Surrealism and Faith 1934–1939

This chapter recounts the first Bernac/Poulenc recital that took place at the École normale de musique after Francis Poulenc's North African tour with Maria Modrakowska in February 1935. It talks about Plume d'eau claire and Rodeuse au front de verre, which Poulenc thought belonged to his more familiar style of almost classical arrangement of harmonies spiced up with a few unimpeachable chromaticisms. It also describes Poulenc's compositions during the remainder of 1935 that turned their back temporarily on surrealism in favour of less demanding fare, including two pieces of incidental music. The chapter looks into Poulenc's devotion to film music and occasional collaborations with Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger, writing five scores between 1935 and 1951. It also assesses Poulenc's most interesting literary contributions that appeared during October 1935, Mes maîtres et mes amis, that was published in Conferencia.

Germaine Tailleferre

Germaine Tailleferre (b. 1892–d. 1983) was a prolific composer of symphonic, chamber, film, and radio music who participated actively in French and international musical life for more than six decades. Tailleferre is most commonly remembered as the sole female member of Les Six, but her association with that group was relatively brief in the broader context of her career. Displaying early brilliance as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Tailleferre won all the major prizes in her disciplines—Premier Prix in Harmony, Counterpoint, and Accompaniment—but never had the opportunity to compete for the Premier Prix in composition due to the suspension of the competition during the First World War. After leaving the Conservatoire, she studied with Charles Koechlin and Maurice Ravel. The latter in particular inspired her early efforts to imbue her music with neo-Baroque and neoclassical qualities. Tailleferre’s devotion to Ravel in the early 1920s, and her independence from the more capricious, experimental aesthetics pursued by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric, led her away from the sphere of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, who had helped usher Les Six into existence. In her first full-length ballet, Le Marchand d’oiseaux, composed for the Ballets Suédois in 1923, and in her Concerto for Piano commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac in 1924, Tailleferre demonstrated a propensity for pastiche and emulation, combining allusions to J. S. Bach, Chopin, Poulenc, and Stravinsky. From the beginning through the end of her career, many works reveal her attachment to perpetuum mobile rhythms and Bachian counterpoint. Although her music was widely performed in the 1920s and 1930s, and although she continued to earn accolades throughout her life, including one of the first state commissions from the French government (1938), the Prix de l’Académie des Beaux Arts (1973), and the Grand Prix Musical de la Ville de Paris (1978), her writings and her friends’ reminiscences reveal Tailleferre to have been extraordinarily modest. Due in part to her modesty, Tailleferre left behind far less music criticism and autobiographical writing than most other members of Les Six. Indeed, after Louis Durey, who left Les Six in 1921, Tailleferre is the next most meagerly documented member of Les Six, as a comparison between this article and those of her peers will attest. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles “Arthur Honegger”, “Francis Poulenc”, and “Darius Milhaud”.) And those sources that do treat her output focus disproportionately on her interwar works to the exclusion of the many works she produced later in life, including Paris-Magie (1948) and Concerto de la fidelité (1981). But numerous sources touch on her contributions to French music and on her relationships with artists, composers, patrons, impresarios, and others.

Tolling Bells and Otherworldly Voices

The early twentieth century saw an explosion in musical works dedicated to Joan of Arc, fueled in part by the saint’s canonization in 1920 and the five-hundred-year anniversary of her martyrdom in 1931. Rising national fervor and French aesthetic battles of the 1930s and 1940s further contributed to French composers’ interest in composing so-called johannique music. As composers attempted to portray the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited, they developed a coherent sonic backdrop that included tolling bells, otherworldly timbres such as the celesta and ondes Martenot, and references to music of the past (ranging from actual plainchant borrowings to pseudo-folksongs). Most significantly, however, many of these works featured unusual combinations of speaking and singing as a means of portraying the boundaries of the human world and unearthly realms, presumed to heavily overlap in composers’ imaginations of Joan’s medieval world. This essay analyzes how French composers of the early twentieth century—including Paul Paray, Manuel Rosenthal, Maurice Jaubert, and Arthur Honegger—portrayed Joan’s own voice as well as the angelic voices she claimed to hear. Ultimately, these works reveal an early twentieth-century French fascination with an imagined, idealized medieval world populated by saints, angels, demons, and mystical vibrations.

