leslie sprout - the 1945 stravinsky debates

The 1945 Stravinsky Debates: Nigg, Messiaen, and the Early Cold War in FranceAuthor(s): Leslie A. SproutSource: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 85-131Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2009.26.1.85 .

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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 85–131, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’sRights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jm.2009.26.1.85.

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An earlier version of this article was presented at a panel on music and the early Cold War sponsored by the Cold War andMusic Study Group at the American Musicological Society na-tional meeting in Quebec City in November 2007. I would like tothank Peter Schmelz for inviting me to participate on this occa-sion, and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Peter Schmelz, and the anony-mous reviewers of this journal for their helpful suggestions in re-vising the article. Special thanks to Kathleen Juliano at the DrewUniversity Library for assistance in obtaining research materials.Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1 Concerts by the Orchestre national in the fall of 1944 included a Prokofiev festi-val, a memorial concert for Maurice Jaubert and Jehan Alain (both killed in battle inJune 1940), and the premiere of the French-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici’sSymphonies pour le temps présent, composed when Mihalovici was in hiding in Cannes. SeeRadio 44, the official guide to Radiodiffusion française, for further details.

The 1945 StravinskyDebates: Nigg, Messiaen,and the Early Cold War in France

LESLIE A . SPROUT

Unlike the war, which left behind death, destruction, and suffering,the occupation inflicted wounds that were not so much physical asmoral and political, and that still have not finished healing.

— Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944

After the liberation of Paris in August 1944,French musicians and audiences joined in embracing music that hadbeen inaccessible during four years of German occupation. Free weeklyperformances by the Orchestre national, broadcast live to a nationwideradio audience, featured the works of previously persecuted Frenchcomposers as well as neglected foreigners.1 On January 11, 1945, Manuel



the journal of musicology

Rosenthal and the Orchestre national inaugurated the season’s mostambitious undertaking: a series of seven monthly concerts devoted to asurvey of Igor Stravinsky’s music (table 1). The first two concerts, con-sisting of some of Stravinsky’s most well-known works, met with enthusi-asm from critics and audience members. Meanwhile, on February 27 ina program by the Société privée de musique de chambre, Parisians hadthe opportunity to hear the neoclassical music Stravinsky had com-posed in America for the first time (table 2). To the dismay of their el-ders, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and PierreBoulez, protested noisily during this concert’s French premiere of Stra -vinsky’s Danses concertantes. The program of the Orchestre national’sthird Stravinsky concert on March 15 had been announced in thepress, and the students came prepared. As Rosenthal attempted to con-duct the French premiere of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods, the stu-dents in the balcony made prolonged use of the police whistles theyhad brought with them expressly for that purpose. Most French criticsrose to the composer’s defense. Although the French premiere of theSymphony in C on April 12 passed without incident, the resulting pressskirmish lasted into the summer months.

Boulez’s biographers have interpreted the student protests at the1945 Stravinsky festival as a sign of the growing influence of René Lei-bowitz and his successful promotion of twelve-tone composition in post-war France. As Joan Peyser put it, “Leibowitz was the figure behind thisdemonstration but Boulez was the young man at the center of things.”In their accounts, the February 27 and March 15 concerts are con-flated, and such details as performers and date are omitted. What re-mains constant is the decisive choice young French composers—Boulezchief among them—are said to be making of serialism over neoclassicism.2

By elevating Boulez’s and Leibowitz’s participation in the 1945protests, Boulez’s biographers foreshadow the 1950s debate in the westover the merits of serialism versus neoclassicism, as well as Boulez’sprominent role in that debate. Mark Carroll makes explicit the largerimplications of the biographers’ story when he writes that “Boulez hadjoined classmates of Messiaen’s 1945 harmony class at the Conserva-toire in heckling Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods at the Théâtre desChamps-Élysées because he, like Adorno, was of the opinion that neo-classicism was being used against the innovations of the Second Vien-nese School.”3 Carroll sees the 1945 Stravinsky Festival as a precursor

86

2 Joan Peyser, Boulez (New York: Schirmer, 1976), 33; Dominique Jameux, PierreBoulez (Paris: Fayard/Fondation SACEM, 1984), 30; Jésus Aguila, Le Domaine Musical:Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de creation contemporaine (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 178. See also An-toine Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris: Julliard, 1958), 9–11.

3 Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2003), 96.



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to the return of the composer himself to postwar Paris in May 1952 forL’Œuvre du XXe siècle, a month-long international festival of the arts dur-ing which Stravinsky conducted several of his own works, including theSymphony in C. The indirect funding that the festival received from the State Department and the CIA, together with the artistic biases ofStravinsky’s friend, Nicolas Nabokov, who organized the festival as Secre-tary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, have provided Car-roll and other scholars with a direct connection between Stravinsky’s lat-est music and early Cold War politics.4 By repeating the biographers’

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4 Ibid., 10–11; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and theWorld of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 113–28; Ian Wellens, Music onthe Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Burling-ton, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 45–62. Carroll’s erroneous claim that the 1945 Stravinsky festi-val was associated with 1945 commemorations of the liberation of Paris stems from hismisreading of Goléa’s Rencontres.

TABLE 1

Stravinsky Festival programs, Orchestre national (Paris, January–July 1945)

January 11 Scherzo fantastique, op. 3Suite from The FirebirdLe Sacre du printemps

February 15 Capriccio for piano and orchestraLes Noces

March 15 Jeu de cartesThe Faun and the ShepherdessFour Norwegian Moods, French premiereSymphony of Psalms

April 12 The NightingaleConcerto for Piano and Wind InstrumentsSymphony in C, French premiere

May 24 MavraLe Roi des étoilesApollon musagètePetrushka

June 21 Feu d’artificeSuite no. 1Perséphone

July 5 Suite no. 2Oedipus Rex




version of the 1945 festival, Carroll subsumes the immediate postwar pe-riod in France within a synchronic view of the early Cold War era, one inwhich the polar opposites of the 1950s—U.S./Soviet Union, modernism/socialist realism, serialism/neoclassicism—had become operative evenbefore the fighting in Europe had ceased.

Yet to ignore chronological distinctions between the spring of 1945and that of 1952 is to miss crucial subtexts in the 1945 debates, andthereby to diminish the contributions that the study of very early post-war (and even late wartime) events might make to our understandingof music in western Europe during the Cold War. The predominant in-terpretation of the 1945 protesters as young champions of serialism dis-regards the fact that it was the exoticism and mysticism of Messiaen’smusic, not the serialism of Schoenberg’s, that became the next topic ofdebate in Paris even before the furor over Stravinsky’s music had dieddown. After all, as Carroll notes, the protesting students were still inMessiaen’s harmony class at the Conservatoire, not in private lessonswith Leibowitz. The standard interpretation also erases Nigg’s centralrole in the controversy, for Nigg participated not only as one of the stu-dent protesters but also as a composer and critic. Nigg’s 1944 Concertinofor piano, percussion, and wind instruments was premiered at the Febru-ary 1945 chamber music concert that was the occasion of the initialprotest against Stravinsky; his April 1945 article in the newspaper Com-bat provided the student protesters’ perspective to the press debatesthat followed the protests.5 At the same time, the extent to which the

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5 Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” Combat (April 14–15, 1945), 2. Founded as a clan-destine resistance newspaper in 1941 and edited by Albert Camus from 1943 to 1947,

TABLE 2

Concert program, Société privée de musique de chambre (Paris, February 27, 1945)

Luigi Dallapiccola Tre Laudi (1936–37), with Marcelle Bunlet, soprano

Jacques Ibert Capriccio for ten instruments (1938)

Darius Milhaud Four Sketches (1941), French premiere

Serge Nigg Concertino for piano, percussion, and wind instru-ments (1944), with Monique Haas, piano; worldpremiere

Igor Stravinsky Danses concertantes (1940–42), French premiere



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1945 debates was motivated by the participants’ wartime experiencesforeshadows the enduring legacy of the German occupation during theearly Cold War years in France.

The 1945 protests against Stravinsky were not about the decisiveembrace of a single musical style; rather, they were about the desire ofyoung French composers to play an active role in shaping the postwarfuture of music in France, even as they were still uncertain as to whatstylistic shape that future would take. In 1945, the protesters could ini-tially agree that the latest version of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, almostuniversally embraced by their elders, was intolerably retrospective. Soonafterward, however, the emerging ideologies of the early Cold Warlinked modernist musical styles with political freedom in the west, andmore accessible music with socialist political commitments in the East.These new ideologies divided the protesters and profoundly affectedtheir aesthetic and political developments.

Boulez later wrote that the concerns that Nigg and other youngFrench composers had begun to express immediately after the warabout social commitment and communication with their audiences rep-resented “an ideology that filled me with horror, and that appeared tome above all to serve as a screen for conformity.”6 Yet as Stephen Walshhas pointed out, Boulez’s aggressive refusal to engage directly with poli-tics in his music was atypical: “For those less detached the question ofhow a progressive (that is, avant-garde) art should relate to a progressive(that is, egalitarian) politics was one of the most important issues of theday.”7 Nigg—and not Boulez—represented the experiences and hopesof the postwar generation in two respects: the aesthetic opinions of agroup of young composers whose entire adult musical education hadtaken place during the German occupation of Paris, and the politicalaspirations of the young French men and women who flocked to theFrench Communist Party (PCF) at the war’s end. Nigg joined the PCFin 1944, was a founding member of the Association française des musi-ciens progressistes in 1948, and published several articles in the Frenchpress between 1948 and 1955 on the importance of social commitmentin art. Nigg’s steady political adherence to the PCF from 1944 to 1956contrasts with the stylistic inconsistencies in his music during the sameperiod, during which he experimented with styles as diverse as exoticism

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Combat became one of France’s leading postwar newspapers, with a leftist political orien-tation that was independent of any political party. See Norman Stokle, Le Combat d’AlbertCamus (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1970), 20–38.

6 Pierre Boulez, “From the Domaine Musicale to IRCAM: Pierre Boulez in Conver-sation with Pierre-Michel Menger,” Perspectives of New Music 28 (1990): 7.

7 Stephen Walsh, review of Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, by Mark Carroll,twentieth-century music 1 (2004): 312.




(the 1944 Concertino), strict twelve-tone composition (the 1947 Vari -ations), socialist-realist settings of French folk songs for workers’ cho-ruses (published by Le Chant du monde in 1957), and orchestral music modeled on the works of Vincent d’Indy (the 1954 Piano Con -certo). Nigg’s participation in the 1945 Stravinsky debates gives us oc-casion to examine both his earliest musical compositions and the politi-cal opinions he would express with increasing ideological fervor in the1950s, even as he struggled to find the compositional voice that wouldbest reflect his political convictions.

Henry Rousso, in writing about France’s lingering “Vichy syndrome,”has described the years from 1944 to 1947 as “a rocky period of mourn-ing” for the tragedies of the occupation, a period left incomplete by newfears of global conflict and the resurgence of anticommunism in France.8The students who protested Stravinsky in 1945 made their aestheticchoices based on their educational experiences during the occupation;the scandalized older generation could not separate their opinions ofStravinsky’s latest music from their own lingering grievances about thewar. But as Rousso reminds us, it was not only the controversies of thisearly period that were affected by the occupation. The French experi-ence of the occupation continued to affect the aesthetic and politicalperspectives of French composers well into the Cold War that followed.

