Music Making As Emotional Care Negotiating Trauma, Expressional Norms, and Politics in Wartime France

Home , Couperin (consortium), Edward Lockspeiser, Fernand Halphen, Gustave Charpentier, Henry Malherbe, Louis Fourestier

1 Music Making as Emotional Care Negotiating Trauma, Expressional Norms, and Politics in Wartime France

Enclose within oneself violent emotions, deep sorrows, and invol- untary urges. . . . Disdain the language of a man who seeks to exteri- orize what he feels and to touch others with what he suffers. —Maurice Maréchal1

On October 6, 1914, just two months after France began sending soldiers to the front, the Paris Conservatoire–trained cellist Maurice Maréchal wrote these words in his war diary. In the same entry, Maréchal revealed that his argument for silent suffering emerged from reading Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire, an 1835 collection of essays reflecting on French military service.2 In the fall of 1914, Maréchal penned a series of diary entries reflecting on life on the front lines. Often in the same or adjacent entries, he described brutal trench warfare and its injuries, as well as the feelings elicited from music making, writing in one case that, after a friend “made music for me again this afternoon, I am so happy to grasp, to sense the poetry, and the intense melancholy, of these minutes at the end of the day.”3 Maréchal articulated in his diary a problem faced by many World War I soldiers: how to cope mentally and emotionally with the violent and often traumatizing sights and sounds of the war. Should feelings about one’s experiences be expressed to others publicly or kept to oneself? How should such feelings be expressed? What does one do with the physical, emotional, and psychological discomforts that often arise in the wake of grief and other difficult or traumatizing experiences? Maréchal suggests in his diary that while certain

1 Maurice Maréchal, October 6, 1914, in “Carnets de guerre,” in Deux musiciens dans la grande guerre, ed. Luc Durosoir (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 223–344; 238: “Renfermer en soi les émotions violentes, les chagrins profonds ou les élans involontaires. . . . Dédaigner le langage d’un homme qui cherche à outrer ce qu’il sent et attendrir sur ce qu’il souffre.” 2 Maréchal mentions having read Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire in the same diary entry of October 6, 1914, cited in the preceding, in fn. 38 in “Carnets de guerre,” 238. 3 Maréchal, October 11, 1914, in ibid.: “Cloëz m’a refait de la musique cette après-midi, et je suis tellement heureux de comprendre, de sentir la poésie, la mélancolie intense de ces minutes de la fin du jour.”

Resonant Recoveries. Jillian C. Rogers, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190658298.003.0002 40 Resonant Recoveries forms of emotional self-expression should be avoided, feelings resulting from listening to music were—at least sometimes—permissible and desirable. Sociocultural norms in wartime France prevented many people from feeling comfortable with telling others about the traumas they had faced. In fact, many soldiers who fought in World War I came to understand their experiences on the front lines as completely unfathomable to anyone who had remained on the home front.4 In some cases, this difficulty of speaking openly about trauma led to the eventual development of safe and caring communities in which people could articulate their feelings, or in which they found solace and solidarity with those who had faced similar experiences of grief and trauma. Many small, informal kinship networks of this kind formed during and after World War I, especially among soldiers and their families.5 For others, however, speaking or writing about their experiences and feelings remained difficult or even impossible, perhaps even exacerbating feelings of social isolation and shame that frequently accompanied trauma.6 In some instances, the inability to discuss their trauma

4 Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13–64; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1992). 5 Jay Winter has written about the kinship networks that developed between families who had lost loved ones in the war and the people who might assist them in finding out what had happened to them in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see chapter 2, “Communities in Mourning.” Sarah Cole has addressed relationships between soldiers in Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Michelle Meinhart addresses relationships between music, mourning, and kinship networks in British contexts in “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. Stéphane Audouin- Rouzeau has also noted this phenomenon among soldiers, which he termed “groupe primaire,” in “L’épreuve de feu,” L’Histoire 225 (October 1998): 41; and Sandrine Visse has utilized Audouin-Rouzeau’s concept to discuss musician-soldiers in “Les ‘concerts’ au front pendant la Grande Guerre: Entre engagement dans le conflit et vie artistique en marge,” in La Grande Guerre en musique: Vie et création musicales en France pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale, eds. Florence Doé de Maindreville and Stéphan Etcharry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 27–50; 30. The wartime phenomenon of marraines de guerre—women who became “mothers” to soldiers they “adopted” during the war offer another type of alternative kinship; see Carol Mann, Femmes dans la guerre (Paris: Pygmalion, 2010) and Susan R. Grayzel, “Mothers, marraines, and prostitutes: morale and morality in First World War-Era France,” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 66–82. I have also addressed musicalized fictive kin networks in French interwar musical contexts in Rogers, “Ties That Bind: Music, Mourning, and the Development of Intimacy and Alternative Kinship Networks in World War I-Era France,” in Music and War: From French Revolution to World War I, ed. Etienne Jardin (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), 415–433. Although I address instances of musi- cally inflected wartime kinship throughout this book, I focus on this in the book’s conclusion. 6 Connections between trauma, shame, and isolation in World War I contexts will be elabo- rated throughout this chapter, but a few texts that address these connections include Louis Crocq, Les Blessés psychiques de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 7–14, 171–172; Gregory M. Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914– 1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 124–145; Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 20–23; Jay Winter, War Beyond Words, Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 172–202; Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008), 53–56. Music Making as Emotional Care 41 forced people to live for years to come in a continual state of hyperarousal— the so-called “fight or flight” mechanism—that may have included flashbacks, nightmares, and other triggering experiences.7 In this particular wartime context, many musicians understood music as an expressive medium that offered them a certain amount of plausible deniability: performers, composers, and listeners could deny that the songs they played, hummed along to, sang, or wrote were about their own feelings, even if they (secretly) were.8 My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate how grief, trauma, and their unspeakability became intertwined with understandings of music as a consolatory medium, particularly within the context of wartime politics and expectations. The first half of this chapter addresses the social and political pressures to keep silent about trauma that French citizens experienced during and after the war. After articulating the importance ofpudeur —a type of modesty that had become a historical and cultural norm in France by the early twentieth century—I show how silence became an especially prominent response to grief and trauma during World War I in musical public and private spheres. Through close readings of French medical and psychology texts, obituaries and funeral accounts in Parisian newspapers, and musicians’ correspondence and diaries, I demonstrate that trauma and personal grief often remained inexpressible within a nationalistic and patriotic culture that considered heroic masculinity—a stoic bravery in which fear, anxiety, and exhaustion played no role—the sine qua non of French citizenship. Contemporary ideas about the hereditary nature of trauma, alongside notions of its social contagiousness among medical and military officials, led to a culture of heroic masculinity that repressed and ignored traumatic experience and symptoms. The silencing of expressions of trauma in musical milieus mirrored the French state’s investment in suppressing widespread accounts of trauma among front-line fighting forces. Despite these attempts to prevent French citizens from talking about trauma, music offered a powerful means by which to cope with traumatic experiences. In the second half of this chapter, I illustrate some of the ways that soldiers and

7 For more on hyperarousal and other common symptoms of trauma, see Herman, Trauma and Recovery, in particular her chapters “A Healing Relationship” (133–154), “Safety” (155–174), and “Remembrance and Mourning” (175–195). 8 Music as a plausibly deniable expressive medium has been addressed in other contexts: Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 51; Robert Fink, “Desire, Repression, and Brahms’s First Symphony,” in Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 1998), 247–288; 258–259. For music’s plausible deniability specifically in relation to trauma, see Maria Cizmic, Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Michelle Meinhart and Jillian Rogers, “Theorizing Trauma and Music in the Long Nineteenth Century,” forthcoming 2021, in a special issue, “Music, War and Trauma in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Nineteenth-Century Music Review. 42 Resonant Recoveries civilians conceived of music as a form of post-traumatic emotional care that could help them to feel better—physically, emotionally, and mentally—without fear of the social censure that would likely occur from talking about one’s traumatic experiences. My examination of enlisted musicians’ letters and diaries and the music that they chose to compose and perform during the war reveals that musical culture often aligned with the norms of heroic masculinity, even while music making held the potential to help soldiers comprehend and sur- vive traumatic situations. In many instances, music offered people opportunities to feel better, safer, and “more themselves,” even if only momentarily. For many musicians, conventional patriotic pieces by French composers provided messages of strength and hope, while for others, listening to music—even music that was considered controversial—offered helpful opportunities to remember times before the conflict. The social silencing of verbal expressions of grief, trauma, and anxiety led to musical consolation becoming paramount, which is evidenced by the number of soldier-musicians who ignored state-supported attempts to suppress politically contentious music, paying attention instead to their own personal desires for musical pleasure. Thus I close this chapter by examining how musician-soldiers developed and demonstrated a commitment to musical emotional care by listening to the music of Richard Wagner—arguably the most controversial and politicized German composer during the war.9 Drawing on Maréchal’s diary, musician-soldiers’ wartime accounts of listening to Wagner’s music in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, and responses to Nadia Boulanger’s May 1918 questionnaire to the Gazette’s readership concerning their musical preferences, I show that many French soldiers reveled in Wagner’s music during the war, despite the prevailing anti-Wagner—and more broadly anti-German—politics that dominated French public life at the time. In attending to music’s capacities for emotional expression and management during the French experience of World War I, I intervene in recent discussions of sound, silence, and nonverbal communication in twentieth-century conflicts, including work by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, Jay Winter, and Esteban Buch.10 Winter understands silence not as the nonexistence of sound, but rather as “the absence of conventional verbal exchanges.”11 Building on Winter’s work,

9 Many music historians have addressed the Wagner controversy in France during World War I, including Rachel Moore, Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris during the First World War (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2018), 65–96; Michael Puri, “The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal,” Cambridge Opera Journal 25, no. 3 (November 2013): 285– 318; Marion Schmid, “À bas Wagner,” in French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 77–94. 10 See Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, eds. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Esteban Buch, “Silences de la Grande Guerre,” in Entendre la guerre: Sons, musiques et silence en 14–18, ed. Florence Gétreau (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 128–133; Winter, War Beyond Words, especially 172–202. 11 Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” inShadows of War, 3–31; 4. Music Making as Emotional Care 43

I show in this chapter that in the space left by the absence of conventional verbal exchanges, music gained special significance as a crucial expressive and therapeutic medium.12 In this chapter, I also contribute to scholarship within trauma studies that examines the tendencies to keep one’s feelings and experiences silent, or to use language in ways that—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously— communicate trauma. Theorists of trauma and recovery from the late nineteenth century to the present have often argued the significance of being able to narrate traumatic experiences and articulate feelings that arise in relation to an initial trauma. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, for example, recounted in 1895 that “the individual hysterical symptoms disappeared immediately and did not recur if we succeeded in wakening the memory of the precipitating event with complete clarity, arousing with it the accompanying affect, and if the patient then depicted the event in the greatest possible detail and put words to the affect.”13 More recently, psychologist Judith Herman argued, in her groundbreaking 1992 study Trauma and Recovery, that narrativizing traumatic experiences offers a way for trauma survivors to integrate such experiences into their psyches and senses of self.14 Since at least the mid-1990s, scholars working in trauma studies have likewise witnessed a focus on how trauma appears in testimony, almost always defined in terms of verbal language.15 In this chapter, I join music scholars such as Maria Cizmic and Amy Lynn Wlodarski in pushing back against the emphasis on verbal language in trauma studies by underlining how, in instances

12 Winter has acknowledged, perhaps especially in War Beyond Words, that the creative arts became very important in the wake of World War I; however, he does not address music’s role in helping people to process war trauma or to remember their experiences and/or loved ones. 13 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst, with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 10. 14 Herman, Trauma and Recovery; see in particular her chapters on “A Healing Relationship,” “Safety,” and “Remembrance and Mourning.” 15 For example, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed., trans., and with an intro. by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Inger Agger, The Blue Room: Trauma and Testimony among Refugee Women: A Psycho-Social Exploration, trans. Mary Bille (London: Atlantic Highlands, 1994); Liria Evangelista, Voices of the Survivors: Testimony, Mourning, and Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentina, 1983–1995 , trans. Renzo Llorente (New York: Garland, 1998); Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, eds. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Michael Richardson, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); The Social Life of Memory: Violence, Trauma, and Testimony in Lebanon and Morocco, eds. Norman Saadi Nikro and Sonja Hegasy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 44 Resonant Recoveries when spoken and written language remained insufficient mediums for communicating or processing traumatic experiences, musical practices often provided soldiers and civilians with meaningful ways to express and console themselves.16 By outlining the emotional and social contexts in which music making occurred during and immediately after World War I, this chapter provides a foundation for the argument I make throughout the remainder of this book: that music making engendered embodied therapeutic practices that permitted soldiers and civilians opportunities to work through trauma in ways that written or spoken words, or overtly symbolic music, did not allow. In so doing, this chapter elucidates how and why music—as a non- or not-only- verbal medium— came to be experienced as a corporeal technology of consolation during the war, as well as far beyond it.

Pudeur and the Politics of Expression in Early Twentieth-Century France

The early twentieth-century French concept of pudeur affords valuable insight into the lived socio-emotional environment of those who experienced trauma in World War I–era France. The pudeur des sentiments—“modesty of feelings”—of the early twentieth century provides an important backdrop for understanding more broadly how people communicated grief and trauma during and after the war, how they felt about these communications, and how these expressions may have changed during the war in both public and private contexts. At the beginning of his landmark book on psychological trauma in World War I, historian Louis Crocq explains that many solders “shocked by combat incidents and affected by the miseries and sufferings of life in the trenches, hadn’t dared, par pudeur, to con- sult with their battalion doctor.”17 Crocq thus suggests that pudeur was an important category of feeling, experience, and expression in early twentieth-century France, and that it is especially important to understanding why trauma—and emotions more generally—often went unvoiced during and after World War I. Although myriad scholars have addressed pudeur in early twentieth-century France, most have focused on sexual modesty rather than on the emotional modesty that was prevalent in the wake of World War I.18 However, authors of essays,

16 Cizmic, Performing Pain; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 17 Louis Crocq, Les Blessés psychiques de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014), 9: “choqués par des incidents de combats et marqués par les misères et les souffrances de la vie aux tranchées, n’avaient pas osé, par pudeur, consulter le médecin du bataillon.” 18 Émile Bayand, La Pudeur dans l’art et la vie: Orné de 32 études académiques (Paris: A. Méricant, 1904); C. S. Merejkovskii, Origine de la pudeur (Paris: Alcan, 1919); Géo Minvielle, L’Expertise en Music Making as Emotional Care 45 letters, diaries, memoirs, and newspaper articles from the first several decades of the twentieth century often speak of a type of pudeur that was focused on emotional expression. In his 1924 book of essays, Quatre-vingt-un chaptires sur l’esprit et les passions, the popular philosopher Alain wrote in a chapter entitled “Des Larmes” (“Tears”) about pudeur in relation to crying, especially at funerals. He wrote, “That there is apudeur des larmes, and that politeness doesn’t allow one to show too much of it is understandable, since it interrogates a little too harshly the pain that the other wants perhaps to hide.” He goes on to talk about the contagious nature of crying: “But those in attendance [at a funeral] have nothing, perhaps because the contagion of tears can be good for someone who has just been touched, and from a grief for which the causes are known and public.”19 Alain also connected pudeur to generally elegant (upper-class) behavior when he wrote in a different chapter that he has known artists devoid of pudeur who are “always without grace.”20 Here Alain approaches historian Jean-Claude Bologne’s defini- tion of pudeur des sentiments: a strong sense of shame surrounding the display of anything that might be considered a social weakness. Bologne articulates that this includes not just the expression of emotion—not only sadness, but also joy, since tears and laughter can, at different moments, be considered equally socially offensive—but also talking about oneself, or posing “indiscreet” questions.21 Bologne emphasizes that pudeur, whether of the sentiment or corporelle variety, is always tied to what is considered a social weakness or indiscretion at a given historical moment. Pudeur was a familiar term within French musical circles, in and beyond the fin de siècle, that often generated commentary. In his memoirs, Piero Coppola

matière de moralité publique, films nudistes et experts en pudeur (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1935); Claude M. Larjat, L’Erotisme et la femme, de la pudeur à la perversion (Paris: Tchou, 1968); Jean Frémon, L’Exhibitionnisme et sa pudeur (Paris: Atelier Morsang, 1980); Jean-Claude Bologne, Histoire de la pudeur (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1986); André Billy, Pudeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Monique Selz, La Pudeur, un lieu de liberté (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2003); Antoine O. Delclos, La Pudeur (Paris: Le Laurier, 1996). Marius Latour, Premiers principes d’une théorie générale des émotions (Paris: Alcan, 1912); interestingly, Latour finds pudeur physique and pudeur morale to be rather problematic; he sees these as the result of social conventions, considering them as evidencing a lack of truth that prevents people from living in reality (see pp. 190–200). Frédéric Paulhan, Les Transformations sociales des sentiments (Paris: Flammarion, 1920).

