In Search of a Consolatory Past Grief and Embodied Musical Memory

4 In Search of a Consolatory Past Grief and Embodied Musical Memory

The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913)

In September 1919, Maurice Ravel wrote to Manuel de Falla to offer his condolences on the death of de Falla’s mother. He confided that, because he was still mourning his own mother’s death, he remained unable to get back to composing, even while feeling that “doing so would in any case be the best consolation, rather than forgetting.”1 When he began working again two months later, Ravel returned to a piece he had begun in 1906 while living with his mother: La Valse. Just before New Year’s Eve of 1919, Ravel wrote to Ida Godebska, “I’m thinking about it even more, since I have resumed work, that I no longer have this dear silent presence enveloping me with her infinite tenderness.”2 While in instances like this one working on La Valse forced Ravel to realize his mother’s absence, at other times he chose to return to La Valse in order to console himself with memories of his mother revived specifically through musical creation. He wrote to Hélène Kahn-Casella in January 1920, “I think of her every day, in every minute. Above all now that I’ve begun working again, which takes me back to the happy moments when I left her.”3 For Ravel there was something in the feeling of working on La Valse—whether hearing its familiar melodies as he ed- ited the score, sensing its well-known rhythms in his fingers as he played it on the piano, or experiencing the familiar ways that his throat vibrated as he hummed its tunes—that allowed him to recall more vividly his mother’s presence during the years of mourning that followed her passing.

1 Ravel to Manuel de Falla, September 19, 1919, in A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, ed. Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 193. 2 Ravel to Ida Godebska, December 27, 1919, in ibid., 195. 3 Ravel to Hélène Kahn-Casella, January 15, 1920, in “Soixante-deux lettres de Maurice Ravel à Hélène et Alfredo Casella,” ed. Jean Roy, Cahiers Maurice Ravel 1 (1985): 59–111; 79.

Resonant Recoveries. Jillian C. Rogers, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190658298.003.0005 In Search of a Consolatory Past 199

This musical-memorial encounter that Ravel created through working on La Valse offers an evocative starting point for investigating relationships between memory, mourning, music, and consolation for civilians and soldier-musicians in interwar France. Ravel was one of many musicians who adopted a style of mourning during and after World War I centered on the preservation of vivid memories of lost loved ones. Some of the most well-known musicians in interwar France, from Nadia Boulanger, Emma Debussy, and Francis Poulenc, to cellist Maurice Maréchal and pianist Marguerite Long, expressed the importance of continuing to viscerally remember and mourn for extended periods of time friends and family members who had died. Their responses to loss reflect a broader cultural, psychological phenomenon that I term here, after the psychologist Vamik Volkan, “perennial” mourning—a kind of prolonged mourning that was prevalent in France after 1914.4 Freud’s work on trauma, mourning, and melancholia is significant to understanding the history of psychological conceptions of these phenomena, and I will briefly address his work on these topics in what follows. However, in line with my ground-up approach to understanding trauma in interwar French contexts, I have chosen in this chapter to focus on theoretical conceptions of grief and trauma that would have been socioculturally relevant to my historical subjects, theories that resonate best with what I have observed in the letters, diaries, music, and memoirs, as well as other objects and practices belonging to, written by, or enacted by the French musicians I discuss here. To this end, the work of psychologists and theorists Volkan, Christopher Bollas, and David Aberbach provide the theoretical frame for my analysis in this chapter. My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate the ways in which music held importance as a memory-focused corporeal technology of consolation for many interwar French musicians who became perennial mourners in the wake of World War I. French musicians’ archival collections, memoirs, letters, diaries, concert programs, and musical compositions demonstrate that music played a crucial role in how they expressed, coped with, and found consolation amidst grief. For many who lived through World War I, music was especially evocative because of its presumed ability—as evinced in popular works by contemporary authors such as Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust—to recapture the feeling of the past. Musicologists of French musical modernism such as Jeanice Brooks, Kimberly Francis, Tamara Levitz, Deborah Mawer, Rachel Moore, Jann Pasler, and

4 Vamik Volkan, “Not Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies,” in On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” eds. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz (London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007), 90–109; Volkan and Elizabeth Zintl, Life after Loss: The Lessons of Grief (London: Karnac, 2015); Volkan, Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice, and Border Psychology (London: Karnac, 2017). 200 Resonant Recoveries

Michael Puri have addressed some of the ways in which French musicians mean- ingfully engaged with memory in their compositions and musical practices, sometimes as a means of mourning dead loved ones, former homelands, or times past.5 Throughout this chapter, I build on this scholarship not only by articulating the broad range of musical activities that functioned as memorial practices and the wide scope of people who used music in this way, but also by empha- sizing how musical-memorial practices offer yet another way—in addition to sonic vibrations and rhythmically regular bodily movement—in which interwar musicians understood music making as an embodied means of processing trauma in interwar France. Although immersing oneself in an ultimately unreachable past could be painful, French musicians were able to find consolation in creating music that permitted them to recall and re-enact previous instances of music making with loved ones. Embodied musical remembering provided opportunities not only to pay tribute to the dead, but also to transform emotional and psychic states in ways that were comforting, even if only temporarily. As I show, French interwar musicians’ understandings of music making as a corporeal-memorial practice are evident not only in their writings, but also in the musical activities in which they chose to participate after the deaths of loved ones. In this chapter, I con- centrate on the wartime and interwar musical activities of Marguerite Long, Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, and Darius Milhaud in particular, which reveal that music making of all kinds—from composing and performing to practicing, score reading, editing, and transcribing—provided these musicians with access to memories not only of the past, but also of the loved ones who had lived with them in their remembered pasts. In this context, mourning, especially as manifested in embodied memory, emerges as a paramount organizing principle in how French interwar musicians approached making music in their everyday lives.

5 Jeanice Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kimberly Francis, Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Deborah Mawer, “Balanchine’s La Valse: Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies,” The Opera Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2007): 90–116; Rachel Moore, “The Legacy of War: Conceptualising Wartime Musical Life in the Post-War Musical Press, 1919–1920,” in Music Criticism in France, 1918– 1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy, eds. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2018), 245–266; Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 493–546, 595–642, 695–700; Michael Puri, “Memory, Pastiche, and Aestheticism in Ravel and Proust,” in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56–73; Puri, Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). In Search of a Consolatory Past 201

World War I, Perennial Mourning, and the Memorial Potential of Linking Objects

Interwar French musicians lived at a time when memory was a significant focus in psychological discourse. From the 1890s through World War I and until today, psychologists have understood the psychic processing of trauma as intimately intertwined with memory. In 1889 the Parisian psychologist Pierre Janet argued that trauma often manifested in disturbances in memory processing, noting the persistence of “subconscious fixed ideas”—memories that have been split off from consciousness, producing the recurrence of painful and often inexplicable emotions.6 Janet’s contemporary Freud likewise found processes of memory to be tied to psychological illnesses, declaring in 1895 that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” which is to say that they experience difficulty coping with unassimilated memories of an earlier trauma.7 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud reconsidered the concept of traumatic memory that he had initially conceived in the 1890s. In this later text, he suggested that the “compulsion to repeat”—to return unconsciously to repressed memories and past actions—is instinctual, and has the ability to override the drive toward pleasure in instances of traumatic neurosis.8 Trauma is characterized for both psychologists, then, as an inability to move past a psychologically disturbing event that results in the return of memories, affects, and behaviors, usually without the traumatized person’s conscious awareness.9 As psychology and psychoanalytic theory of the last century have demonstrated, bringing up and working through memories has since been considered one of the best ways to process grief and trauma, to alleviate some of its painful social, psychological, and physical effects, and to keep the memory of lost loved ones alive. For example, in his wartime essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud posited that the key process in mourning was the slow detach- ment of the libido from the lost love object, accomplished through the gradual

6 Bessel Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, “Pierre Janet and the Breakdown of Adaptation in Psychological Trauma,” American Journal of Psychiatry 146, no. 12 (December 1989): 1530–1540; Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 37: “idée fixe.” 7 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst, with an intro. by Rachel Bowlby (New York: Penguin Books, 2004) 11. 8 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 3–66. As Freud has pointed out and as his writings evidence, these ideas appear, albeit less fully fleshed out, in a number of other essays, including “Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through” (1914) and “The Uncanny” (1919), and the lecture “Fixation to Traumas—The Unconscious” (1917). 9 Jay Winter has also pointed out that during World War I, psychologists who worked with traumatized soldiers began to understand trauma as something that soldiers held within their bodies, often against their will. See Winter,Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 55–61. 202 Resonant Recoveries replaying and working through of each memory concerning the person, place, or ideal being mourned.10 In this essay Freud pathologized modalities of perennial mourning—what he called melancholia—in which the living person refused to decathect the missing loved one. However, numerous recent psychoanalytic theorists have noted—without pathologization—the importance for many people in continuing to hold on to the memories of the dead. Vamik Volkan observed in his decades-long study of people suffering from traumatic grief— which he calls perennial mourning—that many traumatized mourners exhibit a number of behaviors that stem from their continued engagement with traumatic memories or memories of dead loved ones. According to Volkan, perennial mourners “keep the object representation of the lost person or thing within their self-representation as a specific and unassimilated ‘foreign body,’ ” leaving them unable to escape the imagined presences of their lost loved ones.11 Many of these mourners focus on death, tombs, or cemeteries, obsessively read obituaries, and talk or act as if the person being mourned is still present and watching over them. They use terms like “frozen” to describe both their dreams and their sense of being stuck within their mourning processes. Especially striking is perennial mourners’ use of what Volkan calls “linking objects.” He argues that “through the creation of a linking object or phenomenon, the perennial mourner makes an ‘adjustment’ to the complication within the mourning process; the mourner makes the mourning process ‘unending’ so as not to face their conflicted relationship with the object representation of the deceased or lost thing.” Volkan specifies that a linking object can be “a song, a hand gesture, or even a certain type of weather condition,” but that no matter the objects chosen, the mourner experiences these as “magical” objects that link them to the deceased person, serving as an “external bridge between the representations of the mourner and that of the lost person, just as the introject serves as an internal bridge.”12 The existence of linking objects is often a sign that a person has experienced a traumatic response to a loss that manifests as an inability to move beyond the pain of grief; however, such objects also hold the potential to function positively for those who use them. As Volkan suggests, in making an “adjustment” to the psychic process of mourning that allows them to not entirely accept a loss, a mourner might use linking objects in order to achieve consolation through providing relief—albeit often only temporary—from the pain of grief. Moreover, as psychoanalytic theorists Christopher Bollas and David Aberbach have argued, objects of all kinds have transformative potential, enabling those who use them

10 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 237–258; 245. 11 Volkan, “Not Letting Go,” 98. 12 Ibid., 101–103. In Search of a Consolatory Past 203 to alter their psychic states and emotions. Bollas asserts that people use objects to “conjure a specific state of self,” for self-expression and self-discovery, and in coping with and recovering from trauma. He specifies that while trauma is frequently characterized by the repetition of past affects, thoughts, and behaviors, engagement with objects—from musical recordings to books and photographs— can enable people to “re-envision . . . reality and in turn sponsor new ways of living and thinking.”13 Furthermore, both Bollas and Aberbach posit that crea- tive and artistic activities can allow mastery over trauma. Aberbach argues this specifically with perennial mourning in mind. “Through creativity,” he writes, “the artist may confront and attempt to master the trauma on his own terms and, in so doing, complete the work of mourning. The unresolved elements of grief may thus themselves be both motive and substance in creativity.”14 These theorizations of how traumatized individuals psychically engage with objects suggest that it is not only linking objects that can help people to process grief, but also linking practices. Such practices might include engaging with linking objects in particular ways—such as listening to a certain piece of music on a regular basis—but also participating in activities that could reinvigorate the memory of a loved one in and of themselves, without the presence of a specific linking object. Indeed, many interwar French musicians used a variety of musical and non- musical linking objects and practices to cope with their grief.

Trapped in Grief: Interwar French Musicians as Perennial Mourners

The perennial mourning described in varied terms by psychoanalytic theorists from Freud to Aberbach, Bollas, and Volkan provides a useful framework for understanding the mourning practices of many interwar French musicians. Even so, these musicians had their own ways of not only defining perennial mourning in affective and practical terms, but also articulating why never-ending mourning was an ethical response to loss. Comprehending French musicians’ particular logic of perennial mourning is crucial to understanding both how music came to be understood as an embodied, memorial practice, and why memory-oriented music making came to have a deep cultural and personal significance for those in mourning.

13 Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 70. 14 David Aberbach, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 4. 204 Resonant Recoveries

During and after the war, many musicians in French modernist social circles communicated that they felt “stuck” in endless mourning in their correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. Much of Ravel’s correspondence after his mother’s death bears the marks of his deep and continuing grief over this loss.15 Marguerite Long referred to the three years after her husband’s death as a time in which she was “buried” or “trapped” in grief.16 Emma Debussy—Claude Debussy’s wife and a talented musician in her own right—described her grief after the death of her husband as a “labyrinth of pain,” and told Long after her daughter Chouchou’s death in 1919 that she feels “the horrible nightmare” so deeply that she no longer knows where she is.17 The salon organizer and musician Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux repeatedly referred to endlessly mourning her husband—who passed away of natural causes in April 1915—in her private journal. She wrote almost six months after his death, for instance, that she was “in a moral distress” that she would “never be able to overcome,” and she continued to mark the anniversary of his death and complain of depression for many years after his death.18 Similarly, Jean Cocteau, the modernist writer, artist, and friend of Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and many other French musicians, wrote to Francis Poulenc nine months after the death of their mutual friend Raymond Radiguet that “I suffer now as on the very first day.”19 These testimonies indicate these mourners’ longstanding inability to move beyond deep grief. For many French musicians, continuing to grieve—even if this experience was painful—seems to have been a way to keep their dead loved ones alive. Perennial mourning offered them a means to continue to connect and communicate with them, to not forget them, and, in not facing the loss as a loss, to alleviate some of the pain associated with their deaths. There was even a paradoxical pleasure to be felt in this mournful existence, which Saint-Marceaux described in her journal three months after her husband’s death as “a painful melancholy but with pleasure.” It is in this particular emotional state that she said she felt closer to

15 For example, Ravel writes to Hélène Kahn-Casella in September 1919 that he thinks that “this terrible time has stunned me, and I won’t be able to recover from it.” See Ravel to Hélène Kahn- Casella, September 10, 1919, in “Soixante-deux lettres,” 77: “cette terrible époque m’a assommé, et que je ne m’en relèverai pas.” 16 Marguerite Long, Au piano avec Gabriel Fauré (Paris: R. Julliard, 1963), 72: “emmurée dans mon deuil.” 17 Emma Debussy to André Caplet, postmarked April 14, 1918, BnF, Mus., Fonds André Caplet (F-AC), NLA 269, vol. 1B: “ce labyrinthe de douleur.” Emma Debussy to Marguerite Long, undated letter, MMM, F-ML, Correspondance: “Mais le cauchemar horrible dans lequel je suis est si profond en moi que je ne sais plus très bien où je suis.” 18 Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, entry of November 3, 1915, Journal 1894–1927 , in ed. Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 874: “J’y suis misérablement dans une détresse morale que je ne pourrai jamais surmonter.” 19 Jean Cocteau to Francis Poulenc, September 1924, Francis Poulenc, ‘Echo and Source’: Selected Correspondence 1915–1963 , trans. and ed. Sidney Buckland (London: Victor Gollanccz Ltd., 1991), 73. In Search of a Consolatory Past 205 her husband and “more in communication” with him.20 She also often used her journal as a way of communicating with her husband, speaking to him on several occasions as if he were still alive, asking him if he could see her pain and feel her tears.21 Nadia Boulanger likewise communicated with her sister and mother after their deaths. She used her personal journals and datebooks to write messages to her sister Lili after her passing in 1918, and many years after her mother’s death Boulanger reported that “Maman has always been my judge . . . Mother is still with me; I feel her presence. Time has not changed that.”22 Ravel also acknowl- edged that he continued to live with his mother’s presence after her death, writing to Lucien Garban six months after the death of his mother and telling him that he has been waking up in the middle of the night, sensing her “close to [him], watching over [him].” He likewise informed Manuel de Falla two years later that “this solitude that I feared so much before [now] seems delightful. I live more with those who have left me.”23 Emma Debussy also deeply desired to maintain connections with loved ones who had died. She sought to recreate Claude’s and her daughter’s presences after their deaths, but was also troubled by her failure to do so. She heartbreakingly wrote to Marguerite Long after Chouchou’s death in 1919: “I am still calling Chouchou . . . she no longer hears me!!”24 Moreover, Emma described the way in which the reality of Claude’s absence disturbed her ability to keep him with her, telling André Caplet that she was afraid of going back to the home she had shared with Claude because it would force her to face the reality of his death. She adamantly articulated that the most important task in this period of mourning was to continue in this painful state, writing that, “the greatest tragedy, that could yet overwhelm me, would be to no longer feel this fervent search for His trace.”25 Relief from mourning, then, would ache more than the pain of continual grief. Perhaps no one made clearer the importance of continuing to suffer in the pain of loss than the accomplished cellist and musician-solider Maurice Maréchal.

