Patrick Bade
Paris Under the Occupation

Patrick Bade - Paris Under the Occupation

• Hi Patrick. Hi Judi. I’m going to hand over to you, Patrick. Good morning, Patrick.

• Thank you. Good morning to you.

• Thanks. Thanks, Patrick. Handing over to you now. Thank you.

• Thank you. Thank you, Wendy.

• [Wendy] Looking forward to your presentation.

Visuals are displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thanks. Now, the very dramatic image you can see on the left hand side shows a bombing raid on Paris, not by the Germans, but actually by the Allies. It’s a fact that I think is not often taken on board that roughly the same number of French civilians were killed in the Second World War by Allied bombing raids as British civilians were killed by German bombing raids. That’s about 70,000 people in each case. Now, Paris itself, the centre of Paris, was miraculously spared. It was pretty well completely intact at the end of the war, but Paris was surrounded by industrial suburbs, there’s Boulogne-Billancourt in the west, there’s Clignancourt in the north, and the factories in these suburbs were servicing the German war machine so I suppose it was inevitable that they would be hit. In the centre of Paris, life carried on very much as normal, at least on the surface. And the Germans were very keen to keep it that way. They wanted to maintain Paris as a cultural centre and they wanted it also to be a place of recreation for the Wehrmacht. We have an extraordinary series of images of life in Paris at this time, through these colour photographs that were taken for the propaganda magazines that I mentioned in my first Paris lecture.

And once again, we have this extraordinary German technology. In many ways throughout the Second World War, the Germans were always ahead. They had much better colour photography than the Allies. They had better sound equipment, they had magnetic tape, which the Allies didn’t get a hold of till they captured it from the Germans at the end of the war. So somehow seeing these images in such a vivid colour brings home the reality of life where French civilians were constantly mingling with people in gray-green uniforms. And this extraordinary poignant image of a woman walking down the street in Paris on a sunny day with a yellow star on her coat. Now, I mentioned last time there had been a brain drain, had been an intellectual exodus. And I showed you this picture. All these artists, Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, Leger, Breton, Mondrian and so on, who had all been based in Paris and were now based in New York. And there were further terrible losses. Artists who were not yet established enough or famous enough to be helped to escape and go to America by Varian Fry. So this is the cover of an exhibition catalogue. The exhibition was put on at the museum in Montparnasse in 2005.

And it was dedicated to the Jewish artists of the equipe de Paris who were deported during the war to Nazi death camps. And there were well over a hundred of them. The poignant terrible thing is not only did these people lose their lives, but very often their entire life’s work would be destroyed as well. Their studios were pillaged, their work was systematically destroyed. So in many cases, it’s very difficult to reconstruct their careers. So these are just visual artists. Of course, there would’ve been equivalent numbers of victims in the musical world and amongst writers and so on. So with these incredible losses, it’s extraordinary really, how the cultural life of Paris thrived under Nazi occupation. And I think there are very special reasons for this that I will try and explain. You can see this is 1941, early in the war, ‘43, later in the war. You can see that all the galleries were open and were lots of exhibitions for people to go to. There were also important cultural exchanges between France and Germany in both directions. The Nazis invited all the leading cultural figures who were not Jewish in France to go on trips to Germany, particularly Berlin. This is 1941 and this is a group of leading French artists and it includes former Fauve artists, Vlaminck, Derain, Van Dongen, and the sculptor Paul Belmondo, father of the film star Jean-Paul Belmondo.

And there are equivalent trips organised for writers, for actors and musicians. Now, at the end of the war, participation in one of these trips was a real black mark when it comes to, I’m going to do a talk, Trudy’s asked me to do one, on the so called Epuration, the Purification of France, when people were held to account for what they’d done during the war. And one of the blackest marks is if you had gone on one of these trips to Germany during the war. However, it wasn’t at all that simple. There were all sorts of reasons, sometimes very valid reasons why people went on these trips. It wasn’t necessarily a sign of collaboration or Nazi sympathies. And so there were also cultural trips in the other direction. German orchestras, above all, Berlin Philharmonic, German opera companies came to Paris. In 1941, the Berlin State Opera came and appeared at the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera and they performed “Tristan und Isolde”. And it was conducted by the young Herbert von Karajan. And it was an entirely German company except for the great French soprano, Germaine Lubin. I mentioned her before that she was singing Isolde at Bayreuth in the summer of 1939 when the war broke out. In fact, I think by and large, she behaved very honourably.