19 Alain, “Des Larmes,” in Quatre-vingt- un chaptires sur l’esprit et les passions par l’auteur (Paris: Camille Bloch, 1921), 212–213: “Qu’il y ait une pudeur des larmes, et que la politesse ne permette pas d’en trop montrer, cela se comprend, car c’est interroger un peu trop rudement sur des douleurs que l’autre veut peut-être cacher; aussi les femmes en deuil ont le visage voilé. Mais les assistants ne l’ont point, peut-être parce que la contagion des larmes peut être bonne pour celle qui vient d’être touchée, et d’un chagrin dont les causes sont connues et publiques.” 20 Alain, “De la tempérance,” in Quatre-vingt- un chaptires sur l’esprit et les passions, 223: “J’ai connu plus d’un artist impudent, et d’autres étranglés de pudeur, non sans force, mais toujours sans grâce. . . . La sobriété mesure encore mieux ses mouvements que la pudeur.” 21 Bologne, Histoire de la pudeur, 13–15. 46 Resonant Recoveries uses pudeur to compare composer Maurice Ravel to the writer Anatole France, suggesting that “both hide—behind a mask of irony and skepticism—a heart of great feeling. Both evading raucous exuberance . . . they were exemplary of French virtue, still all too rare, alas, of discretion, of refinement of thought, of pudeur des sentiments.” 22 Francis Poulenc echoed this description of Ravel in calling him an “ironiste-par- pudeur” (ironist-by- pudeur ), and musicologist Roger Nichols similarly wrote that, “In Ravel’s lifetime his pudeur, his reticence and sense of delicacy, regularly led critics to decry his music as cold, impersonal, uninvolved.”23 Similarly, Maréchal wrote of Debussy that “his pudeur and his natural distinction prevent him from externalizing his feelings too much.”24 And Claude Rostand said of composer Darius Milhaud, “he kept always a sort of pudeur in which he kept to himself, without confiding in others easily,” something that Milhaud confirmed in describing how he “experience[d]‌ always a kind of shyness, pudeur, even in relation to poets [whose works] have already been set by other composers.”25 Jean Cocteau wrote in his obituary for his poet and musician friend Anna de Noailles in Les Nouvelles littéraires in May 1933,

There is something atrocious in this human norm that consists in hiding things about birth and about death, to place between life and these two forms of eter- nity a barrage of double doors, of silences, of doctors, of lies. We spoke often about this, Madame de Noailles and I; we thought that in our time of exterior well-being, moral health no longer exists and that, alone, poets speak of death without this ridiculous pudeur that hides it, prevents people from believing it and surrounding it with horror.26

22 Piero Coppola, Dix-sept ans de musique à Paris 1922–1939, preface by Aloÿs Fornerod (Lausaunne: Librairie F. Rouge & Cie, 1944), 214: “Tous les deux cachant, derrière une masque d’ironie et de scepticisme, un Cœur d’une grande sensibilité. Fuyant tous les deux l’exubérance tapageuse, qui flatte les instincts les moins raffinés de la nature humaine, ils ont donné l’exemple de la vertu française, toujours plus rare, hélas! de la discretion, du raffinement de la pensée, de la pudeur des sentiments.” 23 Francis Poulenc, J’écris ce qui me chante, ed. Nicolas Southon (Paris: Fayard, 2011), 301; Roger Nichols, Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 348. 24 Maréchal, entry dated May 7, 1918, in “Carnets de guerre,” 336: “Sa pudeur et sa distinction naturelles [sic] l’empêchent de trop extérioriser le sentiment.” 25 Claude Rostand and Darius Milhaud, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, preface by Claude Roy (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1992), 14: “Il conserve toujours une sorte de pudeur dès qu’il s’agit de lui- même, et il ne se confie pas facilement”; and ibid., 38: “j’éprouve toujours une espèce de timidité, de pudeur, de gêne même à l’égard des poètes qui ont déjà été traités par d’autres compositeurs.” 26 Jean Cocteau, obituary for Anna de Noailles, published in Jean Cocteau and Anna de Noailles, Correspondance, ed. Claude Mignot-Ogliastri (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 168: “Il y a quelque chose d’atroce dans cette habitude humaine qui consiste à cacher les choses de la naissance et de la mort, à mettre entre la vie et ces deux formes de l’éternité un barrage de doubles portes, de silences, de docteurs, de mensonges. Nous en avions souvent parlé avec Madame de Noailles; nous pensions qu’à notre époque d’hygiène extérieure, l’hygiène morale n’existe pas encore et que, seuls, les poètes parlent de la mort sans cette pudeur ridicule qui la cache, empêche les gens d’y croire et l’entoure d’é p ou v ant e .” Music Making as Emotional Care 47

Furthermore, in her eulogy for Jean Roger-Ducasse, Nadia Boulanger referenced the composer’s “exquisite pudeur,” which, she said, allowed him to hide the ever- present “tenderness [he felt] for beings and things.”27 For some music critics, pudeur was connected to Frenchness, especially in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In an article entitled “Musical Life during the War,” critic and composer Charles Koechlin described Erik Satie’s pudeur as characteristically French:

Mr. Satie is not what the vain public thinks; [he is an] ironist, but also a musician (and even a very good musician, not to displease you), his art permits him nuances of a naïve sentiment, even mystical, a hardly perceptible tenderness, immediately repressed; art of discretion, of tact, of subtleness. And [it is] so French, this pudeur of a humorist who does not engage.28

In addition, for some interwar musicians, such as French soprano Marcelle Gerar, pudeur des sentiments was a central aspect of much French music of the early twentieth century. In a 1932 interview with Intransigéant, Gerar suggests that German audiences do not understand French music, largely due to its pudeur des sentiments, which, she argues, German music generally lacks: “Schumann did not have pudeur des sentiments, while Debussy had pudeur de ses sentiments, but not of his sensations, and . . . the expression of emotions is more in the German spirit than that of sensations.”29 In other words, whereas French composers tended toward creating bodily sensations through their music, German composers were more concerned with expressing emotions. This generalization is instructive in that through it Gerar made a clear distinction between emotional expression in music, and music designed to engender a bodily response, claiming the latter as a Debussyste—and by extension, French—approach to composition. For French musician-soldiers, pudeur was both a social and a musical standard they attempted to achieve. Musician-soldiers such as Maréchal wrote about the

27 Nadia Boulanger, quoted in Jean Roger-Ducasse, Lettres à Nadia Boulanger, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 1999), 212: “Dans ce puissant et vif esprit, dont l’intelligence ne s’est jamais endormie, la tendresse pour les êtres et les choses, cachée par une exquise pudeur, était toujours présente.” 28 Charles Koechlin, “La Vie musicale pendant la guerre,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1918): 106, n. 1: “M. Satie n’est pas ce qu’un vain peuple pense; ironiste, mais musicien (et même fort bon musicien, ne vous en déplaise), son art lui permet des nuances de sentiment naïf, voire mystique, tendresse à peine perceptible, aussitôt réprimée; art de discretion, de tact, de subtilité. Et si française, cette pudeur d’humoriste qui ne se livre pas.” 29 Marcelle Gerar in André Willemin, “Retour de Berlin. Ambassadrice de la musique française . . . Mme Marcelle Gerar nous dit pourquoi les Allemands apprécient mal Debussy,” Intransigéant, February 14, 1932: “que Schumann n’a pas la pudeur de sentiments, alors que Debussy a la pudeur de ses sentiments, pas de ses sensations, et que l’expression des sentiments est davantage dans l’esprit germain que celle des sensations.” 48 Resonant Recoveries

“apparent coldness” of pudeur as a “true feeling that one needs.”30 Writer, musician, and music critic Henry Malherbe corroborated Maréchal’s perspective on pudeur in writing in his famous autobiographical war novel, La Flamme au poing, that “in living in this atrocious daily life, one will acquire a trembling del- icateness, an unsuspected pudeur sentimentale, that covers a brutal simplicity.”31 Henri Ghéon suggested in his autobiographical novel, L’Homme né de la guerre, not only the importance of keeping one’s emotions invisible, but also how musical activity helped soldiers to process their experiences, even while requiring a certain amount of pudeur des sentiments: “In moments of rest, behind the cluster of bayonets, a chorale arises, slow and large and noble, in several well-grounded parts, religious. One cannot cry, [though] my companions are less sensitive: we don’t dare look at one another.”32 Pudeur des sentiments was indeed an important consideration for musicians active during the war. However, as we will see in what follows, a variety of factors shaped how musicians engaged in emotional management during the war, including press coverage of wartime deaths, conceptions of and treatments for trauma, and the heightening of an already- present heroic masculinity.

Mourning in Print: Shifting Ideas on Representing Grief in the Parisian Press

Examining how the popular press influenced expressions of grief sheds light on the socio-emotional context in which French citizens lived during and after World War I, providing additional information regarding how and why verbal silence became one of the primary public responses to grief and trauma. Public written expressions of grief in Parisian obituaries and funeral accounts shifted once the war began, and this affective shift in the popular press’s treatment of death shaped musicians’ approaches to emotional expression and management. Press responses to the deaths of numerous composers who died between 1875 and 1925 demonstrate that, during the war, death and mourning began to be framed in national and collective terms, rather than in personal and individual

30 Maréchal, entry dated October 6, 1914, in “Carnets de guerre,” ed. Durosoir, 238: “Renfermer en soi les émotions violentes, les chagrins profonds ou les élans involontaires. . . . Dans cette froideur apparente, il y a de la pudeur et les sentiments vrais en ont besoin.” 31 Henry Malherbe, La Flamme au poing (Paris: Albin Michel, 1917), 152: “En vivant dans l’atroce quotidian, on acquiera une tremblante délicatesse, une pudeur sentimentale insoupçonnées, que recouvre une simplicité brutale.” 32 Henri Ghéon, L’Homme né de la guerre. Témoignage d’un converti (Yser-Artois 1915) (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1919), 157: “Dans le repos, derrière le faisceau des baïonnettes, un choral s’élève, lent, et large, et noble, à plusieurs parties bien fondues, religieux. On ne peut pas pleurer, mes compagnons eux-mêmes, moins sensibles: nous n’osons pas nous regarder.” Music Making as Emotional Care 49 terms. Moreover, many expressions of grief in public forums became less open, less detailed, and less emotional, especially concerning instances of death or trauma that could not be considered a direct result of the war. Regardless of how a person died, one of the most significant changes that occurred in public commemorative literature during the war was journalists’ depersonalization and nationalization of deaths. Whereas many obituaries and funeral accounts published before the war illustrated the grief and emotions of particular authors, after 1914 most published responses to death framed grief in collective terms, using nous, nos, and notre, rather than je.33 For instance, the 1912 coverage of French composer Jules Massenet’s death in the daily newspaper Excelsior, and weekly or bi-monthly music journals such as Ménestrel and Le Courrier musical, foregrounded mournful first-person expressions of several of Massenet’s closest friends and colleagues, including Xavier Leroux, Charles Silver, Henri Huegel, and Arthur Pougin. The latter recounted:

It was sixty leagues from Paris, at the seaside, in the middle of vacation, that I received by telegraph the frightful news of the sudden and surprising death of Massenet, who I had known was still perfectly healthy at the time of my depar- ture; and it is with, I can truly say, a wounded heart and eyes full of tears, that I take up my pen to try to retrace quickly the details of the so active, so brilliant, and so prodigiously laborious career of this friend, of this companion of my youth, whose success and glory I believe I can say I had predicted.34

Here Pougin, like many of his peers in 1912, did not hesitate to frame Massenet’s death as an intensely personal loss. And yet the situation was rather different upon the deaths of composers Claude Debussy and Lili Boulanger in March 1918. In both instances, authors of press coverage in L’ É c l a i r , Le Figaro, L’Écho de Paris, and La République française framed their deaths as national losses. Henry Quittard wrote in Le Figaro, “it is with great sadness that French musicians will

33 In an interesting parallel, the literary historian Michael Lucey has demonstrated in Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) that at the beginning of the twentieth century, many French authors negotiated expressions of same-sex love through considerations of first- versus third-person in their literary creations. Although he does not discuss the effects of World War I on these authors’ writings, his discussion of these authors’ considerations of what it meant to use (or not) the first person indicates that this was a fraught and active concern at the same time when music critics and other authors were writing obituaries in response to the deaths of musicians during the war. 34 Arthur Pougin, “J. Massenet,” Ménestrel, (August 17, 1912): 257–259: “C’est à soixante lieues de Paris, au bord de la mer, en pleines vacances, que je reçois télégraphiquement la nouvelle terrifiante de la mort subite et foudroyante de Massenet, que je savais encore plein de santé lors de mon départ; et c’est je puis bien le dire, le cœur meurtri et les yeux pleins de larmes que je prends la plume pour essayer de retracer rapidement les détails de la carrière si active, si brillante, si prodigieusement laborieuse de cet ami, de ce compagnon de mes jeunes années, dont je crois pouvoir dire que j’avais prédit le succès et prévu la gloire.” 50 Resonant Recoveries learn of Claude Debussy’s death.”35 Similarly, Gustave Samazeuilh stated in La République française that “France just lost one of its greatest musicians, one of the artists who most spectacularly represented abroad today its spirit and taste.”36 These obituaries are especially striking given that both men knew Debussy personally, and that Samazeuilh, in particular, was a friend of Debussy’s. Similarly, while the Parisian press frequently provided highly dramatized accounts of funerals and mourners’ grief in the decades before the war, in the years after 1914, authors replaced these with somewhat dry narrative accounts that emphasized silence and stillness as the most appropriate responses to loss. Press accounts of the funerals of Georges Bizet, Ambroise Thomas, and Jules Massenet in 1875, 1896, and 1912, respectively, focused on close friends and family members who gave eulogies, emphasizing their tears and the ways in which their bodies and voices buckled and bent under the weight of grief.37 Here, authors’ close readings of mourners’ bodies seem to be aimed at making readers not only more vividly imagine these responses, but also giving them details that would enable them to recreate these responses in their own lives. Unlike in the pre-war press, post–World War I funeral accounts provided aus- tere play-by- play narratives devoid of descriptions of grieving bodies and personal expressions of emotion. The articles written in response to the deaths of Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré in 1921 and 1924 almost exclusively display what historian Jean-Claude Bonnet has described as a neutrality marked by “informative dryness” that characterized a great deal of French obituary and commemorative writing of this period.38 The authors of funeral accounts were only rarely interested in discussing the feelings, movements, or speeches of those with the most personal relationships to the deceased. Instead, they focused on

