duruflé was participating in the recent vogue not only for the renewal of French choral singing, but also for using plainchant as a source for that renewal. It had been common practice since the seventeenth century for composers who wrote sacred Catholic choral music to retain the Latin texts, but not the medieval plainchant melodies, of the Catholic liturgy they chose as the basis of their new compositions. In his Requiem, Duruflé made the unusual decision to retain the melodies as well as the words of the medieval Mass for the Dead. Yet Duruflé’s use of the existing plainchant melodies was no mere transcription. In some movements of the Requiem, such as the opening of the Introit, he faithfully preserved the plainchant melody, but in other movements, such as the Sanctus and the Libera me, his paraphrases of the plainchant are less exact and more fleeting in the overall musical texture. In addition, the seventh and ninth chords that Duruflé used to harmonize the chants were indebted to the modern modal inflections and unresolved

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dissonances of Fauré and Debussy, and the scoring for vocal soloists, mixed chorus, full orchestra, and organ is that of a modern concert work. The Requiem is Duruflé’s creative engagement with medieval sacred plainchant in modern concert form. Had Duruflé completed his Requiem during the occupation, the piece would undoubtedly have received a premiere by either one of Paris’s four orchestras or the Orchestre national. It would have joined not only the choral adaptations of plainchant in the 1941 performances of Portique pour une fille de France, but also the wartime premieres of completed 1941 commissions by Litaize (Symphonie pour orgue et orchestre, second movement, performed by Concerts Pasdeloup in 1943) and Grunenwald (Bethsabée, biblical poem for orchestra, performed by Concerts Pasdeloup in 1944) in promoting new French symphonic music with sacred themes or connotations.32 But Duruflé, who was notoriously slow at composition, did not finish his Requiem until September 1947, three years after the liberation of occupied Paris. By this time, the Orchestre national had, under the leadership of Manuel Rosenthal, become the preeminent orchestra for premieres of new music in postwar France; the orchestra programmed the work’s nationally broadcast premiere for a concert commemorating All Souls’ Day, 2 November 1947, alongside In Memoriams composed by Alexandre Tansman and László Lajtha, with Roger Désormière at the podium.33 The Administration of Fine Arts paid Duruflé thirty thousand francs for the completion of his commissioned work on 14 January 1948; this time the higher amount took into account the rapid inflation that besieged the postwar French economy as well as the new going rate for commissioned symphonic works in 1946 and 1947 of between twenty thousand and fifty thousand francs. We know that the payment to Duruflé was for his Requiem because the composer submitted a certificate on 21 January 1948 to the Administration of Fine Arts naming the piece as his completed commissioned work (fig. 4).34 The existence of this certificate is important, for the story Duruflé told of the genesis of the Requiem in a 1950 interview is different from the one I have told here. In Duruflé’s account, the impetus to write the Requiem came not from a state commission for a symphonic work but from a longstanding fascination with the plainchant in the medieval Mass of the Dead. Asked by the interviewer, Maurice Blanc, whether his intention was to write music for the concert hall or the church, Duruflé stated unequivocally, “My intention was to write a religious work for the church. Besides, the origin of the themes would itself justify, and even impose, this destination.”35

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figure 4. Certificate signed by Duruflé upon completion of his Requiem, 21 January 1948. (Document conserved at the Archives nationales, Paris.)

Duruflé’s initial attempts to compose a piece based on the plainchant, according to the interview, took the form of an organ suite, not unlike the two organ works he had already composed based on plainchant.36 Yet, after having completed the Sanctus and the Communion, Duruflé found it “difficult to separate the Latin words from the Gregorian chant with which they are so intricately linked.” In order to include the words, one needed to include voices: “So it was that the organ suite was transformed into something more substantial that naturally called for chorus and orchestra. This is how I came to write this work.” Once the composition was scored for orchestra, Duruflé continued, “the important role of the orchestra obliged me to think also about the concert hall where a symphonic ensemble is much more at home than under the vaults of our churches. Nevertheless, I returned to my initial idea by transcribing the work for voice and organ, which would replace the orchestra as best it could.”37 In other words, according to this interview, pious respect for the liturgical origins of the plainchant was at the forefront of Duruflé’s intentions; the composition of a symphonic work for orchestra and chorus was a regrettable but necessary compromise so that both the words and music of the original plainchant could be retained. Duruflé’s account, however,

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leaves unanswered one crucial question: if the inclusion of words with the plainchant was necessary, why not merely compose a work for chorus and organ accompaniment, retaining the possibility of liturgical use? Duruflé’s explanation of why he wrote a symphonic work and not a liturgical one in the 1950 interview with Maurice Blanc stresses the composer’s utmost respect for the original liturgy and glosses over the more secular and fully orchestrated moments of the Requiem. Consciously or not, he was echoing the opinions expressed by critics after the first performances of the piece in their printed reviews, in which they stressed the composer’s piety, discretion, and self-effacement in his approach to setting plainchant. Several reviewers compared Duruflé’s Requiem favorably to Darius Milhaud’s recently premiered Symphony no. 3 “Te Deum,” op. 271, which had been commissioned by Radiodiffusion française to celebrate the liberation of France from German occupation in 1944. In the symphony’s finale, a Te Deum for chorus and orchestra, Milhaud had discarded the music of the Te Deum plainchant, choosing instead to set the Latin words in a modern choral idiom. In her joint review of the two premieres for Les Lettres françaises, Henriette Roget contrasted Milhaud’s symphony, which she called “an intense expression of his era,” with the timelessness of Duruflé’s Requiem. For Roget, Duruflé’s score owed its timeless status to the composer’s piousness and his use of plainchant as source material: “[The Requiem] is the expression of a faith rather than the voice of a man.” She added, “We should be grateful to Duruflé for having effaced himself in front of his work; for him, self-effacement is a daily habit,” and announced that here was “finally a work essentially for the church that is neither watered down or bleating and that carries the mystical spark that César Franck had reignited” after the “carnal torment of Romanticism.”38 Like Roget, René Dumesnil, writing in Le Monde shortly after the premiere, preferred Duruflé’s Requiem to Milhaud’s symphony, in which the Te Deum chorus “bathed [the piece], so to speak, in a liturgical atmosphere . . . but was not exempt from a monotony that stemmed from the compositional process, the absence of modulations, and the roughness of the form.”39 In Duruflé’s work, by contrast, Dumesnil opined that the composer’s “respect of the liturgical music is far from detrimental to the work, but instead confers on it a beautiful unity and a veritable grandeur. The principal (but not the sole) merit of the composer is to have known how to make his own inventions worthy of a singularly dangerous juxtaposition by giving [his own music] the necessary noble and serious eloquence.” The sole reviewer in 1947 to evoke the other two premieres broadcast alongside the Requiem, Bernard Gavoty proclaimed in Le Figaro that, even if

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Duruflé’s Requiem is “sumptuous, maybe even too sumptuous in parts,” it was better than the two In Memoriams, which he found “as hollow as tombs and as formal as pall-bearers.” Duruflé’s piece instead “brings a whiff of the heavenly peace promised to the faithful, and resolutely opposes Christian providentialism to pagan fidelity.”40 The critics’ unanimous preference in 1947 for the “heavenly peace” of Duruflé’s Requiem over both the “monotony” of Milhaud’s Te Deum symphonic finale and the gloomy “formality” of Tansman’s and Lajtha’s In Memoriams underscores a paradox central to the postwar reception of the Requiem in France. The very elements of the Requiem that conveyed a sense of timelessness—its roots in the medieval liturgical music and Latin words of the Requiem Mass, enhanced for concert performance by the judicious use of a symphony orchestra; its atmosphere of piety and contrition made universal in its depiction of generalized, rather than event-specific, mourning—were precisely suited to a listening public for whom the central issues of the war and occupation were still unresolved. If the French could not (and, in Henry Rousso’s opinion, still do not) agree on how to resolve the lingering shame of the swift military defeat in 1940 and the ensuing wartime collaboration at the highest levels of the French state, they could nevertheless unite in embracing the nonspecific expression of mourning and regret in a Requiem Mass.41 The prominence in Duruflé’s Requiem of the sounds of medieval plainchant that were both familiar to a predominantly Catholic population and expressed in a form that had recently been evoked as a symbol of national pride must have made the piece all the more appealing at the time of its premiere. The decision by Radiodiffusion française to program the piece for a nationally broadcast secular commemoration of All Souls’ Day, an important day in the liturgical calendar, suited its secularized expression of religious faith. From 1947 to 1949, November performances of the Requiem were an annual event in Paris.42 Yet the specifically French and Catholic origins of the Requiem’s secularized expression of general mourning have not prevented the piece from gaining immense popularity internationally, especially in North America, where Duruflé conducted the work several times while on five concert tours with his wife, the organist Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, between 1966 and 1971.43 The first recording, made in November 1958 with Duruflé conducting, won the Grand Prix du Disque in France in 1959; as of January 2011, there were at least thirty-five different professional recordings available for sale, featuring leading vocal soloists, choral conductors, and orchestras, from Dame Janet Baker to Robert Shaw, from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to King’s College, Cambridge. These do not include

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the presence of individual movements of the Requiem in compilations with titles like Best Choral Album in the World . . . Ever! (Agnus Dei), Horizons: A Musical Journey (Sanctus), and Hymn for the World 2 (Sanctus).44 Nor do they include Michael Jackson’s use of a two-minute sample of the Pie Jesu at the beginning of his 1995 song “Little Susie,” which prefaces Jackson’s own anguished singing of lyrics protesting child abuse.45 Duruflé’s Requiem has also enjoyed a career as music for memorial services, mostly nondenominational occasions in the United States sung by student or amateur choirs. Struggling choral singers can learn their parts from MIDI files posted on the Internet.46 Such widespread postwar success for Duruflé’s Requiem might suggest that the immediate postwar critical emphasis on the piece’s timelessness was prescient. Why, then, need we discuss the historical details that link the Requiem to the Vichy regime and to France under German occupation? Duruflé’s Requiem, after all, is worlds apart from Gailhard’s Ode, in which explicit propaganda in favor of Vichy seems to have rendered the work unperformable even before the regime’s demise. To put it another way, what is the nature of the relationship, if any, between the historical details about France at the time of the piece’s genesis and the music that is internationally popular today? To answer these questions, I will examine closely the choral scores that Duruflé composed based on plainchant. For the impact of the Vichy commission on Duruflé’s Requiem can be heard not just in his decision to compose a piece based on plainchant, but also in the particular choices he made in creatively transforming the plainchant into a new composition. Plainchant was central to Duruflé’s identity as an organist and musician. If one includes two early organ pieces, works based on plainchant spanned his entire creative life, from his student years at the Conservatoire to the last period of creativity that Duruflé enjoyed before a near-fatal car accident in 1975 severely restricted his musical activities. According to Duruflé, the Requiem originated in an organ suite not unlike his early organ works. The fact that he took a path to its completion that differed both from the early organ works and from the later choral works that he based on plainchant was, I would argue, due to his receiving a state commission for a symphonic work in 1941, and to his decision to fulfill that commission with his Requiem.

a lifelong engagement with plainchant Any modern engagement with music and words of the medieval era is by necessity a highly mediated one. The absence of rhythmic indications in the

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figure 5. Plainchant for the Introit to the Mass for the Dead (Liber usualis, 1930).

medieval notational systems for plainchant presents the biggest challenge for a modern composer who seeks to incorporate medieval plainchant into a polyphonic composition for multiple singers and instrumentalists. The Solesmes method of rhythmic interpretation of plainchant in performance was the system to which Duruflé turned in the composition of his Requiem. Basing their ideas on thorough study of plainchant notation in medieval manuscripts, the monks at the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes proposed that the plainchant be sung not with added pulse and meter, which had been common practice in nineteenth-century France, but with a rhythmic system that respected the alternating strong and weak syllables of the plainchant’s Latin words. Although in 1880 Dom Pothier had advocated a free approach to rhythm—“who dreams of scanning his words while speaking?”—in 1908, his successor, Dom André Mocquereau, proposed that rhythmic signs be added to Solesmes’s editions of plainchant to indicate with more precision the relative durations of the syllables.47 Several of these rhythmic signs (such as half bar lines, dotted notes, and vertical lines below notes) can be seen in the Introit to the Mass for the Dead, as notated in the Liber usualis, the twentieth-century chant book used until Vatican II in 1963 (fig. 5).

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example 14. Comparison of Introit, Mass for the Dead: (a) Transcription of Solesmes notation (Liber usualis, 1930); (b) Tenor/bass melody, Maurice Duruflé, Requiem, op. 9, Introit, mm. 2–12. (Ex. 14b: © 1948 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) (a) 2

Re

qui em

ae

tér

na

m

Re

qui em

ae

tér

na

m

(b)

(a) 7

dó

na

é is

Dó

mi

ne

dó

na

é is

Dó

mi

ne

(b)

By using the Solesmes version of the monophonic plainchant as the basis of a composition for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, Duruflé had to adapt the more flexible rhythmic notation of plainchant used by the Solesmes monks to the modern metrical notation legible to modern performers so as to keep a large ensemble of musicians from falling apart. Duruflé, who sought guidance on the interpretation of Solesmes notation from Auguste Le Guennant (the director of the Institut grégorien in Paris), was especially interested in how the Solesmes method placed the rhythmic ictus, or accent, not on the tonic Latin accent but instead on the last syllable of each word.48 By placing the last syllable of the Latin word on the initial beat of a measure in modern metrical notation, Duruflé surmised that (in his own words) the “weight” or “monotony” of the modern strong beat would disappear, leaving only weak beats: “The marvelous Gregorian melody and the Latin words take on flexibility, lightness of expression, restraint, and a mild immateriality that liberate it from the compartmentalizing of our bar lines.”49 Example 14 compares the opening of the Introit, first in my own transcription of the Solesmes notation, and, below that, in the vocal line sung in unison by tenors and basses in Duruflé’s Requiem (for which the full score appears in example 15). Duruflé’s shifting time signatures are meticulously contrived to place the last syllables of most Latin words on the strong beat of a new measure—for Duruflé, the most important aspect of the Solesmes approach to rhythm in plainchant.

example 15. Maurice Duruflé, Requiem, op. 9, Introit, mm. 1–7. (© 1948 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) Andante moderato ( = 56) Cl. 1, 2 in B B. Cl. in B 1 Hn. in F

S

A sostenuto T 8

Re

qui

em

ae

Re

qui

em

ae

sostenuto

B

Andante moderato ( = 56) Vn. I

Vn. II

Va. sostenuto 1, 2 unis.

Vc. (div. en 4)

sostenuto 3, 4 div. Sourd. sostenuto

Cb. (Moitié) sostenuto

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example 15 (continued) 1

â

â

8

ter

nam

ter

nam

do

do

Sourdines

div.

Sourdines

div.

1

Duruflé was also meticulous in his respect for the Solesmes rhythmic notation, with one unavoidable exception. Whereas the use of the dot to double the duration of the preceding note and the use of a half bar line to indicate a rest between phrases were easy to transcribe into modern notation, the Solesmes invention of a vertical episema—a line below a note to signal the ictus, or emphasis, on that note—had no direct modern

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notational equivalent. According to Le Guennant in his treatise Précis de rythmique grégorienne, a singer following the Solesmes notation can choose whether or not to use a longer duration to emphasize the ictus; moreover, the longer duration need not be exactly twice the original duration.50 Duruflé capitulated to the necessities of modern metrical notation by maintaining equal durations for all notes with vertical lines. Instead of lengthening duration to mark the ictus, he consistently placed the ictusbearing notes on strong beats of the measures in which they occur, thereby using intensity rather than duration for emphasis. In the passage in example 14, he altered the duration of only one note from what was indicated in the Solesmes notation: the G in measure 8, to avoid having to use either a bar of 41 after one of 86, or an irregular grouping (3 + 3 + 2 in the meter of 88 ). Duruflé’s interpretation differs only slightly from that of the Solesmes monks in their 1930 recording of the Introit, in which the monks retain the flexibility recommended by Le Guennant in the nonmetrical notation: some notes with the vertical episema are slightly lengthened, while others are not lengthened at all. Le Guennant wrote that the rhythmic ictus could take on different characters in what is called the “rhythmic synthesis”: the level of interpretation that brings together all melodic, rhythmic, and textual considerations. After citing a passage from Dom Mocquereau’s Le Nombre musical grégorien on the variety of ways singers can create emphasis in plainchant, Le Guennant recommended to his readers to “listen very attentively to the recordings of Solesmes [directed by Dom Joseph Gajard], playing again and again several times in a row the same piece”—advice that Duruflé seems to have taken to heart.51 Duruflé’s careful adaptation of the Solesmes method of medieval plainchant performance anchors his Requiem in a specific time and place: namely, France in the first half of the twentieth century. Nineteenthcentury reformers such as the monks of Solesmes, who had been fighting against the secularization of music for the French Catholic liturgy that followed in the wake of the French Revolution, saw their efforts vindicated in 1903. That year, Pope Pius X issued in a motu proprio a sweeping definition of the kinds of music to be performed in worship. The Pope called for a restoration of Latin-texted medieval plainchant as the most sacred form of music in the Catholic Church and endorsed (not without controversy) the Solesmes method of transcription of the medieval plainchant to be reproduced in modern missals. Massive efforts followed to train seminarians, establish choir schools at cathedrals, and instruct

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congregants in reading and singing medieval plainchant in liturgical services. French Catholic composers of Duruflé’s generation learned plainchant in this way as children enrolled in choir schools: in Duruflé’s case, as a choirboy in the cathedral school of Rouen from 1912 to 1918, where he was trained in the Solesmes method in order to provide music for the cathedral’s worship services.52 Several French composers, including Duruflé, also wrote new music based on medieval plainchant, either to be used in worship (a development welcomed by Pius X as long as the new works were in accord with liturgical law) or for concert performance. Although Duruflé’s Requiem has been performed at public funeral services (such as the composer’s own in 1986), the work falls into the latter category: Duruflé’s use of the orchestra and his occasional liberties with the words disqualify the work as liturgical under the terms of Pius X’s 1903 motu proprio. Three years after completing his Requiem, Duruflé drew on medieval plainchant to compose his Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens, op. 10, a set of a cappella choral works that this time followed the Vatican’s guidelines for music suitable for liturgical use. They were written at the request of Le Guennant, to whom they are dedicated. Le Guennant, who had been instrumental in Duruflé’s understanding of the Solesmes method of plainchant performance in his composition of the Requiem, was not only the head of the Institut grégorien but also maître de chapelle at three congregations in Paris (Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou, Notre-Dame du Rosaire, and Notre-Dame de Clignancourt).53 Durand published the four motets separately in 1960, signaling the possibility of performing them both as a set and individually. Duruflé, in his memoirs, dated their composition to 1950 and indicated their suitability to be sung during the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a devotional liturgy that includes songs and prayers as well as lengthy periods of silence.54 The service features two hymns sung by the congregation, O Salutaris Hostia and Tantum Ergo, both attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. Both consist of the last two stanzas from Eucharistic hymns for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Whereas the plainchant for the first three of Duruflé’s motets came from several different services (Ubi Caritas from vespers on Maundy Thursday, Tota Pulchra Es from the second vespers for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and Tu es Petrus from the first vespers for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul), rendering these pieces suitable as optional music during the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the fourth, Tantum Ergo, had a specific role to play in that service. The centrality of the plainchants Duruflé selected for his motets to their conception, and the importance of the Solesmes method to their

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performance, is immediately evident upon glancing at the published scores. On the first page of each motet, just below the title and above the score, is reprinted the first phrase of the plainchant in Solesmes notation. Duruflé’s treatment of the music and words of the medieval plainchant in the Quatre motets both builds on and expands the techniques he used in his Requiem. Once again, Duruflé used shifting time signatures, the weak metric placement of accented Latin syllables, and meticulous correspondence between the rhythmic symbols of Solesmes notation and the conventions of modern metrical notation to maintain the rhythmic flexibility the Solesmes method was designed to promote in plainchant performance. But in these motets these techniques are refined much further than they had been in the Requiem, and they create a different effect. Duruflé’s treatment of the opening phrase of the first motet, Ubi Caritas, is a case in point. As in the Introit to the Requiem, Duruflé selected certain passages of the plainchant from which he appropriated both music and words; in other passages, he retained only the text. From the original hymn—a strophic melody with three verses and an antiphon, or refrain, to be repeated before each verse—Duruflé retained the music and words of the refrain and the words of the first verse. The refrain is sung twice at the beginning and once at the end of Duruflé’s motet, followed by a wordless vocalise; in between, the musical setting of the verse is freely composed. A novel element here, perhaps inspired by the lack of instrumental accompaniment, is Duruflé’s antiphonal setting of the opening refrain and the first phrase of the verse, for which he divided the altos and basses into two choirs. There are also subtle differences in Duruflé’s treatment of rhythm in Ubi Caritas. Compared with the Requiem, it is much more precise. In the Introit of the Requiem, Duruflé had limited his shifting time signatures to those in common use: 42 , 83, 86, and 89. In his setting of the refrain in Ubi Caritas, he added a bar of 41 at the end of the phrase of the plainchant (ex. 16). The reason for the bar of 41 was to render the dotted square note of the plainchant phrase as a quarter note, and thus twice as long in duration as the square note without the dot. At the same time, a bar of 41 instead of 42 allowed the repeat of the phrase to enter without an intervening rest. In addition, beginning the repeated phrase with a new bar of 42 allowed Duruflé to avoid placing the accented first syllable of “caritas” on the downbeat of the next measure. This is a noticeable increase in precision from the Introit of the Requiem, in which Duruflé emphasized rather than minimized the ends of phrases by lengthening the final dotted notes to half notes and adding an entire measure of silence before the next phrase.

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example 16. Comparison of Ubi Caritas, hymn for Vespers on Maundy Thursday. (Ex. 16c: © 1960 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. Solesmes, in Solesmes notation (Liber usualis, 1930).

U

bi

cá

ri

tas

et

á

mor,

Dé

us

i

bi est.

b. Transcription of A in modern notation.

U bi cá

ri

tas et

á

mor,

Dé us

i

bi

est

c. Alto melody, Maurice Duruflé, Quatre motets, op. 10, Ubi Caritas, mm. 1–8.

U bi cá

ri

tas et

á

mor,

Dé us

i

bi

est

In the same phrase of the Introit, as we may recall, Duruflé even altered the duration of a note to avoid having to use the meter of 41 , a meter he does not shy away from using in Ubi Caritas. In Ubi Caritas, moreover, Duruflé applied a more systematic approach to his treatment of the Solesmes notational conventions than in the Requiem, including those that are the most difficult to render in modern metrical notation: the vertical episema, which denotes the rhythmic ictus, and the horizontal episema, which is not associated with the ictus but indicates, in Le Guennant’s words, an “expressive nuance.” As we have seen in the Requiem, both of these signs may, at the discretion of the performers, be rendered through a slight lengthening of the note’s duration.55 In the Introit to the Requiem, Duruflé opted to use the metrical accent rather than duration to translate the notes marked by the vertical episema, placing these notes on strong beats of the measure and lengthening them only when needed to preserve the prevailing meter he had chosen. In the refrain to Ubi Caritas, however, Duruflé doubled the duration of not only the note marked with the horizontal episema, but also of the note that follows. The effect is to emphasize the pause or break within the first phrase of the plainchant that, in addition to the horizontal episema on the second to last note, is also marked by a quarter bar line after “amor,” the word in question.

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A reason why Duruflé may have been more systematic in his observance of the horizontal episema in Ubi Caritas than in the Introit to the Requiem is suggested by his even more systematic approach to rhythm and duration in the fourth motet, Tantum Ergo (ex. 17). Duruflé’s setting distributes the words and melody of the plainchant Tantum Ergo as a duet for the sopranos and tenors, with supporting counterpoint in the altos and basses. The soprano line consists of the plainchant, set note for note, until the final “Amen,” with the Solesmes rhythmic notation systematically rendered as even quarter notes for every square note-head, half notes for every dotted square note-head, a quarter-note rest for every full bar line, and a changing pattern of time signatures that ensures that every note marked with a vertical episema lands on a strong beat. The tenors imitate the soprano line canonically at a remove of two beats; the addition of passing tones, neighbor tones, and suspensions with eighth-note values works together with a louder dynamic marking and the performance indication “un peu en dehors” to provide an embellished counterpoint to the soprano melody. As a hymn sung by the congregation in multiple services—the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and Holy Thursday—Tantum Ergo (consisting of the last two stanzas of the well-known thirteenth-century strophic hymn Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium) was, of all the plainchant melodies Duruflé selected for his motets, the one most likely to be recognized by listeners in a liturgical setting. Thus Duruflé’s motets amounted to a reenactment of plainchant that French Catholic congregants knew how to sing themselves, in a performance style they would have recognized, it being the one used to teach the congregational singing of plainchant in France and around the world in the wake of Pius X’s 1905 motu proprio. Just as the composer’s decision to set the plainchant as a cappella vocal polyphony rendered Duruflé’s Quatre motets suitable for liturgical use (in contrast to his earlier Requiem), his more systematic interpretation of Solesmes rhythmic notation in the Quatre motets provided knowledgeable congregants with a more familiar rendering of plainchant than the comparatively artful adaptation of plainchant rhythm in the Requiem. Even in the Introit to the Requiem, where Duruflé hewed the closest to the Solesmes interpretation of rhythm, he created no mere utilitarian transcription but an original work composed according to his own creative ideas on harmony and form. The plainchant consists of an antiphon and psalm recitation, followed by the repeat of the antiphon; it is in mode 6, (Hypolydian), with a range from F to C and a reciting tone of A.

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example 17. Comparison of Tantum Ergo, hymn for Feast of Corpus Christi. (Ex. 17c: © 1960 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. Solesmes, in Solesmes notation (Liber usualis, 1930).

Tán tum er

go

Sa cra mén tum

Ve

ne

ré mur cér nu i:

b. Transcription of (a) in modern notation.

Tán tum er

go

Sa cra mén

tum

Ve ne ré mur cér nu

i

c. Maurice Duruflé, Quatre motets, op. 10, Tantum Ergo, mm. 1–3. Andante sostenuto ( = 72)

Tán

tum ni

ér tó

go ri,

Tán Ge

Sa ge

cra ni

mén tó

ér tó

go ri,

Sa ge

tum ni

ér tó

go ri,

Sa ge

cra ni

Tán Ge

tum ni

ér tó

go ri,

Sa ge

tum ni

tum que

cra ni

mén tó

tum que

(un peu en dehors)

8

Tán Ge

mén tó

tum que

cra ni

Duruflé begins with the opening antiphon, harmonized in D minor. The opening chord, a tonic minor seventh, thus contains the final, the reciting tone, and the highest note of the plainchant over a D pedal (see example 15). For the antiphon’s concluding words, “luceat eis” (shine upon them), Duruflé uses some word-painting, changing from D minor to a D-major triad that initiates a modulation to F major: the D-major triad is a secondary dominant of ii in the new key, which leads to a plagal cadence of a first-inversion D minor seventh to the new tonic of F major. Duruflé respects the order of the plainchant’s sections while changing

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the pitch of the psalm recitation for variety: the first two phrases are recited on C, after which the next two phrases are recited on G. After a short orchestral interlude, the antiphon returns, once again modulating from D minor to F major. Yet this is no mere repeat: the opening plainchant melody is now in the first violins, imitated in canon at the fifth below by the second violins, with the vocal parts providing freely composed unison and four-part choral harmonizations. Thus, despite Duruflé’s attentiveness to the Solesmes version of the plainchant in the opening vocal parts, the overall impression is that of an original composition for concert use. Nor is Duruflé’s relatively meticulous attention to rhythm and duration in the Introit sustained throughout all the movements of the piece. The popular Sanctus and the Libera me are particularly free in these regards. In the composer’s own words, “At times I completely respected the musical text [of the plainchant]; . . . at other times, I was merely inspired by the Latin text.”56 As example 18 shows, Duruflé began the Sanctus with a much rougher paraphrase of the third phrase of the plainchant, “Hosanna in excelsis,” than he had composed for the plainchant in the opening of the Introit. In the phrase’s first appearance in Duruflé’s setting, notes with vertical episema in the Solesmes version are generally placed on strong beats and dotted notes are lengthened, even if the application of those concepts is inconsistent and passing tones abound. But these mild departures from the Solesmes version are a mere prelude to the climactic passage that follows, in which Duruflé abandons Solesmes for the more typically modern text setting practices that he himself would later compare unfavorably with that of Solesmes plainchant.57 In repeated settings of the text “Hosanna in excelsis,” Duruflé placed the tonic Latin accents of the words on downbeats of the modern meter, first in a four-bar phrase sung by the altos at rehearsal number 46, and next in a faster, two-bar phrase for the tenors at rehearsal number 48 and imitated in all four vocal parts. This highly repetitive, accented text setting for the chorus, with its shortened upbeats and strong arrivals on the downbeats, evidently responds to the military fanfares in the instrumental parts: the approaching footsteps in the lower strings and timpani, the horns and trumpets exchanging calls that grow louder and louder. In his 1949 review Gavoty singled out this moment almost apologetically in his description of a piece he otherwise praised as “a miracle of discretion,” declaring that although “Duruflé was not afraid, when necessary, to make the trumpets sound, their calls were never theatrical, as they are in Verdi.”58 Nevertheless, the contrast within a single movement between the Solesmes version of Latin text setting in

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example 18. Comparison of Sanctus, Mass for the Dead. (Ex. 18c: © 1948 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) a. Solesmes, in Solesmes notation (Liber usualis, 1930).

Ho sán na

in

ex

cél sis.

b. Transcription of (a) in modern notation.

Ho

sán

na

in

ex

cél

sis

c. Soprano melody, Maurice Duruflé, Requiem, op. 9, Sanctus, mm. 18–21.

Ho sán na

in

ex

cél

sis

plainchant and a modern style of Latin text setting within a freely composed fanfare is one of the most dramatic—not to say theatrical—effects in the entire Requiem. Why did Duruflé not approach the plainchant of the Requiem Mass in the same reverent way as he did in the Quatre motets? In his 1950 interview with Maurice Blanc, Duruflé stated about his Requiem that his “intention was to write a religious work for the church,” and that the “intricate” link between words and music in the plainchant caused him to rethink his original idea of composing an organ suite. But this leaves unexplained both the scoring of the piece for soloists, chorus, organ, and orchestra rather than a cappella voices (as would have suited “a religious work for the church”), and the much greater departure from the plainchant in the melodic writing that rendered it nonliturgical.59 It seems likely that contrasting commissions conditioned contrasting results. The fact that Duruflé received a relatively generous commission for a symphonic work in 1941 supplies what was missing from the composer’s 1950 account of the genesis of the Requiem. The original suite was, in Duruflé’s own words, likely “transformed into something more substantial that naturally called for chorus and orchestra” in order to fulfill the terms of the 1941 commission. In 1950 Duruflé made very different decisions on

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matters of scoring and of how flexible to be in his approach to plainchant when asked by Le Guennant to write the Quatre motets, which were intended from the start for liturgical use by the church choirs under Le Guennant’s direction. Precisely the differences in the compositional choices Duruflé made for the Requiem and the Quatre motets show the two pieces to be alike in their suitability to their respective time and place. Just as the Requiem was uniquely suited for public concert performance in a recently liberated France that had yet to resolve how to face the damage done during the war but still needed to mourn, the respect and devotion Duruflé paid to Solesmes plainchant in the Quatre motets placed them in the mainstream of new music composed for liturgical use in the Catholic Church in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, one year after the publication of Quatre motets, Duruflé received one of the highest honors bestowed by the Catholic Church, the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, in which he was designated a commander.60 Ranked fourth among the five papal orders of knighthood conferred by the Pope, the Order of Saint Gregory is a secular order of merit that is awarded upon recommendation of the bishop of one’s diocese in recognition of a person’s demonstration of loyalty to the Vatican through personal virtue, piety, or achievement.61 Although the recipients of the Order of Saint Gregory are not restricted by religion or nationality, there is evidence to suggest that Duruflé’s meticulous attention to the Vaticanapproved Solesmes editions of plainchant in his recent compositions was a decisive factor in his having received papal recognition. Three years previously, the same papal award had been given to the Belgian composer Flor Peeters, who was almost Duruflé’s exact contemporary and whose compositional output and career as organist were strikingly similar to Duruflé’s.62 Moreover, the award presented to Peeters in 1958 and Duruflé in 1961 had been given in 1908 to Amédée Gastoué after he had been appointed by Pope Pius X in 1905 to work with Dom Pothier on the Vatican-authorized Solesmes plainchant editions.63 In 1949 Peeters published in French and English the Méthode pratique pour l’accompagnement du chant grégorien / A Practical Method of PlainChant Accompaniment, which laid out principles of how to respect the rhythmic and modal patterns of the plainchant when adding organ chords.64 Duruflé’s 1950 Quatre motets are much closer in spirit to the 1950 Missa in honorem Reginae Pacis, which Peeters composed for two voices and organ, than they are to his own Requiem: both works from 1950 were composed for liturgical use and for musicians (voices, organ) likely to be found in every religious setting in which the music might be performed.65 Yet

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Duruflé’s Quatre motets stop short of following the harmonic recommendations in Peeter’s practical manual, which advised musicians accompanying plainchant to favor minor triads and seventh chords over major triads, to use inversions for major triads when they are used, and above all to avoid the use of dominant sevenths, which, according to Peeters, “constitutes a demarcation line separating us from the essential characteristics of the old Modes.”66 Duruflé used major triads in root position as well as in inversions quite freely in Quatre motets, particularly in Ubi Caritas, which also contains frequent authentic cadences (albeit without the seventh); he has a distinct fondness for added ninths; and he even uses an applied dominant seventh in Tu es Petrus. In a later plainchant-inspired work, the 1966 Messe “Cum jubilo,” op. 11, he expanded his harmonic experimentation to include bitonality and octatonicism. Overall, Duruflé approached the use of plainchant in modern polyphonic composition by being faithful to melody and rhythm—albeit more so in the Quatre motets than in the Requiem—but modern in harmony. The balance of old and new did not come easily to him, particularly in works for chorus and orchestra. Although Duruflé, a former student of Paul Dukas, had composed his Trois Danses, op. 6, for orchestra in 1932 (which itself originated in a failed 1927 commission for incidental music), he had never written anything for chorus and orchestra before the Requiem.67 It is possible that receiving a state commission emboldened him to combine his orchestral and liturgical training in one piece. Duruflé not only sought help with the composition of the Requiem from Nadia Boulanger; he also repeatedly expressed both his anxiety about the project—“I am terrified by the adventure I have embarked upon,” he wrote to her in summer 1946—and his gratitude for her advice in several letters. In 1957, a decade after the completion of the Requiem, he was still referring to the “marvelous advice” she gave him when he was “working so painfully” on this piece. In December 1961 he even credited Boulanger for the honor bestowed upon him by the Vatican, which he believed was for the Requiem: “A large part [of this honor] comes back to you . . . because without your enlightened advice I would never have been able to finish this work that I had dared to begin.” When he wrote his second piece for chorus and orchestra in 1966— the Messe “Cum jubilo”—Duruflé turned once again to Boulanger.68 The texture of this late piece is greatly simplified by Duruflé’s eschewal of vocal polyphony, for the exclusively male chorus always sings monophonically to orchestral accompaniment. Duruflé wrote several pieces over his lifetime that drew on the Solesmes editions of plainchant that had inspired his Requiem. Among them, the

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Requiem, decidedly the most secular among his adaptations of medieval plainchant, is the one that has gained the most international popularity since its premiere. The paradox of the Requiem’s postwar reception is that the most secularized of Duruflé’s works based on plainchant has been, among his plainchant-based works, the one most celebrated for its respect for and devotion to the timeless sounds of medieval liturgical plainchant.

vichy and the requiem in france today The extent to which the Requiem’s postwar date of completion and the widespread admiration of its timelessness have obscured its historical ties to wartime France was demonstrated with startling clarity on 11 January 1996 when the chorus of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris sung the Introit, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Lux aeterna for the public funeral mass for the former French president François Mitterrand. Duruflé’s Requiem appears to have been chosen because of its quintessentially French sound: news reports published the next day described the emotional response in the crowd when the choir sang Duruflé’s Introit at the opening of the Mass, and when, later in the service, the American soprano Barbara Hendricks sang the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s equally French (and equally popular) Requiem.69 Yet, given the public debates about Mitterrand’s wartime activities and postwar association with former Vichy officials near the end of his second presidential term, it is unlikely that Mitterrand or his family would have selected for his funeral a piece of music they knew to have had its own connections to the Vichy regime. Mitterrand had long maintained that, after escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp in late 1941, he had, despite a brief stint in the Vichy government, swiftly joined the Resistance. The journalist Pierre Péan, however, in his 1994 book Une jeunesse française, revealed that Mitterrand’s shift from Vichy official to Resistance fighter had been far more gradual and complex.70 At the same time, there was continuing public outrage in France about Mitterrand’s ongoing expressions of sympathy for former leaders of the Vichy regime. These had taken the form not only of his decision to have a presidential wreath placed on Pétain’s grave every year on Armistice Day since 1987 (a practice that ended in 1994 after public outcry). There was also the matter of Mitterrand’s postwar friendship with René Bousquet, Vichy’s former secretary-general of police. Bousquet was cleared of collaboration by the French high court in 1949 and had a successful postwar career in banking and newspapers; he also financed Mitterrand’s unsuccessful 1974 presidential campaign. In 1986, after Bousquet’s role in

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wartime genocide became public—he had arranged for French police to arrest foreign Jews for deportation by the German occupying forces, most notoriously in the 16 July 1942 roundup of an estimated thirteen thousand men, women, and children at Vélodrome d’hiver, or Vel d’Hiv, in Paris— Mitterrand ended their friendship, yet there is evidence that Mitterrand shielded his former friend from prosecution for crimes against humanity, a process that ended when Bousquet was murdered in 1993.71 Mitterrand attempted to answer his critics in a nationally broadcast ninety-minute television interview in September 1994, an unusual move for a sitting president, but he only drew further criticism for minimizing his ties to Vichy during the war and to Bousquet afterward.72 Éric Conan called the 1994 interview a “missed opportunity” for Mitterrand to acknowledge that his story—that of someone who believed in Marshal Pétain and the National Revolution, and even passed through a period of being both loyal to Pétain and resistant to German occupying forces before wholeheartedly embracing the Resistance in 1943—was far more typical of French citizens than the Gaullist myth of “la France résistante.”73 Mitterrand’s biography also demonstrated the continuity that existed between the Vichy regime, the Resistance, and the postwar French political establishment, the denial of which had been an integral part of Gaullist mythology. Reiterating discontinuity between Vichy France and the French Republics before and after the war, Mitterrand had long contested the suggestion that it was the obligation of the French Republic to apologize for Vichy’s crimes, even as he declared 16 July, the anniversary of the roundup at Vel d’Hiv, to be a national day of mourning in France in 1993. In the 1994 television interview he reiterated emphatically, “The Republic has nothing to do with [the crimes of Vichy]. And, in my opinion, . . . France is not responsible either. It was an activist minority that took advantage of the defeat to seize power, and which is guilty of those crimes. Not the Republic, not France. Therefore I will not make any apologies in the name of France.”74 After his successor, Jacques Chirac, was elected president in May 1995, Chirac used the ceremony of remembrance at the site of Vel d’Hiv on 16 July of that year as the occasion for the first formal apology by a French leader for France’s role in the Holocaust. The wording of the apology shocked the country by declaring that “France,” and not the French state of Vichy, “had committed an irreparable act” on 16 July 1942, and that “the criminal madness of the occupier was supported by the French people.”75 The atmosphere of soul-searching and recrimination about Vichy’s crimes reflected in Mitterrand’s and Chirac’s contrasting approaches to the

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question of historical responsibility reached fever pitch in France with the 1998 trial and conviction of Maurice Papon, the eighty-eight-year-old former secretary-general of the Gironde prefecture of police from May 1942 to August 1944, of complicity in crimes against humanity. The conviction of a relatively junior official who may have used his post to help the Resistance, and whom de Gaulle had restored to his post after the liberation, was a poor substitute for the trial that had never taken place—that of Bousquet, Papon’s superior.76 Meanwhile, the French Catholic Church issued a formal apology of its own. The date, 30 September 1997, was chosen to mark the anniversary of Vichy’s first Statut des Juifs on 3 October 1940, for the apology was specifically on behalf of the French Catholic officials who remained silent about Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws and the regime’s complicity with German persecution of Jews in France. The apology, read aloud at the transit camp of Drancy and signed by the French archbishops whose dioceses had contained internment camps during the war, criticized the French Catholic hierarchy for ignoring, out of what it labeled a misplaced sense of national duty and narrow concern for France’s Catholic population, the human suffering in its midst: “Faced with the persecution of Jews, and in particular the multifarious anti-Semitic laws passed by the Vichy authority, silence was the rule, and words in favor of the victims were the exception.”77 The apology also conjectured that, had the Church played a more active role in resisting the German and French authorities, more French Catholics would have followed suit. Indeed, the historian W. D. Halls has compared the wartime attitudes of French Catholics unfavorably to those of Dutch, Danish, and Polish Catholics, despite the “better organized and potentially more formidable” French Church: “French Catholics and Protestants alike were not fully aware of the influence they could have wielded during the Occupation.”78 It was amid this atmosphere of remembrance, controversy, and apology that, in a 1999 article about Vichy’s commissions to composers, I first discussed in print (and in French) the connection between the Vichy regime and Duruflé’s Requiem.79 My claim that Duruflé had received a Vichy commission, and that the commission had resulted in his Requiem, garnered an angry denial from Frédéric Blanc, the president of the Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé. A bitter exchange between Blanc and James Frazier, an American biographer of Duruflé, appeared in The American Organist in March 2003 after Frazier supported my work in print.80 Blanc wrote that the Requiem “most certainly was not a commission from the Vichy Regime. I can prove this, having recently found an unedited [i.e.,

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unpublished] manuscript of an orchestral work bearing the notation ‘Commission by the State’ in the personal archives of Maurice Duruflé.”81 Frazier, in his response to Blanc, pointed out the obvious non sequitur: the existence of one manuscript labeled “State Commission” does not rule out the possibility of other state commissions. Duruflé had, in fact, received a second state commission in 1950 from the Administration of Fine Arts for a symphonic work, for which he was paid 100,000 francs in January 1951.82 Although I have not seen the manuscript to which Blanc refers (it is in his private collection), it is highly likely that the work in question was composed in fulfillment of Duruflé’s second state commission. It is not uncommon for close associates or family members of a deceased cultural figure to seek to distance the person and his or her work from the Vichy regime and the wartime French Catholic Church, all the more when recent apologies for the complicity of both institutions with the persecution of Jews in France have shed unfavorable light on their wartime programs. What is noteworthy about Blanc’s response to my research is that he chose to address not whether Duruflé had accepted a commission from Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts, but whether the Requiem was in fact Duruflé’s fulfillment of that commission. In so doing, he sought to protect the piece, and not the man, from the historical associations that in France in the late 1990s were the cause of national anxiety and shame. We have seen that, at the time of its premiere, early postwar critics responded strongly to the elements of the Requiem that set it apart from its historical time and place, and that, three years afterward, Duruflé went to implausible lengths to describe the work’s genesis in terms that emphasized its use of medieval liturgical music and words at the expense of the freely composed symphonic passages that excluded it from liturgical use. The international popularity of the Requiem rests precisely on those elements that are least firmly associated with any particular time or place; it was this piece, one out of only fourteen works published by Duruflé, that established the composer’s reputation outside organ circles and on an international stage. Yet, like Mitterrand’s story, that of Duruflé’s Requiem is one of nuances and shades of gray rather than black and white. Whereas there is irrefutable evidence in the Archives nationales in Paris that Duruflé was one of sixtyone composers who received a commission for a musical composition from Vichy, he did not complete (and, for all we know, he may not have even started) the Requiem until three years after Vichy’s demise. Among the composers who accepted Vichy’s commissions, moreover, were at least two members of the Resistance group Front national des musiciens (Elsa Barraine and Henri Dutilleux), which calls into question whether such an act was

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perceived as shameful at the time. What is more, the fact that the postwar Administration of Fine Arts paid Duruflé for completing a work commissioned by Vichy (and even adjusted the payment for inflation) demonstrates in microcosm the continuity that existed on several levels between the governments of wartime and postwar France. Although the composer’s meticulous attention to the Solesmes editions of plainchant was a creative expression of French national pride that was financially supported by the Vichy regime, the sounds of the medieval plainchant of the Requiem Mass have a history in France that extends nearly a millennium into the past—a longue durée that, understandably, inspires those who have listened to Duruflé’s Requiem since its 1947 premiere with a sense of timelessness. Finally, had the piece been completed during the occupation, it is unlikely it would have been deemed as appropriate to public performance during the war as it was to the public ceremonies of mourning and remembrance after the war’s end. To label the Requiem a Vichy commission and leave it at that is akin to calling Mitterrand a Vichy bureaucrat. Although it is true, it relates only one small part of a rich and complex story. In that case, why should these historical details about Vichy matter when we listen to the Requiem for musical enjoyment rather than as historical artifact? For me, they matter because Duruflé’s treatment of plainchant in the Requiem is so different from that found in the rest of his output based on the music of the medieval liturgy. This contrast, I would argue, was the product of the circumstances in which Duruflé wrote the Requiem. It was commissioned as a piece of symphonic orchestral music as part of a government effort to promote new French music during the war. At a time when the French felt besieged by German propaganda, they were redefining their own heritage even as they were defending it. The stigma attached to a Vichy connection is understandable. Yet one could also read the origins of the Requiem in a Vichy commission as having led Duruflé, who was otherwise oblivious to his surroundings and his place in history, to speak in music, not just in defense of his besieged religious tradition, but also in defense of his besieged nation. Far from diminishing it, such a resonance might even enhance the stature of this beloved work.

