A Modest Master
SIMON, JOHN
On Music A Modest Master By John Simon WHAT'S IN A NAME? The French composer Germaine Tailleferre (18921983) was born Germaine Marcelle Taillefesse, but probably for the sake of...
...They would meet on Saturdays at Milhaud's and, at concertizing's end, progress to a favorite restaurant...
...The first movement is stately, meditative, discreetly melancholy, but with a brief incursion of breakneck flightiness near the middle...
...Germaine fell fatally in love with Thibaud, but could neither tolerate his long absences on tour nor ever after wholly get over him...
...Germaine divorced Jean and devoted herself to raising the disturbed Françoise's daughter by her first husband, Elvire de Rudder...
...Back in New York, Ralph shot himself, saying in his farewell letter that he couldn't get over Carlotta...
...Ralph tried to shoot the child in her belly, insisting it would not affect her...
...It is amusing, light music that causes people to compare me at times to the minormasters (petits-maîtres) of the 18th century, which makes me very proud...
...Especially fascinating are the slow middle movement with a mysterious flute melody that is quietly, teasingly disturbing, and the roisterous rondo of the third movement to which the snare drum adds brash closing punctuation...
...It's crazy how young and fun an old lady can be," the critic of Le Figaro wrote, confirming Milhaud's much earlier comment that "Germaine's music is always 20 years old...
...It again demonstrates the composer's composite approach: part coolly neoclassical in the Scarlattian mode, with much counterpoint and a double fugue of sorts, part touchingly sweet, notably in the third movement's piano cadenza...
...She taught both privately and, for a time, at the Schola Cantorum...
...Gabriel Marcel aptly called it "an explosion of sunny delight...
...This musical bipolarity, the knack of both encompassing modernity and harking backto the 18th-centuryFrenchharpsichordists, is not a sort of schizophrenia, but the resourceful melding of the feminine and masculine, the graceful and the granitic...
...the engaging 1952 Concertino for flute, piano and chamber orchestra comprises four dance-like movements...
...Intermezzo is in barcarole rhythm—you can hear waves lapping the side of the boat...
...Musique pour piano, harpe et chant (Nuova Era 7341) contains among other good things the haunting song "La Rue Chagrin," for which Germaine's niece wrote the words...
...That features, in addition, the enchanting 13-minute Trio for piano, violin and cello, a most youthful, melodious, and inventive work, written at age 86...
...Piano and Percussion in theXXth Century (Dynamic 2010) offers Hommage à Rameau (1964), a toughly angular, very masculine work for two pianists and four percussionists, with an infusion of tongue-in-cheek deviltry...
...The two contributions by Germaine, Valse des dépèches ("Waltz of the Telegrams") and Quadrille, are exquisite...
...Françoise later married a Polish prince...
...In a duet with the noted pianist Marcelle Meyer, Tailleferre played her Jeux de plein air ("Outdoor Games"), and so enraptured Satie that he declared her his "musical daughter" and conscripted her into his group of protégés, Les nouveaux jeunes ("The New Young Ones"), which included Auric, Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Louis Durey...
...SOMEWHAT LESS HAPPY than her music was Germaine's love life...
...We get here a pentatonic scale, polyharmony, polytonality, and clusters, suggestive of slow Oriental dance, but also tuneful quotations from Ravel...
...Perfectly apt is the title Tailleferre gave to her brief reminiscences, Mémoires à l'emporte-pièce...
...Happily there is the Concerto Grosso for two pianos, singers, saxophones, and orchestra of 1934 (Elan 2298...
...impregnated with the clearest and nimblest musical mind...
...Wagner, Stravinsky, and even Debussy are beautiful octopuses...
...Tubercular and an abusive drunk, Jean would jealously spill ink over her manuscripts, repeatedly toss their daughter Françoise down the stairs, and eventually force Germaine to share their apartment with his mistress...
...This most often recorded and performed work of Germaine's alludes to Scarlatti in its soberly dignified opening Allegretto and incomparably lively closing Perpetuum mobile, the two separated by a wonderfully introspective, vaguely slow-tangoish middle movement...