20 Saint-Marceaux, entry of July 1, 1915, Journal, 862: “une mélancolie douloureuse mais avec plaisir”; “plus en communication.” 21 Saint-Marceaux, entries of May 1, 1915–July 8, 1915, in ibid., 858–863. 22 Nadia Boulanger, cited in Jérôme Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, trans. M. M. Shriver (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992), 9. See also Nadia Boulanger’s datebook for January 1919, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vmf. Ms. 88 (1), and Jeanice Brooks’s discussion of it in The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 23. 23 Ravel to Lucien Garban, June 20, 1917, in “La Correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Lucien Garban,” Cahiers Maurice Ravel 7 (2000): 66: “je la sens près de moi, me veillant.” Ravel to Manuel de Falla, December 16, 1919, in “Correspondance de Maurice Ravel adressée à Manuel de Falla,” ed. Jean Roy, in Cahiers Maurice Ravel 3 (1987): 7–26; 12: “Cette solitude que je redoutais tant autrefois me semble délicieuse. Je vis davantage avec ceux qui m’ont quitté.” 24 Emma Debussy to Marguerite Long, undated, MMM, F-ML, Correspondance: “Moi j’appelle toujours Chouchou. . . . Elle ne m’entend plus!!” 25 Emma Debussy to André Caplet, postmarked April 14, 1918, BnF, Mus., F-AC, NLA 269, vol. 1B: “Il me semble que le plus grand malheur qui pourrait encore m’accabler, serait de ne plus ressentir cette recherche passionnée de Sa trace.” 206 Resonant Recoveries

He wrote to Nadia Boulanger after Lili’s death, articulating his conception of mourning with striking clarity. He sympathized with Nadia, telling her that he “knows all that you are suffering through” since he had experienced losses similar to hers—the death of his fiancée and numerous friends—in the recent past.26 Then he wrote:

The only true and long assuagement is to feel that the suffering doesn’t pass. It would be too painful if it lasted only the strict duration of mourning prescribed; and then we accustom ourselves to it so well eventually; the true suffering would be to no longer suffer. The alleviation of grief must happen little by little; then, when the first bitterness and the first indignation has gone away, we find that sometimes we are able to relive happy memories, veritable minutes full of joy and happiness. They leave an impression that is so comforting, that not only has the being about whom we were just speaking been entirely and intimately evoked, but the reunion of people who loved each other has indeed been realized anew.27

For Maréchal, continuing to mourn and remember—actively and often—offered a strategy for dealing with loss that allowed him not only to remain faithful to his dead beloved, but also to gain a sense of comfort, even if only occasionally, in feeling that the lost person was actually with him—not just evoked, but felt and experienced as if she or he were still living. In another letter, Maréchal wrote to Boulanger, “indeed this is the only way of making dear departed beings live in oneself, namely to act and think as if they were acting and thinking next to us—as beings who very really exist.”28 Boulanger’s and Maréchal’s understanding of the relationship between the mourner and the mourned echoes descriptions of the introject—the psychic sign of persistent, trauma-ridden mourning— articulated by Volkan. The idea that having the departed live “in oneself” and

26 Maurice Maréchal to Nadia Boulanger, May 26, 1918, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (6): “C’est pourquoi, je sais tout ce que vous pouvez souffrir.” He is speaking here about the death of his fiancée Thérèse Quedrue, who passed away on July 22, 1913. See Maurice Maréchal, “Carnets de guerre,” in Deux musiciens dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Luc Durosir (Paris: Tallendier, 2005), 217–343; 224 n.3. 27 Maréchal to Boulanger, May 26, 1918, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (6): “Le seul et vrai et long adoucissement est de sentir que la souffrance ne passe pas. Ce serait vraiment trop pénible qu’elle ne dure que la durée stricte d’un deuil; et puis—on s’habitue si bien à la longue; la vraie souffrance serait de ne plus souffrir. Il faut de reste que cela devienne peu à peu de la douceur; alors, à l’époque où la première amertume et la première révolte ont disparu, on trouve quelquefois, à revivre des souvenirs heureux, de véritables minutes de pleine joie et de bonheur. Elles laissent une impression si réconfortante, celle que l’être dont on vient de parler, entier intime, n’a pas seulement été évoqué, mais que la réunion de tous ceux qui s’aimèrent a bien été réalisé à nouveau.” Emphasis via underlining (rather than italics) in the original. 28 Maréchal to Nadia Boulanger, May 15, 1918, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (4): “Du reste, c’est bien le seul moyen de faire vivre en soi les êtres chers disparus, que d’agir et de penser comme si vraiment ils agissaient et pensaient à côté de nous—en êtres très réellement existants.” Emphasis via underlining (rather than italics) in the original. In Search of a Consolatory Past 207 simultaneously “next to one,” thus maintaining their own boundaries that pre- vent them from being fully incorporated into the ego of the mourner, is very much akin to Volkan’s introject—“an unassimilated object representation.”29 Maréchal’s advice to Nadia Boulanger illuminates two aspects of mourning that became especially important to many of their peers. First, he asserted the necessity of persistently mourning, of extending the period of mourning well beyond what was conventionally practiced or expected.30 Second, Maréchal emphasized that one of the keys to recreating the presence of a loved one rested in finding ways of never allowing the memory of that person to fade. On the one hand, many of these people were plagued by memories of those that they loved that caused them pain; on the other, actions had to be taken to recall actively being in the dead loved one’s presence. Many interwar French musicians performed this perennial mourning through a variety of practices that signaled to others their perpetual mourning, as well as through the use of objects that allowed them to engage with and preserve the memory of those they had lost. Musicians’ desires for connections with dead loved ones through linking objects can also be understood in terms of the consolatory potential of contemporary religious and spiritual movements focused on maintaining contact with the dead. Spiritism, for instance, was exceedingly popular in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and experienced a significant revival in the wake of World War I’s losses, in large part because of the comfort it offered to those who practiced it.31 Although spiritism is perhaps best known for séances and medium possession, it was, more broadly, a widespread and sometimes sci- entifically based interest in the forms that spirits take after death.32 The philo- sophical and spiritual aspects of the movement encapsulated a wide range of ideas and practices, almost all of which centered on communing with the dead, whether through mediums or other forms of spirit conjuring. Objects played especially important roles in conjuring spirits; in a guidebook entitled Comment parler avec les morts, published by B. Thomson in 1919, the author told readers

29 Volkan, “Not Letting Go,” 98–99. 30 Here, Maréchal was likely referring to rules found in detailed guides to mourning etiquette that were published by funeral homes and trade magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a more detailed discussion of these guides, see the first chapter of my dissertation, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France: Maurice Ravel and His Circle, 1914–1934” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2014). 31 On the revival of spiritism during World War I, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54–77. 32 For additional information about spiritism and its connections to scientific and religious institutions, see Lynn Sharp, Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth- Century France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006) and John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 208 Resonant Recoveries that in order to “evoke” the dead, they must “surround themselves with objects that belonged to the dead person, and that can best recall to us their presence.”33 In a different text,Le Spiritisme, Thomson underlined the consolation that spirit communication via objects, mediums, and spiritist practices could offer to people who have lost dead loved ones:

How many sorrows have been calmed by [spiritist] experiments? How many beings who love one another and that death has separated have been pulled out of despair by spirit communication with the dead? Those who have benefited from it are the only ones who can say with ardor that they experience this in order to feel it.34

Thus, for many in interwar France, spiritism offered a means of communicating with and staying affectively connected to people they had lost during the war years. The widespread and long-standing nature of spiritism in France meant that many early twentieth-century musicians would have been familiar with at least some aspects of its discourse and practice, even if they were not active in the movement. Popular figures in French psychology and philosophy, including Théodore Flournoy and Henri Bergson, openly debated spirit phenomenon in their published writings, as well as in public conferences such as the Fourth Congrès de Psychologie held in Paris in 1900.35 Bergson attended séances in the early 1900s, served a one-year term as president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1913, was close with spiritist contem- poraries such as William James, and debated life’s continuance beyond death in his discussion of what he termed the élan vital, or “life force.”36 Although

33 B. Thomson, Comment parler avec les morts: Procédés pratiques (Paris: Hector and Henri Durville, 1919), 11: “Il faut pour ce faire s’entourer des objets qui ont appartenu au défunt et qui peuvent le mieux nous rappeler sa présence.” 34 B. Thomson,Le Spiritisme (Paris: Hector and Henri Durville, 1919), 7: “combien de douleurs ont été calmées par des expériences de ce genre? Combien d’êtres qui s’aimaient et que la mort avait séparés ont été arrachés au désespoir par la communication spirite avec le disparu? Ceux qui en ont bénéficié peuvent seuls le dire avec l’ardeur qu’ils éprouvent à le ressentir.” The consolation offered by spiritism is something that Sharp addresses at various points throughout Secular Spirituality (see pp. xv, 55, 64, 78, 93), noting that such consolation was offered to practitioners not only because of connections with the dead, but also because of the movement’s tendencies toward social reform. Winter also discusses spiritism’s consolatory potential in Sites of Memory, 54–77. 35 Flournoy was a significant figure in psychology as well as spiritism in nineteenth-century France. He was especially interested in the psychology of mediumship, and wrote numerous books and essays on this topic, including Spiritism and Psychology (New York: Harper and Borthers, 1911) and From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), which was centered on the famous medium Hélène Smith. 36 For more on Bergson’s relationship with spiritism and the Society for Psychical Research, see the speech he gave at his induction ceremony in 1913 in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wilden Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920); and Justin Sausman, “‘It’s Organisms That Die, Not In Search of a Consolatory Past 209 none of the musicians I study in this book seems to have fully subscribed to spiritism, there is nevertheless evidence that a good many of them were familiar with spiritism and other alternative spiritual movements of the early twentieth century, including occultism and theosophy. Erik Satie was a prominent member of Joseph Pélatin’s Rosicrucian order in the 1890s, even composing pieces overtly connected to it such as Sonneries de la Rose+Croix (1892). Jean Cocteau and Anna de Noailles joke about spiritism, which de Noailles experimented with, in their wartime letters.37 As I noted in chapter 2, in one of her method books, Marguerite Long described the pianist’s hand as having “fluidic” possibilities at a time when “fluidic” was a common buzzword for magnetism in spiritist and occultist circles.38 Nadia Boulanger’s student and close friend Marcelle de Manziarly was closely aligned in the 1910s and 1920s with the Theosophical Society—an organization that engaged in its own ways with spiritist understandings of the ability to communicate with beings not of this world. Manziarly’s mother, in fact, was a leading member of the Theosophical Society during these years, hosting theosophist spiritual leaders such as Jiddu Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya in their Paris home, and traveling with her daughters to India in the early 1920s in order to work with the theosophist brothers.39 In letters they exchanged after Nitya’s death in 1925, Marcelle spoke openly and often with Nadia about her beliefs regarding death as a state of presence rather than absence.40 Thus even if musicians never attended séances, their ideas concerning the continual presence of the dead may have been shaped by the spiritist discourse that proliferated in the time and culture in which they lived and mourned. Many French musicians’ conceptions of mourning can also be understood in terms of the spiritual practices and discourses of French Catholicism. Although in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French Catholicism death had a finality that it did not have in spiritism, a similar interest in continual communication with or providing for the dead nevertheless existed. In Catholic practice, this connection with the deceased occurred more obliquely

Life’: Henri Bergson, Psychical Research, and the Contemporary Uses of Vitalism,” in The Machine and the Ghost: Technology and Spiritualism in Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century Art and Culture, eds. Sas Mays and Neil Matheson (Manchester University Press, 2013), 16–36.

37 See Anna de Noailles to Jean Cocteau, February 28, 1915, published in Jean Cocteau and Anna de Noailles, Correspondance, ed. Claude Mignot-Ogliastri (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 112–114. 38 Marguerite Long, Le Piano de Marguerite Long (Paris: Salabert, 1959), vi; for information on “fluidic” as a spiritist and occultist buzzword, see Sharp,Secular Spirituality, 127. 39 Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 108–112. See also Marcelle de Manziarly’s letters to Nadia Boulanger from 1924 and 1925, BnF, Mus., NLA 288. 40 See Manziarly to Nadia Boulanger, November 19 and 26, 1925, and December 1, 1925, BnF, Mus., NLA 288, letters 57–59. 210 Resonant Recoveries through Church figures and institutions, as well as through acts such as prayers and masses performed on behalf of the dead.41 Musicians like Nadia Boulanger, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, and André Caplet were devoted Catholics at various points in their lives. As practicing Catholics, they were intimately familiar with the Catholic cult of the dead, and

Figure 4.1 Prayer card for Marguerite Long’s Sister, Madame A. Marquier (née Claire Long). Fonds Marguerite Long, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris, Iconographie, 216. Permission of Médiathèque Musicale Mahler.