5 From the Postwar to the Cold War Protesting Stravinsky in Postwar France Unlike the war, which left behind death, destruction, and suffering, the occupation inflicted wounds that were not so much physical as moral and political, and that still have not finished healing. philippe burrin, La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944

stravinsky and the early cold war in france In the 1944–45 season following the liberation of Paris, the free weekly performances of the Orchestre national, broadcast live to a nationwide radio audience, introduced French listeners to music that had been inaccessible to them during the German occupation. Manuel Rosenthal, who took over the direction of the orchestra in September 1944, conducted several concerts featuring music by the persecuted (such as Mihalovici on 16 November) and the banned (Prokofiev on 19 October, Hindemith on 22 November). Rosenthal later recalled the sense of urgency he felt about using the Orchestre national as a platform to reinstate the works of composers whose music had been banned: “It was crazy to think that the public had been deprived for so long of so much admirable music, and that is why it was necessary to restore, very quickly, the predilection for such music among the public that was awaiting it.”1 His efforts received steady positive press coverage in the formerly clandestine newspapers of the Resistance, with Georges Auric at Les Lettres françaises, Roland-Manuel at Combat, and Claude Rostand at Carrefour providing informed weekly commentary. On 11 January 1945, Rosenthal and the Orchestre national inaugurated the season’s most ambitious undertaking: a series of seven monthly concerts devoted to a survey of Igor Stravinsky’s music (table 6). Henry Barraud, director of music at the French national radio, later wrote that he initiated the series, together with Rosenthal, Roland-Manuel, and Roger Désormière, because “we were sure that Stravinsky’s music, with its variations in style, would, in one blow, sweep away the memory of the impressive concerts” that promoted German musical superiority during the 151

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table 6. Stravinsky Festival programs, Orchestre national (Paris, January–July 1945) Date 11 January

15 February

15 March

12 April

24 May

21 June

5 July

Works performed Scherzo fantastique, op. 3 Suite from The Firebird Le Sacre du printemps Pulcinella, for orchestra Les Noces Capriccio for piano and orchestra Jeu de cartes The Faun and the Shepherdess Four Norwegian Moods, French premiere Symphony of Psalms The Nightingale Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments Symphony in C, French premiere Mavra Le Roi des étoiles Apollon musagète Petrushka Feu d’artifice, op. 4 Suite no. 1 Perséphone Symphonies d’instruments à vent Suite no. 2 Oedipus Rex

occupation through regular broadcasts by the German-run radio station, Radio-Paris.2 The first two concerts, consisting of some of Stravinsky’s best-known works, met with enthusiasm from critics and audience members. Meanwhile, on 27 February in a program by the Société privée de musique de chambre, Parisians had the opportunity to hear the music Stravinsky had composed in America for the first time (table 7). To the dismay of their elders, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, protested noisily during this concert’s French premiere of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes. With the program of the Orchestre national’s third Stravinsky concert on 15 March announced in advance in the press, the students came prepared. As Rosenthal attempted to conduct the French premiere of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods, the students in the balcony made prolonged use of the police whistles they had brought

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table 7. Concert program, Société privée de musique de chambre (Paris, 27 February 1945) Composer Luigi Dallapiccola Jacques Ibert Darius Milhaud Serge Nigg Igor Stravinsky

Works performed Tre laudi (1936–37), with Marcelle Bunlet, soprano Capriccio for ten instruments (1938) Four Sketches (1941); French premiere Concertino for piano, percussion, and wind instruments (1944), with Monique Haas, piano; world premiere Danses concertantes (1940–42); French premiere

with them expressly for that purpose. Most French critics rose to the composer’s defense. Although the French premiere of the Symphony in C on 12 April passed without incident, the resulting press skirmish lasted into the summer months. Boulez’s biographers have interpreted the student protests at the 1945 Stravinsky festival as a sign of the growing influence of René Leibowitz and his successful promotion of twelve-tone composition in postwar France. As Joan Peyser put it, “Leibowitz was the figure behind the demonstration but Boulez was the young man at the center of things.” In their accounts, the 27 February and 15 March concerts are conflated, and further details, such as performers and date, are omitted. What remains constant is the decisive choice young French composers—Boulez chief among them—are said to be making of serialism over neoclassicism.3 By elevating Boulez’s and Leibowitz’s participation in the 1945 protests, Boulez’s biographers are foreshadowing the debate in the West in the 1950s about the merits of serialism versus neoclassicism, as well as Boulez’s prominent role in that debate. Mark Carroll makes explicit the larger implications of the biographers’ story when he writes that “Boulez had joined classmates of Messiaen’s 1945 harmony class at the Conservatoire in heckling Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées because he, like Adorno, was of the opinion that neoclassicism was being used against the innovations of the Second Viennese School.”4 Carroll sees the 1945 Stravinsky festival as a precursor to the composer’s first physical return to postwar Paris in May 1952 at L’Œuvre du XXème siècle, a monthlong international festival of the arts during which Stravinsky conducted several of his own works, including the Symphony in C. The indirect funding that the festival received from the State Department and the CIA,

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together with the artistic biases of Nicolas Nabokov, Stravinsky’s friend who organized the festival as secretary-general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, have provided Carroll and other scholars with a direct connection between Stravinsky’s latest music and early cold war politics.5 By repeating the biographers’ version of the 1945 festival, Carroll subsumes the immediate postwar period in France into a synchronic view of the early cold war era, as if the polar opposites of the 1950s—United States / Soviet Union, modernism / socialist realism, serialism/neoclassicism—had already taken hold even before the fighting in Europe had ceased. Yet to ignore chronological distinctions between the spring of 1945 and that of 1952 is to miss crucial subtexts in the 1945 debates, thereby greatly diminishing the contributions that the study of very early postwar (and even late wartime) events might make to our understanding of music in western Europe during the cold war. The predominant interpretation of the 1945 protesters as young champions of serialism disregards the fact that it was the exoticism and mysticism of Messiaen’s music, not the serialism of Schoenberg’s, that became the next topic of debate in Paris even before the furor over Stravinsky’s music had died down. After all, as Carroll correctly notes, the protesting students were still in Messiaen’s harmony class at the Conservatoire, not in private lessons with Leibowitz. The standard interpretation also erases Nigg’s central role in the controversy, for Nigg participated not only as one of the student protesters, but also as a composer and critic. Nigg’s 1944 Concertino for piano, percussion, and wind instruments was premiered at the February 1945 chamber music concert that was the occasion of the initial protest against Stravinsky, and his April 1945 article in the newspaper Combat provided the student protesters’ perspective to the press debates that followed the protests.6 At the same time, the extent to which the 1945 debates were motivated by the participants’ wartime experiences foreshadows the enduring legacy of the German occupation during the early cold war years in France. The 1945 protests against Stravinsky were not about the decisive embrace of a single musical style; rather, they were about the desire of young French composers to play an active role in shaping the postwar future of music in France, even as they were still uncertain as to what stylistic shape that future would take. In 1945, the protesters could initially agree that the latest version of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, almost universally embraced by their elders, was intolerably retrospective. Soon afterward, however, the emerging ideologies of the early cold war linked modernist musical styles with political freedom in the West, and more accessible music with socialist political commitments in the East. These new ideolo-

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gies divided the protesters and profoundly affected their aesthetic and political developments. Boulez later wrote that the concern that Nigg and other young French composers had begun to express immediately after the war about social commitment and communication with their audiences represented “an ideology that filled me with horror, and that appeared to me above all to serve as a screen for conformity.”7 Yet, as Stephen Walsh has pointed out, Boulez’s aggressive refusal to engage directly with politics in his music was atypical: “For those less detached the question of how progressive (that is, avantgarde) art should relate to a progressive (that is, egalitarian) politics was one of the most important issues of the day.”8 Nigg—and not Boulez— represented the experiences and hopes of the postwar generation in two respects: the aesthetic opinions of a group of young composers whose entire adult musical education had taken place during the German occupation of Paris, and the political aspirations of the young French men and women who flocked to the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, or PCF) at the war’s end. Nigg joined the PCF in 1944, was a founding member (with Elsa Barraine, Roger Désormière, and Louis Durey, who all had been leaders in the Front national des musiciens [FNM] during the occupation) of the Association française des musiciens progressistes in 1948, and published several articles in the French press between 1948 and 1955 on the importance of social commitment in art. Nigg’s steady political adherence to the PCF from 1944 to 1956 contrasts with the stylistic inconsistencies in his music during the same period, during which he experimented with styles as diverse as exoticism (the 1944 Concertino), strict twelve-tone composition (the 1947 Variations), socialist-realist settings of French folk songs for workers’ choruses (published by Le Chant du monde in 1957), and orchestral music modeled on the works of Vincent d’Indy (the 1954 Piano Concerto). Nigg’s participation in the 1945 Stravinsky debates gives us occasion to examine both his earliest musical compositions and the political opinions he would express with increasing ideological fervor in the 1950s, even as he struggled to find the compositional voice that would best reflect his political convictions. Henry Rousso, in writing about France’s Vichy syndrome, has argued that the national mourning for the tragedies of the occupation in postliberation France was left incomplete by new fears of global conflict and the resurgence of anticommunism in France.9 The students who protested Stravinsky in 1945 made their aesthetic choices based on their educational experiences during the occupation; the scandalized older generation could

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not separate their opinions about Stravinsky’s latest music from their own lingering grievances about the war. But, as Rousso reminds us, it was not just the controversies of this early period that were affected by the occupation. The French experience of the occupation continued to affect the aesthetic and political perspectives of French composers well into the cold war that followed.

stravinsky in paris, 1945 The press debates that followed the 1945 Stravinsky protests in which Nigg played a leading role are the surviving traces of the passionate discussions that took place among musicians, critics, and concert-goers, both in private and in public, in early postwar France. These debates, and the music being debated, demonstrate the range of possibilities that existed for modern music in postwar France before global concerns—in the form of the escalating tension between the United States and the Soviet Union—overshadowed local ones once the cold war began.10 In her study of French musicians and the cold war, Michèle Alten argues that the French coalition government’s pivotal decision in mid-1947 to expel its communist ministers and accept U.S. economic aid through the Marshall Plan created pressures on the PCF to stifle freewheeling musical debates in the immediate postwar period in both communist and noncommunist newspapers.11 The pre-1947 debates about Stravinsky’s music provide a rare glimpse of a world preoccupied by the conflicts of the occupation, beset by anxiety about the future, and yet, at least in Nigg’s case, remarkably open as to what musical possibilities awaited the emerging postwar generation. Close examination of these debates allows us to see what the French thought of those possibilities before the hard lines of the cold war were drawn. At the same time, the Stravinsky debates demonstrate the extent to which the French premieres of Stravinsky’s music were a catalyst for expressions of the rancor that lingered among French musicians after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Composers and critics, ostensibly trading insults regarding the music of Stravinsky, were trading insinuations about collaboration and wartime guilt as well. They were, in other words, using Stravinsky as a proxy for deeper concerns about the ability of French contemporary music to recover from the trauma of the occupation. For it would be a mistake to assume that the prevailing atmosphere in Paris in the winter following the city’s liberation was celebratory. Released

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from four years of German occupation, the capital had to wait until spring before the entire country was liberated.12 Megan Koreman notes that the term libération refers not only to the end of the military conflict, but also to “the entire troubled period encompassing the restoration of Republican government in Paris, the resumption of electoral democracy, the purge of collaborators, and the deterioration of food supplies,” a phase that arguably lasted into the fall of 1946 with the referendum on a new constitution. It was, in Koreman’s words, a “transitional period between war and peace.”13 Both the material difficulties that French musicians faced and the simmering resentment toward wartime collaborators made an appearance in Auric’s review of the second Stravinsky festival concert of 15 February 1945. The previous week the Orchestre national had to cancel its live broadcast concert because cuts in electricity to the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées had prevented the ensemble from adequately rehearsing the program.14 The cold was particularly severe that winter, and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was not heated; performers and audience members alike kept their overcoats on during the concerts to keep warm.15 After the second Stravinsky concert went on as planned, Auric expressed his joy that, this week, he had music to review: “So let us forget about the cold and the blackouts. Let us now celebrate the fully recovered genius of Stravinsky, whose splendid music, now closer than ever to our hearts, we were able to appreciate on Thursday.”16 Auric nevertheless digressed from music at the end of his review to speak darkly about his displeasure at seeing Émile Vuillermoz in the audience. Without naming him directly, Auric described Vuillermoz by the company he kept during the occupation: “While Rebatet meditates—you know where—on the ‘ruins’ [décombres] of his beloved Germany, while the fates of Laubreux, Georges Blond, and Coustau are decided in the aftermath of Robert Brasillach’s execution, we saw Thursday, comfortably seated in an orchestra seat, the music critic of the weekly fascist periodical Je suis partout, the author of a preface for Philippe Henriot, the exegete of Georges Claude!”17 Vuillermoz’s music criticism appeared every other week in Je suis partout starting in October 1943; in 1944 he had written an eulogistic preface for a published collection of Henriot’s 1943 radio addresses broadcast by Radio-Paris. Through his addresses, Henriot, who had been appointed Vichy’s minister of information and propaganda in January 1944, engaged in a pro-collaborationist propaganda war with his counterparts at the BBC; he was assassinated by members of the Resistance on 27 June 1944.18

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The postwar fates of these men varied considerably. After a highly controversial trial in January, the thirty-five-year-old Brasillach, editor of Je suis partout, had just been put to death for his treasonous writings on 6 February; his associates, Rebatet, Alain Laubreux, Georges Blond, and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, were later condemned to death but were eventually pardoned.19 Rebatet, who had published his anti-Semitic memoir Les Décombres in 1942, was currently in Sigmaringen, Germany, where the French collaborationist government in exile welcomed persons fleeing prosecution in France.20 At the time of the second Stravinsky festival concert, Vuillermoz’s wartime writings—in particular, the preface for Henriot’s radio addresses—had earned him the condemnation of the Société des gens de lettres, the private association of professional writers in France. Their punishment: he was barred from membership for three years, although he could continue to receive any royalties due to him during that time.21 Auric concluded by expressing his disgust at the purification committees’ focus on French musicians who had participated in German-led propaganda efforts, such as the live public concerts broadcast by Radio-Paris from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, while a journalist of Vuillermoz’s prominence had barely been censured: While, by the caprices of an incoherent “purge,” some unlucky instrumentalists or singers at Radio-Paris are suspended, this man in his dishonored old age [Vuillermoz was sixty-six] leaves his apartment, where he ought to be happy to still find himself, for the evening and comes to publicly shake the hands of some imbeciles, lackeys, and cowards. Those of us who have not forgotten, we won’t forget this either. And, as long as we are permitted to speak and to act, we will know how to prevent, by any means necessary, “that” from being forgotten.22

All this in an article ostensibly reviewing Rosenthal’s performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Capriccio for piano and orchestra, and before any of the composer’s newest compositions were performed for the first time. The text was a reprise of Auric’s unsigned condemnation of Vuillermoz one year earlier in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Musiciens d’aujourd’hui.23 The performance of Stravinsky’s latest compositions in Paris in early 1945 was fanning the flames of a still-smoldering fire. The initial French audience for Stravinsky’s latest music at the chamber music concert on 27 February 1945 heard Désormière conduct Danses concertantes alongside the recent music of four other composers. The five pieces present a revealing snapshot of the range of new music being performed in Paris in the winter of 1945. The sounds of the pieces by

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example 19. Jacques Ibert, Capriccio, mm. 117–22. (© 1939 Éditions Alphonse Leduc. Reproduced by permission, A. Leduc et Cie, Paris.) 10 117

Bsn.

Hp.

5

5

5

Vn. I

Vn. II 3

Va.

Vc. 3

Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Jacques Ibert would have already been familiar to French audiences. In general, their three pieces share similar concerns with dance, neoclassicism, and concertante style. Two of Milhaud’s Four Sketches, op. 227, a 1941 set of short piano pieces that he had transcribed for chamber orchestra, are based on New World dance styles, a habanera (“Alameda”) and a rumba (“Sobre la Loma”), which Milhaud had already evoked in his ballet La Création du monde. Ibert’s more pronounced concern for concerted writing in his Capriccio from 1938 was shared by Stravinsky in his contemporaneous Concerto in Ea “Dumbarton Oaks.” Yet in the two pieces performed on 27 February, Ibert and Stravinsky treated melody, rhythm, and instrumentation quite differently, as is evident in a comparison of two concerted passages. In example 19, a solo episode for bassoon from Ibert’s Capriccio, the melody is lyrical and sustained, drawing in part on an octatonic scale, with a steady, almost percussive rhythm in the accompanying strings. Both melody and accompaniment emphasize the prevailing meter, even when utilizing irregular patterns of offbeats and triplets. The harp, which here contributes occasional rapid arpeggios to the accompaniment, plays

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example 20. Igor Stravinsky, Danses concertantes, III. “Thème varié,” mm. 43–46. (© 1942 schott music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany, worldwide rights except the British reversionary territories where the copyright © 1996 is held jointly by schott music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany and Chester Music Limited, London. All rights reserved.) 73 43

Var. I Allegretto

= 152

Cl. in B poco

1º Solo

poco

Hn. in F poco

poco

Tbn. ma marc.

Vn.

Va. Tutti pizz. Vc. ma marc.

a predominant role in the middle and final sections of the piece. In example 20, a solo French horn passage from the “Thème varié” of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes, the melody is pentatonic, disjunct, and punctuated by rests. Neither the melodic accents nor the spare accompanying figures that shadow the melody correlate with the triple meter of the passage. The austerity of this melody, its lack of forward motion in either pitch or rhythm, and the spare instrumentation of its accompaniment demonstrate the continuity between Stravinsky’s prewar neoclassical works, such as the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, and several of the compositions he wrote in America during the war. The reappearance of the music of Ibert, Milhaud, and Stravinsky in Paris in the 1944–45 season was a significant homecoming for all three, even if Ibert and Stravinsky’s music had appeared on French concert programs during the German occupation.24 The performances of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes and Milhaud’s Four Sketches were French premieres of recent music by prominent French exiles in America, and Ibert’s Capriccio was by a composer whose music had been marginalized in wartime concert life for

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political reasons.25 Unsurprisingly, most music critics reviewing the concert fixated on the novelty of hearing Stravinsky’s American music for the first time, and they responded with hyperbolic praise. Gone are the accusations of academicism that had greeted the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, whose June 1938 European premiere had been Stravinsky’s last concert appearance in Paris before the war.26 The earlier negative critiques were swept aside in 1945 by critics’ eagerness to embrace the return of a major musical figure to the French scene. As Auric wrote in his review, the French premiere of Danses concertantes “brought to us a message from the man of genius who dominated our youth”; the piece was “a new masterpiece by our maître, whose musical language has arrived at a surprising point of perfection.”27 Likewise, Jean Wiéner rejoiced, “After four years of penitence, during which [we received] not a note, not a sign from Stravinsky,” Danses concertantes had arrived in Paris: “It’s love at first sight, at the same time as a lesson in strength, equilibrium, and beauty.”28 Roland-Manuel declared that Stravinsky, who had surprised his admirers several times in the past, did so once more with Danses concertantes, in which a “sort of happy abandon” was “without example or precedent in the feats of this strong man.” He also revealed, and celebrated, that the program was organized so that Stravinsky’s piece was performed twice.29 Nearly absent from the critics’ responses was the fact that two of the pieces on the program presented distinctly different approaches to composing new music. In Tre Laudi Luigi Dallapiccola was experimenting with twelve-tone procedures in idiosyncratic ways. The opening soprano melody consists of a twelve-tone row and its retrograde over a B-minor triad played by the woodwinds, muted brass, harp, and lower strings in harmonics—a much richer use of instrumentation than in Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes. The symbolic use of twelve-tone rows against a sustained triad to represent, in the words of Raymond Fearn, “the splendor of the stars in the firmament,” is limited to the opening measures; the rest of the piece is diatonic.30 The newest music in the concert was the world premiere of Nigg’s 1944 Concertino for piano, percussion, and winds. Audiences in Paris had already heard Nigg’s music during the German occupation: his Piano Sonata no. 1 in 1943, performed by Yvette Grimaud only two years after Nigg had begun his studies with Messiaen at the Conservatoire, and Nigg’s first orchestral composition, the symphonic poem Timour in February 1944, performed by Désormière and the Orchestre national.31 Although Nigg has since destroyed the score and parts of the Concertino, contemporaneous documents describe in detail its musical style.32 In late 1945 Frederick

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Goldbeck at Contrepoints asked several composers to answer a short survey about their own music. Nigg described his earliest compositions as “strongly colored by exoticism and primitivism”; he wrote of music that is “atonal, in the sense that it is not tonal, but in no way dodecaphonic . . . [and] more contrapuntal than harmonic, with a large role for rhythmic pedals.” In program notes for a 1947 concert, Nigg specified that the influence came from “exotic music and Le Sacre du printemps.” A subsequent report in Contrepoints on Nigg’s recent activities reveals that the Concertino belongs to this initial phase of Nigg’s compositional development, when he was strongly influenced by the music and aesthetic preferences of his teacher, Messiaen.33 Rostand was the sole reviewer to acknowledge not only that Stravinsky’s music shared the program with the works of Nigg and the other three composers, but that Danses concertantes and Four Sketches had also met with vocal protests from the audience. Rostand shared the other critics’ tendency toward hyperbole when it came to describing Danses concertantes: “If music, in its diverse forms, has ever been able to express the most inexpressible beauty, surely it is here, in this language whose terms are nearly inhuman.” Rostand did not mince words about “the young cretins who, the other night, attempted quite unnecessarily (and quite pitifully) to manifest their imbecilic bad humor” against Stravinsky. Whereas Rostand was intrigued by the novelty of Dallapiccola’s Tre Laudi, with its “surprising expressiveness” and “surly, rugged melodic line,” his review of Nigg’s Concertino took on a patronizing tone: “[Nigg’s] music is far from indifferent, even if it is not always pleasant. It is merely necessary to advise him not to depend on formulas that were tested now almost thirty years ago, and that he otherwise manipulates with skill and ferocity.”34 Presumably, with Nigg’s own descriptions of his music as primitive, atonal, and contrapuntal, Rostand’s reference could be either to the Stravinsky of Le Sacre or Schoenberg’s early atonal works, both equally invalid in Rostand’s eyes as models for a twenty-year-old composer in 1945. With all but one of the reviews of Danses concertantes published by March 10 (and thus well in advance of the third Stravinsky festival concert on the fifteenth), the stage was set for the generational conflict that manifested itself at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in the press for several weeks afterward. When critics and composers published their opinions about the protests against the Four Norwegian Moods, they described the students’ rejection of Stravinsky’s latest works as unpatriotic, disrespectful, and hopelessly out of date. Roland-Manuel compared the 1945 protests with those that met the premiere of Le Sacre in the same hall thirty-two

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years earlier. The students’ mistake was to idolize the “revolutionary” Stravinsky of 1913 and denounce the “academic” Stravinsky of 1945: “They are wasting their breath, for this great artisan has never concerned himself with either one.”35 Auric made the same comparison and warned against any return to the modernism of the past: “It took us twenty years, but we finally rid ourselves of an absurd conception of ‘modernism’ that seems to me today to be completely outmoded.” Make no mistake, Auric continued: the night of March 15, “the ‘young musician’ was Stravinsky. He will be there in twenty years, in a century. At that moment, we will no longer be here. Neither will most of the mediocre compositions, hastily written and artificial, that I would have hoped not to mention.” The reference is a thinly veiled jab at Nigg’s Concertino, which Auric, in his review of the chamber music concert of February 27, had indeed failed to mention.36 The angriest of them all was Rostand, who decided that, this time, the “young cretins” of the initial protest needed to have Stravinsky’s importance to France spelled out for them. Using language that had special resonance scarcely six months after the liberation of Paris, Rostand declared: Mr. Igor Stravinsky—a Russian, as we all know—honored France by becoming a naturalized French citizen. Nearly his entire stunning career has taken place in France and was made by France. He honored us by premiering in Paris the majority of his most important works. He honored us by occasionally looking into our national culture to enrich his genius. He honored us by bringing to the contemporary French school certain aesthetic or technical elements that gave it, in part, its grandeur and its vitality. He even did us the honor of being a genius. And now, after a ban of five years whose stupidity is equaled only by the intolerant imbecility now shown to him, there is a pitiful attempt to attack him with some absurd recrimination at the first sign of his return among us!

Rostand followed his emotional outburst by marveling, somewhat disingenuously, that the Norwegian Moods—which he described as admittedly not among Stravinsky’s “loftiest creations”—could have inspired such vicious protests, “about which there was nothing spontaneous.”37 The matter might have rested there, had not Rostand’s heated rhetoric generated an equally heated response. Entitled “Enough of Stravinsky!,” André Jolivet’s article on April 4 turned Rostand’s nationalist rhetoric on its head. If Rostand had raised the specter of a wartime ban on Stravinsky’s music, Jolivet made reference to the live public concerts hosted by RadioParis at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées during the occupation to promote the superiority of German over French music. And now, Jolivet complained,

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“we are called to the same theater to adore a new idol whose Frenchness was only temporary.” Our compatriots ought to realize, Jolivet insisted, “that Stravinsky has taught us nothing in the realms of rhythm, melody, orchestration, or formal architecture; that French musicians find these diverse elements of musical composition in their most advanced form in our own tradition.” For Jolivet, the 1945 Stravinsky festival was “the last circle of hell [in French, a play on words between cycle Strawinsky and cycle d’enfer] that French music must cross in order to merit the radiance that the French ought to help it to attain.”38 In Jolivet’s opinion, if Barraud and Rosenthal had wanted to erase the memory of the German music festivals at Radio-Paris, they should have celebrated the music of a native Frenchman.39 The references by Rostand and Jolivet to the recent German occupation were highly charged in the spring of 1945. Questions of whose music had been banned by the German occupying forces, as well as the legacy of German propaganda in occupied Paris, were hotly debated even before Paris was liberated. Rostand’s goal was to elevate Stravinsky for having suffered a wartime ban on his music in France; Jolivet’s was to associate Stravinsky instead with the parade of German composers promoted during the occupation at the expense of the French. Neither claim holds much factual merit. Stravinsky’s music was openly performed in occupied Paris by the major French orchestras, which submitted their programs to German censors in advance, as well as by chamber music series such as the Concerts de la Pléiade; performances of works by Stravinsky were broadcast not only by Radiodiffusion nationale, but also by Radio-Paris. Charles Münch’s June 1944 performance of Les Noces with the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire even shared several soloists with Rosenthal’s in the second Stravinsky festival concert in February 1945.40 Apart from the novelty of featuring the music Stravinsky had composed in America for the first time, the 1945 Stravinsky festival represented a striking degree of continuity with concert programs from the occupation. In Stravinsky’s case, what had changed after the liberation was not the style of the music being performed but the ability of audience members to react so freely in public to the music they heard. Jolivet’s resentment toward Radio-Paris and its pro-German propaganda was widely shared. During the occupation, the Grand Orchestre de RadioParis attracted French musicians and conductors with generous salaries— twice as high as they would earn in the Opéra orchestra or in the Orchestre national—and a programming schedule dominated by music broadcasts. Festivals ranged from the inevitable Beethoven and Wagner celebrations to

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occasional showcases of new German talent, such as the composer Werner Egk, who led the orchestra in October 1942 in an evening-long concert of his own works, including an excerpt from his opera Peer Gynt, the production of which at the Paris Opéra in October 1943 was broadcast live by Radio-Paris.41 After the liberation the focal point of French anger was composers such as Egk, whose music had been reviewed favorably during the occupation by French and German critics alike (including Delannoy and Honegger) and not the venerated German classics whose music had dominated the programs of all the symphony orchestras in occupied Paris. There was even less animosity toward foreign composers as a group.42 RolandManuel, in one of the first issues of Les Lettres françaises to appear after the liberation, wrote disdainfully that the music of recent German composers such as Egk presented an inappropriate model for the French, due to “a romanticism that is out of step with modern life,” even as he advocated that the French not reject the German classics simply because the Germans had denigrated French music.43 In an atmosphere where new music from several countries was featured in the Orchestre national’s 1944–45 broadcast concerts and embraced by the French press (and the audience that filled the theaters), Jolivet’s nationalist diatribe against Stravinsky was decidedly out of place. It did not take long for people to say so in print. Three days after Jolivet’s article appeared, Le Figaro published a response by Poulenc on its front page. Unlike flustered critics such as Rostand, Poulenc proclaimed that young people had the right to reject the music of their elders. But the “pseudo–young people” (presumably, the forty-four-year-old Jolivet) “who owe the meager varnish of modernism that covers their own works solely to the research—already surpassed by the composer himself—of the Stravinsky of 1913” were a much more serious matter. All contemporary music, in France and elsewhere, stemmed from Stravinsky’s work, Poulenc proclaimed. He then countered Jolivet’s innuendo with some of his own: “We ought to have the decency to acknowledge our debt; let’s not push the debate to the level of nationalism, as has, imprudently, one musician, of whom one only asks that he forget a certain incidental music written inadvisably during the occupation to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the most illustrious German playwright. I suppose that my frankness in setting the record straight may earn me several enemies. Far from bemoaning this fate, I celebrate it.”44 The incidental music in question was composed by Jolivet for the play Iphigenie in Delphi by the Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann during its 1943 production in French translation at the Comédie-Française. The

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production, in honor of Hauptmann’s eightieth birthday, was planned by the director of the Comédie-Française, Jean-Louis Vaudroyer, under pressure from the Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF) to expand the theater’s offering by German playwrights. Jolivet conducted his music—his first appearance at the ComédieFrançaise—for the play’s nine performances because the theater’s regular conductor, Raymond Charpentier, refused to participate.45 The production was broadcast on Radio-Paris on the evening of 21 July; two days later, Radio-Paris broadcast baritone Jacques Jansen, with pianist Marthe PellasLenom, singing Jolivet’s Trois Complaintes du soldat.46 The irony that Poulenc meant to highlight was that Jolivet, who was now objecting strenuously to Rosenthal’s celebration of a foreigner, had himself participated in—and may even have benefited professionally from—one of the innumerable festivals in honor of German cultural figures during the occupation. Despite Poulenc’s insinuations, Jolivet was never under suspicion for his wartime activities; his family, in fact, was under threat from Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws.47 Following so closely after Jolivet’s January 1945 appointment as music director at the Comédie-Française, however, Poulenc’s public reminder of Jolivet’s participation in the Hauptmann production was inopportune. Whereas Poulenc reacted to Jolivet’s nationalist call to arms against Stravinsky with insinuations about Jolivet’s wartime activities, RolandManuel chose instead to recount sarcastically the cosmopolitan influences on Jolivet’s compositional development. On 12 April in Combat he described how, back in the “good old days” (aux temps joyeux) of the interwar years, the likes of Schoenberg and Varèse (Jolivet’s teacher from 1930 to 1933) had given to French music a fresh, native flavor and found inspiration in “the most authentic sources of our national tradition.” Jolivet had in turn been “so obligingly attached to the manifestations of French genius” that he followed every new (and foreign) trend that came along. Roland-Manuel saw the controversy as “a new querelle des bouffons,” a phrase that he used as the title of his article. In his opinion, the protesters’ efforts to protect French music from the “foreign” influence of Stravinsky would be as unsuccessful as the eighteenth-century partisans of the tragédie lyrique had been against the incursion of Italian opera buffa in France.48

young french composers, 1945 Finally, on 14 April, one of the protesters spoke up about their activities in print. Having already published two articles by their own music critic,

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Roland-Manuel, the editorial staff at Combat decided to respond positively to the protesters’ request for equal treatment.49 It seems appropriate that the job fell to Nigg, for his music had already figured in the debate. The most recent reference to Nigg had appeared in Combat only two days earlier, when Roland-Manuel had linked Nigg’s Concertino with Jolivet’s recently premiered Chant de Linos to argue that, by protesting Stravinsky’s music, Jolivet and his “little band of partisans” were only “barking at [Stravinsky’s] heels.”50 It was a metaphor already used by Poulenc, albeit more crudely, when he spoke of “little yappy dogs . . . lifting their legs at the pedestals of statues.”51 Yet, whatever musical similarities may have existed between the selfavowed exoticism of Nigg’s Concertino and Jolivet’s use of ancient Greek funeral laments as a model for Chant de Linos, the two composers’ justifications in print for rejecting Stravinsky in 1945 could not have been more different. Most notable is the complete absence of nationalism in Nigg’s provocative explanation of the protesters’ motivations. Nigg chafed at the remarkable unanimity in favor of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as a model of new music composition in postwar France. Instead of the “querelle des bouffons” with its nationalist overtones, Nigg sarcastically evoked later eighteenth-century musical quarrels that had been resolved in favor of an established genius: “So, no defenders of Salieri? No one for Piccinni? Everyone has recognized Mozart and Gluck; what joy!” Nigg listed the labels applied in recent articles to the protesters for having expressed their skepticism: “conformists of nonconformity,” “neo-academics,” and “devotees of modernism at any price.” “What is all this jargon hiding?” he asked. “Incontestably, a guilty conscience.”52 That one loaded little phrase encapsulates the gap between the generation that had come of age in occupied France and its elders. In the minds of French critics, the end of the occupation was an opportunity for French composers to pick up where they had left off in 1939, when the war had begun and several French musicians had been mobilized to fight in the armed forces. Their rediscovery of Stravinsky was a “grand leap backward,” a phrase coined by Serge Guilbaut in reference to the fall 1944 Picasso retrospectives in Paris.53 Guilbaut interpreted the postwar embrace of Picasso as an attempt by the French art world to erase the nightmare of the occupation and return to the point at which the war had intervened. In the case of Stravinsky, the return was to an imaginary version of prewar Paris, one where Stravinsky’s new music had met with universal praise, not the mixed reception that had actually greeted the composer’s final prewar appearance in the capital in 1938.

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Such a return made no sense to French composers of Nigg’s generation, who were intensely aware of their own place in history. Nigg’s emphasis on the necessity of meeting present-day demands confirms Guilbaut’s analysis that “this concealment was certainly therapeutic but would not allow Paris to take charge of the enormous ideological and emotional transformations that the postwar had in store.”54 “Ought we,” asked Nigg, “to prolong or end definitively the neoclassical current that for nearly thirty years has dragged in its wake every mediocre element, and finds its justification in the decadent works of a great man?” Rather, he asserted, the contemporary artistic production of the so-called “young imbeciles” who protested Stravinsky ought to at least bear what he called “the traces of a profoundly felt uncertainty.”55 The “profoundly felt uncertainty” proposed by Nigg for young French composers in 1945 was the polar opposite of the critics’ hyperbolic certainty in Stravinsky’s postwar relevance. Nigg’s position also presented a striking contrast with the knowing self-assurance that dominated the prescriptions offered by French composers, critics, and administrators to young French composers during the occupation. The Vichy government had worked actively to promote new French music by calling on young composers to return to their heritage and by condemning the so-called stylistic gimmickery of the past twenty years through which the traditions of that heritage had been cast aside. At Vichy’s Administration of Fine Arts, the disdain of the director, Louis Hautecœur, for what he called modernism’s “fashionable myth” of originality resonated with older French composers whose values and ideals had been displaced by new currents in modern music since 1918.56 The state’s commissions program ensured that young composers who embraced their heritage received the recognition and financial remuneration their music deserved. Nigg entered the Paris Conservatoire at age seventeen in 1941, followed by Boulez, who arrived in Paris in 1943 at age eighteen.57 Although they were too young to have been directly affected by wartime government programs for contemporary music, the education they received at the Conservatoire was not immune from the wartime nationalist embrace of tradition and the past. Nigg was a student in the first harmony classes Messiaen taught at the Conservatoire in 1941 following release from a German prisoner-of-war camp. Composition classes were taught not by Messiaen, but by Henri Busser and Max d’Ollone. Busser, a member of the Institut de France and professor of composition since 1930, made clear to his students at the Conservatoire that his lineage was from his teachers Ernest Guiraud and Charles Gounod, that his model was Fauré, and that in his class,

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they were to adopt his lineage as their own.58 Although neither Nigg nor Boulez studied with them, these men held powerful positions in wartime French musical life, with d’Ollone appointed the director of the OpéraComique in 1941 and Busser appointed music director at Radiodiffusion nationale in 1943. Boulez spent one year in a preparatory class taught by Georges Dandelot before joining Messiaen’s harmony class in fall 1944. During the occupation, Busser, Honegger, and Tony Aubin—d’Ollone’s successor at the Conservatoire in 1945—were vocal proponents of the so-called New French School of young composers, and Dandelot was both a representative of the school and a beneficiary of French government support. In the realm of orchestral music, the precursors of the New French School were clear. Honegger put it best in his 1941 review of a Debussy festival, quoting Wagner (in the original German) to make his point. “ ‘Honor our German masters!’ sings Hans Sachs at the end of The Meistersingers. He is right. Let us honor our French masters. After Debussy and Ravel let it now be the turn of Vincent d’Indy, Roussel, Florent Schmitt, and all those who are the honor and glory of France.”59 The battle that d’Indy had waged at the turn of the century on behalf of a French symphonic tradition, with its explicit goal of proving French competence in a domain perceived to be inherently German, had never been laid to rest. In 1913 d’Indy was predicting that French composers would fulfill the socalled “mission” of symphonic development that had begun with Haydn and Beethoven.60 Thirty years later, Aubin declared that recent compositions by Dandelot, Henri Tomasi, and others provided the necessary indications that the New French School would justify d’Indy’s optimism. A return to the rigor of d’Indy’s approach to la musique pure, Aubin argued, was exactly what was called for in the France of 1943.61 Aubin was referring to Dandelot’s recent music: a piano concerto, two sonatinas (one for flute and piano, the other for violin and piano), a string quartet, and a piano solo, as well as the 14 February 1943 premiere, by Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, of his Symphony in D, which had been commissioned by the Administration of Fine Arts in 1941.62 Dandelot had come into direct contact with d’Indy in a conducting class at the Conservatoire, and his Symphony in D fulfilled many of the demands that d’Indy had mapped out for the genre in his Cours de composition musicale, such as a folklike theme that outlines the steps of a triad, the contrapuntal reworking of material, cyclical connections between movements, and an overall progression from harmonic obscurity to tonal clarity. The piece is in three movements (Allegro vivo, Lento, Vivo) played without pause; the fanfare theme of the final movement is derived from the

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second theme of the opening Allegro and alternates with a simple folklike melody given in several contrapuntal variations. In the program notes for the premiere Dandelot demonstrated his allegiance to d’Indy’s model by insisting that his symphony had not been inspired by any “literary or anecdotal” programs.63 The premiere of Dandelot’s symphony—which, in a tacit fulfillment of d’Indy’s historiography, shared the program with Beethoven’s Seventh and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole—was greeted with measured approval by French critics who drew the obvious connections between Dandelot’s new piece and the Schola tradition, especially in the third and final movement. Even Serge Moreux’s criticism that Dandelot was not prepared to tackle this most difficult of genres reinforced the idea of the symphony as the touchstone of a composer’s musical maturity. With this “purely French” work, critic Jean Douel wrote, Dandelot had joined the ranks of those who had declared war on the morbidity that had previously characterized contemporary music, thus bringing honor to the New French School as a whole.64 A recording of the slow movement of Dandelot’s symphony was included in the anthology produced by the AFAA in 1943–44 to promote contemporary French music abroad.65 The only way that wartime Conservatoire students such as Nigg and Boulez could gain access to new music that differed from this restrictive view centered on the French tradition was through the teachings of Messiaen, either in his official harmony classes or the private lessons he was offering concurrently.66 In addition to scores by Debussy, Wagner, and Ravel, Messiaen’s students read and played medieval polyphony, nonWestern music, and modern works by composers ranging from Stravinsky (Le Sacre du printemps, Petrushka, and Les Noces) to Bartók (Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste) and the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire; Berg, Wozzeck and the Violin Concerto; Webern, Variations, op. 27).67 Of Stravinsky’s music, Messiaen was notably fond of teaching his students in both classes about rhythm in the early Russian ballets, particularly Le Sacre.68 But his ambivalence toward Stravinsky’s neoclassical works dated to at least 1931, when he stated, “It seems to me that all French music today is focused on the Albert Roussel of the Suite en fa and the symphonies, and early Stravinsky,” and he described Apollon musagète as “like a piece by Lully with a few wrong bass notes.”69 Nigg later told Jean Boivin, “We thought, in [Messiaen’s] class, that the grand Stravinsky was that of Le Sacre, Les Noces—works of that genre.”70 Nigg echoed his teacher’s opinions in his 1945 Combat article when he decried the critics’ dismissal of Le Sacre. As Nigg put it, if the critics saw

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Le Sacre as an outdated source, “how can they dare support those who draw upon the much more valuable, yet unsurpassable, resources of the Brandenburg concertos!”71 It is likely that Messiaen’s students’ experience of the academicism of wartime compositions such as Dandelot’s Symphony in D predisposed them to accuse Stravinsky of a similarly suffocating adherence to tradition when they discovered that he had continued the neoclassical trends of the prewar “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto in his American compositions such as Danses concertantes. The students had not yet heard Stravinsky’s Symphony in C—its French premiere was scheduled at the next Stravinsky festival concert, on 12 April—but the parallels between the symphonies of Dandelot and Stravinsky are striking. Stravinsky may not have followed d’Indy’s prescriptions for the genre as closely as Dandelot, choosing his models instead in the symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven. Yet Stravinsky certainly shared not only Dandelot’s aversion to emotional content, but also the assumption of Dandelot’s reviewers that the symphony was the most respected of forms.72 It is difficult to see what could be more academic than Stravinsky’s classical four-movement symphony, with the modified sonata form in the first movement, the cyclical connections between the outer movements, and an almost overwhelming Beethovenian motivic unity. As Edward T. Cone has written, “What [audiences] would find [in their programs]—the announcement of a symphony openly characterized as tonal, with four movements following the traditional order— would suggest a conservative, not to say reactionary pastiche. (What they might have read previously in popular accounts of Stravinsky’s ‘retrogression’ would only confirm the surprise.)” Cone argues that such an assumption would be misleading, for, in his view, Stravinsky had transformed, not reproduced, convention.73 Such a distinction would probably have been lost on the French students in 1945. They may not have even attended the fourth concert, for no further protests took place. It is possible that, with a piece entitled Symphony in C on the program, they decided they had heard enough of Stravinsky’s American works to justify their rejection of him. With the publication of Nigg’s article, a clash was now inevitable between the hyperbole of the critics who supported Stravinsky and the now-stated position of the protestors. Indeed, the continuing press debate over the third Stravinsky festival concert continued well past the performance of the fourth concert on 12 April, overshadowing the French premiere of the Symphony in C. Among rare reviews of the concert, Roland-Manuel prefaced his positive assessment of the Symphony in C with the sarcastic