35 Henry Quittard, “Claude Debussy,” Le Figaro, March 27, 1918: “C’est avec une vive douleur que les musiciens français apprendront la mort de Claude Debussy.” 36 Gustave Samazeuilh, “Mort de Claude Debussy,” La République française, March 27, 1918: “La France vient de perdre un de ses plus grands musiciens, un des artistes qui représentaient aujourd’hui avec le plus d’éclat, à l’étranger, l’essentiel de son esprit et de son goût.” 37 There are many funeral accounts that demonstrate these tendencies, including H. Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale et musicale. Georges Bizet,” Ménestrel (June 6 and 13, 1875): 211; Le Masque de Fer, “Échos de Paris,” Le Figaro, June 4 and 6, 1875; Anon., “Chronique du jour,” La République française, June 7, 1875; André Maurel, “Obsèques d’Ambroise Thomas,”Le Figaro, February 18, 1896; Anon., “Funerailles. Les Obsèques d’Amrboise Thomas,”L’ É c l a i r , February 24, 1896; H.M., “Les Obsèques d’Ambroise Thomas,” Ménéstrel (February 23, 1896): 57; Pierre Montamet, “L’Hommage suprême,” Excelsior, August 18, 1912; Maurice Saugey, “La Mort de Massenet. Les Obsèques,” Comœdia, August 18, 1912; Paul-Émile Chevalier, “Les Obsèques de Massenet,” Le Ménestrel (August 24, 1912): 267. For a more in-depth discussion of these tendencies and these particular sources, see Jillian Rogers, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France: Maurice Ravel and His Circle” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2014), 19–53. 38 Jean-Claude Bonnet, “Les Morts illustrés,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 239: “Un ton de dérision douce inspire souvent les obituaires du Times, alors que les journaux français ont plutôt cultivé la sécheresse informative et préféré une écriture neutre à l’insolence polémique.” Music Making as Emotional Care 51 the presences and speeches of state officials. For instance, while excerpts from the speech given at Saint-Saëns’s funeral by his close friend Alfred Bruneau appeared in Comœdia’s coverage of the composer’s funeral, the lengthy speech given by Léon Bérard, the Ministre de l’Instruction Publique des Beaux-Arts, was given pride of place in the newspaper—a complete transcription of his speech appears on the front page with the nationalist headline “Saint-Saëns was a French artist.”39 Obituaries and funeral accounts like the ones I have just described reflect a nationalism evident in the hierarchization of loss and grief in World War I–era France that resulted in the frequent erasure of individualized or personal forms of remembrance, commemoration, and mourning. In his work on French interwar commemoration, Daniel Sherman explains that societies that have undergone a traumatic event often feel the need to privilege collective needs over those of individuals, and this extends to the ways in which societies choose to mourn their losses. Thus one significant form of dominant memory appears in the displacement of individual mourning, and the “channel[ing] of mourning in a direction that conforms to dominant perceptions of the national interest.” Furthermore, for Sherman the work of commemoration “inscribes or reinscribes a set of symbolic codes, ordering discourses, and master narratives that recent events, perhaps the very ones commemorated, have disrupted, newly established, or challenged.”40 Moreover, Jeffrey C. Alexander, in his theorization of cultural trauma as a social process, has argued that in the wake of traumatic events, social institutions and mass media often create and disseminate master narratives about events and communities’ responses to them.41 The Parisian press, through its shift away from personal, individualized, and emotive aspects of grief and mourners in the articles it published after 1914, offers one potent instance of the displacement of individual mourning that took place in the years during and after World War I in France. The way that the press addressed grief and mourning after musicians’ deaths thus inscribed new modalities of mourning. Whether inadvertently or intentionally, Parisian journals advocated the nearly silent containment of personal, non-national grief and trauma. In so doing, the French press rendered outward manifestations of grief and trauma ethically questionable in ways that, as I demonstrate in the next section, often led people to feel not only ashamed of their own expressions of grief or trauma, but also critical of those of others.

39 Comœdia, December 25, 1921: “Saint-Saëns fut un artiste français.” 40 Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, 7. 41 Jeffrey C. Alexander,Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 6–30. 52 Resonant Recoveries

Intimate Expressions: Articulating Grief, Trauma, and Sympathy in Private

The wartime and interwar personal correspondence of French musicians mirrors the shifts in conventions for public mourning described in the preceding section. Letters and diaries reveal that many modernist musicians in interwar France felt the need to hide their grief. The widow of French composer Albert Roussel, for example, emphasized her need to hide her pain in writing to Nadia Boulanger after receiving a condolence letter from her on what would have been Roussel’s sixtieth birthday: “Thank you, dear friend, for your warm sympathy. I had been so happy that your thought came to me at the moment of this particularly moving birthday . . . since I know you also bear this secret pain that accompanies our days!”42 Similarly, Boulanger made clear the distinction between her public performance of grief and the private pain she felt in spite or perhaps because of that performance when writing to her friend and pupil Marcelle de Manziarly after the death of her mother, “Externally all is really fine—[while] in truth there is the same impossibility of adapting to anything at all—and emptiness without name, one’s heart cut off from itself—what to do?”43 Rendering one’s grief private was thus a troubling predicament that often led people to dwell on the discrep- ancy between socially acceptable external appearances and painful inner sorrow. People sometimes alluded to this private and personal phenomenological experience of grief, but they were also often required to minimize it, especially when mourning someone who had died outside the purview of the war. With few exceptions, the intensely felt private pain of grief was not to be made public, or only made public in specific and circumscribed ways, even in circumstances or at events where overt mourning might be expected, such as at funerals and ceremonies celebrating the anniversary of a loved one’s death. Socialite and amateur pianist Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, for instance, emphasized that this containment of emotion needed to occur in more private circumstances when she discussed in her diary the mass she had attended on the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death. She wrote that “[while] my children shower me with care and attention . . . I hide my pain and tear apart my heart.”44 Similarly,

42 Mme. B. Albert Roussel to Nadia Boulanger, April 15, 1939, BnF, Mus., NLA 102: “J’ai été si heureuse que votre pensée soit venue vers moi en cet anniversaire particulièrement émouvant . . . car, je sais que vous aussi portez cette douleur secrète qui accompagne nos jours!” 43 Nadia Boulanger to Marcelle de Manziarly, June 22, 1935, BnF, Mus., NLA 289: “Extérieurement tout vraiment bien—vérité, même impossibilité de s’adapter à rien—une vide sans nom, le Cœur amputé de lui-même—que faire?” This statement was even made after saying that she had just received an “unforgettable welcome” by “so many with understanding hearts” [“Accueil inoubliable”; “Tant de cœur de compréhension”]. 44 Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, entry of April 25, 1916, in Journal: 1894–1927 , ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 895: “mes enfants me comblent de soins et d’attentions . . . je cache ma douleur et déchire mon cœur.” Music Making as Emotional Care 53 twelve-year-old Chouchou Debussy wrote in a letter to her half-brother Raoul after her father’s funeral, “At the cemetery, Maman could not have controlled her feelings any better. As for myself, I could think of nothing but one thing: ‘You must not cry because of Maman.’ And so I gathered all my courage . . . I did not shed one tear.”45 Here Chouchou articulated the emphasis placed on keeping grief to oneself in private as well as in public, while also demonstrating that the social norms regarding emotional expression were familiar to her even at the young age of twelve. Just after the death of her father, she wrote that she “wanted to burst into a torrent of tears, but I repressed them because of Maman.”46 Chouchou Debussy’s descriptions of containing her grief indicate as well one of the reasons mourning was often considered undesirable, namely its ability to invade and “contaminate.” Chouchou’s mother Emma expressed a similar concern when, after her husband’s death, she wrote to her close friend André Caplet: “Poor André Caplet, you who is at this very moment in the midst of fiery combat and to whom I should address words of ardent courage, these are renewed complaints that only sadden you.”47 Chouchou and Emma Debussy’s letters thus demonstrate that the transmission of grief was detestable in part because mourning was so often the purveyor of negative affects.48 In other words, the more explicit and personal the expression, and the more an expression fell outside of or exceeded prescribed conventions, the more negative affective reactions attached to it. Despite the social moratorium on public expressions of mourning, many people in interwar musical and artistic social circles found ways of communicating grief through participating in or creating events and associations to honor those whom they had lost. These associations fell within the already established European traditions of memorializing musicians, writers, and artists by building monuments, publishing commemorative volumes, and holding memorial concerts, exhibitions, or festivals in their honor.49 These associations, events, monuments, and published collections might be understood as more socially

45 Claude-Emma [Chouchou] Debussy to Raoul Bardac, April 8, 1918, in Claude Debussy, His Life and Mind, ed. Edward Lockspeiser (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 223– 224; quoted and trans. in Cecilia Dunoyer, Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874–1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 61. 46 Ibid. 47 Emma Debussy to André Caplet, April 14, 1918, BnF, Mus., Fonds André Caplet (hereafter F- AC), NLA 269, Vol. 1B: “Pauvre André Caplet, vous qui êtes en pleine fournaise et ce qui je devrais adresser des paroles d’ardent courage. Ces sont des plaints rénovelées qui viennent vous attrister.” 48 Teresa Brennan has theoretically addressed the various connotations and the mechanics of the transmission of affect inThe Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). The transmission of affect has also been discussed at length by numerous affect theorists, including Silvan Tomkins in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Frank, and Irving E. Alexander (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 49 For more on European cultures of commemoration, see Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. 54 Resonant Recoveries acceptable containers for grief since they offered collective opportunities to mourn and remember, even if they were often organized by those closest to, and arguably the most personally affected by, the death of the deceased.50 Although many of these associations, monuments, and events did not come to be established until after the war, the Festivals de la musique française created a concert series in 1916 centered on performing the compositions of French musicians who had served in the war, been killed or injured in combat, or continued to fight for France.51 As Rachel Moore points out, these performances offered important opportunities to mourn those who had died, while also providing younger and often not well-known composers chances to have their music performed.52 More personal expressions of grief, however, even when expressed privately and among friends, were often avoided since these remained open to criticism for being excessive, annoying, and embarrassing. For example, Roger-Ducasse referred to Marguerite Long’s grief over the death of her husband as “obscenely egotistical.” In 1915, he wrote to his friend André Lambinet about her, reporting that, “And then everything is terrible, everyone is horrible, clergy, courts, army. This woman, she is the opposite of Pangloss.”53 On another occasion, he dis- dainfully pointed to her expressions of sorrow as reasons for reproach, writing, “She is more and more the same, with the same exaggerations, the same un- happy feelings.”54 Mourners felt this contempt as well, as evidenced by Emma Debussy’s nearly constant apologies to friends after Debussy’s death in March 1918, and Chouchou’s in July 1919.55 While mourning her husband, Madame Debussy could not help but share with André Caplet how much she was suffering after her husband’s death, but clarified that she has not forgotten “all the heroes who have struggled for years.” She begged his forgiveness for grieving so

50 For instance, the widows of both Romain Rolland and André Caplet wrote to friends and colleagues of their late husbands in order to solicit their support for monuments and archives to be created in their memory. See Geneviève Caplet to Alexis Roland-Manuel, June 2, 1925, BnF, Mus., NLA 265, and Madame Marie Rolland to Nadia Boulanger, March 15, 1948, BnF, Mus., NLA 102. 51 See issues of La Musique pendant la guerre from June 6, 1916, December 14, 1916, December 28, 1916, and June 17, 1917. Moore discusses these festivals and their coverage in these journal issues in more detail in Performing Propaganda, 104. 52 Moore, Performing Propaganda, 104. 53 Jean Roger-Ducasse to André Lambinet, March 19, 1916; in Lettres à son ami André Lambinet, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2001), 110–111: “obscènement égoiste”; “Et puis tout va mal, tout est mauvais, clergé, magistrature, armée. Cette femme, c’est Pangloss à l’envers.” In referen- cing Pangloss, the overly and bafflingly optimistic teacher in Voltaire’s Candide, Roger-Ducasse refers to Marguerite Long’s late husband, Joseph de Marliave, whom Roger-Ducasse often called by this nickname. 54 Ibid., 111–112: “Elle est de plus en plus la même, avec les mêmes exagérations, les mêmes sentiments malheureux.” 55 Emma Debussy to André Caplet, April 14, 1918, June 20, 1918, August 3 or 4, 1918, undated letters from late 1918 or early 1919, September 15, 1920, September 20, 1920; BnF, Mus., F-AC, NLA 269, Vol. 1B [Letters 170–173; 182–183]. Emma Debussy to Marguerite Long, undated, MMM, F- ML, Correspondance. Music Making as Emotional Care 55 openly, claiming that she was “certain that [she was] annoying everyone with [her] sorrow.”56 The tendency to quiet one’s grief in the presence of others was tied to the idea that language was incapable of adequately expressing or assuaging grief. Cultural historian Sandra Gilbert has written that “the embarrassment of the comforter is a sign of a wound for which neither mourner nor comforter has proper language.”57 And indeed, one notable convention of condolence letters exchanged within this circle was the acknowledgment of the inability of words to provide mourners with consolation. Music critic Émile Vuillermoz wrote to Nadia Boulanger after her sister’s death about the “uselessness of words of consolation in such a moment,” and Boulanger clearly concurred, given her 1914 condolence letter to Marguerite Long after her husband’s death in combat: “I don’t know which words to write to you since I feel so much that they are useless before a loss like yours.”58 In a letter to Emma Debussy after Chouchou’s death, André Caplet asserted that the only proper response when words were lacking was silence: “Madame Debussy! What to tell you? All that I will express will be so empty, so pallid . . . that I prefer to remain in silence, this dismayed silence with which I received the terrifying news that Dolly had so kindly thought to transmit to me.”59 But silence was not only a socially prescribed response to loss and grief; it was also a common spontaneous and unavoidable reaction. One of the most common characteristics exhibited by people who have suffered trauma is an inability to speak about that trauma, or the feelings, thoughts, and memories associated with it. These responses are often evident in self-inflicted social isolation and difficulties in establishing and maintaining intimacy.60 The death of a loved one is often traumatic for those left alive, and while this can be the case for almost any loss, the potential for a loss to be traumatic increases when a mourner feels in some way culpable for it—a scenario that is often termed “survivor guilt”—or feels that their sorrow concerning a loss is greater than what is considered socially

56 Emma Debussy to André Caplet, June 20, 1918, BnF, Mus., F-AC, NLA 269, Vol. 1B: “tous ces héros qui luttent depuis des années”; “j’ai la certitude d’ennuyer tout le monde avec mon chagrin.” 57 Sandra Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 254. 58 Émile Vuillermoz to Nadia Boulanger, March 19, 1918, BnF, Mus., NLA 115: “On sent la vanité des paroles de consolation en un pareil moment”; Nadia Boulanger to Marguerite Long, October 27, 1914, MMM, F-ML, Correspondance: “je ne sais quels mots vous écrire, tant je sens qu’ils sont tous inutiles devant un tel deuil.” 59 André Caplet to Emma Debussy, undated letter, BnF, Mus., NLA 32, letter 75: “Madame Debussy! . . . quoi vous dire? Tout ce que j’exprimerai sera tellement vide—tellement pale . . . que je préfère garder le silence—ce silence atterré avec lequel j’ai accueilli la terrifiante nouvelle que Dolly a en la prévenante attention de me transmettre.” Emphasis in the original, where the author underlined the text. 60 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 121. 56 Resonant Recoveries acceptable. The thought that one could have prevented the death of another, made that death easier, or that one should have died in place of someone who has passed, frequently renders the loss of a loved one more traumatic as well.61 In addition, mourners often experience sudden deaths as traumatic, as well as losses in which a person’s death cannot be confirmed, for instance in kidnappings, missing persons cases, and corpseless deaths. World War I, of course, was rather infamous for these kinds of deaths, in which the loved ones of soldiers might go weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime without receiving official confirmation that their friend or family member had been killed.62 Thus we might imagine that for many soldiers and civilians in wartime France, losing a loved one was a traumatic experience that rendered them speechless.

