Michel Legrand

• Born: February 24, 1932
• Birthplace: Bécon-les-Bruyères, France
• Died: January 26, 2019
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

French film-score and musical-theater composer

Legrand was an important jazz artist in the 1950s and 1960s, but his film scores of the late 1960s and 1970s had a large impact on later composers and the development of the “hit song” movie.

The Life

Michel Jean Legrand was born in 1932. His father, Raymond Legrand, was a film composer who abandoned the family when Legrand was a young child. Legrand was a piano prodigy, and he studied at the Paris Conservatory with the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Legrand’s first album, released in the United States in 1954 as I Love Paris, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. When Legrand arrived with Maurice Chevalier as the French singer’s musical director on an American tour in 1955, Legrand discovered to his surprise that he was already a star.

In the late 1950’s, Legrand scored many French films made by new wave directors such as François Reichenbach, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, and Legrand were turned down by many producers before Mag Bodard agreed to produce their The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which all the dialogue is set to music. The film made Catherine Deneuve a star, and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1964. It was also adapted for stage and performed in New York City, Paris, Montreal, Helsinki, and London.

Legrand’s first big Hollywood success was The Thomas Crown Affair, which marked the beginning of a long collaboration with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Legrand won his first Academy Award for Best Song and a Golden Globe Award for “The Windmills of Your Mind” from this film. He won two more Academy Awards, for Original Dramatic Score for Summer of ’42 and for Original Song Score or Adaptation Score for Yentl. Legrand received thirteen Academy Award nominations in total and won five of the seventeen Grammy Awards for which he was nominated. He also received a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Summer of ’42 and a second Palme d'Or for 1971's The Go-Between.

Legrand never limited himself to one type of film and contributed music to some 250 movies. His scores run the gamut from the Cold War standoff Ice Station Zebra to an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, along with swashbuckling adventures such as The Three Musketeers, the biopic Gable and Lombard, a James Bond film Never Say Never Again, and director Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear. Legrand ventured into television with his scores for Brian’s Song and A Woman Called Golda and went on to score about a dozen other made-for-television movies and miniseries. In 1989 he wrote and directed the film Cinq jours en juin (five days in June).

Legrand promoted his jazz and symphonic career at the same he worked as a film composer. He collaborated with such jazz greats as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Stéphane Grappelli, and Sarah Vaughan. Legrand arranged and conducted most of Barbra Streisand’s 1966 album Je m’appelle Barbra, and he collaborated with her on the film Yentl. His concert performances include appearances with many major American and European orchestras. Legrand’s discography stretched across more than sixty years and many musical genres and encompassed more than one hundred records.

Legrand also composed music for stage productions, several of which were mounted in Paris, and the commissioned ballet Liliom, performed in Hamburg, Germany, in 2011. His first and only Broadway musical, Amour (the English translation of 1997's Le passe-muraille), ran for only seventeen performances in 2002, but it garnered five Tony Award nominations. Legrand's opera Dreyfus received its world premiere in 2014 in Nice, France.

For his career achievements, Legrand was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1990. He was also presented an ASCAP Gold Life Achievement Award and a Living Jazz Legend Award in 2007, named an officer of the French Legion of Honor in 2003, and awarded an honorary degree from from Western Michigan University in 2016.

In his final years, Legrand conducted and wrote classical chamber and orchestral music. He also continued to perform concerts, even embarking on world tours for his eightieth and eighty-fifth birthdays in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Legrand died on January 26, 2019, outside of Paris.

The Music

Legrand’s musical style, heard in his recordings and in those he has arranged and produced for other performers, has a 1960s jazz sound. The composer never turned to rock and roll, and he never adopted some of the stylistic developments found in the Walt Disney films of the 1980s and 1990s or in the Broadway musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Jonathan Larson, and others. Legrand is noted for a spare use of thematic material, and in several films he used the music from one song for most of the music in the picture (for example, “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42). He tended to let important bits of dialogue stand on their own without any underscoring. Although this may be a director’s instructions rather than his own preference, it suggests that Legrand is more comfortable composing on a small scale rather than on a large scale.

Early Works. Legrand was only twenty-two when his album I Love Paris, which also featured Davis, became a best-selling instrumental recording. On a trip to the United States in 1958, he teamed up with Davis again, as well as Coltrane, Bill Evans, and other jazz greats for treatments of standards such as “’Round Midnight” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” on the album Legrand Jazz. Legrand composed the music for more than two dozen French-language films before his work on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg brought him to the attention of Hollywood.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.Demy and Legrand call their remarkable 1964 motion picture about the doomed love affair between a shopkeeper’s daughter and an auto mechanic sent to fight in Algeria a musical, but it is more accurately described as an opera, since all the dialogue is sung in a light, parlando style reminiscent of the older opéra comique (French comic opera). Audiences had never seen auto mechanics singing before, and the somewhat predictable plot is redeemed by the striking final tableau as the now wealthy heroine drives away in the snow from her former boyfriend’s gas station.

This is considered a masterpiece of late-twentieth-century film music. The singsong vocal writing is conversational, with no grand ensembles or even duets, and it fits the petit bourgeois setting perfectly. Most of the time the vocal lines (which were dubbed for the actors) do not double lines in the orchestra, and there are few soaring moments aside from the song that became Legrand’s first film hit, “I Will Wait for You.” Legrand aptly described the music as “a scoreful of hankies.”

The Thomas Crown Affair.In his first big Hollywood success, Legrand won an Academy Award for the song “The Windmills of Your Mind,” to lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who became regular collaborators. They worked with Legrand on the songs for Yentl fifteen years later. Legrand’s arching melody and minor inflections make this song well suited to the story of a doomed love affair between a wealthy bank thief and an insurance investigator. It famously is first heard as the hero is seen soaring overhead in a glider. The song is actually sung in the scene, which is not always the case with Legrand’s later hit songs, where only the music is heard in the course of the film (for example, “The Hands of Time” in Brian’s Song). Sting performed “The Windmills of Your Mind” in the 1999 remake of the motion picture.

