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A member of Les Six, Darius Milhaud belonged to the generation of French composers who came directly after Claude Debussy and strove to distance themselves from the highly influential symbolism. Milhaud built a theory around polytonality as a way to move beyond tonality and distinguish his work as avant-garde, even while his use of diatonicism confirmed his work as “Latin,” setting it apart from what he called the “Germanic” chromaticism of Arnold Schoenberg. Milhaud was a central figure in the interwar period in France and Europe, until his exile to the United States during the Second World War.
“The essence of music is melody.” — Darius Milhaud1
Milhaud’s writing developed with direct influence from his teachers’ interests mixing with his own. Besides his first violin teacher, his most significant meeting would be with the composer André Gedalge, whose teachings were fundamental in the evolution of Milhaud’s voice. By age 19, Milhaud was showing an assertive musical personality, though many of his teachers wanted him to use a more conventional compositional style. To this end, they urged him to study counterpoint with Gedalge. Their first lesson left him shaken: upon hearing the beginning of his Sonata for Piano and Violin, op. 3 (1911), Gedalge criticized him for repeating the same note seventeen times on the first page and declared him incapable of writing a melody. He was particularly attentive to melody, challenging Milhaud to write “eight measures that one could play without accompaniment.”2 His counsel left a lasting impression. Throughout his career, Milhaud heeded it as a fundamental principle of composition, as his signature melodies testify. Musicologist Barbara Kelly’s comparative study of the manuscript and the edited version of Alissa, op. 9 (1913, rev. 1931), a suite for voice and piano, demonstrates the care with which he built his melodies. Eighteen years after composing the piece, he reworked the piano’s melodic lines before sending the revised version to the Heugel publishing company.3
Milhaud’s melodies are usually, but not exclusively, diatonic, as in his Chamber Symphony No. 1 (“Le Printemps”), op. 43, from 1917. They are sometimes tonal (such as the theme from the second movement of the Ninth String Quartet, op. 140, from 1935), especially when the material is taken from popular music. And very often they are modal. The themes and modes in his works are highly diverse, as in his early two-volume piano music collection Le Printemps, op. 25 and 66 (1915-1919 and 1920). When Milhaud deemed necessary, his melodies could also be chromatic, as in the Choral from his Symphony No. 4, op. 74, for ten string instruments (1921). Throughout his compositions, melody prevails over all the other elements in the music.
The young Milhaud’s second significant meeting took place in January 1914 when he met Charles Koechlin. The modernism of the elder composer’s musical language deeply moved Milhaud. In a letter to Koechlin, Milhaud wrote: “While listening to your music, Cliquet and I had the feeling of being faced with the music of a magician — the music of a generation that will come after ours.”4 Koechlin and Milhaud made it a habit to analyse music together. They started this activity with Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in July 1914 while Koechlin was visiting Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and they kept at it for years after. During these score analysis sessions, they examined Milhaud’s Les Choéphores, op. 24 (1915), Alissa, and his Viola and Piano Sonata, op. 53; Koechlin’s Chansons de Bilitis, op. 39, and String Quartet No. 2, op. 57; Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912); and works by Bela Bartók and others.5 In many of these compositions, especially Koechlin’s compositions from 1905 to 1908 and the Rite of Spring, Milhaud discovered polytonality — an element that resonated with him and quickly became central to his compositional process: “Without [having felt the need for] any preconceived plan, [polytonality] gave me the feeling of continuing, logically, what was already there inside me — a need for renewal and for progress, without it being necessarily revolutionary.”6
In 1923, in an article for La Revue musicale entitled “Polytonalité et atonalité,” Milhaud tries to synthesize his musical language and the possibilities that polytonality could offer. He defines polytonality as “the development of harmony and diatonic counterpoint” and atonality as “the development of chromaticism.”7 Which of the two he favored is clear in the diatonicism of his own melodies, which are often influenced by popular song and modes from Gregorian chant. In the same article, he distinguishes between two major developments in polytonality: one being melodic, meaning through a juxtaposition of diatonic lines, corresponding to his main compositional process, and the other being harmonic, which, through “rich chordal counterpoint,” is more in line with Koechlin’s polytonality.8
Nearly systematically, Milhaud tested superposing two chords or even three or more. He had high hopes that these new means of composition would be taught: “One can imagine the infinite possibilities of the study of tonal superpositions. It should be added as a supplement to the harmony treatises that are used as basic teaching materials in music schools.”9 At this point in his career, he had found his style, which, as the 443 works of his corpus testify, proved to be an extraordinarily fertile ground for creation.