Stravinsky in Paris, 1945

The press debates that followed the 1945 Stravinsky protests inwhich Nigg played a leading role are the surviving traces of the passion-ate discussions that took place among musicians, critics, and concert-goers, both in private and in public, in early postwar France. These de-bates, and the music being debated, demonstrate the range of possibili-ties that existed for modern music in postwar France before global con-cerns, in the form of the escalating tension between the United Statesand the Soviet Union, overshadowed local ones once the Cold War hadbegun.9 In her study of French musicians and the Cold War, MichèleAlten argues that the French coalition government’s pivotal decision inmid 1947 to expel its communist ministers and accept U.S. economic

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8 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans.Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 1, “Unfin-ished Mourning (1944–1954).”

9 Similarly, Danielle Fosler-Lussier describes the chaotic period of open and freediscussion in immediate postwar Hungary as “a rare opportunity to glimpse Hungarianmusicians’ ideas about their musical future just before their choices were restricted by the increasingly severe policies of the Communist regime that came to power in 1948.”Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2007), 1.



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aid through the Marshall Plan created pressures on the PCF to stiflefreewheeling musical debates in the immediate postwar period in bothcommunist and non-communist newspapers.10 The pre-1947 debatesabout Stravinsky’s music provide a rare glimpse of a world preoccupiedby the conflicts of the occupation, beset by anxiety about the future,and yet, at least in Nigg’s case, remarkably open as to what musical pos-sibilities awaited the emerging postwar generation. Examination ofthese debates allows us to see what the French thought of those possi-bilities before the hard lines of the Cold War were drawn.

The audience for Stravinsky’s latest music at the chamber musicconcert on February 27, 1945, heard Roger Désormière conduct Dansesconcertantes alongside the recent music of four other composers. Thefive pieces present a revealing snapshot of the range of new music be-ing performed in Paris at the time. The sounds of the pieces by Stravin-sky, Darius Milhaud, and Jacques Ibert would have already been famil-iar to French audiences. In general, their three pieces share similarconcerns with dance, neoclassicism, and concertante style. Two of Mil-haud’s Four Sketches, op. 227, a 1941 set of short piano pieces that hehad transcribed for chamber orchestra, are based on New World dancestyles: a habanera (“Alameda”) and a rumba (“Sobre la Loma”), whichMilhaud had already evoked in his ballet La Création du monde. Ibert’smore pronounced concern for concerted writing in his Capriccio from1938 was shared by Stravinsky in his Concerto in E � (“DumbartonOaks”) from the same year. Yet in the two pieces performed on Febru-ary 27, Ibert and Stravinsky treated melody, rhythm, and instrumenta-tion quite differently, as is evident in comparing two concerted pas-sages. In example 1a, a solo episode for bassoon from Ibert’s Capriccio,the melody is lyrical and sustained, drawing on an octatonic scale, witha steady, almost percussive rhythm in the accompanying strings. Bothmelody and accompaniment emphasize the prevailing meter, evenwhen utilizing irregular patterns of off-beats and triplets. The harp,which here contributes occasional rapid scalar ascents to the accompa-niment, plays a predominant role in the middle and final sections ofthe piece. In example 1b, a solo French horn passage from the “Thèmevarié” of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes, the melody is pentatonic, dis-junct, and punctuated by rests. Neither the melodic accents nor thespare accompanying figures that shadow the melody correlate with thetriple meter of the passage. The austerity of this melody, its lack of for-ward motion in either pitch or rhythm, and the spare instrumentationof its accompaniment, demonstrate the continuity between Stravinsky’s

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10 Michèle Alten, Musiciens français dans la guerre froide (1945–1956) (Paris:L’Harmattan, 2000), 50–51.




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prewar neoclassical works, such as the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto,and several of the compositions he wrote in America during the war.

The reappearance of the music of Ibert, Milhaud, and Stravinsky inParis in the 1944–45 season was a significant homecoming for all three,even if music by Ibert and Stravinsky had appeared on French concertprograms during the German occupation.11 The performances ofStravinsky’s Danses concertantes and Milhaud’s Four Sketches were Frenchpremieres of recent music by prominent French exiles in America, andIbert’s Capriccio was by a composer whose music had been marginalizedin wartime concert life for political reasons.12 Not surprisingly, mostmusic critics reviewing the concert fixated on the novelty of hearingStravinsky’s American music for the first time, and they responded withhyperbolic praise. Gone were the accusations of academicism that hadgreeted the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, whose June 1938 Europeanpremiere had been Stravinsky’s last concert appearance in Paris beforethe war.13 The earlier negative critiques were swept aside in 1945 bycritics’ eagerness to embrace the return of a major musical figure to theFrench scene. As Georges Auric wrote in his review, the French pre-miere of Danses concertantes “brought to us a message from the man ofgenius who dominated our youth”; the piece was “a new masterpiece byour maître,” whose “musical language has arrived at a surprising point ofperfection.”14 Likewise, Jean Wiéner rejoiced that “after four years ofpenitence, during which [we received] not a note, not a sign from

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11 Wartime performances by Charles Munch and the Orchestre de la Société desConcerts du Conservatoire included Ibert’s Ouverture de fête, Concertino da camera, andFlute Concerto as well as four performances of Stravinsky’s Firebird and one each of LeSacre du printemps, Les Noces, the Symphony of Psalms, Jeu de cartes and the Concerto in E �(“Dumbarton Oaks”). For wartime orchestral performances in Paris, see AlexandraLaederich, “Les associations symphoniques parisiennes,” in La Vie musicale sous Vichy, ed.

Myriam Chimènes (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2001), 217–33; see also “Programmessoumises à la censure,” Archives of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Music De-partment, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Stravinsky’s music also appeared regularlyon the programs of the Concerts de la Pléiade, a series founded by Gaston Gallimard andDenise Tual in 1943. For the programs of the Concerts de la Pléiade, see Nigel Simeone,“Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade: ‘A Kind of Clandestine Revenge Against theOccupation,’ ” Music & Letters 81 (2000): 575–78.

12 As director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome since 1937,Ibert was closely allied with the Ministry of National Education during the Popular Frontyears. Ibert chose not to return to Paris to participate in the occupied capital’s musicallife, spending the war instead in the south of France and Switzerland. See Gérard Michel,Jacques Ibert: L’homme et son œuvre (Paris: Seghers, 1967), 70–74; see also Alexandra Laed-erich, Catalogue de l’œuvre de Jacques Ibert (1890–1962) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998),xi.

13 See 1938 assessments such as that of Boris de Schloezer, who wrote that the“Dumbarton Oaks” concerto represented “the most dismal, the flattest academicism,” inStephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 (New York:Knopf, 2006), 77–78.

14 Georges Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” Les Lettres françaises (March 3, 1945), 5.




Stravinsky,” Danses concertantes had arrived in Paris: “It is love at firstsight, and at the same time a lesson in strength, equilibrium, andbeauty.”15 Roland-Manuel declared that Stravinsky, who had surprisedhis admirers several times in the past, did so once more with Danses con-certantes, in which a “sort of happy abandon” was “without example orprecedent in the feats of this strong man.” He also revealed, and cele-brated, that the program was organized so that Stravinsky’s piece wasperformed twice.16

Nearly absent from the critics’ responses was the fact that two ofthe pieces on the program presented distinctly different approaches tocomposing new music. In Tre Laudi, Luigi Dallapiccola was experiment-ing with twelve-tone procedures in idiosyncratic ways. The opening soprano melody consists of a twelve-tone row and its retrograde, over aB-minor triad played by the woodwinds, muted brass, harp, and lower-strings harmonics—a much richer use of instrumentation than inStravinsky’s Danses concertantes (ex. 2). The symbolic use of twelve-tonerows against a sustained triad to represent, in the words of RaymondFearn, “the splendor of the stars in the firmament,” is limited to theopening measures; the rest of the piece is diatonic.17

The newest music in the concert was the world premiere of Nigg’s1944 Concertino for piano, percussion, and winds. Audiences in Parishad already heard Nigg’s music during the German occupation: his Pi-ano Sonata no. 1 in 1943, performed by Yvette Grimaud only two yearsafter Nigg had begun his studies with Messiaen at the Conservatoire, andNigg’s first orchestral composition, the symphonic poem Timour, per-formed by Désormière and the Orchestre national in February 1944.18

Although Nigg has since destroyed the score and parts of the Concertino,contemporaneous documents describe in detail its musical style.19 In late1945, Fred Goldbeck at Contrepoints asked several composers to answer ashort survey about their own music. Nigg described his earliest composi-tions as “strongly colored by exoticism and primitivism”; he wrote of mu-sic that is “atonal, in the sense that it is not tonal, but in no way dodeca-phonic . . . [and] more contrapuntal than harmonic, with a large role for

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15 Jean Wiéner, “Danses concertantes d’Igor Strawinsky,” Arts 7 (March 16, 1945): 4.16 Roland-Manuel, “La Musique: Les Danses concertantes d’Igor Strawinsky,” Combat

(March 9, 1945), 2.17 Raymond Fearn, The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (Rochester: University of

Rochester Press, 2003), 34. Dallapiccola’s brief juxtaposition of twelve-tone compositionwith modality in Tre Laudi prefigured his more extensive use of both in his better-knownCanti di prigionia.

18 Both performances are listed on Nigg’s website at the Académie des Beaux-Arts,where he was elected in 1989: http://www.academie-des-beaux-arts.fr/membres/actuel/Musique/Nigg/fiche.htm.

19 Claude Chamfray lists the score of the Concertino as destroyed in his 1966 cata-logue of Nigg’s works: “Serge Nigg,” Le Courrier musical de France 13 (1966): 57.



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rhythmic pedals.” In program notes for a 1947 concert, Nigg specifiedthat the influence came from “exotic music and Le Sacre du printemps.” Asubsequent report in Contrepoints on Nigg’s recent activities reveals thatthe Concertino belongs to this initial phase of Nigg’s compositional de-velopment, when he was strongly influenced by the music and aestheticpreferences of his teacher Messiaen.20

Claude Rostand was the sole reviewer to acknowledge not only thatStravinsky’s music shared the program with the works of Nigg and theother three composers, but that Danses concertantes and Four Sketches hadalso met with vocal protests from the audience. Rostand shared theother critics’ tendency toward hyperbole when it came to describingDanses concertantes: “If music, in its diverse forms, has ever been able toexpress the most inexpressible beauty, surely it is here, in this languagewhose terms are nearly inhuman.” Rostand did not mince words about“the young cretins who, the other night, attempted quite unnecessarily(and quite pitifully) to manifest their imbecilic bad humor” againstStravinsky. Whereas Rostand was intrigued by the novelty of Dallapic-cola’s Tre Laudi, with its “surprising expressiveness” and “surly, ruggedmelodic line,” his review of Nigg’s Concertino took on a patronizingtone: “[Nigg’s] music is far from indifferent, even if it is not alwayspleasant. It is merely necessary to advise him not to depend on formu-las that were tested now almost thirty years ago, and that he otherwisemanipulates with skill and ferocity.”21 Presumably, with Nigg’s own de-scriptions of his music as primitive, atonal, and contrapuntal, Rostand’sreference could be either to the Stravinsky of Le Sacre or to Schoen-berg’s early atonal works—both equally invalid in Rostand’s eyes asmodels for a twenty-year-old composer in 1945.

