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| In memoriam
Darius Milhaud 18921974
by Ronald Crichton
Darius Milhaud, the French composer, died in Geneva
on June 22; he was 81.
Milhaud was born in 1892 at Aix-en-Provence where his father, of
Jewish descent and religion, was an almond merchant. There can be
few active musicians able to remember a time when Milhauds
name was not familiar, fewer still who can claim knowledge of the
vast quantity of work produced during a long career by this incessantly
prolific and versatile composer. Milhauds musical training
began in his native city. At the age of 17 he went to the Paris
Conservatoire. His teachers were Dukas, Leroux and Gédalge.
Among his friends were Auric and Honegger. Of equal if not greater
importance were literary friendships with, for example, Jammes and
Claudel, two of the great influences (Gide was the third) on the
early years of Milhauds career. By 1917, when Claudel took
Milhaud to Rio de Janeiro as a member of his ambassadorial staff,
the composer had set La brebis égarée of Jammes
as an opera, Alissa, prose excerpts from Gides La
Porte étroite for voice and piano, and the first two
parts (Agamemnon and Les choéphores) of Claudels
Oresteia trilogy. Milhaud later described the visit to Latin
America as the equivalent for him of a stay in Rome (the war of
1914 had prevented his competing for the Prix de Rome). Brazil brought
him into fruitful contact with a civilisation half-Latin, half-exotic,
with Latin-American popular music and with jazz. When he returned
to post-war Paris he won notoriety with such works as Machines
agricoles, Le boeuf sur le toit, La création du monde, Le
train bleu, and the three tiny opéras-minutes
written for Germany. He was a member of the group Les Six, and although
his style was already formed, and although the groups mentor
Cocteau was never so deep an influence on Milhaud as the writers
mentioned earlier, the glitter of that brilliant butterfly period
has stuck. The fading in the 30s was symbolized, in Milhauds
case, by the cool reception given to his Maximilien at the
Paris Opéra in 1932. But the output flowed on, only briefly
interrupted by a painful uprooting from his homeland in 1940. The
years after the Armistice were spent in the USA at Mills College,
where Pierre Monteux and other friends had obtained him a teaching
post. Milhaud, who had for some years been an invalid confined by
rheumatic afflictions to a wheelchair, nursed by his devoted wife,
returned to France in 1947, and was offered the post of professor
of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. He spent alternative
academic years in Paris and at Mills. For many years he attended
the summer music school at Aspen, Colorado, and taught at a number
of other establishments in the USA. In spite of ill-health, and
of persistent attachment to Paris and to his native Provence, Milhaud
remained a willing, indefatigable traveller.
The label member of Les Six is emphatically not enough.
It is not easy to pin him down. The Jewish-Provençal background
was important. It led directly to some of his best works, to the
Poèmes juifs (1916), to operas with texts by his compatriot
Armand Lunel Les malheurs dOrphée (1924)
and Esther de Carpentras (1938, written earlier), to the
Suite provençale (1936), and it lends a melancholy
pastoral colour to other scores not overtly of Provençal
or Jewish origin. Milhauds style set early and evolved hardly
at all. He seems, in spite of a fondness for working with themes
from past composers, especially of the 18th century, to have taken
little from other people or other periods. He gave more than one
explanation of the origins of his use of polytonality, which he
regarded as a Latin solution to the problem of the decay of tonality.
One was a recurrent, quasi-mystical experience at night in the country,
when he felt rays and tremors converging on him from all points
of the sky and from below ground, each bearing its own music
a thousand simultaneous musics rushing towards me from all
directions. Another explanation of the origin was the study
of a duetto by Bach in which the original entries of the
two voices appeared to be in different keys. Milhaud never erected
polytonality into a system. It was more a question of colour, adding
a characteristic tang to the melodic and contrapuntal facility,
sometimes clarifying the texture, sometimes, in the later music
especially, making it opaque. Side by side with the Latin qualities
of Milhauds music there exists a strain of expressionism,
a penchant for thick timbres. Like many French musicians of his
generation, he rejected Wagner and Brahms, but he accepted Mahler
and Strauss. Schoenberg, whom he admired greatly, was a friend of
many years standing.
In a series of radio interviews (published as Entretiens avec
Claude Rostand(, Paris, 1952), Milhaud drew attention to his
simultaneous and continuous cultivation of a number of musical forms
which he listed in order of importance as: large operas, chamber
music, symphonic works, concertos, music for chamber orchestra or
small combinations, musique de divertissement (not quite
the same thing as light music), ballets, works using or deriving
from folk music, works after classical composers. The
Heugel catalogue stops in 1956 at op. 354. In the feature devoted
to Milhaud after his death, Le Monde gave the total as 426
works. This terrifying figure includes several large operas or opera-oratorios
the Oresteia trilogy, Christophe Colomb (1930),
Maximilien, Bolivar (1950), David (1952), Saint-Louis,
Roi de France (1972). To the smaller operas mentioned above
should be added Le pauvre matelot (1927) and Médée
(1939). Among the chamber music are eighteen string quartets, of
which nos. 14 and 15 may be played together as an octet. Milhaud,
who in the 20s had written six little symphonies for
small combinations, waited until he was nearly 50 before embarking
in 1939 on a series of 12 symphonies for full orchestra (the Third
has a choral finale). There are many choral works, a mass of film
scores and incidental music for the theatre, a number of undeservedly
neglected songs. Among his prose writings is a volume of memoirs,
Notes sans musique (Paris, 1949, translated 1952), which
includes a chapter on the death of Satie. Milhaud had an air of
inner serenity and benign authority which impressed those who had
even the slightest acquaintance with him, and won him the affection
and respect of musicians of all tendencies and ages. At this stage
the least one can say is that when the dust has settled and the
grain has been separated from the chaff, there should remain a balance-sheet
of which any composer might be proud.
Musical Times, August 1974
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