Patrick Bade
Darius Milhaud: The Happy Life of a Jewish Composer

Patrick Bade | Darius Milhaud The Happy Life of a Jewish Composer | 05.01.22

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- Good evening everybody. Welcome to my sunny Parisian flat. I’m talking tonight about the French composer Darius Milhaud who lived just a few minutes walk from where I am now on the Boulevard de Clichy. The title of his autobiography and the very first line of the opening chapter tell us a lot of what we need to know about him as a man and as an artist. You can see he called his book, “Ma Vie Heureuse”, “My Happy Life.” And it was a happy life, not exactly a bed of roses. From an early age he suffered from very, very painful rheumatoid arthritis that eventually crippled him. And in the Holocaust, he lost more than his, more than 20 members of his family. But he was the absolute opposite of the cliche idea of a tortured, unhappy artist. He was very happily married. I’ll show you a picture, there he is on his wedding day, with his, he married a cousin called Madeleine. And from beginning to end, it seems to have been an absolute perfect marriage. And he obviously adored her, you can tell that from his book. And he doesn’t, he never seems to have suffered from a moment of creative block, music just poured out of him.

He’s probably the most prolific major composer of the 20th century. He wrote more than 450 opus numbers. When he ran out of text to set to music, he would set catalogues to music. You can see “Catalogue of Flowers”, actually there was one that was a set of songs, which is a catalogue of farming instruments. And on the left, you see a picture of him In 1947, he’d been in America for seven years. He arrived in 1940 as a refugee. And he didn’t have access to scores of all the music he’d written up to that time. So he got down to, I mean, he had a full-time teaching job, but he, the music was still pouring out of him. He needed to write music that could be performed, that would give him an income while he was in America. And that huge pile of scores, ‘cause he… There is Milhaud with his wife and his son Daniel, with the scores of all the music that he wrote during 1940 and '47. The first line of his autobiography is, “I’m a Frenchman from Provence and by religion, I am a Jew.” In fact, in French, he doesn’t use the word Jew, he used the words Israelite. And so, he was very proud of his Provencent Mediterranean heritage. And, as you can see, he came from a prosperous family. They were a well established family that had been in Provence for centuries. His grandfather was a dealer in almonds and his father was a banker.

You see his mother and father here, and there you see his little boy on the right hand side. And here he is at the time of his bar mitzvah. Being Jewish for him was a very important part of his identity. And throughout his career, he dealt with biblical subjects, Jewish subjects, and he set many Jewish texts, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in French translation. And he wrote a number of liturgical works. And I’m going to start by playing you an excerpt from, you can see this is “Sacred Service” for the Sabbath, Sabbath morning service. I’m going to play you the final movement of this. This was commissioned in the 1940s by the big Emanu-El Synagogue in San Francisco. And this is a recording made at the time, but actually in New York. And if my friend Ron Bornstein is listening to this, he will recognise the singer, of course. The singer was a German operatic baritone called Frederick Lechner, who’d come, he’d broken off his career, obviously his career was broken by the Nazis. And he came to America and he had a career singing in synagogues and taking on minor roles at Metropolitan Opera. And Ron tells me that he was prepared for his bar mitzvah with the help of Frederick Lechner.

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And I’m going to play you one of his “Poemes Juifs”. You can see it’s opus 34, he was still in his teens when he got his opus, 34. So this is very early on in his career. And this is a recording of the singer Jane Bathori. She was considered the doyenne of interpreters of the French art song. She was enormously admired by Debussy, by Ravel, by Faure, by all the composers of that period. And she sang many premieres and had many songs dedicated to her, and on this recording, she had the song, it’s the “Song of Resignation”. Not that I think resignation was really something that Milhaud himself was very inclined to, but I suppose resignation has necessarily been something that many Jews have been forced to accept. Anyway, here she sings this song, “Song of Resignation”, accompanied by Milhaud himself on the piano.