Silence as Strength, Trauma as Transmittable: Wartime Conceptions of Trauma

The unspeakability of grief was compounded during and after the war by trauma becoming not only a major subject of investigation for medical doctors, neurologists, physiologists, and psychologists, but also a highly stigmatized condition. Although British doctors and soldiers referred to many traumatic injuries as “shell shock,” in France such injuries went by numerous names, the most common of which were commotion, émotion, and hystérie.63 Regardless of these injuries’ names, psychological, medical, and neurological professionals in France were not often especially moved by soldiers’ complaints concerning trauma they had experienced on the front lines. Except in instances where injuries were ob- vious and visible, doctors treated harshly many soldiers who reported muteness, deafness, dizziness, tiredness, and faintness, as well as nervous and emotional disturbances or exhaustion. Some of the most popular treatments for these injuries were painful electricity-based therapies designed to either scare soldiers out of their current states, or to revive an unresponsive body part into action.64

61 Vamik Volkan makes this argument in “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, foreword by Ethel Spector Person (London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007), 90–109; 96. 62 See Winter, Sites of Memory; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Cinq deuils de guerre (1914–1918) (Paris: Noesis, 2001); and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Corps perdus, corps retrouvés. Trois exemples de deuils de guerre,” Annales 55, no. 1 (January–February 2000): 47–71. 63 See Thomas,Treating the Trauma of the Great War, 58–60. 64 Laurent Tatu, Julien Bogousslavsky, Thierry Moulin, et al., “The ‘Torpillage’ Neurologists of World War I: Electric Therapy to Send Hysterics Back to the Front,”Neurology 75 (2010): 279– 283; 280. Herman also talks about this, albeit largely from British perspectives, in Trauma and Recovery, 21. Music Making as Emotional Care 57

Since I address the specific effects of electrotherapy treatments in more -de tail in the next chapter, here I focus on how expressions, performances, and admissions of trauma, distress, and depression came to be silenced through medical and social discourse—as well as the potential repercussions for expressing trauma—during and after the war. I am interested in the silencing of trauma among soldier and civilian populations due to the ways in which such silencing suggests that music, as an often non-specific, non-verbal medium, held the potential to permit people to process and perform trauma in ways that helped them to cope with difficult experiences and the emotions these elicited. In the minds of doctors and state officials who oversaw World War I’s French medical-military complex, it was the job of medical personnel to return the soldiers they treated to the front lines as quickly as possible. In addition to feeling a responsibility for getting soldiers back to the front, these doctors understood trauma as something to which people were hereditarily or personally predisposed.65 This conception of trauma fostered understandings of soldiers who reported psychological trauma as inherently and fundamentally cowardly men whose genetic weakness led them to shirk their national responsibilities to fight for their country. This understanding was especially prevalent in relation to men whose alleged injuries seemed to leave no physical trace: they were by and large perceived as malingerers. Medical professionals also understood trauma as contagious—in their theorizations, it could come about (or be dissolved) through mere suggestion.66 Doctors felt that if soldiers reported their symptoms to others in their camp, they might begin to examine their own feelings and start to question if they, too, might have been traumatized by a particular violent inci- dent.67 Military personnel became especially concerned that hospitals would become even more overcrowded than they already were, and that mutinies among soldiers might develop. Many in the French medical-military complex were ul- timately afraid that if word of trench warfare’s negative psychological effects became common knowledge, this would have a negative bearing on the German army’s perception of French military forces.68 The wartime writings of French psychologist Maurice Dide offer examples of how disdain for emotional trauma permeated medical and autobiographical

65 Thomas,Treating the Trauma of the Great War. 66 See Allan Young’s work on this topic in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). This is also something that Lisa Blackman talks about in Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012); see especially pp. xiv–xv in her introduction, as well as her second chapter on fin-de- siècle conceptions of crowd psychology, pp. 26–53. 67 This is evident in many of the texts in the Collection Horizon—a series of military-medical texts published in France during World War I, including André Léri, Commotions et émotions de guerre, Collection Horizon, Précis de Medicine et de Chirurgie de Guerre (Paris: Masson et Cie Éditeurs, 2003). 68 Thomas,Treating the Trauma of the Great War, 48–49. 58 Resonant Recoveries literature. Based on Dide’s experiences both before the war (as a psychologist and neurologist) and during the war (as a military doctor), his publication, Les Émotions de la guerre, reveals that he perceived emotional trauma as shameful.69 Dide divided his book into three sections. The first, “Emotion, War Shock, and Hypnosis,” provides an overview of the various emotional conditions and physical injuries that he had encountered in combat. The next two sections are clearly op- posed to one another. Part 2, “Emotional and Depressive Egotism of Individuals— Passionate and Criminal Egotism of Peoples,” includes chapters on war-related hysteria and neurasthenia, both of which he called “egotistical” conditions, as well as on collective emotional disorders. In the latter portion of this chapter, Dide focused on what he considered the collective pathology of the German people. However, his inclusion in this section of a chapter entitled “Collective German Psychopathic Egotism” would seem to suggest that Dide understood war-related emotional distress as akin, at least in part, to what he considered the “destruc- tive” and “barbaric” “insanity” of France’s enemies. Contrasting with this second section is the book’s third part, “Altruistic, Expansive Passions; Heroism: Esthetic Expression; Triumphant Will,” in which Dide detailed the psychology of heroism—a clear antipode to the egotistical emotional conditions discussed in the previous section. Dide thus placed emotional trauma and being a traitor on one side of the spectrum, with heroism, optimism, and altruism on the other. In Dide’s more autobiographical, anecdotal account of his experiences as a military medical doctor during the war, Ceux qui combattent et qui meurent, he acknowledged that some degree of emotional expression might be appropriate in certain situations. However, he clarified that those who succeeded in keeping their emotions to themselves were heroes. In one chapter, Dide told the story of a young soldier with a minor physical injury who had lost his parents and siblings in the war. Dide recalled him telling him about “his odyssey, without apparent emotion, militarily, with only concern for the precision of dates.”70 According to Dide, this soldier was “entirely absorbed by military life, which leaves to the most tragic events only the value of chronological phenomena.” In addition, “he speaks of the death of his loved ones without grieving them, as if this doesn’t touch him at all!”71 Rather than seeing this as perhaps unusual or an indication that perhaps this young soldier was more emotionally conflicted than he let on, Dide referred to this soldier as a hero whose behavior should be imitated.72

69 Maurice Dide, Les Émotions et la guerre: Réactions des individus et des collectivités dans le conflit moderne (Paris: Alcan, 1918). 70 Maurice Dide, Ceux qui combattent et qui meurent (Paris: Payot, 1916): 130: “son odyssey, sans une émotion apparente, militairement, avec seulement le souci de la précision dans les dates.” 71 Dide, Ceux qui combattent, 131: “Il est entièrement absorbé par la vie militaire qui ne laisse aux événements les plus tragiques que la valeur de phénomènes chronologiques.” 72 Dide, Ceux qui combattent, 132: “Le caporal M . . . est un héros.” Music Making as Emotional Care 59

Traumatized soldiers internalized this heroism-versus-hysteria binary in ways that often rendered them silent about their traumatic experiences and symptoms. Crocq writes in Les Traumatismes psychiques de guerre that “considering their psychic troubles as a stigmata of weakness or laziness, [traumatized soldiers] had a tendency to repress, silence, or hide their suffering.”73 Crocq’s historical analysis also suggests that many soldiers did not intentionally silence themselves, but rather considered the flashbacks, nightmares, and other symptoms normal, and thus not worth mentioning to medical personnel. For instance, when in the 1960s and 1970s psychologists began to be called into hospitals to treat older patients who were crying out in their sleep, they found that many of these patients had been World War I soldiers who had been having nightmares and other psychological aftereffects of trauma since the war. However, the soldiers had considered these aftereffects normal for those who had experienced war, and thus had not realized that these could be addressed or treated.74 Medical understandings of emotional, non-physical trauma as shameful went hand in hand with social and financial considerations that shaped soldiers’ reticence to admit that they had been traumatized by wartime experiences. The stigma against mental illness in the years after the war had the potential to nega- tively affect the pensions soldiers received. As Gregory Thomas points out,

Though all sick and wounded soldiers struggled to make ends meet with the meager pensions provided by an economically ravaged French state, psychologically traumatized men suffered more. War hysterics received no pensions, while men interned in mental asylums saw their pensions evaporate through the payment of institutional fees.75

In addition, Crocq outlines that while at the beginning of the war those with emotional issues that did not correspond to physical injuries received pensions just like any other wounded soldier, the Société de neurologie de Paris debated in 1915 and 1916 whether soldiers whose trauma had no “organic” origin should receive pensions, since, they surmised, these soldiers could easily fake their injuries.76 A series of pension laws developed between 1919 and 1940 solidified this valuation of physically evident injuries over “invisible” trauma; these stated that while those with serious head injuries could receive 100% of the possible benefits, those with “subjective” head trauma received only 10% of possible benefits.

73 Louis Crocq, Les Traumatismes psychiques de guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), 59: “considérant leurs troubles psychiques comme un stigmata de faiblesse ou de lâcheté, [ils] ont tendance à réprimer, taire ou dissimuler cette souffrance.” 74 Crocq, Les Traumatismes, 60. 75 Thomas,Treating the Trauma of the Great War, 12. 76 Crocq, Blessés psychiques, 164–165. 60 Resonant Recoveries

Similarly, those with psychiatric aftereffects of combat labeled asangoisses de guerre vraies or états neuropsychasthéniques were awarded 0% to 20% of possible benefits, and those diagnosed with “hysterical manifestations curable by persuasion” were given 0% of war injury pension benefits.77 Therefore, in many instances, reporting mental illness during and after the war would have done little to improve soldiers’ or their families’ lives, leaving many people to continue to live with symptoms such as nightmares, auditory hallucinations, flashbacks, and difficult-to-control emotions that medical personnel now associate with post-traumatic stress disorder. Although civilians would not have had to worry about losing their pensions if they claimed to be deeply emotionally distressed by the war, there were numerous reasons why they would have chosen not to disclose traumatic symptoms. First, many civilian women whose husbands had enlisted would have been disinclined to report traumatic symptoms—which might then lead to hospitalization— because they needed to continue to take care of their homes and families, and in many cases, to get jobs in order to support their family in their husband’s absence. In addition, as Thomas has pointed out, “few individuals saw the decrepit, prison-like asylums, full of their chronic inmates, as enticing or appropriate venues for treatment.”78 He supports this claim by noting that the improvement of psychiatric services after the war was accompanied by an increase in civilians seeking treatment. Furthermore, as I demonstrated in the previous section in my discussion of Emma Debussy, civilians—and especially women—often felt guilty for their grief in the context of a war in which men faced danger and death every day. We can imagine that, for many civilians, these feelings of guilt and shame would have extended to instances of traumatic symptoms as well, leaving many civilians to suffer in silence, often alongside similarly traumatized friends and family members. Many musicians who served in the war, as well as civilian musicians on the home front, would have been aware of contemporary medical, military, and social conceptions of trauma, and how these rendered traumatic experiences and their lingering symptoms unspeakable. Numerous French musicians experienced trauma and its treatments firsthand, although, perhaps predictably, none specifically framed their experiences and symptoms in terms of trauma. Many soldiers wrote to the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire about their injuries, general condition, and their hospital stays, which sometimes included hydrotherapy and electrotherapy. Edouard Hornin wrote, for example, about how in late 1914, he experienced a “commotion produced by the explosion of a bomb” that resulted in spending “four months at the hospital without the least

77 Crocq, Blessés psychiques, 168. 78 Thomas,Treating the Trauma of the Great War, 190. Music Making as Emotional Care 61 amelioration,” at which point “the doctor decided to have me rejoin my depot.” Fortunately, the doctor of Hornin’s corps advocated for him to move “into the auxiliary service for sickness contracted in the armies.”79 A musician-soldier named Stern wrote from a hospital in Montpellier,

After the strongcommotion that shook me and especially my nervous system, I have a great gap in my memory, I cannot recall [what] I did on the day of my arrival to the front, nor the places where I went. I know that they evacuated me in Lorraine, I believe that it is above all through my papers that I was able to remember myself. When I returned to life, I could speak in this way about my return to the feeling of reality, [and] it seemed to me that I had never had life, that I was a newborn!80

He admitted that while things had improved, there were still “great holes in my memories that worry me a lot” and that “I have to reflect in order to speak, to re- educate myself, like a child.”81 In the next issue of the Gazette, Stern wrote that he was about to leave to convalesce elsewhere since “hydrotherapy and electricity [electrotherapy] together tire me.”82 This letter to the Comité Franco-Américain was read by Nadia and possibly Lili Boulanger, and then published in the sixth issue of the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, where it would have been read by hundreds of Stern’s fellow musician-soldiers, demonstrating an awareness of the often devastating effects of trauma on soldiers’ minds and bodies. Although not everyone announced their traumatic experiences and symptoms quite as openly and publicly as Stern, many modernist musicians who served in the war nevertheless had experiences and encountered symptoms that could today fall under the heading of post-traumatic stress disorder. The letters,

79 Edouard Hornin to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated December 8, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 5 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 17: “j’étais évacué pour maladie de cœur, suite d’une commotion produite par l’éclatement d’une bombe, restant pendant 4 mois à l’hôpital sans la moindre amélioriation, le médecin décida de me faire rejoindre mon depôt”; “dans le service auxiliaire pour maladie contractée aux armée.” 80 [Rene] Stern to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 14, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 54: “Après la forte commotion qui m’a ébranlé et particulièrement le système nerveux, il s’est fait un grand vide dans ma mémoire, je ne puis me rappeler ce que j’ai fait du jour de mon arrivé au front ni les endroits où je suis passé, je sais que c’est en Lorraine que l’on m’a évacué, je crois que c’est surtout par mes papiers délivrés ensuite que je m’en suis souvenu. Lorsque je suis rentré en vie, je puis parler ainsi de mon retour au sentiment de la réalité, il m’a semblé que je n’avais jamais eu la vie, que j’étais nouveau-né!!” 81 [Rene] Stern to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 14, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1) No. 6 [1917]: 54: “j’ai de grands trous dans mes souvenirs et qui m’inquiètent bien; [ . . . ] moi, il me faut réfléchir pour parler, me rééduquer, comme un enfant.” 82 Rene Stern to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 12, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 36: “l’hydrothérapie et l’électricité ensemble me fatiguaient.” 62 Resonant Recoveries memoirs, and war diaries of most modernist musicians who lived through World War I recount experiences that might well be considered traumatic today: from being under fire, or watching friends or fellow soldiers die, to experiencing a variety of horrific sensory inundations that they often relay in excruciating detail, or receiving the news that a dear loved one has died. The psychological and physical maladies that many described in the years following World War I suggest that many people experienced the aftereffects of some kind of trauma. For -in stance, while on leave in 1916, Jean Cocteau wrote to his mother about a “terrible night” in which he had a dream about his friend from the front, Bouvet, who had an “automobile filled with victims,” though the dream was populated with other images from the war: “torpedos, salves” and a “bridge cut, preventing return.”83 Later in 1918, not long after the deaths of his close friends Jean Le Roy and Rolland Garros in combat, Cocteau wrote to his mother that he had just had dinner “alone and sad after these days of vague worry where the figure of the dead prevents [him] from seeing or hearing the rest.”84 Maurice Ravel experienced exhaustion, weight loss, loss of appetite, and insomnia for much of the rest of his life after his military service, and developed neurological issues later in life that have never been fully explained by medical doctors, but might be attribut- able to his wartime experiences.85 André Caplet, who fought at Douaumont and was apparently twice buried underground due to shelling during this battle, similarly experienced exhaustion and frequent illness after the war.86 Many French modernist musicians would have learned the importance of remaining silent about traumatic experiences as they came into contact with contemporary conceptions of trauma—as well as their harsh treatments—in their roles as stretcher carriers, nurses, doctors’ assistants, and ambulance drivers. In working closely with medical professionals, many musicians would not only have witnessed the ways in which trauma affected soldiers physically, emotionally, and psychologically, but would also have heard how traumatized soldiers were treated and spoken about. The composer Adolphe Borchard wrote to the Comité Franco-Américain in 1917 about his experience as a nurse at the Hôpital Complémentaire 26 in Evreux:

83 Jean Cocteau to Eugénie Cocteau, June 1, 1916, in Lettres à sa mère, vol. 1, ed. Pierre Caizergues (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 253: “Nuit terrible . . . rencontre de Bouvet son automobile pleine de victimes, torpilles, salves, pont coupé empêchant retour, etc.” 84 Jean Cocteau to Eugénie Cocteau, June 11, 1918, in Lettres à sa mère, vol. 1, 373: “je dine seul et triste après ces journées d’angoisse vague où la figure des morts empêche de voir d’entendre le reste.” 85 For more on Ravel and neurasthenia, see Maurice Ravel to Madame Fernand Dreyfus, September 10, 1918, in A Ravel Reader, 182–183. After having surgery for ganglions in his lungs in the fall of 1918, he spent the majority of 1919 in Mégève, Switzerland. See his letters from 1919 in A Ravel Reader and Ravel au miroir de ses lettres, as well as Nichols, Ravel, 195–196. 86 Lucien Durosoir, letter to his mother dated May 23, 1916, in “Lettres du front de Lucien Durosoir,” in Deux musiciens dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Luc Durosoir (Paris: Tallandier, 2005), 29– 213; 166: “Caplet a été enfoui deux fois sous des éboulements.” Music Making as Emotional Care 63

My service for the chief doctor occupies me all of each day; I don’t think of anything anymore except the special care that one gives here, whether to the poor commotionnés (who arrive often in a lamentable state), or to the wounded soldiers whose nervous systems are found to have been affected. These ailments are innumerable, and I witness somewhat often here extraor- dinary transformations, produced either by electric treatments, or by the re- education of movements with the help of flexible or spring-loaded devices. [ . . . ] men who arrived bent in half (following burial and strong commotion by the explosion of projectiles) straighten back up. We use somewhat often in these cases the famous “torpillage” that the newspapers have been talking about so much for the last few months. And there’s nothing barba- rous about this, I assure you. These electric currents, in a sufficiently elevated dose, and lasting a relatively long time (a half hour or more) require the patient to make a great effort himself. Three or four sessions can suffice for a complete straightening out. Right now we are even creating a new salle de rééducation.87