She instantly stopped her performances. She went back to France and she refused resolutely to perform in Germany during the war. However, she did this one performance or a couple of performances of Isolde. And again, there’s more than meets the eye. She was persuaded to do it, partly to help Jewish friends. She was able to rescue the Jewish singer Marya Freund. She got her out of the Drancy camp and as a result, she survived the war. And she was also very keen to get her son out of, her son was a prisoner of war and she wanted him back in France and that was why she agreed to do it. And it had terrible, terrible, really tragic consequences for her at the end of the war and that’s a story for another time. I will tell you about that when we look at the Epuration. So the German music and German culture was imposed upon the French, the Paris Opera was forced to put on a performance of the opera “Palestrina” by Hans Pfitzner, which was very in favour with the Nazis. I’m quite sure that, well, it’s never been performed in France since. It has oddly enough been performed in London a few years ago. And the German composer, I wonder how many people know of him, he’s kind of a forgotten figure.

But he was flavour of the month during Second World War in occupied Europe, this is Werner Egk. So he represented the acceptable face of modernism. It’s kind of watered down Stravinsky that he writes for the Nazis, and for the French, he was the acceptable face of modern Germany. So he was very much a vogue in Paris and his operas and ballets were frequently performed. But the big cultural event of occupied Paris, the splashiest of the entire period was in 1942 with an exhibition at the Orangerie, you might think of this next time you go there to look at the Monets, of Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker. And so this was really turned into a huge event and at the opening to Paris, all of Paris was here. I can recognise Alfred Cortot, the pianist, in the middle, in the second row. But everybody was there. Cortot was there, Guitry, Sasha Guitry. I mean, I have to say, I find these sculptures absolutely ludicrous. Actually, hilariously funny. These enormously oversized Aryan nudes with bulging muscles and rather small willies. And you can see this elderly lady looking up ecstatically at this specimen of Aryan manhood. As I said, Sacha Guitry was there, in the company of Jean Cocteau.

And Guitry whispered to Cocteau, “Thank God they don’t have erections. We’d never get out of this place alive!” But Cocteau was taken in, I think it was probably the homoeroticism that appealed to him. And he very unwisely published this “Salut A Breker”. And the letter you see on the left is a reprimand from the great surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Actually, it’s written in quite a gentle tone. What he says, he says Freud, Freud as the French would call him, Freud, Kafka, Chaplin are forbidden by the same people who honour Breker. And he says we mustn’t in any way show any sympathy for these people by praising their favourite sculptor. Breker actually was a very ambiguous figure. He was a pupil of the French sculptor Maillol. And he was something like the unofficial German cultural ambassador in Paris throughout the war. And he was also one of those people, if you were in trouble or if you had a Jewish partner or friend that you wanted to rescue, you could go to Breker and Breker had the ear of the top Nazi brass and he could help you. And this happened with Maillol and his muse. I call her muse. This is Dina Vierny. I hope you can see, it’s a lovely picture of her. She was a young girl who inspired a late flowering in his work, and he obviously adored her and loved her.

In France everybody has assumed that she was his mistress. She says she wasn’t. And I believe what she says, but it was obviously a very deep love. So Maillol’s wife contacted Breker and said, “Make sure the bitch gets sent off to the concentration camps as soon as possible.” Maillol contacted Breker and said, “Please, please, can you rescue my muse?” And she was rescued and of course she survived and became a top dealer in Paris and created the Maillol Museum in Paris. Now, the theatre. Theatre and films. This is really extraordinary. There is the most incredible flowering of theatre in France in this period. It was probably the greatest period of French theatre since the 17th century. The period of Moliere, Racine, and so on. And Corneille. This is a view of the theatre, which before the war was called Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, but of course the German occupiers renamed it Theatre de la Cite. And so this is Mr. Theatre, Sacha Guitry. He is the French equivalent of Noel Coward. A very brilliantly witty, clever, multi, multi-talented man. One difference between them being that Guitry was very heterosexual. He had five wives. Claimed to adore women. I suspect that actually Guitry may have adored women, but I don’t think he liked them.

And I’ll give you a little quote from him in a minute. Adoring, liking, two different things. So he was a very good natured man. He immediately came back, was one of the first people to come back to Paris after the great exodus of 1940. And by the end of the year, he was active and writing plays, appearing in plays all the way through the occupation. And he was courted by the Nazis. And he allowed himself really to, I don’t know, you could say he flirted with them, sometimes for very good reasons. He was one of the people, another one of the go-to people if you desperately needed help. And he was certainly responsible for saving many Jewish artists and into black jaws. But every time he did that, of course he was more compromised. And what you see on the right hand side is the day of his arrest after the liberation of Paris. The resistance went straight to his house early in the morning. You can see in his photograph, he’s wearing a jacket over his pyjamas. They dragged him out of bed and they took him down to the police station to be interrogated. And it’s such a rather tragic story.