...Germaine charmed everyone, whether playing duets with George Gershwin or clowning around with Charles Chaplin, arousing Ralph's jealousy...
...Young Germaine's career was symbolically inaugurated by a kiss on the forehead from Erik Satie...
...Tailleferre was to prove marvelously diverse...
...Between them, these two pieces of less than five minutes joint duration encapsulate the composer's modest yet exquisite range, her songful but never soupy élan...
...Nor can we get the important collaborations with such poets as Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Philippe Soupault, and Jean Tardieu, or the copious stage and film music...
...On the tomb," Shapiro tells us, "a small plaque with a sculpted rose reads simply, ? notre maître,' placed there by the children and friends of the Ecole Alsacienne in homage to 'the lady of the dictionary...
...There was little here of what Milhaud called, with reference to others, "nicelyscented young-lady music," but rather, in Cortot's words, "a lively and witty expression of a sprightly temper...
...Contemporary photographs of her reveal an attractive round-cheeked blond and fair-complexioned young woman, with short silky hair, large dreamy eyes, a slightly aquiline nose, shapely mouth, and firm but rounded chin...
...Despite some slow tempi, they constitute a nice introduction to Tailleferre's oeuvre...
...the second, Valse brillante, dedicated to another charmer, Vittorio Rieti, has the saucy sprightliness she was equally adept at...
...Much more classical is the 1917-19 String Quartet, only 10 minutes long and beautifully played on Troubadisc...
...On Cambria 1085, you will find the two splendid but very different violin sonatas of 1921 and 1948, plus the violin sonatina and much more...
...Whoever approaches them is hard put to escape their tentacles...
...A worthy new CD (Timpani 1C1069) of the violin, cello and piano music includes the first version of the Trio's second movement, and a graceful miniature it is...
...Herewith some of its pronouncements...
...Notes sans musique, "In reaction to the Impressionism of the post-Debussyists, the musicians wanted a robust art, clearer and more precise, while remaining human and sensitive...
...All music to be listened to with one's head in one's hands is suspect...
...After 1921 the group collaborated only once, on Cocteau's surreal and satirical work of that year for Rolf de Maré's Swedish Ballets, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel ("The Newly weds of the Eiffel Tower"), and even this without Durey, whose joining the Communist Party took him in other directions...
...She proceeded to win first prizes: for sight-reading, harmony, and counterpoint...
...Her last major effort, the Concerto de la fidélité, was performed with the soprano Arleen Auger at the Paris Opera in 1982...
...The group's sources of inspiration were to be the music hall and the café-concert, the circus and the street fair...
...Notwithstanding marked successes as a composer, she kept taking lessons from Charles Koechlin, and she enjoyed long country rambles with Maurice Ravel, who gave her unofficial counseling...
...Moving to France, the Bartons entertained le tout Paris in their sumptuous apartment...
...It's nicely recorded on The Music of Germaine Taillefeire, volume II (Helicon 1048...
...The nightingale sings badly...
...Finally, the aforementioned Groupe des Six ballet, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, is available on Adès 14.146.2, conducted by Milhaud, or, with the addition of a small missing part, on Chandos 8356...
...from 1910, the Premieres Prouesses ("First Prowesses...
...By that time Germaine had won several prizes, and her works were often heard on Radio France...
...But few of her larger works are on CD, and none of the three ballets or dozen operas and operettas...
...That the family name was changed to Tailleferre is understandable: Taillefesse, if such a word existed, would mean buttock-carver, and who, except perhaps a plastic surgeon, would want it...
...The first, Valse lente, dedicated to the delightful composer Henri Sauguet, has an intoxicatingly melancholy sweetness that never turns saccharine...
...As she herself said, "I am no great respecter of tradition...
...Particularly difficult were the World War II years in America, with Jean a minor diplomat in Washington and Germaine in Pennsylvania, unable to learn English and depending utterly on Françoise...