Milhaud’s use of polytonality is both constant and varied at once. He mainly uses polytonal (usually bi- or tri-tonal, at most) and polymodal melodies. The character of his pieces can be soft, as in the slow movement of his Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, op. 100 (1927); dreamy in the slow movement of his Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone, op. 278 (1947), playful in the beginning of the Second Piano Concerto, op. 225 (1941), or virtuosic and teasing in the third of his Quatre Chansons de Ronsard, op. 223), “Tais-toi, babillarde.” His music can also express violence — as is the case in the beginning of his Symphony No. 8 (“Rhodanienne”), op. 362 (1957) — and despair, as in Orpheus’s lament during the second act of Malheurs d’Orphée, op. 85 (1924).
If Milhaud’s choice of mixed tonalities is often linked to expressivity, it is also connected to symmetry, which he often gives a structural function. For example, in the ballet L’Homme et son désir, op. 48 (1918), he groups the orchestra into several ensembles. In the first movement, he highlights these groupings by composing tight imitative scores for each ensemble — in C major for the first quartet, in E major for the second one, and in A-flat major for the third one. These tonalities were not random: they split the octave in three equal parts (C, E, A-flat).
In Euménides, op. 41 (1917-1923), Milhaud uses polytonality to reinforce the drama of the work. For example, toward the end, the character Aeschylus proposes forgiveness to break the cycle of violence. To represent discord, Milhaud uses six simultaneous tonalities. Then, he progressively reduces the texture to conclude on a single tone, thus highlighting how, in the end, concord triumphs.
An essential key to understanding Milhaud’s approach comes in his autobiography, in the passage where he explains how he experimented with polytonality and explored all the resulting chord combinations and inversions: “I find them more pleasant to listen to [than chords used by previous generations of composers]. A polytonal chord is more subtle in its softness, and more violent in its strength.”10 Subtle softness, and violent strength — these words describe all of Milhaud’s writing. Through polytonal resonances, he enlarged his expressive possibilities so he could obtain starker colors in the forte sections and softer tones in the piano ones.
Somewhat like Bartók, Milhaud integrated folk music into his works in a strong yet simple fashion. Folk melodies being mostly diatonic, it was relatively simple to include them in his music. In discussion with Claude Rostand, Milhaud shared how his Poème sur un cantique de Camargue (1913), op. 13, starts with a folk melody from his childhood. He explored a variety of traditions, ranging from Jewish to South American and Afro-American, as well as from the West-Indies and Martinique: “Of course, I do not merely use these themes without having them undergo some kind of transformation…. If one is to take ancient themes, one must give them a second life to start again with renewed vigor.”11
He lived and worked in Brazil for about two years, enthusiastically discovering its music and welcoming influences from South America into his own compositional language. He existed at the polar end of the-then prominent contemptuous colonialist view — quite vividly stated in some incisive critiques of his Création du monde, op. 81 (1923), a work in which he used jazz rhythms and scales. Milhaud, in contrast, readily expressed his admiration for Brazilian music:
It would be useful for Brazilian musicians to understand the importance of tango, maxixe, samba, and cateretê composers like Tupynamba [Marcelo Tupinambá], or the great [Ernesto] Nazareth. The richness of the rhythms, the infinitely renewed fantasy, the expressiveness, the energy, the highly creative melodies of both masters make them the glory and the gem of Brazilian art.12
The pieces influenced by Brazilian music show the diversity of Milhaud’s compositional processes. For example, in Le Bœuf sur le toit, op. 58 (1919), Milhaud composed the main theme and, for the remainder of the piece, used some twenty authentic Brazilian melodies, almost all of which were by living composers, freely organizing them in a cubist-style collage. In Saudades do Brazil, op. 67 (1920-1921), he composed all the melodies himself based on styles he had heard in Brazil. In L’Homme et son désir, the Brazilian themes undergo an “intense elaboration process.”13 The same type of intense thematic transformation is found in many other pieces: for example, in Kentuckiana, op. 287 (1948), a divertissement based on twenty Kentucky themes, the original themes are rewritten so extensively that they become, in essence, thoroughly Milhaud’s.
In the inter-war period, Brazil and the United States appealed to Milhaud in such a deep way that many have considered that they changed him permanently. Although Brazilian and American themes are found in some of his most popular works, their influence was in fact temporary and can be time bracketed between 1919 and 1923. Five years in the grand scheme of his career is rather short, and though he was readily open to various traditions, he remained, as he states in his autobiography, “a Frenchman from Provence and of Israelite Faith.”14
Here, the order of the words Milhaud used to describe himself is of paramount importance when trying to understand his aesthetic goals. His pieces display the consensual character and techniques that are often attributed to French music, particularly in his sense of brevity and measure and his clear, varied, and broad-palleted orchestration — even with a modest ensemble. His six chamber symphonies act as a manifesto of a French style. For example, the first one, op. 43 (1917), is written for nine instruments and lasts four minutes. But even in his longer works for full-sized orchestra his style remains intelligible. In the same vein of thought, in his perspective, the diatonicism in his pieces marks his music as Latin and positions it in opposition to Germanic chromaticism — it is perhaps a simplistic way to approach music history but nevertheless proves useful when it comes to understanding Milhaud’s music. He was also French in his love for the language and poetry of his country, which guided him to Francis Jammes, Stéphane Mallarmé and, above all, Paul Claudel.