41 For more on Catholic rituals for the dead in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Thomas A. Kselman,Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 65–124. In Search of a Consolatory Past 211 engaged in numerous Catholic rituals honoring the dead. However, many of the musicians I study in this book had less straightforward relationships with Catholicism. Ravel, for instance, was not a practicing Catholic, and yet in 1909, he rushed with Ricardo Viñes to find a priest to perform last rites for his father.42 Similarly, although Marguerite Long was not a regularly practicing Catholic, her archives contain Catholic keepsakes of dead loved ones in the form of prayer cards, which may have functioned as linking objects for Long (see Figure 4.1). Regardless of the spiritual tradition that may have shaped these French musicians’ mourning—and it is likely that they were influenced by several traditions—what remains common to all of these spiritual philoso- phies is the central role that dead loved ones continued to play in the lives of those still living.

Perennial Mourning as Lived Logic: The Scope and Performance of Perennial Mourning in French Musicians’ Non-Musical Activities

Before discussing the specifically musical ways in which musicians perennially mourned, it is important to note the broader context in which these musical practices took place. A close examination of interwar French musicians’ non- musical mourning practices provides an important epistemological framework for more fully understanding the pervasiveness of perennial mourning’s logic in French interwar musical social circles. As I will show in this section, many interwar French musicians expressed or performed grief in their correspondence, journals, and memoirs, as well as in collections of photographs, objects, and documents. In fact, these materials reveal that many mourning musicians engaged in the behaviors that Volkan has described as common among perennial mourners in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Collecting obituaries and creating scrapbooks offered two important ways in which women musicians in mourning memorialized dead loved ones. For example, the pianist Marguerite Long held a keen interest in creating and collecting obituaries and other memorial writings. In a 1915 letter to André Lambinet, the composer Jean Roger-Ducasse confirmed that Long, who lost her husband, mu- sicologist Joseph de Marliave, in August 1914, became preoccupied with scan- ning the papers for obituaries and other news about her husband’s death. He wrote to his friend André Lambinet, “Then Marg[uerite] shows us inLe Temps and Le Matin, the citation of poor Jo . . . then Bruneau’s article in Nouvelle Revue,

42 Roger Nichols, Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 105. 212 Resonant Recoveries then there was another in I don’t know what.”43 Long’s archive demonstrates that her interest in obituaries extended beyond those for her husband: she collected more than twenty press clippings after the sudden death in an airplane crash in 1953 of her friend and business partner Jacques Thibaud, as well as articles devoted to the deaths of fellow musicians Emile Sauer, Florent Schmitt, Anna de Noailles, Dinù Lipatti, and Paul Dukas.44 Similar to Long, Nadia Boulanger and Hélène Jourdan-Morhange created scrapbooks through which to remember dead friends. Boulanger kept a scrapbook devoted entirely to articles on the death of her very close friend, fellow performer, and lover, Raoul Pugno, who died suddenly in January 1914 while on tour with Boulanger.45 This scrapbook includes forty-seven pages of obituaries, funeral accounts, and other articles related to the pianist’s death in six languages.46 Nadia’s obsession with collecting memorial literature extended to materials that were published after her sister Lili’s death in March 1918, since she listed newspapers and journals in which she found articles devoted to Lili in a series of notebooks she kept for recording her correspondence.47 Jourdan-Morhange likewise wrote numerous obituaries, while also organizing projects like Ravel et nous and Mes Amis musiciens in memory of Ravel and other friends after their deaths, and lovingly creating two scrapbooks in memory of her relationship with Ravel.48 The items created or collected by Jourdan-Morhange, Boulanger, and Long demonstrate the need these women felt to continue to mourn and memorialize their friends for many years after their deaths, while also suggesting the gendered nature of these material memorial practices.49

43 Jean Roger-Ducasse to André Lambinet, July 23, 1915, published in Jacques Depaulis, ed., Lettres à son ami André Lambinet (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2001), 106: “Puis Marg. nous montre dans le Temps et le Matin, je crois, la citation du pauvre Jo . . . Puis l’article de Bruneau dans la Nouvelle Revue, puis d’un autre dans je ne sais quoi.” 44 MMM, F-ML, Documents divers sur des sujets divers, Boîte 4. Long wrote a fair number of obituaries—including ones for Ravel, Ida Rubinstein, and the pianists Dinù Lipatti and Émile Sauer—in addition to collecting an extraordinarily large number of obituaries and funeral accounts. 45 There were not very many obituaries for Nadia Boulanger to collect after the death of her sister on March 15, 1918, as I discuss in chapter 1 of my dissertation, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France.” For more on the relationship between Boulanger and Pugno, see Kimberly Francis, “Nadia Boulanger and La Ville Morte: En‘gendering’ a Woman’s Role in the Making of an Opera” (MA Thesis, University of Ottawa, 2005). 46 Nadia Boulanger, “Raoul Pugne [sic]. Articles nécrologiques: Recueil factice de coupures de presse,” BnF, Mus., Vma 4043. Although she may have used a press clipping service to obtain these excerpts, Nadia’s handwriting appears underneath each one with the date and name of the newspaper in which the piece was found, demonstrating that she played an active role in constructing this memento. 47 Nadia Boulanger, “Carnets de correspondance,” BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Ms. 129 (1). 48 One of these was in relation to Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Violoncello, and the other concerned the composition of his Sonata for Violin and Piano. Both scrapbooks include a manuscript autograph of the score, and several letters from Ravel to Jourdan-Morhange in which he refers to the composition included in the scrapbook. PMML, Robert Owen Lehman Collection, R252.S698. 49 Although she focuses on mourning practices in Britain during World War I, Carol Acton addresses the gendered nature of mourning in Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse In Search of a Consolatory Past 213

Figure 4.2 Postcard from Maurice Ravel to Alma Mahler, August 30, 1920. Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Another common way of performing grief was by using mourning stationery—or papier de deuil—for many years after loved ones’ deaths. This type of stationery, which is marked by a black border of widths that varied according to the stage of mourning one felt him- or herself to be in, was, due to its im- mediate recognizability, a particularly effective way of communicating that one was still in mourning (see Figure 4.2). Laura Albéniz, who was Isaac Albéniz’s daughter and a close friend to many musicians living in Paris during and after the war, articulated the communicative efficacy ofpapier de deuil when she wrote to Paul Dukas in January 1916 that “when I saw the enveloppe de deuil, I knew before opening it that your father had died.”50 Nadia Boulanger was especially

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–46. Michelle Meinhart’s work on women’s musical mourning practices in World War I–era Britain similarly addresses material memorial practices as gendered; see “Memory and Private Mourning in an English Country House during the First World War: Lady Alda Hoare’s Musical Shrine to a Lost Son,” Journal of Musicological Research 33, no. 1–3: Music and the Great War (2014): 39–95. Jay Winter also discusses gender across a variety of mourning practices in World War I–era Britain and France in Sites of Memory; and Daniel Sherman addresses how artworks commemorating World War I in France consistently framed women as bearers of grief in The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). Likewise, Susan Grayzel discusses similar issues regarding women’s mourning in Women and the First World War (London: Longman, 2002) and Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

50 Laura Albéniz to Paul Dukas, January 14, 1916, BnF, Mus., W-48 (37). 214 Resonant Recoveries diligent in her use of papier de deuil. She regularly used it during the fifteen years between Lili’s death and her mother’s, both when writing to close friends such as Manziarly, as well as to business associates such as Marc Pincherle and Albert Carré.51 While Ravel used papier de deuil only on rare occasions—and never with any consistency—de Falla used it for at least a full three years after the death of his mother, and Emma Debussy used it for a number of years after the deaths of her husband and daughter. Musicians also signaled the persistence of their grief through self-fashioning that subtly reminded others that they were still in mourning. Marguerite Long continued to use her married name in her personal correspondence throughout the rest of her life, signing her name “Marguerite Long de Marliave.” She also received a very large amount of correspondence from friends who addressed her in this way, despite using “Marguerite Long” as her stage name. Long’s correspondence also shows that she continued to live in the apartment on Rue Fourcroy that she had shared with Marliave at least until 1923.52 Long performed widow- hood through her dress as well: photographs of her housed at the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler in Paris show that her post-1914 wardrobe—both profession- ally and personally—included more black than prior to her husband’s death.53 Jérôme Spycket, in his biography of Nadia Boulanger, remarks on the shift in Boulanger’s wardrobe after the death of her mother, pointing to a picture of Nadia with Stravinsky taken on a steamer in 1937 in which Nadia is dressed very conservatively and completely in black—“deliberately austere, if not ascetic.”54 Commemorating the date of someone’s death was another popular way of mourning. Celebrating anniversaries offered many in interwar France the opportunity to immerse themselves over and over again in grief in order to relive the loss and feel all of the emotions that they had first experienced upon the death of a loved one. Death anniversaries acted as forums for more open expression of these feelings than might have been socially permitted on other days during the year. Nadia Boulanger, for example, paid an enormous amount of attention to death anniversaries, staging annual memorial masses at La Trinité in Paris—the cathedral where the funeral ceremonies for both her sister and her mother were held—in the second or third week of March every year after Lili’s death. After her mother died in March of 1935, these masses came to be of even greater importance to Boulanger. In a notebook listing correspondence she sent and received

51 Nadia Boulanger to Marc Pincherle, May 12, 1926, BnF, Mus., LA 13; Boulanger to Albert Carré, July 1, 1923, BnF, Mus., LA 13. 52 It is difficult to know precisely when she left the apartment on Rue Fourcroy for the apartment she lived in later in life on l’Avenue de la Grande Armée, but a letter from Ravel addressed to “Madame Long de Marliave” dated June 26, 1923, indicates that she was living in the Rue Fourcroy apartment at least until this time. See Ravel to Marguerite Long, MMM, F-ML, Correspondance. 53 MMM, F-ML, Iconographie. 54 Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, 86–88. In Search of a Consolatory Past 215 from 1916 onward, she made notes about these masses at La Trinité, including who attended, what music was performed, and how she felt while attending the mass.55 Moreover, Boulanger sent letters or cards to friends on the anniversaries of their loved ones’ passings with extraordinary diligence. She always wrote these letters by hand, made them personal and distinct (never relying on for- mulaic writing despite the quantity of these letters she needed to write, especially in her later years), and added her own thoughts and memories concerning the deceased whenever possible.56 For Boulanger, honoring death anniversaries seemed to have been an ethically responsible way of rendering homage to the dead annually, and of comforting other perennial mourners through acknow- ledging the depth and continuation of their grief. Many people with whom Boulanger communicated were similarly concerned with death anniversaries. For many years after the deaths of their loved ones, Saint-Marceaux and Maréchal marked the anniversaries of these deaths by writing about their unending grief in their journals.57 In his correspondence, Ravel wrote on at least two occasions about how his sadness was connected to the anniversary of his mother’s death: when writing to Ida Godebska in December 1919 and to Hélène Kahn-Casella in January 1920.58 Marguerite Long was similarly obsessed with death anniversaries, as shown through her collecting and saving of numerous articles on the anniversaries of Debussy’s and Fauré’s deaths, as well as her participation in commemorating the anniversary of Fauré’s death by giving a speech at his grave on November 4, 1940—an event to which she brought her piano class—as part of her role as vice president of the Société des Amis de Gabriel Fauré.59 Many mourners in French musical circles turned to a variety of material objects that allowed them to keep their dead dear ones as vividly present and alive as possible. Through the use of these linking objects, French interwar musicians maintained, upheld, and even in some situations continued to strengthen ca- thectic engagements that might have otherwise been dissolved after their loved

55 In one of these entries, for example, Nadia lists who gave the mass, who sang, and then writes, “There are a lot of people. Very reverential. But what emptiness—what absence.” Nadia Boulanger, “Carnets de Correspondance,” BnF, Mus., Rés. Vmc. Ms. 129 (1): “Il y a beaucoup du monde. Très recueilli. Mais quel vide—quelle absence.” Handwritten entry dated March 15, 1980. This entry was perhaps misdated by Nadia since it appears to be in her hand, and she died in October of 1979. It is also possible that Annette Dieudonné or someone else close to Nadia continued to keep track of the La Trinité memorial services after Nadia’s death. 56 Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, 88. 57 See Saint-Marceaux, journal entries for April 23 from 1916 until 1925, in Journal, 895, 936, 984, 1031, 1072, 1105, 1145, 1193; Maréchal, entry of July 22, 1917, in “Carnets de guerre,” 321–322. 58 Ravel to Ida Godebska, December 27, 1919, in A Ravel Reader, 195; Ravel to Hélène Kahn- Casella, January 15, 1920, in “Soixante-deux lettres,” 79. 59 See MMM, F-ML, Documents divers sur des sujets divers, Boîte 3, Gabriel Fauré. In this collection there is a document with the words she pronounced at his grave on this date, as well as a list of the attendees. 216 Resonant Recoveries ones’ deaths. Indeed, among musicians a great variety of objects functioned in this way: many mourning musicians lived in an incredibly rich and potently imaginative object world that helped them to stave off the conclusion of the mourning process indefinitely. A few examples will serve as cases in point. We might consider, for instance, the scrapbooks that Hélène Jourdan-Morhange made in memory of her relationship with Ravel as linking objects that permitted her to keep her memories of her friend alive. Another example is offered by Francis Poulenc’s admission that after his close friend Raymonde Linossier’s death in 1930, he kept a photograph of her on his desk that he took with him when he traveled, and also kept a cigarette case of hers with him at all times.60 However, a close examination of the many documents, photographs, and other cherished items contained in the archives of Nadia Boulanger and Marguerite Long demonstrates the richness and variation of objects that could function simultaneously as linking objects. Nadia Boulanger’s preferred linking objects were items that reminded her of Lili in the last years of her life. These included correspondence notebooks that had once belonged to Lili and a variety of other documents that would have reminded her of time spent with her sister. Nadia indicated that she used Lili’s correspondence notebooks in order to remember her presence through inscriptions like those found in her 1920 notebook: “I take up with emotion this notebook which She had in her hands! A new year begins and never has my external optimism been further from what is going on inside me.”61 While in 1920 Nadia used her datebook as a confessional space, in 1921 she expressed the phe- nomenology of the persistence of Lili’s memory in terms of the paradoxical nature of perennial mourning: “This book was in the hands of my little Lili—could there be from now on anything other than days devoted to her memory—in her last year perhaps, and so I entrust it to the dear memory that guides me, supports me, and is to me at the same time so sweet and so cruel.”62 But Nadia also kept Lili’s memory alive through objects that served as reminders of Lili’s last years, such as a log of Lili’s pulse, temperature, and general condition, as well as exten- sive lists of the items she found in Lili’s apartment at the Villa Medici when she

