The Musical Legacy of Wartime France by Leslie A. Sprout

Author:Leslie A. Sprout
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520275300
Publisher: University of California Press

5

From the Postwar to the Cold War

Protesting Stravinsky in Postwar France

Unlike the war, which left behind death, destruction, and suffering, the occupation inflicted wounds that were not so much physical as moral and political, and that still have not finished healing.

PHILIPPE BURRIN, La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944

STRAVINSKY AND THE EARLY COLD WAR IN FRANCE

In the 1944–45 season following the liberation of Paris, the free weekly performances of the Orchestre national, broadcast live to a nationwide radio audience, introduced French listeners to music that had been inaccessible to them during the German occupation. Manuel Rosenthal, who took over the direction of the orchestra in September 1944, conducted several concerts featuring music by the persecuted (such as Mihalovici on 16 November) and the banned (Prokofiev on 19 October, Hindemith on 22 November). Rosenthal later recalled the sense of urgency he felt about using the Orchestre national as a platform to reinstate the works of composers whose music had been banned: “It was crazy to think that the public had been deprived for so long of so much admirable music, and that is why it was necessary to restore, very quickly, the predilection for such music among the public that was awaiting it.”1 His efforts received steady positive press coverage in the formerly clandestine newspapers of the Resistance, with Georges Auric at Les Lettres françaises, Roland-Manuel at Combat, and Claude Rostand at Carrefour providing informed weekly commentary.

On 11 January 1945, Rosenthal and the Orchestre national inaugurated the season’s most ambitious undertaking: a series of seven monthly concerts devoted to a survey of Igor Stravinsky’s music (table 6). Henry Barraud, director of music at the French national radio, later wrote that he initiated the series, together with Rosenthal, Roland-Manuel, and Roger Désormière, because “we were sure that Stravinsky’s music, with its variations in style, would, in one blow, sweep away the memory of the impressive concerts” that promoted German musical superiority during the occupation through regular broadcasts by the German-run radio station, Radio-Paris.2 The first two concerts, consisting of some of Stravinsky’s best-known works, met with enthusiasm from critics and audience members. Meanwhile, on 27 February in a program by the Société privée de musique de chambre, Parisians had the opportunity to hear the music Stravinsky had composed in America for the first time (table 7). To the dismay of their elders, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, protested noisily during this concert’s French premiere of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes. With the program of the Orchestre national’s third Stravinsky concert on 15 March announced in advance in the press, the students came prepared. As Rosenthal attempted to conduct the French premiere of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods, the students in the balcony made prolonged use of the police whistles they had brought with them expressly for that purpose. Most French critics rose to the composer’s defense. Although the French premiere of the Symphony in C on 12 April passed without incident, the resulting press skirmish lasted into the summer months.

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