...Further, the important Harp Sonata (1957), commissioned by that supreme harpist Nicanor Zabaleta, and frequently played by him to popular acclaim...
...We need a music for everyday...
...At age four, she started with piano lessons from her musically gifted mother...
...She told Françoise she wouldn't want to live if she stopped composing, and compose she did till a few weeks before her death at 91...
...It is available, a bit too draggily (almost six minutes) on The Music of Germaine Tailleferre, volume I (Helicon 1008), and on a German recording (Troubadisc 1406) a bit too fast (just over three minutes...
...The eminent art patroness Princess Edmond de Polignac (née Winnaretta Singer, the sewing-machine heiress) was so impressed by Tailleferre's ballet, Le Marchand d'oiseaux ("The Bird-Seller," 1923)—unfortunately, like so many of her more than 300 works, unrecorded— that she commissioned the Piano Concerto (1923-4), Germaine's first major success in Paris and America...
...It's rather as if I wanted to express myself in Chinese...
...As Milhaud put it in his memoir...
...It manifests itself clearly in a short piece such as the highly characterful Image of 1918 for flute, clarinet, oboe, piano, and string quartet...
...But the Six remained friends for keeps...
...The first movement is poised and contemplative...
...The second movement begins rather cautiously, but soon switches into a rich but controlled melodiousness...
...She seldom allowed herself the languorous melodies of Poulenc, strong as their friendship remained...
...A friend called it "A blond music...
...Pastorale is bouncy and faintly Brazilian-accented...
...Germaine admired the latest musical trends, but modestly declared, "I haven't the strength to cope with them...
...It's a little late to start learning...
...It is not great music, I know...
...She was fond of the kids, and once they were shown an article on her in a dictionary, their respect for her grew...
...it pleased both critics and audience, but never received another performance...
...Moving again to Grasse, Germaine got pregnant...
...At age 84, she supported herself by playing piano for the rhythmic dancing of children at the Ecole Alsacienne...
...Eugene O'Neill...
...It is equally well played on Helicon I, which includes the Chansons populaires françaises (1952-5), five unassuming settings of old songs m a simple, slightly archaizing mode...
...But for doing Stravinskian improvisations she was kicked out of organ class...
...Let me call a few other CDs to your attention...
...Thus, quite arbitrarily, àia Les Six, or le Groupe des Six, come to be, with much in common and at least as much not...
...Tailleferre, on the other hand, is highly respectable...
...In it there was, together with a Laurencinish charm and playful prettiness, an often sturdy, angular and sometimes experimental aspect, with sentiment judiciously parceled out...
...She composed, as it were, to Cocteau's order for "music of human proportions...
...Zabaleta commissioned it after successfully performing the Tailleferre Concertino for Harp and Orchestra of 1927, premiered by the Boston Symphony...
...Here also is the Arabesque for clarinet and piano (1972-3), three minutes of sheer tuneful loveliness...
...She also had a license for flying hot-air balloons...
...The third propels a melody not unrelated to that of the second into rhythmically intensive vivacity and ends in a delicately dying fall...
...Also the aforementioned Two Waltzes, played rather too slowly, as well as the exquisite Fonane for flute and piano, and the virile Gaillarde fortrumpet and piano, both of 19 72...
...On Helicon II, Nicole Paiement conducts, besides the already mentioned Piano Concerto, the extremely beautiful and stirring Partita for flute, oboe, clarinet, and strings (1962), long believed lost...
...The music journalist Henri Collet dubbed them—in contrast to the mighty Russian Five—the French Six...
...the second has a rocking, tiptoeing, adorably wistful quality...
...That 16-minute piece, scored for a modestsized orchestra, nevertheless achieves lushly coloristic effects ranging from tickling, Satiesque cheekiness to moments of almost neoromantic bravura...
...the French idiom style à l'emporte-pièce translates as a style with punch to it, emporte-pièce being a punch used for stamping sheet metal...
