Do you notice a mistake?
A child prodigy, gifted student, virtuoso pianist, and exceptional sight-reader, Olivier Greif was an absolutely unique artist. His work might disturb, upset, and provoke — but music with such expressive violence, and such freedom from avant-garde conventions, grips the listener so forcefully that we forget the surprising choices of Greif the man and the unorthodox path of Greif the musician.
Marginal to the historiography of French music, he chose to stop composing at the very moment that Pierre Boulez was founding IRCAM. While this retreat had a primarily spiritual motive, Greif had already formed his identity outside of “contemporary music,” breaking every taboo of the dominant ideology: for him, motivic repetition, trivial material, quotation, and insolent affirmations of tonality and modality were all fair game.
The list of Greif’s musical idols reads like an alternative history of twentieth-century music, a far cry from the lineage that runs from Arnold Schoenberg to Darmstadt. We find Gustav Mahler (“the first composer to take all music into himself,” according to Greif),1 Dmitri Shostakovich (whose music gleams like a black diamond, he said), and Luciano Berio (admired for his “demiurgic will to dominate the world by organizing it”).2 He preferred Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux to Boulez, whom he called only an “admirable technician.”3 His pantheon also included Benjamin Britten (who at the very least inspired his interest in the English language), Maurice Ravel (in his dark, cataclysmic moments), and Francis Poulenc (whose complete piano works he recorded).
Greif’s music stands apart not just from the avant-garde but also from other aesthetic currents of the late twentieth century, despite certain affinities with the music of Alfred Schnittke, Philippe Hersant, and Nicolas Bacri. It might appear to align with the neotonal movement, but its tonal or modal qualities, however prominent, emerge organically from the pursuit of creative ideas rather than from any preexisting allegiance. Greif’s music is best labeled “expressionist,” given its intensity; it is full of heart-rending cries, blazing outbursts, desperate energy, a will to possess the listener, to “drag [him/her] to the ground,” as Greif would say.
Greif was postmodern in his rejection of ideologies of artistic progress. “If you want lessons in being modern,” he wrote in his several-thousand-page private journal,
don’t listen to the heralds of the avant-garde. No one knows yet whether their works will stand the test of time; you’re taking a huge risk with them. Instead, go and ask history how it managed to pass down works that still today have the subversive power to drive us mad. Cultural heritage should be your only expert on modernity.4
This kind of sentiment, expressed in 1980, made Greif a herald of nascent postmodernity, his independence from movements and trends notwithstanding.
Greif’s career had three phases. His early works prioritize melody and harmony; they abound with allusions to distant times and places, and often blur the line between high and low art. These instincts were reinforced by his experience in New York and his association with Berio, and later by his exposure to the parallel tradition of American Minimalism, which gives his music its recognizable signature. To Minimalist repetition and variation of simple cells, he added contrapuntal procedures, fragments of borrowed material, and a volatility that veered between explosive violence and soulful lament — echoes, however distant, of blues and gospel (see Le Tombeau de Ravel).
By the mid-1970s, Greif had begun a period of spiritual seeking, and new musical influences followed: Indian ragas in the second movement of the Violin Sonata No. 3 and Japanese Nō theater, from which he took material for his only opera. But his quest for contemplation ultimately led to silence, and Greif gave up composition for ten years.
When his irrepressible need to write finally brought him back, themes that had simmered in the background during his youth — especially his Jewish heritage — moved to the foreground. Greif’s later compositions sought to reconcile spirituality with human emotion. Liberated from individual or egocentric expression, he claimed to be trying to express, and no doubt to alleviate, universal suffering. His favorite word, tellingly, was émotion.
This tripartition of Greif’s career into stages of youth, retreat, and return is complicated by his sudden and untimely death, which casts his whole trajectory in a more meteoric light. His scores reveal less a stylistic evolution than a deep, underlying continuity, even across the 1980s, when he turned to devotional songs and arrangements.
His work is centered largely on chamber ensembles and voice, shaped by his activity as a pianist. It is also characterized by certain thematic and stylistic constants that make his music immediately recognizable to the informed listener.