His reputation never really recovered. The distinguished playwrights of the older generation like Jean Giraudoux, Paul Claudel, Henry de Montherlant, they were already middle-aged or elderly, but each of them wrote very notable plays during the occupation, plays that have gone into the standard repertoire. But today I want to concentrate on the younger playwrights who came into prominence during the war. This is Jean Anouilh. And he had success already in December 1940. So very soon after the theatres reopened with a romantic comedy called “Leocadia”. And it was a vehicle for a power couple in French theatre. That’s Yvonne Printemps and Pierre Fresnay. Yvonne Printemps, she’d been second of Sacha Guitry’s five wives. And he was apparently a very controlling husband. She really couldn’t stand that. So she ran off with Pierre Fresnay and she lived with him the rest of her life, but refused to marry him. And so I said that Guitry may have loved women but didn’t like them. And he famously said, I think probably about Pierre Fresnay, that the best revenge you can have on a man for stealing your wife is to let him keep her. She also had quite a sharp tongue. And when he married his fourth wife, right at the end of the thirties, he was in his late fifties, she was 16, she said, “The next time he will marry Shirley Temple.” Well, in fact, Yvonne Printemps herself was, I suppose, could criticise her because she hung on to her youth.

She was actually 46 years old when she played in this play, playing a girl, again, a girl in her teens. But anyway, she’s so adorable you could forgive her anything. And she sang 'cause she had a wonderful singing voice. And Francis Poulenc wrote a song for her to sing in this play, which is “Les Chemins de l'amour,” which I suppose is what the play is best remembered for today. It’s become an absolute standard. Any number of sopranos have performed it and recorded it, but never, I think quite with the magic of Yvonne Printemps. I hope this is the moment of truth where I’m going to try and play you Yvonne Printemps singing “Les Chemins de l'amour” recorded at the time. Colette, the great writer, she said about Yvonne Printemps, “She doesn’t sing, she breathes melodiously.” So let’s see if we can get some sound. Song plays.

Isn’t that heavenly? And I want to give a very, very big thank you for Judy for enabling that. She has worked out how to put the sound excerpts into the PowerPoint. Thank you Judy. Now, probably the best known play by Anouilh, still performed is “Antigone”.

Song plays.

And this was first performed in February 1944. Now, I said I’d try and explain why it was that there was this kind of urgency and creativity in Parisian cultural life under these terrible circumstances, especially I think as far as theatre is concerned. Well, theatre was going through a golden age because there wasn’t very much else for people to do. They were going to the theatre, especially in the winters, because the theatre was a place where you could be warm during all these fuel shortages. But also, so these playwrights, they want to say something about the situation that people are finding themselves in. Ordinary people in France under German occupation every day were faced with terrible, terrible, momentous moral decisions and political decisions. You could not do anything. You could not buy your groceries. There was nothing you could do in France that didn’t have some profound moral political implications. And the playwrights wanted to deal with this, but of course everything was censored so they couldn’t deal with it directly, they had to do it obliquely. And I think that’s what gives these plays their very special quality, in a way their universality. So here is Anouilh looking at the story of “Antigone” and her rebellion. And this play is really an argument about collaboration and resistance. It’s actually pretty ambiguous.

It was ambiguous enough anyway to get past the German censors. And you’ve got the same kind of argument with this play by Jean-Paul Sartre, it’s “Les Mouches”. This was presented in 1943. Again, it’s looking at the situation of occupied France, but seeing it through Greek mythology. And so Sartre said, “What I really was writing about in this play is the morality of somebody who resists by attacking and killing Germans, and then is responsible for the deaths of 50 hostages.” So that’s what this play is really about but it had to be, as I said, oblique enough that the German censors wouldn’t really pick it up. This is his other very famous play from the occupation. And God knows what the German censors made of this play, “Huis Clos,” “In Camera” presented May 1944, weeks before the Normandy landings. This is a play I would say really with a certain resonance in lockdown. The theme of it is hell is other people. And it’s a man and two women, a wife murderer, a lesbian, and a nymphomaniac who are locked into a room for eternity. And they cannot close their eyes and they cannot stop looking at one another and they torment one another.

I remember having this play in our syllabus for French A level, and my poor French teacher Ms. Scott, getting into a terrible twist trying to explain to us what a lesbian and a nymphomaniac were and what was actually going on in this play. So the film industry. Now, the French film industry in the thirties was blooming, many of the greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema. Think Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, and so on, produced in France in the thirties. But so with the fall of France and the German occupation, the French industry was purified. I use that term please, in inverted commas, of its Jewish elements. The directors, the producers, the financiers were all obviously got rid of one way or another. Rather shockingly, Jean Renoir, actually gave a public speech in 1940 saying that he thought this was a good thing and it would be a good new beginning for French cinema without the Jews. The Germans set up a company called Continental. This was the best finance film company during the Second World War, produced a great many, very lavish films. Once again, it was one of those things where if you had anything to do with Continental at the end of the Second World War, it was trouble. You know, it was regarded as being proof of collaboration.

