Darius Milhaud

Composer

• Born: September 4, 1892
• Birthplace: Aix-en-Provence, France
• Died: June 22, 1974
• Place of death: Geneva, Switzerland

French composer

Perhaps the most famous composer of the mythical “Les Six,” Milhaud was undoubtedly the most prolific; his published works run to nearly 450. He did highly original work in such areas as polytonality and percussion music. His best work is characterized by a Gallic lyricism.

Areas of achievement Music, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Darius Milhaud (dah-ree-uhs mee-yoh) was born into a well-to-do Jewish family settled for centuries in Aix and in close touch with the region’s cultural life. His father was an amateur pianist, his mother an amateur singer. Piano lessons from his father were followed at age seven by violin lessons from a former Paris Conservatoire prizewinner, Léo Bruquier. In 1902, Milhaud was enrolled at the local lycée, where he distinguished himself academically. By the time he was twelve, he was playing second violin in a string quartet with his teacher, taking harmony lessons, and writing a violin sonata. Léo Latil and Armand Lunel, both promising young writers, were his closest friends; later, Milhaud was strongly influenced by friendship with such writers as Francis Jammes, Paul Claudel, and Jean Cocteau. The many friends he made among writers and painters would influence him as much, if not more, than his contemporaries in music.

After passing his baccalaureate examinations at the age of sixteen, Milhaud entered the Paris Conservatoire primarily as a violin student, though he soon came to see composing as his true vocation. In addition to taking the orchestral class of Paul Dukas, he studied harmony with Xavier Leroux and composition with André Gédalge. Milhaud began to travel widely at this time, a habit he would continue throughout his life, despite a severely disabling case of rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually kept him in a wheelchair. He visited Spain in 1911 and Germany in 1913.

Life’s Work

Milhaud began composing his first major works while at the Conservatoire. In 1910, he began work on an opera, La Brebis égarée, to a libretto by Jammes, for whom he had the opportunity to play and sing the first act. Beginning in 1913, he was engaged in writing the incidental music to Claudel’sProtée; he composed three different versions of this music during the next six years as he tried to suit it to changing plans for production. The year 1913 also found Milhaud at work on Agamemnon, the first of an operatic trilogy based on Claudel’s translation of Aeschylus’s Orestia. He avoided the traditional techniques of incidental music in this work; instead, he employed a novel type of transition from speech to song, one he would also employ in the other two parts of the trilogy.

Milhaud was declared unfit for service on medical grounds when World War I broke out in August of 1914. Returning to the Conservatoire, he was awarded a prize for his two-violin sonata the only prize, he noted in his 1949 autobiography, that he ever won. In 1915, Milhaud composed Les Choëphores, the second part of the Orestia trilogy. This work is especially notable for its utilization of a speaking chorus with percussion and for the introduction of polytonality the simultaneous use of two or more keys which would remain a distinctive feature of Milhaud’s style. In two scenes of Les Choëphores, a woman narrator declaims the text against a backdrop of pitchless percussion while the chorus whistles, groans, and shrieks.

In the autumn of 1916, Milhaud entered the propaganda wing of the government; given military standing, he was assigned to the photographic service. Shortly afterward, Claudel, then better known as a diplomat than as a poet and newly appointed ambassador to Brazil, invited Milhaud to accompany him to Rio de Janeiro as his secretary. In 1917, Milhaud began work on the third part of the Orestia trilogy, Les Euménides (completed in 1922). The sights and native music of Brazil, where he would remain for two years, made an indelible impression on Milhaud. The ballet L’Homme et son désir (1918), the two dance suites Saudades do Brasil (1920-1921), and random parts of many later works all bear witness to the enormous and productive impact that Milhaud’s Brazilian sojourn had on his work. An encounter with the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky had led to L’Homme et son désir, but Nijinsky was no longer able to dance by the time it was completed.

When he returned to Paris in November of 1918, Milhaud was drawn into the Cocteau circle of writers, artists, and composers. Reviewing a concert that included songs by Louis Durey and Milhaud’s fourth string quartet, Henri Collet dubbed these two, along with Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, “Les Six,” apparently an arbitrarily chosen French counterpart to the Russian “Five.” Their differences in temperament and aesthetic outlook precluded them from working together as a unit for very long. Nevertheless, this rather ill-assorted group decided to capitalize on the “Les Six” designation before eventually going their several ways. They collaborated on a Cocteau ballet, Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921), without Durey, and staged a two-year series of Saturday soirées. Milhaud wrote the music for another Cocteau ballet, Le Bœuf sur le toit (1919), named for a popular Brazilian song and produced on a program that included Erik Satie’s Pièces montées, Auric’s Fox-Trot, and Poulenc’s Cocardes. The press found it all very amusing, and the following year, it was put on as a part of a music-hall show at London’s Coliseum.