With all but one of the reviews of Danses concertantes published byMarch 10 (and thus well in advance of the third Stravinsky Festival con-cert on the fifteenth), the stage was set for the generational conflictthat manifested itself at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in thepress for several weeks afterward. When critics and composers pub-lished their opinions about the protests against the Four NorwegianMoods, they described the students’ rejection of Stravinsky’s latest worksas unpatriotic, disrespectful, and hopelessly out of date. Roland-Manuelcompared the 1945 protests with those that met the premiere of LeSacre in the same hall thirty-two years earlier. The students’ mistake was

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20 “Une enquête (suite): Serge Nigg, ou les convictions combatives,” Contrepoints 3(March–April 1946): 78–79; Concerts de la Pléiade, program, February 13, 1947, 16–17(Papers of Denise Tual, Music Department, Bibliothèque nationale de France); BrunoValeano, “Sur quelques jeunes musiciens,” Contrepoints 1 ( January 1946): 64. Nigg’s sur-vey responses, although not published until the March-April 1946 issue, predate the Janu-ary 1946 issue of Contrepoints.

21 Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” Carrefour 29 (March 10, 1945): 5.



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to idolize the “revolutionary” Stravinsky of 1913 and denounce the“academic” Stravinsky of 1945: “They are wasting their breath, for thisgreat artisan has never concerned himself with either one.”22 Auricmade the same comparison and warned against any return to the mod-ernism of the past: “It took us twenty years, but we finally rid ourselvesof an absurd conception of ‘modernism’ that seems to me today to becompletely outmoded.” Make no mistake, Auric continued: the night of March 15, “the ‘young musician’ was Stravinsky. He will be there intwenty years, in a century. At that moment, we will no longer be here.Neither will most of the mediocre compositions, hastily written and arti-ficial, that I would have hoped not to mention.” The reference is athinly veiled jab at Nigg’s Concertino, which Auric had indeed failed tomention in his review of the chamber music concert of February 27.23

The angriest of them all was Rostand, who decided that this time,the “young cretins” of the initial protest needed to have Stravinsky’s im-portance to France spelled out for them. Using language that had spe-cial resonance scarcely six months after the liberation of Paris, Rostanddeclared:

Mr. Igor Stravinsky—a Russian, as we all know—honored France bybecoming a naturalized French citizen. Nearly his entire stunning ca-reer has taken place in France and by France. He honored us by premiering in Paris the majority of his most important works. He honored us by occasionally looking into our national culture to enrichhis genius. He honored us by bringing to the contemporary Frenchschool certain aesthetic or technical elements that gave it, in part, itsgrandeur and its vitality. He even did us the honor of being a genius.And now, after a ban of five years whose stupidity is equaled only bythe intolerant imbecility now shown to him, there is a pitiful attemptto attack him with some absurd recrimination at the first sign of his re-turn among us!

Rostand followed his emotional outburst by marveling, somewhat disin-genuously, that the Norwegian Moods—which he described as admittedlynot among Stravinsky’s “loftiest creations”—could have inspired such vi-cious protests, “about which there was nothing spontaneous.”24

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22 Roland-Manuel, “Signification de quelques coups de sifflet,” Combat (March 25–26, 1945), 2.

23 Auric, “Strawinsky ou l’éternel renouvellement,” Les Lettres françaises (March 24,1945), 5; Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” 5. Nigg later claimed that Rosenthal retaliated againsthim for his role in the protests by canceling his plans to perform Timour with the Or-chestre national. Nigg, quoted by Jean Boivin in La Classe de Messiaen (Paris: ChristianBourgois, 1995), 65.

24 Rostand, “Strawinsky contre les imbeciles,” Carrefour 31 (March 24, 1945): 5.Stravinsky also expressed skepticism about the spontaneity of the protests, writing toRosenthal that the “sincere and spontaneous manifestations against the Sacre in 1913




The matter might have rested there, had not Rostand’s heatedrhetoric generated an equally heated response. André Jolivet’s April 4article “Enough of Stravinsky!” turned Rostand’s nationalist rhetoric onits head. If Rostand had raised the specter of a wartime ban on Stravin-sky’s music, Jolivet made reference to the live public concerts hosted bythe German-run Radio-Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées duringthe occupation to promote the superiority of German over French mu-sic. And now, Jolivet complained, “we are called to the same theater toadore a new idol whose Frenchness was only temporary.” Our compatri-ots ought to realize, Jolivet insisted, “that Stravinsky has taught us noth-ing in the realms of rhythm, melody, orchestration, or formal architec-ture; that French musicians find these diverse elements of musicalcomposition in their most advanced form in our own tradition.” For Jolivet, the 1945 Stravinsky festival was “the last circle of hell [inFrench, a play on words between cycle Strawinsky and cycle d’enfer] thatFrench music must cross in order to merit the radiance that the Frenchought to help it to attain.”25

The references by Rostand and Jolivet to the recent German occu-pation were highly charged in the spring of 1945. Questions of whosemusic had been banned by the German occupying forces, as well as thelegacy of German propaganda in occupied Paris, were hotly debatedeven before Paris was liberated. Rostand’s goal was to elevate Stravinskyfor having suffered a wartime ban on his music in France; Jolivet’s wasto associate Stravinsky instead with the parade of German composerspromoted during the occupation at the expense of the French. Neitherclaim holds much factual merit. Stravinsky’s music was openly per-formed in occupied Paris by the major French orchestras, which sub-mitted their programs to German censors in advance, as well as bychamber music series such as the Concerts de la Pléiade. Munch’s June1944 performance of Les Noces even shared several soloists with Rosen-thal’s in the second Stravinsky festival concert of February 1945.26

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[were] comprehensible because of the violent character of this score. . . . But one doubtsthe spontaneity of a howling manifestation against the Norwegian Moods, the elements thatcould provoke boisterous protestations being totally absent. . . . Unless I am mistaken, itseems that once the violent has been accepted, the amiable, in turn, is no longer tolera-ble.” Stravinsky to Rosenthal, January 12, 1946. Quoted in translation in Stravinsky: Se-lected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1984), 2: 347.

25 André Jolivet, “Assez de Strawinsky,” Noir et blanc 8 (April 4, 1945): 114.26 The singer Joseph Peyron and the pianists Monique Haas and Francis Poulenc

performed in both concerts. Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade,” 577.See also note 11. Joan Evans has shown that Stravinsky’s music was heard frequently inGermany until September 1939, after which time his status as a French citizen made Ger-man performances of his music problematic. French citizenship, of course, was not acause for censorship in German-occupied France. Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’sGermany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 581–84. For a discussion



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Apart from the novelty of featuring the music Stravinsky had composedin America for the first time, the 1945 Stravinsky festival represented astriking degree of continuity with concert programs from the occupa-tion. In Stravinsky’s case, what had changed after the liberation was notthe style of the music being performed as the ability of the French tonow react freely in public to the music they heard.

Jolivet’s resentment against Radio-Paris and its pro-German propa-ganda was widely shared. During the occupation, the Grand Orchestrede Radio-Paris attracted French musicians and conductors with gener-ous salaries and a programming schedule dominated by music broad-casts. Festivals ranged from the inevitable Beethoven and Wagner cele-brations to occasional showcases of new German talent, for exampleWerner Egk, who led the orchestra in October 1942 in an evening-longconcert of his own works, including an excerpt from his opera PeerGynt, the production of which at the Paris Opéra in October 1943 wasbroadcast live by Radio-Paris.27 After the liberation, the focus of Frenchanger was against composers such as Egk, whose music had been re-viewed favorably during the occupation by French and German criticsalike, and not the venerated German classics whose music had domi-nated the programs of all the symphony orchestras in occupied Paris.There was even less animosity against foreign composers as a group.28

Roland-Manuel, in one of the first issues of the newspaper Les Lettresfrançaises to appear after the liberation, wrote disdainfully that the mu-sic of recent German composers presented an inappropriate model forthe French, owing to “a romanticism that is out of step with modernlife,” even as he advocated that the French not reject the German clas-sics simply because the Germans had denigrated French music.29 In anatmosphere where new music from several countries was featured in

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of the postwar rumors that the Concerts de la Pléiade performed music of banned com-posers in defiance of the Germans and the persistence of such rumors in recent scholar-ship, see my “Messiaen, Jolivet, and the Soldier-Composers of Wartime France,” MusicalQuarterly 87 (2004): 263–64.

27 Egk’s appearance with the Grand Orchestre de Radio-Paris was announced in LesOndes 78 (October 25, 1942) for broadcast on October 29.

28 On the positive reviews that performances of Egk’s music received in occupiedFrance, see my “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 256–57, 316–21.

29 The article also gives details of the clandestine activities of French musicians inthe resistance. Roland-Manuel, “Roland-Manuel nous dit l’action de quatre ans de musi-ciens français,” Les Lettres françaises (September 16, 1944): 7. On French musicians and theresistance, see Daniel Viriex, “Front national des musiciens (printemps 1941-automne1944),” in Roger Désormière (1898–1963): Actes du Colloque, ed. Nicolas Guillot (Paris:Comité pour la celebration du centenaire de la naissance de Roger Désormière, 1999),47–62; see also Guy Krivopissko and Daniel Virieux, “Musiciens: une profession en résis-tance?” in La Vie musicale sous Vichy, 333–51.




the Orchestre national’s 1944–45 broadcast concerts and embraced bythe French press (and the audience that filled the theaters), Jolivet’snationalist diatribe against Stravinsky was decidedly out of place.