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I think that’s probably the only piece I’m going to play you today, which has a rather sad character. Here was a highly intelligent man, highly educated, articulate, and he mixed throughout his life with in literary and intellectual circles. And at a very early age, I think he was still in his teens, when he encountered the somewhat older poet Paul Claudel, As a sort of surprising combination in a way, because Claudel was rigorously and fanatically Catholic. I think he’s still, I’m to ask my French friends how respected he is these days in France as a literary figure. Outside of France, he’s ironically, probably better known for being the, I would say, rather evil brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. And when their father died, first thing that Paul Claudel did was to have his sister institutionalised. Seems mainly because he was embarrassed by the fact that she had been openly the lover of the sculptor Rodin. Not only did he have her institutionalised for the rest of her life, he made sure that she had no access to any kind of creativity. He would not allow her to continue. She had no materials to continue her art or her sculpture.

So I dunno whether Milhaud knew anything like that or not. But they, as I said, they were lifelong friends and they collaborated on numerous occasions. When the First World War broke out, Claudel was a diplomat. Milhaud was exempt from military service 'cause he was already having health problems with his rheumatoid arthritis. And Claudel made him a wonderful offer. He invited him to accompany him to Brazil as his secretary. And this turned out to be a formative influence, because Milhaud fell in love with the popular culture and the popular music of Brazil. He loved the complex rhythms, he loved the use of drums and all kinds of percussion, whistles and so on. And so, there are several pieces I’m going to play you, which are clearly influenced by Brazilian popular music and culture. First is one of a set of piano pieces called “Saudades do Brasil”. And we hear immediately the Brazilian rhythms, and once again, being played on the piano by Milhaud himself.

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Now, immediately after the First World War, Milhaud’s career really took off and he established himself as probably the most controversial cutting edge avant-garde French composer, particularly with his ballet “L'Homme et son Desir” which was produced in 1921 I think at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, by the Bellets Suedois. For a very short time, just about two or three years, there were serious rivals to Diaghilev Ballets Russes, they put on some very exciting avant garde ballets. “L'Homme et son Desir”, you can, it was, it’s set in Brazil, has these rather fascinating designs. You can see the whole stage set was intended to look like a sheet of music, with stave lines with dancers on different levels. So they’re dancing on the stave lines of the score. With design and costumes by a woman called Audrey Parr. And I’d love to know more about her. I can’t find very much on the internet except that she was German, she was married to an Englishman, and she was a great friend of of Milhaud. And this seems to be her one great thing that designs for this ballet, and they’re really extraordinary I think for 1921. So here is an excerpt with the music, and as I said, Milhaud was very fascinated by the use of percussion in popular street events in Brazil. And he makes use of this in this score.

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It was a Brazilian popular song with the title, “Le Boeuf sur le Toit”, “The Bull on the Roof”, that inspired what became Milhaud’s most popular piece, I suppose it’s still his most widely performed piece. And there are many misconceptions about this piece. He conceived it really as, in his mind, it was music that could accompany a silent film. And he was particularly thinking of Charlie Chaplin. He was very, very popular in France at the time, he was known as Charlot. It’s a good example too of his use, his harmonic language, his use of polytonality or bitonality. In other words, using in different hands or in different instruments are playing simultaneously in different keys. It’s quite a different idea from atonality. The atonality of Schonberg. Well, Schonberg and Milhaud were friends and had a great mutual admiration for one another. So it was originally conceived as a piece for violin, a rather showy piece for violin and piano. And as it took off and became very popular, he orchestrated it and it was used as a ballet. Here is the original version with the original players. Jean Wiener at the piano.

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Yes Jean Wiener was a very gifted pianist and composer, a great friend of Milhaud. And he formed a partnership with another pianist called Doucet. So they were a team Wiener and Doucet, they’ve lots of records together. And they set up a nightclub, and they asked Milhaud’s permission, they said, “Well we really like the title, 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit’, ‘The Bull on the Roof’. Can we use it for our nightclub?” And Milhaud good naturedly said yes. He said later that led to many misunderstandings. Many people thought that he owned a nightclub or you know, that he was part of the enterprise, but he wasn’t. Here is a jolly evening at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and this was where the artistic would’ve been a wonderful place to go. You could have met Picasso and Tamara de Lempicka and Jean Cocteau. Jean Cocteau was really, rules the roost there, he was the, you know, the big cheese. And he almost artificially created this group known as Les Six. They were six very gifted young French composers.