Milhaud’s collaborations with “Les Six” and works of his own such as Le Bœuf sur le toit soon caused the music public to brand him as an unprincipled and flippant exploiter of fashionable music curiosities. His standing was by no means redeemed by the Rite of Spring-like reception of the first performances of the Protée symphonic suite in 1920 and of the Cinq études for piano and orchestra in 1921. The long-postponed L’Homme et son désir, danced by the Ballet Suedois in 1921, occasioned a similar uproar. Even a relatively conventional piece as La Brebis égarée caused a riot when it was staged in 1923 at the Opéra-Comique. To make matters worse, critics refused to take seriously, as Milhaud intended them to be, the song cycles Machines agricoles (1919), composed of extracts from a catalog of agricultural machinery set to music, and Catalogue de fleurs (1920), musical settings to poems by Lucien Daudet inspired by a florist’s catalog.

Billy Arnold and his band provided Milhaud’s first exposure to jazz when Milhaud visited London in 1920 for a performance of Le Bœuf sur le toit. He soon began to steep himself in all of the American popular music he could find. His friends Clément Doucet and Jean Wiener played a variety of transatlantic blues and ragtime imports. In 1922, Milhaud embarked on a tour of the United States. In addition to making his podium debut as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra for a program he chose, appearing as a pianist, and lecturing at various colleges, he was taken to Harlem to hear jazz firsthand. His announcement to reporters that jazz was the American music that most stimulated him became front-page news. Fired by his exposure to authentic black jazz, Milhaud composed the ballet La Création du monde (1923), which is certainly one of his masterpieces.

Milhaud continued to travel restlessly during the early 1920’s; in addition to the United States, he visited Italy, Sardinia, Palestine, Turkey, and Russia. Part of this travel involved his honeymoon; he had married his cousin, Madeline, an actor. La Création du monde was followed in 1924 by two more ballets: Salade and Le Train Bleu. Salade eventually became Le Carnaval d’Aix for piano and orchestra. In 1925, Milhaud completed the comic opera Esther de Carprentras, which was commissioned by the Princess de Polignac, the heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Also in 1925, he completed Les Malheurs d’Orphée, with a libretto by Lunel. This was the first of several chamber operas that were counterparts to his six chamber symphonies composed between 1917 and 1923. Relatively short in duration, each is scored for a minimum of instrumentalists and singers.

Christophe Colomb, the most imposing collaboration between Milhaud and Claudel, was completed in 1928. Partly expressionistic and partly symbolic, it is an opera on a vast scale. It contains references to the Wagnerian leitmotif, the medieval mystery play, and the Greek chorus. An offstage orchestra, forty-five vocal soloists, numerous nonsinging actors, and a huge chorus were necessary for its execution. The opera was successfully produced in Berlin in 1930 complete with film inserts but it would not be taken up again for thirty years. Almost every facet of Milhaud’s musical personality can be found in this work. The same concentrated musical vitality is not to be found in his later large-scale stage works.

Christophe Colomb was quickly followed by another ambitious opera, Maximilien, which was completed in 1930 and staged in Paris in 1932. In 1929, Milhaud had also begun a career as a writer of film scores. He would eventually write more than twenty-five, but none of them was a major success. In 1932, Milhaud also returned to writing incidental music for the theater, eventually providing scores for thirty-odd dramas.

By the 1930’s, Milhaud had attained international prominence and respect. He was regularly asked to appear at big music festivals, world’s fairs, and other important occasional events. Continuing to combine frequent composition with extensive traveling during the 1930’s, Milhaud often appeared as both conductor and pianist at, for example, the Florence and Venice music festivals. He participated in a congress of music critics convened by the government of Portugal in 1932. The year 1937 saw Milhaud making a number of contributions to the International Exposition, including music for Claudel’s Fěte de la musique.

Milhaud had suffered bouts of illness on several occasions during his travels. Always notably overweight, he began to suffer increasingly from rheumatoid arthritis. In an effort to relieve his pain, Milhaud tried such things as acupuncture and faith healing in addition to consulting conventional physicians. Nothing worked, and he was doomed to suffer pain, which was often severe, for the rest of his life. While he was ailing in 1930, Milhaud’s son Daniel was born.

Milhaud was bedridden at home in Provence during the first year of World War II. After the fall of Paris, he and his wife realized that they had to leave France. Reaching New York in July of 1940, Milhaud and his wife, after recuperating at the home of friends, bought a secondhand automobile and drove cross-country to Oakland, California, where Milhaud was to teach at Mills College. He taught there for the next thirty-one years.