Milhaud integrated Provence in titles and themes of many of his works. His Suite provençale, op. 152 (1936), his Quatre Chants populaires de Provence, op. 194 (1938), the Provençal interlude La Cueillette des citrons, op. 298 (1949-1950), and his Ouverture méditerranéenne, op. 330 (1953), are all works that brought him back to his happy childhood. In those years, he would compose in the family’s garden grove, which was “crisscrossed by little paths bordered with spindle bushes, laurel, chaste trees, loquat, and arbutus trees.”15 His manner of borrowing from Provençal music fit with the usual flexibility of his creative process. For example, in his Suite provençale, he indicated that the themes are from the eighteenth century and many of them from the Campra region. But he also stressed how
as with folklore, one must only make use of these themes to create a new and personal music. This is why one must work freely, without scrupulous concerns regarding respect, which have nothing to do with the matter at hand.16
As for Milhaud’s Judaism, it was somewhat buried in his assumed ecumenist stance. His concerns regarding Judaism only appeared with the traumas of the Second World War. Between 1944 and 1948, he wrote many pieces based on biblical or liturgical texts: Borechou-Schema Israël, op. 239 (1944), Kaddish, op. 250 (1945), Service sacré pour le samedi matin, op. 279 (1947), and Lekha Dodi, op. 290 (1948). Many later works follow suit, namely Le Château de feu, op. 338 (1954), a cantata for choir and orchestra with a text by Jean Cassou, composed “in honor of the Jewish people killed by the Nazis during the war.” Ecumenism permeates all his works. One in particular, Pacem in Terris, op. 404 (1963), seemed to have been closest to his heart. This forty-five-minute choral symphony is composed on the text of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, in which the head of the Catholic Church vehemently denounced “discrimination, racism, injustice, infringement of freedom, atomic weapons, and fervently expressed his desire for universal peace.”17
Looking back at my oeuvre, I do not consider it to have followed a linear evolution as we usually understand it — something that gives a feeling of progress, of growth … As far as I am concerned, I do not see anything of the like. Rather, depending on the piece that I wrote, I see different paths that alternately attracted me.18
While most twentieth-century composers reinvented their voice throughout their careers, Milhaud insisted on the absence of such a line of progress in his work, which underlines the continuity and the unicity of his style. Having attained musical maturity early in his career, he felt no need to change style. Rather, he could focus his energy on exploring the specific constraints of different genres.
His early compositions focus on piano melodies and chamber music. Among his first successful pieces are Sept Poèmes de la Connaissance de l’Est, op. 7 (1912-1913), Poèmes juifs, op. 34 (1916), and the Sonata for Piano, Flute, Clarinet, and Oboe, op. 47 (1918). In parallel, he composed the operatic trilogy L’Orestie (op. 14, 24, and 41 from 1913, 1915, and 1917-1923) based on Claudel’s translation of Aeschylus. He also composed his first ballets, concertos, other operas, as well as his first symphonic works like his Symphonic Suite No. 2 (“Protée”), op. 57 (1919), which caused a stir at its premiere. His very original six chamber symphonies and a series of three minute-operas are also from this period. The former works each last just a few minutes and are for ensembles of four to ten instruments; the later each present a ten-minute synthesis of myths such as L’Enlèvement d’Europe, L’Abandon d’Ariane, and La Délivrance de Thésée (op. 94, 98, and 99 from 1927, 1927, and 1927).
These lyrical works were preceded by others that already contained some typical elements of Milhaud’s style: sharp portrayal of characters and brief scenes, arias, and ensemble pieces. Les Malheurs d’Orphée and Esther de Carpentras, op. 89 (1925), with libretti by Armand Lunel, and Le Pauvre Matelot, op. 92 (1926), with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, figure among these early works. Full-scale operas appear a few years later: Christophe Colomb, op. 102 (1928, rev. 1968), complete with cinematographic projections, Maximilien, op. 110 (1930), Médée, op. 191 (1938), with a libretto by Madeleine Milhaud, Bolivar, op. 236 (1943), based on the poet Jules Supervielle, David, op. 320 (1952-1953), and Fiesta, op. 370 (1958), with a libretto by Boris Vian.
In each case, Milhaud used all his means to reflect in music the feelings expressed by the characters in the text. For example, in Christophe Colomb, joyful passages are underlined with clear tonality and the influence of Latin popular music. The rhythmic liveliness of energetic scenes contrasts with the spoken choir, whose characters question the existence of another world. Similarly, harsh polytonality accompanies heartrending scenes like Orpheus’s lament and the beginning of the third act in Pauvre Matelot at the drama’s point of resolution.