But things didn’t always go the way the Germans wanted. Probably the most lavish film produced in France during the war was called “La Symphonie Fantastique” and it was a kind of idealised biopic of Hector Berlioz, great French composer. In fact, when Goebbels saw the film, he was incandescent with rage. He said, “I do not want anybody to be able to be allowed to produce a film like this except the Germans.” We do not want anybody put on a pedestal like this and Berlioz was presented as some kind of super hero, Superman. He said, “No, only Germans can be presented that way. Not French people.” The most famous film produced today anyway, and the one that people still watch, of Continental’s films is “Le Corbeau,” “The Raven”. And again, I wonder, to me it’s a mystery how this film got made. It’s by the director Henri-Georges Clouzot. And the subject is a small French town, which is in the grip of hysteria because of a campaign of poisoned letter writing. And it’s so obviously a metaphor for France under the occupation, denunciation became a national pastime. It has been estimated that up to 5 million letters of denunciation were posted by French people denouncing one another during the Second World War.

This is again Pierre Fresnay on the left hand side, Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, and the director, they’re all in trouble at the end of the war for this film, which was banned for quite a long time. Partly because as I said, it was made for a German-controlled film company, but also because after the war there were aspects of the occupation that people didn’t want to remember and denunciation was one of them. So it’s only really in later years come to be sort of recognised as a masterpiece. Here is another still from this film, “Le Corbeau”. Marcel Carne, as I just mentioned, one of the great French film directors of the late thirties. And he formed a team, my favourite restaurant in Paris, when I’m there I go two or three times a week and we love talking about, there’s a whole group of us. They’re all passionate cinephiles and we all talk about old movies endlessly and we have lots of discussions about Carne. And their consensus is that yes, these films are very, very great films, but it’s actually the team, it’s not really Carne, I’m not sure I agree with them, I think Carne is fantastic. But it’s the writer, the poet Jacques Prevert, who produced the scripts, the music, Joseph Kosma, and the visual side, which was an artist called Alexandre Trauner.

So this team continues during occupation, despite the fact that of course, Kosma and Trauner were both Jews. So their work could not be acknowledged. They had to invent the names for the composer and the designer. There are two films in particular that stand out, “Le Visiteurs du Soir,” with the great Arletty, you see on the left hand side. This film again with, in hindsight, it’s so obviously a metaphor for occupied France. You think, “Well why didn’t the censors see it at the time?” And in this film, the devil goes to a castle and he bewitches all the people in the castle. And the most famous scene is the last scene, these young lovers. And you can see it’s a gorgeous spring day and the devil turns them to stone. But he circles round the statues that he’s created, and to his rage, he realises that the hearts of the young lovers are still beating inside the statues. And this has been interpreted as a message that inside France, which is being turned to stone by the Nazis, the beating heart of France is still there. Most famous film made under the occupation and a film that’s often been claimed to be the greatest film ever made. That’s a big claim, but I possibly might go with it. This is “Les Enfants Du Paradis”. It was made under the occupation, but not actually released until after the liberation. I’m boasting here 'cause I don’t know if you can see the photograph in the middle. It’s inscribed to me. It says Patrick. And that is Arletty, who was the star of the film, had a wonderful day with her when she was 89. And oh, she was so tremendous. Still beautiful, still flirty, still naughty, still outrageous, telling all sorts of stories about what went on during the war. She of course had a German lover and a German general. So she was in very big trouble and accused of collaboration.

The most famous quotes from her that, well, there are two very famous quotes, but one of them that every French person knows is at her trial in the war, the judge said, “How could you possibly sleep with a German during occupation?” She said, . Here are “The Children of Paradise”, the title. Paradise is the gods, the people in the top rows of the theatre. What is so astonishing about this film is how incredibly lavish it is. It is one of the most visually sumptuous, amazing films of the 20th century with a recreation of 19th century Paris and of course a cast of thousands. It’s just the most, an utter feast for the eyes all the way through the film. Now, a story that Arletty told me herself, and I believe it completely, concerns the character of the sinister Rag and Bone Man. When it was originally filmed under the occupation, this was played by a very distinguished character actor called Robert Le Vigan, you see him on the left hand side. He was a notorious Nazi sympathiser Jew hater. He actually followed Peter to Germany at the end of the war. He was sentenced to death. He actually served some time of hard labour, escaped and ended his days in South America. Well, there was no way they could release the film with him in it. So they had to, there were two scenes where he appears with Arletty, but she was in prison at the time.

So very French solution, they smuggled her out of prison at night to refilm these two scenes with Pierre Renoir, that’s what you see on the right hand side, and then took her back to prison in the morning. Musical life, there were similar losses, of course, I mentioned them. In New York, Millieu, Stravinsky, Martinu, wonderful performers who’d been based in Paris like Arthur Rubinstein, Piatigorsky, Mandelondovsky. They’re all gone. But the musical life was still incredibly rich. Just look on the right hand side, all these concerts on offer in 1940. In one week in 1942, you could of heard great pianist Jacques Fevrier, who incidentally was the teacher of Peter Wallfisch, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s husband. Very fine pianist, favourite pianist of Neveu. Ginette Neveu. Incredibly lamented Ginette Neveu. Now I’m going to make a statement here, and we could put this up for debate, was Ginette Neveu the greatest non-Jewish violinist of the 20th century? All sorts of implications to that statement. But at the age of 15, she beat the 27 year old David Oistrakh into second place in a big international violin competition. She made just a handful of recordings that are revered by music lovers and collectors.