It did not take long for people to say so in print. Three days afterJolivet’s article appeared, Le Figaro published a response by FrancisPoulenc on its front page. Unlike flustered critics such as Rostand,Poulenc proclaimed that young people had the right to reject the mu-sic of their elders. But the “pseudo young people,” presumably theforty-four-year-old Jolivet, “who owe the meager varnish of modernismthat covers their own works solely to the research—already surpassed bythe composer himself—of the Stravinsky of 1913,” were a much moreserious matter. All contemporary music, in France and elsewhere,stemmed from Stravinsky’s work, Poulenc proclaimed. He then coun-tered Jolivet’s innuendo with some of his own:

We ought to have the decency to acknowledge our debt; let’s not pushthe debate to the level of nationalism, as has, imprudently, one musi-cian, of whom one only asks that he forget a certain incidental musicwritten inadvisably during the occupation to celebrate the eightiethbirthday of the most illustrious German playwright. I suppose that myfrankness in setting the record straight may earn me several enemies.Far from bemoaning this fate, I celebrate it.30

The incidental music in question was composed by Jolivet for the playIphigenie in Delphi by the Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann during its1943 production in French translation at the Comédie-Française. Theproduction, in honor of Hauptmann’s eightieth birthday, was plannedby the director of the Comédie-Française, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, underpressure from the Propaganda Staffel in Paris to expand the theater’sofferings by German playwrights.31 The irony that Poulenc meant tohighlight was that Jolivet, who was now objecting strenuously to Rosen-thal’s celebration of a foreigner, had himself participated in one of theinnumerable festivals in honor of German cultural figures during theoccupation. Despite Poulenc’s insinuations, Jolivet was never under anysuspicion for his wartime activities. Poulenc’s public reminder of Jo-livet’s participation in the Hauptmann production was inopportune,

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30 Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!” Le Figaro (April 7, 1945): 1.31 On the involvement of the Propaganda Staffel in the production, see Marie-

Agnès Joubert, La Comédie-Française sous l’Occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 1998), 178–86;and Jean-Claire Vançon, André Jolivet (Paris: Bleu Nuit, 2007), 77–78. On Jolivet’s involve-ment as composer and conductor for the production, see Christine Jolivet, “Chronolo-gie,” in Portrait(s) d’André Jolivet (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2005), 151. Jo-livet’s incidental music for Iphigenie in Delphi was published and recorded in 1957 byPathé Marconi as Suite delphique.



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however, coming so closely after Jolivet’s January 1945 appointment asmusic director at the Comédie-Française.

Whereas Poulenc reacted to Jolivet’s nationalist call to arms againstStravinsky with insinuations about Jolivet’s wartime activities, Roland-Manuel chose instead to sarcastically recount the decidedly cosmopoli-tan influences on Jolivet’s compositional development. On April 12 inCombat he described how, back in the “good old days [aux temps joyeux]”of the interwar years, the likes of Schoenberg and Varèse ( Jolivet’steacher from 1930 to 1933) had given to French music a fresh, nativeflavor and found inspiration in “the most authentic sources of our na-tional tradition.” Jolivet had in turn been “so obligingly attached to themanifestations of French genius” that he followed every new (and for-eign) trend that came along. Roland-Manuel saw the controversy as “anew Querelle des Bouffons”: the title of his article. In his opinion, theprotesters’ efforts to protect French music from the “foreign” influenceof Stravinsky would be as unsuccessful as the eighteenth-century parti-sans of the tragédie lyrique had been against the incursion of Italian operabuffa in France.32

Young French Composers in 1945

Finally, on April 14, one of the protesters spoke up about their activities in print. Having already published two articles by their own music critic, Roland-Manuel, the editorial staff at Combat decided to re-spond positively to the protesters’ request for equal treatment.33 Thatthe job fell to Nigg seems appropriate, for his music had already fig-ured in the debate. The most recent reference to Nigg had appeared inCombat only two days earlier, when Roland-Manuel had linked Nigg’sConcertino with Jolivet’s recently premiered Chant de Linos to argue that,by protesting Stravinsky’s music, Jolivet and his “little band of partisans”were only “barking at [Stravinsky’s] heels.”34 It was a metaphor alreadyused by Poulenc, albeit more crudely, when he spoke of “little yappydogs . . . lifting their legs at the pedestals of statues.”35

Yet whatever musical similarities may have existed between the self-avowed exoticism of Nigg’s Concertino and Jolivet’s use of ancient Greekfuneral laments as a model for Chant de Linos, the two composers’ justi-fications in print for rejecting Stravinsky in 1945 could not have beenmore different. Most notable is the complete absence of nationalism inNigg’s provocative explanation of the protesters’ motivations. Nigg

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32 Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des Bouffons,” Combat (April 12, 1945), 2.33 Unsigned editorial, Combat (April 14–15, 1945), 2.34 Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des bouffons,” 2.35 Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!” 1.




chafed at the remarkable unanimity in favor of Stravinsky’s neoclassi-cism as a model for new composition in postwar France. Instead of theQuerelle des Bouffons, with its nationalist overtones, Nigg sarcasticallyevoked later eighteenth-century musical quarrels that had been re-solved in favor of an established genius: “So, no defenders of Salieri?No one for Piccini? Everyone has recognized Mozart and Gluck; whatjoy!” Nigg listed the labels applied in recent articles to the protestersfor having expressed their skepticism: “conformists of non-conformity,”“neo-academics,” and “devotees of modernism at any price.” “What isall this jargon hiding?” he asked. “Incontestably, a guilty conscience.”36

That one loaded phrase encapsulates the gap between the genera-tion that had come of age in occupied France and its elders. In theminds of French critics, the end of the occupation was an opportunityfor French composers to pick up where they had left off in 1939, whenthe war had begun and several French musicians had been mobilized tofight in the armed forces. Their rediscovery of Stravinsky was a “grandleap backwards,” a phrase coined by Serge Guilbaut in reference to thefall 1944 Picasso retrospective in Paris.37 Guilbaut interprets the post-war embrace of Picasso as an attempt by the French art world to erasethe nightmare of the occupation and return to the point at which thewar had intervened. In the case of Stravinsky, the return was to an imag-inary version of prewar Paris, one where Stravinsky’s new music hadmet with universal praise, not the mixed reception that had actuallygreeted the composer’s final prewar appearance in the capital in 1938.

Such a return made no sense to French composers of Nigg’s gener-ation, who were intensely aware of their own place in history. Nigg’semphasis on the necessity of meeting present-day demands confirmsGuilbaut’s analysis that “this concealment was certainly therapeutic but would not allow Paris to take charge of the enormous ideologicaland emotional transformations that the postwar had in store.”38 “Oughtwe,” asked Nigg, “to prolong or end definitively the neoclassical currentthat for nearly thirty years has dragged in its wake every mediocre ele-ment, and finds its justification in the decadent works of a great man?”Rather, he asserted, the contemporary artistic production of the so-called “young imbeciles” who protested Stravinsky ought to at least bearwhat he called “the traces of a profoundly felt uncertainty.”39

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36 Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” 2.37 Serge Guilbaut, “Comment la Ville lumière s’est fait voler l’idée d’art moderne,”

in Paris 1944–1954: Artistes, intellectuels, publics: la culture comme enjeu, ed. Philippe Gum -plo wicz and Jean-Claude Klein (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1995), 49.

38 Ibid.39 Nigg, “La Querelle Strawinsky,” 2.



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The “profoundly felt uncertainty” proposed by Nigg for youngFrench composers in 1945 was the polar opposite of the critics’ hyper-bolic certainty in Stravinsky’s postwar relevance. Nigg’s position alsopresented a striking contrast to the knowing self-assurance that domi-nated the prescriptions offered by French composers, critics, and ad-ministrators to young French composers during the occupation. Thewartime Vichy government had worked actively to promote new Frenchmusic by calling on young composers to return to their heritage and bycondemning the so-called “stylistic gimmickry” of the past twenty yearsthrough which the traditions of that heritage had been cast aside. AtVichy’s Administration of Fine Arts, the disdain of the new director,Louis Hautecœur, for what he called modernism’s “fashionable myth”of originality resonated with older French composers whose values andideals had been displaced by new currents in modern music since 1918.The state’s commissions program ensured that young composers whoembraced their heritage received the recognition and financial remu-neration their music deserved.40

Nigg entered the Paris Conservatoire at age seventeen in 1941, fol-lowed by Boulez, who arrived in Paris in 1943 at age eighteen.41 Al-though they would have been too young to have been directly affectedby wartime government programs for contemporary music, the educa-tion they received at the Conservatoire was not immune to the wartimenationalist embrace of tradition and the past. Nigg was a student in thefirst class Messiaen taught at the Conservatoire in 1941 following thelatter’s release from a German prisoner-of-war camp.42 Officially, Messi-aen was only a harmony professor; he was an isolated figure at the Con-servatoire for several years. Composition classes were taught by HenriBusser and Max d’Ollone, distinguished older composers with solidacademic credentials. Although neither Nigg nor Boulez studied withthem, these men held powerful positions in wartime French musical life,with d’Ollone appointed the director of the Opéra-Comique in 1941and Busser appointed music director at Radiodiffusion nationale (thewartime name of Radiodiffusion française) in 1943.43 Boulez spent one

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40 Louis Hautecœur, Les Beaux-Arts en France, passé et avenir (Paris: Picard, 1948), 80.On the government commissions program and other programs of support for contempo-rary French music during the war, see my “Music for a ‘New Era.’ ”

41 On Nigg’s early years, see Nicolas Bacri, “Serge Nigg: Une introduction,” in Mar-ius Constant et Serge Nigg: Deux compositeurs en marge des systèmes, ed. François Madurell(Paris: La Sorbonne, 2000), 56. On Boulez’s arrival in Paris, see Jameux, 23–29.

42 Like many Frenchmen of his generation, Messiaen was mobilized in September1939 and captured by the Germans in June 1940; he spent several months in a Germanprisoner-of-war camp before his repatriation to France in March 1941.

43 On the roles Busser and d’Ollone played in wartime musical life in France andthe postwar consequences, see my “Music for a ‘New Era.’ ” For a description of Busser’sfinal years as a professor at the Conservatoire, see Boivin, 75–77.




year in a preparatory course taught by Georges Dandelot before joiningMessiaen’s harmony class in fall 1944. During the occupation, Busser,Arthur Honegger, and Tony Aubin—d’Ollone’s successor at the Conser-vatoire in 1945—were vocal proponents of the so-called New FrenchSchool of young composers, and Dandelot was both a representative ofthe school and a beneficiary of French government support.44

In the realm of orchestral music, the precursors of the New FrenchSchool were clear. Honegger put it best in his 1941 review of a DebussyFestival, quoting Wagner (in the original German) to make his point. “ ‘Honor our German masters!’ sings Hans Sachs at the end of Die Meis-tersinger. He is right. Let us honor our French masters. After Debussyand Ravel let it now be the turn of Vincent d’Indy, Roussel, FlorentSchmitt and all those who are the honor and glory of France.”45 Thebattle that d’Indy had waged at the turn of the century on behalf of aFrench symphonic tradition, with its explicit goal of proving Frenchcompetence in a domain perceived to be inherently German, hadnever been laid to rest. In 1913 d’Indy was predicting that French com-posers would fulfill the so-called “mission” of symphonic developmentthat had begun with Haydn and Beethoven.46 Thirty years later, Aubindeclared that recent compositions by Dandelot, Henri Tomasi, and oth-ers provided the necessary indications that the New French Schoolwould justify d’Indy’s optimism. A return to the rigor of d’Indy’s ap-proach to la musique pure, Aubin argued in a review of the premiere ofDandelot’s Symphony in D, was exactly what was called for in theFrance of 1943.47

The only way that wartime Conservatoire students such as Nigg andBoulez could gain access to new music that differed from this restrictiveview centered on the French tradition was through the teachings ofMessiaen, either in his official harmony classes or the private lessons hewas offering concurrently.48 In addition to scores by Debussy, Wagner,

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44 On Dandelot, see Armand Machabey’s wartime portrait, “Galerie de quelques jeunes musiciens parisiens: Georges Dandelot,” L’Information musicale 80 (September 4,1942): 1, reprinted in Machabey, Portraits de trente musiciens français (Paris: Richard-Masse,1949), 49–53. For information about the government support he received during the oc-cupation, including two state commissions, and the reception his music received in occu-pied Paris, see my “Music for a ‘New Era,’ ” 385–86, 393–95, 410.

