MILHAUD: Piano Music, William Bolcom, piano

FLAC

DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)

Though born in Marseilles, Milhaud grew up in the nearby town of Aix-en-Provence. His father was a well-to-do almond dealer who lived and worked at the Bras d’Or, a former inn where the Milhaud family had been established since 1806. From his earliest years Milhaud was exposed to the songs of the amandières, the women who sorted the almonds on the ground floor of the house while singing Provençal airs and comic songs of the café-concerts. Milhaud admitted in his autobiography that he was a ‘rather neurotic’ child, and even as an adult easily prone to anxiety, yet noise must have been a constant feature of life at the Bras d’Or. Half awake in the morning, or in bed at night, he would hear the clamour of the men and women at work, and the ‘soft sound of fruit falling into the baskets and the monotonous and soothing drone of the machines’. It was at night too, before falling asleep, that he would hear a mysterious music he was quite unable to imagine written down, music he later realized was a premonition of polytonality.

He was profoundly marked by Provence, a region of striking contrasts: hot sun and grateful shade, harsh, arid landscapes with a majestic river, the Rhône, running through the heart of it. From the fishing villages to the great, desolate plain of the Camargue, as a young man he would go on long walks, absorbing the landscape and light of Provence. Judaism was a no less important element in his make-up, and, though not a strict orthodox Jew, he always had deeply-held religious beliefs. Aix is the heart of the Comtat Venaissin, where the Jews have their own liturgy and were for centuries under the special protection of the Pope, a situation that forms the background to his opera Esther de Carpentras.

His father was an excellent amateur pianist and pillar of the local musical society, and his Italian mother (née Allatini) was a fine contralto. (He himself came to possess a beautiful baritone voice.) His musical disposition was soon clear: from the age of three he played duets with his father, which ‘at once instilled in me a sense of rhythm’, and at seven he took up the violin, progressing well enough to give recitals and, from 1902 to 1907, play second violin in the quartet of his violin teacher, Léo Bruguier. In 1905 they studied Debussy’s quartet, which was such a revelation for Milhaud that he at once bought the score of Pelléas. The same year he started to take harmony lessons with a local teacher who used the treatises of Reber and Dubois. He was bored, but he had started to compose, and his letters of the time prove that, despite his success with the violin, he already realized that composition was to be his real occupation.

Highly important also in his early years were two exceptionally close friendships, complementary in many ways, and corresponding to different aspects of Milhaud’s character. Léo Latil, the son of a local doctor, was an earnest Roman Catholic of a dreamy, poetic disposition, with a deep love of literature and music. Armand Lunel, who became a novelist and historian as well as librettist for Milhaud, had a more philosophical and also more playful disposition. For these three young men, literature, music and aesthetics were the main subjects of conversation and of the numerous letters that have survived. At first deeply impressed by Maeterlinck and the rather morbid, oniristic symbolist poets, they changed radically when, in 1908, they discovered the poetry of Francis Jammes. Jammes’s homely simplicity and love of nature came like a breath of fresh air, and in these early years Milhaud not only set many of his poems, but made an opera of his play La brebis égarée. ‘When I started to compose’, he recalled, ‘I at once sensed the danger in following the paths of impressionist music. So much woolliness, perfumed billows, rocketing pyrotechnics, shimmering finery, vapours and wistfulness, marked the end of an era whose affectation I found insurmountably repugnant. The poets saved me.’ (Despite this he always had immense love and respect for Debussy’s music. He had taken part in the first, private, performance of the Sonata for viola, flute and harp in 1916, on which occasion he went to see Debussy for advice: that was their only meeting.)

In 1909 he went to Paris to study at the Conservatoire. He was to stay there until 1915, though he returned to Aix regularly for holidays; his main teachers were Berthelier (violin), Dukas (orchestral playing), Leroux (harmony), Widor (fugue) and Gédalge (counterpoint, composition and orchestration). Gédalge had the most decisive impact on him, and he gained a mastery of French academic counterpoint that was to remain, for better or for worse, an important part of his technical apparatus. He also became an excellent orchestrator and a competent conductor, while gaining proficiency as a pianist quite unaided. Paris also exposed him to a much wider range of musical styles. During the early years in Aix, he had attended concerts in Marseilles, but nevertheless, until his arrival in Paris he had been more or less cut off from recent developments in music. Now he discovered the music of, among others, Fauré, Ravel, Koechlin, Satie, Bloch, Magnard (‘I really believe that [the music of] Magnard helped me to find my own path’), Roussel and Wagner (which repelled him from the start), and also Boris Godunov (a score he kept next to Pelléas), Petrushka and The Rite of Spring (which he analysed in 1914 with Koechlin). He was fascinated, if puzzled, in 1910 by Schoenberg’s piano pieces op.11 and a few years later by the op.19 pieces.