Borchard highlighted both some of the most common traumatic injuries of the time, including commotion and camptocormia (bent-trunk), as well as the painful torpillage treatments that were constantly in the news at this time, even defending the latter based on his own experiences witnessing patients’ “extraor- dinary transformations.” Borchard’s experience would not have been unusual for the many musicians who functioned as medical personnel during the war, and thus we can imagine that many musicians would have been similarly familiar with the symptoms and treatments for various kinds of war-related trauma. Those on the home front also likely came into contact with these conceptions of trauma. In addition to learning about treatments for trauma from newspapers, numerous musicians on the home front, such as Misia Sert, Charles Koechlin, André Gide, and Comte Étienne de Beaumont, would have encountered traumatized patients

87 Adolphe Borchard to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 19, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 4: “Mon service auprès du médecin chef occupe toutes mes journées entières; je ne pense plus qu’aux soins spéciaux qu’on donne ici, soit à des pauvres commotionnés (qui arrivent souvent dans un état lamentable) soit à des blessés dont le système nerveux s’est trouvé atteint.—Ces affectations sont innombrables et j’assiste assez souvent ici à des transformations extraordinaires, produites soit par des traitements électriques, soit par la rééducation des mouvements à l’aide d’appareils très souples et non à ressort [ . . . ] des hommes arrivés courbés en deux (par suite d’ensevelissement et de forte commotion par explosion de projectiles) se redressent. Nous usons dans ces cas assez souvent, du fameux ‘torpillage’ dont les journaux ont tant parlé il y a quelques mois. . . . Et qui n’a rien de barbare, je vous assure. . . . Ces courants électriques à dose suffisamment élevée, et pendant un temps relativement long (1/2 heure et davantage) obligent le patient à faire sur lui-même un grand effort . . . . Trois ou quatre séances peuvent suffire à un redressement complet—En ce moment même nous installons une nouvelle salle de rééducation.” 64 Resonant Recoveries in their volunteer work for the Croix-Rouge Française and other medical facili- ties in and beyond Paris.88

Heroic Masculinity: Musician-Soldiers and the Sexual Politics of Self-Expression

During and after the war, musicians’ expressive tendencies were intertwined with prevalent ideas concerning what I have termed here heroic masculinity—a form of masculinity that, in privileging stoicism, abjured confessions of grief and trauma. The historian George Mosse has argued that the French idea of what it meant to be a “true man” during World War I had begun to solidify in later nineteenth-century Europe, and constituted “a man of action who controlled his passions, and who in his harmonious and well-proportioned bodily structure expressed his commitment to moderation and self-control.”89 He points out that this “true man” ideal was a central aspect of French education at the tail end of the nineteenth century, when boys were trained in gymnastics, sports, and moral education as means of helping them to develop into “true men.”90 Mosse underlines that with this stereotype, which was very much in operation during World War I since war offered “the supreme test of manliness,” men who showed symptoms of shell shock were considered “abnormal” social outsiders.91 Because hysteria had initially been conceived of as a feminine illness, deviations from heroic masculinity—for instance, demonstrating symptoms of trauma—were frequently understood as feminine.92 Heroic masculinity was not only defined in terms of gender, however, but also in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class, especially since susceptibility to trauma was considered hereditary at this time. Mosse describes how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews, Irishmen, Scots, and people of lower classes were considered more prone to

88 André Gide, Journal, 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 454, 458–461, 463, 465. Charles Koechlin, Journal Éphémérides, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler (MMM), Fonds Charles Koechlin (F-CK), Écrits de Charles Koechlin, Journal, Boîtes 1–3, 563–599. See also Robert Orledge, Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic, 1989), 115. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1970), 126, 140. 89 George Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock (January 2000): 101–108; 101. 90 Ibid., 102. 91 Ibid., 102, 104. 92 For more on conceptions of hysteria as feminine, see Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 19–20; Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 10; Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Bessel A. Van der Kolk, Lars Weisaeth, and Onno van der Hart, “History of Trauma in Psychiatry,” in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, eds. Bessel A. Van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (New York: Guilford Press, 2007): 47–76. Music Making as Emotional Care 65 trauma, and thus not deemed “true men.”93 He also underlines how, at this time, social ideals and national ideals were intertwined since “the nation reflected and supported the stereotypes of normative society.”94 Even so, “the nation also ful- filled a separate function, encouraged during the war, as a firm belief-system, a secular religion in whose service modern man must place himself facing an ideal which existed outside himself. Here was a test of manliness and of the willingness to sacrifice.” Complicating matters, however, was the fact that, as Mosse puts it, “shell-shock betrayed this ideal.”95 These notions of heroic masculinity were familiar to French musicians living through World War I. For instance, Maréchal’s comments on the necessity of pudeur that opened this chapter came as a result of him reading Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire.96 In this essay collection, Vigny criticized military life for all of its constraints even while praising the effectiveness of the resulting military system. In a chapter entitled “On the constraint of the soldier and his individual character,” Vigny argued that abnegation is “a heavier cross to bear than that of the martyr—you have to have carried it for a long time in order to know its greatness and its weight.”97 He defined abnegation as relinquishing one’s “li- berty to think and act,” and asserted that this was exemplified in “military character.” Every soldier, he wrote, has a “uniform and cold look.”98 Vigny clarified that this abnegation was both the result and the means of bringing into action the military’s system of power, which resulted in a performance of self embodied in “perpetual reserve.” As he explained, “[A man] can’t let loose in front of his inferiors without leaving to them a familiarity that carries with it the attainment of his power.” In Vigny’s estimation, living one’s life in this power-oriented “perpetual reserve” often produced men “who enclose themselves in the silence of a m on k .” 99 That Maréchal chose to read this text and recite back to himself in his journal the lessons learned within it, demonstrates the extent to which at least one young musician-soldier found a source for a pedagogy of self-expression within the French military still relevant.

93 Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a Social Disease,” 103. 94 Ibid., 105. 95 Ibid. 96 Maréchal mentions having read Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire in the same diary entry of October 6, 1914, in “Carnets de guerre,” 238. 97 Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaire (Paris: F. Bonnaire, V. Magin, 1835), 37: “L’abnégation du guerrier est une croix plus lourde que celle du martyr. Il faut l’avoir portée longtemps pour en savoir la grandeur et le poids.” 98 Ibid., 37–38: “une figure uniforme et froide”; “la renonciation entière à la liberté de penser et d’agir”; “le caractère militaire.” 99 Ibid., 39: “une perpétuelle réserve”; “il ne peut dérider son front devant ses inférieurs, sans leur laisser prendre une familiarité qui porte atteinte à son pouvoir”; “qui s’enfermaient dans un silence de trappiste.” 66 Resonant Recoveries

For many musician-soldiers, simply being a musician was a challenge to their masculinity. Many musician-soldiers’ accounts and World War I–era autobiographical war novels demonstrate that non-musicians often discriminated against musicians, considering them lazy and lacking in courage, frequently referring to them as embusqués. As Jacques Meyer and other historians have noted, embusqué was a term used to describe military personnel who had less dangerous positions, such as “telephone operators, secretaries, musicians, orderlies, cyclists.”100 Even though many musicians were also brancardiers— stretcher carriers who risked their lives by searching for wounded and dead soldiers, often without weapons—this did not stop the dissemination of the stereotype that they were cowardly and lazy.101 Louis Leleu—a flutist and stretcher carrier—complained about being “treated like an embusqué . . . by a young guy who . . . believed that we live the good life brightened up by music.”102 One of Léopold Retailleau’s fellow musician-soldiers, Léo, recounted that a sergeant shouted to a group of musicien-brancardiers upon seeing them, “Ah! Here are indeed the slackers, the chickens, the cowards, they arrive when the task is fin- ished! There are some wounded who await you at the farm across the road! Instead of hiding, you would do better to go and find them!”103 Thus military life often provided musicians with a difficult adjustment, based at least in part on preconceived notions of weakness. Because musicien-brancardier was, on the one hand, one of the most common assignments for musicians enlisted in the French military, and on the other, a stereotyped position that often made them targets for abuse from fellow soldiers,

100 See Jacques Meyer, Les Soldats de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Hachette, 1966), 213; cited in Durosoir, “Lettres du front,” 28, n.1: “téléphonistes, secrétaires, musiciens, plantons, cyclistes.” 101 Pierre Tesson describes his service as a brancardier as “très dur et extrêmement dangereux” in a letter to the Comité Franco-Américain dated January 29, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 22–23. Tesson writes about an offensive that took place for 96 hours, not dissimilar from Henry Vasseur’s description of another offensive that took place on September 25, 1915, in which, as a brancardier, he “bandage[d]‌ and transport[ed] the wounded . . . during several days and several nights, without a moment of rest.” Henry Vasseur to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated December 16, 1915, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, No. 2 (February 1916). BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 24–25: “Lorsqu’il y a une attaque nous pansons et transportons les blessés, ecela [sic] pendant plusieurs jours et plusieurs nuits, sans prendre un moment de repos, comme cela nous est arrivé souvent dans et pendant notre grande offensive du 25 septembre.” 102 Louis Leleu, Des Flandres aux Vosges: Un Musicien-brancardier dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Danièle Percic (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Éditions Alan Sutton, 2003), 147: “Un jour je fus traité d’embusqué, comme ça, sans aucun motif, par un jeunot qui venait d’arriver en renfort et n’était jamais monté en ligne. Il croyait qu’on menait la bonne vie, agrémentée de musique!” 103 Léopold Retailleau, Musicien-brancardier: Carnets de Léopold Retailleau du 77e R.I. (1914– 1918), transcription by Claude Retailleau, ed. Éric Labayle, preface by General Jean-Pierre Kelche (Parçay-sur-Vienne: Anovi, 2003), 40: “Le sergent Hérissé nous voyant arriver nous cria: ‘Ah! Les voilà bien les fainéants, les froussards, les lâches, ils arrivent lorsque la besogne est finie! Il y a des blessés qui vous attendent dans la ferme en face! Au lieu de vous cacher vous feriez mieux d’aller les chercher!’ ” Music Making as Emotional Care 67 musicians often attempted to convince others of their heroic masculinity. Though these musicians may not always have been on the front lines, their journals and letters—not to mention their job descriptions—indicate that they regularly placed themselves in harm’s way to provide medical assistance for fellow soldiers, take their comrades to safer locations, and enable proper burial and collective mourning. Music critic Louis Vuillemin’s somewhat rosy portrait of the relationship between poilus and musicians for Le Courrier musical outlined the importance of musicians, especially in terms of the courage required for their roles:

Thepoilu , if he only vaguely likes music, is always courteous towards musicians. He knows what he owes them. He has seen them a hundred times, in murderous hours, roaming the trenches, in a small and slow stride, with a stretcher on the shoulder. He has seen them, at the ends of attacks, jump the parapet in order to bring back the dead. He has seen them, pickaxe in hand, digging tunnels and parallels. He has seen them fall, them too, like the others.104

Vuillemin’s account thus offered a particular narrative that underlined the bravery, heroism, and national sacrifice of musician-soldiers. 105 Numerous musicians in French modernist circles confirmed this privileging of heroic masculinity within the French military, suggesting that this social norm contributed to musicians’ tendencies to remain silent about the grief and trauma they experienced. The composer Jacques Ibert writes to theGazette des classes du Conservatoire that, although in his role as a nurse he has seen “lots of pain and misery to soothe . . . some terrible scenes . . . painful agonies, sobbing loved ones, and weakness before death,” he also took care to clarify that “but they are so brave, our dear ‘petits.’ ”106 The musician Georges Auric, who as a teenager during the war was already one of the most well-regarded music critics in Paris,

104 Louis Vuillemin, “Au canon et à la chandelle. La guerre en musique,” Le Courrier musical (July– August 1918): 247–248: “Le poilu de la guerre, s’il n’aime que vaguement la musique, est toujours courtois envers les musiciens. Il sait ce qu’il leur doit. Il les a vus cent fois, aux heures meurtrières, parcourir la tranchée, le pas petit et lent, le brancard à l’épaule. Il les a vus, à l’issue des attaques, sauter le parapet pour relever les morts. Il les a vus, la pioche aux mains, creuser boyaux et parallèles. Il les a vus tomber, eux aussi, comme les autres.” 105 Interestingly, this tendency of musicians to confirm one’s participation in the war is also evident in Louis Fourestier’s comments in a 1963 interview about his wartime activities. See David Mastin, “Naissance d’un chef: Louis Fourestier en Grande Guerre, 1914–1925,” in La Grande Guerre en musique: Vie et création musicales en France pendant la Premiere Guerre mondiale, eds. Florence Doé de Maindreville and Stéphan Etcharry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 75–94; 76, n.7; 79. Mastin calls Fourestier’s desire to articulate that he performed difficult work during the war an “obsession.” 106 Jacques Ibert to the Franco-Américain, letter dated October 14, 1915, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 (1915), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 15–16: “Beaucoup de douleurs, de misères à soulager . . . des tableaux affreux qui restent là, au fond des yeux: des agonies pénibles, les sanglots des parents, et l’impuissance devant la mort. Mais ils sont si braves nos chers ‘petits.’ ” 68 Resonant Recoveries experienced similar norms and judgments in his brief experience as a soldier at the very end of World War I. In his memoirs, Auric recounted that, despite his best efforts, he could not get his body to “adapt itself to what was demanded of it,” and that this, along with his difficulties in making friends with people his own age, led to bullying and threats by his comrades.107 The French composer Maurice Ravel, who had to return to his military service only weeks after his mother’s death in January 1917, relayed that his captain told him that he must “snap out of it.” According to Ravel’s captain, the antidote to grief was distraction: he gave Ravel a promotion, took him with him as he made his rounds, and promised him a visit to the front lines.108 Certainly, this latter distraction was offered in the interest of forcing Ravel to recall the heroism of so many others. In fact, in Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux’s account of Ravel’s mother’s funeral in her diary in 1917, she indicated the widespread nature of the culture of heroic restraint surrounding self-expression in criticizing Ravel and his brother for their behavior at this funeral: “both were in utter turmoil, incapable of reaction of self-control. A lamentable and distressing spectacle at this time when heroism displays itself as naturally as breathing.”109 According to Saint-Marceaux, the Ravel brothers’ reactions to their mother’s death were not only unheroic, but also decidedly unnatural—especially, she implied, for two soldiers. Heroic masculinity was expected more from men than women, especially in terms of self-expression. Roger-Ducasse made this clear in a letter to his friend André Lambinet just after the death of his beloved teacher, Gabriel Fauré, in 1924. Roger-Ducasse explained that Fauré’s children had asked him to speak on behalf of the Maître’s former students. He wrote to Lambinet: “But I would not have been able to. So, in order to avoid all susceptibilité masculine . . . I asked Nadia [Boulanger] to replace me and to say a few words that I know will be those that one must say, in our name, to everyone.”110 While his decision to ask Boulanger to speak was undoubtedly informed by his knowledge of Nadia’s proclivity for and commitment to mourning, in articulating that giving a eulogy for his teacher would have challenged his masculinity in ways that he could not