Lamentation, the shadow of war, and a fixation on death run through the entirety of Greif’s work. Fusing the cultural legacy of Mitteleuropa with sudden violence and an elegiac tone, his music bears the conscious or unconscious memory of the Holocaust.
Greif felt an intellectual kinship with American Jews such as Leonard Bernstein, to whom he dedicated a cantata in 1979, and Woody Allen, whose films he admired with the same intensity he brought to literature. But it was late in life, upon hearing cassette tapes of Yiddish music from Warsaw, that something shifted. In songs from the ghetto, he claimed to find melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic features present in his own early works, as though this music flowed in his veins, unwittingly transmitted by his atheist parents.
Above and beyond this special coloration, Greif’s Sonate de guerre (War Sonata, 1965-1975) for piano refers to the Austrian anthem and to the Nazi-appropriated song “Heili, Heilo, Heila.” But allusions to the genocide remained cryptic at first; the song “Warum sins den die Rosen so blass” (Why Then Are the Roses So Pale, from Light Music, 1974) is dedicated to the memory of Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the resistance within the German military, and Bomben auf Engelland (Bombs on Angel-Land), dedicated to “those among my people who were murdered during the last war,” refers to “a melody sung by Luftwaffe pilots before setting off to bomb England.”
The name Auschwitz appears in Greif’s journal for the first time only much later, in 1993. The reference comes in connection with his composition Lettres de Westerbork, based on the writings of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jew murdered by the Germans. At the time, Greif was also writing his piano sonata Le Rêve du monde, the first movement of which, entitled “Wagon plombé pour Auschwitz” (Sealed Train to Auschwitz), is built around a synagogue chant from the Istanbul tradition. Following the second movement, a “Thrène des désincarnés” (Threnody of the Disembodied), the sonata’s finale, “Un éblouissement de Sri Ramakrishna” (A Bedazzlement of Ramakrishna), introduces a six-note motif associated with the number 173283, the number tattooed on his father’s arm at Auschwitz.
This terrible motif returns in the final of Ich ruf zu dir (I Call to Thee — also the title of a Bach cantata), a work for piano, clarinet, and string quartet, written in memory of his father at the time of his death in 1999. The same spirit pervades the Fourth String Quartet, which ends with a poignant kaddish. Also pertinent is the fifth movement of Portraits et Apparitions, a “procession of Slovak Jewish children” rendered as a despairing grand funeral march. A Slovak theme is introduced, only to be interrupted and ultimately torn apart by a violently contrasting motif.
In similar vein, the fourth movement of L’Office des naufragés (Service for the Shipwrecked, 1998) stands as an archetype within Greif’s body of work. Titled “Yigdal,” it draws from a Yiddish chant — a long, diatonic litany in a quasi-liturgical mode. But the chant is soon confronted by a sonic chaos of staggering intensity. The theme is subjected to dense polyphonic and imitative development, motifs repeated and embellished with micro-variations, transpositions, and superpositions. The form outlines an epic spiritual trajectory, resolved, as it turns out, by a series of variations on a D major chord that bring the last five minutes of the movement to a culmination. Palpably, the shadow of the Holocaust that hovers over Greif’s work has gone beyond the testimonial or memorial level to the metaphysical.
Death is too central to Greif’s work to be reduced to biographical (his family history) or cultural (his Jewish identity) explanations. It appears from the very beginning, his opus 1, the Cinq Chansons enfantines written at the age of eleven. In addition to the Sonate de Requiem for cello and piano, written shortly after his mother’s death in 1978, numerous of his works sound like “songs and dances of death.”5 Battles (The Battle of Agincourt for two cellos), memorials (Am Grabe Franz Liszts, Le Tombeau de Ravel), funeral bells (Les Plaisirs de Chérence), and danses macabres (Quadruple Concerto “La Danse des morts”) follow one after another in unrelenting procession.