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observation that Rosenthal was “defying Mr. André Jolivet’s ban” by continuing the festival.74 Auric did not even review the Symphony in C, publishing instead, on the day of the concert, a lengthy diatribe against Nigg. Quoting Nigg’s objection to critics’ comparisons of the student protesters in 1945 to the “little old ladies” who booed Le Sacre in 1913—Nigg had asked incredulously, “Do we now live in an age when young people look to the past, whereas the middle-aged grow younger?”—Auric expressed his hope that there still existed some young people who did not make the mistake of looking backward. Whereas his initial response to the protesters on 24 March had been fairly polite, Auric’s response to Nigg’s Combat article bristled with rage: “I know perfectly well that, thankfully, all the young musicians do not look to ‘the past,’ this past that is—and will definitely remain, I am certain—an aesthetic derived laboriously from several otherwise magnificent pages of Le Sacre and also, alas, from the laboratory where Mr. Schoenberg long ago mixed his evil poisons with diabolical skill.” Auric admitted that, in 1918, he and his comrades may have been impressed by Schoenberg’s musical ideas, but these ideas had no place in today’s world. “How can anyone, in 1945, refuse to comprehend that the stench of a cadaver emanates from an imposter art that fools us no longer?”75 Yet it was Nigg’s use of the word “uncertainty” that particularly incensed Auric. After quoting Jolivet as an unnamed “improvised critic” who claimed that “Stravinsky has taught us nothing” (Auric’s emphasis), Auric wrote, “At that point, dear Mr. Nigg, you pull out a superb police whistle and believe that you are bearing witness in this way to a convincing ‘uncertainty’! This time, however, we are the ones who are uncertain. We wish to accord all young artists the benefit of the doubt, but what is there to say in response to your whistles?” Auric’s sarcastic appropriation of Nigg’s “uncertainty” to indicate the skepticism of his generation—they are the ones who are uncertain about Nigg’s claims—reveals his deep attachment to the idea of returning to Stravinsky as the surest way to proceed in the uncertain times of 1945.

messiaen and leibowitz in paris, 1945 Auric’s anxiety was not just about the uncertainty that Nigg expressed in response to the proposed renewal of neoclassicism in postwar France. It was also about what young French composers might embrace instead. Auric referred in his 21 April article to early Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s atonal works. This was music he knew Nigg had been studying in Messiaen’s classes, and it was Nigg’s absorption of them as models in his Concertino

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that both Auric and Rostand had recently deplored.76 Although Auric did not mention Messiaen directly in his attack on Nigg, Messiaen was a central part of the Stravinsky controversy as early as the 27 February French premiere of Danses concertantes. In his 10 March review Rostand implicated Messiaen in his students’ disruptive behavior without directly naming him. Were it true that the protesters were his Conservatoire students, Rostand continued, “he would be giving them a very strange education.”77 In private, Poulenc wrote matter-of-factly to Milhaud in March about Messiaen and the protesters: “The Messiaenistes are very ‘against Stravinsky last period.’ For them, the music of Igor stops with Le Sacre.”78 By the time of the third Stravinsky festival concert, Messiaen was sufficiently conscious of the association to have gone backstage after the performance to personally apologize to Rosenthal.79 Meanwhile, Messiaen had become embroiled in a controversy of his own. On 26 March, Yvonne Loriod performed the premiere of his new Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. The first major premiere of Messiaen’s music since the liberation was met with widely diverging opinions by French critics, some of whom were unsparing in their condemnation. Two opposing views appeared in the press on 3 April in the midst of the continuing controversy over the recent Stravinsky protests. Roland-Manuel in Combat wrote warmly of Messiaen’s sensuous spirituality and the originality of his theoretical system, whereas in Le Figaro Bernard Gavoty condemned Messiaen for what several critics would cite as the composer’s main failings: the “abysmal” verbal commentaries whose connection to the music was opaque at best, and the recondite theoretical system that was at odds with the expressive goals of the composer. “Is this heaven?” Gavoty concluded, “No, it’s purgatory.”80 With Messiaen now the subject of his own press skirmish, Poulenc and Roland-Manuel, responding later that week to Jolivet’s diatribe against Stravinsky, felt obligated to defend Messiaen from any guilt by association—either with the protesters who were his students or with his colleague Jolivet. Poulenc acknowledged on 4 April in Le Figaro that it was an “established fact” that both the “timid” protests at the Danses concertantes premiere and the “premeditated” ones against the Four Norwegian Moods were led by Messiaen’s students. But he defended Messiaen as a person of “integrity” and “intelligence” who ought not to be negatively associated with the actions of his students. Roland-Manuel, in his 12 April response to Jolivet, wrote that, unlike Jolivet, Messiaen was “a great musician who is content to write his music. Mr. Jolivet, who is no longer a young man and who is not yet a great musician, would do well to model himself on his

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colleague.”81 The importance of these published statements of support to Messiaen at this time is evident in a letter Messiaen wrote to Poulenc on 19 April to thank him for his “direct, frank, and chivalrous article, in which you so nicely defended me. . . . I feel less alone now that you have spoken for me. Thank you with all my heart.”82 With the even more tumultuous premiere of Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine on 21 April at the Salle du Conservatoire, the controversy persisted. The concert was a major event in Paris musical circles: the first by the Concerts de la Pléiade since the liberation, with Désormière conducting the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and the Chorale Yvonne Gouverné singing premieres of Milhaud’s Quatrains valaisans, Poulenc’s Un soir de neige, and several selections of Renaissance polyphony.83 Nearly everyone involved in the Stravinsky controversy was there, from Messiaen’s students (Nigg, Boulez, Jean-Louis Martinet, Pierre Henry) to the critics who had defended Stravinsky (Auric, Wiéner, Roland-Manuel, Rostand) and the composers who had recently joined the debate (Poulenc, Jolivet).84 That morning Rostand had published a notoriously harsh review of a recent organ recital by Messiaen. In language that he later recanted in print, the critic excoriated Messiaen for his verbal excesses and mocked his juxtaposition of sensuality and religion as vulgar and in poor taste.85 What resulted was yet another protracted press debate, now surrounding Messiaen the composer instead of Messiaen the teacher, that was soon dubbed “Le Cas Messiaen.”86 Messiaen himself found the furor traumatic. For his students, however, the event was galvanizing: Nigg later described the Trois petites liturgies as “symbolizing the spiritual renewal of the country” after the terrible years of German occupation.87 Poulenc reported triumphantly to Paul Collaer in Belgium that, between the Stravinsky protests and the Messiaen premiere, musical life in Paris had come alive.88 His opinion was shared by Messiaen’s friend, Guy Bernard-Delapierre, in an article published shortly after the premiere: “In this [city of] Paris liberated a few months earlier, slowly relearning how to live, the sudden revelation of this masterpiece took on the solemnity of a grand event.”89 Gavoty prefaced his discussion of “Le Cas Messiaen” in the fall of 1945 with a side-by-side description of the two scandals.90 Some six years later, Rostand regarded the press furor as the enthusiastic embrace of freedom of speech that had recently returned to France, commenting, “Everyone [except Messiaen, presumably] had a great time” (s’en donna à cœur joie).91 The two controversies were sufficiently intertwined that Messiaen responded to both simultaneously in May. From Messiaen’s perspective, the

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quarrel was about Stravinsky, and it made little sense to him to have been placed in the middle of it. He argued that Stravinsky was only a “pretext” to the real issue of the uncertainty surrounding music composition in the present day. What we are waiting for, he declared, was a composer who would come after Stravinsky and neoclassicism. Messiaen’s description of the anticipation surrounding this musician was self-consciously biblical: After Stravinsky, Honegger, and Bartók we await a musician who is not neoclassical but who is so profoundly and brilliantly revolutionary that his style can one day be called classical. Several French and foreign composers have already tried to fill this role: they are the precursors of this surprising genius. When will he appear? In twenty, fifty, seventy years? What a burden of influences, hesitations, reappraisals, detours, hopes, experiments, and partial successes will weigh upon his shoulders! Because it will be from all of us that he will be born: he will be our conclusion, I was about to say our Amen.

Neoclassicism had served its purpose and produced its masterpieces (he named Symphony of Psalms as one), but, Messiaen urged, critics ought to condemn “false revolutionaries” who claimed that “ ‘the new music, it’s us’ [‘la musique nouvelle, c’est nous’] simply because they have shifted a few bass lines in a Donizetti cavatina!” But there was no need to continue the recent name-calling: “My dear detractors, leave Stravinsky in peace; his fame has no need of us. Stop tormenting André Jolivet. . . . Don’t accuse my dear students unjustly. And if some of the young—without my knowledge—display their enthusiasm or their disapproval too noisily, be glad of their passionate feelings, signs of a more generous and humane generation.”92 It is striking that, in speaking of “the young” as potentially representing “a more generous and humane generation,” Messiaen was referring to students who were less than twenty years younger than he was. What separated Messiaen—and Jolivet— from the students more definitively than age was the experience of having reached adulthood and having received an education before the September 1939 declaration of war against Germany.93 That sense of divide deepened as several of Messiaen’s students began to study with Leibowitz in a gradual process of desertion from the late spring of 1945 on.94 Although Messiaen felt that the central musical figure of the time had yet to appear, Leibowitz was clear in his conviction that this figure was Schoenberg. Leibowitz had begun his postwar campaign on behalf of Schoenberg and twelve-tone composition soon after the liberation, organizing in November 1944 a Schoenberg-Debussy concert as well as private concerts in early 1945. Leibowitz proclaimed the language of

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exclusive historical inevitability for twelve-tone music in his announcement for the 1944 concert in Combat, accusing Parisians of “long before the ban imposed by the German occupation . . . [having] accepted a sort of conspiracy of silence around what seems to me to be the most important music of our time.” With the end of the occupation, “the time has come,” Leibowitz proclaimed, “to familiarize the man of today with a mode of expression that he will recognize, sooner or later, as the only musical language suitable to be discussed at the present time.”95 The few critics who took notice of Leibowitz in the fall of 1944 scoffed at his ideas. Roland-Manuel dismissed him as “a priest of a deconsecrated temple,” and Auric derided Schoenberg’s music during the 1945 Stravinsky festival.96 During the Messiaen arguments, Poulenc protested when the preface to Leibowitz’s Introduction à la musique de douze sons appeared in a lavish volume of Cahiers d’art dedicated to French artistic efforts during the occupation, juxtaposing Leibowitz’s arguments on behalf of Schoenberg with the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque and the poems of Éluard and René Char.97 “Everyone knows,” Poulenc wrote, “that, aesthetically, my nationalism is among the most flexible.” It was not mindless flag-waving, he argued, but common sense to wonder why a French composer was not given the place of honor in this volume. Why not an essay on Messiaen, “whose rapid ascent is truly the most crucial event in French music in the past four years? There’s a musician who doesn’t need to split a hair twelve ways to enrich our heritage in a spectacular fashion.”98 Poulenc’s nationalism, a potent force in the French experience of the Second World War, was at the heart of the generational divide. As we have seen, Nigg had no need of Jolivet’s nationalist rhetoric to reject Stravinsky as a model for young French composers. Likewise, Schoenberg’s nationality did not prevent Nigg from embracing Leibowitz’s view of the historical inevitability of twelve-tone composition by the time of his previously mentioned late 1945 Contrepoints survey response in which Nigg proclaimed twelve-tone composition as “the inevitable outcome” of a broad historical progression from modality to a tonality increasingly destabilized by chromaticism.99 Boulez agreed, later commenting on the French rejection of Schoenberg after the war that “for quite some time, especially in French circles in Paris, it was said that this music had nothing to offer us because it was so Central European that it ran counter to our entire culture. Well, I think there is no sillier way of looking at the issue. Even if the music is foreign to your point of view, if you are interested in your personal development, you must confront these works.”100 Messiaen’s students were eager to learn more about the unfamiliar twelve-tone works of Schoenberg

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and his students in no small part because such a system of composition was so different from anything to which they had ever been exposed. As Martinet later explained, the “psychological climate of the postwar period and the deprivations of the occupation” made young musicians such as himself eager to “explore all the possibilities that were offered to them.”101 Messiaen may have unwittingly contributed to his students’ receptivity to Leibowitz, for Messiaen’s tolerant attitude toward twelve-tone composition contrasted greatly with the intolerance of contemporaries such as Auric. In his own response to the 1945 Contrepoints survey, Messiaen refused to embrace or exclude any style in advance: “Why ban this or that? If it pleases me to use [the] major [mode], to mix it with my modes, or to oppose it to them? If it pleases me to imitate bird song or Hindu ragas? If it pleases me to suddenly employ serial techniques because I need them, suddenly?”102 It is important to emphasize, however, that Messiaen’s ecumenical outlook did not extend to Stravinsky’s neoclassical works. He reiterated his disdain in October 1945 when he decried neoclassical composers as “placing around their works a modern sauce that fools the ears of the public, which imagines having heard ‘modern’ music.”103 Despite having apparently apologized to Rosenthal after the third Stravinsky festival concert, Messiaen was unrepentant in a February 1946 interview: “I cannot accompany my students to concerts with a billy club in my hands.” “I admire Stravinsky,” he continued, “but I believe that Le Sacre marked the pinnacle of his genius.”104 Messiaen’s students fully embraced his opinion in their protests of March–April 1945. It is true that their next teacher, Leibowitz, shared Messiaen’s disdain. After the 1945 Stravinsky festival Leibowitz repeated his earlier condemnation of Stravinsky’s “academic” neoclassicism from the 1938 Paris premiere of the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, writing that he would leave to others a closer analysis of Stravinsky’s recent pieces: “Given the scant attention Stravinsky pays to his scores today, I don’t see why I should get worked up about them myself.”105 But Leibowitz’s article “Stravinsky, or, The Choice of Musical Misery,” in which this statement appears, was not published until April 1946, one year after the protests had taken place.

the legacy of the occupation and the early cold war in france Leibowitz’s 1946 article was one of the last contributions to the Stravinsky controversy. One senses that, although the protests themselves already belonged to the past, the issues raised in the ensuing debates continued to

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resonate in the early years of the cold war in France. In Leibowitz’s words, “The criticism that some made of [Stravinsky]—namely, his abandonment of a certain explosiveness [and] of a search toward the discovery of new means of expression—is exactly that which others raised as a virtue. Thus we find ourselves before problems that go beyond the simple ‘Cas Strawinsky’ and call into question the most fundamental questions of today’s musical life.”106 Yet Leibowitz’s insistence on the exclusive historical inevitability of Schoenberg’s model soon alienated at least one of his new students. Boulez’s lessons with Leibowitz lasted only a few months; as he later explained to Goléa, he had come to the conclusion that “Leibowitz, for serial music, was the worst academicism; [he was] much more dangerous for serial music than tonal academicism had ever been for tonal music.”107 Having rejected the content of Leibowitz’s dogma, Boulez nevertheless continued to embrace both the singularity of Leibowitz’s vision and the strong aversion to nationalism that was typical of the generation that had come of age during the occupation. For Boulez there was only one valid way to proceed, and that way could only be found in the rejection of history. When Boulez revisited the 1945 Stravinsky protests in 1971, he reiterated his conviction that, after the “brilliant firework display” of their early years, both Stravinsky and Schoenberg were “haunted” by “history with a capital H.” His conclusion: “I shall praise amnesia.”108 Defining the political significance of Boulez’s postwar rejection of his national heritage in favor of an aesthetic based on revolutionary compositional techniques—what Leibowitz called “the search toward the discovery of new means of expression”—has proven to be elusive. It is telling that when Carroll proposes a political interpretation of Boulez’s Structures 1a in the 1952 L’Œuvre du XXème siècle, the same festival that brought Stravinsky himself to postwar Paris for the first time, he uses the metaphor of neutralité. It is the very inscrutability of Structures 1a to any interpretation that Carroll argues is a representation of the French desire to resist political pressures from both East and West and find its own unique path during the early cold war.109 Indeed, despite the CIA’s role in funding festivals such as L’Œuvre du XXème siècle in Paris in 1952 and Music of the XXth Century in Rome in 1954, both of which included the music of serial composers, the case for arguing that the CIA promoted high modernism is much weaker in music than it is in literature and the visual arts. More plausible is Ian Wellens’s contention that we ought to interpret postwar musical modernism “not as a political statement, but as a withdrawal from conventional politics, and one which . . . laid it open to appropriation.”110 As Wellens points out, whereas the Paris and Rome festivals were vigorously

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opposed by left-wing politicians and publications, Boulez participated in the Paris festival and objected to the Rome festival because of its pompousness, not its politics.111 By contrast, Nigg’s postwar trajectory was profoundly shaped by his yearning to forge a direct connection between his musical aesthetics and his political convictions. Initially, Nigg’s postwar choices, like those of Boulez, were motivated primarily by musical polemics. Before 1947 the PCF displayed a tolerant attitude toward the lively debates over the future of French music that were taking place in left-wing French newspapers among party members like Nigg as well as noncommunists.112 In Nigg’s April 1945 Combat article about the 1945 Stravinsky festival, any traces of Nigg’s membership in the PCF are deeply submerged in vague talk of “an ethics of musical creation” and a sarcastic observation that “just as everyone today is a socialist, everyone is equally in favor of the music of the future.”113 Meanwhile, Nigg was gravitating to Leibowitz to study twelve-tone compositional methods, attracted by the ideal of a universal language mandated by history and uniquely suited to creating “a new musical order” founded on rational and logical principles.114 Nigg remained loyal to Leibowitz much longer than Boulez and is often numbered among the first French composers to embrace twelve-tone methods. For instance, his Variations for Piano and Ten Instruments was among three French contributions—the others were by Leibowitz and another of his students, André Casanova—to Leibowitz’s International Festival of Contemporary Chamber Music in homage to Schoenberg, which took place in Paris on 25 and 29 January 1947.115 Nigg’s eventual rupture with Leibowitz, which was motivated primarily by politics, was far more complete than Boulez’s had been. At the end of 1947 a rapidly changing political landscape forced Nigg to confront the idea that his aesthetic affinity for twelve-tone composition and his political membership in the PCF might no longer be compatible. In March–April 1947 in Moscow the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were unable to come up with a peace plan for Germany and Austria that did not involve partition.116 Escalating tensions in Europe between the two superpowers put pressure on the PCF to bring the activities of all its members into closer alignment with official Soviet directives. The February 1948 resolution of the Soviet Communist Party made clear the consequences in the Soviet Union of disregarding the party’s directives on socialist realism and formalism in music. The resolution’s text was widely discussed in France as early as March 1948 and published in French translation two years later.117

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When, in May 1948, French musicians who sympathized with the PCF traveled to Prague to attend the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics, they learned what the Soviet Communist Party expected of communist musicians in the West. Nigg joined several other French musicians in signing the Prague Manifesto, which laid out these expectations, and in forming the Association française des musiciens progressistes, an organization meant to promote the manifesto’s principles. These were fourfold: to renounce “extreme subjectivism” in their music in favor of the expression of progressive ideals; to defend their national cultural heritage against “falsely cosmopolitan tendencies”; to pay more attention to the vocal forms (operas, oratorios, cantatas, choruses) that would best convey progressive ideals in music; and to musically educate the masses. The manifesto was published in Les Lettres françaises, now under the control of the PCF, in October 1948.118 Nigg’s initial reaction to the Prague Manifesto was to try to find a way to reconcile his avant-garde compositional style with his Communist Party membership, which was itself rooted in his belief in the necessity of social commitment in art. One week after Les Lettres françaises published the Prague Manifesto, the newspaper published an interview between Nigg and his fellow “musicien progressiste,” the music critic Pierre Kaldor. Nigg embraced without condition the idea that all music composition “expresses a social reality, which it is shaped by,” but he defended his right as a composer to use avant-garde methods to achieve socialist ideals. When Kaldor questioned Nigg about the difficulty of his proposed synthesis, Nigg responded that a composer was now obligated to try to “integrate his most extreme research with what people had the right to expect of him, in a synthesis that could constitute the foundation of a truly new music.”119 Nigg attempted to create such a synthesis with his 1949 oratorio Le fusillé inconnu, only to abandon twelve-tone methods in his next major work, the symphonic poem Pour un poète captif, as well as the choral works he was then writing for groups such as the Chorale populaire de Paris.120 It took until 1954, however, for Nigg to accept the manifesto’s directive to embrace his national heritage in his nonchoral concert works. In his Piano Concerto of 1954, Nigg used d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français for piano and orchestra of 1886 as a model in composing a deeply conventional three-movement work. Like d’Indy, Nigg opened his concerto with a French folk tune—first heard, as was d’Indy’s, in solo woodwinds over muted strings in a slow introduction—that recurs throughout the rest of the first movement. Nigg’s concerto was reviewed enthusiastically in Les Lettres françaises by Renaud de Jouvenel, who compared his music favorably to

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Soviet composers Aram Khachaturian and Arno Babadjanian and praised his rediscovery of his national heritage: “Serge Nigg is French. It is an experience that does not often happen to us to watch the birth of a French composer of whom we can be proud.”121 De Jouvenel later claimed that he was the one who introduced Nigg to the French folk song “Filles, chantez le mois de mai,” which became the theme of his Piano Concerto. Until 1954 de Jouvenel had been the director of Le Chant du Monde, a music publishing and record firm funded by the PCF.122 In 1952 Le Chant du Monde issued a recording of Nigg’s choral harmonizations of French folk songs, including “Filles, chantez le mois de mai,” and published them in 1957, the same year the firm published Nigg’s Piano Concerto. Yet such a close embrace of his national heritage in Nigg’s concert music was both ambivalent and short-lived. In verbal statements Nigg was unambiguous in his rejection of serialism, specifically adopting the language of the Soviet Communist Party’s 1948 resolution on music. He told Gavoty and Daniel Lesur in a 1955 radio interview, “For several years I was a prisoner of ideas that were artificial, manufactured, morbid, and souldestroying; for years I dared not write a single triad, or a free and fresh melody. Think of the Procrustean bed: I was one of the victims of what one could call ‘The Musical Terror.’ ”123 But even in music as outwardly loyal to his national heritage as the 1954 Piano Concerto, Nigg did not make a complete break with his recent past. De Jouvenel’s otherwise glowing review of the Concerto for a communist newspaper pointed to the lingering effects of Nigg’s twelve-tone music in the “jerky orchestration” and complex contrapuntal treatment of the folk-song theme.124 In the concerto’s first movement, the initial statement of the folk-song theme appears in the flute and clarinet (ex. 21a). When the theme returns in a climax near the end of the movement, there is a simultaneous statement of two versions of the theme, now transformed rhythmically and metrically. At the same time as the first and second violins and viola (doubled by the flute, oboe, and clarinet) play the theme in diminution and in thirds both above and below the original key, a second version of the first half of the tune, transposed down a whole step and with its original rhythmic durations, can be heard in the bassoons, trumpets, and trombones (ex. 21b). The complexity of such moments have led musicologists who have studied Nigg’s activities during this period to suggest that, despite the clarity of his verbal pronouncements in adhering to socialist realist ideals, such a label may not be appropriate for his music.125 As soon as Nigg left the PCF in 1956—disillusioned, as were several other French musicians and intellectuals, by the Soviet invasion of Hungary—he immediately abandoned the adherence to national tradition of his 1954

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example 21. Serge Nigg, Piano Concerto no. 1, first movement, excerpts. (© 1957 Le Chant du Monde. Reprinted by permission.) a. Mm. 5–20. 1 5

dolce

Fl. I solo solo Cl. dolce 2 solo

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solo cresc.

Piano Concerto in a new work with a deliberately personal style. Nigg’s 1957 Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is written in a highly expressive musical language that, although it is not systematically atonal, assiduously avoids quoting preexisting thematic materials, referencing models of previous composers, or establishing consistent tonal patterns. The problem was that the 1948 Soviet directive to embrace his national heritage pushed Nigg to adopt the very aesthetic positions that had been advocated by conservative French composers during the German occupation. Nigg and his fellow students had rejected Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as unbearably retrospective in 1945, with the near-unanimous certainty of Stravinsky’s defenders reminding them of the smug commendations by wartime composers of new music that was modeled on d’Indy’s symphonic works as the future of the New French School. Some of these composers, moreover, were still advocating their wartime positions in 1955. At the same time as Nigg was denouncing serialism in his radio interview with Gavoty and Lesur, the eighty-three-year-old Busser was telling the same interviewers that the postwar influence of Schoenberg in France was as “decadent” as

example 21 (continued) b. Mm. 300–303. 36

8va

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Ob.

Cl.

I Bsn. II

à 2 (soli) Trp. I, II à 2 (soli) I, II Trb. III

Timp. 8va

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Vn. I

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that of Wagner in 1914, and that neither were “in the lineage of French genius”; Aubin, who was teaching composition at the Conservatoire at the time, was insisting still that young French composers ought to respect the lineage of French music from Gounod to Ravel. “The only rupture between music and composers,” Aubin complained, “is for those who amuse themselves in burning bridges. There is no [rupture] for the French composers who remain appropriately faithful to their culture.”126 Meanwhile, Boulez was mocking the very idea of a French tradition in music, while Nigg, pressured by the PCF to make use of the French musical heritage, did so in few of his compositions.127 During the 1945 Stravinsky debates, Nigg was a spokesman for his generation in both words and music, with his political commitment to communism playing a negligible role. After 1947, as the Soviet Union began to intervene directly in the political and creative lives of communist musicians in western Europe, Nigg could not maintain his aesthetic interests in twelve-tone composition or his distaste for overt expressions of French nationalism and remain a loyal member of the PCF. Nigg’s ambivalent engagement with the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism in works such as his 1954 Piano Concerto demonstrates how the legacy of the German occupation of France lasted into the early cold war. The stylistic choices faced by French composers during this period were colored not only by the global cold war rhetoric from the superpowers, but also by the local history of France’s wartime promotion of the French musical heritage as a model for a New French School. When Nigg swiftly abandoned both the French national heritage and Soviet aesthetic doctrine in the music he composed after he left the PCF in 1956, he finally began to seek the music that, he felt, would appropriately express what in 1945 he had called the “profoundly felt uncertainty” of the era. For Nigg, as for France, the early cold war had come to an end.

Notes

abbreviations AN BNF-Arts BNF-Mus MAE PSS

Archives nationales Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Arts du spectacle Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique Archives des affaires étrangères, Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes, Paris Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel

preface 1. Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 2. Myriam Chimènes, ed., La vie musicale sous Vichy (Brussels: Complexe, 2001). 3. Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 8. 4. Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française, François Mitterrand: 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 5. François Mitterrand, interview by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, France 2, 12 September 1994. 6. Exercice 1947: Commandes à des artistes musiciens. AN. F21.5150. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1947. See figure 4 in chapter 4. 7. Leslie Sprout, “Les commandes de Vichy, aube d’une ère nouvelle,” in Chimènes, ed., La vie musicale sous Vichy, 176–77. 8. Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: Un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994); Henry Rousso, La hantise du passé: Entretien avec Philippe Petit

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(Paris: Textuel, 1998); Henry Rousso, Vichy: L’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 9. See, for example, Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time, Gil Shaham, Paul Meyer, Jian Wang, Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon CD 289 469 052–2, 2000); Honegger, Symphonie pour cordes, in The Art of the Conductor, Vol. 1: Charles Münch in Paris (A Classical Record ACR 40/41, 1997) and Charles Münch: La France résistante, Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Charles Münch (Cascavelle Vel 3060, 2003); Poulenc, Figure humaine, The Sixteen, Harry Christophers (Virgin Classics VC 7 59192 2, 1993); Auric, Quatre chants de la France malheureuse, in Georges Auric: Mélodies, Sonia de Beaufort, Martial Defontaine, Alain Jacquon (Timpani 1C1049, 1999); Barraine, Avis, in Figure Humaine: Hommage à la résistance et aux victimes de la déportation, Ensemble vocal français (Skarbo D SK 2980, 1998); Dutilleux, La Geôle, in Henri Dutilleux: Orchestral Works III, Bordeaux Aquitaine National Orchestra, François Le Roux, Hans Graf (Arte Nova Classics ANO 638250, 2005); Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, Pierre Bernac, Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Charles Münch, in The Art of the Conductor, Vol. 1: Charles Münch in Paris and Charles Münch: La France résistante. See also Poulenc, Suite from Les Animaux modèles, in Francis Poulenc: Works for Orchestra, Südwestfunk Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, Marcello Viotti (Claves CD 50–9111, 1991); and Poulenc, “Le jour m’étonne et la nuit me fait peur,” from Figure humaine, followed by a recording of Paul Éluard reading “Liberté,” in Figure Humaine: Hommage à la résistance et aux victimes de la déportation. 10. Conan and Rousso, Vichy, 11–13, 268–75. The book is published in English as Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). See also Henry Rousso, “Vichy et le ‘cas’ Mitterrand,” interview by Véronique Sales, L’Histoire 181 (October 1994): 77–78. 11. See, for example, Jósef Koffler, Szymon Laks, David Diamond, Olivier Messiaen, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Paul Ben-Haim, Darkness and Light: Music Performed in Concert from the Chamber Music Series at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, vol. 2, Steven Honigberg, Music Director (Albany Records CD TROY 229, 1997); and A Voice for the Silenced, series produced by Classical Public Radio Network (www.wbhm.org/Programs/ Specials/voiceforthesilenced.html, accessed 13 April 2010). 12. John William McMullen, The Miracle of Stalag 8A: Beauty Beyond the Horror: Olivier Messiaen and the Quartet for the End of Time (Evansville, IN: Bird Brain Publishing, 2010). 13. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009; Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), xiv. 14. Alana Newhouse, “A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac,” New York Times Magazine, 4 April 2010.

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chapter 1 1. A partial list of thirty-six musicians, most of them composers, who were mobilized for the war by December 1939 was published that month in Revue musicale; Poulenc, who was still awaiting mobilization, is not on the list. “Quelques adresses actuelles de Musiciens, Critiques, Personnalités du monde musical parisien,” Revue musicale 194 (December 1939): 177–80. On the French military strategy after September 1939 and the German invasion in May and June 1940, see Adolphe Goutard, 1940: La Guerre des occasions perdues (Paris: Hachette, 1956). 2. Poulenc, letter to Pierre Bernac, 10 July 1940, and Poulenc, letter to Marie-Blanche de Polignac, 10 July 1940, in Poulenc, Correspondance 1910– 1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 498–99. 3. The programs of Poulenc’s wartime recitals in Paris with Bernac are listed in Poulenc, Journal de mes mélodies, ed. Renaud Machart (Paris: Cicero, 1993), 70–72. 4. Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc, Soupir (Duparc) and Le colibri (Chausson), Voix de son maître DA 4928 (1940); Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc, Après un rêve and Lydia (Fauré), Voix de son maître DA 4931 (1940); Lucienne Tragin and Francis Poulenc, Six Ariettes oubliées and La Vierge Erigone, from Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (Debussy), Columbia LFX 651 (1943). On the re-releases of these recordings, see Francine Bloch, Francis Poulenc: 1928–1982 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1984), 221, 225–26. 5. The Concerts Gabriel Pierné was the name given to the Concerts Colonne after the armistice because of its Jewish founder and namesake, Édouard Colonne. Pierné had succeeded Colonne as the orchestra’s director in 1910. 6. Poulenc, “Igor Strawinsky,” L’Information musicale 7 (3 January 1941): 195; Poulenc, “Le cœur de Maurice Ravel,” Nouvelle Revue française 4, no. 1 (1941): 237–40; Poulenc, “Centenaire de Chabrier,” Nouvelle Revue française 4, no. 2 (1941): 110–14. 7. Poulenc, “La leçon de Claude Debussy,” in Claude Debussy, chronologie de sa vie et de ses œuvres, ed. Auguste Martin (Paris: Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux, 1942), xiii. This was a catalog for an exposition devoted to Debussy at the Opéra-Comique in May 1942, financed by Pathé-Marconi to promote its commercial release of the first complete recording of the opera. The other contributors to the published catalog were Henri Busser, Jean Cocteau, and LéonPaul Fargue. Poulenc’s contribution was reprinted in Le Figaro, 6–7 June 1942, 3. 8. Poulenc argued unsuccessfully to Jacques Rouché, the director of the Opéra, that, since the ballet was a new French work for the Opéra, it was only fair to treat it as a state commission and pay him accordingly. Poulenc’s sizable personal fortune may have convinced those in charge of commissions that he did not need one. Poulenc to Rouché, 4 June 1942, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 518. 9. Program, Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles, Théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris, 9 August 1942. BNF-Mus, Francis Poulenc, Dossiers constitué par André Lecoeur, 3, no. 13. A slightly revised version of Poulenc’s program notes—minus

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the German translation—was reprinted in the published piano reduction of the score: Poulenc, Les Animaux modèles (Paris: Eschig, 1942), 1. 10. Éluard, letter to Poulenc, summer 1941, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 514. 11. Paul Baudouin, Neuf mois au gouvernement: avril–décembre 1940 (Paris: Éditions de la Table ronde, 1948), 219; cited by Robert O. Paxton in Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 28. 12. Conflicts between Laval and Pétain led to Laval’s dismissal in December 1940. He returned to his post in April 1942 through the support of the German embassy. 13. Anti-Semitic restrictions first became French law on 3 October 1940 with the Statut des Juifs, which defined who was legally to be considered as Jewish and restricted those persons’ access to professions that influenced public opinion, such as teaching, cinema, theater, radio, and journalism. It was followed by further restrictions for Jews in June and July 1941. Although musicians working outside the film industry were not specifically named in Vichy anti-Semitic legislation until June 1942, several found it safer to not perform in public long before that date. Administration of the statutes was delegated to the Office for Jewish Affairs (Commissariat générale des questions juives), which was created in March 1941. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 3–4, 98–106; Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 56–61. See also Richard Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (New York: New York University Press, 1996), especially chapter 2. The law of 6 June 1942 specifies that “Jews are barred from artistic employment in theatrical productions, films, and any other kind of spectacle, and from giving or participating in vocal or instrumental concerts.” Journal officiel de l’État français, 11 June 1942, 2038. On the uneven application of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws to those considered Jewish at Radiodiffusion nationale—where the composer Claude Arrieu (the pseudonym of Louise-Marie Simon), the celebrated harpist Lily Laskine, and at least six members of the Orchestre national lost their jobs—see Karine Le Bail, “Les services artistiques de la radio de Vichy: L’application hasardeuse de la législation antisémite,” Archives juives 41, no. 1 (March 2008): 59–74. 14. Louis Hautecœur, “Projet d’Équipement national. Beaux-Arts. Notes et rapports au ministre de l’Éducation nationale, 13 janvier 1942,” 1. AN. F17.13368. Cabinet du ministre de l’Instruction publique (État français). Papiers provenant du cabinet d’Abel Bonnard. 1942–1944. Bibliothèques; beaux-arts; spectacles et musique; bâtiments civils et palais nationaux; architecture. 1942–1944. 15. In the first six months of the Vichy regime, the post of minister of national education was held by Albert Rivaud, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne; Émile Mireux, codirector of the newspaper Le Temps; Georges Ripert, dean of the Paris law faculty; and Jacques Chevalier, professor of philosophy at Grenoble. Jérôme Carcopino, professor of history at the Sorbonne, held on to the post from February 1941 to April 1942 but was replaced at a time when strong pro-German sympathies, like those held by Vichy’s sixth and final

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minister of national education, the writer Abel Bonnard, matched growing German interference in French government and politics. Bonnard was openly sympathetic to the Nazi regime as early as 1936 and published numerous proNazi articles in La Gerbe, Je suis partout, and the Nouvelle Revue française. Anne-Marie Fabre, “Seconde Guerre mondiale,” in Dictionnaire des ministres (1789–1989), ed. Benoît Yvert (Paris: Perrin, 1990), 671. 16. In spring 1941 Hautecœur sent a questionnaire with twenty-five queries on cultural policy to cultural administrators in Germany, Italy, and Holland. He was able to obtain responses because of the involvement of Jean-François Darlan, minister of both foreign affairs and information under Pétain. Admiral Darlan, the second most powerful man in Vichy, personally made sure that Hautecœur received the detailed information he needed on how to reformulate Vichy cultural policy even though a state of war still technically existed between France and the Axis powers. The existence of the questionnaire reveals both that support of French culture was crucial to the new state at its highest levels, and that its implementation was modeled on the arts policies of France’s former fascist enemies. Letter from Hautecœur to Jean-François Darlan, dated 3 May 1941 and accompanied by four copies of the questionnaire; letter from Darlan to Hautecœur, dated 12 December 1941 and accompanied by a copy of the German responses. MAE. Série Guerre 1939–1945. Vichy: État français. Beaux-Arts: dossier général. Translated excerpts can be found in my “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000, 407–8. 17. Marie-Claude Genêt-Delacroix, “Le budget de la musique sous Vichy: Une administration entre rupture et continuité,” paper presented at the conference La vie musicale en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Paris, 28–30 January 1999. 18. The amount was raised from 3 million francs in 1940 to 5.2 million in 1941, 7 million in 1942 and 1943, and 10 million in 1944. AN. F21.5134, F21.5135. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, 1940–1943, 1944–1946. 19. For a complete list of state commissions between 1938 and 1945, see my “Music for a ‘New Era,’ ” 376–405. 20. Louis Hautecœur, Les Beaux-Arts en France, passé et avenir (Paris: Picard, 1948), 219. 21. Note sur le transport de crédits du budget du Commissariat à la lutte contre le chômage au budget du secrétariat général des Beaux-Arts, 10 décembre 1942. AN. F21.5134. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, 1940– 1943. 22. Arrêté portant règlement intérieur de la Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux. Fait à Vichy, le 8 janvier 1941. Réunion des Théâtres lyriques nationaux: Lois, Décrets, Arrêtés. AN. F21. 5216. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et Musique. RTLN, 1932–1956. 23. Letters from Jacques Rouché to Louis Hautecœur, dated 15 July 1940 and 17 August 1940. AN. F21.5254. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et Musique. Opéra. Correspondance chronologique. 1936–1945.

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24. Paris-Soir, 16 August 1940. 25. The state commissions premiered during the war at the RTLN were: the operas Nele Dooryn by Antoine Mariotte (Opéra-Comique, 17 October 1940), Le Rossignol de Saint-Malo by Paul Le Flem (Opéra-Comique, 5 May 1942), and Ginevra by Marcel Delannoy (Opéra-Comique, 25 July 1942); and the ballets Guignol et Pandore by André Jolivet (Opéra, 29 April 1944) and Les Mirages by Henri Sauguet (Opéra, dress rehearsal, 10 July 1944 before blackouts in Paris forced the closure of the Opéra and Opéra-Comique on 23 July). Planned performances of commissioned works included the operas La Farce de Maître Pathelin by Henry Barraud (planned for 1 March 1945, postponed) and Maître Cornélius by Yvonne Desportes (planned for the 1944–45 season, postponed) and the ballet Soir de Jazz by Eugène Bozza (planned for December 1943 but canceled). 26. The new versions of older music were featured at gala events, such as the 1941 New Year’s Eve benefit for the Secours national under the patronage of Admiral Darlan and Marshal Pétain, who was represented in the audience by his wife. Although the evening began and ended with creations from just before the war (Schmitt’s Oriane et le Prince d’amour and Samuel-Rousseau’s Entre deux rondes), the highlights of the evening were Lifar’s new choreographies for d’Indy’s Istar and Ravel’s Bolero. 27. Correspondence between Lifar, Abetz, and Schleier, cited in Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 36. This invitation is not mentioned in Lifar’s postwar description of his relations with Germans such as Goebbels, Radermacher, and key agents of the Gestapo in occupied Paris, which the dancer defended as essential to his work on behalf of the Opéra as an autonomous French cultural institution during the occupation. Lifar, Ma vie (Paris: Julliard, 1965). 28. Lifar’s article, “À l’occasion du centenaire de Giselle: Un Siècle d’Histoire du Ballet,” was published in four installments in L’Information musicale from 16 May to 25 July 1941; Lifar, “À propos de deux nouveaux ballets à l’Opéra,” L’Information musicale 32 (27 June 1941): 687–88. 29. Letter, Lifar to Bonnard, June 1942. AN. F17.13368. Cabinet du ministre de l’Instruction publique (État français). Papiers provenant du cabinet d’Abel Bonnard. 1942–1944. Bibliothèques; beaux-arts; spectacles et musique; bâtiments civils et palais nationaux; architecture. 1942–1944. 30. Henriette Blond, “La Danse: Les inconnues dans la saison,” La Chronique de Paris 1 (November 1943): 83. 31. Arthur Hoérée, “À l’Opéra: Spectacle de danse,” Comœdia, 19 July 1941, 6. 32. Detailed descriptions, drawings, and color plates can be found in Léandre Vaillat, Ballets de l’Opéra de Paris (Paris: Compagnie française des arts graphiques, 1943); Thibault de Champrosay, ed., Serge Lifar à l’Opéra: Défini par Paul Valéry, parlé par Jean Cocteau, vécu par Serge Lifar (Paris: T. de Champrosay, 1943). 33. Émile Vuillermoz, “Terpsichore vous parle,” Je suis partout, 17 March 1944, 3.

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34. Poulenc, cited in Henri Hell, Francis Poulenc: Musicien français (Paris: Plon, 1958), 122. 35. Serge Lifar, “Ce soir à l’Opéra: Les Animaux modèles,” Comœdia, 8 August 1942, 5. 36. Honegger, “Un ballet de Francis Poulenc à l’Opéra,” Comœdia, 13 August 1942, 1; Delannoy, “ ‘Les Animaux modèles,’ ” Les Nouveaux Temps, 16 August 1942, 2. 37. Poulenc, Journal, 37; Poulenc, letter to André Schaeffner, October 1942, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 532. Stravinsky’s Pribaoutki is a cycle of four songs based on Russian folk texts. 38. Poulenc, “Centenaire de Chabrier,” 112–14. 39. On the relationship between the Revue musicale, the Guide du concert, and L’Information musicale before and after the war, see Myriam Chimènes, “L’Information musicale: Une ‘parenthèse’ de La Revue musicale?,” La Revue des revues 24 (1997): 91–110. 40. In reality, however, the group announced in November 1940 was a restricted version of a group that had existed since January 1940, with Florent Schmitt, the president of the Société nationale de musique since May 1939, as honorary president. The original roster of the association consisted of several French and foreign composers, including Poulenc, Georges Auric, Marcel Delannoy, Maurice Duruflé, Jean Françaix, André Jolivet, Jean Rivier, and Henri Sauguet (among the French) and Tibor Harsányi, Bohuslav Martinu, Marcel Mihalovici, and Alexander Tcherepnin (among the foreigners). By November 1940, the list of names is missing all suspected Jewish composers and all but one foreigner, the Russian-born Tcherepnin. Claude Chamfray, “Un nouveau groupe ‘Musique contemporaine’,” Beaux-Arts 352 (January 1940): 39. 41. Myriam Chimènes, “Alfred Cortot et la politique musicale du gouvernement de Vichy,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Brussels: Complexe, 2001), 38–41. Little of consequence was decided by these committees, although by the spring of 1944 Cortot’s committee had in its possession a list of twenty-five thousand professionals who taught music in France, in order to advance its goal of excluding those without the credentials the committee deemed appropriate. As for the committees themselves, the sheer number of people involved—Cortot’s committee alone consisted of fifty-seven members grouped into eight subcommittees—makes it difficult to assess how active a role any one member may have played. Cortot’s committee included not only those, such as Cortot himself, who worked openly with the Germans, but also several members of the FNM, which fought against such collaborative ventures, including Münch and Poulenc. Le Comité professionnel de l’Art musical et l’Enseignement libre de la musique. Arrêté, fait à Paris, le 6 janvier 1944. AN. F21.5178 (6). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Documentation d’Édouard Bourdet. 42. The PAF and the German embassy, like their parent institutions in the Reich, were often in conflict with each other over German cultural policy in occupied France. Élisabeth Dunan, “La Propaganda Abteilung en France:

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Tâches et organisation,” Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale, October 1951, 19–32; Eckard Michels, Das Deutsche Institut in Paris 1940–1944 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993); Lucien Steinberg, Les autorités allemandes en France occupée (Paris: Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, 1966), 2:11–42. 43. Numbers cited in Patrick Marsh, “The Theatre: Compromise or Collaboration?,” in Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1944, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 144. 44. Cécile Méadel, “Pauses musicales ou les éclatantes silences de RadioParis,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 241. Méadel lists the titles of some of Radio-Paris’s news programs: Les Juifs contre la France, Un journaliste allemande vous parle, La Rose des vents (which explored French public opinion), and Un neutre vous parle (a Swiss journalist). Starting in October 1940, all news programs were broadcast exclusively in French. Ibid., 238, note 15. 45. Les Ondes 37–80 (11 January–8 November 1942). 46. Letter from Émile Vuillermoz to Hautecœur, 5 November 1940. AN. F21.5182. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Radiodiffusion, Section d’Études artistiques, divers. Correspondance, Louis Hautecœur. 47. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac and Hélène Eck, “France,” in La Guerre des ondes: Histoire des radios de langue française pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, ed. Hélène Eck (Paris: Armand Colin, 1985), 46–48, 99–100. 48. This was Karajan’s second tour to occupied Paris. The first was with the Aachen choir and orchestra, to perform Bach’s B-Minor Mass in December 1940. One of the three concerts was reserved exclusively for German troops. Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 146–47, 151. 49. Lucien Rebatet, “L’Opéra de Berlin à Paris,” Je suis partout, 26 May 1941, 9. The opera was performed on 22 and 25 May 1941. On the exclusive performance of 22 May, see Sandrine Grandgambe, “La Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 115. 50. In the Nouvelle Revue française Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte exclaimed that Karajan’s powers of interpretation were tailor-made for the evaluation of Tristan by France’s own Gabriel Fauré as “ever more noble, more vast, more clear and ever more sublimely classical.” Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, “L’Opéra de Berlin à Paris,” Nouvelle Revue française 329 (July 1941): 127 (italics are in Boudot-Lamotte’s citation of Fauré). As eyewitness Alfred FabreLuce reported, the tuxedos of French civilians and the last remaining Americans mingled with the green uniforms of German soldiers at Karajan’s performances; Karajan, wrote Fabre-Luce, was “the magician who caused the frontiers to collapse.” Alfred Fabre-Luce, Journal de la France 1939–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 379. 51. “The enthusiasm for the German performance verged on furor,” the author of the report remarked, noting that the sounds of the live radio broadcast could be heard from the open windows of apartments throughout the city. “Tätigkeitsbericht der Untergruppe Theater für die Zeit vom 18–25.5.41.” AN.