Still to this day, they’re always referred to as Les Six. And you can see there’s Cocteau at the piano. There is Milhaud looking a bit grim, really, standing on the left hand side. Georges Auric was missing. So Cocteau made a caricature of him to hang on the wall. The next person along is Arthur Honegger, Swiss composer, then Germaine Tailleferre, wonderful composer, very neglected, I recommend her to you. Poulenc and Durey on the right hand side, he’s the least known of the six. They collaborated together on a few occasions. In fact, really musically, they didn’t really have a lot in common. They didn’t really have a common aesthetic. Here again is Cocteau surrounded by members of Les Six this time with Honegger on the right and Milhaud between him and Cocteau and Poulenc on the extreme left. And a painting of Les Six with the pianist, Marcelle Meyer, who was really a kind of muse for the group and performed premiers, many, many premieres of their work.

On the right hand, you can see very dapper looking Cocteau with Milhaud, with an American jazz band in front of them. Billy Arnold’s American novelty jazz band. But Milhaud, like several other composers, peers Stravinsky, Ravel and so on, became very fascinated by jazz. He went to New York, this is the great period of the Harlem Renaissance. Went up to Harlem to the Cotton Club and he was absolutely blown away by the freshness of inspiration of black American jazz musicians. And that shows itself in the next piece I’m going to play you, which is another ballet that was staged by the Bellets Suedois, title is “La Creation du monde”, “The Creation of the world.” And it’s set in Africa round a waterhole with various animals that come to drink at the water hole. And this had very spectacular scenery and costume designs by the great cubist artist Fernand Leger. I’d love to see a performance of this with the original costumes. And you will hear this again, is a performance recorded at the time, conducted by Milhaud himself.

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Perhaps because he had achieved such great successes with the Bellets Suedois, the great Russian impresario, who I’m going to be talking about in our next series, Sergei Diaghilev, didn’t like Milhaud and he didn’t like jazz either. So that was probably a double reason for not liking Milhaud. And, but he was eventually persuaded to commission a single score from Milhaud. Which is, I think it’s called “Le Train Bleu”, Train Bleu of course is the famous train that goes from Paris or down to the Cote d'Azur. And Milhaud’s score is not very often performed. I think it’s actually in a way, out shone by the designs of the ballet. This is the very famous curtain for the ballet by Picasso. In fact, Picasso didn’t design it for the ballet. He made a watercolour and Diaghilev saw it and said, “Oh, that fits in very nicely with the ballet.” Which is a beach scene, you can see two ladies gambling on the beach. And he asked permission to have it enlarged to use as the curtain for the the score. Of course, it’s very, very famous.

Now at Victoria and Albert Museum. But the ballet itself was an idea of Cocteau. Again, he’s sort of ubiquitous at this period. Cocteau, I should be telling the story again. But he was so excited by the Ballets Russes when they first arrived in Paris, and that he went to Diaghilev and said, “Please, please, can you use me? Can I be involved?” And Diaghilev with his usual incredible sharpness, he was able to see qualities in people that they didn’t even know they had. He just looked them up and down. And he said, , surprise me. And that could have been the motto for Cocteau for the rest of his career, really. That’s what he did. He was always surprising. And one day on the beach, he saw the latest lover of Diaghilev, Anton Dolin, who you see here to his right wearing the stripey jumper. He was showing off on the beach doing handstands and all sorts of acrobatics, and Cocteau thought, “Oh this would be a great idea for a ballet.” And the other very famous thing about the ballet, of course, are the costume designs, which are the latest sexy 1920s beachwear designed by Coco Chanel. And this is what the ballet looked like with lots of gymnastics on the beach.