45 “ ‘Ehrt eure deutschen Meister!’ dit Hans Sachs à la fin des Maîtres chanteurs. Il araison. Honorons nos maîtres français.” Arthur Honegger, “Le Festival Claude Debussy,”Comœdia ( June 21, 1941), 3.

46 D’Indy, “Concerts Lamoureux,” S.I.M. 9 (December 1, 1913): 45, quoted byBrian Hart in “The Symphony in Theory and Practice in France, 1900–1914” (PhD diss.,Indiana University, 1994), 140.

47 Aubin, “Premières auditions,” Comœdia (February 20, 1943), 5.48 Boulez joined Messiaen’s harmony class and the private lessons in the fall of

1944, and Nigg, who had been in Messiaen’s harmony class since 1941, joined the privatelessons sometime around 1946, shortly before he left the Conservatoire. On Nigg, see



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and Ravel, Messiaen’s students read and played medieval polyphony,non-western music, and modern works by composers ranging from Stra -vinsky (Le Sacre du printemps, Petrushka, Les Noces) to Bartók (Music forStrings, Percussion, and Celeste) and the Second Viennese School (Schoen -berg, Pierrot Lunaire ; Berg, Wozzeck and the Violin Concerto; Webern,Variations, op. 27).49 As for Stravinsky’s music, Messiaen was notably fondof teaching his students in both classes about rhythm in the early Russianballets, particularly Le Sacre.50 But his ambivalence toward Stravinsky’sneoclassical works dated from at least 1931, when he stated that “itseems to me that all French music today is focused on the Albert Rous-sel of the Suite en fa and the symphonies, and early Stravinsky” and de-scribed Apollon musagète as “like a piece by Lully with a few wrong bassnotes.”51 Nigg later told Jean Boivin that “we thought, in [Messiaen’s]class, that the grand Stravinsky was that of Le Sacre, Les Noces—works ofthat genre.”52 Nigg echoed his teacher’s opinions in his 1945 Combat ar-ticle when he decried the critics’ dismissal of Le Sacre. As Nigg put it, ifthe critics saw Le Sacre as an outdated source, “how can they dare sup-port those who draw upon the much more valuable, yet unsurpassable,resources of the Brandenburg concertos!”53

With the publication of Nigg’s article, a clash was now inevitable be-tween the hyperbole of critics who supported Stravinsky and the now-stated position of the protestors. Indeed, the continuing press debateover the third Stravinsky festival concert continued well past the perfor-mance of the fourth concert on April 12, overshadowing the Frenchpremiere of the Symphony in C, the most substantial new Stravinskypiece of the festival. Among rare reviews of the concert, Roland-Manuelprefaced his positive assessment of the Symphony in C with the sarcasticobservation that Rosenthal was “defying Mr. André Jolivet’s ban” by

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Boivin, 48. On Boulez’s arrival in Messiaen’s classes, see Boivin, 34–35. Boulez wrote ofthe enormous impact of Messiaen’s class on himself and his fellow students in “Une classeet ses chimères,” a tribute to Messiaen on his fiftieth birthday in 1959. Reprinted inBoulez, Points de repère, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981), 566–67.

49 Boivin, 434.50 Messiaen’s opinions on Stravinsky’s use of rhythm appeared in print in a 1939 ar-

ticle in which he singled out Le Sacre and Les Noces as Stravinsky’s most significant works:“Le rythme chez Igor Stravinsky,” Revue Musicale 191 (1939): 91–92. Both Messiaen andhis former students later recalled the prominence of Le Sacre in his classes. Boivin, 37–38,46.

51 Messiaen, in José Bruyr, “Olivier Messiaen,” in L’Écran des musiciens, seconde série(Paris: José Corti, 1933), 128. The interview was published two years after it took place.See Simeone, “Offrandes oubliées 2: Messiaen, Boulanger, and José Bruyr,” Musical Times142 (2001): 20.

52 Nigg, quoted in Boivin, 64.53 Nigg, “La querelle Strawinsky,” 2. The reference could apply to either Danses con-

certantes or the Concerto in E � (“Dumbarton Oaks”), which had last been performed inParis in May 1944.




continuing the festival.54 Auric did not even review the work but insteadpublished a lengthy diatribe against Nigg on the same day of the con-cert. Quoting Nigg’s objection to critics’ comparisons of the studentprotesters in 1945 to the “little old ladies” who booed Le Sacre in 1913—Nigg had asked, incredulously, “Do we now live in an age when youngpeople look to the past, whereas the middle-aged grow younger?”—Auric expressed hope that there still existed some young people whodid not make the mistake of looking backwards. Whereas his initial re-sponse to the protesters on March 24 had been fairly polite, Auric’s re-sponse to Nigg’s Combat article bristled with rage: “I know perfectly wellthat, thankfully, all the young musicians do not look to ‘the past,’ thispast that is—and will definitely remain, I am certain—an aesthetic de-rived laboriously from several otherwise magnificent pages of Le Sacreand also, alas, from the laboratory where Mr. Schoenberg long agomixed his evil poisons with diabolical skill.” Auric admitted that in1918, he and his comrades may have been impressed by Schoenberg’smusical ideas, but these ideas had no place in today’s world. “How cananyone, in 1945, refuse to comprehend that the stench of a cadaveremanates from an imposter art that fools us no longer?”55

Yet it was Nigg’s use of the word “uncertainty” that particularly in-censed Auric. After quoting Jolivet as an unnamed “improvised critic”who claimed that “Stravinsky has taught us nothing [Auric’s emphasis],”Auric wrote: “At that point, dear Mr. Nigg, you pull out a superb policewhistle and believe that you are bearing witness in this way to a convinc-ing ‘uncertainty’! This time, however, we are the ones who are uncer-tain. We wish to accord all young artists the benefit of the doubt, butwhat is there to say in response to your whistles?” Auric’s sarcastic ap-propriation of Nigg’s “uncertainty” to indicate the skepticism of hisgeneration—they are the ones who are uncertain about Nigg’s claims—reveals his deep attachment to the idea of returning to Stravinsky as thesurest way to proceed in the uncertain times of 1945.

Messiaen and Leibowitz in Paris, 1945

Auric’s anxiety was not just about the uncertainty that Nigg ex-pressed in response to the proposed renewal of neoclassicism in post-war France. It was also about what young French composers might em-brace instead. Auric referred in his April 21 article to early Stravinskyand Schoenberg’s atonal works. This was music he knew Nigg had beenstudying in Messiaen’s classes, and it was Nigg’s absorption of them as

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54 Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle symphonie de Strawinsky,” Combat (April 22–23,1945), 2.

55 Auric, “Génie et sifflets à roulette,” Les Lettres françaises (April 21, 1945), 5.



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models in his Concertino that both Auric and Rostand had recently de-plored.56 Although Auric did not mention Messiaen directly in his at-tack on Nigg, Messiaen was a central part of the Stravinsky controversyas early as the February 27 French premiere of Danses concertantes. Inhis March 10 review, Rostand implicated Messiaen in his students’ dis-ruptive behavior without directly naming him. If it were true that theprotesters were his Conservatoire students, Rostand continued, “hewould be giving them a very strange education.”57 In private, Poulencwrote matter-of-factly to Milhaud in March about Messiaen and the pro-testers: “The Messiaenistes are very ‘against Stravinsky[’s] last period.’For them, the music of Igor stops with Le Sacre.”58 By the time of thethird Stravinsky festival concert, Messiaen was sufficiently conscious ofthe association to have gone backstage after the performance to per-sonally apologize to Rosenthal.59

Meanwhile, Messiaen had become embroiled in a controversy ofhis own. On March 26, Yvonne Loriod performed the premiere of hisnew Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. The first major premiere of Messi-aen’s music since the liberation was met with widely diverging opinionsby French critics, some of whom were unsparing in their condemna-tion. Two opposing views appeared in the press on April 3 in the midstof the continuing controversy over the recent Stravinsky protests.Roland-Manuel wrote warmly in Combat of Messiaen’s sensuous spiritu-ality and the originality of his theoretical system, whereas in FigaroBernard Gavoty condemned Messiaen for what several critics would citeas the composer’s main failings: the “abysmal” verbal commentarieswhose connection to the music was opaque at best, and the reconditetheoretical system that was at odds with the expressive goals of the com-poser. “Is this heaven?” Gavoty concluded. “No, it’s purgatory.”60

With Messiaen now the subject of his own press skirmish, Poulencand Roland-Manuel felt obliged to defend Messiaen from any guilt byassociation—either with the protesters who were his students or with Jolivet, his close colleague in La Jeune France—in responding later thatweek to Jolivet’s diatribe against Stravinsky. Poulenc acknowledged onApril 7 in Le Figaro that it was an “established fact” that both the “timid”

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56 Auric, “Tibor Harsanyi,” 5; Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” 5.57 Rostand, “La Musique: Strawinsky et Milhaud,” 5.58 Poulenc to Milhaud, March 27, 1945, in Chimènes, ed., Poulenc, 585.59 Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),

393, note 11. They cite Roger Nichols as their source.60 Roland-Manuel, “Olivier Messiaen et ses Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus,” Combat

(April 3, 1945), 2; Clarendon [Bernard Gavoty], “Les Concerts: Regard sur Olivier Messi-aen,” Figaro (April 3, 1945), 2. For a detailed account of several responses in the press to Messiaen’s music in the spring of 1945, see Hill and Simeone, 144–54, 160–61, and165–67.




protests at the Danses concertantes premiere and the “premeditated”ones against the Four Norwegian Moods were led by Messiaen’s students.But he defended Messiaen as a person of “integrity” and “intelligence”who ought not to be negatively associated with the actions of his stu-dents. Roland-Manuel, in his April 12 response to Jolivet, wrote that un-like Jolivet, Messiaen was “a great musician who is content to write hismusic. Mr. Jolivet, who is no longer a young man and who is not yet agreat musician, would do well to model himself on his colleague.”61

The importance of these published statements of support to Messiaenat this time is evident in a letter the composer wrote to Poulenc onApril 19 to thank him for his “direct, frank, and chivalrous article, inwhich you so nicely defended me. . . . I feel less alone now that youhave spoken for me. Thank you with all my heart.”62

With the even more tumultuous premiere of Messiaen’s Trois petitesLiturgies de la Présence Divine on April 21 at the Salle du Conservatoire,the controversy persisted. The concert was a major event in Paris musi-cal circles: the first by the Concerts de la Pléiade since the liberation,with Désormière conducting the Orchestre de la Société des Concertsdu Conservatoire and the Chorale Yvonne Gouverné singing premieresof Milhaud’s Quatrains valaisans, Poulenc’s Un soir de neige, and severalselections of Renaissance polyphony.63 Nearly everyone involved in theStravinsky controversy was there, from Messiaen’s students (Nigg,Boulez, Jean-Louis Martinet, Pierre Henry) to the critics who had de-fended Stravinsky (Auric, Wiéner, Roland-Manuel, Rostand) and thecomposers who had recently joined the debate (Poulenc, Jolivet).64 Ro-stand had fanned the flames by publishing that morning a notoriouslyharsh review of a recent organ recital by Messiaen. In language that helater recanted in print, the critic excoriated Messiaen for his verbal ex-cesses and mocked his juxtaposition of sensuality and religion as vulgarand in poor taste.65 What resulted was yet another protracted press

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61 Poulenc, “Vive Strawinsky!” 1; Roland-Manuel, “Une nouvelle querelle des bouf-fons,” 2.