107 Georges Auric, Quand j’étais là (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1979), 98: “s’adapter à ce qu’on lui demandait”; “Lorsque nous serons arrivés au front, nos premières balles seront pour toi, nos premières balles dans ton dos!” 108 See Ravel to Mme Fernand Dreyfus, February 9, 1917, in A Ravel Reader, 180; and Ravel to Ida Godebska, February 14, 1917, in the Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 51, Folder 1094. 109 Saint-Marceaux, entry of January 7, 1917, in Journal, ed. Chimènes, 926: quoted and trans. in Nichols, Ravel, 188. 110 Jean Roger-Ducasse to André Lambinet, November 7, 1924, in Lettres à son ami André Lambinet, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2001), 159: “mais je n’aurais pas pu. Alors, pour éviter toute susceptibilité masculine, et, je l’avoue, éviter un laïus protestant de Koechlin, j’ai demandé à Nadia [Boulanger] de me remplacer et de dire quelques mots que je sais qui seront ceux qu’il faut dire, en notre nom à tous.” Music Making as Emotional Care 69 bear, Roger-Ducasse implied that Nadia was a better choice for this task because she was a woman and thus less susceptible to criticism for her emotional expressions.111 In interwar France, mourning openly was understood not only as a task to be undertaken by women, but also as their patriotic responsibility. As numerous World War I historians have noted, the grief of war widows and mothers of soldier sons was frequently appropriated and utilized as a powerful symbol of national sacrifice.112 One of the most visible examples of this is the predominance of the figure of the grieving mother or wife in interwar monuments and other commemorative artworks.113 On the one hand, this figure permitted women who experienced war-related losses more leeway in terms of publicly displaying their sorrow. On the other hand, these silent, still, and stone representations of grieving mothers, wives, or sisters were far afield from actual lived, experienced, and expressed grief. War widows in France were thus charged with the task of acting as emotional laborers—bearers, symbols, and conduits for the nation’s grief, especially when the ethos of heroic masculinity prevented men from grieving on their own—but only if they were capable of carefully control- ling their grief. Moreover, the leeway regarding public expressions of grief that was extended to women (and men) who lost loved ones outside of the purview of the war was less than that offered to those who had lost loved ones in combat.114 As a result, musicians such as Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, Emma Debussy, and many others whose friends or family members died between 1914 and 1918 due to non-war- related causes, were often forced to grieve in relative silence, immersed in guilt for grieving while the war was raging. As Winter has

111 For more on Nadia Boulanger’s proclivity for mourning see, for example, Jérôme Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, trans. M. M. Shriver (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992), 47–49, 61–62, 86–90; Jeanice Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19–25; Kimberly Francis, Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 82–83. I discuss relationships between Boulanger’s mourning and her musical activities in detail in chapter 4 of this book. 112 See Carol Acton, Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse (Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Stéphanie Petit, “Le Deuil des veuves de la Grande Guerre—un deuil spécifique?” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 198, Les Femmes et la guerre (June 2000): 53–65; Susan Grayzel, 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); Françoise Thébaud, “La Guerre et le deuil chez les femmes françaises,” in Guerre et Cultures 1914–1918 , eds. Jean- Jacques Becker, Jay M. Winter, Gerd Krumeich, Annette Becker, and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 103–110. 113 See Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, especially chapter 4; and Winter, Sites of Memory. 114 For more on the criticism of war widows, see Margaret H. Darrow, “French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of War Experience in World War I,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 1 (February 1996): 80–106. Darrow cites several important sources of men’s condemnation of mourning women during the war, including Abel Hermant, La Vie à Paris (1916) (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1917), 113– 114; Lucien Descaves, La Maison anxieuse (Paris: G. Crès, 1916). 70 Resonant Recoveries asserted, “entitlement to speak about war and violence is in no sense universal. Some have the right; others do not. The difference between the two categories is a matter of social and cultural codes, which can and do change over time.”115 For many musicians, the right to speak about grief was tied not only to gender, but also to the circumstances surrounding a loved one’s death, specifically, whether or not they died in combat. Many musicians living in France during and after the war were therefore forced to negotiate myriad sociocultural norms regarding emotional expression. This is often evident not only in musicians’ letters and diaries, but also in their musical compositions and practices. In the next section of this chapter, I explain some of the ways in which musical compositions, musicians, and music making created spaces in military and civilian arenas that shaped people’s abilities to communicate, express, and cope with trauma.

Composing in Wartime: Negotiating Nationalism, Emotional Needs, and Public Expectations

In World War I–era France, music came to function as a means of emotional management that often operated outside of patriotic, propagandistic, and verbal discourse. As such, music became a crucial means of survival for many musicians who lived through the war. Music offered a way to hold on to one’s sanity or to cope with the insidious slipping away of it. Music could operate as a modality of comfort and consolation, often in specifically corporeal ways. Studying the compositions that musicians wrote, performed, and listened to, as well as the spaces and situations in which music making occurred, reveals the extent to which musicians turned to music as a consolatory, empowering medium during some of the most difficult years of their lives. Musicians who wrote music during the war had to negotiate a range of musical conventions, many of which were bound up not only with nationalist and patriotic expectations and discourse, but also with expectations for emotional expression. Considering that musical expression and personal emotional expression were understood as closely tied, it might have been especially important for musicians to keep their feelings under wraps at a time when heroic masculinity was considered an especially salient aspect of Frenchness. Composing music in wartime thus was an especially significant activity through which musicians negotiated traumatic experience within a nationalistic culture that frowned upon direct expression or open discussions of grief and trauma. I am especially interested here in how certain kinds of musical-expressive discourse may have

115 Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” 8. Music Making as Emotional Care 71 been shaped by nationalistic conventions for wartime mourning, both in music and in French culture more broadly. To this end, in this section I address modernist musical creations that were composed, published, or performed with specific associations between the war, mourning, and trauma in mind. Musical compositions that address the war in some way generally mirror many of the social conventions discussed earlier for communicating grief and trauma in speech and writing. Since individual and collective trauma were generally not discussed except among small groups of specialists—with the exception of discussions of the controversial torpillage treatments for shell- shocked soldiers in newspapers—compositions that explicitly address wartime trauma do not really exist. Music’s status as a sometimes-imitative art, and the fact that many French musicians were living daily with the sounds of war, may have likewise played a role in musicians’ decisions to avoid compositions that were specifically about trauma. Although occasionally composers like Philippe Gaubert wrote pieces that attempted to capture the sounds of trench warfare, most composers opted to avoid pieces that represented the harsh sounds of war, even for the stage. It was far more common, in fact, for musicians to write pieces that addressed mourning either through representing grief, or through creating spaces in which people felt comfortable enough to mourn lost loved ones. Debussy’s Berceuse héroïque, written to honor those killed or affected by Germany’s invasion of Belgium, offers one example, although, interestingly, Debussy focused on mourning Belgian rather than French losses. It is possible that this focus on Belgian rather than French grief offered Debussy and other mourners important opportunities to mourn without having to look forward toward victory, especially given the frequency with which references to France’s victory became standard in pieces otherwise designed to address grief, as I discuss in more detail in what follows. Moreover, at this time, the French press feminized Belgium as a nation that had been “raped” by Germany; such feminization of Belgium may have made it an apt vehicle for mournful expression, especially given the gendered norms of mourning I have described earlier.116 The Parisian composer and conductor Gabriel Pierné offers us another example of a musical space constructed for mourning in the incidental music he composed in 1915—while his son was on the front lines—for Les Cathédrales, the allegorical play that was a theatrical vehicle for actress Sarah Bernhardt. The play features four destroyed French cathedrals—clearly drawing on the German bombing of the Reims Cathedral in 1914—who consider and mourn France’s fate. As Erin

116 I am grateful to Erin Brooks for pointing out this significant connection. For more information about Belgium as a feminized nation during World War I, see Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2004); and Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 50–51. 72 Resonant Recoveries

Brooks has shown, this play, and Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance in it as an am- putee, offered a significant identificatory space for many of France’s wounded soldiers.117 Similar to the conventions for more straightforwardly verbal expressions of grief, modernist composers’ music for mourning shaped and was shaped by a whole host of social and sonic conventions for emotional expression. Moreover, these conventions would have been significantly influenced by the cultural exi- gencies of pro-France and anti-German propaganda, the norms and complexities of which Moore has addressed in detail.118 For instance, some composers, such as Pierné, utilized clear sonic markers of French nationalism—the “Marseillaise” in the case of Les Cathédrales’s “Prélude”—placed in minor keys.119 Other composers included military tropes, or, with just about the same amount of frequency, markers of religious music, such as hymns or church bells.120 In addition to writing many pieces for small ensembles, often according to the performers available to perform these pieces, numerous composers chose to write for unaccompanied choir, usually comprising male voices. Sophie-Anne Leterrier has suggested that this had to do both with the solemnity and religious undertones of unaccompanied voices, and also the association between male voices and the male-dominated nature of the conflict.121 Of course, many composers wrote

117 Erin Brooks, “Sarah Bernhardt, Les Cathédrales, and Performing the Wounded Nation,” unpub- lished paper, delivered at the British Library Conference, Music of War: 1914–1918, London, August 29–31, 2014. Les Cathédrals is a notable composition as well in the ways in which it reflects and contributes to the wartime construction of what Nicola Lambourne has named “moral” cathedrals in “Moral Cathedrals: War Damage and Franco-German Cultural Propaganda on the Western Front, 1870–1938” (PhD diss., University of London, 1997). 118 Rachel Moore, Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris during the First World War (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2018). Moore also points out that Matinées nationales concerts that took place between November 1914 and Fall 1917 often functioned as spaces for collective mourning. I would also note that these musical spaces for collective mourning were inordinately shaped by norms surrounding public mourning, including the fact, as I have already discussed earlier in this chapter, that collective mourning, especially when performed for nationalistic reasons, was far more socially acceptable than individual mourning. See also Moore, “The Legacy of War: Conceptualising Wartime Musical Life in the Post-War Musical Press, 1919–1920,” in Musical Criticism in France, 1918–1939 , eds. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2018), 246–266. 119 Similarly, Debussy included both “La Marseillaise” and the Belgian national anthem, “La Brabançonne,” in his wartime elegy, En Blanc et noir. For more in-depth discussions of this piece, see Rogers, “Grieving through Music in Interwar France: Maurice Ravel and His Circle, 1914–1934” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2014), 125–129; Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 43–53; Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 91–95. 120 Bells held myriad meanings for people in Third Republic France, although a detailed discussion of these meanings is outside the scope of this chapter. For additional information, see Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 121 Sophie-Anne Leterrier, “Culture de guerre et musique nationale: La Musique française dans la Grande Guerre,” in Chefs-d’œuvre et circonstances: Trois concerts, ed. Patrice Marcilloux (Dainville, France: Archives Départementales du Pas-de- Calais, 2000), 15–38. Music Making as Emotional Care 73 compositions to specifically honor and commemorate their fellow musicians; frequently these compositions were marches or other pieces associated with military action.122 Although soldiers were rarely forthright about their reasons for composing such pieces, we can imagine that these genres offered them ways of remembering their fellow comrades in their everyday military actions, rather than in pieces that might only be played every once in a while. The vast majority of pieces that modernists composed during the war that were either specifically for mourning, or that explicitly address grief in some way, exhibit a two-part structure in which an initial lament gives way to a celebratory finale. In their chapter inEntendre la guerre, Annette Becker and Patrice Marcilloux note that the “French musical landscape” of many wartime compositions “traverses death, grief, heroism, celebration and commemoration.”123 This trope appears in a wide array of guises in myriad compositions of different genres, including Florent Schmitt’s piece for male chorus and piano (and later orchestra), Chant de guerre (1915); Nadia Boulanger’s song for soprano and piano, Soir d’hiver (1914), and her piece for solo piano, Vers la vie nouvelle (1915); Reynaldo Hahn’s song for male voice and piano, Nos morts ignorés (1915); Georges Hüe’s symphonic poem, Émotions (1919); Vincent d’Indy’s Third Symphony, otherwise known as Sinfonia Brevis de bello gallico; and Camille Saint-Saëns’s tribute to the Allied Forces’ victory, Cyprès et Lauriers (1919).124 Although this mourning-to- celebration narrative does not appear in every piece written explicitly for wartime mourning, it is a frequent enough rhetorical feature to be understood as a sociocultural norm of French wartime musical propaganda, which sought to frame France as a country whose morals and strength would lead to its eventual victory.125 In this way, grief was almost always accompanied by an optimistic view of the war’s eventual outcome. This was even inscribed in the plaque designed by Charles Widor and other members of the Association des Artistes to commemorate musicians who had died in the

122 For example, André Caplet composed a march entitled Les Gas d’Mangin for “our dear comrades of the 5th division and in Mangin’s group.” 123 Annette Becker and Patrice Marcilloux, “Musique funèbres,” in Entendre la guerre: Sons, musiques et silence en 14–18 , ed. Florence Gétreau (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 110–119; 113: “Si l’on écoute plus précisément le paysage musical français pendant et après la guerre, on entend bien qu’il est lui aussi parcouru par la mort, le deuil, l’héroïsme, leur célébration et leur commémoration.” 124 For close readings of the optimistic trajectory of pieces written for wartime mourning in France during World War I, see chapter 3 of my dissertation, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France. 125 See Moore, Performing Propaganda. Although I focus on art music (and more specifically on modernist art music) throughout this chapter and this book, I should note that Martin Pénet has similarly argued that within the popular song repertoire of World War I–era France, the majority of songs were patriotic and propagandistic, with a smaller number of songs devoted to addressing daily life on the front, socialism, the union sacrée, or healing. See Martin Pénet, “Chansons de l’arrière et du front,” in Entendre la guerre: Sons, musiques et silence en 14–18 , ed. Florence Gétreau (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 36–51. 74 Resonant Recoveries war: after a list of names of fallen soldiers, the celebratory cry, “Vive la France!” appears.126 This tendency to focus on victory and celebration might explain why requiems were not popular choices for wartime composers, nor were they among the most commonly used pieces in funerals and memorial services. Louis Leleu offers one account of the music played at a memorial service:

To honor the memory of our dead, we quickly organized a solemn mass and, accompanied by a magnificent organ . . . we played some circumstantial pieces that we had in our wheelhouse in our notebooks . . . notably Handel’s famous “Largo” and Schubert’s Ave Maria. Some musicians, some Poilus from the com- panies, accompanied by our music unit sang a few hymns. This was a beautiful ceremony attended by a large crowd of civilians and soldiers.127

Composers’ lack of interest in requiems may have been related to the increas- ingly secular nature of French life in the early twentieth century, or to the fact that numerous popular requiems—by Fauré, Berlioz, Verdi, and Mozart, just to name a few—were already in existence. It may also be that composers avoided writing requiems since, as large-scale works, these were time-consuming, while also requiring large numbers of performers at a time when most professional musicians were unavailable due to military duty. Perhaps this was the reason why Louis Fourestier chose to compose smaller pieces—and never a requiem—even though he once wrote that, “when a comrade died, I would have liked to compose

126 Wartime optimism of this sort was not limited to music, but rather appeared in myriad discourses. “Vive la France!” is especially significant here given a famous report of a woman who had lost all six of her sons in the war, and cried out at one of their funerals: “Vive la France quand même!” See Françoise Thébaud, “La Guerre et le deuil chez les femmes françaises,” in Guerre et cultures 1914– 1918, eds. Jean-Jacques Becker, Jay M. Winter, Gerd Krumeich, Annette Becker, Stéphane Audoin- Rouzeau (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 103–110; 106. André Gide points out and also problematizes the optimism of French newspapers in a journal entry from October 1916: “The newspapers exas- perate me, in which cowardly and outdated optimism seems always to believe that triumph consists of not consenting to see the hits that one receives. It appears to me that they flatter and encourage bizarrely the French spirit, most dangerously in times of war, since inevitably a lack of preparation accompanies [this optimism].” For Gide, the optimism of newspapers was dangerous because it rendered people less prepared for battle, but also, we might assume, for the emotionally difficult or traumatic experiences that might arise in instances of loss, whether of individual human lives, or of French victory. André Gide, entry of October 29, 1916, in Journal, 1889–1939 , 581: “Les journaux m’exaspèrent, dont l’optimisme pleutre et suranné semble toujours croire que le triomphe consiste à ne pas consentir à s’apercevoir des coups que l’on reçoit. Il me paraît qu’ils flattent et encouragent un des travers de l’esprit français les plus dangereux en temps de guerre, car immanquablement l’impréparation l’accompagne.” 127 Leleu, Des Flandres aux Vosges, 95: “Pour honorer la mémoire de nos morts, nous eûmes vite fait d’organiser une messe solennelle et, accompagnés par un orgue magnifique logé dans un riche buffet, nous jouâmes des morceaux de circonstance que nous avions dans notre giberne sur des carnets et qui nous servaient d’en-cas, notamment le célèbre Largo d’Haendel et l’Ave Maria de Schubert. Des musiciens, des Poilus des compagnies, accompagné par notre Musique chantèrent quelques hymnes. Ce fut une belle cérémonie à laquelle assistait une foule nombreuse et recueillie de civils et de soldats.” Music Making as Emotional Care 75 the most beautiful requiem in the world in his honor, and then conduct it. This, to me, was my way to do my duty.”128 On the rare occasions when composers wrote requiems, they often did so with small ensembles in mind.129 Religious pieces were nevertheless important for many French composers, and religious ideology often permeated pieces written during the war, especially those concerned with mourning. Musicians such as Schindler and Pierre Grout, who wrote to the Comité Franco-Américain about their experiences, recounted composing and performing hymns, a Pie Jesu, and other religious pieces for fallen comrades.130 André Caplet, who was well-known for his piety and Catholicism, wrote several pieces during the war that represented wartime mourning, including the songs Détresse and La Croix douloureuse. Although Caplet’s training at the church music–oriented Schola Cantorum demonstrated and continued to develop his interest in religious music, prior to the war, Caplet had been more fascinated with symbolism. After 1914, however, Caplet turned to composing almost entirely Catholic-themed works for voice.131 This aligns with Sophie- Anne Leterrier’s assessment that sacred song came more to the fore during the war years, and perhaps reflects Caplet’s renewed need for spiritual support and reflection given his experiences on the war’s front lines.132 Caplet linked both Détresse and La Croix douloureuse to spiritual contemplation and prayer in wartime mourning through epigraphs, Catholic texts that describe mourners’ struggles, and music that is at times melancholy while also remaining somewhat archaic and clearly influenced by church music of the somewhat distant past. In La Croix douloureuse, Caplet sets this “prière des âmes en deuil” to the text of the nineteenth-century French Catholic poet Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, whereas Détresse musicalizes the French Catholic writer Henriette Charasson’s