So at this point, I’d just like to mention that of course, Milhaud knew all these artists. Paris was such an exciting place to be between the wars. It was the artistic capital of the world, and it was attracting talent from everywhere. And the list of artists that Milhaud worked with is, well, it includes not only Picasso on several occasions, his fellow cubist Braque, Leger a couple of occasions, Andre Masson, as you can see on the left hand side, Marc Chagall, as you can see on the right hand side, Juan Gris, nearly all the great artists worked with Milhaud at one point or another. Here is Milhaud in his apartment, which as I said is a short walk from where I am now. This is number 10 Boulevard de Clichy and I often walk up and down that street. It’s a street that fascinates me, I mean, it’s a little bit grungy, really. And when I first started working as a guide in Paris a few years ago, I meet the clients at the Gare du Nord, and we get on a bus, and we have to drive along these Boulevard, La Chapelle, Rochechouart, Clichy, are three streets that run one into the next, along the northern periphery of central Paris. We’d always get stuck in traffic. And on a grey November’s day I’d think, oh my God, what am I going to talk to about to these people? So I really researched the street, and the street is absolutely fascinating.

I mean everybody who is anybody between 1900 and Second World War lived on that street. What Van Gogh, Picasso, Whistler painted the white girl in his studio on that street. Degas was the next door neighbour, actually, well he was dead by the time that that Milhaud got there. But he lived in the house next door to Milhaud’s. You can see it’s a very typical 19th century French apartment block. And you see him with these beautiful cast iron garde-corps, which I actually had garde-corps just like that in my flat until early this year. The awful Scandic who run this building ripped them out and replaced them with things that look like prison bars for reasons of the dread health and safety. But I’ve kept my garde-corps, they’re in my cache in the basement. So one of these days I hope to introduce them, reintroduce them to my flat if I live long enough. So this is where he lived, he moved in the 1920s and he kept this flat until he died in the 1970s. Of course, he had to move out very hurriedly in 1940 when the Germans arrived in Paris. A neighbour, the great conductor Roger Desormiere, took in his paintings and his piano and in a great act of faith, really, Desormiere paid the rent on this flat, from June, 1940, right up to the liberation in the summer of 1944. So it was not only a great act of friendship, but of course an enormous act of faith in the ultimate victory of the allies and the liberation of France from German domination.

Now Milhaud was, as I said, he was a happy man. He was happy in his skin and he got on very well with all his fellow composers. Even when the critics tried to manufacture a completely artificial rivalry between him and Arthur Honegger, it didn’t work because Milhaud just wasn’t going to let it work. He liked Honegger and he liked his music and the friendship survived. In his autobiography, he’s got tremendously open wide tastes. He can appreciate Schoenberg, he can appreciate all sorts of other kinds of music. The one composer that he really didn’t like was Wagner. And I’d like to read you what he said about Wagner, because when he was a young man, Wagner was the God in the late 19th, early 20th century. And he bought the Wagner scores and he went to see the Wagner operas, but he was puzzled. He said, “Unable as I was to share the general emotion, I felt lonely, as if abandoned by the wayside. My cousin, a fervent Wagnerian took me to me to hear "Tristan”. I never dared tell him how deadly boring I found that sonorous love philter. When the Bayreuth copyright expired and “Parsifal” was given the opera, I went to hear it.

This work, which had been impatiently, everybody impatiently waiting to hear, sickened me by its pretentious vulgarity. I did not realise that what I felt was merely the reaction of a Latin mind, unable to swallow the philosophical musical jargon of the shoddy mixture of harmony in mysticism in what was essentially a pompous art. I felt that even the leitmotifs was a childish device. Like so many thematic Baedekers, flattering the audience’s self-esteem as they always knew where they were. And I deplore the influence of Wagner’s music on ours.“ That’s the most negative thing I think he says about anybody by a very long way in the entire book. And it’s interesting, I really understand where he’s coming from. It was a frame of mind just after the First World War where people were reacting against everything that had led up to the war. The pathos, the pomposity of late romanticism was something that revolted them. They were reacting against, they wanted to get away from. So as you can see, you’ve got a score of "Parsifal” on the right hand side. And that enables me to tell you an anecdote that, as I said, this is Desormiere on the left, conductor Desormiere, conductor of the first complete recording of “Pelleas et Melisande”, which is universally acknowledged as the finest, the absolute measure of what that opera should sound like.