62 Messiaen to Poulenc, April 19, 1945; in Chimènes, ed., Francis Poulenc: Correspon-dance 1910–1963 (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 586.

63 For the full program, see Simeone, “Messiaen and the Concerts de la Pléiade,”577.

64 Hill and Simeone, 148.65 Messiaen performed Les Corps glorieux at the Palais de Chaillot on April 15, 1945.

To cite one of the most offending passages of Rostand’s review: “When Mr. Messiaenspeaks to me of ‘birds who have swallowed blue,’ I simply respond to him with the five let-ters made famous by General Cambronne [a euphemism for merde], for either he takesme for an imbecile and thus I have the right to consider him a rogue, or I fear for his sanity and his case, regarding his literary work, is a matter for psychiatric evaluation.” Rostand, “Olivier Messiaen,” Carrefour 35 (April 21, 1945): 5. Rostand apologized for hisoffensive language in Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Ventadour, 1957), 8, note 2.



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debate, now surrounding Messiaen the composer instead of Messiaenthe teacher, that was soon dubbed “Le Cas Messiaen.”66

Messiaen himself found the furor traumatic. For his students, how-ever, the event was galvanizing: Nigg later described the Trois petitesLiturgies as “symbolizing the spiritual renewal of the country” after theterrible years of German occupation.67 Poulenc reported triumphantlyto Paul Collaer in Belgium that, between the Stravinsky protests and theMessiaen premiere, musical life in Paris had come alive.68 His opinionwas shared by Messiaen’s friend, Guy Bernard-Delapierre, in an articlepublished shortly after the premiere: “in this [city of] Paris liberated afew months earlier, slowly relearning how to live, the sudden revelationof this masterpiece took on the solemnity of a grand event.”69 Gavotyprefaced his discussion of “Le Cas Messiaen” in the fall of 1945 with a description of the two scandals (Stravinsky and Messiaen) side byside.70 Some six years later, Rostand regarded the press furor as the en-thusiastic embrace of freedom of speech that had recently returned toFrance, commenting that “everyone [except Messiaen, presumably]had a great time [s’en donna à cœur joie].”71

The two controversies were sufficiently intertwined that Messiaenresponded to both simultaneously in May. From Messiaen’s perspective,the quarrel was about Stravinsky, and it made little sense to him to havebeen placed in the middle of it. He argued that Stravinsky was only a“pretext” to the real issue of the uncertainty surrounding music compo-sition in the present day. What we are waiting for, he declared, was a composer to come after Stravinsky and neoclassicism. Messiaen’s description of the anticipation surrounding this musician is self-consciously Biblical:

After Stravinsky, Honegger and Bartók, we await a musician who is notneoclassical but who is so profoundly and brilliantly revolutionary thathis style can one day be called classical. Several French and foreigncomposers have already tried to fill this role: they are the precursors

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66 On “Le Cas Messiaen” in the context of postwar France, see Lilise Boswell-Kurc,“Olivier Messiaen’s Religious War-time Works and their Controversial Reception inFrance (1941–46)” (PhD diss., New York University, 2001).

67 Nigg, quoted in Boivin, 65.68 Poulenc recommended to Collaer that he program the Trois petites Liturgies in

Brussels. Poulenc to Collaer, 26 April 1945; Archives Collaer, quoted in Chimènes, ed.,Poulenc, 587.

69 Guy Bernard[-Delapierre], “Souvenirs sur Olivier Messiaen,” Formes et couleurs,nos. 3–4 (1945): unpaginated (10 pp.).

70 Gavoty, “Musique et mystique: Le ‘Cas’ Messiaen,” Les Études (October–December1945), 21–22.

71 Rostand, La musique française contemporaine (Paris: Presses universitaires deFrance, 1952), 57.




of this surprising genius. When will he appear? In twenty, fifty, seventyyears? What a burden of influences, hesitations, reappraisals, detours,hopes, experiments and partial successes will weigh upon his shoul-ders! Because it will be from all of us that he will be born: he will beour conclusion, I was about to say our Amen.

Neoclassicism had served its purpose and produced its masterpieces(he named Symphony of Psalms as one), but Messiaen urged that criticsought to condemn “false revolutionaries” who claimed that “ ‘the newmusic, it’s us’ [‘la musique nouvelle, c’est nous’ ], simply because they haveshifted a few bass lines in a Donizetti cavatina!” But there was no needto continue the recent name-calling: “My dear detractors, leave Stra -vinsky in peace; his fame has no need of us. Stop tormenting André Jolivet . . . . Don’t accuse my dear students unjustly. And if some of theyoung—without my knowledge—display their enthusiasm or their dis-approval too noisily, be glad of their passionate feelings, signs of a moregenerous and humane generation.”72

It is striking that in speaking of “the young” as potentially represent-ing “a more generous and humane generation,” Messiaen was referringto students who were less than twenty years younger than he. What separated Messiaen—and Jolivet—more definitively from the students than age was the experience of having reached adulthood and havingreceived an education before the September 1939 declaration of waragainst Germany.73 That sense of divide deepened as several of Messi-aen’s students began to study with Leibowitz in a gradual process of de-sertion from the late spring of 1945 on.74 Although Messiaen felt thatthe central musical figure of the time had yet to appear, Leibowitz wasclear in his conviction that this figure was Schoenberg. Leibowitz hadbegun his postwar campaign on behalf of Schoenberg and twelve-tone

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72 Messiaen, “Querelle de la musique et de l’amour,” Volontés (May 16, 1945), 1.73 To my knowledge, there are two exceptions. Martinet, who attended Messiaen’s

private lessons, was born in 1915; he began his studies at the Conservatoire in 1933, wasmobilized in 1939, and returned to the Conservatoire in October 1940. Raymond Deprazwas born in 1912; he joined Messiaen’s harmony class in 1943–1944 after returning froma German prisoner-of-war camp. Boivin, 410–11.

74 According to Jameux, Boulez first met Leibowitz at Claude Halphen’s house inFebruary 1945. Boivin describes the studies as lasting from late spring in 1945 to the fol-lowing fall, with interruptions during the summer. After surveying the many contradic-tory dates in the literature, Susanne Gärtner has concluded that Boulez’s studies beganno later than June 1945, and that they lasted only a few months. Nigg claimed to Boivinto have instigated the defection of Messiaen’s students to study with Leibowitz, whom hehad met through André Casanova, but he gave no date. Jameux, 29; Boivin, 56–57; Gärt-ner, “La discipline dodécaphonique. Untersuchungen zu René Leibowitz’ Rezeptionspäter Werke Anton Webern” (Lizentiatsarbeit, Universität Basel, 1996), 4–7, 16–17;quoted by Sabine Meine in Ein Zwölftöner in Paris: Studien zu Biographie und Wirkung vonRené Leibowitz (Augsburg: Wissner-Verlag, 2000), 211.



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composition soon after the liberation, having organized in November1944 a Schoenberg-Debussy concert as well as private concerts in early1945. Leibowitz proclaimed the language of exclusive historical in-evitability for twelve-tone music in his announcement for the 1944 con-cert in Combat, accusing Parisians of “long before the ban imposed bythe German occupation . . . [having] accepted a sort of conspiracy of si-lence around what seems to me to be the most important music of ourtime.” With the end of the occupation, “the time has come,” Leibowitzproclaimed, “to familiarize the man of today with a mode of expressionthat he will recognize, sooner or later, as the only musical language suit-able to be discussed at the present time.”75

The few critics who took notice of Leibowitz in the fall of 1944scoffed at his ideas. Roland-Manuel dismissed him as “a priest of a de-consecrated temple,” and Auric spoke derisively of Schoenberg’s musicduring the 1945 Stravinsky festival as “an imposter art that fools us nolonger.”76 During the Messiaen arguments, Poulenc protested when thepreface to Leibowitz’s Introduction à la musique de douze sons appeared in a lavish volume of Cahiers d’art dedicated to French artistic efforts dur-ing the occupation, juxtaposing Leibowitz’s arguments on behalf ofSchoen berg with the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque and thepoems of Éluard and René Char.77 “Everyone knows,” Poulenc wrote,“that, aesthetically, my nationalism is among the most flexible.” It was notmindless flag-waving, he argued, but common sense to wonder why aFrench composer was not given the place of honor in this volume. Whynot an essay on Messiaen, “whose rapid ascent is truly the most crucialevent in French music in the past four years? There’s a musician whodoesn’t need to split a hair twelve ways to enrich our heritage in a spec-tacular fashion.”78

Poulenc’s nationalism, a potent force in the French experience ofthe Second World War, was at the heart of the generational divide. Aswe have seen, Nigg had no need of Jolivet’s nationalist rhetoric to rejectStravinsky as a model for young French composers. Likewise, Schoen-berg’s nationality did not prevent Nigg from embracing Leibowitz’sview of the historical inevitability of twelve-tone composition by the

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75 Leibowitz, “La Musique: Un festival Debussy-Schoenberg,” Combat (November 18,1944), 2.

76 Roland-Manuel, “La Musique,” Combat (November 25, 1944): 2; Auric, “Génie etsifflets à roulette.”

77 Leibowitz, “Introduction à la musique de douze sons,” Cahiers d’art (1940–1944),111–25. Leibowitz’s article, with some minor editorial changes, became the preface, theintroduction, and the first four sections of the first chapter of Introduction à la musique dedouze sons: Les Variations pour orchestre op. 31, d’Arnold Schoenberg (Paris: L’Arche, 1949).