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AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Rapports du service de propagande, 1940–1941. 52. Captain Lucht, “Gruppe Kultur. Paris, den 13 Januar 1942. Aktennotiz für den Herrn Staffelführer. Betrifft: Französische Kulturpropaganda.” AN. AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Gruppe Kultur/Theater: rapports d’activité. 53. Lucht is cited by Maurice Roy, the Ministry of National Education’s liaison with German forces, in “Note relative à l’entretien du 22 septembre [1941].” AN. F17.13391. Cabinet du ministre de l’Instruction publique (État français). Papiers de Maurice Roy, inspecteur général de l’Instruction publique chargé de mission auprès du cabinet du ministre. Relations culturelles francoallemandes. 1941–1944. 54. Grandgambe, “La Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux,” 114–15. According to Grandgambe, Vichy reimbursed the RTLN in June 1944 for the cost of the seats requisitioned by the German occupying forces at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, totaling 10.2 million francs. 55. Letter from Jacques Rouché to Captain Lucht, 30 August 1940. AN. AJ40.1002. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Correspondance avec les directeurs des théâtres. 56. Memo dated 4 October 1940. AN. AJ40.1002. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Correspondance avec les directeurs des théâtres. 57. Piersig discussed his role at the PAF in a series of informative letters to Fred Prieberg. The published excerpts present an incomplete picture, however, as they stress the ways Piersig’s liberal views on music in Paris ran counter to the intransigence of the RMVP. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 398–401. 58. Strobel had immigrated to France before the war after his writings had run afoul of German authorities. After the armistice he was ordered by the Wehrmacht to report to Paris. Despite his earlier progressive stance, in occupied Paris Strobel embraced a more conservative perspective, supporting the performance and discussion of works by Pfitzner, Reger, Orff, and Egk in France in his articles and lectures, and in the advice he gave Piersig at the PAF. Ibid., 312–17; Manuela Schwartz, “‘Eine versunkene Welt’: Heinrich Strobel als Kritiker, Musikpolitiker, Essayist und Redner in Frankreich (1939–1944),” in Musikforschung— Faschismus—Nationalsozialismus. Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers (8. bis 11. März 2000), ed. Isolde von Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Mainz: Are Musik Verlags, 2001), 291–317. 59. “Tätigkeitsbericht der Propaganda-Abteilung Frankreich,” 26 January–2 February 1941, 3–16 February 1941, 6–19 March 1941. AN. AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Rapports du service de propagande, 1940–1941. 60. See Vaillat, Ballets de l’Opéra de Paris, 133; and Werner Egk, “Vom Podiumstanz zum Handlungsballett,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 141, no. 2 (January 1980): 125. Egk wrote that Rouché chose his ballet, Joan de Zarissa,

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from among four scores presented to him by the PAF, which in turn were among several sent by German music publishers (via the RMVP) to Paris. According to Egk, the other three were Strauss’s Josephslegende, Hermann Reutter’s Die Kirmes von Delft, and Boris Blacher’s Fest im Süden. 61. The ban, issued in Germany on 18 September 1939 by Peter Raabe, president of the Reichsmusikkammer, against performance of music still protected under copyright from all enemy nations, was published in the Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer 6, no. 19 (1 October 1939): 57. Cited by Joan Evans in “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 581–82. 62. Letters between the Armistice Commission, the Ministry of National Education, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 1943–January 1944. MAE. Série Guerre 1939–1945. Vichy: État français. Beaux-Arts: dossier général. 63. According to an entry in Egk’s pocket calendar, the composer met with Goebbels on 16 June 1942, right before his departure on 24 June for Paris to prepare the premiere of Joan at the Opéra. Egk’s pocket calendar, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Handscriftenabteilung, Ana/410, cited in Michael Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 290, notes 84 and 87. The recording consists of four excerpts—Moorish Dances, The Coronation, Isabeau’s Lament, and Isabeau’s Anger and Enchantment—on two 78 rpm disks. Werner Egk, Joan de Zarissa. Orchestre de l’Opéra. Werner Egk, conductor. 1942. Gramophone W 1517, W 1518. 64. The German embassy numbered the membership in the Groupe Collaboration at one hundred thousand. Through the support of Laval, the group was able to expand its activities throughout France, occupied and unoccupied, and often held events in partnership with one of the eleven regional offices of the Institut allemand. Bertram Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 230–31; Max d’Ollone, “Rapport sur la ‘section musicale’ du Groupe ‘Collaboration’,” 13 September 1944, in Dossier d’épuration: Max d’Ollone. AN. F21.8125. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Épuration. Comité national d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs; “Statuts du Groupe Collaboration.” AN. F17.13359. Cabinet du ministre de l’Instruction publique (État français). Papiers provenant du cabinet d’Abel Bonnard. 1942–1944. Relations culturelles avec l’étranger. 1941–1944; Manuela Schwartz, “La musique, outil majeur de la propagande culturelle des nazis,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 95–98. 65. “Begrüßungsansprache des Vorsitzenden der Sektion Musik der Groupe ‘Collaboration,’ Max d’Ollone, auf dem Empfang für Werner Egk, Lore Fischer und Alfred Cortot,” Propaganda-Staffel Paris, Gruppe Kultur. Bonn, Auswärtiges Amt, Botschaft Paris 1215. Cited in Myriam Chimènes, “Alfred Cortot et la politique musicale du gouvernement de Vichy,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 46. 66. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 17–18.

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67. Borgelt, “Diskussion um ‘Peer Gynt.’ Werner Egks Oper im Urteil der französischen Kritik,” Musik im Kriege 1, nos. 9–10 (December 1943–January 1944): 179. 68. Honegger, “Création à l’Opéra de Joan de Zarissa,” Comœdia, 18 July 1942, 1. 69. “Deutsche Kultur im Spiegel der französischen Presse,” Spiegel der Französischen Presse: Bericht der Gruppe Presse der Propaganda-Abteilung Frankreich, October–November 1943, 34. AN. AJ40.1008. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Organisation de la presse parisienne. Revue de presse quotidienne. 70. Manuela Schwartz described the Opéra’s 1942 production of Joan de Zarissa as one among many examples of German authorities looking to promote “normality” when they made their plans for German music propaganda. Alongside Joan’s ties to French culture, and Egk’s own prior contacts in France, Schwartz cites the prewar Paris tours of conductor Wilhelm Kempff and the fact that pianist Walter Gieseking was born in Paris as factors that the German authorities hoped would ease the acceptance of their Paris performances by French audiences. Schwartz, “La musique, outil majeur de la propagande culturelle des nazis,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 102–3. 71. See commentary by Jean Laurent in “Deux ballets médiévaux à l’Opéra,” Les Nouveaux temps, 8 January 1943, 2; and Vaillat in Ballets de L’Opéra de Paris, 135. 72. Serge Lifar, “Au lendemain de Joan de Zarissa à l’Opéra de Paris,” L’Information musicale 79 (28 August 1942): 1. 73. Ferdinando Reyna, “ ‘Les Animaux modèles,’ ” L’Information musicale 79 (28 August 1942): 3; Colette, “À propos d’un ballet,” Comœdia, 22 August 1942, 1; Poulenc, “À propos d’un ballet,” Comœdia, 29 August 1942, 4. 74. Jean de La Fontaine, The Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Marianne Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 160. 75. Irène Joachim, cited in Brigitte Massin, “Mélisande se souvient . . .,” in Nicolas Guillot, ed., Roger Désormière (1898–1963): Actes du Colloque (Paris: Comité pour la célébration du centenaire de la naissance de Roger Désormière, 1999), 13. In 1997 Elsa Barraine wrote that, with the presence of Joachim (the granddaughter of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish violinist Joseph Joachim) on the stage of the Opéra, “it took the Nazis’ crass stupidity and lack of culture for them to not realize the fantastic provocation that was being inflicted upon them.” Elsa Barraine, “Lettre à Thierry Adhumeau: Souvenirs d’Elsa Barraine,” Cahiers Boëllmann-Gigout 2–3 (December 1997-March 1998): 95 (italics in original). 76. Auric, “Reprise de Pelléas et Mélisande,” Nouvelle Revue française 322 (December 1940): 102–3. Ten years later Antoine Goléa, who also attended the performance, described Auric’s comments as an accurate portrayal of what all French people felt at being able “to rediscover, amidst the country’s difficulties, the incomparable masterpiece of the greatest French musician of the twentieth century, and of one of the greatest contemporary masters of all Europe

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and beyond.” Goléa, Georges Auric (Paris: Ventadour, 1958), 22–23 (italics in original). 77. See Yannick Simon, “Claude de France, notre Wagner: Le culte de Debussy sous l’occupation,” Cahiers Debussy 30 (2006): 5–26; see also Jane Fulcher, “Debussy as National Icon: From Vehicle of Vichy’s Compromise to French Resistance Classic,” Musical Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 454–80. 78. Abel Bonnard, “Pelléas et Mélisande,” L’Information musicale 58 (20 February 1942): 763–64. See also Bonnard, “L’arc-en-ciel,” program notes, Festival Claude Debussy, Palais de Chaillot, 13 June 1941. BNF-Mus, Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Programmes, 1932–1967. Lucien Rebatet, “Les disques: ‘Pelléas et Mélisande,’” Je suis partout, 24 January 1942, 7. “Kurzbericht über die Tätigkeit der Gruppen, 31.1–7.2.1942.” AN. AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Rapports du service de propagande, 1942–1944. 79. Guy Krivopissko and Daniel Virieux, “Musiciens: Une profession en résistance?” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 335–38. Virieux interviewed Barraine in summer 1998; Krivopissko and Christian Beerman interviewed Rosenthal in July 1997. See also Henri Dutilleux, Mystère et mémoire des sons: Entretiens avec Claude Glayman, rev. ed. (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 55–56. The exact membership of the committee is difficult to determine, since the members were not aware of one another’s existence beyond the one or two other members with whom each one came into contact. Jacques Chailley later described the surprise everyone felt, after the liberation, when the identities of all the members were finally revealed at the only general meeting of the FNM, on 27 September 1944. Jacques Chailley, interview by Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération: Épuration des musiques?,” France Culture, 9 June 1994. 80. Chamfray, “Dans la Résistance,” Arts, 31 January 1945, 4. 81. “Faisons le point,” Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 4 (October 1942): 1–2. 82. “Le front de la résistance chez les musiciens,” Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 4 (October 1942): 4. In Lyons members of the French Resistance had distributed leaflets calling for demonstrators to prevent the Berlin Philharmonic from performing: “At the very hour that they still execute our brothers, the executioners provoke us at home! Gather at eight o’clock Monday at the Salle Rameau: the Boches from Berlin will not perform!” Tract signed “Les Mouvements de Résistance,” cited by Henri Amouroux in La grande histoire des Français sous l’occupation, vol. 2, Quarante millions de pétainistes (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1998), 569. Michael Kater cites German accounts of the disruptions to these concerts in The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 258, note 95. 83. Pierre Duclos and Georges Martin, Piaf (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 136. 84. “Debussy, musicien français,” Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 4 (October 1942): 3–4. This was followed in subsequent years by two additional articles praising Debussy: “Debussy le Libérateur,” Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 6 (June 1943): 4; and “Debussy, musicien français,” Le Musicien d’aujourd’hui, published (since July 1944) as part of Les Lettres françaises 19 (August 1944).

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85. Ben Tayoux, Gaston Villemer, and Henri Nazet, Alsace et Lorraine (Paris: Félix Mackar, 1871). 86. In 1954 Poulenc described how he cited the melody of a song entitled “Non, non, vous n’aurez pas notre Alsace-Lorraine” during “the fight of the two roosters,” and that “each time the trumpet announced the theme, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.” Assuming that the song to which Poulenc referred here is the well-known Alsace et Lorraine by Tayoux, Villemer, and Nazet (which had been recently released, in 1940, by the tenor Georges Thill for Columbia), then Poulenc must have conflated the two appearances of the citation while describing it to Rostand, just as he made a similar conflation regarding the premiere of Figure humaine by the BBC (he told Rostand it was in January 1945, during his first post-liberation London tour with Bernac, whereas the BBC premiered the cantata in March of that year). Although Poulenc did cite the tune in “The Two Roosters,” it is only played twice there, first by the violins and second (only once) by the trumpets. In “The Lion in Love,” however, he would have been able to hear the trumpet “announce” the theme two out of the five times it appears in complete form. Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand (Paris: René Julliard, 1954), 58, 104. For slightly different interpretations of Poulenc’s remarks to Rostand and the exact location of the citation(s), see Nigel Simeone, “Making Music in Occupied Paris,” Musical Times 147 (Spring 2006): 34–36; and Yannick Simon, Composer sous Vichy (Lyons: Symétrie, 2009), 235–37. 87. On postwar allegorical interpretations of Pontcarral’s overtly expressed patriotism that range from claiming that the film glorified the Resistance to asserting that it celebrated Vichy, see Evelyn Erlich, Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 108–12. On the equally equivocal interpretations of Les Mouches, see Ingrid Galster, Sartre devant la presse d’Occupation: Le dossier critique des Mouches et Huis Clos (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 10–22. 88. On Schaeffer, Roy, and the creation of Jeune France, see Véronique Chabrol, “L’ambition de ‘Jeune France,’ ” in La vie culturelle sous Vichy, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux (Brussels: Complexe, 1990), 163–66. 89. Roy described his interactions with composers as well as writers and playwrights (he mentioned Messiaen and Daniel Lesur by name) at Jeune France in Vichy as well as his transformation from an “uncertain vichyssois” to a committed résistant in Moi je: Essai autobiographique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 351–54, 389–93. In late summer 1943 Schaeffer began using his Studio d’essai—an ostensibly apolitical studio of Radiodiffusion nationale, created in January 1943 in central Paris—to record the music of banned composers such as Schoenberg (the Wind Quintet, op. 26, with René Leibowitz’s assistance), Mihalovici (his 1942 Sonata for Viola and Piano, with Monique Haas), and Milhaud (Catalogue de fleurs, sung by Joachim) as well as recitations of the poetry of clandestinely published writers such as Aragon and Éluard for broadcast as soon as the country was liberated. Schaeffer was also among those who made use of the Studio d’essai to emit the first broadcasts of the newly liberated

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Radiodiffusion nationale during the insurrection in Paris, including a famous call to arms to fight the Germans on 22 August 1944 and an order to ring the church bells throughout the city on 24 August to celebrate the arrival of French and Allied troops. Martial Robert, Pierre Schaeffer: Communication et musique en France entre 1936 et 1986, vol. 1, des “Transmissions” à “Orphée” (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 77–83; Henri Dutilleux, “Au service de tous,” in Denise Mayer and Pierre Souvtchinsky, eds., Roger Désormière et son temps (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1966), 120; Chamfray, “Dans la Résistance,” 4. 90. Claude Roy to Francis Poulenc, 10 April 1944, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 551. 91. The line from García Lorca’s 1921 poem “Las Seis Cuerdas” is cited (in French translation) on the first page of the score of the second movement. Poulenc, Sonate pour violon et piano (Paris: Eschig, 1944), 16. In 1954 Poulenc told Claude Rostand that he wrote the Intermezzo first, imagining it “in the style of a vaguely Spanish Andante-cantilène.” Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, 120. Poulenc returned to the poetry of García Lorca in summer 1947 with his Trois Chansons de F. García Lorca (Paris: Heugel, 1947). 92. On the postwar misconstrual of the Concerts de la Pléiade as having performed works of banned composers during the war, see chapter 3. 93. Gaston Gallimard, letter to Poulenc, 30 June 1943, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 535. 94. On the role of the Institut allemand in the editing of Comœdia, see Olivier Gouranton, “Comœdia pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale,” Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris I, 1992, 24–25, 40. 95. Poulenc, “Sur deux premières auditions,” Comœdia, 19 June 1943, 1, 5. The program for the 21 June 1943 concert included Poulenc’s settings of poetry by Apollinaire and Éluard. Program, BNF-Mus, Francis Poulenc, Dossiers constitué par André Lecoeur, 3, no. 23. 96. Concert notice, L’Information musicale 135 (3 December 1943): 107. 97. Aragon, Les Yeux d’Elsa (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1942); Bernard Leuilliot, “Aragon, autrement dit ‘François La Colère,’ ” in Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet en Résistance (Novembre 1942–Septembre 1944), Les Annales de la Société des amis de Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet 6 (2004): 88–99. 98. Henri de Mollans, Combats pour la Loire, Juin 1940 (Chambray-lesTours: C.L.D., 1985), 144–48. 99. On the trajectory of Aragon’s regiment in the spring and summer of 1940, see Pierre Daix, Aragon, 3rd ed. (Paris: Tallandier, 2005), 391–92. Aragon published a description of Ribérac, filled with soldiers and refugees on the day of the armistice with Germany, as “La leçon de Ribérac” in the journal Fontaine, which was produced in Algiers in June 1941. 100. Aragon, “C,” English translation in Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc: The Man and His Songs, trans. Winifred Radford (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 186–87. 101. Aragon, “Fêtes galantes,” English translation in ibid., 188–89.

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102. Joachim cited in Brigitte Massin, “Mélisande se souvient . . .,” in Roger Désormière (1898–1963): Actes du Colloque, 14. Joachim spoke of the performance of the songs as an encore at the December 1943 concert. The program, however, lists the premieres of both songs along with the premiere of Métamorphoses, three songs to poems by Louise de Vilmorin that Poulenc composed in August and October 1943, on the planned program for the concert. Program, BNF-Mus, Francis Poulenc, Dossiers constitué par André Lecoeur, 3, no. 25. 103. Jeannie Chauveau, “Secrètement élaborée sous l’Occupation, l’œuvre de deux grands artistes français va être révélée au monde par la chorale d’Anvers,” Ce Soir, 25 November 1944, 1. 104. Violane Vanoyeke, Paul Éluard: Le poète de la liberté (Paris: Julliard, 1995), 283–84, 389. 105. Ibid., 281–87. 106. Chauveau, “Secrètement élaborée sous l’Occupation,” 1. 107. Letters, Poulenc to Bernac (17 August 1943), Collaer (20 August 1943), Jolivet (October 1943), Brianchon (October 1943), Roland-Manuel (8 November 1943), and Marie-Blanche de Polignac (November 1943); letter, Valentine Hugo to Poulenc, 9 December 1943, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 538–49. 108. Carl B. Schmidt, The Music of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963): A Catalogue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 339. 109. At the other extreme from Poulenc, Durey ascribed the musical simplicity of his Quatre poèmes de Minuit to his “need, after years of militant resistance, to express emotions that were collective, not personal.” Cited in Frédéric Robert, Louis Durey: L’aîné des Six (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1968), 148. On clandestine settings of Resistance poetry during the war by Claude Arrieu, Auric, Barraine, Durey, Dutilleux, Honegger, and Rosenthal, see chapter 2. 110. Poulenc, letter to Schaeffner, October 1942; Koechlin, letter to Poulenc, 19 August 1942; Poulenc, letter to Koechlin, August 1942; in Poulenc, Correspondance, 519–21, 531–32. 111. The harsh conditions and mortal threat of Allied bombings made the STO deeply unpopular and inspired several in the Resistance to create ways to help shield conscripted workers from serving. Delvincourt, director of the Paris Conservatoire since April 1941, was able to convince German authorities that a newly created ensemble at the school, the Orchestre des Cadets du Conservatoire, fulfilled the needs of the STO, thereby saving from deportation not only instrumental students, but also singers, actors, and dancers who feigned participation in the orchestra’s concerts. Delvincourt’s public reputation in the 1930s as an ardent royalist and his membership in Croix de Feu, a right-wing paramilitary group, camouflaged his adherence to the FNM, a group dominated by Communist Party members, former supporters of the Popular Front, and those, such as Rosenthal, with whom he had long clashed. Rosenthal was especially struck by the irony that made Delvincourt, his bitter enemy, his loyal ally once they found out they were members of the same Resistance group. Jacques

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Chailley, “Marie-Louise Boëllmann et la Résistance au Conservatoire sous l’Occupation allemande 1940–1945,” Les cahiers Boëllmann-Gigout 2–3 (December 1997–March 1998): 67–68; Dominique Saudinos, Manuel Rosenthal: Une vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 144–45; Rosenthal, interview by Pierre-Émile Barbier, “Les musiques prisonnières: France, 1939–1945,” Les Mots et les notes, France Musique, 10 June 1994. Delvincourt’s wartime record, however, also includes the application of anti-Semitic legislation to the faculty and students of the Conservatoire, as discussed in Jean Gribenski, “L’exclusion des juifs du Conservatoire (1940–1942),” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 143–56. 112. Catherine Morgan, “Roland Manuel nous dit l’action de quatre ans des musiciens français,” Les Lettres françaises, 16 September 1944, 7. The reference in the article to Poulenc’s Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon for solo voice and piano as “a symphonic poem composed based on poems by Aragon” is surely an editorial error in what was only the second issue of the newspaper after the liberation. Other signs of haste include a reference to Berg as “Albauberg.” 113. See Radio 44 1, no. 1 (29 October–4 November 1944). Other radio broadcasts in 1944–45 of musical settings of Resistance poetry include the 9 November 1944 broadcast, by Rosenthal and the Orchestre national, of Dutilleux’s La Geôle (Cassou) and the 22 March 1945 broadcast, by Rosenthal and the Orchestre national, of Auric’s Quatre chants de la France malheureuse (Aragon, Éluard, and Jules Supervielle). See Radio 44 1, no. 2 (5–11 November 1944) and Radio 45 21 (18–24 March 1945). 114. Chauveau, “Secrètement élaborée sous l’Occupation,” 1. 115. In an internal list of proposed events promoting French culture abroad for the year 1945, the AFAA listed the performance of Figure humaine by the Chorale d’Anvers in Brussels and Paris, setting aside two hundred thousand francs in its budget; the amount was renewed for the 1946 budget. After Poulenc gave up on the original plans for the premiere with de Vocht and the Chorale d’Anvers, he arranged with Paul Collaer in December 1945 for the piece to be performed in Brussels and Paris by the Chœurs de la Radiodiffusion nationale belge. The Paris premiere on 22 May 1947 was funded in part by the AFAA as well as Radiodiffusion française, which broadcast the concert at Concerts de la Pléiade. MAE. Relations culturelles, 1945–1958. Années 1945– 1947. Œuvres diverses. Action Artistique; letters, Poulenc to Collaer, 25 June 1945, 18 December 1945, 4 December 1946, 8 April 1947, in Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1996), 384–85, 388, 402–3 ; letter, Poulenc to Milhaud, 1 July 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 593. 116. The Purification Committee for Dramatic, Lyric, and Music Performance Professionals (Comité national d’épuration des professions d’artistes dramatiques, lyriques et de musiciens exécutants) banned Passani from performing as a choral director for one year starting on 15 November 1944. Répertoire. Comités d’Épuration du spectacle, 16 October 1944–17 February 1945. AN. F21.8105 (1). Épuration. Épuration à la radio; répertoire des artistes sanctionnés.

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See letter, Poulenc to Yvonne de Casa Fuerte, 30 July 1945; and letters, Poulenc to Nadia Boulanger, 18 March 1946 and 8 May 1946, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 601, 620–22. See also letters, Poulenc to Denise Tual, from Larche on 30 July 1945 (“You’ll see that this will end with [the premiere of Figure humaine] constituting the return of Passani. If only I dared . . . but you can imagine the scandal!”) and from Noizay on 21 August 1946 (“I have decided, whatever it costs, to get the cantata performed. I’m even thinking of Passani. In that case would La Pléiade give up? It’s too silly, after all.”), in BNF-Mus Rés. Vm. dos. 70 (13), ff. 8, 9, 12. The Chorale Passani at Radio-Paris was able to recruit talented singers away from the choruses of Radiodiffusion nationale with a substantially higher salary: 6,500 francs per month versus 3,500. Karine Le Bail, “Radio-Paris ou Radio-Vichy? Le milieu artistique français au nouveau marché des ondes,” in Culture et médias sous l’Occupation: Des entreprises dans la France de Vichy, ed. Agnès Callu, Patrick Eveno, and Hervé Joly (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2009), 342. 117. Poulenc, Correspondance, 575. 118. Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, 103–5. 119. Ibid., 105. 120. Auric, “La Musique: Francis Poulenc à Pablo Picasso,” Les Lettres françaises, 31 March 1945, 5. Éluard expressed his own feeling that Poulenc had enhanced his poem by writing in a new poem, “À Francis Poulenc,” that “Francis I didn’t hear myself / Francis I owe it to you that I hear myself.” Letter, Éluard to Poulenc, spring 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 589; Éluard, “À Francis Poulenc,” in Éluard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 2:874–75. 121. Or nearly so. Auric was overlooking the works of two non-French composers performed in Poulenc’s wartime recitals with Bernac: a set of five songs by Liszt, and Schumann’s Sechs Gedichte und Requiem, op. 90. Poulenc, Journal de mes mélodies, 70–72. 122. Auric, “La Musique: Francis Poulenc à Pablo Picasso,” 5. On the 1945 Stravinsky protests in Paris, see chapter 5. 123. Rostand, “Poulenc, musicien des cœurs attentifs . . .,” Carrefour, 5 May 1945, 5 124. Rostand, “Tableau d’honneur,” Carrefour, 21 July 1945, 5. Mihalovici began composing his Symphonies pour le temps présent while living in Cannes when the city was under Italian control; after Germany invaded the Italian zone in September 1943, he hid in Mont-Saint-Léger, a small village in eastern France, where he completed the work. Rosenthal conducted the premiere with the Orchestre national on 16 November 1944. Rosenthal and the Orchestre national premiered Harsányi’s Divertimento no. 2 for trumpet and strings, also composed in Cannes in 1943, on 1 February 1945. The premieres of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus and Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine took place on 26 March and 21 April 1945. As is noted in chapter 5, despite his inclusion of Messiaen’s work here as a highlight of the past season, Rostand was scathing in his reviews of the premieres.

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125. André Schaeffner, “Francis Poulenc, musicien français,” Contrepoints 1, no. 1 (January 1946): 56–58. Poulenc himself saw the ballet as a highlight of his career, describing the work to Rostand in 1954 as combining the earlier frivolity of Les Biches with the seriousness and harmonic complexity of his choral works of the late 1930s. Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, 59. 126. Stéphane Wolff, L’Opéra au Palais Garnier (1875–1962): Les œuvres, les interprètes (Paris: L’Entr’acte, 1962), 238. Lifar, initially banned for life from the Opéra for collaboration, returned to the company in 1947. 127. Unsigned [Paul Éluard], “Bêtes et méchants,” Les Lettres françaises 16 (May 1944): 1; Éluard, Œuvres complètes, 2:1232–33. 128. André Schaeffner, notes for the program, Concerts de la Pléiade, 22 May 1947. BNF-Mus, Francis Poulenc, Dossiers constitué par André Lecoeur, 3, no. 38. 129. Maurice Brillant, “Les spectacles: un concert et un récital,” L’Aube, 28 May 1947, 5; Henri Sauguet, “La musique: Figure humaine,” La Bataille, 28 May 1947, 4. 130. See note 8. On Blanc’s reaction to my research on Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem and the wartime Vichy commissions to French composers, see chapter 4. 131. Ivry, Francis Poulenc (London: Phaidon, 1996), 117–22. Poulenc’s aforementioned October 1942 letter to Koechlin, for instance, postdates the June 1942 requirement that Jews wear the Star of David on their clothing in the occupied zone. Moreover, if Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws excluding Jews from employment in organizations such as the Paris Opéra had initially been met with public indifference, the roundups and deportation of tens of thousands of foreign Jews in Paris and southern France in the summer of 1942 had shocked the French public into greater awareness of the dangers such policies represented for those whom they targeted. Denis Peschanski, “Que savaient les Français?” in Qui savait quoi? L’extermination des juifs, 1941–1945, ed. Stéphane Courtois and Adam Rayski (Paris: La Découverte, 1987), 86–92. 132. Ivry, Francis Poulenc, 126, 130. In a 2006 conference presentation, Jane Fulcher similarly described Les Animaux modèles as Poulenc’s attempt to fashion a nationalist style acceptable to Vichy authorities and read Koechlin’s criticism of the ballet in his August 1942 letter to Poulenc as a covert expression of political disapproval. Fulcher, panel member, European Nations, Musical Nationalisms, and the Writing of Music Histories, Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Los Angeles, 3 November 2006. Although it is true that, in a letter to Poulenc eighteen months later, Koechlin used political language to praise Poulenc’s setting of “C” as the best of his recent mélodies (“the intense and noble emotion of Ponts de Cé, in which breathes the soul of the wounded Nation”), I read Koechlin’s almost apologetic tone in his 1942 letter, in which he admits his preference for Les Biches over Les Animaux modèles, as a gentle attempt to convey an honest aesthetic appraisal. Letters, Koechlin to Poulenc, 19 August 1942, 30 April 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 519–20, 587–88. 133. Henry Barraud, “Musique et Résistance,” Contrepoints 1, no. 1 (January 1946): 4–8.

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134. After his demobilization from the French army, Barraud spent the war as an employee of Radiodiffusion nationale, following the artistic services division from Toulouse to Montpellier, Marseille, and, in March 1943, Paris. (His adhesion to the FNM apparently dates from shortly after he moved back to Paris.) Indeed, according to his postwar memoirs, Barraud’s responsibilities at the radio left him with ample time to compose, but very little of his music was actually performed until after the liberation. Three works were premiered in Marseille: his Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, by Hélène Pignari and the Orchestre national in June 1941; his Quatuor à cordes, by the Quatuor Pascal in August 1942; and the Quatre poèmes de Lanza del Vasto for baritone and piano, by Yvon and Maruissia Le Marc’Hadour, sometime before March 1943. The only public performance of Barraud’s music in occupied France was the inclusion of the Quatre poèmes in a concert of the Société musicale indépendante at the École normale de musique in Paris in early 1944 for what Barraud described as “a meager audience.” Barraud, Un compositeur aux commandes de la Radio: Essai autobiographique, ed. Myriam Chimènes and Karine Le Bail (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 345, 1065–67. The only wartime public recognition of Barraud as a composer—one who had been awarded a government commission in 1938, no less (for his one-act opera, La Farce de Maître Pathelin)—by the Vichy administration was the inclusion of his 1936 Suite pour une comédie de Musset for chamber orchestra in the recordings anthology of contemporary French music produced by the French Association for the Promotion of the Arts (Association française d’action artistique, or AFAA) in 1943–44, discussed in chapter 3. 135. Sartre, “La République du silence,” Les Lettres françaises, 9 September 1944, 1. Reprinted in Sartre, Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 11. 136. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 22–23. 137. Durey worked first at the Société française de musicologie and next at the Compagnie de discophiles français. Frédéric Robert, Louis Durey, 58–59. 138. Désormière participated in the French premiere of one of the four German works imposed on the RTLN by the PAF: he conducted the French premiere of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Opéra-Comique in April 1943. The commercial recording made during the war of Désormière and the cast of the Opéra-Comique production was never released. Philippe Morin, “Discographie de Roger Désormière,” in Roger Désormière (1898–1963): Actes du Colloque, 98. 139. Morgan, “Roland Manuel, ” 7. In his postwar memoirs, Henry Barraud concurred, describing the FNM as “less of a combat organization than one of moral cohesion.” Barraud, Un compositeur aux commandes de la Radio, 345.

chapter 2 1. Dominique Saudinos, Manuel Rosenthal: Une vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 109–45. It is an irony of the French war experience that French

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Jewish soldiers like Rosenthal were safer in German prisoner-of-war camps than they were upon their return to France. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 99–100. 2. Roland-Manuel, “Un concert de musique interalliée,” Combat, 30 September 1944, 2; Saudinos, Manuel Rosenthal, 147; Catherine Morgan, “Roland Manuel nous dit l’action de quatre ans de musiciens français,” Les Lettres françaises, 16 September 1944, 7. 3. Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire performed the Roussel in November 1940 and November 1941, and gave the Ibert its French premiere in January 1942, repeating it twice more before the liberation in December 1942 and February 1944. Ibert’s Ouverture, commissioned by the French state to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese empire, had been premiered in Tokyo in December 1940. (Any association between the work and the Japanese empire would not have been problematic in wartime France, for the Vichy regime never declared war on Japan.) As for Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, Münch conducted it in oratorio form with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault, in two gala performances of the work in June 1941 and June 1942. Barrault also participated in the 22 October 1944 Debussy performance. D. Kern Holoman, “The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (1828–1967),” http://hector.ucdavis.edu/sdc/ (accessed 24 March 2010). 4. Maurice Brillant, “Musique: Honegger chante la Libération,” L’Aube, 28 October 1944, 2. 5. Claude Rostand, “Rentrée de Charles Münch,” Carrefour, 28 October 1944, 5. 6. “A certain Chant de Libération, performed at the beginning of last winter, gave off the suspicious odor that already reigned in L’Aiglon. But this time [in L’Appel de la montagne], enough is enough: there is no longer anything here that is doubtful or suspect. It’s bad, detestable, execrable.” Rostand, “C’était bien la peine . . .,” Carrefour, 14 July 1945, 5. 7. Auric, “La Musique: Serge Prokofieff,” Les Lettres françaises, 28 October 1944, 7; Roland-Manuel, “Rentrée de Paul Paray; Une symphonie d’Elsa Barraine,” Combat, 27 October 1944, 2. 8. Jean-Paul Dorian, “Quand la musique se taisait . . .,” Carrefour, 23 October 1944, 5. 9. Münch, explained Roland-Manuel, who had been “constrained by the need to keep the programs of the [Société des Concerts du Conservatoire] within the bounds of tradition, took a perverse delight in inserting pieces such as Albert Roussel’s Bardit des Francs and the Hymne à la Justice of Albéric Magnard, the French composer assassinated by the Germans in 1914, as often as possible.” Morgan, “Roland Manuel,” 7. 10. The two reviews of the 1941 Mozart festival are Honegger, “La Semaine Mozart à Vienne,” Comœdia, 13 December 1941, 1, 7, and “Le 150e anniversaire de Mozart: Le Festival de Vienne,” Comœdia, 20 December 1941, 7. Honegger’s positive reviews of German music include the French premieres of Pfitzner’s Palestrina (“A l’Opéra: ‘Palestrina’ de Hans Pfitzner,” Comœdia,

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4 April 1942), Egk’s Joan de Zarissa (“Création à l’Opéra de ‘Joan de Zarissa,’ ” Comœdia, 18 July 1942), and Egk’s Peer Gynt (“Création à l’Opéra: ‘Peer Gynt’ de Werner Egk,” Comœdia, 9 October 1943). Honegger met with Egk three times during the German composer’s wartime trips to Paris: on 26 October 1942, at the Hotel Ritz, and on 3 and 5 February 1943. Honegger, appointment books for 1942 and 1943, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 11. Guy Krivopissko and Daniel Virieux, “Musiciens: une profession en résistance?,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Brussels: Complexe, 2001), 338, 347; Manuel Rosenthal, interview by Pierre-Émile Barbier, “Les musiques prisonnières: France, 1939–1945,” Les Mots et les notes, France Musique, 10 June 1994. 12. Several scholars have recently suggested that there may in fact have been a connection between Honegger’s actions and the Germans’ concessions. Yannick Simon points out, for example, that Pacific 231 is not listed in the concert announcements of L’Information musicale until a Honegger Festival by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire on 8 February 1942, three days after the reception for Drewes; and that Pacific 231 was subsequently performed by the Orchestre Pasdeloup, conducted by the composer, on 3 July 1942, during the Honegger Week festivities. Fred Prieberg links Honegger’s interactions with the German officials Fritz Piersig, Hans-Georg Bonte, and Waldemar Rosen (all of whom worked for the RMVP) at the reception for Drewes to the relatively liberal programming for the Honegger Week concerts. Manuela Schwartz’s contradictory assertion that permission for Pacific 231 to be performed in occupied Paris came from Honegger’s friendly relationship with Heinrich Strobel, who lobbied Piersig on Honegger’s behalf, highlights that there were several ways in which Honegger had contact with German officials who made decisions on censorship in French musical life. Honegger’s appointment book for 1941 indicates that Honegger had two additional meetings with German officials shortly after the trip to Vienna: a luncheon at the Institut allemand on 19 December 1941 and a meeting with Strobel on 23 December 1941. Although Honegger was allowed to take a brief trip to Amsterdam on 15 January 1942, the fact that he was unable to obtain visas for two planned trips in February (to Lisbon on the 11th and to Barcelona on the 22nd) but was able to travel to Switzerland in May of that year and to several other foreign countries thereafter supports the hypothesis that Honegger had to earn the right to perform his music abroad through his participation in events such as the Vienna trip and the embassy reception. This is a hypothesis that Harry Halbreich and the composer’s daughter Pascale Honegger, both of whom defend the composer’s wartime conduct, support. Yannick Simon, Composer sous Vichy (Lyons: Symétrie, 2009), 288; Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 316; Manuela Schwartz, “‘Eine versunkene Welt’: Heinrich Strobel als Kritiker, Musikpolitiker, Essayist und Redner in Frankreich (1939–1944),” in Musikforschung— Faschismus—Nationalsozialismus. Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers (8. bis 11. März 2000), ed. Isolde von Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Mainz: Are Musik Verlags, 2001), 315; Harry Halbreich, Arthur

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Honegger: Un musicien dans la cité des hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 204. On Pascale Honegger, see Christiane Strucken-Paland, “‘On n’a rien à me reprocher’: Arthur Honegger und die Frage der Kollaboration,” in Peter Jost, ed., Arthur Honegger: Werke und Rezeption / L’œuvre et sa réception (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 116–17. 13. On the purges in France, see Herbert R. Lottman, The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators after World War II (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986), and Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). 14. Those named were: André Cœuroy, Alfred Cortot, Claire Croiza, Marcel Delannoy, Jean Fournet, Marius-François Gaillard, Georges Hüe, André Lavagne, Max d’Ollone, “Henri” (probably Émile) Passani, Georges Ricou, César Sautereau, Florent Schmitt, and Émile Vuillermoz. “Malaise chez les musiciens,” Les Lettres françaises, 30 September 1944, 7. On the general meeting of the FNM, see Jacques Chailley, interview by Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération: Épuration des musiques?” France Culture, 9 June 1994, and Morgan, “Roland Manuel,” 7. An article that appeared in Le Musicien d’aujourd’hui in August announced that the Comité of the FNM had decided to propose, after the liberation, that the director of fine arts form a commission of fifteen music professionals chosen for both their professional credentials and their “proof of patriotism” to reorganize musical life in postwar France. “Vœu au C.N.R.,” Les Lettres françaises 19 (August 1944): 3. 15. Detailed records of the trip to Vienna, the expenses incurred (which included free cigarettes and spending money for the participants), and the thank-you note sent to Goebbels by Louis Hautecœur on behalf of the French delegation are found in Correspondance avec le ministère allemand de la Propagande. AN. AJ40.1002. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. The list of invited guests from France was drawn up jointly between the RMVP and the Paris bureau of the Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF), and included two leading government administrators (Jacques Rouché, Louis Hautecœur), composers (Alfred Bachelet, Robert Bernard, Marcel Delannoy, Marcel Labey, Gustave Samazeuilh), critics (Adolphe Borschot, Guy Ferchault, Raphaël Edgard Génin, Louise Humbert, Paul Marie Masson, Lucien Rebatet), music publishers (René Dommange, head of Éditions Durand; Jean Marietti, head of Éditions Eschig), recording industry officials (Jean-Louis Bérard, head of Pathé), and newspaper editors (René Delange, editor of Comœdia; Eugène Gerber, appointed by the PAF in 1940 as editor of Paris-Soir). Although they were not among the official French delegates of the RMVP, Honegger and Florent Schmitt took the trip with them as invited guests of the Institut allemand. According to Manuela Schwartz, the archives of the Institut allemand (now in Bonn and Koblenz) reveal that Claude Delvincourt, Marcel Dupré, and Germaine Lubin declined the invitation. Personal communication with the author, 22 September 1997.