60 See Sophie Robert, “Raymonde Linossier: ‘Lovely Soul Who Was My Flame,’” trans. Sidney Buckland, in Francis Poulenc: Music, Art, and Literature, eds. Sidney Buckland and Myriam Chimènes (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 87–139; 87. As Robert details, he wrote to Marie-Blanche de Polignac about the cigarette case that it “never left Raymonde, and . . . never leaves me now. On all the important nights of my career, I like to feel it in my hand.” 61 Nadia Boulanger, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vmf. Ms. 89 (1): “Je reprends avec émotion ce cahier qu’Elle a eu entre les mains! Une nouvelle année commence et jamais mon optimisme extérieur n’a été plus loin de ce qui se passe en moi.” Cited and translated in Brooks, Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 23. 62 Nadia Boulanger, “Carnets de correspondance,” BnF, Mus., Rés. Vmc. Ms. 129 (1): “Ce livre fût entre les mains de ma petite Lili—puisse-t-il ne voir passer que des jours dignes de son souvenir— année définitive peut-être et que je confie à la chère mémoire qui me guide, me soutient et m’est à la fois si douce et si cruelle.” In Search of a Consolatory Past 217 went to collect her things after her death. These lists include details about the items themselves, for instance the color and material of handkerchiefs, or the fact that in “le petit buffet” there was “1 box of tea, half-full.” 63 Nadia’s fanatical attention to how things were arranged suggests that she attempted to preserve on paper the state of things when Lili had been living, offering her anaide- mémoire to access in instances when she felt herself precariously close to forgetting. Boulanger’s inventory of Lili’s apartment acted as a stand-in for what she and her mother may have otherwise preferred: to keep the room precisely as it had been when Lili was alive, just as their mother had done after her husband’s death.64 For Long, objects once belonging to her husband and photographs of him best allowed her to connect with him after his death. Long kept many items that once belonged to Marliave, including several of his notebooks, one of which is a small brown leather-bound book that includes a combination of phone num- bers, recipes, favorite quotations, ledgers of purchases, and impressions of composers, musical works, and concerts.65 She also kept letters that Marliave wrote to colleagues and editors, ones that he had received from some of their mutual friends, and a long letter that he had written to Long’s sister in May 1914.66 Moreover, Long saved copies—often in typewritten, draft form—of memorial literature written about Marliave by their music critic friends.67 Long kept a large collection of photographs of her husband, several of which stand out as having been especially dear to her. For example, upon opening a beautiful green, purple, and orange stamped and gilded leather box—the only object so ornate in her entire collection—one finds several smaller framed pictures, more than half of which are of her husband.68 One of these mementos appears a bit more precious than the others, due in part to its container: a crafted pewter frame molded into a delicate floral motif topped with two lovebirds holds a photograph of Marliave. Additionally, unlike the other framed photographs in this box, the cellophane covering the photograph as well as the photograph itself are worn and wrinkled,

63 Nadia Boulanger, “Inventaire des meubles et objets qui se trouvaient dans l’appartement de Lili Boulanger à la Villa Medicis, à Rome (1919),” BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 130: “1 boîte de thé, à moitié remplie.” 64 Spycket notes that Raïssa Boulanger was mourning several losses during Nadia’s childhood, including the deaths of two infants within the first two years of their lives, as well as the death of her husband. See Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, 10–17. It is likely that Nadia learned this means of mourning from her mother’s reaction to that loss, or was urged by her mother to do the same after Lili’s death. 65 MMM, F-ML, Joseph de Marliave. 66 Ibid.; and MMM, F-ML, Correspondance. 67 MMM, F-ML, Joseph de Marliave. 68 Three of these are in a wallet-style photograph holder with two sepia-toned portrait-style photographs of Marliave—one of him in uniform, the other of him in more casual attire—with a central picture of Long and Marliave together. There is another—of him on a horse in his full military uniform—in a small oval frame backed with gold velour. MMM, F-ML, Iconographie, 437. 218 Resonant Recoveries suggesting that this picture was a well-loved, much-handled, and especially potent linking object for Long.69 Most of the linking objects utilized by interwar French musicians described thus far have lent themselves more to private usage. However, many of the objects that linked musicians to their departed loved ones were designed for public consumption, and thus were able to function as containers for collective and public mourning while still facilitating mourning that was private and individual. Books published by, written about, or simply preferred by someone being mourned offer examples of objects that operated in this way, as in the case of Joseph de Marliave’s Études musicales, Émile Vuillermoz’s commemorative Tombeau de Jules Ecorcheville, and the obituaries for Lili Boulanger that Nadia saved. As we will see in what follows, musical compositions similarly functioned as linking objects that were simultaneously private and public. Through composing, performing, and even reading scores, musicians in wartime and interwar France consoled themselves with musical memories of times past.

Musicians on Embodied Musical Memory, Mourning, and Consolation

Musicians who were active during World War I frequently extolled the ability of music to effect remembering in ways that provided them with consolation in the midst of combat or while mourning a loved one’s death. Discussions and descriptions of music making and its abilities to evoke memories that were important to surviving life at the front and the deaths of loved ones emerge in a variety of sources, including musicians’ and soldiers’ diaries and correspondence, André Pézard’s war memoir, Nous autres à Vauquois, and several articles published by Nadia Boulanger in Le Monde musical in the years after the Armistice. These sources reveal that interwar musicians understood musical activities as embodied practices that enabled them to sense and engage with people, places, and feelings of the past, providing them with much needed consolation in moments of loneliness, sorrow, and grief. Musicians who fought in World War I frequently described music as per- mitting them to recreate vividly—often in ways that were simultaneously comforting and painful—features and people of their past. In the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire published and distributed by Nadia and Lili Boulanger during

69 In general, photographs seem to have held a special affective and memorial potency for Long. That at least some photographs were tied to grief is evident, for instance, in anenveloppe de deuil containing several photographs of two different dogs; dates on two of these indicate that the photos were taken 24 years apart. See MMM, F-ML, Iconographie, Boîte B, Mariage et famille, 175. In Search of a Consolatory Past 219

World War I, numerous musician-soldiers spoke about having the opportunity to make music, most often privately or among a few friends, and how, in providing a distraction from the loneliness, violence, and depression they encountered daily in their lives as soldiers, time spent making music helped them to recall what their lives had been like before 1914. Albert Bertelin wrote that when “I let my fingers wander adventurously on the keyboard of a very modest harmonium in the Église de St. Ouen-l’Aumône, I forget then for a little while the worries, the grief, the anguish of each day.” He added that, “I have the illusion, [which] too quickly evaporate[s],‌ of having resumed the course of my past life.”70 Ernest Mangeret corroborated Bertelin’s perspective when he wrote, “A few moments of leisure permit me to become a little bit myself again. . . . Recently, we found a piano in a half-demolished house, we went down into a cellar (you understand why!) and, when evening arrived, we gathered together, a few friends, to make a little bit of music.”71 Auguste Druvert, a bassoonist, recounted that playing music with another musician in his military zone allowed them both to “recall the good old times.”72 Louis Fourestier articulated that music’s potential to recall the past vividly was unlocked not only in music performance, but also in reading scores: “I have also . . . the Psaume of [Florent] Schmitt, this raw and powerful work, the reading of which recalled to me the beautiful performance [of it] at the Concerts Colonne, and the emotion provoked by the frenzy of its accents.”73 In addition to recounting how music allowed them to forget their present sit- uation through recalling something of past events or past versions of themselves, several musician-soldiers specified that performing and listening to music permitted them to “recreate” the presence of people from their past. Aimable Valin

70 Albert Bertelin to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 [1915], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 5: “je laisse errer un peu à l’aventure mes doigts sur le clavier d’un très modeste harmonium dans l’Église de St. Ouen-l’Aumône, j’oublie alors pour un temps, les soucis, les chagrins, les angoisses de chaque jour, j’ai l’illusion, trop vite envolée, d’avoir repris le cours de ma vie passée.” 71 Ernest Mangeret to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated October 15, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 5 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 22: “Quelques moments de loisir me permettent de redevenir un peu moi-même. . . . Ces temps-ci, nous avons trouvé un piano dans un maison à moitié démolie, nous l’avons descendu dans une cave (vous comprenez pourquoi!) et le soir venu, nous nous réunissions, quelques amis pour faire un peu de musique.” 72 Auguste Druvert to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 28, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 17: “J’ai avec moi au groupe le camarade Corne (hautbois) qui est le seul musicien de profession, aussi nous causons ensemble (moi, je joue le basson) ce qui nous rappelle le bon temps passé.” 73 Louis Fourestier to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated February 2, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 22: “J’ai aussi les pièces de piano de Déodat de Severac, en lesquelles se cristallisent en sonorités, les émotions, les impressions que m’a suggérées ce pays qui est le mien et que j’aime; et le psaume de Schmitt, cette œuvre rude et puissante, dont la lecture m’a rappelé la belle exécution des concerts Colonne et l’émotion provoquée par la frénésie de ses accents.” 220 Resonant Recoveries asserted in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire that playing his flute offered him a way to “recreate” friends with whom he once spent time: “I have my flute with me—I enjoy practicing a little and recreating [my former] roommates.”74 And Maréchal wrote to the Comité Franco-Américain in 1918 that listening to Weber’s Invitation à la Valse on a phonograph led him to recall Paul Dukas’s orchestra class at the Conservatoire; whereas, when the phonograph switches to a tango, he “sees again this gang of young fools, so happy, so glad to be alive— Lucien Andisio—Laurent [L]‌—Pierre Jaunière—René Chizalet—some living, some missing, some killed.”75 The composer Albert Roussel wrote to his wife from the front in 1915 that “gradually the music overtakes me, the music and art and all the beautiful things that we saw together, that we loved together, and that make me remember so many happy days, so many joyous and moving days spent w it h y ou .” 76 For these men, music offered a special way to recall not only the generalized past, but also the people that they had known, loved, and cherished within it. The idea that music enabled and enacted memorialization in the interest of mourning is a central aspect of one of the most popular published memoirs from World War I: André Pézard’s Nous autres à Vauquois. Pézard’s autobiographical novel—dedicated “to my dead friends”—is centered on his relationships with fellow soldiers who are killed in the course of the narrative. Although there are numerous instances where Pézard discusses making music with various people he encountered, in places where he wanted to highlight a song or piece of music as closely tied to his friendship with a particular person or group of people, he included fragments of music. He does this, for instance, when he first mentions a contrafacta about Vauquois sung by his fellow soldier Angels at a gathering in February 1915 among a group of friends that included Hekking and Des Francs. Pézard included music as well in recounting a moment when he whistled Chopin’s C-sharp minor Waltz, Op. 64, no. 2—enjoining his close friend Chalchat to lovingly poke fun at his Romanticism—on a rare, peaceful, explosion-free evening in April 1916.77

74 Aimable Valin to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 13, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 56: “J’ai ma flûte avec moi—J’en profite pour travailler un peu et récréer les camarades de chambre.” 75 Maurice Maréchal to the Comité Franco-Américain, June 23, 1918, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (6): “Maintenant le phonographe passe un tango, argentine, sans doute! Et je revois une bande de jeunes fous si gais, si heureux de vivre—Lucien Andisio—Laurent [L]‌—Pierre Jaunière—René Chizalet—des vivants—des disparus—des tués.” 76 Albert Roussel to Blanche Roussel, November 30, 1915, in Lettres et écrits, ed. Nicole Labelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 55: “Insensiblement la musique me reprend, la musique et l’art et toutes les belles choses que nous avons vues ensemble, que nous avons aimées ensemble et qui me rappellent tant de jours heureux, tant d’heures joyeuses ou émotionnantes passées avec toi.” 77 André Pézard, Nous autres à Vauquois 1915–1916, ed. Jean-Charles Jauffret (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1992), 54–55, 331. In Search of a Consolatory Past 221

In the final section of the book, entitled “Mort,” Pézard penned a mournful tribute to the friends he lost during the war that centers on these two musical fragments, highlighting the role that each played in helping him to remember each friend’s presence and absence. Addressing Chalchat, he confessed that,

I no longer dare to move my fingers even, or my eyes, in thinking of you; so as to not disturb this pain, so as to better let return the wind of before, damp with greenness and golden, [of that] evening. Immobile, I cannot hear without tears Chopin’s waltz mixing in the air. And I am saddened for a long time, since there is no one here but me for all of these memories.78

In this moment, Pézard tells his readers that he remained as still as possible in a desperate attempt to gain access to the evening that he and Chalchat once shared, realizing even as he did so, that remembering would not be enough to bring his friend back from the dead. A few pages later, Pézard loses himself in memories of battle, recalling that:

I did not know yet, petit Des Francs, that you were going to die before your men; and I repeated our old “catchphrase,” I quietly buzzed the refrain once heard in Parois: “On irait bien jusqu’à Vauquois, Mais y tomb’ des marmit’ comm’ ça . . . , La-quellaquellaquell’ des trois? [ . . . ]” Today still I lull my sadness in the slowly calmed rhythm, in the consoling monotony of two notes, which turn by turn raise and lower, like a chest in which sobs fall asleep.79

In Nous autres à Vauquois, Pézard repeatedly underlined the strength with which his musical memories helped him to reach his past by returning to the exact same words he had used when describing consoling himself with this tune earlier in the book. The consolation he recounted at the book’s conclusion, then, might be understood to have come not only from the “monotony of two notes, which turn by turn raise and lower,” but also from the embodied memory of this lulling monotony that enabled him to recreate the presences of his dead friends.

78 Ibid., 428–29: “je n’ose plus bouger les doigts même, ou les yeux, en pensant à vous; pour ne pas troubler cette douleur, pour mieux laisser revenir le vent d’autrefois, mouillé de verdure, et doré, le soir. Immobile, je ne peux entendre sans larmes remuer dans l’air la valse de Chopin. Et je me désole longuement, car il n’y a plus ici que moi, pour tous ces souvenirs.” 79 Ibid., 435–436: “Je ne savais pas encore, petit Des Francs, que tu venais de mourir devant tes hommes; et je répétais notre vieille rengaine, je bourdonnais en sourdine le refrain naguère entendu à Parois: We’ll go indeed until Vauquois, But machine gunfire falls there like this . . . which-i-ich- i-ich of the three? [ . . . ] Aujourd’hui encore je berce ma tristesse au rythme lentement apaisé, à la monotonie consolante des deux notes, qui tour à tour s’élèvent et s’abaissent, comme une poitrine où s’endorment des sanglots.” 222 Resonant Recoveries

Nadia Boulanger also spoke at length about her understanding of music as a medium capable of inciting the vivid recollection of lost loved ones, often asserting music’s ability to conjure the presences of the dead. In a review for Le Monde musical published in 1919 for the Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux’s concert at Châtelet commemorating the bombing of Saint Gervais a year earlier on March 29, 1918, she described the “irradiated atmosphere, supercharged with emotional emanations” resulting from “the memories the concert evoked; the vanished presences that it brought back to this place where they were so be- l ov e d .” 80 Although Boulanger clarified that she was “thinking of Edouard Colonne and Raoul Pugno,” both of whom had performed with the Concerts Colonne before their deaths in 1910 and 1914, respectively, she was prob- ably thinking as well of her sister Lili—with whom she likely attended these concerts—and of all of the musicians who had performed with the Concerts Colonne but had since been killed in the war.81 Boulanger explained:

Nothing is better than music—when it takes us out of time, it does more for us than we have any right to expect: it has expanded the limits of our sorrowful lives . . . bringing us pure and new towards what was, towards what will be, towards what it has created for us. Through music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity, solitude is accompanied by a new hope, between pitying ourselves which makes [us] more indulgent, more understanding and the certitude of finding again something that lives forever in it.82