78 Poulenc, “Le musicien et le sorcier,” Les Lettres françaises (May 5, 1945), 5.




time of his previously mentioned late 1945 Contrepoints survey responsein which Nigg proclaimed twelve-tone composition as “the inevitableoutcome” of a broad historical progression from modality to a tonalityincreasingly destabilized by chromaticism.79 Boulez agreed, latercommenting on the French rejection of Schoenberg after the war that“for quite some time, especially in French circles in Paris, it was said thatthis music had nothing to offer us because it was so Central Europeanthat it ran counter to our entire culture. Well, I think there is no sillierway of looking at the issue. Even if the music is foreign to your point ofview, if you are interested in your personal development, you must con-front these works.”80 Messiaen’s students were eager to learn moreabout the unfamiliar twelve-tone works of Schoenberg and his students,not in small part because such a system of composition was so differentfrom anything to which they had ever been exposed. As Martinet laterexplained, the “psychological climate of the postwar period and the deprivations of the occupation” made young musicians such as himselfeager to “explore all the possibilities that were offered to them.”81

Messiaen may have unwittingly contributed to his students’ recep-tivity to Leibowitz, for Messiaen’s tolerant attitude towards twelve-tonecomposition contrasted greatly with the intolerance of contemporarieslike Auric. In his own response to the 1945 Contrepoints survey, Messi-aen refused to embrace or exclude any style in advance: “Why ban thisor that? If it pleases me to use [the] major [mode], to mix it with mymodes, or to oppose it to them? If it pleases me to imitate bird song orHindu ragas? If it pleases me to suddenly employ serial techniques [em-phasis in the original] because I need them, suddenly?”82 It is impor-tant to emphasize, however, that Messiaen’s ecumenical outlook did notextend to Stravinsky’s neoclassical works. He reiterated his disdain inOctober 1945 when he decried neoclassical composers as “placingaround their works a modern sauce that fools the ears of the public,which imagines having heard ‘modern’ music.”83 Despite having appar-ently apologized to Rosenthal after the third Stravinsky festival concert,Messiaen was unrepentant in a February 1946 interview: “I cannot accompany my students to concerts with a billy club in my hands.” “I

118

79 “Une enquête (suite): Serge Nigg,” 78–79.80 Boulez, Par volonté et par hasard: Entretiens avec Célestin Déliege (Paris: Seuil, 1975),

33–34.81 Martinet, “Notes autobiographiques,” at http://www.musimem.com/biographies

.html.82 “Une enquête (suite): Olivier Messiaen, ou les harmonies poétiques et in-

génieuses,” Contrepoints 3 (March–April 1946): 74.83 Messiaen, in Claude Chamfray, “Notre enquête: Le désarroi musical: Olivier Mes-

siaen,” Arts 39 (October 26, 1945): 5.



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admire Stravinsky,” he continued, “but I believe that Le Sacre marked thepinnacle of his genius.”84 Messiaen’s students fully embraced his opin-ion in their protests of spring 1945. It is true that their next teacher, Leibowitz, shared Messiaen’s disdain. After the 1945 Stravinsky festival,Leibowitz repeated his earlier condemnation of Stravinsky’s “academic”neoclassicism from the 1938 Paris premiere of the “Dumbarton Oaks”concerto, writing that he would leave to others a closer analysis ofStravinsky’s recent pieces: “given the scant attention Stra vinsky pays tohis scores today, I don’t see why I should get worked up about them my-self.”85 But Leibowitz’s article, “Stravinsky, or, The Choice of MusicalMisery,” in which this statement appears, was not published until April1946, one year after the protests had taken place.

The Legacy of the Occupation and the Early Cold War in France

Leibowitz’s 1946 article was one of the last contributions to theStra vinsky controversy. One senses that although the protests themselvesalready belonged to the past, the issues raised in the ensuing debatescontinued to resonate in the early years of the Cold War in France. InLeibowitz’s words, “the criticism that some made of [Stravinsky]—namely, his abandonment of a certain explosiveness [and] of a search toward the discovery of new means of expression—is exactly that whichothers raised as a virtue. Thus we find ourselves before problems thatgo beyond the simple ‘Cas Strawinsky’ and call into question the mostfundamental questions of today’s musical life.”86 Yet Leibowitz’s insis-tence on the exclusive historical inevitability of Schoenberg’s modelsoon alienated at least one of his new students. Boulez’s lessons withLeibowitz lasted only a few months; as he later explained to Goléa, hehad come to the conclusion that “Leibowitz, for serial music, was theworst academicism; [he was] much more dangerous for serial musicthan tonal academicism had ever been for tonal music.”87 Having re-jected the content of Leibowitz’s dogma, Boulez nevertheless contin-ued to embrace both the singularity of Leibowitz’s vision and the strongaversion to nationalism that was typical of the generation that had

119

84 Messiaen, in Gabriel Bender, “Un entretien avec Olivier Messiaen,” Guide du con-cert 15 (February 22, 1946): 190–91.

85 Leibowitz, “Strawinsky ou le choix de la misère musicale,” Les Temps modernes 1(1946): 1335. In 1938 Leibowitz saw the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto as evidence ofStravinsky’s “total creative impotence” and described a fugal passage as “revoltingly aca -demic.” Leibowitz, “La Musique: Dialogue sur Strawinsky,” Esprit 6 (1938): 587. See alsonote 13.

86 Leibowitz, “Strawinsky ou le choix de la misère musicale,” 1321.87 Goléa, 46; see also note 74.




come of age during the occupation. For Boulez, there was only onevalid way to proceed, and it could be found only in the rejection of his-tory. When Boulez revisited the 1945 Stravinsky protests in 1971, he re-iterated his conviction that after the “brilliant firework display” of theirearly years, both Stravinsky and Schoenberg were “haunted by history.”His conclusion: “Praise be to amnesia!”88

Defining the political significance of Boulez’s postwar rejection of his national heritage and adoption of revolutionary compositionaltechniques—what Leibowitz called “the search toward the discovery ofnew means of expression”—has proven to be elusive. It is telling thatwhen Carroll proposes a political interpretation of Boulez’s Structures1a in the 1952 L’Œuvre du XXe siècle (the same festival that broughtStravinsky himself to postwar Paris for the first time), he uses themetaphor of neutralité.89 Indeed, despite the CIA’s role in funding festi-vals such as L’Œuvre du XXe siècle in Paris in 1952 and Music of the XXthCentury in Rome in 1954, both of which included the music of serialcomposers, the case for arguing that the CIA promoted high mod-ernism is much weaker in music than in literature and the visual arts.More plausible is Ian Wellens’ contention that we ought to interpretpostwar musical modernism “not as a political statement, but as a with-drawal from conventional politics, and one which . . . laid it open to ap-propriation.”90 As Wellens points out, whereas the Paris and Rome festi-vals were vigorously opposed by left-wing politicians and publications,Boulez participated in the Paris festival and objected to the Rome festi-val because of its pompousness, not its politics.91

By contrast, Nigg’s postwar trajectory was profoundly shaped by hisyearning to forge a link between his musical aesthetics and his political

120

88 Boulez, “Stravinsky: Style or Idea? In Praise of Amnesia,” in Pierre Boulez: Orienta-tions, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez and trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1986), 358–59. Originally published as “Style ou idée?—éloge d’amnésie,” Musiqueen jeu 4 (1971): 4–14.

89 Carroll argues that the very resistance of Structures 1a to interpretation representsthe French desire to fend off political pressures from both East and West and find its ownunique path during the early Cold War. Carroll, 3, 16, 91. Boulez and Messiaen per-formed the premiere of Structures 1a in a chamber music festival associated with L’Œuvredu XXe siècle, where it caused an audience protest of its own. Robert Craft described theincident, which he and Stravinsky witnessed, in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, revisedand expanded edition (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 77.

90 Wellens, 126. Wellens argues that Stonor Saunders mischaracterizes the Romefestival in particular as having “a heavy concentration” on serialist composers in order tomake her case for CIA sponsorship of serialism. He contends the modest presence of seri-alism in the festival was consistent with its presence in any contemporary music festival ofthe 1950s. Wellens, 121.

91 Ibid., 124–26. Wellens cites Boulez’s scathing rejection of Nabokov’s invitation toparticipate in the Rome festival in a letter preserved in the archives of the InternationalAssociation for Cultural Freedom, Special Collection of the Joseph Regenstein Library,University of Chicago.



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convictions. Initially, Nigg’s postwar choices, like those of Boulez, weremotivated primarily by musical polemics. Before 1947, the PCF dis-played a tolerant attitude toward the lively debates over the future ofFrench music that were taking place in left-wing French newspapersamong party members like Nigg as well as non-communists.92 In Nigg’sApril 1945 Combat article about the 1945 Stravinsky festival, any tracesof Nigg’s membership in the PCF are deeply submerged in vague talkof “an ethics of artistic creation” and a sarcastic observation that “just aseveryone today is a socialist, everyone is equally in favor of the music ofthe future.”93 Meanwhile, Nigg was gravitating to Leibowitz to studytwelve-tone compositional methods, attracted by the ideal of a universallanguage mandated by history and uniquely suited to creating “a newmusical order” founded on rational and logical principles.94 Nigg re-mained loyal to Leibowitz much longer than Boulez and is oftencounted among the first French composers to embrace twelve-tonemethods. For instance, his Variations for Piano and Ten Instruments wasamong three French contributions (the others were by Leibowitz andanother of his students, André Casanova) to Leibowitz’s InternationalFestival of Contemporary Chamber Music in homage to Schoenberg,which took place in Paris on January 25 and 29, 1947.95

Nigg’s eventual rupture with Leibowitz was motivated primarily bypolitics and was far more complete than Boulez’s had been. At the endof 1947, a rapidly changing political landscape forced Nigg to confrontthe idea that his aesthetic affinity for twelve-tone composition and hispolitical membership in the PCF might no longer be compatible. In the Moscow meeting of March-April 1947, the foreign ministers of theUnited States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were unable tocome up with a peace plan for Germany and Austria that did not in-volve partition.96 Escalating tensions in Europe between the two super-powers put pressure on the PCF to bring the activities of all its mem-bers into closer alignment with official Soviet directives. The February1948 resolution of the Soviet Communist Party made clear the conse-quences in the Soviet Union for disregarding the Party’s directives on

121

92 Alten, 11, 23.93 Nigg, “La querelle Strawinsky,” 2.94 Nigg, 1978 interview, cited in Bacri, 57.95 For a complete program of the festival, see Meine, 259–60. Casanova, who (like

Boulez) studied with Dandelot during the occupation, became Leibowitz’s first Frenchpupil in 1944. Jean-Yves Bosseur, “Casanova, André,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford MusicOnline, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05064 (ac-cessed October 13, 2008).