In L’Office des naufragés, a work framed by poems from Paul Celan and Virginia Woolf — two artists who drowned themselves — this funereal thread takes on an existential dimension: “The drowned in question,” Greif explained,
are us, are the human being. I suppose I see terrestrial life as a shipwreck, of which the outcome, potentially ranging from annihilation in the dark waves of sorrow to washing up on an island paradise, depends on our will and our destiny.6
His music becomes a liturgical office, asked to heal an existential wound.
This man with “death in the soul”7 never tired of writing serious, sometimes searing music, in what ultimately amounts to an immense set of variations on the minor triad. The key of E-flat minor, associated with death and mourning ever since Schumann, turns up again and again in Greif’s work, from In Memoriam Gustav Mahler (1969) onward. Oscillation around the minor third, a gesture often derived from a popular register in his early music, becomes the emblem of intimate suffering in Portraits et Apparitions, where it drones on endlessly in Minimalist fashion, and, as a fugue subject, in the String Quartet with Voices No. 3. The minor third rings out in the bell-like triads with omitted fifth that punctuate all of his work (they triumph in “Abendphantasie,” the ninth of the Hölderlin Lieder). This same third generates the motif that Brigitte François-Sappey calls “the fingerprint of sorrow”: typically F (or C)–D–A-flat–G–F, an omnipresent calling card that first appears in the Sonate de guerre.
This meditation on death culminates in the String Quartet with Voices No. 3, subtitled “Todesfuge.” In a letter to Jean-Michel Nectoux (the dedicatee), Greif explains his choice of the fugue form, a favorite of his:
It is a form that proliferates, an ‘apotheotic’ form, but also one that, because it coils round itself, brings all rhetoric to a close, like the threshold of the silence of death. Nothing can follow once a fugue has run its course.8
He further intimated that
the impossibility of keeping the music, […] each time that a new motif appears, from turning into a fugue — fugue meaning to flee, and therefore to die — and from proliferating, is clearly an allusion to cancer, to illness, to death.9
His earlier String Quartet with Voices No. 2 had finished with a fugal movement, its subtitle, “The Prey of Worms,” taken from a sonnet by Shakespeare.
This centrality of death does not, however, amount to a revelling in morbidity, nor an existential despair: “I am a tragedian,” Greif insists; “I am not, ever, a pessimist.”10 Evocation of death is not an end in itself, but, as in the Baroque vanitas genre, the core of a metaphysical questioning that is consistently associated with reminiscences of religion. Beyond the Hebraic cantillation and Lutheran chorales scattered throughout his work, Greif turns to Gregorian modality (in his Veni Creator), plainsong motifs (in the opening of the String Quartet No. 4 “Ulysses” and the Dies Irae in La Danse des morts), and diatonic modality tinted with expressive chromaticism (Requiem).
Whether structured as a slow unraveling driven by accumulating tension, as a litany, or as an implacable machine, each of Greif’s works traces a spiritual arc and treats art as a vehicle for higher truth. As Benoît Menut writes, “All his craft seems to bend toward a point of ultimate expression that gives way to salvific silence, or to the silence of fear of the void.”11
Greif’s compositions often chart sweeping agogic trajectories, leading sometimes from drama to redemption, in the spirit of Beethoven; from order to chaos, as in the Piano Sonata No. 19, where tonal melody is overtaken by dissonant clusters; or from struggle to silence, as in Am Grabe Franz Liszts, where a chorale invokes, unleashes, and gradually subdues the chthonic forces of atonality. Across his body of work, Greif returned again and again to what he once called (in reference to his Third Violin Sonata) a “struggle between darkness and light.”
These intense, existential trajectories can be demanding for performers, requiring nothing less than total commitment. One telling example: the performance marking for Le Fantôme d’Enrico Clifford reads, “In a hallucinatory trance state, free.” Trance, in fact, is just as apt a description of the listening experience. In Les Plaisirs de Chérence, tintinnabulation floats over an obsessive ostinato. In Portraits et Apparitions, twenty-seven minor triads open the eighth movement in hypnotic procession.
“I want to bring the listener into the same state of intoxication that comes over me at the moment of creation,” Greif averred. His music functions almost ritually, imposing itself as a total experience that aspires, if not to abolish time altogether, then at least to break through it, reaching for something essential beyond life’s uncertainties.