Before fleeing France, Milhaud had begun the first of a series of twelve symphonies for full orchestra. Of these, Symphony no. 3 (1946) is a choral hymn of thanksgiving for victory, no. 4 (1947) is an epic of the 1848 Revolution in Europe, and no. 8 (1957) is a portrait of the Rhone River. Milhaud was seriously ill during 1946, but, by the end of the summer of 1947, he was well enough to return to France. There, he suffered a relapse and was forced to spend much of his time indoors. After August of 1947, despite indifferent health, he combined his post at Mills College with that of professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Among his successful pupils were Morton Subotnick, Steven Reich, Dave Brubeck, Howard Brubeck, William Bolcom, Ben Johnston, Seymour Shifrin, and Betsy Jolas. Together with his wife, Madeline, he became a prime mover at the music school connected with the summer festival at Aspen, Colorado.

During the latter part of his career, Milhaud received many commissions and composed as prolifically as before. In 1952, he composed the opera David, with a libretto by Lunel, for the Festival of Israel in honor of the three thousandth anniversary of King David’s founding of Jerusalem. Milhaud made a special journey to Israel as part of his preparation for this work. In spite of his ill health, he continued an active schedule of composing and teaching until long after his seventieth birthday, which was marked by a number of new recordings and enthusiastic celebrations in France. Ill health finally forced him to resign his post at Mills College and move to Geneva in 1971. Tribute was paid to him in Brussels, Aix, Rome, Nice, and elsewhere on his eightieth birthday. His last work was Ani maamin, un chant perdu et retrouvé, a cantata written for the 1973 Festival of Israel. Milhaud died in Geneva on June 22, 1974.

Significance

Darius Milhaud composed his most enduring works while he was still a comparatively young man. Undoubtedly, his best work was done by the beginning of World War II. After the war, the distinct decline in quality, if not in quantity, may be attributed in part to increasing age, infirmities, and professional commitments. Nevertheless, the real cause of this decline was the war, which cut him off from one of the two primary sources of his inspiration the Provençal landscape of France and its popular music (the other source of his inspiration being his Jewish heritage). Milhaud’s unselfconscious and spontaneous utilization of folk materials give his best work a freshness and an element of Mediterranean lyricism that is conspicuously absent elsewhere. As a folklorist, Milhaud successfully crossed the borderline between popular culture and high art.

In Milhaud’s Provençal landscapes, no less than in those of Paul Cézanne, there is the imprint of the familiar features of the Provençal scene: the dry air, the harsh light, the jagged shape of rocks and trees, and the noisy blend of colors. Both Milhaud and Cézanne achieved a remarkable combination of earthy solidity and rustic simplicity. This achievement would not have been possible in Milhaud’s case were it not for the new dimension of polytonality that he added to the harmonic language of his time. As he saw it, polytonality was a melodic, tonal antidote to the disintegration of the diatonic system. It was not an end in itself, but rather a means of creating the unique atmosphere in which Milhaud created his best music, in which he captured the Mediterranean spirit of Provence better than any other composer.

Bibliography

Bolcom, William. “Reminiscences of Darius Milhaud.” Musical Newsletter 7 (Summer, 1977): 3-11. An affectionate memoir by one of Milhaud’s students, who was later an important composer in his own right.

Brody, Elaine. Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870-1925. New York: George Braziller, 1987. This excellent study chronicles an important chapter in French musical history. Particularly good on the growth of a specifically French musical nationalism and on the new importance of ballet and its function as a focus for artists, writers, musicians, and impresarios.

Collaer, Paul. Darius Milhaud. Edited and translated by Jane Hohfeld Galante. San Francisco, Calif.: San Francisco Press, 1988. This work is valuable for its complete catalog of Milhaud’s works, editions, discography, writings, and translations.

Harding, James. The Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in Paris in the Twenties. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. In this book about “Les Six,” Harding maintains that the group, even though it did not found a school or stimulate disciples, contributed much to the musical flavor of the 1920’s.

Kelly, Barbara L. Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud, 1912-1939. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. Reassesses Milhaud’s contributions to music by focusing on the development of his style from 1912 through 1939, the period before Milhaud left France for the United States.

Milhaud, Darius. Notes Without Music. Edited by Rollo H. Myers, translated by Donald Evans. London: Dennis Dobson, 1952. On the first page of this autobiography, Milhaud proclaims the mainsprings of his musical inspiration: He is a Frenchman from Provence and a Jew in religion.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1906-1907: Artists Find Inspiration in African Tribal Art; January 16, 1920: Formation of Les Six.