And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (26 page)

This gathering of talent was, however, just that: a musical elite with little political experience and, it soon transpired, no ability to shift the musical rank and file from the safety of its artistic neutrality. It published a clandestine newsletter,
Le Musicien d’Aujourd’hui
, which in October 1942 spelled out its aims: to keep alive banned music, such as that of Milhaud, through private performances; to help musicians who were captives in Germany or who, as Jews, were in hiding; and to boycott pro-Nazi events and encourage spontaneous protests, such as playing “La Marseillaise” in the presence of Germans.
^*
As an opposition force, though, the front remained peripheral: as of March 1944, it had fewer than thirty members, and only eight issues of
Le Musicien d’Aujourd’hui
were circulated, the last two reaching a larger audience as part of
Les Lettres Françaises
, the writers’ underground publication.

What most mobilized the front was what it called “the systematic strangling of French music by Nazi propaganda.” As Auric later wrote acidly in an unsigned article in
Le Musicien d’Aujourd’hui:
“If music has no country, musicians do. And we’re going to put our orchestras and conductors, our virtuosos, our singers, at the service of the monumental works of the German school … all this with the pretext of covering up the so-called insufficiency of French musical culture.”
⁴

In fact, French music was being widely performed, but in the main this comprised symphonic works by Berlioz, Debussy, Fauré and Ravel and operas by Bizet, Gounod and Massenet. Living composers, on the other hand, felt they were being overlooked, perhaps for political reasons. And they were hardly beginners. In the interwar years, six of them—Milhaud, Honegger, Poulenc, Auric, Durey and Germaine Tailleferre—had become known as Les Six, a nod to the nineteenth-century Russian composers known as the Five. Although their styles were different, they were friends of much the
same age who had all sympathized with the left-leaning Popular Front in the mid-1930s. Now they saw they had to fight to be heard.

They were helped by Vichy, which felt a need to challenge the perceived superiority of German music. Over four years, the regime commissioned works from fifty-seven composers, including those in the Front National de la Musique and, above all, those returning to France from prison camps. Some of these works were performed publicly, and many were recorded. It was also possible to present new compositions privately, in homes or cultural salons. One forum was before students at the École Normale de Musique, although composers reached a wider audience at the new Concerts de la Pléiade, created by the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the movie producer Denise Tual. These were held in the Conservatoire or the Galerie Charpentier before invited guests and, so long as the audience did not exceed forty people, no official permission was required. Here, Poulenc and others could hear their new works performed by top instrumentalists and singers. Occasionally, programs included works by Milhaud and other banned composers. The concerts were hardly clandestine, though, since Francophile Germans also attended.

Honegger, who carried a Swiss passport but had spent all but two years of his life in France, needed no extra push. Early in the occupation, he had to prove that he was not Jewish. But while he joined the Front National de la Musique, he was viewed with some suspicion by other members because he had accepted the German invitation to Vienna and wrote music reviews for the German-approved cultural weekly
Comoedia
.
^*
In 1943, the front decided to exclude Honegger from its meetings. Yet, throughout the occupation, he maintained the high profile he had enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s. Always a prolific composer, he saw his instrumental works regularly performed by most orchestras. His oratorio
Jeanne au bûcher
, with text by Claudel, was presented in Lyon in 1941 and then toured the country, while his opera
Antigone
, with a libretto by Cocteau, was finally presented by the Paris Opera in 1943, sixteen years after it was first rejected. He also wrote the music accompanying Claudel’s epic play
Le Soulier de satin
, which was produced at the Comédie Française in late 1943.

Part of Honegger’s appeal was that his style bridged the French and German music traditions. The perception that he had become close to an official French composer was reinforced by the honors that came his way around his fiftieth birthday, in 1942, with Vichy’s
L’Information Musicale
devoting an entire issue to the occasion. But he was not a collaborationist; in fact, he helped some Jewish composers. Rather, like his colleagues, he simply wanted his music to be heard and appreciated—and was more successful than the others in doing so.