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16. Cited by Guy Ferchault in “La semaine Mozart à Vienne,” Cahiers franco-allemands 9, no. 1 (January 1942): 29. Complete texts in English translation of von Schirach and Goebbels’s addresses can be found in Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 251–61. Levi also discusses the significance of the international contingent to the organizers of the festival (ibid., 175–76). 17. “Wien feiert Mozart: Das große Musikfest hat begonnen,” Völkische Beobachter, 29 November 1941, 4; “Ausklang der Mozartwoche: Fernschreiberbericht unserer Wiener Schriftleitung,” Völkische Beobachter, 7 Dezember 1941, 4. The articles appeared in the north German edition of the newspaper. 18. Robert Bernard, “Le Festival Mozart à Vienne,” L’Information musicale 50 (19 December 1941): 476–77; Ferchault, “La semaine Mozart à Vienne,” 32; Lucien Rebatet, “Huit jours à Vienne avec Mozart,” Je suis partout, 13 December 1941, 9; Honegger, “Le 150e anniversaire de Mozart,” 7. Bernard and Ferchault published additional articles in L’Information musicale, Le Cri du peuple, BeauxArts, Vedettes, La Gerbe, and Paris-Midi. 19. “Domaine française,” Le musicien d’aujourd’hui, published as part of Les Lettres françaises 18 (July 1944): 3. 20. On the petition, the fifty-nine people who signed it, and those who are known to have refused to sign, see Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 191–201. 21. Cocteau, “Salut à Breker,” Comœdia, 23 May 1942, 1. 22. Paul Claudel, letters to Arthur Honegger, 16 August 1944, 28 September 1944, 22 December 1944; Honegger, letter to Claudel, 28 November 1944, in Claudel, Paul Claudel: Correspondance musicale, ed. Pascal Lécroart (Geneva: Papillon, 2007), 148–53, 157–59; Honegger, appointment book for 1942, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. Bourdet, a playwright and friend of Poulenc and Auric, had been the director of the Comédie-Française before the war. His brief tenure as director of theater and music lasted from 20 September 1944 until his death in January 1945. AN. F21.5178 (6). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Documentation d’Édouard Bourdet. 23. Honegger was still hopeful that the performance of Jeanne was imminent as late as June. Letter, Honegger to Maya Sacher, 13 June 1945, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. 24. Letter, Henry Barraud to Honegger, 25 December 1944, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 25. Roland-Manuel, letter to Poulenc, 13 November 1943, BNF-Mus, Rés. N.l.a. 37 (674). See also Poulenc, letter to Roland-Manuel, 8 November 1943, in Poulenc, Correspondance 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 547. 26. Honegger to Claudel, 29 December 1944, in Paul Claudel, 154. 27. Poulenc, letters to Milhaud, 27 March 1945, 1 July 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 585, 594 (italics in original). Poulenc was referring to a

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broadcast on 10 May 1945 of the Orchestre national, led by Ansermet, of Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes with the music of contemporary Swiss composers Willy Burkhard, Pierre Wissmer, and André-François Marescotti. Roland-Manuel reviewed the concert, treating Honegger as the most illustrious among the Swiss composers whose music was featured on the program. RolandManuel, “Autour et alentour de Gabriel Fauré,” Les Lettres françaises, 19 May 1945, 5. 28. Chant de Libération, music by Arthur Honegger, lyrics by Bernard Zimmer (Paris: Salabert, 1944); letter, Éditions Salabert to Zimmer, 24 October 1944. BNF-Arts, Fonds Bernard Zimmer. I am grateful to Patrick Le Boeuf for his assistance in locating these documents. 29. It is cited, for example, as “Chant de Libération (B. Zimmer), 1944” among a list of Honegger’s works published by Salabert on the back cover of the composer’s Sonate pour violon seul (Paris: Salabert, 1948). There is a fouryear gap between Salabert’s publication of Honegger’s songs during the war (Trois poèmes de Claudel, 1942; Trois Psaumes, 1943) and its postwar publication, in 1947, of Petit cours de morale (composed in April 1941), Quatre chansons pour voix grave (to three songs composed between February 1940 and March 1944, Honegger added a fourth in December 1945), and Mimaamaquim (composed in December 1946). Éditions Salabert, which became Honegger’s publisher in early 1941 when it bought Éditions Maurice Sénart (put up for sale because its director, Albert Nauberger, was Jewish), published nothing by Honegger between 1943 and 1946. 30. Marcel Delannoy, Honegger (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1953), 197–98; Jacques Tchamkerten, Arthur Honegger ou l’inquiétude de l’espérance (Geneva: Papillon, 2005), 190; Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, 197–98, 206, 684. StruckenPaland refutes Halbreich’s dismissal by pointing out that Honegger decided, despite the obvious risk that his presence in the Vienna delegation and at the later embassy reception would be used by the Germans for propaganda, to personally attend both events; she also argues that Honegger’s Swiss citizenship may not be completely relevant because it is unclear whether Honegger was attending the events as a Swiss citizen or as a well-known composer and music critic who was part of the French delegation. Strucken-Paland, “ ‘On n’a rien à me reprocher,’ ” 128. 31. Cited in Halbreich, L’Œuvre d’Arthur Honegger: Chronologie, catalogue raisonné, analyses, discographie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994), 914. 32. The nuance in Brillant’s declaration that the piece was composed “dès 1942” (beginning in 1942) is already lost in José Bruyr’s 1947 biography: “The Liberation. Victory. Honegger had to celebrate them in song in a simple Chant de Libération. . . . N.B.—This Chant de Libération had been composed in 1942.” In his 1992 biography Halbreich cited Brillant’s dating (“composed beginning in 1942”) in his discussion of Honegger’s wartime activities, but, in the inventory of Honegger’s works, he listed the date of composition simply as April 1942. In 2005 Tchamkerten made a direct connection between the timing of the composition of Chant de Libération and the German army’s difficulties on the

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Eastern Front: “It was probably not by chance that in April 1942, when just a little over a month earlier the Wehrmacht was forced to retreat from Moscow, [Honegger] wrote his Chant de Libération, unfortunately now lost.” Bruyr, Honegger et son œuvre (Paris: Corrêa, 1947), 222; Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, 199, 684; Tchamkerten, Arthur Honegger, 190. 33. Brillant, “Musique,” 2. 34. “If the ‘voices’ of Joan of Arc inspired the saint, the voice of the Marshal emanating from our radios strikes us, half a millennium later, as the product of a scientific miracle.” Raymond Braillard, “La Radio, instrument de la rénovation nationale sous le signe de la qualité,” Radio national 64 (9–15 August 1942): 5. Starting in June 1941, the weekly magazine Radio national offered detailed programs and commentaries about the broadcasts of Radiodiffusion nationale. The cover of the first issue displayed the Marshal himself in the act of speaking to the nation through a crystal microphone, with the caption, “Through the voice of Radio national the head of the nation speaks to the French people.” Radio national 1 (1–7 June 1941). 35. Gerd Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc à travers l’histoire, trans. Josie Mély, Marie-Hélène Pateau, and Lisette Rosenfeld (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 261– 63; Laurent Gervereau, “Y a-t-il un ‘style Vichy’?” in La Propagande sous Vichy, 1940–1944, ed. Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski (Nanterre: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, 1990), 122. 36. Jeune France, divers. Service des Manifestations: Projects. AN. F21.8098 (2). Beaux-Arts. Administration centrale des beaux-arts. Archives de Louis Hautecœur, Directeur général des Beaux-Arts, 1940–1944. Beaux-Arts et jeunesse; Arthur Hoérée, “La ‘Jeanne-d’Arc’ de Claudel-Honegger commence son tour de France,” Comœdia, 12 July 1941, 1; Philip Nord, “Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France: Cultural Politics in the Vichy Years,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (January 2007): 699. 37. Pascal Lécroart, “La réception de Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher de 1940 à 1945,” in Claudel Politique: Actes du colloque international de l’Université de Franche-Comté: 12, 13, et 14 juin 1993, ed. Pascal Lécroart (Lons-le-Saunier: Aréopage, 2009), 265. In an angry letter to Hubert d’Auriol, the music director of the touring production, Claudel protested, “I asked you and you promised me that nothing would be done to make the English [appear] odious. Naturally you did not keep your promise. But from you, nothing surprises me.” Letter, Claudel to d’Auriol, 7 July 1941, cited by Claudel in his Journal, ed. François Varillon and Jacques Petit (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 2:367–68. 38. On the musical contributions to Portique, see chapter 4. 39. Cited in Simon, Composer sous Vichy, 199. Vaucouleurs was the first step of Joan’s journey to liberate France, and her time there was filled with rejection and skepticism; it took two tries and several months for her to convince a local nobleman, Robert de Baudricourt, to bring her services to the attention of King Charles VII. The seven composers who participated in Sainte Jeanne were Tony Aubin, Louis Beydts, Pierre Capdevielle, Jacques Chailley, Georges Dandelot, Raymond Loucheur, and Jolivet, who later reworked his

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contribution, La Tentation de Jeanne, into the 1956 oratorio La Vérité de Jeanne, for narrator, solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. Simon, Composer sous Vichy, 198. 40. “Despite the great artistic interest of Jeanne au bûcher . . . it does not seem possible to grant a subsidy to its performance, the composer not being French.” Memo from Louis Hautecœur to Jérôme Carcopino, 13 December 1941. AN. F21.5201. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Décentralisation lyrique. 1934–1944. 41. Henry Barraud, “Vous allez entendre ‘Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher,’ ” Radio national 103 (9 May 1943): 2. 42. The English translations are taken from the trilingual score, with added Prelude, published in 1947. Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Paris: Salabert, 1947), 87, 119–20. 43. Anonymous critic in Le Progrès and André Fabre in La Croix, July 1941, cited in Lécroart, “La réception de Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher,” 267–68. 44. Chant de Libération. Music by Arthur Honegger; lyrics by Bernard Zimmer. (© 1944 Éditions Salabert, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) 45. Pierre Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 267, 328; François-Georges Dreyfus, Histoire de la Résistance: 1940–1945 (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1996), 584–86. 46. “La Victoire,” Marthe Richard: Espionne au service de la France, directed by Raymond Bernard (1937; Antony, France: Studio Canal, 2006), DVD. MS autograph, orchestral score, “Final de l’armistice,” Marthe Richard: Espionne au service de la France, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 47. The film was one among fifteen French films that the German Armistice Commission (Commission allemande de l’armistice) requested be banned in September 1940 in occupied and unoccupied France. When the French delegation at Wiesbaden passed the list along to Jean-Louis TixierVignancour, the relevant Vichy official in charge of the French cinema, he replied that his service had already banned not only the fifteen French films named by the Germans but six additional ones as well. “One of the primary aspects of our doctrine in these matters,” Tixier-Vignancour wrote, “is the strict observance of the views of the [German] Armistice Commission.” Letter, De Geffrier, Représentant du Ministre des Affaires Étrangères, Wiesbaden, to the Secrétariat Général de L’Information, Presse, Radiodiffusion, 30 September 1940; letter, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Chargé de mission, Chef des Services de la Radiodiffusion et du Cinéma, to the Ministre Secrétaire d’État à la Guerre, Direction des Services de l’Armistice, 6 October 1940. MAE. Série Guerre 1939–1945. Vichy: État français. Beaux-Arts: industrie cinématographique. Tixier-Vignancour, who was elected to the Chambre des députés in 1936 and who voted to give Pétain full powers in July 1940, was general-assistant secretary at the Ministry of Information from July 1940 to January 1941. Thierry Bouclier, Tixier-Vignancour (Paris: Perrin, 2003), 59, 66–68.

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48. Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 20. 49. Honegger, Cahier pour brouillons, 2: Septembre 1936 à Février 1939; Cahier pour brouillons, 3: Février 1939 à Mai 1943; Cahier pour brouillons, 4: 22 Mai 1943 à Décembre 1948. BNF-Mus. 50. Halbreich, L’Œuvre d’Arthur Honegger, 914. 51. From late April to May 1942 Honegger was working on the music for Le Journal tombe à 5 heures, a contemporary romantic comedy set in the offices of a large daily newspaper; in June 1942 production started on Pontcarral, colonel d’empire, a historical drama about the Empire and the July Monarchy for which Zimmer adapted Albéric Calmet’s 1937 novel. Honegger and Zimmer’s two wartime collaborations—Secrets, for which Honegger composed the score in October 1942, and Un Seul amour, the score composed in June and September 1943—were adaptations of nineteenth-century tales of romance by Turgenev (A Month in the Country) and Balzac (La Grande Brétèche). Ibid., 863, 871, 892. 52. Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, 666. 53. Honegger, “Chanson de l’Escadrille” (Paris: Coda, 1934); “De l’Atlantique au Pacifique” (Paris: Ray Ventura, 1937). Honegger used the same form, in E minor / E major and in simple duple meter, for “Hymne au Sport,” a song he composed in October 1942 for a documentary film by Lucien Gasnier-Reymond (Paris: Choudens, 1943). 54. Chant de Libération resembles Honegger’s popular film score marches in one final respect: the format in which it was almost published. It was common for French publishers at the time to release scores in various formats— piano-vocal and solo vocal being the most common—alongside commercial recordings of Honegger’s popular film songs, timed to the release of the films. This was the case in 1934 and 1937, respectively, for “Chanson de l’Escadrille” and “De L’Atlantique au Pacifique.” In the case of “Chanson de l’Escadrille,” the song was recorded by the actress who sung it in the original film, Lys Gautry (Columbia DF 1563); “De l’Atlantique au Pacifique” (Columbia DF 2289). “Chanson de l’Escadrille” was recorded with “Valse (Rengaine) de Lagasse,” another song from Cessez le feu with words by Zimmer. The correspondence between Éditions Salabert and Zimmer in October 1944 reveals that the publishing house was at least considering publication and recording of the song in similar formats. Letter, Éditions Salabert to Zimmer, 24 October 1944. BNFArts, Fonds Bernard Zimmer. 55. Traces of Zimmer’s role in the Comité exist in the film criticism he published for the Comité’s clandestine newspaper, which was published independently in December 1943 as L’Écran français before being incorporated into Les Lettres françaises from March to August 1944. Paul Léglise, “Août 44: La libération du cinéma français,” Écran 74 (October 1974): 34–35; Olivier Barrot, L’Écran français 1943–1953: Histoire d’un journal et d’une époque (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1979), 11–19. According to Gisèle Sapiro, Zimmer began writing for them in April 1944. Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains 1940– 1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 205, 474.

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56. In these letters Blanchar thanked the composer for his help with Secrets, the film the three had just completed together, and notified Honegger that he and Zimmer were planning to ask him to work on their next project, Un Seul Amour, which they completed in September 1943. Letters, Pierre Blanchar to Honegger, 28 January and 24 March 1943. Honegger subsequently met with Blanchar in person at least twice in May and June 1943. Honegger, appointment book for 1943, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 57. Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français, 27–28, 106–19, 194, 210. 58. Jules Supervielle, Poèmes de la France malheureuse 1939–1941 (Buenos Aires: Éditions des Lettres françaises, 1941; Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1942). 59. Violane Vanoyeke, Paul Éluard: Le poète de la liberté (Paris: Julliard, 1995), 294. The four poems set by Auric are “Richard II Quarante” (Aragon), “Le petit bois” (Supervielle), “Nous ne vous chantons pas” (Éluard), and “La Rose et le Réséda” (Aragon). 60. Barraine, Avis (Paris: Le Chant du monde, 1945); Arrieu, Cantate des Sept Poèmes d’amour en guerre, MS autograph, BNF-Mus, Ms. 23273; Rosenthal, Deux Sonnets de Jean Cassou, MS autograph, Fonds Manuel Rosenthal, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris; Dutilleux, La Geôle (Paris: Durand, 1946). The date of composition for Dutilleux’s La Geôle, while unclear, must predate its 9 November 1944 premiere. 61. Jean Cassou, 33 Sonnets composés au secret (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1944), 55. 62. La Valentine [Gabriel Audisio], Par dessus le toit, in L’Honneur des poètes: Europe (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1944), 11–17; Frédéric Robert, Louis Durey: L’aîné des Six (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1968), 60. The prison at Fresnes, located near Paris, was where the Germans held, tortured, and killed suspected French Resistance fighters. 63. Georges Auric, Quatre chants de la France malheureuse (Paris: Salabert, 1947), 6, 11–12. Audisio’s fifteen poems were untitled in the original; Durey provided the four he chose with titles taken from lines of the poetry. On “Avis,” see Éluard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 1:1643. 64. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre: De l’appel du 18 juin à la libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 918. In his first speech in liberated France on 25 August 1944, de Gaulle proclaimed from the front of City Hall in Paris that it was the French armed forces, not those of the Allies, that, with the aid of the French people, were responsible for the liberation of their nation: “Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France.” De Gaulle, “Allocation prononcée par le général de Gaulle à l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, le 25 août 1944,” in Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, vol. 2, L’Unité 1942–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956), 709.

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65. Éloi Juif and Laurent Commet, Chant de la libération (Bordeaux: Ebréo, 1944). Cited in Sylvain Chimello and Serge Domini, eds., La Résistance en chantant 1939–1945 (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004), 186. 66. Honegger, MS autograph, orchestral score, “Final de l’armistice,” Marthe Richard: Espionne au service de la France, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 67. Honegger, Hymne de la délivrance, MS autograph score dated 27 May 1945, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 68. Hymne de la Résistance, composed in June 1944 by Marcel Salin for the maquis in Auvergne; Les amis du maquis, with words written by Resistance fighter Blanche Gabrielle in February 1944 to be sung to the music of “La Carmagnole”; La Chanson de la Résistance, words written by imprisoned Resistance fighter Jean Nocher to the 1933 song, “Au-devant de la vie”; and Ceux du maquis, composed in London by Francis Chagrin to a text by Maurice van Moppès. Chimello and Domini, eds., La Résistance en chantant, 48, 118, 124, 150, 254. 69. From May 1943 to May 1944 the melody of Le Chant des Partisans, whistled without text or accompaniment, was broadcast twice daily by Honneur et Patrie, the Resistance radio station in London, as the station’s theme music. The BBC broadcast the song, recorded with lyrics and accompaniment by Germaine Sablon in London in 1943, in its French-language program three times in 1944: first in April, then on 6 June following de Gaulle’s announcement of the debarkation of the Allies, and a third time on 19 August, during the insurrection in Paris. The newly liberated French national radio, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, broadcast the song on 21 August 1944 before and after Albert Camus’s reading of a Combat editorial. Richard Raskin, “ ‘Le Chant des Partisans’: Functions of a Wartime Song,” Folklore 102 (1991): 64–65. 70. Druon, interviewed by Raskin, 24 April 1980, in ibid., 65. 71. Honegger, Hymne de la délivrance, MS autograph score dated 27 May 1945, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS; Honegger, “Chant de la Délivrance,” in Un Ami viendra ce soir (Paris: Choudens, 1946), 16–18. 72. Honegger met with Bernard twice more, on 5 June and 19 July, during the initial planning and composition of the film score. Honegger, appointment book for 1945, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. Letter, Honegger to Maya Sacher, 13 June 1945, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. 73. “Hélène,” Un Ami viendra ce soir, directed by Raymond Bernard (1946; Antony, France: Studio Canal, 2006), DVD. 74. “Parachutage allié,” Un Ami viendra ce soir, DVD. 75. Raskin, “ ‘Le Chant des Partisans,’ ” 71. 76. In the lyrics to Maurice Vandair and Henri Bourtayre’s 1944 “Fleur de Paris,” for example, the subject is a flower whose colors—red, white, and blue— had endured “for four years in our hearts.” Natalie Domptier, “La défaite ne se chante pas: Non-dits et sous-entendus sur la guerre dans la chanson française entre 1939 et 1945,” in La Guerre en chansons, ed. François Genton, Chroniques allemandes 10 (2003–4):197–98.

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77. Honegger, “Chant de la Délivrance,” 14–15. 78. “Trouble jeu,” Un Ami viendra ce soir, DVD. 79. “Le commandant Gérard,” Un Ami viendra ce soir, DVD. 80. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 350–58. The Frenchlanguage broadcasts of the BBC began alerting their listeners about mass executions of Jews in Poland in the summer of 1942, at around the same time that the brutal treatment of foreign Jews in the roundups in Paris in June and in southern France in August elicited public outcry in France. Fear of the eventual fate of those arrested inspired Jews to subsequently go into hiding in greater numbers after that time. But, as Denis Peschanski has written, “just because the message was heard does not mean that it was received.” According to Peschanski, French opinion turned against anti-Semitic persecution in France in mid-1942 based on the shocking mistreatment of Jews at home—by French police, no less—rather than on widespread understanding of German policies of mass extermination. Peschanski, “Que savaient les Français?” in Qui savait quoi? L’extermination des juifs, 1941–1945, ed. Stéphane Courtois and Adam Rayski (Paris: La Découverte, 1987), 86–92. Barraud wrote after the war that the French “knew very well that those whom they saw deported to Germany in full train cars would not be met with a life of paradise. But they imagined nothing like the horror” of the Holocaust. Barraud, Un compositeur aux commandes de la Radio: Essai autobiographique, ed. Myriam Chimènes and Karine Le Bail (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 394. 81. Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français, 74–75; Marcel L’Herbier, La Tête qui tourne (Paris: Belfond, 1979), 280. 82. The website Internet Movie Database lists four wartime films for which Companeez was an uncredited writer: Caprices, Une femme dans la nuit, L’Inévitable M. Dubois, and Florence est folle (www.imdb.com/name/ nm0173952/, accessed 23 March 2010). See also the interview with Nina Companeez, Un Ami viendra ce soir, DVD. 83. Interview with Nina Companeez, Un ami viendra ce soir, DVD. 84. Bernard’s father (the celebrated playwright Tristan Bernard) and mother were arrested in October 1943 and interned briefly at Drancy; his brother, the playwright Jean-Jacques Bernard, was deported to Germany but survived. Tristan Bernard testified after the war that Sacha Guitry and Arletty’s intervention with the PAF had led to the couple’s release from Drancy. Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français, 69, 233; Jean-Jacques Bernard, “Le Camp de la mort lente: Choses vécues,” Les œuvres libres 227 (Paris: Fayard, 1944), 87–88. Jean-Jacques Bernard was among the more surprising signers of the petition to save Brasillach from execution in February 1945. Kaplan, The Collaborator, 198. See also note 20. 85. Interview with Nina Companeez, Un ami viendra ce soir, DVD. The film was coproduced by Constantin Geftman and Jacques Roitfeld. 86. It appears the two may have even been in touch during the war, for Bernard’s name appears in Honegger’s appointment book once during the occupation, on 23 March 1942. Honegger, appointment book for 1942, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS.

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87. Münch and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire had given Nocturne its French premiere in Paris on 9 April 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France. On the 10 May 1945 broadcast concert of the Orchestre national, see note 27. 88. Letter, Honegger to Maya Sacher, 13 June 1945, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. 89. Honegger wrote to Sacher on 28 October 1945, “Two film scores are waiting for me”—Un ami viendra ce soir and Les Démons de l’aube—“and a shower of articles in newspapers and magazines.” Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. Music plays a much smaller role in Les Démons de l’aube than in the previous film: the score consists primarily of background music for battle scenes and shootouts and brief passages of diegetic music for the soldiers (a wordless march they hum while marching, a bar song nearly drowned out by other sound effects). Les Démons de l’aube, VHS, directed by Yves Allégret (1946; Courbevoie: Hollywood boulevard vidéo, 1995). Choudens published a set of ten passages from Un ami viendra ce soir, including Chant de la Délivrance, in piano-vocal reduction in 1946 and Souvenir de Chopin as a separate piano solo in 1947. The six articles that Honegger contributed to XXème siècle in an eight-week period from November 1945 to January 1946 are reproduced in Honegger, Écrits, ed. Huguette Calmel (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1992), 180–96; starting in late January, the music columns were written by René Dumesnil. In these articles, Honegger writes with the same trenchant criticism of contemporary music, and contemporary concert life, that he provided throughout the occupation for Comœdia; he also weighs in, albeit several months late, on the scandals surrounding the Paris premieres of music by Messiaen and Stravinsky the previous spring. On the Messiaen and Stravinsky scandals, see chapter 5. Honegger wrote again to Sacher on 12 December 1945 about his music journalism, commenting that his work for Méridien, which had since folded, and XXème siècle “isn’t that amusing but brings me a little money.” Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. 90. Journal officiel de la République française. Ordonnances et décrets (31 May 1945): 3108–9. 91. These included Max d’Ollone, president of the music division of Groupe Collaboration, and Henri Busser, who had written for the collaborationist newspaper La Gerbe, worked at Radiodiffusion nationale as its music director, and participated in a June 1943 concert in honor of the Légion des Volontaires français, a militia of volunteers who fought with the German army against the Soviet Union. Dossier d’épuration: Max d’Ollone. AN. F21.8125. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Épuration. Comité national d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs. Dossier d’épuration: Henri Busser. AN. F21.8104. BeauxArts. Spectacles et musique. Épuration. Commissions d’épuration des théâtres nationaux. 92. Dossier d’épuration: Florent Schmitt. AN. F21.8126. Dossier d’épuration: Marcel Delannoy. AN. F21.8124. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Épuration. Comité national d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs. The

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editor of Les Nouveaux Temps, Jean Luchaire, was a close friend of Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Paris; Luchaire founded his newspaper on 29 October 1940, the day after Pétain and Laval met with Hitler at Montoire, to support Abetz’s work toward Franco-German reconciliation. After the liberation he was condemned to death for collaboration and executed in February 1946. Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, eds., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 4, De 1940 à 1958 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975), 48, 325. 93. René Delange, the editor of Comœdia, worked with the Institut allemand on the content of the journal, in particular that of the page “Connaître Europe,” which was created to promote Franco-German collaboration. Delange was among the French delegates to the Mozart festival in Vienna in 1941. Olivier Gouranton, “Comœdia pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale,” Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris I, 1992, 24–25, 40. 94. In the section of his article on occupied Paris, Collaer wrote that, in Milhaud’s absence, Poulenc was the “most visible” composer, Sauguet’s work was well received, and Messiaen was “without contest the French revelation of recent years.” In a second article in the same issue on musical life in occupied Belgium, Collaer reported that everyone had been pleased to hear Honegger and Claudel’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher once again, suggesting that the German authorities had authorized the work “because they thought it would serve as anti-English propaganda.” Collaer, “La musique depuis 1940,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 85, no. 10 (October 1945): 379; Collaer, “La vie musicale en Belgique pendant l’occupation allemande,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 85, no. 10 (October 1945): 381. Sacher wrote back to Honegger that he shared his indignation over Collaer’s work but that the article by Willi Tappolet in the next issue of Schweizerische Musikzeitung on Honegger’s new works ought to have “rehabilitated” him for the journal’s readers. Letters, Honegger to Sacher, 12 December 1945, and Sacher to Honegger, 26 December 1945, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. Sacher was referring to Willi Tappolet, “Les récentes œuvres d’Arthur Honegger,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 85, no. 11 (November 1945): 417–22. 95. Letter, Honegger to Milhaud, 10 May 1946, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 96. Philippe Morin, liner notes, Charles Münch: La France résistante (Fribourg, Switzerland: Cascavelle Vel 3060, 2003), compact disc, 6, 10. On Ansermet’s transmission of the score from Honegger in Vienna to Sacher in Basel, see note 112. 97. Honegger’s portrait is on the front of the banknote; on the back are the pistons of a trumpet and the steam train of Pacific 231. Documentation on the website of the Swiss national bank praises the composer as “a mediator between the worlds of German and French music.” www.snb.ch/en/mmr/reference/ banknotes_personalities_CV20/source. For an image of the banknote, see www. snb.ch/en/iabout/cash/history/id/cash_history_serie8 (accessed 24 March 2010). 98. Rosenthal, interview by Pierre-Émile Barbier, 10 June 1994. Pascale Honegger also objected to Rosenthal’s discussion in a broadcast later that day

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on France Culture of “certain composers who clearly collaborated in a shameful fashion with the occupiers,” even though he did not mention her father by name. Rosenthal, interview by Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération: Vers des lendemains qui chantent,” France Culture, 10 June 1994. One day earlier, Dumon mentioned Honegger’s Chant de Libération, noting, “Not long after [the premiere of Chant de Libération], matters grew more complicated for Arthur Honegger” and reading from Honegger’s 29 December 1944 letter to Claudel; this broadcast was not included among the two targeted by Pascale Honegger’s lawsuit. Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération: Épuration des musiques?” France Culture, 9 June 1994. The French court found not only that the discussion of Honegger in the France Musique broadcast was factually accurate, but also that, since neither broadcast mentioned any of Honegger’s family members, his daughter had no grounds to file suit. Pascale Honegger has donated her correspondence concerning the lawsuit to the PSS; see also the discussion of the documents in Strucken-Paland, “ ‘On n’a rien à me reprocher,’ “ 107–10. Halbreich, in support of Pascale Honegger’s lawsuit, wrote a letter in which he names the 1942 composition of the lost Chant de Libération and its favorable reception “in the press of the time” as figuring among the evidence exonerating Honegger of charges of collaboration. Letter, Halbreich to Pascale Honegger, 14 August 1994, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 99. Rosenthal, interview by Pierre-Émile Barbier, 10 June 1994; Poulenc, letters to Milhaud, 27 March 1945, 1 July 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 585, 594. Rosenthal’s measured evaluation of Honegger’s activities was a significant factor in the French court’s decision against Pascale Honegger’s accusations of libel. Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, Jugement rendu le 6 septembre 1995, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. 100. Honegger and Claudel, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 11. 101. Simon, Composer sous Vichy, 286; Honegger, La Danse des Morts, VI, “Espérance dans la Croix” (Paris: Maurice Sénart, 1939), 56–58. Simon also reports, with skepticism, the testimony of Paul and Edmée Arma that, during the February 1941 performance by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, “the text caused several Germans to leave the hall,” for, as Simon observes, the Germans did not prevent the orchestra from performing the piece twice more (in March 1941 and February 1942) as well as making their March 1941 commercial recording. Paul and Edmée Arma, ”Mémoires à deux voix: témoignages de Mouvement dans le mouvement” (unpublished MS, BNF-Mus, 1986), 277, cited in Simon, Composer sous Vichy, 286. 102. Arthur Hoérée, “La Danse des Morts à la Société des Concerts,” L’Information musicale 12 (7 February 1941): 304. 103. José Bruyr, “Festival Honegger à Chaillot,” L’Information musicale 77 (3 July 1942): 1012. 104. Hoérée, for example, wrote that the June 1942 concert juxtaposed, in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, “what the musician, born and raised in France, owed his adoptive country” with “the Germanic traits (the parents of Honegger

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being originally from Zurich) that, in my opinion, give to the Symphonie [pour cordes] their distinctive accent.” Hoérée, “La Semaine Honegger: Première et deuxième journée,” Comœdia, 4 July 1942, 5. 105. The only wartime reference I have seen to the Symphonie pour cordes as an allegory of France’s wartime plight is in one of the weekly reports Jolivet sent Daniel-Lesur in the spring and summer of 1942. Daniel-Lesur, who was in the unoccupied zone, asked Jolivet to be the Paris correspondent for his radio show, Actualité musicale, broadcast on Radiodiffusion nationale. After attending the June 1942 premiere, Jolivet concluded his description of Honegger’s Symphonie with the comment, “I have tried here to translate visually the psychic impression that Paul-Marie Masson told me he had experienced. The distinguished music history professor at the Sorbonne confided to me that he had heard in Honegger’s Symphonie an extremely faithful and suggestive musical expression of the difficult and troubled times in which we live: the opposing tempos of the first movement, the anguished melody layered over a plodding ostinato in the second, and the brutal accents of the finale lightened by a brief melody in a brighter color.” For Jolivet, however, the work was “not at the same aesthetic level” as Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, which completed the day’s concert. I have not been able to verify whether Daniel-Lesur used Jolivet’s commentary in any of his broadcasts. Jolivet, “Sommaire: Symphonie pour orchestre à cordes d’Honegger—Le Trio à cordes de Robert Bernard—Concert spirituel en l’Église Saint-Gervais,” in Jolivet, Écrits, ed. Christine Jolivet-Erlih (Sampzon, France: Delatour, 2007), 1:135. 106. Wolfram Gerbracht, “Honeggers zweite Sinfonie,” Melos 14, no. 5 (March 1947): 221. 107. Honegger, “A propos de la Symphonie pour orchestre à cordes,” MS autograph, 25 June 1942, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS; published as “Symphonie pour orchestre à cordes,” Mitteilungen des BKO 1 (9 October 1943), reprinted in Honegger, Écrits, 171–73. 108. Honegger, Je suis compositeur (Paris: Conquistador, 1951), 105. 109. Jacques Lonchampt, “Le legs d’Arthur Honegger: Comme un parfum perdu,” Le Monde, 31 May 1989, 13 (italics mine). Morin cites Lonchampt in his liner notes for the 2003 Cascavelle CD. 110. Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, 195. 111. Ibid., 203. Halbreich mistakenly dates Auric’s Quatre chants to 1941; they were composed in 1943. 112. Ibid., 198, 204. The score still did not arrive in Basel in time, forcing Sacher to postpone the work’s premiere until May 1942 in Zurich. In his account of Honegger’s trip to Vienna, Halbreich writes that Honegger gave the score to the German conductor Franz von Hoesslin to pass on to Sacher, whereas, according to Honegger’s letter to Sacher from Vienna on 30 November 1941, the person to bring Sacher the score from Vienna was Ansermet, to whom, Honegger wrote, he had given the score himself. Halbreich also claims that Honegger’s music was banned in Austria; however, according to Ansermet’s biographer, Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Ansermet conducted the Symphonie pour

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cordes in Vienna in April 1943. Honegger, letter to Sacher, 30 November 1941, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS; Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Ernest Ansermet ou la passion de l’authenticité (Geneva: Slatkine, 1997), 88. 113. Honegger, undated autograph MS, Sammlung Arthur Honegger, PSS. Honegger also did not mention his efforts to help those whose lives were in danger during the occupation: Fernand Ochsé, who was arrested with his wife in July 1944 and deported to Auschwitz after Honegger was unable to secure their release from the transit camp at Drancy; Louis Sauguer, for whom Honegger wrote a letter of recommendation in 1941 and who survived the war as a member of the Resistance; and Milhaud, whose library Honegger sheltered until his friend returned from California. Simon, Composer sous Vichy, 273–74. 114. On debates over Pontcarral and Les Mouches as political allegories, see chapter 1. Zimmer was working on the screenplay of Pontcarral in spring 1942, around the time he and Honegger were writing the first version of Chant de Libération; the film starred Pierre Blanchar as Pontcarral. 115. Lucien Rebatet, “Le Festival Honegger,” Je suis partout, 3 July 1942, 7. Honegger’s prewar left-wing credentials include musical compositions such as the popular 1937 song Jeunesse (a score and recording of which Chant du monde reissued in September 1945) and written texts such as Honegger’s 1939 antifascist speech published in Clarté, an antiwar journal edited by Romain Rolland. The speech reproduced in Clarté was given by Honegger in Paris at an international conference “for democracy, peace, and the human being,” 13–14 May 1939: Honegger, “Messages,” Clarté 33–34 (June 1939): 1367. Rebatet betrayed his lingering ambivalence about Honegger in his postwar memoirs. After describing Honegger’s insecure and demanding behavior during the 1941 Vienna trip (“Honegger, protected by his Swiss passport, tried to keep his distance from the Frenchmen who compromised themselves by this pilgrimage more Nazi than Mozartean”), Rebatet wrote, “I wasn’t acquainted [at the time] with his Deuxième Symphonie for strings and trumpet (still unpublished) that was inspired by the absurdity of the war, and which would have allowed me to go beyond polite banalities with him.” Rebatet, Les Mémoires d’un fasciste (Paris: Pauvert, 1976), vol. 2, 1941–1947, 40–42.

chapter 3 1. The original source for Messiaen’s statement is Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: René Julliard, 1960), 63. 2. Anthony Pople, Messiaen: “Quatuor pour la fin du Temps” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 3. Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Paris: Durand, 1942), i. 4. Messiaen, Technique de mon langage musical (Paris: Leduc, 1944). More musical examples are drawn from the Quartet than from any other of Messiaen’s compositions. 5. Pasquier, interview with Hannalore Lauerwald, “Er musizierte mit Olivier Messiaen als Kriegsgefangener,” Das Orchester 47 (1999): 21–23. See

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also Pasquier, “Hommage à Olivier Messiaen,” in Olivier Messiaen, homme de foi: Regard sur son œuvre d’orgue (Paris: Église de la Trinité, 1995), 91–92. More extensive interviews with Pasquier on the Quartet have been published in Rebecca Rischin, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 6. Messiaen, in Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, 64–67. 7. “It is just possible to believe that Messiaen’s unswerving faith allowed him to focus exclusively on the theological import of his music, even at the first performance. But one can be fairly sure that many of his fellow prisoners, listening to a work about the day of judgment, would have allowed their thoughts to alight on their future deliverance, and on their captors being brought to account before the Almighty.” Pople, Messiaen, 15. See also page 40, where, regarding the text that inspired “Abîme des oiseaux,” Pople writes, “Although one ought not to doubt that Messiaen’s subject was indeed the apocalypse, one can imagine that the words ‘And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months’ would have had particular resonances for his fellow prisoners-of-war. As indeed might his own words: ‘The abyss is Time, with its sorrows and its weariness.’ ” 8. Rischin, For the End of Time, 66. 9. Christopher Dingle, The Life of Messiaen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71. According to Messiaen’s fellow prisoner, Charles Jourdanet, however, the prisoners had little free time: they worked every day from 8 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and concerts, films, and plays were often shown from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Charles Jourdanet, “Il y a soixante ans en Allemagne: Messiaen créait Quatuor pour la fin du Temps au stalag,” NiceMatin, 15 January 2001, 12. 10. There are many contradictory reports on when Messiaen was released, ranging from spring of 1941 to mid-1942. However, we can be sure Messiaen was in Neussargues by 10 March 1941 from a letter he sent to fellow composer and former Conservatoire classmate, Claude Arrieu, on that date. BNF-Mus Rés. N.L.a. 27 (021–7). 11. On Bloch, see AN. F21.5345(9). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Inspecteurs de l’enseignement musical. Dossiers administratifs des inspecteurs: André Bloch. 12. They were particularly struck by the chilblains from captivity that could be seen still covering his hands when he sat at the piano to play from his miniature orchestral score of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Yvonne Loriod, cited in Jean Boivin, La classe de Messiaen (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1995), 31–32. See also Peter Hill, “Interview with Yvonne Loriod,” in Peter Hill, ed., The Messiaen Companion (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 288–89. 13. To cite two examples: in 1958 Goléa equated France with other occupied countries by writing that 1945 marked the “liberation of music from the yoke that its oppressors had maintained in Germany since 1933, in Austria since 1938, and in France and the other occupied countries since 1940”; decades later Andrew Clements described Paris in 1945 as “a city at ease with the polemical

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tradition and with an appetite for radicalism in all the arts unsatisfied after five years of Nazi proscription.” Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris: René Julliard, 1958), 9; Clements, “Western Europe, 1945–1970,” in Modern Times: From World War I to the Present, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 260. On the ban in Germany from September 1939 to December 1943 on public performances of French music protected under copyright, see chapter 1, note 61. 14. Rudolph Dunbar, “The News from Paris,” Tempo 9 (December 1944): 15. 15. Denise Tual, Itinéraire des Concerts de la Pléiade, n.d., 2–3. BNF-Mus Rés. Vm.dos. 70 (1). The manuscript, although undated, postdates 1989, for that was the year that Serge Nigg, whom Tual refers to as “now an académicien” on page 16, became a member of the Institut de France. 16. Nigel Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade: ‘A Kind of Clandestine Revenge against the Occupation,’ ” Music and Letters 81, no. 4 (November 2000): 551, 570–71. The quote in his title is from a 1977 interview with Nouritza Matossian, to whom Messiaen is describing the Concerts de la Pléiade. Matossian, Xenakis (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 52. 17. Jane Fulcher sees the 1943 Opéra production of Honegger’s Antigone as emblematic of the internal contradictions of the Vichy regime, which did not object to the occasional performance, among more traditional offerings, of works at the RTLN that challenged audiences. Fulcher, “French Identity in Flux: The Triumph of Honegger’s Antigone,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 673–74. 18. “Tätigkeitbericht der Propaganda-Abteilung-Frankreich für die Zeit vom 16–22.12.40.” AN. AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Rapports du service de propagande, 1940–1941. 19. On Messiaen’s contributions to Portique pour une fille de France, see chapter 4. In April 1941 Messiaen also participated in a group lecture-recital that Jeune France organized in the unoccupied zone in the regions of Isère and HauteSavoie with fellow composers Daniel Lesur and Pierre Auclert. In the lecturerecitals, which they gave forty-two times, Messiaen performed two of his Préludes (“La colombe” and “Les sons impalpables du rêve”) and accompanied the singer Marthe Bailloux in four of his melodies; “Le sourire,” “Pourquoi?,” “Vocalise,” and “Minuit pile et face” (three of which he would repeat in the June 1941 Paris concert giving the Paris premiere of the Quatuor). Programme, “Jeune France”; Service des manifestations: Réalisations. AN. F21.8098(2). Beaux-Arts. Administration centrale des beaux-arts. Archives de Louis Hautecœur, Directeur général des Beaux-Arts, 1940–1944. Beaux-Arts et jeunesse. 20. Messiaen, letters to Claire Messiaen, 12 March 1941, 28 March 1941, Archives of Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, cited in Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 104–9. 21. Right before the war Messiaen had published his own harmony treatise in which he advised students not to memorize a set of normalized procedures,

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as was standard pedagogical practice, but instead to examine the harmonic language actually used by composers from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries directly from scores of their works, and then endeavor to imitate each composer in a series of quasi-compositional exercises. Messiaen, Vingt leçons d’harmonie, dans le style de quelques auteurs importants de l’histoire harmonique de la musique, depuis Monteverdi jusqu’à Ravel (Paris: Leduc, 1939; reprint, 1951). Messiaen’s incorporation of music analysis into harmony lessons was even more revolutionary, especially when he extended the repertoire from Mozart and Debussy to include such scores as Le Sacre du printemps, Pierrot Lunaire, and Wozzeck. On Messiaen’s harmony classes at the Conservatoire during the war, including a list of repertoire for analysis, see Boivin, La classe de Messiaen, 30–39, 434. 22. Hautecœur, Les Beaux-Arts en France, passé et avenir (Paris: Picard, 1948), 80–81; Hautecœur, Considérations sur l’art d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Librairie de France, 1929), 71–72. 23. Pierre Laval, acting as Vichy’s minister of foreign affairs, announced that the anthology was close to completion in a letter dated 24 September 1943 that was sent out to embassies in Helsinki, Budapest, Istanbul, Bucharest, Sofia, and Bern, and to both embassies and French institutes in Madrid, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Barcelona. The list was substantially reduced from the original plans drawn up in a 19 August 1941 letter that Laval’s predecessor, Admiral Darlan, had sent to Carcopino, the minister of national education, in which Darlan envisioned sending the anthology to these locations, plus embassies in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Washington, D.C., as well as institutes in Athens and Zagreb, legations in Santiago, Caracas, and Mexico City, and a French lycée in Montevideo. Most of these countries, however, had long since severed diplomatic ties with Vichy. By October 1943, everyone but the ambassador in Helsinki had sent the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a positive response. MAE. Série Guerre 1939–1945. Vichy. Œuvres. Radio: dossier général, 1940–1944. 24. Honegger, “Olivier Messiaen,” Comœdia, 12 July 1941, 3; Honegger, “Olivier Messiaen à la Pléiade,” Comœdia, 15 May 1943, 5. 25. Armand Machabey, “Galerie de quelques jeunes musiciens parisiens: Olivier Messiaen,” L’Information musicale 71 (22 May 1942): 945. 26. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also distributing L’Information musicale to subscribers of Revue musicale abroad. Myriam Chimènes, “L’Information musicale: une ‘parenthèse’ de La Revue musicale?” La Revue des revues 24 (1997): 93–94, 99–103. Machabey’s columns from L’Information musicale were published, some of them revised, after the war as Portraits de trente musiciens français (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1949). 27. Estimates from Yves Durand, La Captivité: Histoire des prisonniers de guerre français 1939–1945 (Paris: Horizons, 1980), 20–21, 324. 28. According to Pasquier, the camp authorities made sure that he and Messiaen were among the first convoys of prisoners to be repatriated, having assumed erroneously that the two musicians were classified as soldats musiciens—drafted to serve in the armed forces as musicians, and therefore

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unarmed. Rather than leave the matter up to chance, Pasquier, with the help of Hauptmann Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic German guard, forged their papers to read “medical orderly,” since the soldiers who had worked in the medical services were also unarmed and therefore eligible for early release. Ironically, Akoka, who really was a soldat musicien, was pulled off the train at the last minute by a German guard who had identified him as Jewish, while Pasquier’s forgery ensured his and Messiaen’s departure. Pasquier, in Rischin, For the End of Time, 72–74. Akoka escaped a few months later and took refuge in Marseille, finding work as a clarinetist in the Orchestre national; Le Boulaire remained in the Stalag until December 1941, when, having also forged his papers with Brüll’s help, he returned to Paris and abandoned music for a career as an actor. Ibid., 76–79, 85–86. 29. Daniel Lesur, “Les écrivains et musiciens prisonniers ou morts pour la France,” Radio National 5 (22–28 June 1941): 11. 30. Program listing, Radio National 5 (22–28 June 1941): 5. On Gailhard’s La Française, see my “Muse of the Révolution française or the Révolution nationale? Music and National Celebrations in France, 1936–1944,” repercussions 5–1/5–2 (Spring–Fall 1996): 108–16. 31. “Le Kriegsgefangener Olivier Messiaen, replié sur lui-même.” Marcel Delannoy, “Depuis le mysticisme jusqu’au sport,” Les Nouveaux Temps, 13 July 1941, 2. 32. Serge Moreux, “Théâtre des Mathurins: Œuvres de Messiaen,” L’Information musicale 33 (11 July 1941): 759. The mention of Schoenberg’s name in print is a typical example of inconsistency in German censorship of the French press during the occupation. 33. Roger Guillaumin, “L’Écho des Camps: L’activité artistique au Stalag VIIIA: Du music-hall à la comédie classique,” Le Trait d’union 123 (2 October 1941): 5. 34. J. M., “L’Écho des Camps: Les activités du Stalag IXA,” Le Trait d’union 41–44 (Christmas 1940): 16. Lucien Akoka, a trumpet player and brother of Henri Akoka, spent five years as a prisoner in Stalag IXA. This was the camp where François Mitterrand was held prisoner from his capture by the German army in June 1940 until his escape in December 1941. According to Lucien Akoka, Mitterrand would often visit the musicians’ barracks because the Germans gave the musicians special privileges such as increased food and coal rations. Lucien Akoka, interview with Rebecca Rischin, 22 March 1995, cited in Rischin, For the End of Time, 25–26, 115. 35. For a description of the concert, see Marcel Delannoy, “La musique: La semaine,” Les Nouveaux Temps, 19 January 1942, 2. 36. Program, “Gala d’Œuvres de Prisonniers,” Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire, 17 December 1942. BNF-Mus, Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Programmes, 1932–1967. 37. Damais, a largely self-taught musician who studied violin with Capet and composition with Koechlin, worked before the war as a conductor for the Société philharmonique in Le Havre. While in Stalag IIB he conducted the camp