The “undying archaic elements” in dramatic oratorio by Arthur Honegger “Joan of Arc at the Stake”

The subject of this research is the integration of the elements of old genres in to a composition of Arthur Honegger’s dramatic oratorio. Particular attention is paid to formation of the system of interrelated intonation-dramaturgical spheres and vocal-symphonic development of recurring themes, motifs and sound symbols. The author examines the interaction of verbal and vocal-symphonic elements of sound fabric. The goal consists in identification of the traits of old genres and other archaic elements within the synthetic form of musical/dramatic theatre, as well as determination of the dominant aspect of musical meaning therein. Research methodology is based on the musical-hermeneutic reconstruction of the process of composing, detection of the fundamental principles of musical dramaturgy along with functions of cited by the composer Latin texts in the synthetic form of dramatic oratorio. The main method for this work became the musical-theoretical analysis of polyphonic vocal-symphonic musical fabric, and analysis of the verbal texts of voice part in the French and Latin languages, in de visu score. This article is first to interpret integration of the genre codes of medieval mystery play and citations from liturgical texts of the previous eras, including the Holy Scripture, into the compositions of dramatic oratorio of Arthur Honegger as the means for creating temporal multidimensionality of the synthetic form of French musical/dramaturgical theatre of the XX century within the context of Christian tradition. Honegger has overcome the linearity of narration through integration into the composition of the traits of previous eras. The citation of liturgical texts, including Holy Scripture, lead to expansion of the semantic space of literary text of the dramatic oratorio. This established the idea of synthesis of time and eternity characteristic to Christianity.

Composing Film Music in Theory and Practice: Honegger's Contributions to Les misérables and Rapt

Arthur Honegger composed his first sound film scores in 1933–34. For Les misérables, Raymond Bernard, who was under contract at Pathé-Natan to direct big-budget theatrical films that would compete with Paramount's French-language productions, expected Honegger to provide intermittent orchestral underscoring for already filmed sequences that privileged dialogue over music. For Rapt, the musically trained Dimitri Kirsanoff used independent financing to collaborate from the start with Honegger and Arthur Hoérée on what the director called “a hybrid form … in which music, image, and dialogue work together.” The innovative electroacoustic and sound editing techniques in the soundtrack for Rapt have, I argue, overshadowed the strikingly reciprocal relationship between the soundtrack's more conventional instrumental underscoring and the images on screen. Honegger theorized in 1931 that, in sound film, music's “autonomy” would free it from the burden of mimesis. Instead, the images on screen would teach listeners about music's abstract “reality.” In practice, however, in Rapt, mimetic music and musicalized sound effects bridge the gap between aesthetic goals of hybridity and practical demands for intelligible dialogue. My analysis of the abduction, washhouse, storm, and dream sequences in Rapt demonstrates that a successful hybrid of sound and image ultimately has the potential not just to use images to pin down music's elusive “reality,” but also to use music's mimetic possibilities to influence our reading of ambiguous imagery. It also shows that music does not need to be in itself groundbreaking in order to contribute to groundbreaking innovations in sound film.

Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)

Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism. Les Six (Honegger, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Georges Auric (1899–1983), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and Louis Durey (1888–1979)) frequently presented their work together. They were championed by author Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and loosely associated with composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Contemporary critics noted a seriousness and profundity to Honegger’s music that contrasted with that of the other members. Honegger’s instrumental compositions, such as his chamber and symphonic works, often cultivated large multi-movement formal structures. Several of his oratorios (for orchestra, chorus, and soloists) treated biblical topics. He also wrote operas, songs, music for ballet, and film scores. Early works, such as the 1921 oratorio Le Roi David and the 1923 symphonic work Pacific 231 (which musically depicts the acceleration and deceleration of a steam locomotive) helped seal Honegger’s international reputation as a modernist whose music was nevertheless eclectic and accessible. Much of Honegger’s music is characterized by strong motoric rhythms, use of counterpoint and contrapuntal devices (imitation and fugue), and an inclusive harmonic language that uses tonality, extended tonality, and atonality.

Héctor Tosar (1923–2002)

Héctor Tosar was a composer, pianist, director, and composition teacher in Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the United States. One of the best-known Uruguayan composers of his generation, his works have been presented in festivals worldwide. He started studying piano with Wilhelm Kolischer, harmony with Tomás Mujica, and composition with Lamberto Baldi, and completed his studies in the United States and France where he studied composition with Aaron Copland, Arthur Honegger, Jean Rivier, and Darius Milhaud, and orchestral direction with Serge Koussevitzky, Eugène Bigot, and Jean Fournet. The defining characteristics of his works are his use of a compositive principle based on "groups of sounds" and his search for musical communication by means of expressiveness and lyricism. His catalogue includes soloist works, mainly for piano, as well as symphonic, chamber, and vocal works, and, in his last period, compositions with new instruments, such as the synthesizer.

The soft or hard borders of French identity: Honegger’s iconic role and subjectivity during Vichy

Arthur Honegger was used symbolically by Vichy and the occupant, but even after the reality of French state collaboration became clear he refused to assume an unequivocal resistance stance. While Schaeffer gradually grew recalcitrant and then entered the Resistance, Honegger, who had been recruited through his friends, was expelled from the Resistance for his hesitation to thwart his use as a Vichy icon. Conveniently for the Vichy regime, his ambiguous cultural identity as a Swiss (German-speaking) national born and living in France, who intermingled German and French traits in his compositions, made him an emblem of Franco-German cultural collaboration. This chapter examines the way in which the French and Germans employed Honegger and his works, above all his opera Antigone, premiered in France in 1943.