Thus for Boulanger, musical performance offered like nothing else a way to re- move oneself from the linear experience of time—to recall the presences of those

80 Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” Le Monde musical 30, no. 5 (May 1919): 136–137: “Les souvenirs qu’il évoquait, les présences disparues qu’il ramenait dans ce milieu où elles furent si chères (je songe à Edouard Colonne, à Raoul Pugno), le public plus nerveux, plus sensitif, dans cette salle plus vaste, le retour d’un grand artiste longtemps absent, tout cela créait une atmosphère irradiante, surchargée d’émanations émotives.” Quoted and translated in Jeanice Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 19–20. 81 At the conclusion of her article, in fact, she provides a list of orchestra musicians who had participated in the war, including a list of men who had died in combat. Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 20. 82 Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux”: 136–137: “Rien n’est meilleur que la musique— quand elle nous emmène hors du temps, elle a fait plus pour nous que nous n’avions le droit d’espérer: elle a élargi les limites de notre vie douloureuse, elle a auréolé la douceur de nos heures de bonheur, en effaçant les mesquineries qui nous diminuent, nous menant alors purs et neufs vers ce qui fut, vers ce qui sera, vers ce qu’elle a créé pour nous.” Cited and trans. in Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 19–20. I translated the second part of this quotation. The original text is: “En elle tout se prolonge, tout s’édifie et lorsque l’enchantement a cessé, nous sommes encore baignés de sa clarté, la solitude est accompagnée d’un nouvel espoir, entre la pitié de nous-mêmes qui rend plus indulgent, plus compréhensif et la certitude de retrouver quelque chose ce qui vit à jamais en elle.” In Search of a Consolatory Past 223 that exist only in our pasts, and to imagine, with them, a better future beyond the pain of the present.83 For Boulanger, music’s ability to return someone to the past lay in its inex- tricable connection to the musician who had once created it. In January 1920, Nadia wrote a long review in Le Monde musical addressing the challenges of postwar mourning and suffering in which she argued that a person’s music is inseparable from his or her soul. This appears as a theme in articles and letters she wrote in the 1920s, especially when she discusses the music of people who require remembering. She wrote in a May 1920 review of two songs by Philippe Moreau, a musician who had been killed in the in the war, that “one senses that the musician let his heart sing, and that this heart was infinitely sensitive.”84 Moreover, in a letter published in the newspaper Comœdia on March 3, 1928, Boulanger asked if the paper’s editor might “evoke her [Lili’s] memory” by letting readers know about the annual mass being given at La Trinité on the anniversary of Lili’s death. She explained that she hoped that “her œuvre will make her live again in the eyes of those who believe her dead.”85 For Nadia, then, hearing the music of someone who had died not only vividly evoked their memory, but also embodied and brought to life, even if only momentarily, the feeling of being in that person’s presence. These descriptions by musician-soldiers, Pézard, and Nadia Boulanger of the ways in which music assisted them in recalling vividly the presences of lost loved ones resonate with contemporary, popular theories of embodied memory proffered by Henri Bergson inMatière et mémoire (1896) and Marcel Proust in À la recherché du temps perdu (1913–1928). In his extraordinarily popular novel, Proust translated into a fictional, semi-autobiographical tale Bergson’s ideas about memory as a fundamentally embodied and multi-sensorial process that, by allowing someone to temporarily step out of the “rhythm of the flow of things” in the present, had the potential to affect a person’s current moment as well as his or her future.86 In À la recherche, Proust repeatedly made the link between Bergson’s corporeal remembering and mourning. Oftentimes throughout the novel, and in ways and with such frequency that suggest that this was one of the aims of his expansive story, Proust has characters perform actions that

83 Brooks reads this passage similarly in The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 20. 84 Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” Le Monde Musical, no. 9–10 (May 15 and 30, 1920): 155: “on sent que le musicien laissait chanter son cœur et que ce cœur était infiniment sensible.” 85 Nadia Boulanger, cited in “Souvenir ému à Lili Boulanger,” Comœdia, March 14, 1928: “évoquer son souvenir”; “Espérons que son œuvre la fera revivre aux yeux de ceux qui la croient morte.” 86 Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 113. For additional information on Bergson’s theories of memory and how they relate to Proust, see chapter 5 of my dissertation, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France,” 231–293, as well as the numerous informative essays on this topic that appear in the collection Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, eds. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Continuum, 2013). 224 Resonant Recoveries facilitate their remembering of what it felt like to be in the presence of those who have either died or have ceased to exist in their lives in the way they once had. Notably, it is always through a sensual perception, accompanied by or enacted through bodily movement, that Proust’s characters actively recall the vivid presence of these loved ones. Significant examples of this include the famous “madeleine scene,” in which the taste of a madeleine cookie that has been dipped in orange-blossom tea makes the narrator suddenly aware of a previously shrouded memory of the time he had spent with his Aunt Léonie before she passed away.87 However, some of Proust’s most remarkable examples of mourning through embodied memory occur in musical terms. For instance, at one point the narrator Swann, still in love with and desperately grieving his separation from his lover Odette de Crecy, hears “the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata” that had been the “national anthem” of their love. Proust wrote that for Swann in this moment, “all of his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of being deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love whose slumber had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”88 Considering the popularity of Bergson’s and Proust’s texts in early twentieth-century French modernist social circles, it is unsurprising that their ideas about the abilities of material objects and bodily movements to incite memory reverberate not only in interwar French musicians’ descriptions of music making as an emotionally transformative practice, but also in the musical activities that they undertook while in mourning.89 In these, they were searching for a consolatory past in which communion with a lost loved one was possible, even if only for a moment.

Searching for a Consolatory Past in Concert Curation and Preparation: Marguerite Long and Nadia Boulanger

For many French musicians, designing concerts and preparing to perform the music that they selected for these offered meaningful ways to engage with memories of dead loved ones. The archival materials of Marguerite Long and Nadia

87 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, vol. 1, Swann’s Way (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 48–51. 88 Proust, Swann’s Way, 375. 89 Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France were extremely popular at this time, and his theories were well known and discussed by a number of musicians, including Louis Laloy, Gabriel Marcel, Charles Koechlin, and Nadia Boulanger. See Louis Laloy, “M. Bergson et la musique,” Comœdia (February, 19, 1914), 3; Gabriel Marcel, “Bergsonisme et musique,” La Revue musicale 6, no. 5 (March 1, 1925): 219–229; Charles Koechlin, “Le Temps et la musique,” La Revue musicale 7, no. 3 (January 1, 1926): 45–62. In Search of a Consolatory Past 225

Boulanger suggest that both women chose to program music that, having been previously created, rehearsed, or performed in the presence of a loved one, assisted them in remembering what it felt like to be in their presence. The pro- gramming of such compositions on concerts and recitals would have allowed Long and Boulanger not only to connect with lost loved ones privately while preparing for these performances, but also to honor and perpetuate in public forums the memory of those who had died. For Long, planning, preparing for, and performing in recitals seems to have helped her to process her grief after the death of her husband. This was in part due to the fact that, because both Long and Joseph de Marliave were musicians, music was attached to many events in the shared history of their relationship. They had met after her performance of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor and Liszt’s Polonaise No. 2 in E Major at an estate party in 1902.90 Both adored and championed Gabriel Fauré’s music, and were big supporters of each other’s careers. From a letter penned by Marliave to Long’s sister Claire in May 1914, it is evident that Long and Marliave shared a very close relationship that very often revolved her musical life: he knew intimate details about her daily schedule, musical preferences, and upcoming performances.91 Considering their closeness, their overlapping musical preferences, and the fact that both were well- trained musicians, they likely discussed and performed music together at home on a regular basis, and it is even more likely that Marliave was often with her or in the next room of their Paris apartment as she practiced and prepared for performances. Making music, especially when the music chosen was something they had enjoyed together, would have been an activity that reminded her of her husband after his death. Engaging her body in piano playing likely allowed Long to access and live in and with memories of being in her husband’s presence. She confessed in one of her memoirs, At the piano with Gabriel Fauré, that in the years immediately following her husband’s death, when she was struggling with accepting it, “music alone was consoling to me.” “It is what saved me,” she wrote.92 That music facilitated Long’s abilities to remember her husband vividly and sensorially is also evidenced by that fact that, for many years after Marliave’s death in August 1914, Long centered many of her public performances on compositions that might help her to better evoke her husband’s presence. When she decided to return to the concert stage in 1917 after a two-and- a-half-year hiatus, she chose to perform music that she had been working on just before her husband’s departure for the

90 Dunoyer, Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 16–17. 91 Joseph de Marliave to Claire Marquier [Long], May 5, 1914, MMM, F-ML, Correspondance. 92 Long, Au piano avec Gabriel Fauré, 72: “La musique seule m’était consolante. C’est elle qui m’a s au v é e .” 226 Resonant Recoveries front lines. In her first public performance after her husband’s death, she played Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un thème montagnard, which she had performed in May 1914 in the last public concert that she had given before Marliave had been sent to the front. Moreover, in the spring of 1921, in the first full-length re- cital Long gave in Paris after her husband’s death, she chose to perform several pieces that would have served as very strong reminders of being in her husband’s presence. She performed Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse, which she was working on in the summer of 1914, and which, she tells us in Au piano avec Claude Debussy, was the last piece she had played for him before he left for the front.93 She also programmed Fauré’s Thème et variations, Op. 73, his Nocturne No. 6 in D-flat major, Op. 63, and his Nocturne No. 7 in C-sharp minor, Op. 74, all of which were among Marliave’s favorite compositions, as evidenced by his lengthy essay on Fauré’s piano music for Nouvelles Revues.94 In Roger-Ducasse’s 1921 review of Long’s recitals for Le Monde musical, he verified that these concerts were connected to mourning and remembering Joseph de Marliave in writing that Long’s performances acted as “a faithful tribute to the friend whose memory we honor.”95 Honoring her husband’s memory in concert would have offered Long opportunities to engage in musically remembering her husband’s presence both on stage and off. As a virtuoso pianist, the repertoire Long chose to play was de- manding, and would have likely required her to practice these compositions daily at home in order to play them in public. A photograph in Long’s archive further confirms that Long grieved through conjuring memories of performing music in Marliave’s presence. It is one of a set of “action” photos of Long seated at the keyboard that offer close-up views of her hands as she performs different pianistic movements, which are notated on the backs of the photographs.96 One of these photographs appears far more wrinkled and handled than the others in the set, and also idiosyncratically features a rounded top, as if it had been cut to fit a frame (see Figure 4.3). This photograph also differs from the others in the set because it shows Long leaning back into her husband, who is standing behind her and grasping her elbows as she plays. Only five of the eight photographs in this set show Marliave’s hands touching her arms, and, of these, only this and one other provide the viewer with a glimpse of Marliave’s uniformed torso. It is only in this particular photograph, however, that we witness Long touching, sinking into, and allowing herself to be completely enveloped by Marliave.97 This

93 Marguerite Long, Au piano avec Claude Debussy (Paris: Julliard, 1960), 21. 94 The essays that Joseph de Marliave published inNouvelles Revues under the pseudonym “Saint Jean” were posthumously published in Joseph de Marliave, Études musicales (Paris: Alcan, 1917). 95 Jean Roger-Ducasse, “Les Deux concerts de Mme Marguerite Long,” in Le Monde musical 32, nos. 7–8 (April 1921): 159: “Fidèle, ce faisant, au souvenir de l’Ami dont nous vénérons la mémoire.” 96 MMM, F-ML, Iconographie, Boîte A: “Jeunesse,” 17–24. 97 Ibid., 23. In the other photograph (24) she is leaning forward and away from him as she plays. In Search of a Consolatory Past 227

Figure 4.3 Marguerite Long playing the piano with Joseph de Marliave holding her arms. Fonds Marguerite Long, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris, Iconographie, 23. Permission of Médiathèque Musicale Mahler.

photograph may have thus functioned as a linking object for Long that allowed her to inhabit the memory of his presence, his touch, and what it felt like to play the piano while he was next to her. Whether evidenced through her concert programs or well-loved photographs of her making music in their home, it appears that for Long, time spent at the piano reminded her of her husband, offering her a way to connect with him sensually after his death. Feeling her fingers press into the keys, the cool ivory 228 Resonant Recoveries pressing back on her fingerpads, her muscles and tendons flexing with supple grace, as she heard and felt the piano’s sound waves coursing through her bones, may have provided Marguerite Long with a means of sensorially recreating the feeling of being in the presence of her lost husband. The piano, with its kines- thetic potentialities, thus helped Long to be with her husband: to feel him, to move and be moved by him, and to ease the pain of no longer experiencing his touch, his voice, his smells and tastes. For other musicians, however, it was not only pianistic performance that facilitated mournful remembrance, but also listening in the audience, singing, sitting down at the piano, or drawing their pen across paper in the act of composing, editing, or transcribing. Like Long, Nadia Boulanger turned repeatedly to compositions that would have reminded her of a dead loved one—her dear younger sister Lili—in the years following her death. The composer, critic, historian, and friend of Boulanger’s Gustave Samazeuilh pointed out that after Lili’s death, Nadia desired to “forget her own music” and to focus largely on “distributing the completed works of her dear departed [sister].”98 Indeed, after 1919 Nadia was committed to organizing performances of Lili’s compositions as frequently and in as many places as possible. In 1919 alone she arranged to have Lili’s compositions performed on at least five occasions. She organized a “Concert d’œuvres de Lili et Nadia Boulanger” on January 12, 1919, and arranged for the premiere of Lili’s song cycle Clairières dans le ciel at a Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI) concert later that week, on January 17.99 In addition, Boulanger arranged to have Lili’s Pour les funérailles d’un soldat performed at the Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux on March 29, and to have Clairières dans le ciel performed not only at the Concerts Pasdeloup in May, but also in an SMI concert in June.100 In the 1920s and 1930s, Nadia had Lili’s works performed in France, Belgium, and the United States (see Table 4.1). Organizing these performances would have permitted Boulanger the opportunity to advocate for her sister’s posthumous career and pay tribute to her after her death, while also actively remembering Lili’s presence through the other modes of musical engagement—public and private—that arranging these performances entailed.