Ice Station Zebra.Released the same year as The Thomas Crown Affair, this was one of Legrand’s first big Hollywood blockbusters, a Cold War standoff in the Arctic starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, and Patrick McGoohan. Legrand’s music for the American submarine as it races to beat the Soviets to a downed spy satellite has a surging Victory at Sea (1952) sound, and his use of dissonant electronic techniques when the submarine is stuck under the ice conjures the weird, frozen underwater world. Legrand leaves most of the dramatic situations without underscoring, but his subtle scoring for the final Russian-American confrontation shows that he is able to do it effectively.

Brian’s Song.This 1971 television motion picture tells the story of the friendship between Chicago Bears football players Brian Piccolo and Gayle Sayers as they confront racism toward Sayers and an aggressive cancer that sidelines and eventually kills Piccolo. The song “If the Hands of Time” became another hit for Legrand, although it is never sung in the film. The music for it, on the other hand, provides the majority of the underscoring. Monotony is avoided by Legrand’s use of various instrumental settings, not just his trademark piano and light orchestral sound, and the use of some interesting thematic transformations not found in other films, where the hit song forms the basis for most of the score, such as Best Friends, with the underrated song “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”

Lady Sings the Blues.This biopic about jazz singer Billie Holiday allowed Legrand to return to his jazz roots. Holiday’s songs, such as “Strange Fruit,” sung by Diana Ross, provide much of the music in the film. Legrand shows his light hand when it comes to underscoring dramatic scenes, though on occasion it seems that the director told him a scene needed music and the composer was not sure what to use (for example, the jazzy score when Holiday comes upon the lynching, or the almost ironic romantic strings in the scene where she is found shooting heroin and her lover leaves her). Although Holiday’s life would seem to be ideal material for Legrand, ultimately his score for this film is not one of his most successful.

Yentl.Legrand’s Academy Award–winning score for Streisand’s 1983 musical setting of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story does not emphasize Jewish elements, aside from the funeral early in the film and the scene where Yentl cuts her hair and begins her transformation into a boy. Alert listeners can catch a suggestion of cantillation in the song that became one of Streisand’s signature numbers, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” On the whole, however, the songs are in Legrand’s characteristic romantic style and would not have been out of place in any of his Hollywood films made in the previous two decades.

Musical Legacy

Legrand’s many awards and nominations reflect the admiration his musical colleagues held for him. In addition to his own scores and recordings Legrand conducted, arranged, and produced recordings for many of his contemporaries over more than six decades. Legrand’s work in jazz enhanced his reputation, and he was an important influence on other jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the composer never developed a style beyond this early sound to attract younger musicians and audiences. Legrand is celebrated more for individual songs from his films than for the films’ scores.

Principal Works

film scores:Le Triporteur, 1957 (The Tricyclist); L’Amérique insolite, 1960 (America as Seen by a Frenchman); Une femme est une femme, 1961 (A Woman Is a Woman); Eva, 1962; Love Is a Ball, 1963; Bande à part, 1964 (The Outsiders); Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964 (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg); La Vie de château, 1966 (A Matter of Resistance); Ice Station Zebra, 1968; Play Dirty, 1968; The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968; The Picasso Summer, 1969; Wuthering Heights, 1970; Brian’s Song, 1971 (television); Summer of ’42, 1971; Lady Sings the Blues, 1972; La Vielle Fille, 1972 (The Old Maid); Portnoy’s Complaint, 1972; Cops and Robbers, 1973; A Doll’s House, 1973; The Three Musketeers, 1973; Le Sauvage, 1975; Gable and Lombard, 1976; Gulliver’s Travels, 1977; The Other Side of Midnight, 1977; Mon premier amour, 1978 (My First Love); Atlantic City, 1980; Les Uns et les autres, 1981 (Boléro); Best Friends, 1982; A Woman Called Golda, 1982 (television); Never Say Never Again, 1983; Yentl, 1983; Train d’enfer, 1985 (Hell Train); Switching Channels, 1988; Dingo, 1991; Prêt-à-Porter, 1994 (Ready to Wear); Les Enfants de Lumière, 1995; Les Misérables, 1995; Madeline, 1998; Cavalcade, 2005; J’ai perdu Albert, 2018; The Other Side of the Wind, 2018.

musical theater (music): Of Love Remembered, 1967 (libretto by Arnold Sundgaard); Le passe-muraille, 1997; Amour, 2002 (libretto by Didier van Cauwelaert); Marguerite, 2008.

Principal Recordings

albums: I Love Paris, 1954 (with Miles Davis); Legrand Jazz, 1958 (with Davis, Bill Evans and John Coltrane).

Bibliography

“Biography: Michel Legrand—A Lifetime of Exquisite Melody.” MichelLegrandOfficial.com, 2017, michellegrandofficial.com/biography. Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.‌

Cook, R. M., and Brian Norton. The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. 8th ed. Penguin, 2006. Accessible reference for listings and reviews of Legrand’s jazz recordings.

Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Translated by Richard Neupert. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Although there is only a brief mention of Legrand, this book describes the world of early French cinema in which Legrand honed his craft.

Riggs, Thomas, ed. Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television. Gale, 1992. Detailed, standard biography of Legrand, with extensive list of works and discography.

Santopietro, Tom. The Importance of Being Barbra: The Brilliant, Tumultuous Career of Barbra Streisand. St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Detailed account of Legrand’s collaborations with Streisand, including the making of Yentl.