Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912-1939 (review)

Darius Milhaud's reputation has rested on the popular appeal of the compositions he himself took the least seriously. He blamed his fleeting association with Jean Cocteau and Les Six for both his early fame and his enduring notoriety, and in 1922 he complained, "Must I always write Le Boeuf or the Sérénade?" (Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée [Liège: Mardaga, 1996], 118). Although Barbara Kelly shares Milhaud's frustration, she believes that the ephemeral nature of Les Six is no reason to declare the group irrelevant to Milhaud's career. Previous scholars have had us believe that Les Six was a haphazard group brought together less by aesthetics than by friendship, and that Henri Collet's famous Comoedia article ("Un livre de Rimsky et un livre de Cocteau: les cinq Russes, les six Français et Erik Satie," Comoedia 16 [January 23, 1920]) was responsible for the group's name and formation. In her first chapter, "Milhaud, Les Six, and Musical Politics in Paris," Kelly convincingly demonstrates that the composers themselves sought the group identity as early as 1918, and that they actually enlisted Collet to promote their agenda in the press. It was only after performances of their music led to controversy that Milhaud and the others reconsidered their initial aims, finding it personally advantageous to disclaim the values, particularly the allegiance to Satie, that had brought them together in the first place. Kelly shows that Milhaud's experiences with Les Six—as well as his reasons for leaving the group behind—were crucial components of his subsequent compositional development.

Yet the most informative chapters of Kelly's book concentrate not on Milhaud's departure from Les Six, but on the much earlier transfer of his aesthetic allegiance from Claude Debussy to Satie and the postwar esprit nouveau. In an undated article on Debussy, Milhaud wrote that "we were in such need of an art that was robust, wholesome and more contrapuntal in expression" (Milhaud, "Claude Debussy" [unpublished typescript, Archives Milhaud], 14). For Kelly, the assertion not only demonstrates Milhaud's increasing interest in counterpoint; it also betrays his acceptance of a gendered dichotomy between what he saw as Debussy's "decadent mists" and the "more concise, more healthy and more virile" art he sought to create. Chapter 3, "Works for Music Theatre 1: Collaboration with Paul Claudel," reveals that the playwright shared Milhaud's preoccupation with developing a more masculine form of artistic expression. Kelly uses the surviving letters from Claudel to Milhaud to demonstrate that "the salient features of Milhaud's declamatory style were, in fact, inspired by Claudel" (p. 49). In 1913 Claudel instructed Milhaud to provide him with "a 'music' pared down to its rhythmic element," one in which exaggerated rhythmic declamation would drive home the violence of the text (Correspondance Paul Claudel—Darius Milhaud, 1912-1953, ed. Jacques Petit [Paris: Gallimard, 1961], 37). Whereas in Agamemnon Milhaud responded with misaccentuation of the French text, in the next two installments of the Orestie trilogy he dispensed with melody altogether, turning instead to rhythmic declamation over percussion accompaniment. In chapter 5, "Vocal Music: Texts and Voices," Kelly shows how Milhaud's earliest scores display his initial affinity for Debussy by citing Milhaud's use of note repetition, narrow ranges, and recitative-like rhythms in his 1913 settings of Claudel's Sept poèmes de La connaissance de l'Est and André Gide's Alissa. Kelly takes advantage of Milhaud's atypical decision to revise Alissa in 1931 to demonstrate, with numerous musical examples, Milhaud's transformations of both vocal and piano parts, primarily through the addition of contrapuntal melodies. The 1913 Alissa contained Milhaud's first attempt to set English text (Gide quoted Shakespeare in passing). English held a special fascination for Milhaud, one which Kelly attributes...