And of course, died tragically in an air crash, same air crash that killed Edith Piaf’s boxer lover, Marcel Cerdan. And then further down you can see Chopin, a Chopin concert with Alfred Cortot. I had an email actually after my first lecture from somebody saying, “Well, why didn’t you mention Cortot? He’s an important figure.” Cortot is the ultimate pianist, pianist. You know, ask almost any great pianist who are your favourite historic pianists and Cortot will nearly always be near the top of the list. Unlike Neveu, he lived a very long time. He made an enormous number of recordings. You can currently buy, I bought it, I haven’t listened to it all yet, a set of 40 CDs of all the recordings of Alfred Cortot. His reputation was very tainted at the end of the war because he accepted an official position with the Vichy regime and he promoted Franco-German cultural contacts and he went to Berlin to perform so lots and lots of black marks against him. But as I said to the person who wrote to me, it’s a very, very complicated story. I don’t really have time today to go into the details, but there’s another side to Cortot and his behaviour in the Second World War and I would not like to make a firm judgement one way or another. Now, the the greatest new talent to emerge during the war was Olivier Messiaen.

He’d begun to make a reputation before the war but his first masterpiece, which you’d say is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, is the “Quartet for the End of Time”. This was written over the winter of 1940 to '41 in a German prisoner of war camp. And as you can see from the programme on the right hand side, it was first performed 15th of January, freezing freezing conditions, in a Silesian prisoner of war camp for an audience of 400 soldiers. They were Poles, they were British, and they were French. The quartet is an unusual combination of piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. That was simply because those were available to him in the camp, musicians and the instruments. And he says that it was the most attentive audience that he’d ever had for a premier in his career. I’d love to know what they thought of this extraordinary music. I’m going to play you an extract from a recording made after the war with Messiaen himself on the piano as he was on the first occasion, and again with Ettienne Pasquier. So we’ve got two of the original members on this recording of the “Quartet for the End of Time”.

Song plays.

The ballet of the National French Ballet Company at the Palais Garnier was also having a mini golden age under the direction of the Russian dancer Serge Lifar. He’d been one of the last lovers of Diaghilev. He’s a very dubious character. Actually, I think he’s an idiot. What can I say? His autobiography is so unbelievably silly and idiotic that you can hardly seriously blame him for his collaboration. You’d think this person wasn’t sufficiently adult to understand what he was doing. He was obviously in love with the Wehrmacht with their gorgeous fascist uniforms. The Germans did have the best uniforms in the Second World War. And you can see, he got a French couturier to personally design his own fascist uniform, which he had himself photographed in and even put the photograph in his autobiography. But these drawings actually, I found about six weeks ago in the flea market in Paris by a Russian, quite a good Russian artist called Serge Ivanoff. And you can thereof, I briefly recognised him, this is the drawings of Serge Lifar dated 1941. And one of his, he was not only star dancer, he was on a high really, as a choreographer during this period. And one of the ballets that he created was “Les Animaux Modeles,” which is inspired by “The Fables of La Fontaine”. And the musical score was entrusted to Francis Poulenc.

And Poulenc wrote an absolutely gorgeous score, but he put in a very naughty thing. And I think one of the ways that the French kept themselves going in the Second World War was through humour. I mean, the Brits like to think they’re the only people on earth with a sense of humour, but no, French also have a wonderful sense of humour and they often used it against the Germans. And so he slipped into the score, the tune of a popular song called “No You Will Not Have Our Alsace-Lorraine”. It was this popular song that went back to the war of 1871. But he orchestrates it and harmonises it. The tune is the same, but it sounds totally different in his score. But I think all the French people in the audience, they would’ve been chortling and giggling. The Germans would’ve wondered what was going on with the French reaction. So I’m going to try and play you, first of all, the original song. “You Shall Not Have Our Alsace-Lorraine” sung by Georges Thill. And this is how it sounds.

Song plays.

So quite an amazing transformation. So Paris was of course in the occupied zone and you’ve got quite a different cultural life going on in the South of France in Marseille and Nice up to November 1942. The Americans landed in North Africa at the beginning of November and the Germans responded by invading the South of France. So here is the arrival of the Germans in Marseille.