98 Gustave Samazeuilh, Musiciens de mon temps: Chroniques et souvenirs (Paris: M. Daubin, 1947), 287: “oublier sa musique”; “répandre les œuvres achevées de sa chère disparue.” 99 Although I have not been able to find an account of either of these concerts in major daily newspapers, I have found concert programs in one location for the first of these, and in two locations for the second (see Table 4.1). 100 Nadia Boulanger, “Programmes de concerts donnés par Nadia Boulanger,” BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 195; “Courrier musical. Ce soir. Aux Concerts Pasdeloup,” Le Figaro, May 22, 1919; Caroline Potter, “Appendix B: Catalogue of Lili Boulanger’s Works,” in her Nadia and Lili Boulanger (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 174–182; 178. Potter suggests that several movements of Clairières dans le ciel were premiered at this performance, but programs in Rés. Vm. Dos. 195 and in collections of programs from the SMI housed at the BnF suggest otherwise. In Search of a Consolatory Past 229

Table 4.1 Performances of Lili Boulanger’s Compositions in Which Nadia Boulanger Was Involved, 1919–1973

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance

January 12, Concert d’œuvres BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1919 de Lili and Nadia Dos. 195. Boulanger January 17, Clairières Société Musicale Performed on BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1919 dans le ciel Indépendante the piano Dos. 195; BnF, Mus., (premiere) SMI Programs. February 8, Pièces en trio Performed on Alexandra Laederich, 1919 the piano “Au clavier et au puptire: Les Concerts de Nadia Boulanger de 1901 à 1973,” in Nadia et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, eds. Alexandra Laederich and Karol Beffa (Lyon: Symétrie, 2007), 173–190; 183. March 29, Pour les Concerts Performed on BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1919 funérailles Colonne- the organ Dos. 195; Laederich, d’un soldat Lamoureux “Au Clavier et au pupitre,” 181. May 24–25, Clairières Concerts Le Figaro, May 22–25, 1919 dans le ciel Pasdeloup 1919. (premiere, orchestrated) June 6, Clairières Société Musicale Performed on Caroline Potter, 1919 dans le ciel Indépendante the piano “Appendix B: Catalogue of Lili Boulanger’s Works,” in Nadia and Lili Boulanger (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 174–182; 178. Potter suggests that several movements of this piece were premiered at this performance, but concert programs suggest otherwise. January 25, D’un matin de Salle des Laederich, “Au Clavier 1920 printemps Agriculteurs et au pupitre,” 182. Continued 230 Resonant Recoveries

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance March 7, Clarières dans Société des Possibly BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1920 le ciel Concerts du performed Dos. 194; BnF, Mus., Conservatoire (Nadia played Fonds Montpensier, (Directed organ on the Nadia Boulanger. by Philippe Handel Concerto Gaubert) that came just before on the program) June 15, Soir sur Société Musicale Performed on BnF, Mus.: SMI 1920 la plaine Indépendante the piano Programs. & Hymne au soleil (premieres) March 6, Pour les Trocadéro, Gala Performed as Léonie Rosenstiel, 1921 funérailles Concert of the accompanist Nadia Boulanger: A d’un soldat Ligue Française Life in Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 152. June 6, Cortège, Salle des Performed on BnF, Mus.: Fonds 1921 Nocturne, Agricultures: the piano Montpensier, Nadia D’un matin de Concert de Boulanger. printemps Musique Moderne Française donné par Yvonne Astruc June 9, Prière Salle Pleyel, Performed on BnF, Mus.: Fonds 1921 hindoue, Audition the piano Montpensier, Nadia Clairières d’œuvres de Lili Boulanger. dans le ciel, Boulanger Nocturne, D’un matin de printemps, Psaume CXXIX, Dans l’immense tristesse, Reflets, Pie Jesu, Pour les funérailles d’un soldat March 23, Clairières Société Musicale Performed on 1922 dans le ciel Indépendante the piano November Envois de Académie des Rosenstiel, Nadia 22, 1922 Rome Beaux-Arts Boulanger, 166–167. In Search of a Consolatory Past 231

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance January 17, Envois de Conservatoire Performed on Rosenstiel, Nadia 1923 Rome de Paris organ Boulanger, 167. 1923 Psaume Institut de BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. CXXIX France Dos. 195. (premiere) March 3, Psaume BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1924 CXXIX Dos. 195. (Belgian premiere) January 9, Cortège Wanamaker Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1925 Store, performed on Dos. 195. Philadelphia the organ January 11, Pour les Carnegie Hall Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1925 funérailles performed on Dos. 195. d’un soldat the organ January 15, Cortège Wanamaker Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1925 Auditorium, performed on Dos. 195. NYC the organ January 21, Cortège Cleveland Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1925 Museum of Art performed on Dos. 195. the organ February 1, Clairières dans Conservatoire BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1925 le ciel (Belgian Royal de Dos. 195. premiere); Musique de Psaume Bruxelles CXXIX (Belgian premiere) February Pour les Boston Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 20, 1925 funérailles Symphony performed on Dos. 195. d’un soldat Orchestra the organ February Pour les Boston Transcribed; BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 21, 1925 funérailles Symphony performed on Dos. 195. d’un soldat Orchestra the organ April 2, Psaume Concerts Laederich, “Au clavier 1926 CXXIX Lamoureux et au pupitre,” 181. July 18, Psaume Palais de Performed on the BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1929 CXXIX; D’un Fontainebleau, piano Dos. 195. soir triste; Conservatoire Clairières dans Américain le ciel; Reflets; Pie Jesu; Faust et Hélène Continued 232 Resonant Recoveries

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance June 30, Vieille prière École normale de Performed on BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1930 bouddhique musique the piano Dos. 195; Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 232. May 18, Deux Psaumes Fédération Performed on BnF, Mus.: Fonds 1933 (CXXXX and Internationale the organ Montpensier, Lili XXIV) des Concerts: Boulanger. Congrès de Paris: L’Orchestre de la Société des concerts du Conservatoire November “Au pied de Morning Concert under BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 4, 1936 mon lit” & Musicales her direction Dos. 195. Renouveau January 25, Nocturne Chez Madame Performed on the BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1937 Verginiaud piano with Paul Dos. 195. Makanowitzky July 6, 1937 Vieille prière Conservatoire BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. bouddhique Américaine Dos. 195. March 22, Vieille prière Union Interalliée: BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1938 bouddhique; “Œuvres de Dos. 195. Nocturne; Lili Boulanger Cortège; pour la 20e Clairières Anniversaire de dans le ciel; sa mort” Psaume CXXIX; Faust et Hélène April 2, Pie Jesu Library of Concert under BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1938 Congress her direction Dos. 195. April 7, Pie Jesu Ohio State BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1938 University Dos. 195. April 15, Pie Jesu Cleveland Art BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1938 Museum Dos. 195. April 16, Pie Jesu; Oberlin College BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1938 Psaume XXIV Dos. 195. October Renouveau Conservatoire Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 28, 1938 royal: Concerts Dos. 195. de la société de musique de chambre et la maison d’art In Search of a Consolatory Past 233

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance November Renouveau Londonderry Concert under BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 8, 1938 House: The her direction Dos. 195. Anglo-French Art and Travel Society November Clairières Nantes: La Boîte BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 30, 1938 dans le ciel à musique Dos. 195. January 13, Psaume XXIV Western Reserve Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1939 University, Dos. 195. Cleveland, Ohio January 20, Psaume XXIV Oberlin Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1939 Conservatory of Dos. 195. Music January 23, Pour les Dayton, Ohio Performed on BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1939 funérailles the piano Dos. 195. d’un soldat February Pour les Philharmonic- Performed on BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 11, 1939 funérailles Symphony the organ Dos. 195. d’un soldat League of Ne w York February Pour les National Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 26, 1939 funérailles Symphony Dos. 195. d’un soldat Orchestra March 6, Pour les Lili Boulanger Conducted BnF, Mus., Fonds 1939 funerailles Memorial Montpensier, Lili d’un soldat; Fund Concert, Boulanger. Pie Jesu; The Harvard Psaume Glee Club, The CXXX (US Radcliffe Choral premiere); Society, Boston Psaume XXIV Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA March 10 Pour les Philadelphia Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. and 11, funérailles Orchestra Dos. 195; Laederich, 1939 d’un soldat “Au clavier et au pupitre,” 188. August 26, Renouveau Canterbury, Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1939 Chapter House Dos. 195. April 12, Nocturne; Orchestre Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1940 Cortège symphonique du Dos. 195. Centre musical et théâtral d’armée Continued 234 Resonant Recoveries

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance April 28, Psaume XXIV North Andover, Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1942 MA: Joint Dos. 195. Concert with the Concord Academy Glee Club & Brooks School Choir May 5, Psaume XXIV Concord, Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1942 Massachusetts: Dos. 195. Joint Concert with the Concord Academy Glee Club & Brooks School Choir May 9, Psaume XXIV Chestnut Hill, Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1942 Massachusetts: Dos. 195. Glee Clubs and Orchestras of the Beaver Country Day School April 22, Pie Jesu Sanders Theater, Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1943 Cambridge, Dos. 195. Massachusetts: War Savings Victory Concert July 30, Nocturne The Dominican Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1944 Sisters of Dos. 195. Edgewood College March 17, Psaume Union interalliée Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1947 CXXIX; Dos. 195. Nocturne; Pie Jesu March 18, Psaume Cercle interalliée Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1947 CXXIX; Dos. 195. Nocturne; Pie Jesu March 21, Psaume Club d’essai Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1947 CXXIX; Dos. 195. Nocturne; Pie Jesu In Search of a Consolatory Past 235

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance March 16, Faust et Union interalliée: Performed on the BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1948 Hélène Pour le 30e piano Dos. 195. (excerpts); anniversaire de Psaume la mort de Lili CXXIX; Boulanger Clairières dans le ciel; Nocturne; Cortège; D’un matin de printemps October Nocturne; [Unidentified] BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1948 Cortège; Pie Dos. 195. (day not Jesu specified) March 11, Clairières Union interalliée Performed on the BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1952 dans le ciel; piano Dos. 195. Nocturne; D’un matin de printemps May 9, Nocturne Fondation Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1957 Singer-Polignac Dos. 195. March 6, Vieille prière Statsradiofonien Conducted BnF, Mus., Res. Vm. 1958 bouddhique; Symphoniorkester Dos. 195. Pie Jesu; Psaume XXIV April 23, Vieille prière Harvard Glee Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1958 bouddhique Club and Dos. 195. Radcliffe Choral Society February Psaume New York Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 15–18, CXXX; Philharmonic Dos. 195. 1962 Psaume CXXIX; Psaume XXIV March 8, Pie Jesu; Cornell Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1962 Nocturne University Glee Dos. 195. Club and Cornell Chorus April 1, Pie Jesu Sprague Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1962 Memorial Hall, Dos. 195. New Haven, CT Continued 236 Resonant Recoveries

Table 4.1 Continued

Date Composition Venue/ Nadia’s Role in Source(s) Organization the Performance April 8, Pie Jesu King’s Chapel, Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1962 Boston Dos. 195. April 19, Psaume Boston Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1962 CXXX; Symphony Dos. 195. Psaume Orchestra CXXIX; Psaume XXIV April 21, Psaume Boston Conducted BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1962 CXXX; Symphony Dos. 195. Psaume Orchestra CXXIX; Psaume XXIV March 9– Bibliothèque BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 27, 1968 Nationale Dos. 195. de France: Exposition Lili Boulanger January Psaume Le Grand Concert under BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 26, 1970 CXXX Orchestre her direction Dos. 195. Symphonique de la R.T.B.: “Hommage à Lili & Nadia Boulanger” July 6, Psaume Conservatoire Performed on BnF, Mus.: Res. Vm. 1973 CXXIX; Faust Américain the piano Dos. 195. et Hélène

Boulanger often turned to musical performance in order to remember her sister, specifically by performing Lili’s works as a pianist or organist. Although trained and often billed—especially in the United States—as a virtuoso keyboard player, Nadia felt apprehensive about her performing abilities.101 Performing Lili’s works in public, especially considering the faithfulness she likely felt to her sister to represent her musical gifts to the world to the best of her abilities, would have entailed Nadia’s frequent practice of her compositions at home, often in the presence of their mother, who was also mourning Lili’s death in the 1920s and early 1930s before her own death in March 1935.102 Nadia’s decision to program

101 See Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, 29. 102 Nadia Boulanger lived with her mother, Raïssa Boulanger, until Raïssa’s death in March 1935, just days after the seventeenth anniversary of Lili’s death. In Search of a Consolatory Past 237 her sister’s compositions was thus likely informed by her desire to remember what it was like to listen to or perform Lili’s compositions in her presence. But performing, conducting, and arranging performances of Lili’s compositions entailed other musical tasks as well, including orchestration, tran- scription, and preparing compositions for publishers. The May 1919 performance of Clairières dans le ciel at the Concerts Pasdeloup was likely the result of Nadia’s orchestration of the work, since the only extant copy of the orchestral version’s manuscript is in her hand.103 Nadia also orchestrated Lili’s Nocturne around 1950, and her Pie Jesu around 1960; the latter composition was one of Nadia’s favorites to program on her US tours in 1938 and 1962 (see Table 4.1). Moreover, Nadia transcribed Cortège and Pour les funérailles d’un soldat for organ so that she could perform them on her US tour in 1925, and completed alter- nate versions of several of Lili’s last compositions, including Psaume 130, Psaume 24, Dans l’immense tristesse, and D’un matin printemps. According to Caroline Potter’s “Catalogue of Lili Boulanger’s Works,” none of Lili’s compositions was published before 1918. Considering Nadia’s involvement in Lili’s compositions after her death, as well as Samazeuilh’s assertion that after 1918 one of Nadia’s main life goals was to make Lili’s works known by a broader public, Boulanger likely did much of the work of preparing Lili’s compositions for publication.104 Performing each of these musical tasks necessitated her working closely with the music written by her sister that she would have first encountered in Lili’s presence, either while hearing or performing Lili’s works with her, or in putting down on manuscript paper the musical figures Lili dictated to her when she was too weak to complete this task herself.105 Boulanger tended to engage with compositions that would have reminded her of Lili in the last years of the younger woman’s life. While the two sisters had always been close, they became much closer in Lili’s last years, in part because they worked together on the Comité Franco-Américain, but also because Lili’s wors- ening health demanded that Nadia act as her nurse and companion on a regular basis. She kept Lili company and cared for her as she went through a series of surgeries and experimental treatments that attempted to cure her ailments, or at least reduce her discomfort.106 Nadia stayed with Lili during the day,

103 Caroline Potter wonders in Nadia and Lili Boulanger if “Nadia Boulanger is also responsible for this work,” especially since “Lili Boulanger scrupulously dated her manuscripts, and some stylistic features of the orchestrations are more characteristic of her sister’s work.” See Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, 108. 104 Samazeuilh, Musiciens de mon temps, 287. 105 Nadia Boulanger helped her sister compose a number of compositions, especially in the last years of Lili’s life. Lili’s Pie Jesu is one notable example of this. 106 She frequently kept track of Lili’s pulse, temperature, and general condition in 1916 and 1917, and often slept with her at night. Lili Boulanger, Agenda, 1916, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vmf. Ms. 116 (3): “Nadia va à Paris 7h24—y reste coucher. Maman prend la place de Nadia auprès de moi cette nuit.” 238 Resonant Recoveries frequently engaging her in musical activities such as singing or playing the piano. Lili wrote in her diary on November 29, 1916, for instance, that she and Nadia “s[ang] together improvised counterpoints,” while on December 20 of the same year, Nadia “made [her] improvise” before they sat together while Nadia made a scrapbook of articles—likely related to their compositions or performances— and Lili corrected proofs of Funérailles d’un soldat.107 In her 1916 diary, Lili confirmed that Nadia “stays with her so much of the time” since “her presence assuages the bothersome sensation” of her pain.108 For Nadia, the last years of Lili’s life were both pleasurable and painful. She wrote to Manziarly just before Lili’s death that she was struggling “to keep the necessary courage,” and revealed a few months after her death that “I have lived for years in this torture of thinking only of the pain that was close to me, to share it and try to illuminate it a little.”109 Nevertheless, after her death, it was Lili’s final years in which Nadia often wanted to dwell. Many of the compositions that Boulanger was most keen to have performed after her sister’s death were those composed in Lili’s final years. These would have engendered especially strong memories of making music with her sister or in her sister’s presence. For instance, one of Lili’s last compositions was her Pie Jesu, a setting of an excerpt of the Catholic Requiem Mass for soprano, harp, organ, and string quartet. Although it seems as though Lili began sketching this piece— perhaps as part of an entire Requiem mass setting—between 1909 and 1913, she finished it, thanks to Nadia’s help, only shortly before her death. As Nadia explained in an interview with her biographer Léonie Rosentiel, “when [Lili] could no longer write, she dictated note by note, line by line . . . the work which she had conceived within her.”110 In addition to arranging to have the piece performed annually at the memorial masses held at La Trinité—a strong indica- tion of Nadia’s adherence to Catholic rituals of remembrance—Nadia included Lili’s Pie Jesu in more concerts than any other piece in Lili’s œuvre (see Table 4.1). Moreover, two other pieces that Nadia frequently programmed throughout the rest of her life were Lili’s Psaume 129 and Psaume 24, both of which Lili composed in the last years of her life. These pieces appear in manuscript in Nadia’s hand, suggesting that she copied down the music for each as Lili sang it to her, or described how she wanted it to sound, perhaps as Nadia played the piano or

