Milhaud: Musical Modernism’s Merrymaker

Amid a mass culture ever more enslaved (despite the all-too-pertinent warnings of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and James McAuley) to autobiographical “self-expression” at its most puerile—whether this “self-expression” be via misery memoirs, or umpteen exhibitionistic TikTok videos, or fashionable journalistic ascriptions of heroic virtue to Amy Winehouse’s suicidal mania—it behoves us to undertake a corrective thought-experiment. Let us, accordingly, now do so.

Imagine a French composer born in 1892 with no advantages of birth, health, or education. With, moreover, one clear disadvantage: he was a Jew, a fact providing limited actuarial comfort when the Wehrmacht strode down the Champs-Élysées. Too ill for conscription during even the most desperate stages of the First World War, he spent most of his adult life tortured by rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually prevented him from being able to walk. Nothing save the fortunate happenstance of a sea berth across the Atlantic in 1940 guaranteed that he would avoid Auschwitz.

What sort of music will such a man conceive? Surely you would predict howls of anguish, perhaps unrelenting twelve-tone usage, perhaps marathons of existential anger against bodily handicaps and against European civilisation’s journey to the end of the night. But on all these criteria you would be wrong.

Because the composer in question was Darius Milhaud, whose death occurred exactly five decades ago, on June 22, 1974, in Geneva. Equipped by a rancorous fate with a résumé that afforded him ample justification for convincing himself, “Life’s a bitch, then you die”, Milhaud did the precise opposite. He cultivated an idiom—actually, several idioms—as redolent of sheer exuberant buttonholing pleasure in the visible and audible world as music can be.

Milhaud’s output abundantly offers, in a word, fun.

To Erik Satie’s freshness of outlook, Milhaud added a technique beyond Satie’s most sanguine hopes. Like any virtuoso, he relished surmounting near-impossible challenges, none greater than the cantata which he based on the 1961 encyclical Pacem in Terris. Confronted with bromidic Vatican prose that most other composers would view as utterly impervious to musical treatment—a sample from which reads: “A further consequence of man’s personal dignity is his right to engage in economic activities suited to his degree of responsibility”—Milhaud somehow turned such bureaucratic waffle into a dignified, periodically exalted score.

Technical feats, nonetheless, are not Milhaud’s chief claim upon music-lovers’ attention. Wildly inventive ebullience is. In style no less than in physique, Milhaud was as plethoric as Chesterton, whose intellectual hyperkinesis, “Great Gusto” (being Chesterton’s own phrase), and freedom from cheap angst he shared. Despite his distaste for Richard Strauss, he could have echoed Strauss’s defiant creed from 1924: “I want to create joy. I need it.”

A typical Milhaud score (he reached 443 opus numbers) will be garrulous, discursive, sardonic, sometimes affectionate, occasionally downright congested, and often so gaudily opulent in its textures that by comparison, Respighi seems almost to be wearing a hairshirt. Theatrical boldness abounds, while hedonism and the terpsichorean spirit are almost ubiquitous. Milhaud’s output abundantly offers, in a word, fun.

No wonder critical opinion underrated it for so long. Most of the musicological verbiage from the Cold War by which proselytisers Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, René Leibowitz, and, at his worst, T.W. Adorno championed mainstream musical modernism, can be encapsulated in one banal edict: “Eat your spinach”. About the public’s spinach consumption levels, Milhaud could not have cared less. Into his own modernism, cheerfulness kept breaking in. His explorations of severe antique ritual—including an early triumph in 1922, Les Choéphores (The Libation-Bearers), based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia—become all the more effective for their rarity and restraint.

As befits this user-friendliest among France’s twentieth-century musical masters, few of Milhaud’s pieces (and probably none of his best pieces) last more than an hour; most clock in at well under that. A Detroit resident once assured an Australian visitor, “If you don’t like our climate, there’ll be another one along in fifteen minutes.” Milhaud’s musical climate is equally volatile. It precludes tedium. His orchestral lament over President Kennedy’s assassination makes all its points—high wailing violins, snarling trombones, fulminating timpani, desolate woodwind solos—within four minutes of agonised dissonance, then stops. Of Milhaud’s twelve symphonies, the final three, all dating from the 1960s, can fit together on a single compact disc.

Or take Milhaud’s singularly menacing opera, Le Pauvre Matelot (1927), in which a case of mistaken identity prompts a wife to slay her sailor husband with a hammer. Most of Milhaud’s contemporaries would have dragged out Jean Cocteau’s libretto to Wagnerian proportions. Milhaud’s three acts are finished inside forty minutes, with no short-changing of tragic grandeur. Although the work could well purify your emotions by terror and pity, it will still leave you with a third of your lunch break intact. And parts of it, improbably for a tale of mindless homicide, will tempt you to dance.

Which seems as apposite a segue as any into the Milhaud whom some of us love best, and with whom we will particularly want to mark June’s anniversary. That is, the Milhaud of the Suite Provençale (1936), which uses tunes by eighteenth-century master André Campra (like Milhaud, a native of the Midi) to conjure up such a beguiling genius loci that the listener can almost smell the aroma of ratatouille emerging from the stereo. The Milhaud of La Création du monde (1923), written a decade after and in obvious homage to The Rite of Spring, but over in a third of the time, and with an irrepressible Gallic mischief that keeps it far fresher than Stravinsky’s self-consciously humourless innovation. La Création clearly haunted Gershwin, whose An American in Paris moved Milhaud to write A Frenchman in New York. The Milhaud of Le Bœuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof, 1920), initially envisaged for an aborted Charlie Chaplin film, and with a mocking allusion to Strauss’s Salome. Possibly most beguiling of all is the Milhaud who produced—also in 1920—Saudades do Brasil: musical evocations of his time in Rio de Janeiro as assistant to Paul Claudel, who was the French ambassador there. Warning: avoid the Saudades’ penny-plain original version for piano. Only Milhaud’s subsequent orchestral arrangement accords the music its requisite gorgeous, humid, hallucinatory Lusotropicalism.

The Talmud speaks of two men who told Elijah: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person who is downhearted, we cheer him up.” Again and again, many have found Milhaud’s bounciest creations to be much better antidepressants than nine-tenths of what Big Pharma peddles. Let one final anecdote portray Milhaud the life-affirmer. Recounted in a 1988 biography, it comes from his postwar tenure at Oakland’s Mills College (his world-famous pupils included Iannis Xenakis, Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, and P.D.Q. Bach’s creator Peter Schickele):

A student composition had just been performed … The poor student was barely fending off questions from a particularly vocal fellow composer who kept asking why he had done this or that, when there was a sudden commotion in one corner of the room, and Milhaud slowly raised himself out of a deep armchair. Silence fell as the students waited to hear a pronouncement from the master. “Why not?” Milhaud said, and sat down.

To every vicissitude which he encountered, Milhaud’s riposte (explicit or implicit) remained: why not? How characteristic that, corporeal torments and Nazism’s shadow notwithstanding, he should have titled his reminiscences My Happy Life (1972). He has bequeathed to us a cornucopia of rambunctious harmony and invention. Explore it at your leisure: it will never bore you.

R.J. Stove is an organist and writer living in Melbourne.

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