If you want to know “Pelleas” you have to really hear his recording. And he was the one, as I said, who paid the rent on Milhaud’s flat, and saved his piano and saved his paintings. But the Nazis pillaged everything else from the flat, they stripped it except for Milhaud’s score of “Parsifal”. It was a kind, I dunno, I suppose even Nazis have a sense of humour. So I suppose it’s a slightly sick, perverse Nazi joke that they left the score of “Parsifal” on Milhaud’s mantle piece. Now I mentioned at the beginning, the very first thing that Milhaud says in his autobiography is, “I am a Frenchman.” And I think if you turn on the radio, in England, Radio 3, in the middle of a performance of a piece of music by Milhaud, you know, straightaway that this is music by a Frenchman. It has very French qualities, wit, brevity, transparency, a lightness of touch, all qualities which you don’t find in Wagner for one, and wouldn’t find really in any German composer of the same period. Yes brevity, definitely not one of most great qualities.

So, but in the 1920s, yes, Milhaud took pride in writing symphonies that lasted five or six minutes. So I’m going to play you next, a whole movement. The first movement of Milhaud’s second symphony, which he called his “Pastorale” symphony. And the whole movement lasts 50 something seconds, somewhat under a minute. You think of, you know, Mahler ninth symphony. The first movement of that lasts no less than 29 minutes.

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And that’s it, whole movement of the symphony. Next I’m going to play you half an opera, and the opera is called “L'Enlevement d'Europe”, “The Abduction of Europa” or “The Rape of Europa”. And this was written really as a result of a bet between him and Hindemith. So to some extent in Germany too, I suppose there was this anti-Wagnarian reaction, wanting to write something that’s more concentrated, less prolix than Wagner. And so a group of composers got together and they really had a competition to see who could write the shortest opera. And it was Kurt Weill, Hindemith, I can’t remember who else was involved, but Milhaud won easy peasy by writing an opera that comes in at just under 8 minutes. So I’m going to tell you actually about 3 minutes of this opera.

It’s this Greek myth, “The Rape of Europa”. But a very witty, subversive take on the myth. Jupiter has this clever ability to transform himself into the form of an animal in order to seduce mortal women. And in this little excerpt, you’ll hear him saying, boasting that he has the loins of a bull and the heart of a God. And in the background, the peasant shepherds find this very amusing. And they indulge in a mocking chorus of mooing.

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And we’ll move on. I can’t resist showing you this, it’s relevant to the subject matter. This is a drawing I bought about a month ago in Paris from my favourite dealers, Amicorum. It’s by an artist called Joseph Avy. And as you can see, it shows a bull. And when I got the drawing home, I turned it round. And guess what, there’s a goddess or a virgin on the back of the bull, I suppose bulls and virgins sort of go together. So I’ve had it framed. So you can actually see both sides. And if you hold it up against the light, you can see her on the right hand side. You get both drawings for the price of one, the bull and the virgin. Now of course 1940 was the most appalling and terrible disaster. He had a very lucky escape, nerve-wracking escape, like so many people fled from Paris as the German’s approached. And he got down to the Pyrenees and managed to get out, I think with the help of Varian Fry, over the Pyrenees, cross Spain to Portugal, and then took a little boat across the Atlantic and arrived in America, course when he set out, his prospects must have been really grim ‘cause he wasn’t that well known in America. He had to leave everything behind, lost everything.

But while he was on the ship, they received a telegraph message with an invitation to teach at Mills College in California, on the Bay of San Francisco. And this turned out to be very, very happy experience for him. He was a natural teacher, very gifted teacher. And I think, as you can see from this photograph, his students really loved him. And amongst his better known students were Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Steve Wright, Philip Glass. And Dave Brubeck liked him so much that he even named his son Darius after Milhaud. And so I’m going to finish with two very beautiful songs. Milhaud had a great love for the highline soprano, coloratura soprano voice. 'Cause French had made a specialty of this. There are many French roles written for that type of soprano. And I’m going to play you two of the song cycle, “Chansons de Ronsard”, these were actually written before the war for the soprano, Lily Pons, you may be familiar with her from her movie fame. She went to Hollywood and made very successful movies. But I’m going to play them in a post-war recording with another soprano that he loved.