107 Ibid.: “Nadia me fait improviser ensuite. puis ns. remontons elle colle ces articles auprès de moi qui couchée corrige les épreuves des Funérailles.” 108 Ibid.: “Nadia reste avec moi tant le temps” and “sa présence m’adoucit la sensation énervante que me cause cette jambe.” 109 Nadia Boulanger to Marcelle de Manziarly, July 25, 1918, BnF, Mus., NLA 289: “J’ai vécu des années dans cette torture de ne penser qu’à la douleur qui était près de moi, à la partager et à tenter de l’éclairer un peu.” 110 See Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, 123–124; here she cites Léonie Rosentiel, The Life and Works of Lili Boulanger (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1978), 200, 282. In Search of a Consolatory Past 239 organ. In preparing these pieces for performance, Boulanger would have had the opportunity to immerse herself in felt and heard memories of spending time making music with Lili. In addition to these pieces written at the end of Lili’s life, the compositions to which Nadia returned most throughout her conducting and performing career also would have conjured strong memories of making music with her sister at earlier points in their lives. For instance, Lili’s Nocturne appears on concerts in which Nadia participated almost as many times as her Pie Jesu. This piece for violin or flute and piano, completed in October 1911 and one of Lili’s first, likely reminded Nadia of a period of particular closeness between the sisters when Nadia had been helping Lili to prepare for the 1912 Prix de Rome competition.111 Listening to, performing, and even just engaging deeply with these pieces in editing and orchestrating them thus allowed Nadia to “find again something that lives in [the music]”—perhaps in this case, her sister’s presence. Although Nadia’s preoccupation with her sister’s compositions was certainly motivated by her desire to ensure that Lili would not be forgotten, engaging with these pieces likely also offered Boulanger opportunities to immerse herself in memories of the sister she had loved so dearly. In this way, music offered a bridge between public and private processes and performances of mourning, allowing Boulanger to promote her sister’s memory publicly while also reliving moments of her past once experienced alongside Lili. This latter experience would have been especially important to helping Boulanger mourn the loss of her sister, and to creating the mixture of pleasure and pain that was, for her, central to grief.

Searching for a Consolatory Past in Music Composition: Maurice Ravel and Darius Milhaud

Whereas for Long and Boulanger preparing for and performing in concerts and recitals permitted access to the memories of lost loved ones, for composers in mourning, such as Ravel and Milhaud, the act of composition offered a means of connecting to the deceased. Ravel’s repeated decisions to return to the compositions he had been working on before his mother’s death demonstrate how composition functioned as a linking practice, as do Milhaud’s choices to engage with poems and compositions that would have reminded him of his childhood friend, Léo Latil, who was killed in combat in 1915.

111 See Annegret Fauser, “‘Fighting in Frills’: Women and the Prix de Rome in French Cultural Politics,” in Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 60–86. 240 Resonant Recoveries

Central to Ravel’s mourning was his desire to return to an idealized past. The time he wished to remember most was the summer of 1914, which he considered one of his happiest as well as most productive periods. He writes to Hélène Kahn- Casella about the “happier times before I left her,” likely referring not to the fall of 1914 and 1915, but rather to the months before the war broke out.112 Although Ravel did not go to the front until March 1915, his letters from the fall of 1914 and the few that remain from early 1915 indicate that he was incredibly depressed, particularly fearing his mother’s reaction to his decision to enlist.113 In addition, in January 1920 Ravel wrote to Long—who was a close friend by then—that “I have resumed working, in a furious manner, as before,” but then clarified, “as before, [but] not completely: the last time was in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. . . . No one better than you can understand my horrible sadness.”114 At the time of writing this letter, the last time Ravel had been to Saint-Jean-de-Luz was the summer of 1914. When Ravel wrote to his close family friend Marie Gaudin in January 1921 to offer his condolences on the death of her father, he conjured 1914 as the time when “we were all so happy.”115 Marie, too, had suffered loss during the course of the war: her two brothers, Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, had been killed on their first day at the front in November 1914. For Ravel, and likely many others, the months before the war stood out as a particular time, the memory of which required preserving. The projects that Ravel undertook after 1917 demonstrate his desire to evoke through music composition—enacted at the piano116—the presence of his mother, recalled from the years immediately preceding the war. Between 1917 and 1925, he almost exclusively returned to music he had been working on while living with his mother in 1914. In 1917 he resumed working on Le Tombeau de Couperin, which he had begun in the summer of 1914 while vacationing in Saint-Jean-de-Luz with his mother. Between the completion of Le Tombeau in November 1917 and the completion of La Valse in February 1920, Ravel devoted a great deal of energy to orchestrating compositions that he had

112 Ravel to Hélène Kahn-Casella, January 15, 1920, in “Soixante-deux lettres,” 79: “moments heureux où je l’ai quitté.” 113 For more on this, see Ravel’s letters to Roland-Manuel, Cipa Godebska, and Florent Schmitt from the fall of 1914, in A Ravel Reader, 150–158. 114 Ravel to Marguerite Long, January 14, 1920, in Ravel au miroir de ses lettres, eds. Marcelle Gerar and René Chalupt (Ravel: Robert Laffont, 1956), 168: “j’ai repris le travail, d’un manière acharnée, comme autrefois. . . . Comme autrefois; pas tout à fait: la dernière fois c’était à St-Jean-de-Luz . . . Nulle mieux que vous ne peut comprendre ma tristesse affreuse.” The second ellipsis here is Ravel’s. 115 Ravel to Marie Gaudin, January 6, 1921, in “Lettres de Maurice Ravel à la famille Gaudin, de Saint-Jean-de-Luz; 2e partie: 1919–1927,” ed. Michel Delahaye, Cahiers Maurice Ravel 10 (2007): 14– 56; 17: “Nous étions tous si heureux en 1914!” 116 We know from numerous sources that Ravel composed at the piano. See Marguerite Long, “La Musique de piano,” in Maurice Ravel (Paris: Les Publications techniques et artistiques, 1945), 3–7; 7; and Émile Vuillermoz, “L’œuvre de Maurice Ravel,” in Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers (Paris: Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1939), 1–95; 16–17. In Search of a Consolatory Past 241 composed during 1914, including four movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin, as well as “Kaddisch”—not insignificantly the prayer spoken in Jewish mourning rituals—and “L’Énigme éternelle” from Deux mélodies hébraïques. Ravel also turned during this time to orchestrating “Alborada del gracioso” from Miroirs (1904–1906), which Roger Nichols has suggested may have been inspired by the Spanish folk songs sung to Ravel by his mother when he was a child.117 In these years Ravel also made contact with Colette about their collaboration on the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, which consumed most of Ravel’s time during the first half of the 1920s. While the subject matter of L’Enfant et les sortilèges may have appealed to Ravel as a way to work through his guilt over abandoning his mother in the last years of her life, Ravel also took working on this opera as an opportunity to return to music for his planned but never completed opera La Cloche engloutie, which he had been working on in the summer and fall of 1914, and which appears in trace fragments throughout L’Enfant.118 Thus for Ravel, as for Long and Boulanger, mourning and consolation were often achieved through engagement in musical activities that could engender sensual musical remembrance, that could “take one back” to “happy moments” before the death of those they loved. In the years during and after the war, Milhaud’s decisions concerning what pieces to work on likewise exemplify an interest in immersing himself in memories of a dead loved one—his childhood friend Léo Latil. Prevented from enlisting for medical reasons, Milhaud watched as many of his friends left for the front lines in late summer and early fall of 1914. Among these were his childhood friend Léo Latil, whom he had known since adolescence, when the two took violin lessons from Léo Bruguier while growing up in Aix-en-Provence. Milhaud and Latil shared not only musical interests, but also a love of contemporary French poetry.119 While Milhaud studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, Latil studied law and letters in Aix. On the occasions when Milhaud returned to Aix, the two young men spent almost all of their time together, often traveling together and mutually supporting each other’s budding careers. Milhaud indicated the strength of his bond with Latil in recalling in his memoirs that while crossing the Place de Villiers in Paris on the day of Latil’s death in September 1915, he “felt an exceedingly acute physical pang, which lasted several seconds,” at which point he “immediately thought of Léo and feared that some disaster had befallen him.” “Later,” he revealed, “I was to learn that I had felt this pain at the

117 Nichols, Ravel, 74. 118 For more on this, see Emily Kilpatrick, “Enchantments and Illusions: Recasting the Creation of L’Enfant et les sortilèges,” in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31–54. 119 Darius Milhaud, Notes Without Music, trans. Donald Evans and ed. Rollo H. Myers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 21. 242 Resonant Recoveries very moment of his death.”120 The connection the two men shared made grieving the loss of Latil difficult for Milhaud, who attributed his decision to go to Brazil with Paul Claudel in 1916 to “the great longing for solitude [he] had had since Léo’s death.”121 During and just after World War I, Milhaud was preoccupied with composing music that allowed him to immerse himself in memories of Latil. Milhaud demonstrated his devotion to remembering Latil in the many settings he composed of Latil’s published and unpublished writings in the years following his death. Milhaud had begun setting Latil’s poetry before the war in two different sets of songs: Trois poèmes de Léo Latil, Op. 2, and Quatre poèmes de Léo Latil, Op. 20. He completed the latter piece—a melancholy set of songs on loss and abandonment—in June 1914, and the former in 1916. After Latil’s death, Milhaud set his texts even more frequently, exhibiting a particular penchant for setting excerpts from Latil’s personal diary, which Latil had bequeathed to Milhaud upon his death. Although Milhaud chose not to publish or perform his String Quartet No. 3—dedicated to Latil—until 1956, in 1915 and 1916 he set several lines from Latil’s diary in its second movement, and in 1921 he published another song based on Latil’s diary entitled Poème du journal intime de Léo Latil. Milhaud also remembered Latil through setting the verse of poets over which the two men had bonded. Milhaud’s 1915 song cycle D’un cahier inédit du journal d’Eugènie de Guérin sets texts taken from the diary of Eugènie de Guérin, the sister of Maurice de Guérin, a nineteenth-century poet to whom Latil had intro- duced Milhaud.122 Dedicating these songs to Latil, Milhaud chose to set lines from Eugènie’s diary that resonated with his experience of mourning since they focused on Eugènie’s love for her brother and how much she missed his presence. In addition, Milhaud set several texts by the French poet Francis Jammes, whose work was beloved by both men, and who had become a mentor to Milhaud and especially Latil. In addition to composing L’Église habillée de feuilles based on Jammes’s text in 1916, and Trois poèmes de Francis Jammes in 1918, in the years after the war Milhaud was preparing his opera La Brebis égarée—which he had written and performed for Jammes in Latil’s presence—for its premiere in 1923. Perhaps for Milhaud, working on music based on texts the two men had come to love together permitted him to better hear the tone, timbre, and affect of Leo’s voice as he read aloud. Many of the musical pieces that Milhaud wrote after Latil’s death can be understood as sonic repositories of Milhaud’s perennial mourning, in particular his desire to remember time spent with Latil musically and corporeally. In addition

120 Ibid., 67. 121 Ibid., 68. 122 Ibid., 21. In Search of a Consolatory Past 243 to using texts that would have helped him to recall being in Latil’s presence, Milhaud also returned obsessively to plodding, minor-key figures in a number of his post-1915 pieces, including his Poème du journal intime de Léo Latil, “Nous voila donc exilés . . .” from D’un cahier inédit du journal d’Eugène de Guérin, and both movements of his Third String Quartet. Milhaud’s use of these figures in works that have explicit connections to Latil suggest that Milhaud inscribed his inability to let go of Léo’s memory into these compositions, especially since repetition of this kind is not a standard feature of Milhaud’s overall modernist aes- thetic. For as much as the appearance of such figures might be understood as symptoms of Milhaud’s psychic difficulties in mourning Latil’s death, they might also be understood as musical figures of consolation that provided comfort in the familiarity they brought to the listener, performer, or composer. But beyond the mere existence of the repetition of these figures, Milhaud communicated his perennial mourning in returning to music—as Long, Boulanger, and Ravel had— that would have reminded him of time spent composing in Latil’s presence. Milhaud’s musical perennial mourning is especially evident in his String Quartet No. 3. One of the first pieces composed after Latil’s death, the quartet features a text from Latil’s personal diary, and draws on music and themes from Quatre poèmes de Léo Latil that would have reminded Milhaud of being in Latil’s presence in the months before he left for the front. Milhaud indicated as much in writing at the bottom of the manuscript, “in remembrance of Spring 1914”— precisely the time when he had been composing his Quatre poèmes at L’Enclos where both men had been living.123 Many of the same general rhetorical themes that appeared in Quatre poèmes de Léo Latil appear as well in his String Quartet No. 3. For instance, the passages from Latil’s diary that Milhaud set in the string quartet’s second movement are strikingly similar to the Latil poem that Milhaud used for the first of hisQuatre poèmes—“L’Abandon.” After opening by asking an unknown listener, “why have you abandoned me?” this song conveys a sense of abandonment through a cold, blowing wind that infiltrates and chills everything it touches:

It is nighttime and the great wind of the winter’s end blows. It whistles in the chimney and under the doors, and surrounds me with coldness. Outside it shakes the trees crazily, soars through the streets, bypassing the houses, and leaps in the countryside, above the hills and the dead moors.124

123 Milhaud’s score for Quatre poèmes de Léo Latil is dated “L’Enclos Juin 1914.” See the 1920 Durand edition. 124 Latil, cited in Milhaud, “L’Abandon,” from Quatre poèmes de Léo Latil, Op. 20: “Il fait nuit et le grand vent de la fin de l’hiver souffle. Il siffle dans la cheminée et sous les portes, et m’entoure de froid. Dehors il doit secouer les arbres follement, s’élancer dans les rues, contournant les maisons, et bondir dans les campagnes, au dessus des collines et des bruyères mortes.” 244 Resonant Recoveries