...The work is ably recorded as part of Music for Two Pianos & Piano 4-hands by the Clinton-Narboni Duo (Elan 2278), along with much else of grace and verve...
...Some of her early works were performed by the celebrated duo comprising the great violinist Jacques Thibaud and equally great pianist Alfred Cortot...
...Walter Labhart has called this an"estheticallypathbreaking montage in which the simultaneity of the dissimilar is carried to extremes...
...at five, she was working on an opera with the awesomely precocious title Sur les Lieux du malheur ("On the Sites of Misfortune...
...Indeed, Germaine's is a music neatly cut out and sharply chiseled...
...Its first half is a stately English waltz...
...Cocteau famously characterized her as a "Marie Laurencin for the ear," but this does not really describe her music...
...later also for fugue, and finally accompaniment...
...She herself stated, "Overall, I have barely changed since I first composed when I was six...
...the concluding Rondo is irresistibly cheerful...
...Similarly believed lost until recently...
...GerMaine always exhibits self-depreciation— viewed by Robert Shapiro as low self-esteem...
...On Exposition Paris 1937 (Etcetera 1061), Bennett Lernerplays—along with the fascinating works of 16 other composers—Tailleferre's contribution to the event, Au Pavillon d'Alsace...
...Escaping his shots, Germaine had a miscarriage...
...What she could achieve, though, is succinctly illustrated by her Deux Valses of 1928 for two pianos...
...Wagnerian fog and Impressionist mists were to be shunned...
...These promenades were abruptly halted for no known reason...
...It is ably performed by Jo Ann Falletta and the Women's Philharmonic with Gillian Benêt on harp (Koch International 7169...
...The violin sonatas are well played on Dynamic 223, too, and on the aforementioned Troubadisc...
...The third is all dancing merriment, peppered by a few nervy discords, and ending snappily in a quick, sudden flourish...
...The French composer Germaine Tailleferre (18921983) was born Germaine Marcelle Taillefesse, but probably for the sake of brevity—epitomized by her work—she dropped the Marcelle...
...Germaine, who over the years got to know almost all the leading composers, writers and artists, followed the advice Picasso gave her to keep reinventing herself...
...Germaine, the youngest of five children, was born in a Paris suburb to a middle-class family and showed musical aptitude almost from the cradle...
...its second, a delectable Wagnerian pastiche...
...By age 12, she was accepted as a pupil of the sternly exacting Eva Meyer-Sautereau of the Paris Conservatory, though she had to be sneaked to her lessons past her father, who considered musicians no better than boulevard prostitutes...
...Germaine composed little until she returned to France after the War...
...By 1911, her classmates and subsequently lifelong friends were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Georges Auric, all of whom she beat out for those gold medals...
...Their irreverent bible was a book of impudent aphorisms by Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et le harlequin ("The Rooster and the Harlequin," 1918...
...Germaine's circumstances were straitened...
...I make music because it is fun...
...You would never guess which of these tiny, endearing sixmovement pieces was written at 87, and which at 18...
...Germaine tatlleferre is buried at Meaux near the Marne in a family grave without a name...
...The Opera audience heartily applauded the fragile silhouette in the balcony...
...Not without considerable skill in painting, she excelled at needlepoint, which in 1932 earned her an exhibition...
...Tailleferre's second marriage, to the French lawyer Jean Legeat, was hardly better...
...From 1979, on the same disc (and on Elan 2278), is the Suite burlesque for piano-four-hands...
...Satie shows a white road where everyone can freely mark his footprints...
...Nocturne is mild and songful...
...There are other, shorter pieces on the two Helicon discs...
...Sung to a wordless text that uses eight mixed voices as instruments, the piece has infectiously merry outer movements framing a yearning middle one...
...It is a homonym of taillefer, which would mean iron-carver, and was the name of a fabled Norman trouvère (troubadour) who accompanied William the Conqueror's Army to England in 1066...
...In America, still not over Thibaud, she married the neurotic cartoonist Ralph Barton, who carried a torch for his ex-wife, Carlotta Monterey, better known as Mrs...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