None of Les Six carried the stigma of being a “degenerate” composer. Although they had made their name at the time that Schönberg, Berg and Anton Webern were founding the Second Vienna School, they did not adopt twelve-tone serialism. Poulenc was particularly admired for his captivating melodies. Only twenty-three when he wrote the ballet
Les Biches
for Diaghilev, in 1922, he was openly homosexual and considered an enfant terrible in the 1920s and early 1930s. But in 1936, while visiting the shrine of the Black Virgin in Rocamadour in southwestern France, he had a religious conversion that profoundly affected his life and resulted in a body of sacred music (including his fine postwar opera,
Dialogues des carmélites)
. During the war, while his opposition to the occupation never wavered, he wrote works for both public and private performance. In a letter to a friend in December 1941, he did not sound unhappy: “The musical life in Paris is intense. Munch puts on beautiful concerts and everyone tries to keep alive the spiritual atmosphere of our good city. Picasso paints alone and wonderfully. Braque too. Éluard writes masterpieces. In the spring, there will be a concert devoted to my works given by the Société Nouvelle de Musique de Chambre de Paris.”
⁵

In 1942, Poulenc’s ballet
Les Animaux modèles
, inspired by La Fontaine’s
Fables
, was presented at the Paris Opera. Knowing there would be many Germans in the audience, he mischievously borrowed a few bars of an Alsatian song, “Non, non, vous n’aurez pas notre Alsace-Lorraine” (No, No, You Will Not Have Our Alsace-Lorraine), a reference to German annexation of France’s easternmost regions between 1871 and 1918 and again in 1940. He also wrote scores for many poems, including some by Louise de Vilmorin and Aragon. One outstanding work was
Figure humaine
, a twelve-voice cantata based on resistance poems by Éluard, including “Liberté”; it was first performed in 1944 at the home of the wealthy socialite
Marie-Laure de Noailles. Poulenc also put to music “Un soir de neige,” Éluard’s homage to the poet Max Jacob, who died in Drancy in 1944.

Olivier Messiaen, nine years Poulenc’s junior, was no less devout a Catholic but was a more experimental composer. Only thirty-two when he was captured by the Wehrmacht in June 1940, Messiaen spent the next eleven months in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, in eastern Germany. It was there that he completed his
Quatuor pour la fin du temps
(Quartet for the End of Time), first performed on January 15, 1941, inside the camp itself. Before an outdoor audience of freezing POWs and interested German guards, Messiaen played an old piano and was joined by three other prisoners, the cellist Étienne Pasquier, the violinist Jean Le Boulaire and the clarinetist Henri Akoka. In May 1941, Messiaen was released and was named by Vichy to be professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris, a position previously held by a Jewish musician. He also recovered his place as organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, a post he held until his death in 1992. Paris first took note of him when he presented his
Visions de l’Amen
for two pianos on May 10, 1943, at a Concert de la Pléiade that included Poulenc, Valéry, Cocteau, Braque and Mauriac in the audience. Messiaen was the only prominent composer not to have a work commissioned by Vichy, but he emerged as an influential teacher: among the students at the
conservatoire
whom he converted to serialism was Pierre Boulez, who after the war would become a leading avant-garde composer in his own right as well as an admired conductor of both classical and modern music.

When Boulez arrived in Paris from Lyon in September 1943, he was only eighteen and would not learn of the activities of the Front National de la Musique until after the liberation. In hindsight, though, he said he did not feel that German music was smothering French music. “Radio-Paris had its own orchestra which celebrated Richard Strauss’s eightieth birthday in May 1944,” he recalled. “But the Germans in charge of culture tried to seduce rather than impose their will. I remember hearing Messiaen for the first time at the École Normale de Musique; Poulenc was at the Concerts de la Pléiade. Honegger was the big French composer. He was very popular.” While attending the Conservatoire de Paris, Boulez took counterpoint lessons with Honegger’s wife, Andrée Vaurabourg. In June 1944, he finally met Messiaen. He recalled, “I showed him some work and asked to join his harmony class, which I did in September,
after the liberation.”
⁶
The two composers would become friends and, in the furious debates over musical style in late-1940s Paris, Boulez was Messiaen’s strongest defender.