In the second movement of his string quartet, Milhaud clearly evoked these lines in the excerpts he chose to set from Latil’s diary:

There is a wind, a cold wind that blows very strong in a crazy manner and shakes the trees in the garden, that shakes these trees without leaves and the thickest branches up the trunk that trembles. It gathers the rain that it throws on the walls of houses and stops itself against the houses jumping in the streets. The wind blows. It gathers the clouds of rain in the vast sky, it blows in the city, above the city, and all around it, and everywhere in the countryside in obliterating the trees and the poor grasses so tender, obliterating them in the fields.125

The strength of the similarities between these two passages suggests that Latil may have written the lines that appear in Milhaud’s string quartet in his journal before revising them for the poem that Milhaud set in Quatre poèmes. Considering how intertwined in each other’s careers Milhaud and Latil had been, especially in their youth, it is possible that Latil even consulted Milhaud about these lines when he was turning them into the poem that Milhaud would set in “L’Abandon.” It is equally possible, however, that Milhaud encountered these lines in Latil’s journal after his death and was reminded of his friend, and of the poem he had set while working alongside Latil. Either way, Milhaud’s choice to set these particular lines from Latil’s diary in a piece dedicated to his friend and “in remembrance of Spring 1914” intimates that these lines from Latil’s diary offered Milhaud potent reminders of being in his childhood friend’s presence. Composing this movement, then, may have brought Milhaud into spiritual, imaginative contact with Latil in ways that consoled him in his grief. The music that Milhaud wrote for the string quartet’s first movement suggests that composing this movement was a powerful activity for evoking Latil’s presence. In this movement Milhaud drew heavily on music from the third song of Quatre poèmes—“Le Rossignol.” The climax of this song expresses a longing for a friend and lover through asking, “Where are you, marvelous and so sweet [one] who loves me, submitting yourself to me, and who will give me your heart in order to enrich mine and your pain? Where are you?”126 Although it is clear

125 Latil, cited in Milhaud, String Quartet No. 3, second movement: “Il fait un vent, un vent froid qui souffle très fort d’une manière folle et qui secoue les arbres du jardin, qui les secoue ces arbres sans feuilles et les branches les plus grosses jusqu’au tronc qui tremble. Il amasse la pluie qu’il jette sur les murs des maisons et il s’arrête lui, contre les maisons bondissant dans les rues. Le vent souffle. Il amasse les nuages de pluie dans le vaste ciel il souffle sur la ville, par dessus la ville, et tout autour, et partout sur les campagnes en écrasant les arbres et les pauvres herbes si tendres, les écrasant dans les champs.” 126 “Mais qui est mon amie, qui est mon amie? Où êtes-vous, merveilleuse et si douce qui m’aimerez, vous inclinant devant moi, et qui me donnerez votre cœur pour enrichir le mien et votre douleur? Où êtes-vous?” In Search of a Consolatory Past 245

Musical Example 4.1 Darius Milhaud, String Quartet No. 3, mvmt. 1, mm. 1–2: Rossignol motive.

through Latil’s use of “amie” that he was addressing a woman, all other evidence suggests that this yearning for a missing loved one resonated with Milhaud’s feelings of loss in the wake of Latil’s death. Quotations from “Le Rossignol” proliferate throughout the first movement of Milhaud’s Third String Quartet. Milhaud set both the song and the string quartet predominantly in 6/8, and both pieces begin with the same D-minor melody accompanied by an eighth note–quarter note dyad that descends by half step from B-flat and G-flat to D and A. This descending eighth note–quarter note figure functions as an ostinato in large sections of both pieces, and the first phrase of the opening melody returns in both pieces, although far more frequently in the string quartet. In fact, one of the most striking features of this movement is Milhaud’s ob- sessive return to this melody, which in “Le Rossignol” was sung to the words, “We are at the doors of springtime”—perhaps Milhaud’s way of referencing the spring of 1914. Over the course of the movement, Milhaud returned to this melody twenty- five times, placing it in all voices, as well as in a variety of registers and keys. Some of the melody’s appearances include the second phrase of “Le Rossignol,” while others center on the short, opening phrase that begins with a rising minor third and continues through two three-note, descending step-wise sequences before moving up a step to return to the pitch on which it began (see Musical Example 4.1). While most instances of this motive appear in dotted rhythms, two of the iterations in the B section are set in straight eighth notes. Regardless of the differences between the twenty-five appearances of the Rossignol motive, by the end of the piece, the listener is very familiar with this impossible-to- escape melody. When understood in the context of interwar French memory-centered mourning practices, the frequent appearances of the Rossignol melody in Milhaud’s string quartet, as well as the musical contexts in which these appear, suggest that returning again and again to this motive while in the act of composition may have permitted Milhaud to mourn his friend through imagining what it had felt like to be in Latil’s presence in the spring of 1914. But Milhaud’s musical settings of the melody, as well as the narrative form of the movement, reveal that the affective experience of remembering his dead friend was not always pleasant. Rather, Milhaud seems to confess that mixed emotions can accompany remembering a dead loved one. 246 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 4.2 Darius Milhaud, String Quartet No. 3, mvmt. 1, mm. 1–5.

The first appearance of the Rossignol motive at the opening of the movement is a case in point. The fluid, diatonic Rossignol theme played by the cello is accompanied by the descending half-step figures in the viola and second violin parts—both of which continue their chromatic descent beyond the half-step al- ternation found in “Le Rossignol,” and instead intimate the descending tetrachord figure typically associated with lament (see Musical Example 4.2).127 Just after the cello finishes playing the first phrase of the motive, landing on a D that provides the root of what sounds at first to be a D major chord, the first violin enters with a jarring double stop: a B-flat with an E-flat harmonic. This intru- sive double stop grates dissonantly against the Rossignol melody, with the faint and otherworldly harmonic furthering the sense of affective dissonance that marks this opening passage. This double stop resolves to another, moving down

127 Neither instrument outlines a fourth: the second violin line descends by half-step from G-flat to A, while the viola descends from B-flat to F-sharp. The descending tetrachord became an especially popular way of signifying lament in seventeenth-century opera. For more on the development of this association, see Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” The Musical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (July 1979): 346–359. In Search of a Consolatory Past 247 by half-step to harmonize with a an implied D minor triad in the next measure, although the D harmonic in the uppermost voice continues to undermine any sense of stability. When the extended Rossignol melody concludes in m. 5, the harmonic-laden double stop enters again, here harmonizing with an E seventh chord. However, shortly thereafter it moves down by half step, again creating a strong sense of affective dissonance just before the quartet moves into the many varied repetitions of the motive that comprise the remainder of the movement. By placing these harmonic double stops at the very beginning of the movement and also having the harmonics return at the close of the movement, Milhaud allowed the affective dissonance they create to hover over the piece. In listening to or performing this piece, one gets the sense that recalling the Rossignol melody—hearing it, feeling it, playing it, writing it down—might bring with it an amalgamation of contradictory feelings. But the near continuous presence of the melody throughout the movement suggests that Milhaud continued to remember the melody—and thus also being with Latil—in any case. The B section of the movement continues to foreground the paradoxical affective experience of corporeally remembering a dead loved one. The descending half-step figure that opens both this movement and “Le Rossignol” is the pre- dominant motive and driving force of the B section, appearing—as the Rossignol melody had—in a variety of registers and rhythmic and pitch configurations. In many instances, Milhaud relies on the tension of the half-step figure to pre- cede or underpin attempts at resolution. That each of these is almost or even very briefly achieved before ultimately failing can be understood as indicative of Milhaud’s conflicted experience of remembering Latil. At the beginning of the B section at m. 36, for instance, rising and falling half-step figures appear in the first and second violin and viola parts, just before an attempt at resolution in m. 37 to A major is undercut by the viola’s E-sharp. The pattern is repeated in the two measures that follow, here with an attempt to resolve to G major that is once again prevented by the viola, this time playing a D-sharp (see Musical Example 4.3). One of the most striking sonic representations of the combination of anguish and pleasure characteristic of musical remembering appears in an achingly beautiful passage in mm. 50–66. Here, Milhaud takes the listener through a series of attempted resolutions, all underpinned by constant reiterations of the descending half-step motive. As before, just as it seems that resolution might be achieved, a new point of dissonance enters (see Musical Example 4.4). At m. 65, however, the cello plays the Rossignol melody—heard here for the first time in thirty-five measures—landing on a D-sharp that is met in the other voices by a B in the viola and octave Gs in the violins. Then the viola moves down by a half-step to A-sharp, resulting in what sounds like an E-flat major chord, even though it is voiced enharmonically as D-sharp, G, and A-sharp. That this brief 248 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 4.3 Darius Milhaud, String Quartet No. 3, mvmt. 1, mm. 34–40.

moment of consolation before the cello and viola enter with a minor second in the next bar is produced through remembering the Rossignol melody, indicates that Milhaud’s string quartet perhaps offers us an inscription of Milhaud’s experience of corporeal musical remembering as he mourned Latil’s death. Initially, Milhaud refused to have his String Quartet No. 3 published or performed during his lifetime, originally arranging with Durand to have it published six months after his death. In the 1950s, however, he softened on this and decided to have it published in 1956. Milhaud’s decision to keep the piece private for so long may have been in order to protect Latil’s words, although this seems unlikely given that Latil’s father published his son’s war letters as early as 1916, and given Milhaud’s own decision to publish the song Poème du journal intime de Léo Latil in 1921.128 It is also possible that in keeping this string quartet from the public Milhaud succeeded in keeping his mourning of his friend’s death a private matter, perhaps due to an emphasis on pudeur, which, as I addressed at

128 This is, however, the explanation that Milhaud furnishes to Claude Rostand in a 1952 interview. See Darius Milhaud: Interviews with Claude Rostand, preface and trans. Jane Hohfeld Galante (Oakland, CA: Center for the Book, Mills College, 2002), 34. In Search of a Consolatory Past 249 length in chapter 1, was prevalent in interwar France.129 Emotional stoicism— as manifested in pudeur, for instance—was especially linked to masculinity at this time, and Milhaud may have already felt his masculinity challenged by his

Musical Example 4.4 Darius Milhaud, String Quartet No. 3, mvmt. 1, mm. 45–66.

129 In addition to looking to the first chapter of this book, for more onpudeur in interwar France, see the first chapter of my dissertation (“Grieving Through Music in Interwar France”), as well as my article “Mourning at the Piano.” On pudeur in general, see Jean Claude Bologne’s Histoire de la pudeur (Paris: Hachette littératures, 2004). 250 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 4.4 Continued.

inability to fight in the French army, which was then the ultimate and nearly obligatory performance of masculinity.130 Or perhaps Milhaud wanted to keep this piece—a musical-memorial dialogue with his closest friend—something

130 See Joe Lunn, “Male Identity and Martial Codes of Honor: A Comparison of the War Memoirs of Graves, Ernst Jünger, and Kande Kamara,” The Journal of Military History 69, no. 3 (July 2005): 713– 735; my dissertation, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France,” 66–70; and Gregory Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 48–49. In Search of a Consolatory Past 251 just between the two of them, something he could turn to when he needed to console himself and feel connected to Latil.

Conclusion: Music, Affect, and Multi-Sensory Mourning in the Wake of Trauma

There are, of course, many reasons that these musicians might have turned to works that reminded them of their loved ones after their deaths. Convenience, facility, financial consideration, maintaining legacy, or holding a sense of re- sponsibility to lost loved ones were all likely reasons for these musicians’ musical choices. However, I believe that we are overlooking something crucial to understanding how music took on meaning for interwar French musicians if we do not explore how engaging in musical activities held the potential to influence, shape, and at times transform their psychic and emotional lives.131 Ravel’s, Long’s, Boulanger’s, Milhaud’s, and others’ shared musical practices with loved ones shaped their affective experiences of composing, listening, and performing after their loved ones’ deaths. As a result, musicians made musical choices influenced by their understanding of music as a medium saturated with the potential to permit them to intensely and viscerally recall loved ones who had died. Knowledge of the importance of musical-corporeal remembering in interwar France prompts looking beyond the three most considered and theorized of musical activities—composition, performance, and listening—to all of the musical activities that might viscerally engage one’s body in acts of remembering. As Bergson and Proust each articulated in their own way, remembering is a multi- and trans-sensorial process: memories lie in the body’s sensory-motor system waiting to be awakened by new sensory experiences. Each of these musical activities is likewise a multi-sensory act that might involve hearing the music at hand (whether in one’s mind or in one’s ear), feeling the sound as it vibrates through their body, or feeling their fingers as they move across the keyboard or grip a pen or pencil, not to mention seeing, hearing, and smelling things in their surrounding environment. Each of these sensory experiences has the potential to elicit sensory memories that might themselves stimulate memories. Music making, then, can be thought of as a way of provoking memorial chain reactions that both console and enable emotional transformation—or even, for some, compel what Bollas and Aberbach termed “mastery over trauma.”

131 Tia DeNora has made a similar argument Music in Everyday Life, especially in her second chapter, “Musical Affect in Practice.” Here, she suggests the importance of considering “human- music interaction.” See DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. 252 Resonant Recoveries

Bearing all of this in mind, we can imagine that the act of sinking one’s fingers familiarly into the piano’s keys and hearing the soft tones of the opening fragments of La Valse evoked for a composer in mourning like Ravel the kind, loving presence of his mother—the smell of her perfume, the sound of her voice as she hummed along with her son’s tunes. While for another composer like Milhaud, the richly recalled feeling of etching onto manuscript paper a phrase one has written or heard in one’s head hundreds of times before could result not only in remembering the familiar, melodic lilt of a childhood friend’s voice as he recites a verse you both know and love so well, but also in reviving the rich scent of cherry-wood and vanilla of Latil’s pipe tobacco as the sound of birds chirping floats through the window at L’Enclos. For a musical editor, transcriber, or con- ductor like Nadia Boulanger, preparing a score and hearing the sound of a familiar melody or instrumental combination in her ear might have resurrected the creaking of floorboards under the weight of Lili’s stockinged feet, the rustling of papers, and the sound of a pen being drawn across a piece of paper on the wooden desk in the room next to her. Nadia might have even been able to recall the sound of Lili softly singing the familiar melody while playing its harmonization on the piano. For Marguerite Long, perhaps the feeling of playing one of Fauré’s Nocturnes brought back the sensation of the weight of Joseph de Marliave’s hands on her shoulders, of his warm lips softly gracing her neck, of his breath—the way it smelled and tasted—like the sweetness of earth mixed with coffee and just a touch of tobacco. As these smells, tastes, sounds, and visions enter each musician’s consciousness, they inevitably induce other moments of tactility that recall their own sensuous environments. Sensuous remembrance enacted through musical activities enabled French interwar musicians to relive relationships in the interest of being consoled—even for just a moment—by being in the corporeally recalled presence of someone they continued to hold in their hearts, minds, and bodies. In the following chapter, French musicians look to another form of corporeal consolation and pleasure in the wake of trauma: laughter.