128 Louis Fourestier, cited in Anne-Marie Martyn, Ils ont bonne mémoire (Strasbourg: Istra, 1965), 128–131; cited in Mastin, “Naissance d’un chef,” 84: “Quand un camarade mourait, j’aurais voulu composer le plus beau requiem du monde en son honneur, et le diriger. C’était ma façon à moi de faire mon devoir.” 129 Marc Delmas wrote a Messe de Requiem (1925) for men’s voices (BnF, Mus., Fol. Vm1-757), while Alexandre Georges wrote a Messe de Requiem (1923) for four male voices accompanied by organ or harmonium (BnF, Mus., 4-Vm1-491). Similarly, Guy Ropartz (Messe de Requiem (1938), BnF, Mus., 4-Vm1- 974 (2)) and Paul Blondé (Messe de Requiem (1925), BnF, Mus., 4-Vm1- 622) wrote requiems for only male voices. 130 G. Becker, undated letter to the Comité Franco-Américain, published in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1), No. 1 (1915): 4–5. Pierre Grout to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated November 27, 1916, published in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1), No. 4 (November 27, 1916): 20. G. Schindler to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1), No.1 (1915): 25. 131 Marie-Christine Catherine Allen, “The Wartime Melodies of André Caplet” (DMA Diss., University of Arizona, 1994), 67. 132 Leterrier, “Culture de guerre et musique nationale,” 32. For additional information regarding relationships between Catholic symbology and music in early twentieth-century (including wartime) France, see Megan Sarno, “Symbolism and Catholicism in French Music at the Time of the Separation of Church and State (1888–1925)” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2016). 76 Resonant Recoveries poem in response to her brother’s death in combat.133 Caplet’s epigraph for the song tells us that Charasson wrote the poem “for a soldier, wounded and ‘pre- sumed dead’ after the fighting in Neuveille St. Waast en Artois on September 28, 1915.”134 Both of these wartime songs feature texts and music that can be understood to reflect the sociocultural demands of heroic masculinity in the wake of mourning, albeit here in a spiritualized form. Each song features a subject who has experienced a loss and prays for the loss to be reversed, but, through acceptance of God’s all-powerful will, is guaranteed redemption and peace. In order to underline this shift from grief and sorrow to acceptance and peace, Caplet composed significant affective shifts through movements from richly somber, melancholic music to celebratory displays.135 In this way, Caplet’s music for mourning aligns with the propagandistic and optimistic aesthetic promulgated by many of his French modernist peers. Although musical compositions concluding in celebratory claims of eventual victory can be understood as expressing heroic masculinity through state- oriented musical propaganda, it is important to also acknowledge the extent to which the optimism of many of these pieces may have been just as much about providing musicians with hope. Representing more hopeful, positive, and redemption-oriented perspectives of death was not uncommon at the time. Lili Boulanger’s Pie Jesu, which she dictated to her sister Nadia while on her deathbed, offers one of numerous examples of this: the piece begins with the organ playing a chromatic melody in sharp dissonance with the soprano’s vocal line, and ends with a peaceful resolution ornamented with major-key harp flourishes. Composing optimistically, then, might be understood as reflecting or engaging with an emotional regime that tended toward silencing or quickly overcoming trauma, while at the same time providing soldiers with the means to emotionally withstand their present situations, in the hopes of a brighter, less trauma-filled future. Some modernist musicians resisted the convention of composing music with this common mourning-to- celebration narrative by writing pieces that offered more pacifist, complicated, or ironic perspectives. Maurice Ravel, for instance, wrote a handful of pieces during and just after the war in which he resisted wartime conventions for mourning. In the middle movement of Trois chansons pour

133 See Lucien Durosoir, letter to his mother dated September 1, 1918, cited in Georgie Durosoir, “Faire œuvre de musique en guerre: André Caplet,” in La Grande Guerre en musique: Vie et création musicale en France pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale, eds. Florence Doé de Maindreville and Stéphan Etcharry (Brussells: Peter Lang, 2014), 97–120; 112. 134 André Caplet, Détresse: “pour un Soldat, blessé et ‘porté disparu’ après les combats de Neuville St. Waast en Artois le 18 Septembre 1915.” 135 For a lovely analysis of the mournful aspects of André Caplet’s Détresse, see Durosoir, “Faire œuvre de musique en guerre,” 114–115. Music Making as Emotional Care 77 chœur mixte (1914), “Trois beaux oiseau de Paradis,” Ravel addressed wartime mourning with a conventional a cappella choir texture; patriotic references to the red, white, and blue of the French flag; and the refrain “Mon ami z-il est à la guerre.” However, he also broke with wartime musical conventions by concluding this song with a classic descending lament gesture in the song’s last line136 (see Musical Example 1.1). Even more striking is Ravel’s wartime piece for piano five-hands, Frontispice. The Italian avant-garde poet Ricciotto Canudo—who ran in French modernist circles during and after the war—commissioned and published this composition in his volume of war poetry, SP 503 Vardar. Although Ravel also published the fifteen-measure piece in a 1919 issue of Feuillets d’art, it seems that the piece was not performed in a public concert setting during Ravel’s lifetime.137 Given wartime social expectations, it is perhaps not difficult to imagine why this might have been the case: unlike the music Ravel composed prior to his wartime military service, Frontispice features extreme metric, melodic, harmonic, and motivic dissonance for the first ten of the piece’s fifteen measures. The bulk of this short piece signifies the war not only in its title—evoking the front lines—but also in its chaotic soundscape and the fact that its performance requires a third player to use only one arm, perhaps a reference to the wounded soldiers frequently seen on the front lines and on the home front.138 The piece’s final five measures con- sist of a series of repeated chords that expand in register and texture, after which Ravel offers a closing gesture that, in its seeming frivolity, might be understood as framing what has just come before as a performance—specifically a performance of stoicism (see Musical Example 1.2). One way of understanding the last five measures of Frontispice is that Ravel composed these recurring chords in reference to the performances of stoicism that soldiers were required to repeat while enduring the trauma of their military lives. The irony for which Ravel had been known before the war came to be perceived as inappropriate in wartime contexts, as is evident from his 1917 piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and its reception in the years immediately

136 For more on this, see Jillian Rogers, “Musical ‘Magic Words’: Tracing Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice, and La Valse,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review, special issue “Music, War and Trauma in the Long Nineteenth Century” (forthcoming 2021). 137 Rex Lawson, “Maurice Ravel: Frontispice for Pianola,” The Pianola Journal 2, no. 2 (1989): 36– 37. No discussions or records of a live performance in Ravel’s lifetime appear in any of the memoirs, journals, diaries, and other sources I have examined during this project. 138 For a more in-depth discussion of this piece and how it relates to Ravel’s wartime experiences, see Rogers, “Musical ‘Magic Words’ ”; and Tobias Plebuch, “Der stumme Schrecken: Ravels Frontispice,” in Hommage à Ravel 1987 (Bremen: Die Hochschule, 1987), 155–165. Rex Lawson has addressed the possibility that Ravel wrote this piece for five hands specifically because he composed it for pianola in “Maurice Ravel: Frontispice for Pianola,” Even if Lawson’s argument holds true, Ravel could still have desired to represent wartime disability in this piece. 78 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 1.1 Maurice Ravel, Trois chansons pour chœur mixte, mvmt. 2: “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis,” mm. 41–48. Music Making as Emotional Care 79

Musical Example 1.1 Continued.

following the war. The suite, which critics described as embodying a cheer- iness that exemplified the living characters of the dead soldiers to whom Ravel dedicated each movement, features six very difficult-to- play dances in an eighteenth-century neoclassical style. Ravel made evident the associations between this piece and wartime mourning not only in his dedications of each movement to friends who had died in the war, but also in his inclusion on the piece’s title page of a funeral urn. However, when Roger-Ducasse heard his good friend, the pianist Marguerite Long, play the piece privately in May 1918, Roger-Ducasse was appalled by Ravel’s musical homage to dead soldiers, exclaiming incredulously to his friend Lambinet that this music, which he says would have benefited better from dedications to “dancers or pleasure girls,” has “no measure of emotion” even though “the memory of these soldiers demands it.”139 When French modernist composers wrote music during the war for which clear paratextual connections to wartime mourning or activities are absent, their compositions are frequently less concerned with the sorrow-to-hope trajectory, or other tropes and conventions of wartime musical mourning. Thus,

139 Jean Roger-Ducasse, letter to André Lambinet dated May 6, 1918, in Lettres à son ami André Lambinet, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2001), 120–121; 121: “danseuses ou à des filles de joie”; “pas une mesure d’émotion, et cependant le souvenir de ces soldats l’exigeait.” 80 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 1.2 Maurice Ravel, Frontispice, mm. 11–15.

as we might expect, these pieces are usually far more nuanced and varied than their propagandistic counterparts. This is the case for those composing on the home front as well as on the front lines. For instance, André Caplet’s Le Vieux coffret, even though it touches on themes of death, does not embody the hopeful trajectory of his other wartime songs, and Debussy’s Études and his Sonata for ’Cello and Piano—both of which he composed in 1915—exhibit far more stylistic and affective variance, in addition to lacking the strictly patriotic and optimistic narratives found in most of the pieces he wrote in the interest of mournful wartime propaganda.140 This suggests that composers may have

140 For more on Debussy’s wartime compositions, see Marianne Wheeldon’s analysis in Debussy’s Late Style; Glenn Watkins’s discussion of these and other pieces in Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press); as well as my analysis in chapter 3 of my dissertation—“Grieving Through Music in Interwar France.” Music Making as Emotional Care 81 felt compelled to compose and perform wartime mourning in particular ways in their compositions, due in large part to early twentieth-century and wartime conventions concerning the minimization of emotional expression within French culture. Wartime French modernist composers’ tendencies to compose more non- propagandistic pieces during the war than propagandistic ones can be read in numerous ways. We might understand musical propaganda within art music idioms as the result of composers “paying their dues”—i.e., through composing wartime narratives—in a wartime context in which music composition was considered sacrilegious and offensive by many of France’s most notable and powerful composers, including André Gédalge, Gustave Charpentier, and Camille Saint-Saëns.141 The latter composer was quoted inLe Temps in October 1915 as saying, “I’ve refused to write the ballet that I had planned to give at Monte-Carlo. I cannot sing when France suffers.”142 Although this was clearly not the perspective of all French composers—especially not of those who were serving on the front lines—Saint-Saëns’s statement suggests that the act of composing during the war was a controversial and political one, and thus one that required a fair amount of public and private negotiation, some of which might have entailed writing a number of pieces that supported the war effort in order to write more “neutral” music. When it came to addressing the grief, trauma, depression, and loneliness of living at the front, the optimistic narratives of pieces might have mattered less from a compositional standpoint than the affective dimensions of engaging in the act of composition. Accounts from the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, as well as from musicians’ letters, diaries, and published articles, demonstrate how much musical composition was appreciated as a significant medium and practice for helping to soothe soldiers and civilians who had experienced violence. Numerous musicians wrote to the Comité Franco-Américain about how composition was an important activity for them, even if they found it difficult to devote the time to it that they would have wished. Myriad musicians composed music at this time for specific groups of people—perhaps helping them to con- struct a specific sense of community—or for particular occasions. A musician- soldier named Becker, for instance, wrote that he had written a “petite valse” with “curious instrumentation” for the specific musicians in his regiment, while Schindler and Marcel Lattès wrote music to honor and mourn fallen fellow

141 This perspective—of music as a “frivolous” activity in wartime—comes through in Gaston Carraud’s article, “Pour la musique française: Les Théâtres et les concerts pendant la guerre,” Le Courrier musical, February 15, 1917): 73–78; 73. 142 Camille Saint-Saëns, quoted in “Théâtrés. La Musique pendant la guerre,” Le Temps, October 19, 1915: “J’ai refusé d’écrire le ballet que je m’étais engagé à donner à Monte-Carlo. Je ne puis chanter lorsque la France souffre.” 82 Resonant Recoveries soldiers.143 Other musician-soldiers like Philippe Gaubert composed pieces in which they tried to transduce the sounds of war into concert music, while still others merely aimed to keep up with their composition portfolios.144 The letters published in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire illustrate that composers wrote a wide array of compositions, and that the types of compositions, especially whether or not they were directly political, was but a secondary concern for these men. Rather, for many musician-soldiers, the act of composing seems to have brought them solace and a sense of community in otherwise challenging environments. Composers may have been limited in their abilities to utilize musical composition as a therapeutic technology for coping with trauma due to the particular social, emotional, and musical contexts of interwar France. To be clear, I am not suggesting that music exhibiting clear links to wartime or postwar politics or public mourning did not function as therapeutic technologies of consolation. Many scholars who address interwar French music and its relationship to World War I have tended to understand French musical discourse—and especially that of modernist composers—through the lens of intellectualism, nationalism, identity, and politics. In addition, musicologists have often understood much of this music as an expression of composers’ thoughts, feelings, and ideologies in ways that may have indeed been useful to them in processing their emotionally difficult—and perhaps traumatizing—circumstances during and after the war.145 However, throughout this book, I suggest a new way of understanding interwar French music of this period by showing how music making became part of a rich, multifaceted system for emotional self-care in ways that often went unspoken. As

143 Edouard Flament to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 10, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 8, 10: “Je termine un petit recueil intitulé ‘Marche des Zouaves pendant la guerre’; un Prélude et Fugue sur un thème de FELITSOHA; un air varié pour deux bassons et des exercices technique pour le même instrument”; Lucien Niverd to the Comité Franco-Américain, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 4 (November 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 30: “J’ai terminé une sonate pour violoncelle et piano dernièrement et je travaille actuellement à une quintette pour deux violons, alto, violoncelle et piano dont j’ai déjà écrit le premier morceau”; Ausseill to the Comité Franco- Américain, letter dated May 1917, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 9 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 1: “Les renseignements que je pourrais vous donner sur mon propre compte ne seraient guère intéressants. Entre mes heures de service, j’ai quelquefois sacrifié au besoin d’écrire. Jusqu’ici, une ouverture et deux suites d’orchestre sont à peu près mes seuls produits de guerre.” 144 Philippe Gaubert to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated December 11, 1915, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 11: “J’ai fait une poème symphonique dans lequel j’ai traduit mes impressions de guerre.” 145 See, for instance, Jane Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914– 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Regina Sweeney, Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Watkins, Proof Through the Night; Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2013). Music Making as Emotional Care 83 a result, I am less concerned with text-music relationships, pieces that are overtly political, and music that was designed for public mourning. Instead, I try to get at the ways in which French musicians may have understood music making as a socially, emotionally, physically, and psychologically significant technology for coping with trauma during and after the war. In some instances, the ways in which musicians active during World War I chose to utilize music align with Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the real and the symbolic. In moments when written, spoken, and narrative—simply put, symbolic—forms of expression and recovery failed to work for them, musicians turned to music as the stuff of the real. In considering the real, I draw on Naomi Cumming’s interpretation of Lacan in musical terms in her powerful analysis of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Cumming theorizes the musical real after Julia Kristeva, understanding it as that which not only “allows more explicitly for non- linguistic modes of signification,” but also, more specifically, focuses on rhythm and bodily drives, which Kristeva sees as linked to what she terms the “maternal chora”—the developmental stage in which a child is still in the womb.146 When thinking about the different positions a listener might embody in relation to Different Trains, and thus the different ways that the music might function for listeners, Cumming clarifies that these “are not, of course, states that need nec- essarily be isolated in an individual listener, but possible attitudes that could be taken up by the same listener at different times.”147 I would assert that something similar was happening for World War I–era musicians: while at certain times, they might have been engaged in listening patriotically to the symbolism of the words and music of a particular piece, at other moments, they were likely engaging in a less narratively- or symbolically-oriented, and more emotionally- or corporeally-engaged, manner. These modes of musical engagement would also not have been mutually exclusive; as Anahid Kassabian has pointed out, listening occurs in different ways in different moments, allowing people to experience and recognize different affects and different aspects of themselves in what she has termed “distributed subjectivity.”148 Put another way, perhaps musicians—at various moments—sought a bodily comfort long-since lost. Longing to feel better, to feel pleasure, to feel more like themselves in an environment so far removed from what they had experienced prior to August 1914, musicians found in music making access to more desirable corporeal and affective states.