Milhaud described his first meeting with Paul Claudel in 1912 as ‘the great stroke of luck in my life’. Though 24 years older, the poet, playwright, diplomat and fervent Roman Catholic was to become not only a frequent source of texts but also a close personal friend. Gide was also an important, if passing influence: ‘Gide’s prose has an enchanting rhythm that is highly attractive for a composer’, he later remarked, and he set extracts from Gide’s novel La porte étroite as a kind of song cycle, Alissa (1913). One of the themes of the novel, the ‘desire for purity through so much suffering and sacrifice’ had deeply impressed him, as had the themes of adultery and forgiveness in Jammes’s La brebis égarée. These Christian preoccupations are, too, a surprising but constant feature of his correspondence with Latil and Lunel at this time. As he matured such ideas lost their importance, yet they reflect a truly catholic spirit that led him to write several works of specifically Christian inspiration, such as the Te Deum in the Third Symphony, the Cantate de la croix de charité, Pacem in terris (a papal encyclical) and many works with texts by Claudel, including Christophe Colomb.

At the outbreak of World War I Milhaud was unable for medical reasons to join the armed services, and found work helping Belgian refugees. In 1915 came the shattering news of the death of Léo Latil at the front. In 1916 Milhaud took up a job in the propaganda department of the foreign ministry. With the turmoil of war and the loss of such a close friend, his world was thoroughly shaken, so when Claudel, as newly appointed minister to Brazil, offered him the post of attaché in charge of propaganda, he accepted with alacrity. In early January 1917 he embarked at Lisbon, conscious of leaving behind him his ‘little habits, his little fads, his little flat full of little objects from the 1830s’. In Brazil he discovered the tropical forest, the sounds of which were ever after to haunt his music, and Brazilian popular music, whose rhythms had a wonderfully liberating effect on his works. His official duties consisted of translating coded messages and accompanying Claudel on his travels, but he also organized concerts and lectures in aid of the Red Cross. Leaving Brazil on 23 November 1918, he returned via the West Indies and New York, and arrived in Paris on 14 February 1919.

Though in Brazil he had not been completely cut off from French musical life, for Ansermet, Artur Rubinstein, Nizhinsky and the Ballets Russes had visited Rio, he now plunged into the postwar effervescence of Paris. This was the period of the Bar Gaya, soon to be renamed ‘Le boeuf sur le toit’ after Milhaud’s Brazilian pot-pourri, the Cirque Médrano with the Fratellini brothers, Les Six (not that this is of any importance for his music), the ‘Wiéner concerts’ and the Saturday evenings in Milhaud’s flat when poets, artists and musicians would share their latest work. It was a time of renewing old acquaintances (with Koechlin, Honegger and Poulenc among others) and especially of making new friendships, including that of Satie. During the 1920s he also made journeys that were crucial to him as man and composer: to London in 1920 (bringing the revelation of jazz) and Vienna in 1921 (he went with Poulenc and Marya Freund to meet Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), and concert tours of the USA (1922 and 1927) and USSR (1926, with his cousin Madeleine Milhaud, whom he had married in 1925, and Jean Wiéner). Throughout the decade, compositions flowed with unfailing regularity and growing success. As a pianist he gave numerous concerts, mainly of his own works, while his most notable achievement as conductor was the French première of Pierrot lunaire on 15 December 1921 (first part only) and 12 January 1922 (complete). He also wrote music criticism regularly for the Courrier musical from 1920 to 1924; some articles of this period, including ‘Polytonality and Atonality’, are crucial to an understanding of his musical aesthetics. (His Notes sur la musique includes a representative selection.) By the end of the decade he had established himself as a major composer, especially with the remarkable success of his multimedia opera Christophe Colomb in Berlin in 1930.

The next ten years were marked by an increasing amount of film and incidental music (from which he was able to recuperate a number of concert works: Scaramouche, Suite provençale, etc.). Indeed, from 1935 to 1938 he composed little else. He continued his activity as a music critic for the daily Le jour (1933–7) and occasionally other publications. Unhappily, during this decade his paralysing attacks of rheumatoid arthritis became increasingly severe and frequent: by 1948 he would be permanently confined to a wheelchair.

