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  • Varèse: Astronomer in Sound
  • Charles Wilson
Varèse: Astronomer in Sound. By Malcolm MacDonald. pp. xx + 423. (Kahn & Averill, London, 2003, £24.95. ISBN 1-871082-79-X.)

For a relatively small independent publisher to issue a substantial monograph on a twentieth-century composer—not least one whose surviving [End Page 503] output amounts to barely two hours of music—testifies to some commitment in these ungenerous times. In his dedication, Malcolm MacDonald writes that Morris Kahn, of Kahn & Averill, 'wanted to see "what I had to say about Varèse" '; and it is soon clear that he has plenty to say, much of which may not be radically new but has long awaited collation between a single pair of covers. If it is not too optimistic to speak of a 'market' in Varèse books, then there has certainly been a gap in it, with, as the author recognizes, little 'between the biographical and the technical' for the 'inquiring but non-academic music lover' (p. xiii). This is therefore likely to become, at least in English, the book of first resort—a reason, perhaps, for tempering the rightful celebration with a degree of caution.

The book's subtitle makes immediate reference to one of Varèse's many aborted projects, a stage work known either as L'Astronome or The One All Alone, at which he worked intensively during his later spell in Paris (1928–33), assisted by a dream cast of literary collaborators: Alejo Carpentier, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Robert Desnos (Antonin Artaud later drafted a second version of the libretto). Though the work has not survived, a text published in Carpentier's collected writings, hitherto overlooked by Varèse scholars, suggests that a lot more of it may have been composed than was previously thought. Its astrological preoccupations are traced back through Arcana (with its 'seven stars' epigraph from Paracelsus) to the projected Rosicrucian opera Le Fils des étoiles (1906–7) and the lost symphonic poem Les Cycles du nord (1912–13), whose title alludes to the aurora borealis. That L'Astronome stands conceptually (and more or less chronologically) at the centre of the book testifies to the belief that underpins this project—that Varèse's surviving works can only be rightly assessed in the light of the missing links in between. And there are many. The majority of the early works, left in storage when the composer departed for New York late in 1915, were lost around the end of the war in a warehouse fire, while, according to his second wife, the symphonic poem Bourgogne—which received a single Berlin performance in 1910—was destroyed by Varèse himself in the early 1960s. Around this time he also apparently threw out most of his sketches from the 1940s. These included a good deal of the material for Espace, a choral symphony planned, with Skryabin-like apocalyptic ambition, for simultaneous broadcast performance in various capital cities. One fragment, Étude pour Espace (of which the composer conducted a single performance in 1947), survives in manuscript; other material may have found its way into Déserts.

On the early output much valuable information is assembled here. Only one work exists from the pre-emigration period, a setting of Verlaine's Un Grand Sommeil noir that was published in 1906 but only unearthed again for performance in the 1970s. For twenty or so other compositions only documentary or anecdotal evidence survives. The information we have suggests a restless spirit, flitting rapidly from impressionism (Poème des brumes) and regionalism (Bourgogne) to high Romantic grandiloquence (the symphonic poem Gargantua) and low circus frolics (in his projected contribution to Cocteau's planned production of Le Songe d'une nuit d'été, the project to which Satie's Cinq grimaces owe their existence). All this serves as a vital corrective to the myth, propagated above all by Varèse himself ('Moi, je suis l'ancêtre'), of the composer who sprang fully formed into the forefront of 1920s high modernism, an 'orphan' with no past and no patrimony. And, speaking of parricide, MacDonald cannot resist Freudian 'psychologizing' (p. 63) over Varèse's notoriously violent relationship with his...

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