Milhaud’s operas were both acclaimed and frowned upon in their time — a diversity of opinions that does not lead to any real conclusions regarding the general reception of his works. For example, even though Christophe Colomb, with its text by Claudel, was warmly received in Berlin in 1930 — with twenty encores at the end of each act — it was not reprogrammed in Paris in the following years. Nevertheless, his success abroad made his music more influential and eventually led to greater recognition in France.
Alongside composing concert music, Milhaud also wrote scores for the new sound films and for the theater. He composed cantatas on biblical texts or on poems (by Claudel, Supervielle, Lunel, Cassou, Robert Desnos, and Maurice Carême). He worked in all these fields simultaneously, while composing five piano concertos or concertinos, four violin concertos, three viola concertos — the first of which was premiered by Paul Hindemith — two cello concertos, sonatas, duets, trios, eighteen string quartets, and twelve symphonies, among other works.
Milhaud’s impressive corpus is also dotted with experimental projects which, while they did not give rise to actual changes in his writing, still testify to his need to compose music relevant to current trends. In L’Homme et son désir, he wrote the first pages of music that are dedicated exclusively to percussion instruments. He also wrote concertos for instruments that were underrepresented in the solo repertoire: Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestre, op. 109 (1929-1930), Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone, and Concertino d’hiver pour trombone et cordes, op. 327 (1953).
After he first used the ondes Martenot in 1932 in the Le Château des papes, op. 120, he used it regularly from then on. His use of musique concrète techniques in Le Mariage de la feuille et du cliché (1956) is usually not considered as an important representation of his style. A better exemplar can be found in his writing for choir in La Mort du tyran, op. 116 (1932). To represent the violence of the text, Milhaud directed the choir to speak, declaim, and almost scream specific passages. Percussion instruments are put to the forefront. The melodic instruments — a piccolo, clarinet, and tuba — play in such different registers that their melodies cannot blend and their lines are heard discretely.
Many of Milhaud’s other scores call for unusual performance practices. In Musique pour San Francisco, op. 436 (1971), the audience must participate. The famous fourteenth and fifteenth string quartets (1948-1949) can be played either separately or at the same time, creating his Octet, op. 291.
Such aspects reveal no affectation, no posing in Milhaud’s works; one only sees a sincere composer, all his life faithful to the music he wanted to hear.
1. Darius MILHAUD, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, Paris, Belfond, 1992 [1952], p. 23. ↩
2. http://www.musimem.com/gedalge.htm, accessed 1 December 2017. ↩
3. Barbara L. KELLY, “Milhaud’s Alissa Manuscripts,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, CXXI/2 (1996), p. 229-245. ↩
4. Letter from Darius Milhaud to Charles Koechlin, March 1915, “Charles Koechlin 1867-1950, Correspondance,” La Revue musicale, 348-350 (1982), p. 24. ↩
5. Aude CAILLET, “Défense et illustration de la musique française modern: Les Conférences de Charles Koechlin de 1915 à 1918,” in Philippe CATHE, Sylvie DOUCHE, Michel DUCHESNEAU, and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis (eds), Charles Koechlin, compositeur et humaniste, Paris, Vrin, 2010, p. 111. ↩
6. MILHAUD, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, p. 31. ↩
7. Darius MILHAUD, “Polytonalité et atonalité,” La Revue musicale, 4 (1923), republished in Darius MILHAUD, Notes sur la musique, Paris, Flammarion, 1982, p. 188. ↩
8.Ibid., p. 183. ↩
9.Ibid., p. 182. ↩
10. Darius MILHAUD, Ma Vie heureuse, Paris, Belfond, 1987 [1974], p. 60. ↩
11. MILHAUD, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, p. 83. ↩
12. Darius MILHAUD, “Brésil,” La Revue musicale, 1 (1920), republished in MILHAUD, Notes sur la musique, p. 61. ↩
13. Manoel ARANHA CORREA DO LAGO, “Brazilian Sources in Milhaud’s Le Bœuf sur le toit: A Discussion and a Musical Analysis,” Latin American Music Review, XXIII / 1 (2002), p. 9. Aloysio Alencar Pinto and Manoel Aranha Corrêa do Lago identified the original themes; see “Darius Milhaud Le Bœuf sur le toit,” Concert Program Temporada Oficial de Ballet de 1980, Rio de Janeiro, 1980. ↩
14. MILHAUD, Ma Vie heureuse, p. 9. ↩
15. Ibid., p. 15. ↩
16. MILHAUD, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, p. 85. ↩
17. MILHAUD, Ma Vie heureuse, p. 279-280. ↩
18. MILHAUD, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, pp. 67-68. . ↩
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