She was called Jeannine Michaud. And he wrote quite a number of songs, especially for her voice, even though these weren’t written particularly for her, they suit her voice, they fit her like a glove. And I may have mentioned, probably I’m sure I’ve mentioned in lots of of lectures, the French soprano, Renee Doria. She was a great friend, I used to visit her at least once a month for years outside of Paris. She died just after her 100th birthday earlier this year. And a part of the pleasure for me, what was always a fantastic, amazing, amazing French lunch that would take me days to recover from. You know, not a green leaf in sight, you know, cholesterol upon the cholesterol. It was absolutely wonderful. And we’d have a conversations about, she sang with everybody, every conductor, every singer. And she could make some pretty acid comments about some of her rival sopranos, including Jeannine Michaud.

She really didn’t like Jeannine Michaud, either as a woman or as a singer. And she used to say, “Oh, she’s always the same in every role. You know, she always acted the grand dame, whatever role she was singing, she was always too ladylike.” And I think there’s probably an element of truth in that. But what you have to give her, and I hope you’ll be able to enjoy here, is the incredible ease and beauty of the top of her voice. I mean, in that sense, she’s rather like Joan Sutherland, another soprano, if you’ll forgive me, who can be, for saying it, can be quite boring, but the joy of Joan Sutherland of course, is this miraculous beauty and ease of the top of the voice, which I think you’ll hear in Jeannine Michaud as well.

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And to finish another very short, delicious song from the same series.

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Q&A and Comments

Well, let’s see what we’ve got in the way of questions. Have I already, I’ve never done a lecture on Ernest Bloch and I don’t know his music that well. That was Ron telling us, yes, Frederick Lechner was his Bar Mitzvah tutor. You can catch him in quite a number of radio broadcasts from the Met from the 1940s. Let me see. Jennifer, I don’t think Milhaud was a child prodigy and I would recommend the autobiography, which is a very charming book, it’s beautifully written. I think that’s the best thing you could possibly read on him.

Did I know that if Rene Benedetti was, no he’s not related to her. He was a French Italian, well she’s an Italian background, I suppose Benedetti’s quite a common name. It was, yes, Rene Benedetti was the violinist playing “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” piece, spectacular stuff. Just why Milhaud didn’t, he did write music for several films, including a couple in America. But I can see his, you know, his style wasn’t as well suited to what was wanted in Hollywood of the 1940s as Korngold, for instance.

Yes, that’s true, Dave Brubeck was his pupil. Did he know Gershwin? Yes, he did know Gershwin. And of course they both made use of of jazz. He did write for films, but not a lot. No, he wasn’t in a, he was in America throughout the second World War in California, living a good life, but glued to the radio obviously for news of Europe and anguished about what was happening in France and worried about his family, of course. He was in Oakland, yes, just across the bay, that’s right. Yeah. Yes I’m devastated really about the loss of my beautiful garde-corps. And I did contact the Monuments Historiques and I made myself very unpopular with some my neighbours by doing so. sounds a bit like “Rhapsody in Blue”.

Q: Do I think that Gershwin was influenced by Milhaud? A: Gershwin, yes, I think that’s probably the way around, because and Gershwin of course came to Paris. They must have met, I’m quite sure they met when Gershwin came to Paris in the 1920s. At that point Milhaud was everywhere and very, very influential.

Ooh, that’d be very sad, Mills College, if it closes. It’s had a very distinguished history. This is Sarah saying her husband Irving Glick, the Canadian composer studied with Milhaud in Aspen.

Q: Do you have any observation of the “Wind Quintet”? A: I don’t know it actually. I mean, he’s such a prolific composer. I’ve got boxes and boxes of CDs of Milhaud, but I haven’t really listened through all of them.

Darius Brubeck taught jazz at Natal University, now there is an interesting connection, isn’t that extraordinary? Srul was one of Canada’s most prolific composers during his lifetime. Most frequently played music of Milhaud nowadays is undoubtedly, really? Is that really true? “La Cheminee du roi Rene”? Well, if it’s the theme music for a radio programme, yeah.

You don’t understand the music? Oh, I’m really sorry about that. I think it’s music that, you know, speaks. It’s not that, I wouldn’t say it’s that difficult. I think it’s speaks to a lot of people. There’s a simplicity about it.

Thank you all very much. And we’re all off to Russia, god help us, for the next few weeks. And I’ll be talking about Russian opera next time.