Knowing that his name was on the Germans’ wanted list of prominent Jewish artists, Milhaud was obliged, after the fall of France in 1940, to emigrate to the USA. During the crossing he received a telegram from Mills College, Oakland, offering him a teaching post, which he accepted. Later he also taught at the summer school in Aspen, Colorado, and from 1948 to 1951 he was honorary director of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. In 1947 he made his first return to France and became professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Since he only gave up his Mills post in 1971, the latter part of his life was divided between the two countries. With the constant round of concerts, this all meant a lot of travel, yet despite his handicap, he relished it: ‘Travel is one of the most necessary things for my imagination …. I love travel and I need it … whatever the destination’. To the continuing prodigious output of compositions was thus now added intense activity as a teacher. Milhaud’s approach was characteristically undogmatic: ‘teaching composition involves, I believe, allowing [students] to liberate themselves from all the conventional formulae … helping them, by a sort of cleansing process, to realise their often sensitive and refined personalities, which many years of strict but necessary exercises have prevented from flowering’. Among his pupils number many French and American composers, as well as the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.

Milhaud composed almost to the end and left no unfinished works. His last, a wind quintet, was written for the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Madeleine, his inseparable companion, helpmate and muse.

There is scarcely a genre not represented in Milhaud’s output. From grand opera to children’s piano pieces, everything seems to be there in extraordinary profusion. Capable of composing anywhere, even while travelling he was not disturbed by the presence of other people or by ambient noise. He found his musical voice very early on, and there was neither anguish in creation, nor any problem of language or expression, let alone of technique. He rarely made sketches or notes.

Such serenity in the act of creation – allied to an independence of mind and musical style, an indifference to criticism (unless from his close friend, the Belgian musicologist Paul Collaer), and a seriousness of purpose that his sense of fantasy sometimes seems to belie – meant that he was receptive to many and varied sources of inspiration. Provence was a seemingly inexhaustible stimulus whether as a setting for opera and ballet (Les malheurs d’Orphée, Le carnaval d’Aix, La cueillette des citrons, La branche des oiseaux) or as a direct musical source (the Chansons de troubadour and the Suite provençale include 18th-century Provençal themes while Barba Garibo uses songs and dances from the Menton area). The Symphony no.8 is a portrait of and homage to the river Rhône. Similarly the Comtat Venaissin was a setting (Esther de Carpentras) and its liturgy a source of music (e.g. Etudes for string quartet) or a stimulus to composition (Liturgie comtadine). A more generalized Jewish inspiration is apparent in many works, from the Poèmes juifs to the Ode pour Jérusalem. In his epic opera David he portrays the warrior-king’s life and its effect on present-day Israelis; in one of his most powerful works, Le château de feu, he remembers the holocaust, as in Ani maamin; the Service sacré and the Service pour la veille du sabbat are liturgical works.

Milhaud’s attachment to these origins was inclusive, not exclusive. Provence was part of the Mediterranean, which for him extended all the way from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro. A globe-trotter both physically and musically, he used themes from, or composed in the style of, folk music from many other countries. His suite Le globe trotter evokes France, Portugal, Italy, the USA, Mexico and Brazil. Kentuckiana and the Carnaval à la Nouvelle-Orléans use local American tunes. The Suite française is based on French themes, and the third act of his opera Le pauvre matelot is entirely constructed from French shanties. The influence of Brazilian folk music was exceptionally strong, anecdotally in Le boeuf sur le toit, a medley of tangos and maxixes written as music for an imaginary Chaplin film, and much more profoundly in a work such as Saudades do Brasil (‘Memories of Brazil’), two suites of original and deeply felt piano pieces that go far beyond musical tourism. His use of existing music also extended to older classical music. He made arrangements of The Beggar’s Opera and Le jeu de Robin et Marion; he wrote works using the music of Corrette (Suite d’après Corrette), François Couperin (Introduction et allegro), and the little-known 18th-century composer Baptiste Anet (Viola Sonata no.1, L’apothéose de Molière), whose Tenth Violin Sonata he also transcribed. In La bien-aimée he transformed Liszt’s arrangements of Schubert waltzes, writing for a mechanical piano and orchestra.

His fascination with jazz began in London in 1920, where he heard the Billy Arnold Jazz Band, recently arrived from New York. Noting the subtle use of timbre and the complex rhythmic vitality, he was inspired to write Caramel Mou, a shimmy. Two years later, on tour in the USA, he heard the Paul Whiteman Band, and on his return composed the Trois rag caprices. The decisive, overwhelming experience, however, was the jazz of the blacks in Harlem: ‘Against the beat of the drums, the melodic lines criss-crossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms’. Out of this – in 1923, the year before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue – came La création du monde, a highly successful blend of jazz and classical elements (including a