Immediately, the musical life was turned upside down. Marseille Opera House, the German censors banned the performance of three operas, of “Boris Godunov,” because it was Russian, “William Tell,” because it was about an oppressed people and they thought that might not be a very good idea, and “Madame Butterfly” because in act one of “Madame Butterfly,” Pinkerton and Sharpless drink a toast, America forever and the Germans were afraid that the French audience might make a big demonstration of enthusiasm. What we see here actually is the arrival, soon after the German army arrived, the Berlin Philharmonic followed them to try and pacify the Marseille public. And so this is the Berlin Philharmonic performing in the beautiful Marseille Opera House. This is one of my greatest heroes. This is Reynaldo Hahn and Reynaldo Hahn was of course the lover of Proust, he’s one of the main inspirations for the character of Vinteuil in “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”. He wrote his most famous songs, what is it about young Jewish male composers who write these incredible masterpieces when they’re, you know, barely into long trousers. He wrote his most famous song “Si Mes Vers” when he was 13 years old, that was back in the 1880s. But he had a lifelong obsession with an opera by Gounod called “Mireille,” which had not been a great success and was only performed in a very barbarized version. So he spent decades of his life working on the score and putting it back together. And amazingly, a few years ago in the Paris flea market, I found his working scores with all his annotations.

I have to think what to do with them, they’re really, I have to give them to some kind of archive in France. But it was just at the outbreak of war that he finally achieved his ambition of being able to perform this opera. And we actually, it’s amazing, we have fragments of the performance of 1941. So just before the German invasion of the south as a radio broadcast of his version of “Mireille”. Sound quality is not very good so I’m not going to play you the music, but I’d just like to play you a little bit of the voice of Reynaldo Hahn on this occasion in June 1941 talking on the radio about his restoration of “Mireille”. Right, this is one of his, he was a very generous man and one of his proteges was a young singer from Perpignan called Renee Doria. And he generously agreed to coach her and to accompany her first concerts. And here is Renee Doria, this photograph is her hundredth birthday, which was the 13th of February of this year, the day before I came back to England. I was very privileged to be one of six people present at the hundredth birthday of Renee Doria. You can see how fabulous she was. And I’m happy to be able to show you her like this. And she, I don’t know the full circumstances, but she died just a few days later but she was certainly good on this occasion. And she told me over this table at lunch of a story that I’m going to repeat to you about another example of how the French sort of boosted their morale by joking at the German’s expense. It was a performance of “Lakme” at the Opera Comique during the occupation. Of course, “Lakme” is set in British India and the hero and his friend are British army officers so they’re in British uniforms.

And the baritone Michel Dens during the interval dressed as a British officer. He went round the auditorium offering flowers to all the German military. And he’d say to them, “Are you happy to receive flowers from a British officer?” In fact, on this occasion, the Germans did have a sense of humour failure, they realised that they were being laughed at and he did actually get into some quite severe trouble. Anyway, she made her debut in 1942 just before the Germans arrived at the Opera in Marseille. And she sang the role of Rosina in “The Barber of Seville”.

Song plays.

So I want to just give you the sound of her voice, which is such a typical French voice with a little squeeze of lemon in it. So I’m now going to talk a little bit about Radio Paris. Radio Paris was a radio station created by the Germans and it put on a fabulous cultural programme of music, theatre, all sorts of things, even jazz oddly enough, in order to attract people to listen to it so that they would hear the German version of events in the news bulletins. Radio Party engaged in a duel over the airwaves with the free French radio broadcast by the BBC. So this is on the left is Pierre Dac. He was a French comedian, Jewish, who escaped, came to London and he worked for the BBC. And my next excerpt is a little ditty that he recorded mocking Radio Paris. And you’ll see he sings, “Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est allemand”

Song plays.

When I was working on my book about music in Second World War, actually I’d already delivered the text so this is not in the English version, it’s only in the later German version. I was walking along the Cayre in Paris and I spotted this book, “Journal D'un Coiffer Juif” that looked interesting so I picked it up. And this man Albert Grunberg, he was what he said he was, he was a hairdresser. And in 1942, the Gestapo came to take him and he managed to trick them and he slipped out of the back of the house and his wife hid him in an attic above his hairdressing business. So from September 1942 until August 1944, he was in one room. Think of that, people who feel claustrophobic and confined. All that time completely alone. But he had a radio set and he filled his time by writing this journal, which is really fascinating. If you can read French, I do recommend it 'cause he was probably one of the best informed people about the progress of the Second World War 'cause he was listening to BBC, he was listening to Radio Paris, he’d be fulminating, he’d be angry against the propaganda of Radio Paris, but he still enjoyed all the music.