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orchestra and chorale. Machabey, “Galerie de quelques jeunes musiciens parisiens: Émile Damais,” L’Information musicale 114 (30 April 1943): 301. O Nuit was performed a second time in occupied France during a 27 March 1944 broadcast of the Orchestre national, conducted by Damais, for Radiodiffusion nationale. Radio national 149 (26 March–1 April 1944). Goué was interned in Oflag XB, in Nienburg, where he provided his fellow prisoners with not only new compositions but also courses in math and music history. Machabey, “Galerie de quelques jeunes musiciens parisiens: Émile Goué,” L’Information musicale 101 (29 January 1943): 185. Another concert that omitted Messiaen was the 15 April 1942 broadcast of the Orchestre radio-symphonique de Paris on Radiodiffusion nationale of Martinon’s Stalag IX, Thiriet’s Oedipe-Roi, and Trois mélodies by Raymond Gallois-Montbrun. The concert is listed in Radio national as held “in honor of composers who fought in 1939–40 and have recently been liberated.” Radio national 47 (12–18 April 1942). The Orchestre radio-symphonique de Paris was created in summer 1941 after the musicians of Radiodiffusion nationale’s second-tier orchestra, the Orchestre radio-symphonique, remained in the French capital when Radiodiffusion nationale regrouped in southern France after the armistice. 38. Ferchault goes on to address Damais directly: “In the applause that saluted your return among us, perhaps you were able to sense, Damais, the fervor that rises from our hearts toward our absent comrades, of whom, this evening, you were for us the living symbol and whose tragic message your music has brought to us.” Guy Ferchault, “Concert d’œuvres de prisonniers,” L’Information musicale 109 (26 March 1943): 263. 39. In 1947 Éditions Choudens published Martinon’s piece under the altered title Musique d’exil: Mouvement symphonique, op. 31. 40. Delannoy, “La musique: La semaine,” 2. 41. The published score indicates the text of the excised passage: Martinon, Psaume 136: Chant des captifs, op. 33 (Paris: Costallat, 1946), 45. The premiere of the unexpurgated version took place shortly after the war, on 17 February 1946, with Jean-Louis Barrault as narrator and Münch conducting the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. 42. P. J., “Un quart d’heure avec Jean Martinon,” Toute la France 39 (30 January 1943): 8. 43. Messiaen, letter to Denise Tual, Neussargues, 22 September 1943. BNFMus Rés. Vm. dos. 70 (11), f. 9. 44. Tual’s new commission resulted in the Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine. 45. The concert was the first of several during the war to reunite the four original members of Jeune France: Messiaen, Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier. Others took place under the auspices of Le Triptyque in Paris (a chamber music concert that included Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi on 27 October 1943) and the Orchestre symphonique de France conducted by Hubert d’Auriol at the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice (4 March 1942, with Les Offrandes oubliées) (see table 5). The entire Quartet was performed in private at the Paris

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homes of Comte Étienne de Beaumont on 17 January 1942 and Virginie Bianchini on 2 December 1942. 46. The melody of the fifth movement is from Fête des belles eaux for a sextet of ondes Martenot, commissioned by the city of Paris as part of its celebration of the International Exposition of 1937; the eighth is from the second movement of the early Diptyque for organ, composed in 1930. At least one person at the Paris premiere caught the reference in the fifth movement: Delannoy’s amused reference to the “protean virtues” suggested by the use of such music in the Quartet foreshadows similar comments by Paul Griffiths forty years later on the mixed messages conveyed by the contrasts in the two contexts for the same melody. Delannoy, “Depuis le mysticisme jusqu’au sport,” 2; Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 105. 47. Jolivet supplied this information in two postwar interviews, the first with Élie Rabourdin, “Musiciens contemporains. Vie et création. André Jolivet,” Radio-Télévision Française, broadcast in October 1946, and the second with Antoine Goléa, “Les années de guerre et Les Trois Complaintes du soldat,” recorded April 1960, broadcast on Radio-Télévision Française on 24 April 1961. Both interviews are reprinted in André Jolivet, Écrits, ed. Christine Jolivet-Erlih (Sampzon, France: Delatour, 2007), 1:297–302 and 2:459–64. 48. Jolivet, interview with Goléa, “Les années de guerre,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 1:300–301. 49. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu.” (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) 50. On the postwar silence of the veterans of May–June 1940 and their tainted association with Vichy in the postwar imagination, see Robert Frank, “La mémoire empoisonnée,” in La France des années noires, ed. Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, vol. 2: De l’Occupation à la Libération (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 488; and François Cochet, Les exclus de la victoire: Histoire des prisonniers de guerre, déportés et S.T.O. (1945–1985) (Paris: S.P.M., 1992), 167– 75. The less receptive atmosphere toward captured soldiers in postwar France may have influenced Martinon’s decision to drop the mention of Stalag IX from the title of his symphonic poem Musique d’exil when the work was published in 1947 (see note 39). 51. André Jolivet, Trois Complaintes du soldat, I. “La complainte du soldat vaincu.” (© 1942 Éditions Durand, Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.) 52. Robert Bernard, Les Tendances de la musique française moderne (Paris: Durand, 1930), 131; Bernard, “La musique: Récitals et concerts symphoniques,” Les Nouveaux Temps, 7 March 1943, 2. 53. The poem begins “Et voici le soldat sur la route, Il recherche les siens (Et marche, et marche, use-toi les pieds!)” (And here is the soldier on the road, He is looking for his family [And march, and march, wear out your feet!]). In his interview with Goléa, Jolivet described how he wrote the Trois Complaintes

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while waiting to reunite with his own family: his wife, pregnant with their second child, was due to arrive at Pressignac with their five-year-old son, Pierre-Alain, on 13 July 1940. Jolivet, interview with Goléa, “Les années de guerre,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 1:298. 54. On the struggles over the strategic Loire River bridges, see Henri de Mollans, Combats pour la Loire, Juin 1940 (Chambray-les-Tours: C.L.D., 1985), 18–29. 55. Jolivet, interview with Goléa, “Les années de guerre,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 1:298. Jolivet received the Croix de Guerre with a bronze star in a ceremony on 14 July 1940 at Pressignac for his military service. 56. The premiere of the first and third songs (“The Lament of the Defeated Soldier” and “The Lament to God”) took place at the Salle Chopin in Paris on 14 February 1941; they were repeated on 18 July 1941 at the aforementioned concert of the four members of Jeune France, alongside the fifth movement of Messiaen’s Quartet. It appears that the second song (“The Lament of the Bridge at Gien”) was initially censored in occupied Paris because the text described the Germans’ bombing of French civilians; all three songs were permitted by the time of another Jeune France joint recital on 8 May 1942. Lucie Kayas, André Jolivet (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 308. The national broadcasts were on Radio-Paris (23 July 1943, with piano) and on Radiodiffusion nationale (12 April 1944, with the Orchestre national). War shortages delayed the release of the recording made in October 1943 and March 1944 with Münch and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire; it finally appeared in 1946. See Jolivet, letters to Louis Émié, 1942–1943. BNF-Mus Rés. N.L.a. 47 (1–5). Bernac sung Trois Complaintes du soldat at least once in liberated Paris according to a concert listing in the Guide du concert for a 26 February 1946 performance at the Foyer des Arts contemporains. Guide du concert 15 (22 February 1946): 193. 57. Élie Rabourdin, “Musiciens contemporains. Vie et création. André Jolivet,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 2:460. 58. Jolivet, interview with Goléa, “Les années de guerre,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 1:299–300. 59. Jolivet, “Les sources héroïques du lyrisme musical,” in Jolivet, Écrits, 1:166–67. Delannoy cited Jolivet’s remarks in “Compositeurs d’aujourd’hui,” Les Nouveaux Temps, 28 February 1943, 2. 60. Honegger, “Concerts du Dimanche,” Comœdia, 6 March 1943, 5; José Bruyr, “André Jolivet,” L’Information musicale 105 (26 February 1943): 217. 61. Jean Mariat, “L’art et le film au stalag,” Les Nouveaux Temps, 17 December 1941, 2. Mariat was reviewing the Salon du Prisonnier, which had just opened at the Musée Galliéra in Paris, as well as a documentary film on the prisoners, entitled simply Prisonnier, that the Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War had released that month as well. 62. Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, 105. One could say the same for Messiaen the autobiographer. 63. Honegger, “Olivier Messiaen,” 3. 64. Moreux, “Théâtre des Mathurins,” 759.

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65. Delannoy, “Depuis le mysticisme jusqu’au sport,” 2. 66. M. H. [Marcel Haedrich], “Une grande première au Stalag VIIIC [sic]: Olivier Messiaen présente son Quatuor pour la fin des [sic] Temps,” Le Figaro, 28 January 1942, 2. The complete text of the article is reproduced in my “Messiaen, Jolivet, and the Soldier-Composers of Wartime France,” Musical Quarterly 87 (2004): 292–94. 67. Ibid. In an account of the premiere published in the camp’s own newspaper in April 1941, a critic identified as “V. M.” made a similar observation that “what’s strange is that in a prison barracks we felt just the same tumultuous and partisan atmosphere of some premieres, latent as much with passionate acclaim as with angry denunciation. And while there was fervent enthusiasm along some rows, it was impossible not to sense the irritation in others.” V. M., “Première au camp,” Lumignon: Bi-mensuelle du Stalag VIIIA 1 (1 April 1941): 3–4, cited in Hill and Simeone, Messiaen, 101. Sixty years later, Jourdanet remembered that the audience was divided between those who were “full of unexpected enthusiasm” and others who were “annoyed by the rhythms and sounds to which they were not accustomed.” Jourdanet, “Il y a soixante ans en Allemagne,” 12. 68. M. H. [Marcel Haedrich], “Une grande première,” 2. Below the name M. H. in Le Figaro is “Visa D.S.P.G. 4.335”; all articles about the prisoners in Le Figaro have a similar visa at the end. The article reappeared in Le Trait d’union 172 (22 March 1942): 5. 69. Ibid. 70. Guy Bernard[-Delapierre], “Souvenirs sur Olivier Messiaen,” Formes et couleurs 3–4 (1945): n.p. 71. Program, reproduced in Thomas Daniel Schlee and Dietrich Kämpfer, Olivier Messiaen: La Cité céleste—Das himmlische Jerusalem. Über Leben und Werk des französischen Komponisten (Cologne: Wienand, 1998), 225. 72. The rest were on work detail in nearby farms, villages, and factories. Lauerwald, “Quartett auf das Ende der Zeiten: Olivier Messiaen als Kriegsgefangener in Görlitz,” Das Orchester 43 (1995): 19; Durand, La Captivité, 96. 73. Jourdanet, “Il y a soixante ans en Allemagne,” 12. 74. Pasquier, interview with Lauerwald, “Er musizierte mit Olivier Messiaen,” 23. Rischin and Lauerwald concur, with Rischin describing the persistence with which Messiaen repeated his error as having “imbued his story with an even greater aura of the miraculous,” and Lauerwald proposing, “It is possible that a messianic vision of thousands of fellow prisoners stayed alive in Messiaen’s memories.” Rischin, For the End of Time, 66; Lauerwald, “Quartett auf das Ende der Zeiten,” 18. 75. Messiaen, in Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, 61–62. 76. Loriod, interview by Rischin, 25 November 1993, in Rischin, For the End of Time, 28. 77. David Gorouben, letter to Rischin dated 8 August 1995 in ibid., 29–30; Le Boulaire, interview by Rischin, 3 March 1995, in ibid., 29, 38, 109; Pasquier, interview by Rischin, 19 June 1994, in ibid., 72–73.

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78. See ibid., chapters 2 (“The Quartet in Prison”) and 3 (“Preparing the Premiere”), for the relationship between the musicians and the German guards at Stalag VIIIA. 79. Le Boulaire, interview by Rischin, 3 March 1995, in ibid., 38. 80. Messiaen, interview by Leo Samana, in Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time (dir. Astrid Wortelboer, 60 min., 1993, VHS). 81. Loriod told Rischin that Messiaen tried unsuccessfully to contact Brüll at a later date, but it was too late: Brüll had passed away in a car accident. See Rischin, For the End of Time, 95–96, who bases her information on an 8 July 2002 interview with Gorouben. 82. Information supplied by Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade,” 557. 83. For a discussion of the Messiaen controversy and Stravinsky protests of 1945, see chapter 5. 84. See for example Pierre Boulez, “Propositions,” Polyphonie 2 (1948): 65–72, reprinted in Relevés d’apprenti, ed. Paule Thévenin (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 65–74. Boulez’s article was written in response to Leibowitz, “Olivier Messiaen ou l’hédonisme empirique dans la musique contemporaine,” L’Arche 9 (September 1945): 130–39. See also Boulez, “Éventuellement . . .,” Revue musicale 212 (May 1952): 133–34, an homage to Messiaen’s “discoveries in the field of rhythm.” 85. André Hodeir, La musique depuis Debussy (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961), 100. Boulez wrote his famous condemnation of Messiaen’s lyricism in 1948: “In short, there is no way to reconcile Messiaen’s works with his theory because he does not compose—he juxtaposes—and he always calls on an exclusively harmonic style of writing; I would almost call it accompanied melody.” Boulez, “Propositions,” in Relevés d’apprenti, 68. 86. Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, 70. Goléa also reported on the reactions of others to the piece: “I have heard the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps many times in the past fifteen years, in Paris, Cologne, and, notably, Darmstadt, and every time I have been struck by the pitiless reactions of certain young musicians who reproach Messiaen for the contrast between his theoretical pretensions and what they label the banality and the platitude of his inspiration” (p. 68). 87. See the detailed analyses in Jean Barraqué, “Rythme et développement,” Polyphonie 9/10 (1954): 58–63; and David Drew, “Messiaen: A Provisional Study (III),” The Score 14 (December 1955): 41–61. 88. Messiaen repeated his 1963 and 1969 references to colored dreams in the camps in his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992) (Paris: Leduc, 1994), 1:66. 89. The first book-length biography to appear (Claude Rostand, Olivier Messiaen [Paris: Ventadour, 1957]) predates the 1960 publication of Messiaen’s interview with Goléa. After that time, most biographers cite Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen: Pierrette Mari, Olivier Messiaen: L’homme et son œuvre (Paris: Seghers, 1965); Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen (London:

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J. M. Dent and Sons, 1975); Alain Périer, Messiaen (Paris: Seuil, 1979); Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time; Theo Hirsbrunner, Olivier Messiaen: Leben und Werk (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1988). While Roger Nichols (Messiaen [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975]) makes no direct mention of Goléa, his brief discussion of the camps reveals key details from that source. In Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Fayard, 1980), Harry Halbreich cites Goléa but later quotes extensively from the liner notes to the 1963 recording (Erato STU 70.156). The two New Grove entries repeat the exaggerations of the 1958 interview: Boucourechliev writes in 1980 that the Quartet “was performed before 5000 prisoners,” and Griffiths in 2001 refers to “a huge audience of prisoners in the depth of winter” for the premiere. André Boucourechliev, “Messiaen, Olivier,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), 12:204; Paul Griffiths, “Messiaen, Olivier,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 16:492. Rischin’s For the End of Time was the first book-length study to question the factual inconsistencies in Messiaen’s interviews and the secondary literature. 90. See note 43. 91. Marc Pincherle, “Existe-t-il une musique contemporaine?” Nouvelles littéraires 2150 (5 December 1968): 13. My thanks to Eric Drott for suggesting the relevance of this article to my work. 92. Jósef Koffler, Szymon Laks, David Diamond, Olivier Messiaen, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Paul Ben-Haim, Darkness and Light: Music Performed in Concert from the Chamber Music Series at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, vol. 2, Steven Honigberg, music director (Albany Records CD TROY 229, 1997). According to Bret Werb, the music curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the producer used the name and logo of the museum without authorization. Messiaen’s Quartet was performed at the museum but was paired with music by Jean Martinon; both pieces were identified as having been composed by French prisoners of war. Bret Werb, email to the author, 29 June 2009. 93. See, for example, the advertisement for the program on 90.3 FM WBHM Birmingham www.wbhm.org/Programs/Specials/voiceforthesilenced.html, accessed 13 April 2010). My thanks to Bret Werb for bringing this program to my attention. 94. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Francis McDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), 189. Here Adorno is speaking about Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw. The essay was first published in Noten zur Literatur in 1965.

chapter 4 1. Arrêté, fait à Vichy, le 16 mai 1941. AN. F21.5305(2). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Musique. Législation. Œuvres commandées aux compositeurs de musique. Arrêtés originaux. 1938–1944.

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2. For details on the 1941 commissions, see my “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000, 138–60, 384–87. 3. Musicians were also required to attend a minimum of three rehearsals per concert, perform in twenty-four concerts per season (up from twenty), and participate in special concerts with reduced prices for students. Letter from the General Secretaries of the Association de Concerts to Hautecœur, dated 11 November 1941. AN. F21.5134(3). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, 1942. For the previous statutes, last altered in March 1935, see AN. F21.5201(3). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Décentralisation lyrique. Concerts à Paris et dans les Départements—Musiques populaires et Œuvres de décentralisation artistique, 1934–1938. 4. Louis Hautecœur, Les Beaux-Arts en France, passé et avenir (Paris: Picard, 1948), 245–47. Bouthillier and Berthelot were suspended from their posts in April 1942 because of their opposition to Pierre Laval, who had just returned to power; in Bouthillier’s case, his continuing covert attempts to get rid of Laval resulted in his arrest by the Gestapo and deportation to Germany in January 1944. AnneMarie Fabre, “Yves Bouthillier” and “Jean Berthelot,” in Dictionnaire des ministres (1789–1989), ed. Benoît Yvert (Paris: Perrin, 1990), 386, 667. 5. Alexandra Laederich, “Les associations symphoniques parisiennes,” in Myriam Chimènes, ed., La vie musicale sous Vichy (Brussels: Complexe, 2001), 225. 6. “Kurzbericht über die Tätigkeit der Gruppen, 31.1–7.2.1942.” AN. AJ40.1001. Archives allemandes de l’Occupation. PAF. Propaganda-Staffel Paris. Rapports du service de propagande, 1942–1944. 7. Jeanne Laurent, “L’État et l’activité musicale: L’administration des BeauxArts et la musique en 1941–1942,” Revue des Beaux-Arts de France 6 (August– September 1943): 356. 8. Louis Hautecœur, “Introduction,” Revue des Beaux-Arts de France 1 (October–November 1942): 5. 9. Georges Huisman, “Nouveaux rapports de l’art et de l’État,” Europe 174 (15 June 1937): 158. 10. Huisman was removed from his post by Pierre Laval in July 1940. The treatment of Huisman’s supervisor, Jean Zay—the minister of national education during the Popular Front—is indicative of how Vichy vilified the prewar government. Zay, who joined the army when war was declared in September 1939, was convicted for desertion in fall 1940 in a highly publicized trial that was motivated by political revenge. He spent most of the war in prison before being assassinated in June 1944 by members of the milice, Vichy’s military police. Marcel Ruby, Jean Zay (Paris: Corsaire, 1994), 351–80. 11. Eleven Conservatoire professors, out of a total faculty of eighty-three in all disciplines, received commissions from Vichy between 1941 and 1944. Six of these—Jean Déré, Yvonne Desportes, Robert Dussault, René Guillou, Edmond Marc, and Victor Serventi—taught solfège; Henri Challan, Georges Dandelot, Duruflé (starting in 1943), and Georges Hugon taught harmony; and Henri

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Busser taught composition. Nearly half of living winners of the Prix de Rome, from as early as 1893 (Busser) to as recent as 1939 (Pierre Maillard-Verger), received a commission; of the winners from the past fifteen years, eleven were chosen, including Henri Dutilleux, the 1938 laureate of the prize. Dutilleux wrote Danse fantastique, the second movement of his Symphonie de danses, to fulfill a 1941 state commission. One notable exception was Marcel Stern, a Jewish student of Busser’s who won the Prix de Rome in 1936. He spent the war hiding in Cannes. 12. Messiaen was, of course, the exception. The former prisoners of war who received commissions were Henri Challan and Pierre Maillard-Verger in 1941, Raymond Gallois-Montbrun in 1942, Marcel Dautremer in 1943, and Émile Damais and Jean Martinon in 1944. State support of Challan’s piece—the fourth movement of his Symphonie en sol majeur—extended beyond the initial commission. In December 1943 the committee selected his Symphonie from among all works commissioned by the state to receive fifty thousand francs toward its publication by Durand. The amount was ten times that of any other grant provided for the publication costs of commissioned works during the war. On the extra payment for the publication of Challan’s Symphonie, see Exercice 1943: Acquisitions et Commandes d’œuvres d’art à des artistes vivants. AN. F21.5147(1). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1943. As discussed in chapter 3, the premiere of Challan’s Symphonie took place at a benefit gala for repatriated prisoners, with music by the prisoners performed by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, on 17 December 1942. Preconcert publicity misrepresented Challan as the winner of the Prix de Rome in 1936; he had actually come in second behind Stern, his fellow student in Busser’s class at the Conservatoire. J[osé] B[ruyr], “Pour la ‘deffense’ de nos Compositeurs prisonniers; Pour l’illustration de notre jeune Musique,” L’Information musicale 94 (11 December 1942): 131. 13. Grunenwald had been Marcel Dupré’s deputy at Saint-Sulpice since 1936, Litaize had worked as an organist in Saint-Cloud since 1934, and Duruflé had been appointed organist at Saint-Étienne du Mont in 1929. Ermend Bonnal, a student of Tournemire, left his post as director of the École de musique in Bayonne for Paris to become a state inspector of music in December 1941 and to take over at Sainte-Clotilde in March 1942. Gastoué, who was currently president of the Société française de musicologie, had produced editions of French sacred music from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. 14. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’art de la défaite, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 143. 15. Jacques Duquesne, Les Catholiques français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1966). Most of Vichy’s laws favoring the Catholic Church were rescinded after the liberation, although members of religious orders were allowed to continue teaching after the war. W. D. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 387. 16. Cited in Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, 63.

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17. Jules Meunier, “Les Maîtrises de France,” excerpted from La semaine religieuse de Paris (15 March 1941); letter from Jules Meunier to Marshal Pétain dated 27 August 1941. AN. F21.5134. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, 1940–1943. 18. Jeanne Laurent, “L’État et l’activité musicale,” 346–47. 19. Norbert Dufourcq, La musique française (Paris: Secrétariat général du gouvernement, Direction de la documentation, 1949), 18–22. 20. Archival sources number the spectators at 5,000 at Vienne and Grenoble, 15,000 in Toulouse, 30,000 in Marseille, and 50,000 in Lyons. Service des Manifestations: Réalisations. AN. F21.8098 (2). Beaux-Arts. Administration centrale des beaux-arts. Archives de Louis Hautecœur, Directeur général des Beaux-Arts, 1940–1944. Beaux-Arts et jeunesse. 21. Henry Fellot, “La partition de MM. Yves Baudrier, Léo Preger, et Olivier Messiaen [pour Portique pour une fille de France],” Lyon-Soir, 14 May 1941, 3. I am grateful to Chris Murray for bringing this article to my attention. 22. Although Messiaen listed his Chœurs pour une Jeanne d’Arc for a cappella choir in his Technique de mon langage musical (Paris: Leduc, 1944), the score was lost until its 2008 rediscovery in the archives of Radio France by Lucie Kayas and Nigel Simeone. Nigel Simeone and Chris Murray, “Olivier Messiaen’s Forgotten Joan of Arc Choruses for Portique pour une fille de France,” paper presented at the conference Twentieth-Century Music and Politics, University of Bristol, 14–16 April 2010. I am grateful to Nigel Simeone for sharing a copy of the rediscovered manuscript of Messiaen’s Chœurs pour une Jeanne d’Arc with me. 23. On this broadcast and its significance for Messiaen’s status as a repatriated prisoner of war in occupied France, see chapter 3. 24. Of the commissions granted in 1941, eleven were granted on 16 May (including Duruflé’s) and five were granted on 17 June; Gailhard’s was the only one granted on 26 August. Arrêté, fait à Vichy, le 26 août 1941. AN. F21.5305(2). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Musique. Législation. Œuvres commandées aux compositeurs de musique. Arrêtés originaux. 1938–1944. 25. André Gailhard, Ode à la France blessée. MS, Centre de documentation musicale, Maison de la Radio, Radio France, Paris. 26. Debussy, Ode à la France (Paris: Choudens, 1928). On the 1928 premiere of the posthumously completed Ode à la France and the discrepancies between Debussy’s autograph manuscript and the published score, see Marianne Wheeldon, “Debussy’s Legacy: The Controversy over the Ode à la France,” Journal of Musicology 27, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 304–41. 27. “Our Father, who is at the helm, glorified be your name / Let your reign commence / Let your will be done / on earth so that we shall live.” “Credo de la France,” La Revue moderne (1941), cited in Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, 51–52. 28. Théodore Dubois, Symphonie française (Paris: Heugel, 1908). Gailhard entered the Conservatoire in 1905, the last year of Dubois’s directorship of the school, and studied there with Massenet until he won the Prix de Rome in 1908.

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29. On Gailhard’s appointment, see Arrêté de 6 août 1942, signed by Abel Bonnard. AN. F21.5201(4). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Décentralisation lyrique. Arrêtés originaux des subventions pour des concerts à Paris, etc. 1939– 1944. On the payments for Gailhard’s completed commission, see Exercice 1942, Exercice 1943: Acquisitions et Commandes d’œuvres d’art à des artistes vivants. AN. F21.5146(2), F21.5147(1). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1942, 1943. 30. The fact that the orchestral parts and score of Ode à la France blessée are stamped and dated (November 1943–January 1944 and February 1944, respectively) by the library of the Radiodiffusion nationale, together with the markings in colored pencil of a conductor preparing for rehearsals, suggests that the national broadcast of the piece was in the works six months before the liberation of Paris. But there is no confirmation in the listings of Radio National or any other newspapers that the work was ever performed. Perhaps by spring 1944 its vision was simply too unrealistic for a world in which Germany had long since abandoned any pretense of French sovereignty and Pétain had to travel escorted by German guards. Gailhard, Ode à la France blessée, MS, Centre de documentation musicale, Maison de la Radio, Radio France, Paris. 31. On Jolivet’s change of style, starting with his Trois Complaintes du soldat in summer 1940, see chapter 3. Jolivet discussed the new challenges and opportunities he faced after making the change in his 1960 radio interviews with Antoine Goléa, “L’Écriture vocale et la technique des petits formations orchestrales” and “Les Problèmes du théâtre lyrique,” recorded April 1960, broadcast on RTF on 1 and 8 May 1961, reprinted in André Jolivet, Écrits, ed. Christine Jolivet-Erlih (Sampzon, France: Delatour, 2007), 1:302–13. The new opportunities included being asked to write the music for Guignol et Pandore, a new ballet that Lifar conceived as an updated French version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and that was premiered at the Opéra in April 1944. In Jolivet’s score, which was commissioned by the Administration of Fine Arts in 1942, the composer replaced Stravinsky’s folk songs with evocations of the classical sounds of pre-Revolutionary France. “I wanted to prove to myself,” he wrote after the war, “that I was capable of writing music that was faithful to tradition.” Jolivet, interviewed by Suzanne Demarquez in André Jolivet (Paris: Ventadour, 1958), 17. On Lifar, Jolivet, and Guignol et Pandore, see my “Music for a ‘New Era,’ ” 325–40. 32. The 1944 performance of Grunenwald’s Bethsabée, as well as its publication by Salabert (with no date given), is listed in Armand Machabey, Portraits de trente musiciens français (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1949), 94. Grunenwald received an additional four thousand francs from the Administration of Fine Arts in June 1944 to pay for the copying fees to prepare the work for performance. Exercice 1944: Chapitre G: Subvention destinée à lutter contre le chômage des artistes de la musique et du spectacle. AN. F21.5147(2). BeauxArts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1944. The score of Litaize’s Symphonie pour orgue et orchestre, second movement (“Intermezzo”), was, according to a stamp on the score, received by

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Radiodiffusion nationale in May 1943 (Centre de documentation musicale, Maison de la Radio, Radio France, Paris). It appears that Litaize never wrote the other movements to the symphony. 33. The time and full program of the broadcast was announced in Le Monde’s weekend issue of 2–3 November 1947. 34. Exercice 1947: Commandes à des artistes musiciens. AN. F21.5150. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1947. On the higher amounts granted to commissions, including an increase from thirty thousand francs to two hundred thousand francs (plus forty thousand francs for a libretto) for opera commissions starting in 1946, see AN. F21.5135. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, 1944–1946. Exercice 1946: Note, Chapitre nouveau: Commandes à des compositeurs de musique. 35. Duruflé, interview with Maurice Blanc, “Le Requiem de Maurice Duruflé,” Musique et liturgie 18 (November–December 1950): 10. Reprinted in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986) ed. Frédéric Blanc (Paris: Séguier, 2005), 84. 36. Duruflé’s op. 1, the Tryptique: Fantaisie sur des thèmes grégoriens, an unpublished work first composed in 1927 and revised in 1943; and his Prélude, adagio et choral varié sur le Veni Creator, op. 4, published by Durand in 1931. 37. Duruflé, interview with Maurice Blanc, “Le Requiem de Maurice Duruflé,” 10. 38. Henriette Roget, “La Musique,” Les Lettres françaises, 27 November 1947, 7. 39. René Dumesnil, “La musique: Premières auditions,” Le Monde, 4 November 1947, 6. 40. Clarendon [Bernard Gavoty], “ ‘Le Requiem’ de Duruflé,” Le Figaro, 8 November 1947, 6. 41. See Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1990), especially chapter 1, “Le deuil inachevé (1944–1954).” 42. On 14 November 1948, Duruflé’s Requiem was performed in Paris by Concerts Pasdeloup and the Chorale Brasseur, conducted by Pierre Dervaux; on 11 November 1949 (Armistice Day), it was performed by Concerts Lamoureux and the Chorale Universitaire de Paris, conducted by Eugène Bigot. 43. James E. Frazier discusses the Duruflés’ North American tours in detail in Maurice Duruflé: The Man and His Music (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 228–37, including offers of commissions to write new works “in the vein of the Requiem” that Duruflé declined. Notable performances in the 1950s included the North American premiere at the Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City in February 1952 and a BBC broadcast in April 1957. Seth Bingham, “Duruflé’s ‘Requiem’ Marked by Elegance and Warm Humanity,” Diapason 44 (1 March 1953): 18; Felix Aprahamian, “Maurice Duruflé and His Requiem,” Listener, 11 April 1957, 613. 44. Best Choral Album in the World . . . Ever! (EMI Classics 67104, 2005); Horizons: A Musical Journey (Delos 3511, 1995); and Hymn for the World 2 (Deutsche Grammophon 459146, 1998).

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45. Michael Jackson, “Little Susie / Pie Jesu,” on HIStory: Past, Present, Future, Book I (Epic 7474709, 1995). Jackson credits Duruflé for the music sample, taken from Robert Shaw’s 1987 Telarc recording with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, on page 50 of the liner notes that accompany the CD. 46. To cite only a few recent North American memorial performances: a 22 April 2007 performance of the Pie Jesu at the Washington National Cathedral in a memorial service for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia, six days earlier (www.nationalcathedral.org/pdfs/CathedralVoice0705. pdf); and a Veterans’ Day performance (with Fauré’s Requiem) to honor military dead at the Cathedral of St. Joseph the Workman in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on 11 November 2006 (La Cross Tribune, November 12, 2006). The MIDI files can be found at www.cyberbass.com/Major_Works/Durufle/durufle.htm (accessed 28 July 2009). 47. Dom Joseph Pothier, Les Mélodies grégoriennes (Tournai: Desclée, 1880), 177; cited in Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 108. On the shift from Pothier’s to Mocquereau’s approach to plainchant rhythm in the Solesmes editions, see Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments, 92–142. 48. On Duruflé’s interest in Le Guennant, see Duruflé, “Souvenirs,” in Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 47–48; see also Duruflé, “Réflexions sur la musique liturgique,” L’Orgue 174 (1980), reprinted in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 199–203. Le Guennant published several treatises on the Solesmes method, including Notes pour servir à la direction d’une schola grégorienne: D’après les principes rythmiques de Solesmes (Paris: Institut grégorien, 1947) and Précis de rythmique grégorienne d’après les principes de Solesmes (Paris: Institut grégorien, 1948–54). 49. Duruflé, “Souvenirs,” in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 48. 50. Le Guennant, Précis de rythmique grégorienne, 159. 51. Dom Mocquereau, Le Nombre musical grégorien, vol. 1, no. 569 (Rome: Desclée, 1908–27), cited in ibid. The original 1930 recordings made by the Solesmes choir were issued on 78-rpm records by Grammophon and have been reissued on CD (Le Chant grégorien retrouvé, SM62, 1994). 52. Duruflé wrote of his exposure to the Solesmes method at Rouen through the teachings of Abbé Bénard, the maître de chapelle, and Canon Adolphe Bourdon, who replaced Bénard when he was called up during the First World War. Duruflé wrote, “For the first time we heard talk of Dom Pothier, choirmaster at Solesmes. . . . This was a real revolution in the liturgical plainchant practiced until then at the cathedral, with its old plainchant and its square notes. It was the updated version of this marvelous Gregorian chant, with all its suppleness, its soaring [melodies, and] its mystical radiance. A new archbishop had just been named in Rouen, Monsignor [Louis-Ernest] Dubois, who was also quite taken with Gregorian chant. He favored its implementation in the liturgy

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at Rouen and imposed the Roman pronunciation of the Latin.” Duruflé, “Souvenirs,” in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 25. On Duruflé’s education as a choirboy in Rouen, see Frazier, Maurice Duruflé, 15–23. 53. Frazier, Maurice Duruflé, 311, note 111. 54. Duruflé, “Souvenirs,” in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 49. 55. See Le Guennant, Précis de rythmique grégorienne, 81–83, for a comparison of the vertical episema with the horizontal episema, in notation and performance. 56. Duruflé, “Le Requiem de Maurice Duruflé,” in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 87. Blanc dates this document to the 1960s. 57. See note 49. 58. Clarendon [Bernard Gavoty], “Les Concerts,” Le Figaro, 15 November 1949, 6. 59. Duruflé, interview with Maurice Blanc, “Le Requiem de Maurice Duruflé,” 10. 60. “Onorificenze,” Acta Apostolicae Sedis 54 (28 February 1962): 123. 61. James Van der Veldt, The Ecclesiastical Orders of Knighthood (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1956), 50. 62. On Flor Peeters, see “Peeters, Flor (1903–1986),” Belgian Centre for Music Documentation (www.cebedem.be/en/composers/p/112-peeters-flor, accessed 4 May 2010). 63. By 1908, in addition to musicological publications, Gastoué had been teaching plainchant at the Schola Cantorum since 1898 and had also published the first of his four practical books on plainchant, the Cours théorique et pratique du plain-chant romain grégorien (Paris: Éditions de la Scola cantorum, 1904). 64. Flor Peeters, Méthode pratique pour l’accompagnement du chant grégorien / A Practical Method of Plain-chant Accompaniment (Malines: H. Dessain, 1949). 65. Peeters, Missa in honorem Reginae Pacis (for two equal voices) (Boston: McLaughlin and Reilly Company, 1950). 66. Peeters, Méthode pratique, 7–8, 15–17, 22. 67. Duruflé attributed his attention to orchestral music during this time to the fact that the organ at Saint Étienne-du-Mont was unavailable for long periods of time until 1958 because it was being renovated. Duruflé, “Souvenirs,” in Duruflé, Souvenirs (1976) et autres écrits (1936–1986), 43–44. 68. Duruflé, letters to Nadia Boulanger, 28 July 1946, 13 July 1957, and 14 April 1966. BNF-Mus Rés. N.1.a. 66 (200, 205, 211). 69. Florence Aubenas, Michel Henry, and Brigitte Vital-Durand, “À NotreDame, l’émotion des grands, la curiosité des petits,” Libération, 12 January 1996; Craig R. Whitney, “World’s Leaders Bid Farewell to Mitterrand,” New York Times, 12 January 1996. 70. Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française, François Mitterrand: 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

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71. The French police had hoped to round up 25,000 Jews but were thwarted by the actions of many Parisians, including some of the policemen, who warned or sheltered those who were targeted. The 13,152 detained in the Vel d’Hiv roundup were transferred to the camps at Drancy, Pithivers, and Beaune la Roland before being deported to Auschwitz in August. Serge Klarsfeld, Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France, rev. ed. (Paris: Fils et filles de déportés juifs de France, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 2006), vol. 1, Familles du Vel d’Hiv, iv. 72. Mitterrand also claimed, implausibly, that he was unaware of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws when he joined the government because they had been passed during his incarceration in Germany and no one had spoken to him of them upon his return. He left unanswered his interviewer’s repeated questions about when he first learned about them. François Mitterrand, interview by JeanPierre Elkabbach, France 2, 12 September 1994. 73. Éric Conan, “L’autre génération Mitterrand: Vichy,” L’Express, 11 January 1996, 38. 74. François Mitterrand, interview by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, France 2, 12 September 1994. 75. Chirac’s 1995 speech is reproduced in Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 233–35. Chirac reiterated the significance of the roundup at Vel d’Hiv—that the French police, under orders from prominent Vichy officials, played a prominent role—in March 2010 on the day before the commercial release of the film La Rafle, which dramatizes the events of 16 July 1942 through the eyes of a young boy who lived to tell the tale. “The atrocious images, restored with such force in La Rafle, of civil servants in French uniforms separating mothers from their children with no pity or respect for the elderly, brutally shoving them into the train cars of death, opened a wound that time has not succeeded in healing. . . . As head of state, I recognized [in 1995] that my mission and my duty was to acknowledge that, yes, the criminal madness of the occupiers was assisted by the French, by the French state.” Chirac, “La Mémoire éclaire l’avenir,” Journal du Dimanche, 6 March 2010. 76. Nancy Wood, “Memory on Trial in Contemporary France: The Case of Maurice Papon,” History and Memory 11, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1999): 41–44. 77. “Déclaration de repentance d’evêques de France,” 30 September 1997, Drancy, France, http://catholique-nanterre.cef.fr/connaitre%20et%20annoncer/ judaisme/bibliographie/DeclarationDeRepentance.htm (accessed 14 January 2008). 78. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, 387. 79. Sprout, “Les commandes de Vichy, aube d’une ère nouvelle,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, 176–77. A more detailed account of the commissions appeared in my “Music for a ‘New Era’,” 354–60, 384, 386. 80. James Frazier, “Maurice Duruflé: A Centenary,” American Organist 35 (November 2002): 58–65; 36 (December 2002): 51–53; Frédéric Blanc, letter to

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the editor, American Organist 37 (March 2003): 16, 18; Frazier, Maurice Duruflé, 161–62. 81. Frédéric Blanc, letter to the editor, 18. Blanc, a former pupil of MarieMadeleine Duruflé, owns the majority of Duruflé’s papers and manuscripts. 82. Exercice 1950: Commandes à des artistes musiciens. AN. F21.5152 (2). Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Budgets, comptabilité. Engagements ou ordonnements. 1950.

chapter 5 1. Manuel Rosenthal, interview by Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération: Vers des lendemains qui chantent,” France Culture, 10 June 1994. 2. The decision, wrote Barraud, “was a little risky, in the sense that we were placing all our bets on one name, but [the name] became a sort of flag.” Henry Barraud, interview with Pierre Dellard and Louis Courtinat, “Henry Barraud: Une longue carrière radiophonique au cœur de la vie musicale et au service de la culture (1938–1965),” Cahiers d’histoire de la Radiodiffusion 43 (December 1994–February 1995): 153–54. 3. Joan Peyser, Boulez (New York: Schirmer, 1976), 33; Dominique Jameux, Pierre Boulez (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 30; Jésus Aguila, Le Domaine musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 178. See also Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris: René Julliard, 1958), 9–11. 4. Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 96. 5. Ibid., 10–11; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 113–28; Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 45–62. Carroll’s erroneous claim that the 1945 Stravinsky festival was associated with 1945 commemorations of the liberation of Paris stems from his misreading of Goléa’s Rencontres. 6. Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” Combat, 14–15 April 1945, 2. Founded as a clandestine resistance newspaper in 1941 and edited by Albert Camus from 1943 to 1947, Combat became one of France’s leading postwar newspapers, with a leftist political orientation that was independent of any political party. See Norman Stokle, Le Combat d’Albert Camus (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1970), 20–38. 7. Pierre Boulez, “From the Domaine Musicale to IRCAM: Pierre Boulez in Conversation with Pierre-Michel Menger,” Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 7. 8. Stephen Walsh, review of Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, by Mark Carroll, twentieth-century music 1, no. 2 (2004): 312. 9. Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 42.

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10. Similarly, Danielle Fosler-Lussier describes the chaotic period of open and free discussion in immediate postwar Hungary as “a rare opportunity to glimpse Hungarian musicians’ ideas about their musical future just before their choices were restricted by the increasingly severe policies of the Communist regime that came to power in 1948.” Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1. 11. Michèle Alten, Musiciens français dans la guerre froide (1945–1956): L’indépendance artistique face au politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 50–51. 12. Although most of the country was liberated by October 1944, it took until March 1945 for the Allied forces to cross the Rhine, following the German army’s final offensive push in the Battle of the Bulge. Pockets of German resistance lingered in towns along the Atlantic coast as late as 10 May, two days after the unconditional surrender of the German army in Europe. On the military campaign to end the occupation of France, see Robert Aron, Histoire de la libération de la France, juin 1944–mai 1945 (Paris: Fayard, 1959), 659–713. 13. Megan Koreman, “Libération,” in Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance, 1938–1946, ed. Bertram M. Gordon (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 222–23. 14. See Auric, “It faut y voir clair!,” Les Lettres françaises, 10 February 1945, 5. 15. Dominique Saudinos, Manuel Rosenthal: Une vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 152. Among the many mentions of the poor conditions were Roland-Manuel’s review of the first Stravinsky festival concert on 11 January (“A large and enthusiastic audience braved the snow outside and the ice that reigns inside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to come applaud” Stravinsky’s music) and Poulenc’s letter to Milhaud of 1 July 1945 (“Rosenthal’s orchestra concerts have been well attended. Despite the cold, people have acquired the habit of coming to hear modern music every Thursday”). Roland-Manuel, “La Musique,” Combat, 13 January 1945, 2; Poulenc, Correspondance 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 593. Rosenthal recalled how the musicians, especially those in the wind and brass sections, had to warm their instruments with their breath before they could play them. Manuel Rosenthal, interview by Marc Dumon, “1944: Les musiques de la Libération.” 16. Auric, “Le Cycle Strawinsky,” Les Lettres françaises, 17 February 1945, 5. 17. Ibid. 18. Émile Vuillermoz, preface to Philippe Henriot, Et s’ils débarquaient? (Paris: Éditions du Centre d’études d’agence Inter-France, 1944), vii–xii. On Vuillermoz’s music criticism at Je suis partout, see Dioudonnat, Les 700 Rédacteurs de “Je suis partout,” 1930–1944 (Paris: Sedopols, 1993), 91. On the war carried out over the airwaves among the competing radio stations of RadioParis, the BBC’s French-language broadcasts, and Vichy’s own Radiodiffusion nationale, see Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac and Hélène Eck, “France,” in La Guerre des ondes: Histoire des radios de langue française pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, ed. Hélène Eck (Paris: Armand Colin, 1985), 39–149.

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19. Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Je suis partout 1930–1944: Les maurassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris: La Table ronde, 1973), 402–11; and Dioudonnat, Les 700 Rédacteurs. On Brasillach, see Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 20. On Rebatet’s flight to Germany, see Rousso, Pétain et la fin de la collaboration: Sigmaringen 1944–1945 (Brussels: Complexe, 1984). Claude was an engineer and inventor who had advocated collaboration with Germany and a member of the comité d’honneur of Groupe Collaboration; he was sentenced to life in prison in 1945 but pardoned five years later. Vuillermoz had read an introduction to the broadcast of a 1943 speech by Claude on Radiodiffusion nationale: “La Croisade de Georges Claude: Français, il faut comprendre, un grand savant vous parle,” Dossier 1939–1944, Fonds Émile Vuillermoz, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris. 21. Vuillermoz had been called before a committee of the Société des gens de lettres on 24 January 1945 “to provide the committee with an explanation of his activity and his attitude during the period of enemy occupation.” On 9 February the committee informed him of their decision. A document dated November 1944 indicated that the committee viewed Vuillermoz’s preface to Henriot’s radio addresses as having “presented, defined, and reinforced propaganda in favor of the enemy.” Letters, 24 January 1945 and 12 February 1945, from the Société des gens de lettres to Émile Vuillermoz; Proposal, Commission d’épuration au Comité des gens de lettres, November 1944. Dossier d’épuration: Émile Vuillermoz. AN. F21.8126. Beaux-Arts. Spectacles et musique. Épuration. Comité national d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs. 22. Auric, “Le Cycle Strawinsky,” 5. Auric returned to the theme of retribution six weeks later when he articulated the anger several FNM members felt about the postwar hypocrisy of French musicians who went along with the Germans’ plans: “People have told me several times in the last six months that everything [during the occupation] was really not as bad as I had believed it to be. This or that famous singer, didn’t they have an elderly mother to feed? Apparently this pianist or that violinist, with the money of their Nazi masters, was hiding a mysterious parachutist, a Jew, a Communist in danger. . . . It wasn’t at all like that, at least as much as I can remember, when I encountered them. If they were playing a ‘double game,’ they admittedly did so with a talent that oddly surpasses that which I had known them to possess.” Auric, “La Musique: Francis Poulenc à Pablo Picasso,” Les Lettres françaises, 31 March 1945, 5. 23. “Mort de quelqu’un,” Musiciens d’aujourd’hui 8 (February 1944): 3–4. Henry Barraud recalled in his postwar memoirs that Auric was the only musician to testify against Vuillermoz at his postwar purification trial. When it came to Vuillermoz, Barraud noted, Auric “had the soul of [Antoine Quentin] Fouquier-Tinville,” a notoriously ruthless public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the Reign of Terror. Barraud, Un compositeur aux commandes de la Radio: Essai autobiographique, ed. Myriam Chimènes and Karine Le Bail (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 392.