Greif raised his cult of totality to the status of a religion, in the etymological sense of the word: his work is always re-lating worlds and types of music that might seem antithetical. This is precisely what he admired in Mahler:
When Mahler juxtaposes a Lutheran chorale and a dance band, he does so not in order to emphasize what separates them, but on the contrary to bring out the deep humanity that unites them in the same suffering, the same hope, the same joy.12
The similarities to Mahler are indeed striking, as François-Sappey has well observed:
Many of Greif’s works play with harmonic, rhythmic, or timbral lapses, escapades into the realm of the raucous or the sardonic. Hence the integration of opposites, just as in Mahler — sublime and ridiculous, revolt and resignation, tension and ecstasy, major and minor, all layered into a sonic Tower of Babel.13
This totalizing project is visible in the subtitle of the Piano Quintet “A Tale of the World”: “This had to be a work able to contain the whole world,” Greif explained.
This same perspective makes sense of the various quotations that crisscross his work. Emboldened by Berio’s example, Greif borrowed indiscriminately from Elizabethan music, Beethoven, Schumann, Johann Strauss, Kurt Weill, nursery rhymes, military marches, Uzbek songs, negro spirituals, French chansons (one by Joe Dassin in the Cello Concerto), national anthems (see the incipit of the Third Violin Sonata), football chants (in L’Office des naufragés), even commercial music (in the final snook of the Sonate dans le goût ancien). Each of the Portraits et Apparitions puts distant worlds into contact with each other; the eighth, for example, draws a chorale by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck into the realm of hip hop.
But this pluralistic borrowing differs from collage or postmodern eclecticism. His references are not merely juxtaposed, but placed in deliberate confrontation with one another, part of a deeper dialectical pursuit of unity. This reconciliation of opposites plays out across multiple levels: materially, between the profane and the sacred, the highbrow and the lowbrow, the East and the West, the written tradition and the oral; ethically, between pleasure and asceticism, revolt and resignation, profusion and economy, lyricism and asperity; and stylistically, between continuity and discontinuity, thematicism and athematicism, tonality and atonality.
This com-position — putting together — reflects Greif’s ambition to embrace the fullness of reality, in all its multiplicity and complexity. It also gestures toward a naturalistic ideal. Greif once explained that he sought to “make the musical language work as Nature works, namely by cycles, and thus to show how Nature expresses in reflection, in echo, the incommensurable beauty of God, and how music, in turn, expresses the divinity of Nature.”14
Envisioning art as “the sublimation of form by thought,”15 he ultimately found its raison d’être in such considerations:
If the act of composition still has meaning for me, it exists to testify, through the multiplicity of the musics and sounds available to our ears today, to the multiplicity of experiences of the real, and thereby to the profound unity that suffuses all things.16
1. Olivier Greif, Journal, entry for 11 July 1993 (unpublished, in family archive). ↩
2. Ibid., entry for 19 November 1999. ↩
3. Ibid., entry for 6 January 1976. ↩
4. Ibid., entry for 20 February 1980. ↩
5. The expression is from Brigitte François-Sappey and Jean-Michel Nectoux (eds), Olivier Greif, le rêve du monde. Essais, témoignages et documents (Château-Gontier: Aedam Musicae, 2013), p. 69. ↩
6. Interview, 1999, on DVD Les Incontournables. Olivier Greif, compositeur (ABB Reportage, 2013). ↩
7. The expression is Jean-Michel Nectoux’s; see Olivier Greif, le rêve du monde, p. 75. ↩
8. Ibid. (quoting a letter of 30 July 1998). ↩
9. Ibid. ↩
10. Ibid., quoting a letter of 10 January 1998 to Jean-Michel Nectoux. ↩
11. Ibid., p. 177. ↩
12. Greif, Journal, entry for 11 July 1993. ↩
13. See Olivier Greif, le rêve du monde, p. 65. ↩
14. Greif, Journal, entry for 2 January 1993. ↩
15. Ibid., entry for 19 November 1999. ↩
16. Ibid., entry for 11 July 1993. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?