96 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005),124–26. Judt quotes Robert K. Murphy, the political advisor to the U.S. military govern-ment in Germany, as declaring that the Moscow meeting “rang down the Iron Curtain.”




socialist realism and formalism in music. The text of the resolution waswidely discussed in France as early as March 1948 and was published inFrench translation two years later.97 When French musicians who sym-pathized with the PCF traveled in May 1948 to Prague for the SecondInternational Congress of Composers and Music Critics, they learnedwhat the Soviet Communist Party expected of communist musicians inthe west. Nigg joined several other French musicians in signing thePrague Manifesto (which laid out these expectations) and in formingthe Association des musiciens progressistes, an organization meant topromote the Manifesto’s principles. These were fourfold: to renounce“extreme subjectivism” in their music in favor of the expression of pro-gressive ideals; to defend their national cultural heritage against “falselycosmopolitan tendencies”; to pay more attention to the vocal forms(opera, oratorio, cantata, chorus) that would best convey progressiveideals in music; and to musically educate the masses. The Manifesto waspublished in Les Lettres françaises, by this time under the control of thePCF, in October 1948.98

Nigg’s initial reaction to the Prague Manifesto was to try to find away to reconcile his avant-garde compositional style with his Commu-nist Party membership, which was itself rooted in his belief in the neces-sity of social commitment in art. One week after Les Lettres françaisespublished the Prague Manifesto, the newspaper published an interviewbetween Nigg and his fellow “musicien progressiste,” the music criticPierre Kaldor. Nigg embraced without condition the idea that all musiccomposition “expresses a social reality, which it is shaped by,” but he de-fended his right as a composer to use avant-garde methods to achievesocialist ideals. When Kaldor questioned Nigg about the difficulty of hisproposed synthesis, Nigg responded that a composer was now obligedto try to “integrate his most extreme research with what people had theright to expect of him, in a synthesis that could constitute the founda-tion of a truly new music.”99 Nigg attempted to create such a synthesis

122

97 “Ob opere ‘Velikaya druzhba’ V. Muradeli, Postanovleniye TsK VKP(b) ot 10fevralya 1948 g,” Sovetskaya muszyka 12, no. 1 ( January–February 1948): 3–8; Andrei Alek-sandrovich Zhdanov, Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique (Paris: Les Éditions de laNouvelle critique, 1950). On the French reception of the resolution, see Alten, 57–71.For an English translation see: “Soviet Music Policy, 1948” in Music since 1900, ed. LauraKuhn and Nicolas Slonimsky, 6th ed. (New York: Schirmer, 2001): 942–52.

98 “La Crise de la musique: Le manifeste de Prague, les réactions des musiciensfrançais,” Les Lettres françaises (October 7, 1948), 6. The French musicians who signed theManifesto were Nigg, Martinet, Désormière, Elsa Barraine, Charles Bruck, Louis Durey,Pierre Kaldor, and Charles Koechlin. Les Lettres françaises was founded during the occupa-tion as a clandestine literary journal; it became a weekly paper in September 1944 andwas taken over by the PCF in 1947. See Pierre Daix, Les Lettres françaises: Jalons pourl’histoire d’un journal, 1941–1972 (Paris: Tallandier, 2004).

99 Kaldor, “Entretien sur la crise de la musique,” Les Lettres françaises (October 14,1948), 6.



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with his 1949 oratorio, Le fusillé inconnu, only to abandon twelve-tonemethods in his next major work, the symphonic poem Pour un poète cap-tif, and in the choral works he was then writing for groups such as theChorale populaire de Paris.100

It took until 1954, however, for Nigg to accept the Manifesto’s di-rective to embrace his national heritage in his non-choral concertworks. In his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra of 1954, Nigg usedd’Indy’s 1886 Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français for piano and orchestra as a model in composing a deeply conventional three-movement work. Like d’Indy, Nigg opened his concerto with a Frenchfolk tune (first heard, as was d’Indy’s, in solo woodwinds over mutedstrings in a slow introduction) that recurs throughout the rest of thefirst movement. Nigg’s Concerto was reviewed enthusiastically in LesLettres françaises by Renaud de Jouvenel, who compared his music favor-ably to Soviet composers Aram Khachaturian and Arno HarutyuniBabadjanian, and praised his rediscovery of his national heritage:“Serge Nigg is French. It is an experience that does not often happento us to watch the birth of a French composer of whom we can beproud.”101 De Jouvenel later claimed that he was the one who intro-duced Nigg to the French folk song “Filles, chantez le mois de mai”that became the theme of his Piano Concerto. Until 1954, de Jouvenelhad been the director of Le Chant du Monde, a music publishing andrecord firm funded by the PCF.102 In 1952 Le Chant du Monde issueda recording of Nigg’s choral harmonizations of French folk songs, in-cluding “Filles, chantez le mois de mai,” and published them in 1957,the same year the firm published Nigg’s Piano Concerto.

This close embrace of his national heritage in Nigg’s concert musicproved ambivalent and short-lived. In verbal statements Nigg was unam-biguous in his rejection of serialism, specifically adopting the languageof the Soviet Communist Party’s 1948 resolution on music. He toldGavoty and Daniel Lesur in a 1955 radio interview that “for severalyears I was a prisoner of ideas that were artificial, manufactured, mor-bid, and soul-destroying; for years I dared not write a single triad, or afree and fresh melody. Think of the Procrustean bed: I was one of thevictims of what one could call ‘The Musical Terror.’ ”103 But even in

123

100 On Nigg’s music and political engagement during this period, see Alten, 78–94.Nigg later destroyed the score of Le fusillé inconnu. Chamfray, “Serge Nigg,” 57.

101 Renaud de Jouvenel, “Réflexions sur le concerto de Serge Nigg,” Les Lettresfrançaises (March 10, 1955), 6.

102 De Jouvenel, Confidences d’un ancien sous-marin du P.C.F. (Paris: Julliard, 1980),32–52, 133.

103 “Serge Nigg,” in Bernard Gavoty and Daniel Lesur, eds., Pour ou contre la musiquemoderne? (Paris: Flammarion, 1957), 45.




music as outwardly loyal to his national heritage as the 1954 Piano Con-certo, Nigg did not make a complete break with his recent past. De Jou-venel’s otherwise glowing review of the concerto for a communist news-paper pointed to the lingering effects of Nigg’s twelve-tone music in the “jerky orchestration” and complex contrapuntal treatment of thefolksong theme.104 Example 3a, from the Concerto’s first movement,consists of the initial statement of the folksong theme in the flute andclarinet. When the theme returns in a climax near the end of the move-ment, there is a simultaneous statement of two versions of the theme,now transformed rhythmically and metrically. At the same time as thefirst and second violins and viola (doubled by the flute, oboe, and clar-inet) play the theme in diminution and in thirds both above and belowthe original key, a second version of the first half of the tune, trans-posed down a whole step and with its original rhythmic durations, canbe heard in the bassoons, trumpets and trombones (ex. 3b). The com-plexity of such moments have led scholars who have studied Nigg’s activities during this period to suggest that, despite the clarity of his verbal pronouncements in adhering to socialist realist ideals, such a label may not be appropriate for his music.105 As soon as Nigg left thePCF in 1956—disillusioned, along with several other French musiciansand intellectuals, by the Soviet invasion of Hungary—he immediatelyabandoned the adherence to national tradition of his 1954 Piano Con-certo in a new work whose style was deliberately personal. Nigg’s 1957Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is written in a highly expressive mu-sical language that, while not systematically atonal, assiduously avoidsquoting preexisting thematic materials, referencing models of previouscomposers, or establishing consistent tonal patterns.

In essence, the 1948 Soviet directive to embrace his national her-itage had pushed Nigg to adopt in his 1954 concerto the very aestheticpositions that had been advocated by conservative French composersduring the German occupation. Nigg and his fellow students had re-jected Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as unbearably retrospective in 1945.The near-unanimous certainty of Stravinsky’s defenders reminded themof the wartime composers who smugly commended new music mod-eled on d’Indy’s symphonic works as the future of the New FrenchSchool; some of these composers still adhered to their wartime posi-tions as late as 1955. At the same time as Nigg was denouncing serial-ism in his radio interview with Gavoty and Lesur, the eighty-three-year-old Busser was telling the same interviewers that the postwar influence

124

104 De Jouvenel, “Réflexions,” 6.105 Bacri, 58–59; Carroll, 50.



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of Schoenberg in France was as “decadent” as that of Wagner in 1914,and that neither were “in the lineage of French genius”; Aubin, whowas teaching composition at the Conservatoire at the time, was still in-sisting that young French composers ought to respect the lineage ofFrench music from Gounod to Ravel. “The only rupture between musicand composers,” Aubin complained, “is for those who amuse them-selves in burning bridges. There is no [rupture] for the French com-posers who remain appropriately faithful to their culture.”106 Mean-while, Boulez was mocking the very idea of a French tradition in music,

125

106 “Tony Aubin” and “Henri Busser,” in Gavoty and Lesur, 47, 79.

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while Nigg, pressured by the PCF to make use of the French musicalheritage, did so in only a few of his compositions.107

During the 1945 Stravinsky debates, Nigg was a spokesman for hisgeneration in words and music, his political commitment to commu-nism playing a negligible role. After 1947, as the Soviet Union began tointervene directly in the political and creative lives of communist musi-cians in western Europe, Nigg could not maintain his aesthetic interestsin twelve-tone composition or his distaste for overt expressions ofFrench nationalism and remain a loyal member of the PCF. Nigg’s am-bivalent engagement with the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism inworks such as his 1954 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra demonstrateshow the legacy of the German occupation of France lasted into theearly Cold War. The stylistic choices faced by French composers duringthis period were colored not only by the global Cold War rhetoric fromthe superpowers, but also by the local history of France’s wartime pro-motion of the French musical heritage as a model for a New FrenchSchool. When Nigg swiftly abandoned both the French national her-itage and the Soviet aesthetic doctrine in music he composed after heleft the PCF in 1956, he finally began to explore just what kind of music he felt would appropriately express what he had called in 1945the “profoundly felt uncertainty” of the era. For Nigg, as for France, theearly Cold War had ended.

Drew University

ABSTRACT

In spring 1945, a small group of students, among them Serge Niggand Pierre Boulez, protested during the first performances in liberatedParis of the neoclassical works Stravinsky had composed in America.Whereas Boulez’s biographers have interpreted the student protests asa sign of René Leibowitz’s successful promotion of serialism in France,scholars of the Cold War have seen the 1945 concerts as a precursor toStravinsky’s participation in the 1952 L’Œuvre du XXe siècle, a festival in Paris indirectly funded by the CIA. These interpretations subsumethe immediate postwar period in France within a synchronic view of theearly Cold War era. But the 1945 protests against Stravinsky were notabout the decisive embrace of a single musical style; rather, they were

130

107 Boulez sarcastically observed in 1952 that “They try to persuade us that serialdiscoveries are old. We ought now to create something new, and to support this brilliantthesis, they cite false Gounod, fake Chabrier, champions of clarity, elegance, refinement—qualities that are eminently French. (They adore mixing Descartes with haute couture.)”Boulez, “Éventuellement . . . ,” Revue musicale 212 (1952): 118.



sprout

about the desire of young French composers to play an active role inshaping the postwar future of music in France.

In 1945, Nigg—and not Boulez—represented the aesthetic opin-ions of a generation of French composers who had grown up duringthe German occupation of Paris and the political aspirations of thosewho, like Nigg, flocked to the French Communist Party at war’s end.Nigg’s participation in the 1945 Stravinsky debates gives us occasion toexamine his earliest musical compositions and the political opinions hewould express with increasing ideological fervor in the 1950s. Althoughin verbal pronouncements he supported socialist realism, Nigg’s rareand complex use of a French folk tune in his 1954 Piano Concerto be-trays his ambivalence about the Soviet demand for communist com-posers to reject “falsely cosmopolitan tendencies” in favor of their national cultural heritage. Having rejected in 1945 both Stravinsky’sneoclassicism and French nationalism (the latter tainted by associationswith Vichy during the occupation), Nigg had to choose in the earlyCold War between his aesthetic and political loyalties.

Keywords: Pierre Boulez, Cold War, German occupation of France,Olivier Messiaen, Serge Nigg, Igor Stravinsky 131



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