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24. Wartime performances by Charles Münch and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire included Ibert’s Ouverture de fête, Concertino da camera, and Flute Concerto as well as four performances of Stravinsky’s Firebird and one each of Le Sacre du printemps, Les Noces, the Symphony of Psalms, Jeu de cartes, and the Concerto in Ea “Dumbarton Oaks.” For wartime orchestral performances in Paris, see Alexandra Laederich, “Les associations symphoniques parisiennes,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Brussels: Complexe, 2001), 217–34. See also “Programmes soumises à la censure, 1940–1944,” BNF-Mus, Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Archives, D 17263 (19). On 13 July 1941, Ernest Ansermet conducted the Orchestre nationale in a broadcast performance on Radiodiffusion nationale of a Stravinsky festival that included Petrushka, The Firebird, and The Nightingale. Radio national 8 (13–19 July 1941). Stravinsky’s music also appeared regularly on the programs of the Concerts de la Pléiade. For the programs of the Concerts de la Pléiade, see Nigel Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade: ‘A Kind of Clandestine Revenge Against the Occupation,’ ” Music and Letters 81, no. 4 (November 2000): 575–78. 25. As the director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome since 1937, Ibert was closely allied with the Ministry of National Education during the Popular Front years. Ibert chose not to return to Paris to participate in the occupied capital’s musical life, spending the war instead in the south of France and Switzerland. See Gérard Michel, Jacques Ibert: L’homme et son œuvre (Paris: Seghers, 1967), 70–74. See also Alexandra Laederich, Catalogue de l’œuvre de Jacques Ibert (1890–1962) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998), xi. 26. See 1938 assessments such as that of Boris de Schloezer, who wrote that the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto represented “the most dismal, the flattest academicism,” in Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 77–78. 27. Georges Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” Les Lettres françaises, 3 March 1945, 5. 28. Jean Wiéner, “Danses concertantes d’Igor Strawinsky,” Arts 7 (16 March 1945): 4. 29. Roland-Manuel, “La Musique: Les Danses concertantes d’Igor Strawinsky,” Combat, 9 March 1945, 2. 30. Raymond Fearn, The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 34. Dallapiccola’s brief juxtaposition of twelve-tone composition with modality in Tre Laudi prefigured his more extensive use of both in his better-known Canti di prigionia. 31. Both performances are listed on Nigg’s website at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, where he was elected in 1989. www.academie-des-beaux-arts.fr/ membres/actuel/Musique/Nigg/fiche.htm (accessed 10 July 2010). 32. Claude Chamfray lists the score of the Concertino as destroyed in his 1966 catalogue of Nigg’s works, “Serge Nigg,” Le Courrier musical de France 13 (1966): 57.

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33. “Une enquête (suite): Serge Nigg, ou les convictions combatives,” Contrepoints 3 (March–April 1946): 78–79; Concerts de la Pléiade, program, 13 February 1947, 16–17: Denise Tual, Programmes, Concerts de la Pléiade, 1943–1951, BNF-Mus Rés. Vm.dos. 70 (2); Bruno Valeano, “Sur quelques jeunes musiciens,” Contrepoints 1 (January 1946): 64. Nigg’s survey responses, although not published until the March–April 1946 issue, predate the January 1946 issue of Contrepoints. 34. Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” Carrefour 29 (10 March 1945): 5. 35. Roland-Manuel, “Signification de quelques coups de sifflet,” Combat, 25–26 March 1945, 2. 36. Auric, “Strawinsky ou l’éternel renouvellement,” Les Lettres françaises, 24 March 1945, 5; Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” 5. Nigg later claimed that Rosenthal retaliated against him for his role in the protests by canceling his plans to perform Timour with the Orchestre national. Nigg, quoted by Jean Boivin in La Classe de Messiaen (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1995), 64–65. 37. Rostand, “Strawinsky contre les imbeciles,” Carrefour 31 (24 March 1945): 5. Stravinsky also expressed skepticism about the spontaneity of the protests, writing to Rosenthal, “[The] sincere and spontaneous manifestations against the Sacre in 1913 [were] comprehensible because of the violent character of this score. . . . But one doubts the spontaneity of a howling manifestation against the Norwegian Moods, the elements that could provoke boisterous protestations being totally absent’. . . . Unless I am mistaken, it seems that once the violent has been accepted, the amiable, in turn, is no longer tolerable.” Stravinsky to Rosenthal, January 12, 1946. Quoted in translation in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1984), 2:347 (italics in original). 38. André Jolivet, “Assez de Strawinsky,” Noir et blanc 8 (4 April 1945): 114. In Jolivet’s manuscript version, this final sentence is followed by “And, this, first and foremost, in France.” André Jolivet, Écrits, ed. Christine JolivetErlih (Sampzon, France: Delatour, 2007), 1:183. 39. In a postwar interview Barraud justified the choice of Stravinsky, a nonnative French composer, with the claim, also made by Rostand, that the marginal role his music had played during the war made his Russianness irrelevant: “He may have been Russian through and through; no matter, no one had been playing his music for years.” Barraud, interview with Pierre Dellard and Louis Courtinat, “Henry Barraud: Une longue carrière radiophonique au cœur de la vie musicale et au service de la culture (1938–1965),” Cahiers d’histoire de la Radiodiffusion 43 (December 1994–February 1995): 154. 40. The singer Joseph Peyron and the pianists Monique Haas and Francis Poulenc performed in both concerts. Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade,” 577. See also note 24. Joan Evans has shown that Stravinsky’s music was heard frequently in Germany until September 1939, after which time his status as a French citizen made German performances of his music problematic. French citizenship, of course, was not a cause for censorship in German-occupied

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France. Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 581–84. 41. Egk’s appearance with the Grand Orchestre de Radio-Paris was announced in Les Ondes 78 (25 October 1942) for broadcast on October 29. 42. On the positive reviews that performances of Egk’s music received in occupied France, see my “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000, 262–63, 334–41. See also chapter 1. 43. Catherine Morgan, “Roland Manuel nous dit l’action de quatre ans de musiciens français,” Les Lettres françaises, 16 September 1944, 7. 44. Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!” Le Figaro, 9 April 1945, 1. 45. On the involvement of the PAF in the production, see Marie-Agnès Joubert, La Comédie-Française sous l’Occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 1998), 178– 86; and Jean-Claire Vançon, André Jolivet (Paris: Bleu Nuit, 2007), 77–78. On Jolivet’s involvement as composer and conductor for the production, see Lucie Kayas, André Jolivet (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 320–33. Jolivet’s incidental music for Iphigenie in Delphi was published and recorded in 1957 by Pathé Marconi as Suite delphique. 46. The scheduled broadcasts of Iphigenie in Delphi on 21 July 1943 and Trois Complaintes du soldat on 23 July 1943 are listed in Les Ondes 116 (18 July 1943): 8, 10. 47. Jolivet’s wife, Hilda, originally from Algeria, could not return from maternity leave as a schoolteacher after the first Statut des Juifs was passed on 3 October 1940. The law also stripped Algerian Jews of their French nationality. Kayas, André Jolivet, 289. 48. Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des Bouffons,” Combat, 12 April 1945, 2. 49. Unsigned editorial, Combat, 14–15 April 1945, 2. 50. Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des bouffons,” 2. 51. Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!,” 1. 52. Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” 2. 53. Serge Guilbaut, “Comment la Ville lumière s’est fait voler l’idée d’art moderne,” in Paris 1944–1954: Artistes, intellectuels, publics: la culture comme enjeu, ed. Philippe Gumplowicz and Jean-Claude Klein (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1995), 49. 54. Ibid. 55. Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” 2. 56. Louis Hautecœur, Les Beaux-Arts en France, passé et avenir (Paris: Picard, 1948), 80. 57. On Nigg’s early years, see Nicolas Bacri, “Serge Nigg: Une introduction,” in Marius Constant et Serge Nigg: Deux compositeurs en marge des systèmes, ed. François Madurell (Paris: La Sorbonne, 2000), 56. On Boulez’s arrival in Paris, see Jameux, Pierre Boulez, 23–29. 58. Henri Busser, De Pelléas aux Indes galantes . . . de la flûte au tambour (Paris: Fayard, 1955), esp. 268–69. The publication of his composition textbook

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in 1943 firmly established Busser, at age seventy-one, as a prominent conservative voice in wartime France. Busser, Précis de composition, with a preface by Claude Delvincourt (Paris: Durand, 1943). 59. “ ‘Ehrt eure deutschen Meister!’ dit Hans Sachs à la fin des Maîtres chanteurs. Il a raison. Honorons nos maîtres français.” Honegger, “Le Festival Claude Debussy,” Comœdia, 21 June 1941, 3. 60. D’Indy, “Concerts Lamoureux,” S.I.M. 9 (1 December 1913): 45, quoted by Brian Hart in “The Symphony in Theory and Practice in France, 1900– 1914,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1994, 140. 61. Aubin, “Premières auditions,” Comœdia, 20 February 1943, 5. 62. The piece, which was dedicated to Münch, was published by Lemoine in 1941 and received a second wartime performance by the Concerts Pasdeloup on 14 March 1943. Dandelot received a second state commission for an opera in 1943. See my “Music for a ‘New Era,’ ” 385–86, 393, 395. On Dandelot, see Armand Machabey’s wartime portrait, “Galerie de quelques jeunes musiciens parisiens: Georges Dandelot,” L’Information musicale 80 (4 September 1942): 11, reprinted in Machabey, Portraits de trente musiciens français (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1949), 49–53. 63. Program, Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Salle du Conservatoire, 14 February 1943. BNF-Mus, Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Programmes, 1932–1967. Compare to d’Indy’s contention that the symphony as a genre is “opposed to the very idea of a literary or poetic program, a scenic or mimed representation, or the declamation of any words whatsoever.” D’Indy, Cours de composition musicale, ed. Auguste Sérieyx (Paris: Durand, 1933), vol. 2, part 2, p. 100. 64. Serge Moreux, “La musique,” La Gerbe, 25 February 1943, 7; Jean Douel, review of Dandelot, Symphonie en ré, L’Information musicale 112 (16 April 1943): 289. 65. On the recording anthology of the AFAA, see chapter 3 and table 4. 66. Boulez joined Messiaen’s private lessons in the fall of 1944; Nigg joined the private lessons sometime around 1946, shortly before he left the Conservatoire. On Nigg, see Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 48. On Boulez, see ibid., 34–35. Boulez wrote of the enormous impact of Messiaen’s teaching on himself and his fellow students in “Une classe et ses chimères,” a tribute to Messiaen on his fiftieth birthday in 1959. Reprinted in Boulez, Points de repère, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981), 566–67. 67. Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 434. 68. Messiaen’s opinions on Stravinsky’s use of rhythm appeared in print in a 1939 article in which he singled out Le Sacre and Les Noces as Stravinsky’s most significant works. “Le rythme chez Igor Stravinsky,” Revue musicale 191 (June 1939): 91–92. Both Messiaen and his former students later recalled the prominence of Le Sacre in his classes. Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 37–38, 46. 69. Messiaen, in José Bruyr, “Olivier Messiaen,” in L’Écran des musiciens, seconde série (Paris: José Corti, 1933), 128. The interview was published two years after it took place. See Simeone, “Offrandes oubliées 2: Messiaen, Boulanger, and José Bruyr,” Musical Times 142 (Spring 2001): 20.

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70. Nigg, quoted in Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 64. 71. Nigg, “La querelle Strawinsky,” 2. The reference could apply to either Danses concertantes or the Concerto in Ea “Dumbarton Oaks,” which had last been performed in Paris in May 1944. 72. Stravinsky had recently remarked, “Of all the musical forms, the one considered the richest from the point of view of development is the symphony. . . . I only mention the subject in passing to remind you that there exists in music, just as in the other arts, a sort of hierarchy of forms.” Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 44–45. The lectures were given in 1939–40, while Stravinsky was composing the Symphony in C. 73. Edward T. Cone, “The Uses of Convention: Stravinsky and His Models,” in Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of His Work, ed. Paul Henry Lang (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 21–33. 74. Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle symphonie de Strawinsky,” Combat, 22–23 April 1945, 2. 75. Auric, “Génie et sifflets à roulette,” Les Lettres françaises, 21 April 1945, 5. 76. Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” 5; Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” 5. 77. Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” 5. 78. Poulenc to Milhaud, 27 March 1945, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 585. 79. Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 393, note 11. They cite Roger Nichols as their source. 80. Roland-Manuel, “Olivier Messiaen et ses Vingt Regards sur l’EnfantJésus,” Combat, 3 April 1945, 2; Clarendon [Bernard Gavoty], “Les Concerts: Regard sur Olivier Messiaen,” Le Figaro, 3 April 1945, 2. For a detailed account of several responses in the press to Messiaen’s music in the spring of 1945, see Hill and Simeone, Messiaen, 144–54, 160–61, and 165–67. 81. Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!,” 1; Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des bouffons,” 2. 82. Messiaen to Poulenc, 19 April 1945; in Poulenc, Correspondance, 586 (italics in original). 83. For the full program, see Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade,” 577. 84. Hill and Simeone, Messiaen, 148. 85. Messiaen performed Les Corps glorieux at the Palais de Chaillot on 15 April 1945. To cite one of the most offending passages of Rostand’s review: “When Mr. Messiaen speaks to me of ‘birds who have swallowed blue,’ I simply respond to him with the five letters made famous by General Cambronne [a euphemism for merde], for either he takes me for an imbecile and thus I have the right to consider him a rogue, or I fear for his sanity and his case, regarding his literary work, is a matter for psychiatric evaluation.” Rostand, “Olivier Messiaen,” Carrefour 35 (21 April 1945): 5. Rostand apologized for his offensive language in Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Ventadour, 1957), 8, note 2.

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86. On “Le Cas Messiaen” in the context of postwar France, see Lilise Boswell-Kurc, “Olivier Messiaen’s Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–46),” PhD diss., New York University, 2001. 87. Nigg, quoted in Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 65. 88. Poulenc recommended to Collaer that he program the Trois petites liturgies in Brussels. Poulenc to Collaer, 26 April 1945; Archives Collaer, quoted in Poulenc, Correspondance, 587. 89. Guy Bernard[-Delapierre], “Souvenirs sur Olivier Messiaen,” Formes et couleurs, nos. 3–4 (1945): n.p. 90. Gavoty, “Musique et mystique: Le ‘Cas’ Messiaen,” Études (October– December 1945): 21–22. 91. Rostand, La musique française contemporaine (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1952), 57. 92. Messiaen, “Querelle de la musique et de l’amour,” Volontés (16 May 1945): 1 (italics in original). 93. To my knowledge, there were two exceptions. Martinet, who attended Messiaen’s private lessons, was born in 1915; he began his studies at the Conservatoire in 1933, was mobilized in 1939, and returned to the Conservatoire in October 1940. Raymond Depraz was born in 1912; he joined Messiaen’s harmony class in 1943–44 after returning from a German prisoner-of-war camp. Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 410–11. 94. According to Jameux, Boulez first met Leibowitz at Claude Halphen’s house in February 1945. Boivin describes the studies as lasting from late spring in 1945 to the following fall, with interruptions during the summer. After surveying the many contradictory dates in the literature, Susanne Gärtner has concluded that Boulez’s studies began no later than June 1945 and that they lasted only a few months. Nigg claimed to Boivin that he instigated the defection of Messiaen’s students to study with Leibowitz, whom he had met through André Casanova, but he gave no dates. Jameux, Pierre Boulez, 29; Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen, 57–58; Gärtner, “La discipline dodécaphonique. Untersuchungen zu René Leibowitz’ Rezeption später Werke Anton Webern,” Lizentiatsarbeit, Universität Basel, 1996, 4–7, 16–17; quoted by Sabine Meine in Ein Zwölftöner in Paris: Studien zu Biographie und Wirkung von René Leibowitz (Augsburg: Wissner, 2000), 211. 95. Leibowitz, “La Musique: Un festival Debussy-Schoenberg,” Combat, 18 November 1944, 2. 96. Roland-Manuel, “La Musique,” Combat, 25 November 1944, 2; Auric, “Génie et sifflets à roulette.” 97. Leibowitz, “Introduction à la musique de douze sons,” Cahiers d’art (1940–44): 111–25. Leibowitz’s article, with some minor editorial changes, became the preface, the introduction, and the first four sections of the first chapter of Introduction à la musique de douze sons: Les Variations pour orchestre op. 31, d’Arnold Schoenberg (Paris: L’Arche, 1949). 98. Poulenc, “Le musicien et le sorcier,” Les Lettres françaises, 5 May 1945, 5.

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99. “Une enquête (suite): Serge Nigg,” 78–79. 100. Boulez, Par volonté et par hasard: Entretiens avec Célestin Déliege (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 33–34. 101. Martinet, “Notes autobiographiques,” at www.musimem.com/ biographies.html (accessed 10 January 2010). 102. “Une enquête (suite): Olivier Messiaen, ou les harmonies poétiques et ingénieuses,” Contrepoints 3 (March–April 1946): 74 (emphasis in original). 103. Messiaen, in Claude Chamfray, “Notre enquête: Le désarroi musical: Olivier Messiaen,” Arts 39 (26 October 1945): 5. 104. Messiaen, in Gabriel Bender, “Un entretien avec Olivier Messiaen,” Guide du concert 15 (22 February 1946): 190–91. 105. Leibowitz, “Igor Strawinsky ou le choix de la misère musicale,” Les Temps modernes 1, no. 7 (April 1946): 1335. In 1938 Leibowitz saw the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto as evidence of Stravinsky’s “total creative impotence” and described a fugal passage as “revoltingly academic.” Leibowitz, “La Musique: Dialogue sur Strawinsky,” Esprit 6, no. 70 (June 1938): 587. See also note 26. 106. Leibowitz, “Igor Strawinsky,” 1320. 107. Goléa, 46; see also note 94. 108. Boulez, “Style ou idée? (Éloge de l’amnésie),” in Points de repère, 323 (italics in original). Originally published as “Sur Stravinsky néo-classique,” Musique en jeu 4 (1971): 4–14. 109. Carroll, Music and Ideology, 3, 16, 91. Boulez and Messiaen performed the premiere of Structures 1a in a chamber music festival associated with L’Œuvre du XXème siècle, where it caused an audience protest of its own. Robert Craft described the incident, which he and Stravinsky witnessed, in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, rev. ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 77. 110. Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 126. Wellens argues that Stonor Saunders mischaracterizes the Rome festival in particular as having “a heavy concentration” on serialist composers in order to make her case for CIA sponsorship of serialism. He contends the modest presence of serialism in the festival was consistent with its presence in any contemporary music festival of the 1950s. Ibid., 121. 111. Ibid., 124–26. Wellens cites Boulez’s scathing rejection of Nabokov’s invitation to participate in the Rome festival in a letter preserved in the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, Special Collection of the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. 112. Alten, Musiciens français, 11, 23. 113. Nigg, “La querelle Strawinsky,” 2. 114. Nigg, 1978 interview, cited in Bacri, “Serge Nigg,” 57. 115. For a complete program of the festival, see Meine, Ein Zwölftöner in Paris, 259–60. Casanova, who (like Boulez) studied with Dandelot during the occupation, became Leibowitz’s first French pupil in 1944. Jean-Yves Bosseur, “Casanova, André,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,

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www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05064 (accessed 13 October 2008). 116. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Press, 2005), 124–26. Judt quotes Robert K. Murphy, the political advisor to the U.S. military government in Germany, as declaring that the Moscow meeting “rang down the Iron Curtain.” 117. “Ob opere ‘Velikaya druzhba’ V. Muradeli, Postanovleniye TsK VKP(b) ot 10 fevralya 1948 g,” Sovetskaya muzyka 12, no. 1 (January–February 1948): 3–8; Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique (Paris: Les Éditions de la Nouvelle critique, 1950). On the French reception of the resolution, see Alten, Musiciens français, 57–71. For an English translation, see “Soviet Music Policy, 1948,” in Music since 1900, ed. Laura Kuhn and Nicolas Slonimsky, 6th ed. (New York: Schirmer, 2001), 942–52. 118. “La Crise de la musique: Le manifeste de Prague, les réactions des musiciens français,” Les Lettres françaises, 7 October 1948, 6. The French musicians who signed the manifesto were Nigg, Martinet, Désormière, Barraine, Charles Bruck, Durey, Pierre Kaldor, and Koechlin. Les Lettres françaises was founded during the occupation as a clandestine literary journal; it became a weekly paper in September 1944 and was taken over by the PCF in 1947. See Pierre Daix, Les Lettres françaises: Jalons pour l’histoire d’un journal, 1941– 1972 (Paris: Tallandier, 2004). 119. Kaldor, “Entretien sur la crise de la musique,” Les Lettres françaises, 14 October 1948, 6. 120. On Nigg’s music and political engagement during this period, see Alten, Musiciens français, 78–94. Nigg later destroyed the score of Le fusillé inconnu. Chamfray, “Serge Nigg,” 57. 121. Renaud de Jouvenel, “Réflexions sur le concerto de Serge Nigg,” Les Lettres françaises, 10 March 1955, 6. 122. De Jouvenel, Confidences d’un ancien sous-marin du P.C.F. (Paris: Julliard, 1980), 32–52, 133. 123. “Serge Nigg,” in Bernard Gavoty and Daniel Lesur, eds., Pour ou contre la musique moderne? (Paris: Flammarion, 1957), 243–44. 124. De Jouvenel, “Réflexions,” 6. 125. Bacri, “Serge Nigg,” 58–59; Carroll, Music and Ideology, 50. 126. “Tony Aubin” and “Henri Busser,” in Gavoty and Lesur, Pour ou contre la musique moderne?, 47, 49. 127. In 1952 Boulez sarcastically observed, “They try to persuade us that serial discoveries are old. We ought now to create something new, and to support this brilliant thesis, they cite false Gounod, fake Chabrier, champions of clarity, elegance, refinement—qualities that are eminently French. (They adore mixing Descartes with haute couture.)” Boulez, “Éventuellement . . .,” Revue musicale 212 (April 1952): 118 (italics in original).

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Index

Abetz, Otto, 8, 13, 216n92 Administration of Fine Arts (Vichy regime), 5–8, 86; allocation in budget for music, 6; journal of, 121. See also commissions of new works by Vichy regime; Hautecœur, Louis Adorno, Theodor, 117, 118, 153 AFAA. See French Association for the Promotion of the Arts “À Francis Poulenc” (Éluard), 201n120 Akoka, Henri: in camp performance of Messiaen’s Quartet, 82, 116; escape from captivity, 223n28 Akoka, Lucien: in Stalag IXA with Mitterrand, 223n34 Alain, Jehan, 1, 91 allegorical readings: of Honegger’s music, 74–78, 218n105; of Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire, 25, 78, 197n87; of Sartre’s Les Mouches, 25, 78, 197n87; of “The Two Roosters” in Les Animaux modèles, 20. See also Quartet for the End of Time; Symphonie pour cordes Allies, celebration of: in Chant de Libération, 48, 57–58; in Orchestre national first post-liberation concert, 38–39 Alsace et Lorraine (Tayoux; lyr. Villemer, Nazet), 24ex, 197n86; references to in Les Animaux modèles, 3, 4, 23–26, 24ex Alten, Michèle, 156 Amis du maquis, Les, 213n68 Ami viendra ce soir, Un (film, Raymond Bernard), 61–68, 73; Chant de la Délivrance in soundtrack of, 62–68;

influenced by wartime experiences of Companeez and Raymond Bernard, 68–69 Animaux modèles, Les (ballet, Poulenc), 2, 10–11, 19–26; citation of Alsace et Lorraine, 23–26, 24ex; citation of Debussy, La Mer, 20, 21ex, 23; Fulcher on, 202n132; Ivry on, 36; Koechlin’s criticism of, 31; premiere, 3–4, 85; reinterpretation by Schaeffner, 34–35; revival in 1946, 35 Ansermet, Ernest, 69, 71tab, 74, 208n27, 218n112, 241n24 Antigone (Honegger; libr. Cocteau), 8, 73, 85, 221n17 Apocalypse selon Saint Jean, L’ (Françaix), 85 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 2 Appel de la montagne, L’ (ballet, Honegger), 39, 69–70 Aragon, Louis: poems in Quatre chants de la France malheureuse, 55, 56, 212n59. See also Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon Ariadne auf Naxos (Strauss), 16, 203n138 Arrieu, Claude (pseud., Louise-Marie Simon): Cantate des Sept Poèmes d’amour en guerre, 56; in FNM, 22; on losing job at Radiodiffusion nationale, 188n13 Ascension, L’ (Messiaen), 91 Association de musique contemporaine, 12; membership of, 191n40 Association française d’action artistique (AFAA), 32, 86, 200n115. See also Recordings anthology of contemporary French music

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Association française des musiciens progressistes, 155; promoting Prague Manifesto, 180 Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, 35, 148 Aubade (Poulenc), 3 Aubin, Tony, 32; composer for Sainte Jeanne, 209n39; proponent of New French School, 169; on respect for lineage of French music, 184 Auclert, Pierre, 221n19 Audisio, Gabriel, 32, 56 Auric, Georges: in FNM, 22–23, 31, 43; on music of Schoenberg, 176; during occupation, 37; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; on postwar hypocrisy, 240n22; testifying against Vuillermoz, 240n23 —compositions. See Quatre chants de la France malheureuse —writings: condemnation of Vuillermoz in Les Lettres françaises and Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 157–58; on Figure humaine, 33–34; on Nigg, 172–73; on 1945 protests against Four Norwegian Moods, 163; production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 23; review of Danses concertantes, 161; review of Prokofiev festival by Orchestre national, 40; review of revival of Pelléas and Mélisande, 21, 195n76; review of second Stravinsky festival concert, 157; on Rosenthal’s efforts to perform banned music, 151 Auriol, Hubert d’, 209n37, 224n45 Avis (Barraine), 32, 56, 57 “Avis” (Éluard), 56 Babadjanian, Arno, 181 Bachelet, Alfred, 17; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; in recordings by AFAA, 91 Bailloux, Marthe, 221n19 ballets, wartime productions of French, 7–10. See also Animaux modèles, Les (ballet, Poulenc) Ballets de l’Opéra de Paris (Vaillat), 10 Banalités (Poulenc), 2, 11 Bardit des Francs (Roussel), 39, 204n9 Barraine, Elsa: Avis, 32, 56, 57; in beginning of musical resistance movement, 22, 31; founding member of Association française des musiciens progressistes,

155; production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 23; on revival of Pelléas et Mélisande, 195n75; signer of Prague Manifesto, 248n118; Vichy commission, 149 Barraud, Henry, 49; on Auric’s testifying against Vuillermoz, 240n23; in FNM, 22; Honegger and, 44–45; on music and resistance, 36; on 1945 Stravinsky festival, 151, 238n2, 242n39; during war, 203n134 Barrault, Jean-Louis: in performance of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, 204n3; signer of petition to pardon Brasillach, 43 Baudrier, Yves, 224n45; music for Portique pour une fille de France, 49, 85, 124. See also Jeune France, group of four composers (1936); Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) BBC: broadcast of Le Chant des Partisans, 58–59, 213n69; broadcast of Requiem (Duruflé), 234n43; French-language broadcasts, 62, 214n80; premiere of Figure humaine, 32–34, 197n86 Beaumont, Étienne de, 225n45 Beer, Jean de, 49 Beide, Die (Hofmannsthal), 56 Bérard, Jean-Louis, 206n15 Berlin Staatsoper, 14–16 Bernac, Pierre: performance of Trois Complaintes, 109, 226n56; in premiere of Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, 27; programs with Poulenc, 1, 2, 11, 33, 34, 201n121 Bernard, Jean-Jacques, 214n84 Bernard, Raymond: family of, 214n84; life during the war, 69; professional relationship with Honegger, 61, 69 —films. See Ami viendra ce soir, Un; Cavalcade d’amour; Marthe Richard, Spy in the Service of France Bernard, Robert, 12; and 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 42, 206n15; review of Trois Complaintes, 106, 108 Bernard, Tristan, 214n84 Bernard-Delapierre, Guy, 113, 174 Berthelot, Jean, 120, 230n4 “Bêtes et méchants” (Éluard), 35 Bethsabée (Grunenwald), 127, 233n32 Beydts, Louis, 209n39 Bigot, Eugène, 234n42 Blanc, Frédéric, 35, 148–49

Index Blanc, Maurice: interview of Duruflé, 127– 29, 143 Blanchar, Pierre, 54–55, 212n56 Bloch, André, 84 Blond, Georges, 158 Blond, Henriette, 9–10 Böhm, Karl, 42 Boivin, Jean, 170 Bonnal, Ermend, 122, 124, 231n13 Bonnard, Abel, 9, 126, 189n15 Bonte, Hans-Georg, 205n12 Borgelt, Hans, 18 Borschot, Adolphe, 206n15 Boudot-Lamotte, Emmanuel, 192n50 Boulanger, Nadia, 32, 145 Boulez, Pierre: criticism of Messiaen, 115, 228n85; on French rejection of Schoenberg, 176; on idea of French tradition in music, 184, 248n127; influenced by Messiaen, 244n66; and Leibowitz, 178–79, 246n94; on Nigg and social engagement in music, 155, 179; at Paris Conservatoire, 168–70; performing in premiere of Structures 1a, 247n109; at premiere of Trois petites liturgies, 174; protests during 1945 Stravinsky festival, 152–53, 178 Bourdet, Édouard, 41, 44 Bousquet, René, 146–47 Bouthillier, Yves, 120, 230n4 Brasillach, Robert, 43, 158. See also Je suis partout Brianchon, Maurice, 30 Brillant, Maurice: on Honegger as musician of the Resistance, 40; review of Figure humaine, 35; review of 1944 performance of Chant de Libération, 39, 47, 52 Bruck, Charles, 248n118 Brüll, Karl-Albert, 114, 223n28, 228n81 Bruyr, José: dating of Chant de Libération, 208n32; lyrics for Hymne de la Délivrance, 58; on 1942 performance of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 75; on Trois Complaintes du soldat, 110 Bunlet, Marcelle, 95 Burkhard, Willy, 208n27 Busser, Henri, 187n7; composition textbook, 243n58; dismissal of case against, 215n91; music director at Radiodiffusion nationale, 169; professor of composition at Paris Conservatoire,

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168–69; on Schoenberg’s postwar influence in France, 182, 184; Vichy commission, 230n11 “C” (Aragon), 27, 29 Capdevielle, Pierre: composer for Sainte Jeanne, 209n39; Honegger and, 45 Capitant, René, 41 Capriccio (Ibert), 153tab, 159ex Capriccio for piano and orchestra (Stravinsky), 158 Carcopino, Jérôme, 188n15 Caron, Fernand, 96 Carrefour (newspaper), 151 Carroll, Mark: on Boulez in protests at 1945 Stravinsky festival, 153; political interpretation of Structures 1a, 178 Casanova, André, 179, 246n94, 247n115 Cassou, Jean, 56 Catholic Church: apology of French, 148; Pius X on music to be performed in worship, 136–37; and Vichy regime, 122–23 Cavalcade d’amour (film, Raymond Bernard), 51–52, 69 Cessez le feu (film), 54 Ceux du maquis (Chagrin), 213n68 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 3, 11–12 Chagrin, Francis, 213n68 Chailley, Jacques: composer for Sainte Jeanne, 209n39; in FNM, 22; on members of FNM, 196n79 Challan, Henri, 97; Vichy commission, 230n11, 231n12 Chamfray, Claude, 23, 241n32 Chanson de la Résistance, La, 213n68 “Chanson de l’Escadrille” (Honegger; lyr. Kessel), 54, 211n54 Chansons villageoises (Poulenc), 2, 11 Chant de la Délivrance (Honegger; lyr. Bruyr), 58, 61ex, 67ex, 73, 74; lyrics inspired by Le Chant des Partisans, 58–60 Chant de la libération (Juif), 57 Chant de Libération (Honegger; lyr. Zimmer), 52–53ex, 74, 79; Brillant on, 39; compared to finale of Marthe Richard, 51–52, 57–58; date of composition, 46, 54, 58, 208n32; dedication, 57; format for planned publication, 211n54; Halbreich on, 46, 208n32; 217n98; lyrics of second half,

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Chant de Libération (continued) 50–51; originally written as film song, 54, 58; premiered by Münch, 39; pianovocal score of, 45, 46, 47–48, 58, 208n29; Rostand on, 39, 204n6; writing of first half, 50 Chant de Linos (Jolivet), 167 Chant des Partisans, Le (Marly; lyr. Druon, Kessel), 59–60, 60ex; broadcast by Honneur et Patrie, 213n69; Bruyr’s words to Hymne de la Délivrance inspired by, 58–59; postwar popularity of, 66 Chant du Monde, Le, 181 Charles Münch: La France résistante (CD, Cascavelle), 73–74 Charpentier, Raymond, 166 Chausson, Amédée-Ernest, 2 Chevalier, Jacques, 7 Chevalier et la Damoiselle, Le (ballet, Gaubert), 9, 18 Chirac, Jacques: apology for France’s role in Holocaust, 147; on significance of Veld’Hiv roundup, 237n75 Chœurs pour une Jeanne d’Arc (Messiaen), 232n22 choir schools, composers in, 123, 137 Chorale Brasseur, 234n42 Chorale d’Anvers, 30 Chorale Universitaire de Paris, 234n42 Chorale Yvonne Gouverné, 174 choral singing: Duruflé and renewal of, 126; reform of, 123 Chronique de Paris, La (journal), 9 Claude, Georges, 240n20 Claudel, Paul: on anti-English slant given to Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 209n37; letter of Honegger to, 45; libretto of La Danse des morts, 74–75, 78; libretto of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 49–50, 74, 78; signer of petition to pardon Brasillach, 43 Clements, Andrew, 220n13 Cocteau, Jean: in “Composers in the camps” concert, 96; libretto of Honegger’s Antigone, 8; reviews of visiting German artists, 44; signer of petition to pardon Brasillach, 43; text for Serge Lifar à l’Opéra, 10 Cold War politics: CIA funding of festivals, 153, 178; Stravinsky’s music and, 154 Colette, 19 collaboration, 2, 5, 13–14, 22–23; Debussy as symbol of, 22; and postwar purge of

suspected collaborators, 41, 43–45, 70–72, 146, 157–58, 202n26, 206n13, 216n92, 240n20. See also Groupe Collaboration Collaer, Paul: letters from Poulenc, 30, 174, 246n88; on music in occupied France, 73, 216n94; and performance of Figure humaine, 200n115 Colonne, Édouard, 187n5 Combat (newspaper), 151, 238n6; in Stravinsky controversy, 167 Comité de libération du cinéma français, 54–55 Commet, Laurent, 57 commissions of new works by Vichy regime, 5–6, 120–22, 149–50, 168; to Conservatoire professors and winners of Prix de Rome, 121, 230n11; to Dandelot, 169, 244n62; to Duruflé, 120–31, 148–50; to former prisoners of war, 122, 231n12; to Gailhard, 124–26, 232n24; to Jolivet, 233n31; premiered at RTLN during the war, 190n25; to specialists of Catholic sacred music, 122, 231n13 Comœdia (newspaper): Honegger on German music in, 41, 71–72, 165, 204n10; Honegger’s regular column on French music in, 40, 44–45, 77, 205n89; Institut allemand and, 72; Poulenc’s reference to Éluard in, 26–27. See also Delange, René Compagnie des discophiles français, 29 Companeez, Jacques, 68–69 Companeez, Nina, 69 composers: Jewish, in October 1944 concert of Concerts Colonne, 40; mobilized for the war, 187n1; as soldiers, 83 “Composers in the Camps” concert (11 January 1942), 96–97, 100 Conan, Éric, 147 Concert champêtre (Poulenc), 3 Concertino (Nigg), 153tab, 154, 161, 162, 167 Concertino da camera (Ibert), 241n24 Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Nigg), 182 Concerto in Ea “Dumbarton Oaks” (Stravinsky), 159, 241n24; Leibowitz on, 247n105 Concerts Colonne, 40, 187n5 Concerts de la Pléiade, 26, 84; and Messiaen’s Quartet, 102; premiere of Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano,

Index 26; premiere of Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine, 174 Concerts Gabriel Pierné, 3, 120, 187n5; performance of Les Offrandes oubliées, 91 Concerts Lamoureux, 120; performance of Duruflé’s Requiem, 234n42 Concerts Pasdeloup, 120, 205n12; performance of Duruflé’s Requiem, 234n42 Cone, Edward T., 171 Constant, Marius, 117 Continental Films, 55 Corps glorieux, Les (Messiaen), 91, 245n85 Cortot, Alfred, 12, 17, 191n41, 206n14 Cours de composition musicale (d’Indy), 169 Cousteau, Pierre-Antoine, 158 Craft, Robert, 247n109 Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis, 57 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 153tab, 161, 241n30 Damais, Émile, 97; music from the camps, 98; in Stalag IIB, 223n37; Vichy commission, 231n12 Dandelot, Georges, 49; Aubin on, 169; Boulez student of, 169; composer for Sainte Jeanne, 209n39; influenced by d’Indy, 169; in recordings by AFAA, 91; Vichy commission, 230n11 Danse des morts, La (Honegger; libr. Claudel), 74–75; historical recording in Charles Münch: La France résistante (CD), 73 Danse fantastique (Dutilleux), 231n11 Danses concertantes (Stravinsky), 153tab, 160ex; in chamber music concert of 27 February 1945, 158–60; French premiere, 160; protests during 1945 performance of, 152; review by Auric, 161; review by Rostand, 162 Darlan, Jean-François, 189n16 Dautremer, Marcel, 231n12 debate on serialism versus neoclassicism, 153; interpretation of protests during 1945 Stravinsky festival in light of, 154 Debussy, Claude, 39; citation of La Mer in Les Animaux modèles, 20, 23; as icon of French culture, 22; La Mer, 21ex; Ode à la France, 125, 232n26; Poulenc’s article on, 3

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Décombres, Les (Rebatet), 158 de Gaulle, Charles, 57, 212n64 Delange, René, 206n15, 216n93 Delannoy, Marcel, 12, 25, 165; on Les Animaux modèles, 11; examination by National Purification Committee for Writers, Authors, and Composers, 71, 72; in FNM list of compromised musicians, 206n14; on Honegger after liberation, 46; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; on Paris premiere of Messiaen’s Quartet, 95, 111, 225n46; on Stalag IX ou musique d’exil, 100. See also Groupe Collaboration “De l’Atlantique au Pacifique” (Honegger; lyr. Féline), 54, 211n54 Delvincourt, Claude, 7; declining invitation to 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; in FNM, 31, 199n111; hiring Messiaen for Paris Conservatoire, 84, 85–86; protection of Conservatoire students from STO, 31, 199n111; radio show on, 94; support of compromised musicians, 71 Démons de l’aube, Les (film), 70, 215n89 Depraz, Raymond, 246n93 Derain, André, 43–44 Déré, Jean, 230n11 Dervaux, Pierre, 234n42 Désormière, Roger, 3; conducting Danses concertantes, 158; conducting Les Offrandes oubliées, 91; conducting premiere of Les Animaux modèles, 4; conducting premiere of Duruflé’s Requiem, 127; conducting Trois petites liturgies, 174; founding member of Association française des musiciens progressistes, 155; in musical resistance movement, 22, 31; during occupation, 37, 203n138; Pelléas and Mélisande revival, 20; planning of 1945 Stravinsky festival, 151; reaction to Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, 29; signer of Prague Manifesto, 248n118; support of compromised musicians, 71 Desportes, Yvonne, 230n11 “Deux lumières, Les” (Durey), 32 Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon (Poulenc), 4, 28ex; premiere of, 27, 31; Rostand on, 34 Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou (Rosenthal), 56

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Dingle, Christopher, 83 Diplomatic Service for Prisoners of War, 95 Diptyque for organ (Messiaen), 225n46 Dommange, René, 206n15 Douel, Jean, 170 Drewes, Heinz, 41 Druon, Maurice, 59 Dubois, Théodore, 125 Duchesse de Langeais, La (film), 2 Dudach, Georges, 57 Dufourcq, Norbert, 123 Dukas, Paul, 145 Dumesnil, René, 129 Dunbar, Rudolph, 84 Dupré, Marcel, 206n15 Durey, Louis: “Deux lumières, Les,” 32; in FNM, 22, 31; founding member of Association française des musiciens progressistes, 155; during occupation, 37, 203n137; “Ma haine,” 32; production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 23; Quatre poèmes de minuit, 56, 199n109; signer of Prague Manifesto, 248n118 Duruflé, Marie-Madeleine, 130 Duruflé, Maurice: anxiety about Requiem, 145; and Catholic Church, 122; correspondence with Boulanger, 145; former student of choir school, 123, 137; harmony professor at Paris Conservatoire, 230n11; interview by Maurice Blanc, 127–29, 143; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; North American tours, 130, 234n43; and Order of Saint Gregory, 144; and Saint-Étienne-duMont, 231n13, 236n67; and Solesmes plainchant, 131–36, 144, 235n52; Vichy commission, 120, 127, 131, 148–50, 230n11, 232n24 —compositions: Messe “Cum jubilo,” 145; Tota Pulchra Es, 137; Trois Danses, 145; Tu es Petrus, 137. See also Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens; Requiem; Tantum Ergo; Ubi Caritas Dussault, Robert, 230n11 Dutilleux, Henri: in FNM, 22; Geôle, La, 56, 57; Vichy commission, 149, 231n11 Dutilleux, Paul, 57 Écran français, L’ (journal), 211n55 Éditions Salabert, 45, 47, 70, 208n29 Egk, Werner, 3, 16, 17; meeting with

Honegger, 205n10; reviews by Honegger, 41; wartime performances, 165. See also Joan de Zarissa; Peer Gynt “Éloignez-vous” (Rosenthal), 32 Éluard, Paul: clandestine poetry set to music, 56; poem in Quatre chants de la France malheureuse, 55, 212n59; Resistance themes in work of, 26; wartime activities of, 55. See also Honneur des poètes, L’; Poésie et Vérité; Sept Poèmes d’amour en guerre Epting, Karl, 13 Éternel retour, L’ (film), 37 Étoile, L’ (Chabrier), 11 Evans, Joan, 242n40 Fabre, Marc-André, 124–25 Fabre-Luce, Alfred, 192n50 Fantaisie (Barraud), 203n134 Fauré, Gabriel, 11, 27, 127, 192, 235n46; mélodies recorded by Poulenc, 2; model for Busser, 168; model for Duruflé, 127; Pénélope, 7; Requiem performed at Mitterrand’s funeral, 146 Féline, Jean, 54 Fellot, Henry, 124 Ferchault, Guy: on Damais, 224n38; and 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 42–43, 206n15; on O Nuit, 100 Fêtes des belles eaux (Messiaen), 225n46 “Fêtes galantes” (Aragon), 29 Figure humaine (Poulenc; poetry by Éluard), 4, 26, 32, 55, 77; Auric on, 33–34; BBC premiere of, 32–34, 197n86; commissioned by Chorale d’Anvers, 30; dedicated to Picasso, 36; 1947 French premiere of, 32, 35, 197n86, 200n115; origin explained in 1944 interview, 29–30; origin explained in 1954 interview, 32–33; performance by Chœurs de la Radiodiffusion nationale belge, 200n115; plans for premiere of, 32, 200nn115,116; private performance of, 30; Rostand on, 34 Fille du jardinier, La (Exbrayat), 2 Fischer, Lore, 17 Flute Concerto (Ibert), 241n24 FNM. See Front national des musiciens Fombeure, Maurice, 2 For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Rischin), 83 Fosler-Lussier, Danielle, 239n10