The experience of another young composer illustrated how difficult it was for many musicians to make ends meet. Henri Dutilleux was twenty-two in 1938 when he won the prestigious Prix de Rome to study at the Villa Medicis, the French academy in Rome, following the path of many of France’s great composers. But when he arrived in Rome in February 1939, he found Mussolini’s Fascism in full flower. And in early April, it celebrated Franco’s victory in the Spanish civil war. “I wasn’t keen to be there at that time,” he recalled, “and I left in July.” Soon he was mobilized as a stretcher bearer with an air force squadron based near Rennes. “During the phony war, music continued,” he said. “We thought we were protected by the Maginot Line. I spent some time in Paris. I played piano a bit in a brasserie, I took some lessons, I worked with some singers.”

When Germany invaded, his unit went south to Bordeaux, where the French government had fled. As he remembers it, “We thought there was a possibility of continuing the war in North Africa. We were almost sorry that Pétain asked for an armistice. It was the beginning of the French turning against the French.” Demobilized in Toulouse, Dutilleux reached Paris in time to attend the reprise of a famous production of Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande
at the Opéra-Comique, conducted by Roger Désormière, with Jacques Jansen and Irène Joachim in the title roles. “It was one of the most intense moments I have known,” Dutilleux said. He then returned to Toulouse for some months before going to Nice, where winners of the Prix de Rome were summoned to resume work. “I didn’t want to be in a golden cage,” he recalled. “It was not the right moment. My brother was a prisoner of war, friends had been killed. I wrote a piece for the bassoon and then left for Paris.”
⁷

Without a job, he was forced to freelance. “I gave some lessons in counterpoint and in harmony, I accompanied dancers and singers, I played jazz in some brasseries,” he said. “I even orchestrated some Chopin waltzes, which was criminal of me.” One break came in early 1942 when he was invited by the Paris Opera to accompany the chorus in rehearsals for the first French production of Hans Pfitzner’s opera
Palestrina
. He noted, “I didn’t like the opera, but it was well written, with heavy counterpoint. I’d get grumbled at by some of the singers for making mistakes. I’m not a very good pianist.” He was
not asked to stay on. But, through Irène Joachim, he was invited to join the Front National de la Musique, along with the pianist Geneviève Joy, later his wife. “We belonged to a chain of resistance,” he said. “Our aim was to fight collaboration. We said it was all right to play in front of Germans, but not for Radio-Paris. Many musicians agreed to play and sing on Radio-Paris, saying they had to live, but they shouldn’t have done so.”

During the last months of the occupation, Dutilleux found work at Radiodiffusion Nationale, better known as Radio Vichy, which had returned to Paris. There his job was to commission music to accompany radio plays and other spoken programs. At the same time, he began working with Pierre Schaeffer,
^*
the former head of Jeune France, who was now running the experimental Studio d’Essai and preparing programming for the liberation by recording banned music by the likes of Schönberg, Berg and Milhaud. Two poems that Dutilleux put to music—“La Geôle” (The Jail), based on a sonnet by Jean Cassou, and “Chanson de la deportée” (Song of the Deported Woman) by Jean Gandrey-Réty—were first performed in public after the liberation.

Also keeping alive the spirit of French music was the Conservatoire de Paris under Delvincourt. Vichy had named him to succeed Henri Rabaud in April 1941 because it felt reassured by his ties to the right-wing Croix-de-Feu in the 1930s. When he arrived, two Jewish teachers, Lazare Lévy and André Bloch, and twenty-five Jewish students had already been forced to leave, and in September 1942, under pressure from Vichy, most “half-Jewish” students were also expelled. But the occupation gradually transformed Delvincourt. Whether or not there is truth to the version that he secretly arranged for private tuition for Jewish students, the composer Roland-Manuel, himself Jewish, later said that not one Jewish student under his care at the
conservatoire
was deported.
^*