And above all, he was listening to Swiss radio and that was where he really got the accurate information. You had to sit, listen through all sorts of stuff about the local price of milk and things like that but then at the end of the news, you would get the truth about what was happening in Stalingrad or whatever. And so this is Radio Paris, as I said, any association with Radio Paris was another very, very black mark at the time of the Epuration. It was probably quite convenient that one of the few buildings destroyed in Paris during the Epuration was the building of Radio Paris. So that meant all the archives, all the material of everything that had gone on in Radio Paris was destroyed. So it was really an astonishing thing. We thought there was almost nothing left of it that in a junk shop in Leon a few years ago, somebody came across a big pile of recordings. They were actually of two concerts broadcast by Radio Paris in early 1944 and they are conducted by the very great Dutch conductor, Willem Mengelberg. He was on a level with Furtwangler and Toscanini. But because of accusations of collaboration, and again, it’s not all together what meets the eye, there are nuances to this. He was banned from conducting, he never conducted again after Second World War.

And for the Dutch, he’s considered really something of a national shame. But these concerts, there’s one, it’s a fantastic sound. They’re really amazing. They were published by the firm of Mallispas and they did a very lavish booklet explaining the background of the concerts and they asked me to translate it for them. And there are two concerts. There’s one which has the Cesar Franck Symphony. There’s the Chopin first piano concerto with Cortot, which is just the most amazing performance. There’s Paul Tortelier playing the Dvorak cello concerto. And there is, I think it’s the 20th of January 1944 is the Tchaikovsky Pathetique. And what sort of amazed me about this is these concerts, they were free. So as long as you weren’t Jewish, if you were French, you could just turn up and get a seat at the concert, but you would likely to sit next to somebody in a gray-green uniform. So you had a mingled French German orchestra. And so this was two days I think, or even one day after the breaking of the siege of Leningrad. So you’ve got this doom laden Russian symphony all about fate.

And so I’m thinking, what were people thinking of during this concert? Well I’m going to play you a couple of short excerpts 'cause I want to take you there. 'Cause I feel with this recording you’re almost there. Here is the Theatre des Champs-Elysees where the concert took place. And we’re going to start off with the announcer at Radio Paris saying, “We’re going over now to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees.” And then you hear the orchestra tuning up. So here is Mengelberg, who was rather like Toscanini. He was a tyrant, a disciplinarian as a conductor. So we’re going to hear the start of the concert and you hear this tapping, this very peremptory tapping on the conductor’s desk. Now, he had been the chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the 1920s. And I’m quite sure he’s the inspiration for that very famous scene in the Marx brothers, “A Night at the Opera” where the conductor taps on the desk and the Marx brothers sabotage him by tapping all over the theatre and then announcing that there’s a plague of woodpeckers. So here is the start of the concert.

Song plays.

I’m going to play you a bit from the middle of the first movement.

Song plays.

And whenever I listen to Mengelberg, I think, “How on earth did his musicians keep it together?” 'Cause the rhythm is all over the place and there are no bar lines. It beats up, it slows down. Here it is from the middle of the movement.

Now there’s Normandy landing sixth of June at the resistance call on the Parisian public to rise up against the Germans. And there are street battles wherever you go in Paris, you can see these plaques to the people of Paris who died fighting the Germans in that week in August 1944. And this is the great Colette in her apartment in Palais Royal. Very often in Paris when I take people, I walk them through Palais Royal and we look at the building where she lived. This is her third husband on the left hand side. He’s called Maurice Goudeket and he was Jewish. And so when the great exodus happened, they fled from Paris and then coming back again, they were stopped by the Germans. And the German officer said to Colette, “I can see that you are Jewish.” And he very bravely, but unwisely said, “No, she’s not Jewish. I am.” And so they arrested him and he was sent to the transit camp of Tarsi. And she was desperate so she went to everybody. I’m sure she went to Sasha Guitry, I’m sure she went to Arletty, she probably went to Arno Breker and she succeeded in getting him out of the camp of Tarsi. And he tells this in his book, “Pres de Colette”. And so he after months in Tarsi in the most filthy verminous horrible conditions, he was just put on a train, unwashed, filthy clothes covered in lice, came back to Palais Royal, rang the doorbell, then the maid opened the door. Madam was at a hairdresser. So he sort of had mixed feelings that, “Oh my God, I’ve been through this and she’s at the hairdresser.”

He said actually he was very happy that she didn’t see him in the state he was in. The maid put brown paper on the floor and they kind of stripped him and hosed him down. And she realised that it was too dangerous to have him in Paris so she sent him to the south. But when the Germans invaded the south, it was more dangerous there than in Paris. So he came back again and she hid him in the attic, again, from the end of 1942 to August 1944. And so then they can hear sounds or something happening in the streets, and he’s stir crazy. She pleads with him, “No, no, no, don’t go out.” But he rushed out into the streets and then he got trapped in a situation like this. And overnight, he was not able to get back. But the next day he went back and he said, “Look darling, Paris is liberated.” And she said, “I can’t believe you, I just can’t believe you.” And he said, “I promise you, Paris is liberated.” And she said, “Well, I’ll believe it when you bring me a man wearing a kilt.” So Goudeket went out into the streets with all the Allied soldiers pouring into Paris. And he found a Scottish soldier with a kilt. And he said, “Will you come home with me to speak to my wife to prove her that Paris has been liberated?” and the soldier did. Now my last story, I know I’m running out of time, I’m sorry to trespass on your time. This is the great jazz musicians, Stephane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, the first great pioneers of jazz on the European continent.