Index Four Norwegian Moods (Stravinsky), 152–53, 162 Four Sketches (Milhaud), 153tab, 159; French premiere, 160 Française, La: À la gloire du Maréchal (Gailhard; lyr. Fabre, Thouvenin), 95, 124 Françaix, Jean, 85; choral writing, 123; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; in recordings by AFAA, 91 France: liberation of, 239n12; question of historical responsibility, 148 France-Actualités, 55 Franck, César: in development of mass and oratorio, 123; performance of music of, 12, 95 François la Colère. See Aragon, Louis Frazier, James, 148–49 French Association for the Promotion of the Arts, 86, 87–90tab, 170, 200n115, 222n23 French Communist Party (PCF): Les Lettres Françaises and, 248n118; Nigg in, 155, 179 Front national des musiciens (FNM), 149, 191n41; and Association française des musiciens progressistes, 155; Delvincourt and, 199n111; formation of, 22; Honegger in, 40–41, 46, 54–55, 69, 74, 77; members of, 22, 196n79; Musicien d’aujourd’hui, in Les Lettres françaises, 23, 43; Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, newsletter of, 23, 37, 158; and performance of Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, 29; postwar accounts of, 31, 37; and postwar purge of musicians, 41, 44, 71; Poulenc in, 3; Rosenthal in, 38, 199n111. See also Resistance Fulcher, Jane, 202n132, 221n17 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 42 Fusillé inconnu, Le (Nigg), 180 Gabrielle, Blanche, 213n68 Gailhard, André: at Conservatoire, 232n28; Vichy commission, 124–25; Vichy public servant, 126. See also Française, La: À la gloire du Maréchal; Ode à la France blessée Gallimard, Gaston, 26, 84 Gallois-Montbrun, Raymond, 86, 224n37; performing in prison camp, 96; Vichy commission, 231n12

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García Lorca, Federico, 26 Garden, Mary, 21 Gärtner, Susanne, 246n94 Gastoué, Amédée, 122, 144, 231n13, 236n63 Gaubert, Philippe, 9 Gavoty, Bernard: on Duruflé’s Requiem, 129–30, 142; interview of Busser, 182; interview of Honetter, 76; interview of Nigg, 181; review of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, 173; on Stravinsky and Messiaen controversies, 174 Génin, Raphaël Edgard, 206n15 Geôle, La (Dutilleux), 56, 57 Gerbet, Eugène, 206n15 Gerbracht, Wolfram, 75–76 Gerlier, Pierre-Marie, 122 German occupying forces, 2, 3, 7, 35–37, 97, 121, 147; in audience at Opéra, 15, 193n54; cultural events and, 12–19; French cultural activities and, 85, 164. See also Abetz, Otto; Epting, Karl; Institut allemand; Piersig, Fritz; Propaganda Division for France (PAF); Radio-Paris; Reich Ministry of Propaganda (RMVP); Spiegel der Französischen Presse Gide, André, 43 Gieseking, Walter, 195n70 Goebbels, Josef, 8, 17 Goldbeck, Frederick, 161–62 Goléa, Antoine: criticism of Messiaen’s Quartet, 115; interview of Jolivet in 1960, 108, 110, 225nn47,53, 233n31; interview of Messiaen in 1958, 82, 114; on music during war, 220n13; on revival of Pelléas et Mélisande, 195n76 Gordon, Bertram, 17 Gorouben, David, 114 Goué, Émile: in captivity, 224n37; music from the camps, 98; Psaume CXXIII, 97 Gounod, Charles, 168 Gouranton, Olivier, 72 Grand Orchestre de Radio-Paris, 13, 164–65 Griffiths, Paul, 111, 225n46 Grimaud, Yvette, 161 Groupe Collaboration, 17, 41, 72, 194n64, 215n91, 240n20 Grunenwald, Jean-Jacques: and Catholic Church, 122; Vichy commission, 127, 231n13, 233n32 Guéranger, Dom Prosper, 123

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Guignol et Pandore (ballet, Jolivet), 233n31 Guilbaut, Serge, 167–68 Guillou, René, 230n11 Guiraud, Ernest, 168 Guitton, Jean, 97 Haas, Monique, 22, 242n40 Haedrich, Marcel, 111–12 Halbreich, Harry: dating of Chant de Libération, 208n32; on Honegger’s film music, 54; on Honegger’s Symphonie pour cordes, 77; on Honegger’s wartime conduct, 78, 205n12; support of Pascale Honegger, 217n98; on Swiss citizenship of Honegger, 46 Halls, W. D., 148 Harsányi, Tibor, 34; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 165–66 Haut, Jean de. See Éluard, Paul Hautecœur, Louis, 3, 5–7, 14, 123, 189n16; on commissions and aesthetics, 121; on denying state funding for Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 49, 210n40; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; objection to modernism, 86, 168; on work of French orchestras as form of propaganda, 120 Hendricks, Barbara, 146 Henriot, Philippe, 157 Hodeir, André, 115 Hoérée, Arthur: on Lifar’s choreography, 10; music for Les Démons de l’aube, 70; on 1941 performance of La Danse des morts, 75 Hoesslin, Franz von, 218n112 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 56 Honegger, Arthur: association with prewar political left, 78, 219n115; and Barraud, 44–45; and Raymond Bernard, 61, 69, 73, 213n72, 214n86; and Blanchar, 54–55, 212n56; and Claudel, 44–45, 74; and Milhaud, 69, 73, 219n113; and Münch, 39–40; objecting to allegorical reading of Symphonie pour cordes, 76, 78; signer of petition to pardon Brasillach, 43; sketchbooks, 52–54; on Swiss banknote, 74, 216n97; and Zimmer, 54–55, 70, 211n51 —compositions: choral writing, 123; Jour de fête suisse, 70; Nocturne, 70, 216n87;

orchestral performances in 1945–46, 71tab; Pacific 231, 41, 205n12; Sérénade à Angélique, 70; Symphonie liturgique, 70; Symphony No. 4, 70. See also Antigone; Appel de la montagne, L’; Chant de Libération; Danse des morts, La; Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher; Symphonie pour cordes —film music: for Cavalcade d’amour, 69; for Cessez le feu, 54; for Les Démons de l’aube, 70, 215n89; Halbreich on, 54; for Le Journal tombe à 5 heures, 53, 211n51; for Marthe Richard, Spy in the Service of France, 51–52, 69; for Les Misérables, 69; for Secrets, 211n51; for Un Seul amour, 211n51; songs from, 54, 211n53, 211n54; wartime work for French industry, 55. See also Ami viendra ce soir, Un; Chant de la Délivrance —music reviews: on Les Animaux modèles, 11; on Joan de Zarissa, 18; on German music performed in occupied Paris, 41, 71–72, 165, 204n10; on Messiaen’s music, 91, 111; on New French School, 169; on 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 43, 204n10; on Pfizner, 41; on Trois Complaintes du soldat, 110; in XXème siècle, 70, 216n89 —wartime activities: compared with Poulenc, 35–36; defense of, 77–78; efforts to save people in danger, 219n113; and German occupying authorities, 40–43, 204n10, 205n12; Halbreich on, 46, 77–78, 205n12, 208n30, 218n12; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 40–42, 71–72, 206n15, 219n115; repercussions on performances of music during 1944–45, 44–45, 72; wartime performances of music, 11, 12, 41, 48–49, 73–74, 205n12. See also Front national des musiciens Honegger, Pascale, 74, 205n12, 216n98 Honegger Week (festival for fiftieth birthday), 41, 49, 205n12 Honneur des poètes, L’ (Éluard), 56 Hugon, Georges, 230n11 Huisman, Georges, 6, 121, 230n10 Humbert, Louise, 206n15 Hymne à la Justice (Magnard), 204n9 Hymne de la Délivrance (Honegger).

Index See Chant de la Délivrance (Honegger; lyr. Bruyr) Hymne de la Résistance (Salin), 213n68 Ibert, Jacques, 159; Capriccio for ten instruments, 153tab, 159ex; Ouverture de Fête, 39, 204n3; during the war, 241n25; wartime performances of music of, 160–61, 241n24 incidental music for plays: by Jolivet for Hauptmann’s Iphigenie in Delphi, 165– 66, 243n45; by Poulenc, 2; by Thiriet for Œdipe-Roi, 96, 224n37. See also Portique pour une fille de France Indy, Vincent d’: on French symphonic development, 169; influence on Dandelot, 169; influence on Nigg, 155, 180; performance of music of, 95 Information musicale, L’ (journal), 94, 222n26; founded by Robert Bernard, 12; illustration of music making in the Stalag, 97, 98fig; publicity for Poulenc recital of 8 December 1943, 27 Inghelbrecht, Désiré-Émile, 14, 124 In memoriam (Lajtha), 127, 130 In memoriam (Tansman), 127, 130 Institut allemand, 13, 72, 205n12 International Festival of Contemporary Chamber Music (1947), 179 Introduction à la musique de douze sons (Leibowitz), 176 Iphigenie in Delphi (Hauptmann), 165–66 Ivry, Benjamin, 35–36 Jacob, Max, 57 Jansen, Jacques, 166 Jaubert, Maurice, 1, 8, 94; in recordings by AFAA, 91 Jaujard, Jacques, 41 Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Honegger; libr. Claudel), 44, 47, 74–75, 78, 218n105; on Hautecœur denying state funding for 49, 210n40; Paris performance in 1947, 70; performance by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 49, 216n94, 217n104; tour financed by Vichy government, 48–49 Je suis partout (newspaper): Brasillach editor of, 43, 158; Vuillermoz music critic for, 157 Jeune France, group of four composers (1936): wartime concerts reuniting original members of, 92–94tab, 102,

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224n45, 226n56. See also Baudrier, Yves; Jolivet, André; Lesur, Daniel; Messiaen, Olivier Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940), 25; lecture-recitals organized by, 221n19; music for Portique pour une fille de France, 49, 85, 124; music for Sainte Jeanne, 49–50, 209n39; tour of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 48–50, 209n37. See also Baudrier, Yves; Jolivet, André; Lesur, Daniel; Messiaen, Olivier; Schaeffer, Pierre Jeunesse française, Une (Péan), 146 Jews: composers in opening concert of Concerts Colonne, 40; French opinion and anti-Semitic persecution, 202n131, 214n80; Statut des Juifs, 188n13; Vel d’Hiv roundup (1942), 147, 237n71; Vichy regime and, 5 Joachim, Irène: debut as Mélisande, 20–21, 195n75; on Désormière, 29; in FNM, 22 Joan de Zarissa (Egk): Lifar’s choreography for, 18–19, 195n70; performance at Opéra, 3, 17, 18; review by Honegger, 205n10 Joan of Arc: popular symbol in Vichy propaganda, 48; tolerated by German occupying forces, 50. See also Chant de Libération; Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher; Portique pour une fille de France; Sainte Jeanne Jolivet, André, 30, 83, 174–76, 191n40, 226n55, 243n47; change of style, 106, 108, 126, 233n31; composer for Sainte Jeanne, 209n39; fighting in central France, 1; incidental music for Hauptmann’s Iphigenie in Delphi, 165– 66; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; on Stravinsky concerts, 163–66; on Symphonie pour cordes, 218n105. See also Jeune France, group of four composers (1936); Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) —compositions: Chant de Linos, 167; Guignol et Pandore (ballet), 190n92, 233n31; La Vérité de Jeanne, 210n39. See also Trois Complaintes du soldat Jolivet, Hilda, 243n47 Jourdanet, Charles, 113, 220n8 Jour de fête suisse (Honegger), 70 Journal tombe à 5 heures, Le (film), 211n51

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Jouvenel, Renaud de, 180–81 Joy, Geneviève, 22 Kaldor, Pierre, 180, 248n118 Karajan, Herbert von, 14, 192n48, 192n50 Kayas, Lucie, 232n22 Kempff, Wilhelm, 195n70 Kessel, Joseph, 54, 59 Khachaturian, Aram, 181 Knappertsbuch, Hans, 42 Koechlin, Charles, 32, 97; criticism of Les Animaux modèles, 31, 202n132; in recordings by AFAA, 91; signer of Prague Manifesto, 248n118 Koreman, Megan, 157 Krauss, Clemens, 42 Labey, Marcel, 206n15 Ladmirault, Paul, 91 La Fontaine, Jean de, 2 Lajtha, László, 127 Langendorf, Jean-Jacques, 218n112 La Presle, Jacques de, 123 Laubreux, Alain, 158 Laurent, Jeanne, 121, 123 Laval, Pierre, 230n4, 230n10; advice to Lifar, 8; on Recordings anthology of contemporary music, 222n23 Le Boulaire, Jean: and camp performance of Messiaen’s Quartet, 82, 113; release from camp, 223n28; reminiscences of camp life, 114 Lécroart, Pascal, 48 Legrand, Raymond, 13 Le Guennant, Auguste: commissioning Duruflé’s Quatre motets, 137, 144; on Solesmes notation, 133, 136, 235n48 Leibowitz, René: and Boulez, 178–79, 246n94; condemnation of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, 177–78; influence on students, 153; Nigg’s rupture with, 179; and twelve-tone composition, 175–76, 178 Léocadia (Anouilh), 2 Lesur, Daniel: in group lecture-recital of Jeune France, 221n19; interview of Busser, 182, 184; interview of Nigg, 181; radio show, 94, 218n105. See also Jeune France, group of four composers (1936); Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) Le Triptyque, 224n45 Lettres françaises, Les (newspaper): L’Écran

français absorbed by, 211n55; list of compromised musicians, 41, 206n14; Musiciens d’aujourd’hui absorbed by, 23; PCF and, 248n118; publication of Prague Manifesto, 180; on Rosenthal’s efforts to perform banned music, 151; Sartre in, 36–37 “Leurs noms bénis” (Audisio), 56 libération, meaning of term, 157 “Liberté” (Poulenc; poem by Éluard), 4, 29–30 Lifar, Serge: in Les Animaux modèles, 3–4; Blond on choreography by, 9–10; and French ballet, 8–9; Guignol et Pandore, 233n31; during the occupation, 190n27; at Opéra, 8; praised by Egk, 17 Lindsay, Vera, 32 Litaize, Gaston: and Catholic Church, 122; Vichy commission, 127, 231n13, 233n32 Livre pour Jean, Le (Thiriet), 97 Lonchampt, Jacques, 76 Lorca, Federico García, 26 Loriod, Yvonne: on Messiaen after release, 220n12; on Messiaen and Brüll, 228n81; on Messiaen as harmony professor, 84; on Messiaen’s recollections of camp life, 114; performing premiere of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, 173 “Louange à l’éternité de Jésus” (Messiaen), 102 Loucheur, Raymond, 209n39 Lubin, Germaine, 14, 206n15 Luchaire, Jean, 216n92. See also Nouveaux Temps, Les Lurçat, Jean, 29 Machabey, Armand, 91, 94 Magnard, Albéric, 95, 204n9 “Ma haine” (Durey), 32 Maillard-Verger, Pierre, 231nn11,12 Marc, Edmond, 230n11 Marescotti, André-François, 208n27 Mari, Pierrette, 117 Mariat, Jean, 110, 226n61 Marietti, Jean, 206n15 Marly, Anna, 59, 60 Marseillaise, La (sculpture, Rude), 39 Marthe Richard, Spy in the Service of France (film, Raymond Bernard): finale, 57; Honegger’s music for, 51–52, 69; wartime ban on, 210n47

Index Martinet, Jean-Louis, 246n93; on postwar young musicians, 177; signer of Prague Manifesto, 248n118 Martinon, Jean, 96; in “Composers in the Camps” concert, 96, 100; music compared to Messiaen’s Quartet, 100, 102; music performed at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 229n92; Vichy commission, 231n12. See also Psaume 136: Chant des captifs; Stalag IX ou musique d’exil Martyre de Saint Sébastien, Le (Debussy), 39, 204n3 Mass of the Dead: Duruflé’s Requiem and, 126–27; plainchant for Introit, 132fig Masson, Paul Marie, 206n15 Matossian, Nouritza, 221n16 Mauriac, François, 43 Mazelier, Jules, 91 Messe “Cum jubilo” (Duruflé), 145 Messiaen, Olivier, 224n45; after captivity, 84; biographies of, 228n89; Boulez student of, 169; Brüll and, 114, 228n81; in “Composers in the Camps” concert, 96; early release of, 94, 220n10, 222n28; on faculty of Paris Conservatoire, 84, 85–86; harmony treatise of, 221n21; influence on Boulez, 244n66; influence on Nigg, 162; on lack of influence of circumstances on writing of Quartet, 82; music taught by, 170; Nigg student of, 168; performances in wartime France, 91, 92–94tab; performing in Paris premiere of Quartet, 95; performing in premiere of Boulez’s Structures 1a, 247n109; prisoners of war, 1; private lessons by, 244n66; in recordings by AFAA, 91; relationship to Vichy regime, 85; reminiscences of camp life, 114; Rostand on wartime music of, 34; in Stravinsky controversy, 173; Technique de mon langage musical, 232n22; toleration of twelve-tone composition, 177. See also Jeune France, group of four composers (1936); Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) —compositions: Chœurs pour une Jeanne d’Arc, 232n22; commission for Portique pour une fille de France, 49, 85, 124; Les Corps glorieux, 91; Diptyque for organ, 225n46; Fêtes des belles eaux, 225n46; mélodies, 95, 221n19; “Minuit pile et face,” 95, 221n19; Les Offrandes

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oubliées, 91, 96; Préludes, 221n19; “Résurrection,” 95; “Le Sourire,” 95, 221n19; Thèmes et variations, 95; Turangalîla-Symphonie, 115; Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, 173; “Vocalise,” 95, 221n19. See also Ascension, L’; Quartet for the End of Time; Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine; Visions de l’Amen Méthode pratique pour l’accompagnement du chant grégorien (Peeters), 144 Meunier, Jules, 123 Mihalovici, Marcel: in FNM, 22; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; recording of music of, 197n89; Rostand on wartime music of, 34; Symphonies pour le temps présent, 201n124 Milhaud, Darius, 45, 72, 173; Four Sketches, 153tab, 159, 160; Honegger and, 69, 73, 219n113; Médée, 7; Quatrains valaisans, 174; Suite provençal, 38; Symphony no. 3 “Te Deum,” 129–30; wartime ban on music of, 16, 84; wartime performances of music of, 23; wartime recording of music of, 197n89 “Minuit pile et face” (Messiaen), 95, 221n19 Mireux, Émile, 188n15 Misérables, Les (film, Raymond Bernard), 69 Missa in honorem Reginae Pacis (Peeters), 144 Mitterrand, François: claiming unawareness of anti-Semitic laws, 237n72; Duruflé’s Requiem played at public funeral mass, 146; as prisoner of war, 233n34; wartime activities, 146 Mocquereau, Dom André, 132, 136 Moppès, Maurice van, 213n68 Moreux, Serge, 95; on Dandelot’s Symphony in D, 170; on Messiaen’s religious texts for his Quartet, 111 Morin, Philippe, 74 Mouches, Les (Sartre), 25, 78 Mozart festival in Vienna (1941), 42; French delegation at, 206n15; Honegger at, 40, 74, 78; reviews by Honegger, 204n10 Münch, Charles: featuring contemporary composers in post-liberation concert, 39; in FNM, 31; during occupation, 37;

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Münch, Charles (continued) partnership with Honegger, 40; performance of Concert champêtre with Poulenc, 3; performance of Les Noces, 164; performance of Symphonie pour cordes, 70; premiere of orchestrated version of Trois Complaintes, 109; programming during the occupation, 204n9 Münch, Geneviève, 57 music, contemporary French: belief in wartime ban on, 84–85; influence of reform of choral singing on, 123; promotion by Vichy government, 168; range of postwar possibilities, 156. See also Recordings anthology of contemporary French music Musicien d’aujourd’hui, Le (newsletter). See Front national des musiciens Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (newsletter). See Front national des musiciens Music of the XXth Century (1954 festival), 178 Mystère des Saints Innocents, Le (Péguy), 98 Nabokov, Nicolas, 154 Nat, Yves, 91 National Purification Committee for Writers, Authors, and Composers, 70–71 neoclassicism, 153, 154, 177 Neveu, Ginette, 26 New French School, 12, 169, 191n40 Nigg, Serge, 153tab, 221n15; aesthetics and politics, 155, 179, 184; on defection of students from Messiaen to Leibowitz, 246n94; on earliest compositions, 162; founding member of Association française des musiciens progressistes, 155; interview by Kaldor, 180; at Paris Conservatoire, 168; rejection of serialism, 181; rejection of Stravinsky, 167; on Rosenthal, 242n36; rupture with Leibowitz, 179; in Stravinsky controversy, 152, 154; student of Messiaen, 244n66; study of twelve-tone composition, 179; on Trois petites liturgies, 174 —compositions: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, 182; Le Fusillé inconnu, 180; Pour un poète captif, 180; Timour, 161; Variations for Piano and Ten

Instruments, 179. See also Concertino; Piano Concerto no. 1; Piano Sonata no. 1 Noailles, Marie-Laure de, 30, 32 Noces, Les (Stravinsky), 158; Messiaen on, 244n68; wartime performances of, 164, 241n24 Nocher, Jean, 213n68 Nocturne (Honegger), 70, 216n87 Noir, Jean. See Cassou, Jean Nombre musical grégorien, Le (Mocquereau), 136 “Nous ne vous chantons pas” (Éluard), 56, 212n59 Nouveaux Temps, Les (newspaper), 72; Luchaire, editor of, 216n92 Nouvelle Revue française (journal), 9 Ochsé, Fernand, 219n113 Ode à la France (Debussy), 125, 232n26 Ode à la France blessée (Gailhard; lyr. Fabre), 125–26, 233n30 Œdipe-Roi (Cocteau), 96, 224n37 Office for the Fight against Unemployment: financing performance of commissioned works, 7; financing tour of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 48–49; Gailhard appointed to, 126 Offrandes oubliées, Les (Messiaen), 91, 96 Ollone, Max d’: director of Opéra-Comique, 169; dismissal of case against, 215n91; in FNM list of compromised musicians, 206n14; professor of composition at Paris Conservatoire, 17, 168. See also Groupe Collaboration Ondes, Les (magazine), 13 O Nuit (Damais), 97, 98–100, 99ex, 224n37 Opéra: German repertoire and, 16; Jewish composers taken out of repertoire, 16; performance of contemporary French music, 85; reopening, 7 Opéra-Comique, 7, 169 Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 3, 120; benefit gala by, 97; concert of music of repatriated prisoners, 96; performance of contemporary French music, 85; performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 164; premiere of orchestrated version of Trois Complaintes, 109 Orchestre des Cadets du Conservatoire, 199n111 Orchestre national, 120; difficult conditions in winter 1945, 157, 239n15; first post-

Index liberation concert, 38; free weekly postwar performances, 151; 1945 Stravinsky festival, 151, 152, 152tab, 238n2; 1947 premiere of Duruflé’s Requiem, 127; performance of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 49; postwar performance of Honegger’s music, 70 Orchestre symphonique de France, 224n45 Order of Saint Gregory the Great, 144 organ: funding priority to organist composers, 122; recitals by Messiaen, 91 Ouverture de Fête (Ibert), 39, 204n3; wartime performance of, 241n24 Œuvre du XXème siècle, L’ (1952 festival): Boulez’s Structures 1a at, 178, 247n109; Stravinsky at, 153–54 Pacific 231 (Honegger), 41, 205n12 PAF. See Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF) Pageot-Rousseaux, Lucienne, 10 Palestrina (Pfitzner), 16, 204n10 Papon, Maurice, 148 Paray, Paul, 40, 123 Paris: atmosphere in winter following liberation, 156–57; Honegger’s choice to live in, 77; liberation of, 31, 38–40, 57, 59, 151, 197–98n89, 212n64, 213n69; Messiaen’s choice to live in, 84; Poulenc’s choice to live in, 2 Pasquier, Étienne: and camp performance of Messiaen’s Quartet, 82, 95, 113; early release of, 94, 222n28; reminiscences of camp life, 82, 83, 114 Pasquier, Jean, 95 PCF. See French Communist Party Péan, Pierre, 146 Peer Gynt (Egk), 165; French premiere, 16; reception of, 18; review by Honegger, 205n10 Peeters, Flor, 144–45 Péguy, Charles, 98 Pellas-Lenom, Marthe, 166 Pelléas et Mélisande (Debussy), 7, 20 Peretti, Serge, 35 Peschanski, Denis, 214n79 Pétain, Philippe, 5, 51 Peyron, Joseph, 242n40 Peyser, Joan, 153 Pfizner, Hans, 16, 41 Piaf, Édith, 23

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Piano Concerto no. 1 (Nigg), 180–81, 182– 83ex, 184 Piano Sonata no. 1 (Nigg), 161 Picasso, Pablo, 43 Piersig, Fritz: and French-German music cooperation, 16; Honegger and, 205n12; role at PAF, 193n57 Pignari, Hélène, 203n134 Pincherle, Marc, 117 Pinot, Maurice, 97 Pius X, pope, 136–37, 140 plainchant: Duruflé’s use of, 124, 126–33, 135–46, 149–50; Gastoué and, 122, 236n63; medieval notational system, 131–32; in Portique pour une fille de France, 124. See also Solesmes Poèmes de la France malheureuse (Supervielle), 55 Poésie et Vérité (Éluard), 30 Polignac, Marie-Blanche de, 30 Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire (film, Jean Delannoy), 25, 78, 211n51 Pople, Anthony: on circumstances of writing of Messiaen’s Quartet, 82–83; close reading of Messiaen’s Quartet, 80–81; on meaning of Messiaen’s Quartet for fellow prisoners, 220n7 Portique pour une fille de France. See Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) Pothier, Dom Joseph, 123, 132 Poulenc, Francis: on Les Animaux modèles, 202n125; in FNM, 3, 22, 31; on Honegger, 45; image as heroic Resistance composer, 33; letters discussing Figure humaine, 30; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; on Messiaen, 173, 174; music criticism, 3; nationalism, 11, 176; 1954 interview by Rostand, 32–33, 198n91; on poor conditions of performances in 1945, 239n15; on postwar musical life in Paris, 174; on protests during 1945 Stravinsky festival, 173; recommending Trois petites liturgies to Collaer, 246n88; recordings by, 2–3; Rostand on wartime music of, 34; in Stravinsky controversy, 165 —compositions: Chansons villageoises, 2, 11; Concert champêtre, 3; Sept chansons, 29; Sextet for Piano and Winds, 12; Un soir de neige, 174; Sonata for Violin and Piano, 26; Violin Sonata, 4. See also Animaux modèles, Les; Aubade;

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Poulenc, Francis (continued) Banalités; Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon; Figure humaine —performances: of his own music, 3; recitals with Bernac, 1, 2, 11; as soloist in Les Noces, 242n40 Poulet, Gaston, 3 Pour un poète captif (Nigg), 180 Prague Manifesto, 180, 248n118 Précis de rythmique grégorienne (Le Guennant), 136 Preger, Léo. See Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) Préludes (Messiaen), 221n19 Prieberg, Fred, 193n57, 205n12 prison camps: commissions to composers released from, 122, 231n12; differing reminiscences of, 114; music performance in, 96; radio transmission of concerts to, 97 prisoners of war: composers as, 1, 223– 24n37, 231n12; concerts in honor of, 94tab, 96–97, 102, 231n12; as symbols of hope for Vichy regime, 83, 94–96, 110, 226n61 Prisonnier (documentary), 226n61 Professional Committee of Dramatic Authors, Composers, and Music Editors, 12 Professional Committee of Musical Arts and Private Music Education, 12 Propaganda Division for France (Propaganda Abteilung Frankreich, or PAF), 12; conflicts with German embassy, 191n42; repertoire of Opéra and, 15; report on cultural events, 85 protests during 1945 Stravinsky festival, 152–53, 162; interpretation by Carroll, 154; and shaping postwar future of music in France, 154–55 Psaume 136: Chant des captifs (Martinon), 100, 102, 224n41 Psaume CXXIII (Goué), 97 Purification Committee for Dramatic, Lyric, and Music Performance Professionals, 200n116 Quartet for the End of Time (Messiaen): camp performance of, 111–12, 113, 227n67; commentaries on genesis of, 80–81; compared to Trois Complaintes, 103, 105; and concerts of music composed

in captivity, 95–96; criticism after war’s end, 115; Deutsche Grammophon CD 2000, 81–82, 81fig; eighth movement, 225n46; fifth movement, 102, 103ex, 225n46; Griffiths on, 111, 225n46; lack of exposure in wartime Paris, 114; liner notes of recordings of, 115–17; performance at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 229n92; Pople on, 80–81, 82–83, 220n7; preface for first published score, 81–82; Paris premiere of, 91, 92tab, 95; reading through lens of captivity, 82–83, 118; as representation of plight of all victims of German persecution, 118; reviews of Paris premiere of, 95 Quatrains valaisans (Milhaud), 174 Quatre chants de la France malheureuse (Auric), 55, 56, 57, 200n13, 212n59; Halbreich on, 77 Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens (Duruflé), 137–40; and Peeter’s harmonic recommendations, 145 Quatre poèmes de Lanza del Vasto (Barraud), 203n134 Quatre poèmes de minuit (Audisio as La Valentine), 56, 199n109 Quatuor à cordes (Barraud), 203n134 Raabe, Peter, 194n61 Rabaud, Henri, 12 Rabourdin, Élie: interview of Jolivet, 225n47; on premiere of Trois Complaintes, 110 Radermacher, Bernard, 8 Radiodiffusion nationale, 13–14; antiSemitic laws affecting musicians at, 188n13; Barraud and, 203n134; broadcast of Le Chant des Partisans after liberation, 213n69; broadcast of concerts commemorating first anniversary of the armistice in 1941, 94–95; broadcast of Figure humaine, 32; broadcast of Trois Complaintes, 226n56; Busser music director at, 169, 215n91; Lesur’s radio show, Actualité musicale, 218n105; Pétain’s radio addresses, 48, 209n34; score of Ode à la France blessée and, 233n30; Schaeffer’s Studio d’essai, 197n89; Émile Vuillermoz at, 14; wartime broadcasts of Stravinsky’s music, 164, 241n24. See also Radio national

Index Radio national (magazine), 49, 209n34 Radio-Paris, 13–14; broadcast of Jolivet’s Trois Complaintes, 166, 226n56; Chorale Passani at, 201n116; Henriot’s addresses on, 157; musicians compromised by broadcasts on, 41, 158; programs, 192n44 Rafle, La (film), 237n75 Rebatet, Lucien: on Honegger, 219n115; and 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 42–43, 206n15; in postwar period, 158; review of Symphonie pour cordes, 78 Recordings anthology of contemporary French music, 86, 87–90tab, 91, 170, 203n134, 222n23 Reich Ministry of Propaganda (RMVP): Berlin Staatsoper tour, 16; PAF linked to, 13; sponsor of 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 40 Requiem (Duruflé): certificate of completion for, 127, 128fig; composed for concert performance, 128–29, 137, 143; connection with Vichy regime, 148–50; genesis of, 126–29, 131, 143; international popularity of, 130–31; Introit, 126, 133ex, 134–35ex, 135–36, 140–42; Introit compared to Solesmes notation for Mass of the Dead, 133ex; at Mitterrand’s funeral, 146; Libera me, 126, 142; performances of, 234n42, 235n46; premiere of, 127; recordings of, 130–31; reviews of, 129–30; Sanctus, 126, 128, 131, 142, 143ex, 146; Ubi Caritas compared to, 138–40; viewed as timeless, 129–31. See also plainchant; Solesmes Requiem (Fauré), 146, 235n46 Resistance: Barraud and, 36; conductors belonging to, 40; on Debussy as symbol of, 20–23; musical acts of, 23, 196n82; musical settings of Resistance poems, 55–57; postwar broadcast of poets and music of the, 32; Poulenc and, 3–4, 19–31, 33–37; reaction to Les Animaux modèles, 3; Roy in, 25–26; Schaeffer in, 25; songs of, 58–59, 213n68. See also Front national des musiciens “Résurrection” (Messiaen), 95 Réunion des Théâtres lyriques nationaux (RTLN): danger of productions of new German works, 19; premieres of state commissions, 190n25; repertoire, 16; Rouché head of, 7; seats requisitioned by

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German forces, 193n54. See also Opéra; Opéra-Comique Revue des Beaux-Arts de France (journal), 121 Reyna, Ferdinando, 19 “Richard II Quarante” (Aragon), 56 Ripert, Georges, 188n15 Rischin, Rebecca: on genesis of Messiaen’s Quartet, 83; interview of Lucien Akoka, 223n34; interview of Le Boulaire, 114; interview of Loriod, 114, 228n81; interview of Étienne Pasquier, 223n28; on Messiaen’s memories of the camp premiere of his Quartet, 227n74 Rivaud, Albert, 188n15 Rivier, Jean, 12; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40 RMVP. See Reich Ministry of Propaganda Roget, Henriette, 129 Roland-Manuel: correspondence with Poulenc, 30, 45; in FNM, 22, 31; on Honegger, 45, 208n27; interview on activities of FNM, 31–32, 37, 40; and Jolivet on Stravinsky, 166–67, 173–74; on Leibowitz, 176; on Messiaen, 173–74; on Münch’s programming during the occupation, 204n9; on music of Egk, 165; on October 1944 concert of Concerts Colonne, 40; and planning of 1945 Stravinsky festival, 151; on poor conditions for performances in 1945, 239n15; production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 23; review of Danses concertantes, 161; review of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, 171–72; review of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, 173; on 1945 protests against Four Norwegian Moods, 162–63 Ropartz, Joseph Guy, 91 Rosen, Waldermar, 205n12 Rosenthal, Manuel: Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou, 56; in FNM, 22, 31, 199n111; on Honegger in 1994 radio interview, 74, 216n98; on Honegger’s wartime activities, 217n99; and Orchestre national, 38, 151; on poor conditions for performances in 1945, 239n15; postwar performance of Honegger’s music, 70; premiere of Duruflé’s Requiem, 127; production of Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 23; wartime activities of, 38, 204n1

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Rostand, Claude: on concert of 27 February 1945, 162; dismissive of Chant de Libération, 39; interview of Poulenc in 1954, 32–33, 198n91; review of concert on Poulenc’s mélodies, 34; review of Münch’s concert of October 1944, 39; review of organ recital of Les Corps glorieux, 174, 245n85; on Rosenthal’s efforts to perform banned music, 151; on 1945 protests against Four Norwegian Moods, 163 Rouart, Paul, 29 Rouché, Jacques, 7–9; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; submission of Opéra’s programs to PAF, 15–16, 193n60 Roussel, Albert, 39, 96, 204n3; Bardit des Francs, 39, 204n9 Rousso, Henry, 130, 155–56 Roy, Claude, 25, 197n89. See also Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940); Resistance RTLN. See Réunion des Théâtres lyriques nationaux Rude, François, 39 Sablon, Germaine, 213n69 Sacher, Maya, 61, 70, 73, 74 Sacre du printemps, Le (Stravinsky): Messiaen on, 170, 222n21, 244n68; Nigg on, 162, 170–71; wartime performances of, 241n24 Sainte Jeanne: composers of, 209n39; Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher compared to, 50. See also Jeune France, Vichy organization (1940) Salin, Marcel, 213n68 Salon du Prisonnier (exhibition, Musée Galliéra), 226n61 Samazeuilh, Gustave, 206n15 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36; Les Mouches, 25; refusal to sign petition to pardon Brasillach, 43 Sauguer, Louis, 219n113 Sauguet, Henri: membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; in recordings by AFAA, 91; review of Figure humaine, 35 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 247n110 Scapini, Georges, 97 Schaeffer, Pierre, 213n69; recording of music of banned composers, 197n89; role in emitting radio broadcasts during Paris insurrection, 197–98n89. See also Jeune

France, Vichy organization (1940); Resistance Schaeffner, André: on genesis of Figure humaine, 35; letter from Poulenc on Les Animaux modèles, 11, 31; reinterpretation of Les Animaux modèles, 34 Schirach, Baldur von, 42 Schlee, Alfred, 42 Schmitt, Florent, 95, 169, 190n26; examination by National Purification Committee for Writers, Authors, and Composers, 71, 72; in FNM list of compromised musicians, 206n14; membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40; at 1941 Mozart festival in Vienna, 206n15; in recordings by AFAA, 91. See also Groupe Collaboration Schoenberg, Arnold, 27, 72, 95, 154, 162, 166, 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 223n32, 229n94; recording of music of, 197n89 Schwartz, Manuela, 205n12; on production of Joan de Zarissa and tours of German musicians in France, 195n70 Schwarz, Solange, 19 Schweizerische Musikzeitung (journal), 73, 216n94 Screpel, Henri, 29 Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics (Prague, 1948), 180 Secrets (film), 211n51, 212n56 Sept chansons (Poulenc), 29 Sept Poèmes d’amour en guerre (Éluard as Jean de Haut), 55–56 Sérénade à Angélique (Honegger), 70 Serge Lifar à l’Opéra (Valéry and Cocteau), 10 Serventi, Victor, 230n11 Service du travail obligatoire (STO), 31 Seul Amour, Un (film), 211n51, 212n56; songs by Honegger and Zimmer, 70 Sextet for Piano and Winds (Poulenc), 12 Simeone, Nigel, 232n22; on Concerts de la Pléiade, 85 Simon, Yannick, 205n12, 217n101; on La Danse des morts, 74–75 Société des gens de lettres, 158, 240n21 Société privée de musique de chambre, 153, 153tab, 158–62

Index Soir de neige, Un (Poulenc), 174 Solesmes: horizontal episema, 139; recording of plainchant, 136; revival of plainchant, 123; rhythmic notation of plainchant, 132–33, 135–36; vertical episema, 135–36, 139. See also plainchant; Requiem (Duruflé) Sonata for Violin and Piano (Poulenc), 26 “Sourire, Le” (Messiaen), 95, 221n19 Spiegel der Französischen Presse, 18 Stalag IX ou musique d’exil (Martinon), 96, 100, 101ex, 224n37 Stern, Marcel, 231n11 Strauss, Richard, 16, 41, 42, 203n138 Stravinsky, Igor: music taught by Messiaen, 170; protests during 1945 performance of music of, 152–53, 162; rejection by Nigg, 167; return to Paris in 1952, 153–54; wartime performances of music of, 241n24, 242n40 —compositions. See Capriccio for piano and orchestra; Concerto in Ea “Dumbarton Oaks”; Danses concertantes; Four Norwegian Moods; Les Noces; Sacre du printemps, Le; Symphony in C Stravinsky festival (1945), 151–52, 152tab, 153, 157–58, 162–66, 171–73, 238n5, 239n15 Strobel, Heinrich, 16, 193n58, 205n12 Strucken-Paland, Christiane, 208n30 Structures 1a (Boulez), 178 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 36–37 Supervielle, Jules, 55, 212n59 Symphonie en blanc (film), 9 Symphonie en sol majeur (Challan), 97, 231n12 Symphonie en sol majeur (Rivier), 12 Symphonie française (Dubois), 125 Symphonie liturgique (Honegger), 70 Symphonie pour cordes (Honegger): allegorical readings, 75–77, 218n105; broadcast by Orchestre national in May 1945, 69, 208n27; Halbreich on, 77, 218n12; historical recording in Charles Münch: La France résistante (CD), 73; performances by Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 40, 49, 70, 73; review by Gerbracht, 75–76; review by Rebatet, 78; score sent to Basel, 77, 218n112 Symphonie pour orgue et orchestre (Litaize), 127, 233n32

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Symphonies pour le temps présent (Mihalovici), 201n124 Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (d’Indy), 180 Symphony in C (Stravinsky): compared to Dandelot’s Symphony in D, 171; in 1945 Stravinsky festival, 152, 153; reviews of, 171–72 Symphony in D (Dandelot), 169–70, 244n62; compared to Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, 171 Symphony no. 3 (Roussel), 96 Symphony no. 3 “Te Deum” (Milhaud), 129–30 Symphony no. 4 (Honegger), 70 symphony orchestras in Paris: after the liberation, 38; performances during the occupation, 11. See also Concerts Gabriel Pierné; Concerts Lamoureux; Concerts Pasdeloup; Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire Tansman, Alexandre, 127 Tantum Ergo (Duruflé), 137, 141ex; approach to rhythm and duration in, 140 Tantum Ergo (hymn), 140, 141ex Tappolet, Willi, 216n94 Tchamkerten, Jacques: on Honegger’s Chant de Libération, 46, 208n32; on Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 50 Tcherepnin, Alexander: membership in Association de musique contemporaine, 191n40 Technique de mon langage musical (Messiaen), 232n22 Thèmes et variations (Messiaen), 95 Thiriet, Maurice, 94; in “Composers in the Camps” concert, 96; incidental music for Œdipe-Roi, 96, 224n37; performance of Le Livre pour Jean, 97; performing in prison camp, 96 Timour (Nigg), 161 Tixier-Vignancour, Jean-Louis, 210n47 Tomasi, Henri, 95, 169 Tota Pulchra Es (Duruflé), 137 Tournemire, Charles, 122 Tragin, Lucienne, 3 Trait d’Union, Le (newspaper), 96 Tre Laudi (Dallapiccola), 241n30; performance by Société privée de musique de chambre, 153tab, 161; review by Rostand, 162

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33 sonnets composés au secret (Cassou as Jean Noir), 56 Triptyque, Le, 224n45 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 14, 15 Trois Complaintes du soldat (Jolivet), 29, 103, 104ex, 105–6, 107ex, 108–9, 109ex, 110, 118, 225n53; historical recording in Charles Münch: La France résistante (CD), 74; performances and recordings of, 109, 166, 226n56; review by Robert Bernard, 106, 108; review by Bruyr, 110; review by Honegger, 110 Trois Danses (Duruflé), 145 Trois mélodies (Gallois-Montbrun), 224n37 Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine (Messiaen), 115, 174, 201n124, 224n44 Tual, Denise, 26, 32, 84 Tual, Roland, 32 “Tuer” (Rosenthal), 32 Tu es Petrus (Duruflé), 137 Turangalîla-Symphonie (Messiaen), 115 twelve-tone composition: Leibowitz and, 175–76, 178; Nigg and, 176, 179; toleration by Messiaen, 177 Ubi Caritas (Duruflé), 137, 138; score compared to Solesmes notation, 139ex Vacellier, André, 95 Vaillat, Léandre, 10 Valéry, Paul: signer of petition to pardon Brasillach, 43; text for Serge Lifar à l’Opéra, 10 Variations for Piano and Ten Instruments (Nigg), 179 Vaudroyer, Jean-Louis, 166 Vaussard, Christiane, 35 Vérité de Jeanne, La (Jolivet), 210n39 Vichy regime: anti-Semitic legislation, 68–69, 166, 188n13, 200n111; bargaining for release of prisoners, 94; and Catholic Church, 122–23; Messiaen’s relationship to, 85; Mitterrand and former leaders of, 146; Poulenc in administration committees of, 12; support of French culture, 5, 189n16; symbolic use of Messiaen, 94. See also Administration of

Fine Arts; Office for the Fight against Unemployment Vichy regime, music funding by: for contemporary French music, 4, 5–6; exclusion of Messiaen from, 86; musicians and, 230n3; subsidies for choir schools, 123; subsidies for orchestras, 120. See also commissions of new works by Vichy regime XXème siècle (journal), 70, 216n89 Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Messiaen), 173, 201n124 Violin Sonata (Poulenc), 4 Visions de l’Amen (Messiaen): premiere during occupation, 91; review by Honegger, 91; success of, 102, 115 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 43–44 “Vocalise” (Messiaen), 95, 221n19 Vocht, Louis de, 30, 70 Voice for the Silenced, A (series, Classical Public Radio Network), 118 Vuillermoz, Émile: examination by purification committee of Société des gens de lettres, 240n21; in FNM list of compromised musicians, 206n14; at Radiodiffusion nationale, 14; wartime publications, 157–58, 240n20. See also Auric, Georges Vuillermoz, Jean, 1 Walsh, Stephen, 155 Warlop, Michel, 96 Wellens, Ian, 178–79 Werb, Bret, 229n92 Wiéner, Jean, 161 Wissmer, Pierre, 208n27 Yeux d’Elsa, Les (Aragon), 27 Zay, Jean, 230n10 Zimmer, Bernard: film criticism in L’Écran français, 211n55; lyrics of Chant de Libération, 39, 45–54, 57, 58; and Marthe Richard, 51; and Pontcarral, 219n114; and the Resistance, 54; wartime film collaborations with Honegger, 54–55, 70, 211n51, 212n56