The outbreak of war they were separated because Grappelli was in Britain and Django Reinhardt was in France. So there were several years, of course, where they couldn’t perform together. But in January 1946, Django Reinhardt comes to London, they meet up oddly enough in the Athenaeum Club. I’d love to know how that came about. Anyway, they don’t say anything to one another, they just pick up their instruments and this is what they played.

Song plays.

So that’s it. Thank you so much for bearing with me through my terrible trivials that have really cost me sleep and anguish with BT. But I’m happy to say that I’m in the process of transferring to another provider. And on April the first, I should be able to speak to you from as I said, another provider, which I hope will be a bit more efficient. And once again, a huge, huge thanks to Judy who’s suffered with me through all of this and who has sorted out the problems with the sound being inserted into the PowerPoint. So let’s see, do we have any time for questions?

• Patrick, I just want to say a big thank you to you.

• Oh, thank you.

• For your fabulous presentations and things do happen and the internet does go down and there are issues and that’s life and that Covid has taught us. We just have to grin and bear it, help each other and try and figure it out. It’s no longer instant gratification, it’s just like slowly and we just slowly figure it out. So please don’t apologise. We are very, very grateful to you and thank you for an outstanding presentation. You are fabulous. And we love having you as part of our team.

Q&A and Comments:

• Thank you.

Q: Are they using AG for film?

A: I’m not sure about that. Yes, I think they probably are.

I’m doing a talk on it, somebody’s saying they’re interested in the idea of the Epuration.

Q: Did France- Yes. You say did France ever totally engage with its own history?

A: Not for a very long time afterwards. Maybe I’ll talk about that in that lecture. Particularly of course a notorious TV documentary called “Le Chagrin et la Pitie,” which was a very profound shock, I think, to the French enforcing them to confront the, it wasn’t all glorious resistance.

Career and life of the artist’s son of Max Ernst who remained in Ger- I don’t know actually. I really don’t know but that’s interesting. I don’t know about Max Ernst’s son who remained in Germany.

Charles Trenet. Well that’s another talk I want to do, which is about the role of the chanson during war. Trenet is a really interesting figure. He had his finger on the pulse all the way through the war. He wrote the song for the moment. Chevalier, dubious. Dubious. But I will talk about that when I do that talk.

Let me see. A friend’s father was helped across the Pyrenees by Dina, was it Dina Vierny? Yes. My friend wrote to her to thank her and to tell her that after a fruitful life, thanks to her he had a fruitful life, had recently died. He said my father spoke of you in a red dress and had been told to follow her out of the bar. Dina said that she was coming to New York to discuss an exhibition. They arranged to meet in her hotel. “How will I recognise you?” my friend asked. “You will,” said Dina. And of course she was wearing a red dress. And of course she was fabulously beautiful. She was absolutely gorgeous so I don’t think you’d mistake her in a hurry. When I was at Dworkin summer camp near Rochester at age 13, we read and performed “No Exit” by Sartre.

Yes, that’s, god, age 13. It haunts me for years. Still does. Especially the statement “Hell is other people.” Yeah. Well, it made a big impression on me and I was 17 or 18.

Favourite restaurant in Paris. Yes, it’s La Fresque. F-R-E-S-Q-U-E. It’s so fabulous. I’m missing it terribly. It’s 100 Rue Rambuteay, so it’s right next to the Halles in Paris. The best meal you will have in Paris and it costs 16 euros. And I swear to you, you could spend all the money you have and you wouldn’t get a better meal.

French flea market. Oh yes, well, there are two big flea markets. The one I get most of my best stuff from is in the Port de Vanves in the south.

Poulenc. Yes, he was in front- I mean, there’s a whole lecture on Poulenc under the occupation. He’s a very, very interesting figure.

What was his- Chevalier, he’s generally regarded as actually being, having not a very glorious, but it’s good. I mean there, it’s complicated. He had a Jewish wife, so I suppose that might encourage you to be a bit more cooperative with the Germans. It took 10 plays to get out of Egypt.

Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. That’s kind. And I think that’s it. I don’t think there are any more questions. So let’s hope that we’ve managed to put these dreadful technical problems behind us. Thank you all. Thank you.

• [Judi] Thank you Patrick. Wendy, are you still there with us?

• Yes, I’m still here.

• [Judi] No, I was thinking if Wendy was still there. Just saying thank you very much Patrick, It was wonderful today and I’m so glad that everything worked.

• So am I.

• [Judi] Take care. Thank you everybody. And we’ll see everybody a little bit later for our next talk at 6:00 PM UK. Thank you everybody. Bye-Bye.