146 Naomi Cumming, “The Horrors of Identification: Reich’s ‘Different Trains,’” Perspectives of New Music 35, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 129–152; 135. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 92; cited in Cumming, “The Horrors of Identification,” 135. 147 Cumming, “The Horrors of Identification,” 135. 148 Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 84 Resonant Recoveries

Music Making as Care in Wartime

Musicians’ accounts of wartime music making in their published articles, memoirs, war diaries, and letters show that music making was a vital aspect of military life for musicians and non-musicians alike, offering crucial spaces for the expression of national and personal identity, as well as for the negotiation and management of a wide range of emotions. Many of the autobiographical narratives that emerged from World War I underline the importance of music in combatants’ lives. Although these narratives often present somewhat roman- ticized accounts of music making, they nevertheless shed light on the significant emotional and social roles that music making played during the war. Before delving into the care-oriented potentialities of music making, it is important to note that musicians in the French military during World War I served myriad roles, some of which kept them a good distance from the potential trauma of the front lines. In addition to serving as musiciens-brancardiers , musicians frequently worked as nurses, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, typists, radio operators, and cyclists, all of which, while not without danger, were positions that did not involve daily trench warfare. Ravel, for instance, was a truck driver who rarely saw front-line action as “ordinary” French soldiers—otherwise known as poilus—would have. This was likely due to his stature as one of the most prominent composers in France in the early twentieth century. Similarly, the pianist Alfred Cortot, after being made head of the artistic propaganda unit of the Maison de Presse in 1916, was able to move musicians like Pierre Monteux from military positions into roles as performers of wartime French propaganda abroad.149 In addition, some musicians were lucky enough to have the majority of their work centered around musical activities, for instance those who worked as band and orchestra leaders, organizing concerts and other entertainments for soldiers and officers. Thus for many musicians, musical skills and the military occupations these skills permitted them to attain had the potential to help soldiers manage trauma by altogether or partially avoiding exposure to poten- tially traumatizing events, situations, and sensory experiences. Despite the negativity that was often directed toward musician-soldiers, as discussed earlier in this chapter, musicians offered important opportunities for diversion and entertainment that helped non-musician soldiers forget the traumatic realities of their environments. In Vuillemin’s account of music-making during the war for Le Courrier musical (cited earlier), which aims in part to make the Parisian readership of the journal see the benefits of military music,

149 François Anselmini, “Alfred Cortot et la mobilisation des musiciens français pendant la Première Guerre mondiale,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 118 (April–June 2013): 147–157; 155. See also Moore, Performing Propaganda, 50–55. Music Making as Emotional Care 85 he highlights that when military musicians performed, their music covered up the sounds of warfare and provided poilus with a momentary sense of peace, an opportunity to forget “in a glorious instant the misery of days, and the horror of nights.”150 Musicians frequently performed public concerts for a range of listeners, including fellow soldiers, officers, hospital patients and staff, and civilians. These performances offered significant moments of musical self-care for listeners, while also providing musicians with opportunities to recognize the beneficial impact their music making had on others. In her discussion of concerts at the front, Leterrier connects concerts to the morale of troops, asserting that, “in the violence of the war, music acts as an antidote.”151 In his Prix Goncourt–winning novel La Flamme au poing, Malherbe confirms Leterrier’s assertion in his description of a chamber music concert performed by musician-soldiers that led to “an immense surge of sweetness submerg[ing] the souls” of the men, permitting “the best and the healthy to arise again in us.”152 Leleu similarly recounts that “during our trip to Dampierre, our Music unit gave concerts, one each day. They were followed with lots of interest, more by our Poilus than by civilians, especially since distractions [like this] were rare.”153 Sometimes these concerts were organized specifically in order to raise money for the wounded, as well as for their entertainment. The organist Caffot mentions having “organized several -ar tistic matinées for the benefit of the wounded” that “exceeded their hopes thanks to all the artists who lent us their performances for our program.”154

150 Vuillemin, “Au canon,” 248–250; 250: “d’oublier dans un instant de gloire la misère des jours et l’horreur des nuits.” 151 Sophie-Anne Leterrier, “Les Concerts au front,” in Entendre la guerre: Sons, musiques et silence en 14–18 , ed. Florence Gétreau (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 76–87; 82: “Dans la violence de la guerre, la musique agit aussi comme antidote.” 152 Malherbe, La Flamme au poing, 126–127: “un flot immense de douceur a submergé les âmes”; “ce que nous avons de meilleur et de sain remonte en nous.” 153 Leleu, Flandres aux Vosges, 72: “Durant notre séjour à Dampierre, notre Musique donna des concerts, un chaque jour. Ils étaient suivis avec beaucoup d’intérêt tant par nos Poilus que par les civils, d’autant plus que les distractions étaient rares.” 154 J. Caffot to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated September 13, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 4 (November 27, 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 6: “Nous avons déjà organisé plusieurs matinées artistiques au profit des blessés. Le résultat a toujours dépassé nos espérances grâce à tous les artistes qui nous ont prêté leur concours à titre gracieux.” The programs for these concerts often showcased an array of music, and the ways in which soldiers talked about these concerts indicates that, while such concerts were designed to help and distract the wounded, they were also important sites for (re)establishing senses of self for the musicians who participated in them. Pierre Tesson writes that, after a period of dangerous work as abrancardier, his fellow musicians were eventually permitted to get back to work in preparing “concerts des- tined to distract the combatants and to contribute to their excellent morale, concerts that we give during periods of rest.” He describes these concerts as “very interesting” with “extremely appealing” programs, “where the names of Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Reyer, Delibes, Charpentier or Büsser re- side next to those of the great classics.” He talks about his excitement in having the opportunity to play string instruments when they were able to find them, and the joy he experienced in “directing a 86 Resonant Recoveries

Musicians’ accounts of performing in hospitals provide additional insight into how music was understood as a means for helping soldiers to cope with physical and psychological trauma. Edouard Mignan wrote about organizing “recreational performances” for the hospitals in his region that would “make our poor wounded soldiers forget a bit their suffering,” as well as holding “ver- itable concerts where the generosity of a large public had the occasion to man- ifest for the benefit of the hospital system.”155 Fernand Halphen recounted that his music regiment gave “concerts in the public spaces of military quarters and in the ambulances, nearly always with the accompaniment of a cannon, in which the sonority ends up becoming indispensable.”156 About a year later, Halphen wrote that they had been “making lots of music here” at “the hospitals that have had for some time a large number of wounded soldiers in need of distraction.”157 Julien Porret wrote in March 1917 that, “it is easy for us here to organize concerts of all sorts with which we distract the numerous wounded soldiers recovering in our hospitals.”158 And Félix Taillardat told the Gazette’s readers that each Sunday he

sings at the chapel and at the hospital for the wounded, and in numerous churches in Bordeaux and in the suburbs. This is to say that I am always busy and hurried by rehearsals and traveling. In addition, there are 800 to 900

read-through with the whole symphony orchestra” of his recently composed Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra. See Pierre Tesson to Nadia and Lili Boulanger, letter dated January 29, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 22– 23: “les concerts destinés à distraire les combattants et à contribuer à leur excellent moral, concerts que nous donnons pendant les périodes de repos—Fort intéressants ces concerts et très suivis—notre chef, excellent musicien, compose des programmes extrêmement attachants où les noms de Saint- Saëns, Massenet, Reyer, Delibes, Charpentier ou Büsser voisinent avec ceux des grands classiques”; “diriger une lecture à l’orchestre symphonique complet.”

155 Edouard Mignan to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 (1915), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 19: “Séances récréatives destinées à faire oublier à nos pauvres blessés un peu de leur souffrance mais aussi et le plus souvent, véritables concerts où la générosité d’un public nombreux eut l’occasion de se manifester en faveur des formations sanitaires.” 156 Fernand Halphen to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 11, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 12: “donnant concerts sur les places publiques des cantonnements et dans les ambulances presque toujours avec accompagnement de canon, dont la sonorité finit par devenir indispensable.” 157 Fernand Halphen to Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 2, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 29: “Nous y faisons beaucoup de musique. Les hôpitaux qui ont eu pendant quelque temps un grand nombre de blessés avaient besoin de les distraire.” 158 Julien Porret to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 16, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 29: “Il nous est facile ici d’organiser des concerts de toutes sortes avec lesquels nous distrayons les nombreux blessés soignés dans nos hôpitaux.” Music Making as Emotional Care 87

wounded at the hospital, the personnel being limited, there is a lot to do as you can imagine.159

Although these accounts do not indicate precise connections between medicine and music, the importance of these events should not be underestimated. The frequency with which performances took place, as well as the joy and support that they appear to have evoked in hospitalized soldiers and medical staff alike, suggest that these concerts offered emotionally and physically soothing spaces for listeners and performers. One of the most significant roles ofmusiciens- brancardiers during the war in- volved performing music at masses, funerals, and other religious ceremonies.160 Maurice Dide described how music enlivened the mood in a village church during the war years:

The small church was crowded the first Sunday, the musical mass had great -al lure. The strong tenor voice of abrancardier du Gard filled the nave melodi- ously, a violin vibrated the offertory while the harmonium under the fingers of a very artist-like médecin auxiliaire, attained the volume of a cathedral organ.161

Charles Quef poignantly articulated in the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire that, although his daily work as a corporal fourrier was “somewhat tiring and ab- sorbing,” he “was able nevertheless on Sundays to play the organ at the church, [the] only nice moment in my military existence.”162 These accounts indicate that making music in religious and church settings offered emotionally important experiences for performers as well as for listeners. French prisoners of war made music in the camps where they were interned, often in order to cope with the containment, uncertainty, and boredom that

159 Taillardat to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 17, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 38: “Les dimanches, je chante à la chapelle et l’hôpital pour les blessés, et dans diverses églises de Bordeaux et de la banlieue. C’est vous dire que je suis toujours occupé et pressé par les répétitions et les déplacements. De plus, il y a de 800 à 900 blessés à l’hôpital, le personnel étant restreint, il y a fort à faire comme vous pouvez l’imaginer.” 160 See Leleu, Des Flandres aux Vosges, 95, 103. Retailleau also talks about this repeatedly in his journal, although he would seem to be more of a frequent participant—he talks about “singing” in the masses. See Ratailleau, Musicien-brancardier , 107, 115, 129. 161 Dide, Ceux qui combattent, 38: “La petite église fut bondée le premier dimanche, la messe en musique avait grande allure. La voix de fort ténor d’un brancardier du Gard remplit la nef mélodieusement, un violon vibra l’offertoire tandis que l’harmonium sous les doigts d’un médecin auxiliaire très artiste, atteignit une ampleur d’orgue de cathédrale.” 162 Charles Quef to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 (1915), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 24: “Quant à moi, j’occupe ici un emploi assez fatiguant et absorbant, non sans responsabilités; je puis néanmoins le dimanche, jouer de l’orgue à l’église, seul moment agréable de mon existence militaire.” 88 Resonant Recoveries accompanied being kept prisoner. When Madame Pierre Camus’s husband received a flute sent to him by the Comité Franco-Américain, Madame Camus relayed that Pierre wrote that, “Nothing! . . . could give him more pleasure!” Madame Camus expressed gratitude to the Comité for giving him “this distraction, which will help him to endure a little these very difficult moments.”163 Pierre Monier’s mother similarly recounted that her son “has been able to put together a small orchestra” that is “for him a great diversion from his chagrin.”164 Georges Drouet, who was a prisoner of war in Hameln, underlined the importance of music making in asking the Comité Franco-Américain to send him orchestral scores. He clarified that “we have easily here the German classics of the repertoire,” and that he had attempted to contact French editors, though he had only received affirmative responses from Durand and Joubert. He added that other editors “don’t consider music as a good thing for those in exile,” and signed off by noting “how wrong they are.”165 Many musicians had close, intimate, and affirmative relationships with music making, specific pieces, or their musical instruments. Georges Duhamel described his flute as “a very nurturing friend” that “never left [him],” whether when “marching on ravaged roads” or while on permission. For Duhamel, “calm returned” when his flute “was between [his] fingers.”166 Similarly, a soldier named Potavin wrote about a piano found in one place of shelter that he called “a good companion for me” with whom he “spent agreeable evenings.”167 In a letter to the Comité Franco-Américain, Henri Bouillard spoke of having received a collection of Bach chorales, which he described “as an old friend lost for a long time that one finds again after a long absence.”168 For still other musicians who may not have had access to instruments or to people with whom they could make

163 Madame Pierre Camus to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated September 12, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 4 (27 November 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 45 “Rien! Me dit-il, ne pouvait lui faire plus plaisir!”; “Je suis bien heureuse moi-même qu’il ait pu avoir cette distraction, cela lui aidera à supporter un peu ces si durs moments.” 164 Madame Monier to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 14, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 60: “Il me dit avoir pu reformer un petit orchestre [ . . . ] c’est pour lui une grande diversion à son chagrin.” 165 Georges Drouet to Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated October 13, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 5 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 39: “Nous avons ici facilement la musique classique”; “Les autres ne considèrent pas la musique comme pouvant être d’un bon secours pour des exiles, combien ils se trompent.” 166 Duhamel, La Musique consolatrice, 73: “ma flûte fut une amie très bienfaisante”; “Le calme revenu, elle était entre mes doigts, non point toujours docile à toutes mes prières, mais généreuse malgré tout et, quand j’en avais besoin, pitoyable aux pires tristesses.” 167 A. Potavin to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated February 4, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 42: “c’est un bon compagnon pour moi et avec lui je passe d’agréables soirs, de plus, personne ici ne s’en plaint.” 168 Henri Bouillard to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 26, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 4: “Ces œuvres sont pour moi comme un ancien ami perdu depuis longtemps et qu’on retrouve après une longue absence.” Music Making as Emotional Care 89 music, private musical activities were important for creating an imagined sense of community with others. Aimable Valin, for example, complained about not having people with whom to discuss or play music, noting that in this case prac- ticing his flute allowed him to “recreate comrades playing chamber music,” in addition to “amusing [him]self in sketching a little harmony and counterpoint” in his downtime.169 Joseph Boulnois even told the Comité Franco-Américain that he practiced “à la table” and “has given [him]self the illusion of civilian life in creating a tiny grand piano out of cardboard.”170 Close relationships with musical instruments and scores were especially important for soldiers who felt isolated in their new environments and were perhaps struggling to communicate their experiences and emotions to other soldiers in their regiments. Musician-soldiers emphasized that organized music making in their downtime was an emotionally important activity that helped them to build and maintain a sense of community, remember their past lives as musicians, and provide forms of pleasure that assisted them in coping with the particular brand of trench warfare depression termed cafard. In his autobiographical war novel Nous autres à Vauquois, André Pézard underlined singing, whistling, and other forms of casual music making as helping him to connect with his comrades, and to remember them after their deaths.171 Themusicien- brancardier Roger Pénau recounted being given a baritone saxophone by his colonel in order to “make music in our times of rest”; he noted that their repertoire included the “dear Marseillaise” as well as “a few concert pieces, Rameau, Berlioz, Palestrina, and even better, Beethoven and Mozart.”172 Pierre Tesson, who also served as a musicien-brancardier , talked about how on Sundays, “when we are resting, the médecin divisionnaire gathers in his ambulance the musicians in the area, and, on a beautiful Pleyel [piano], we have a musical blow-out—it’s here that I’ve had the pleasure to meet Cloëz, who I knew in my accompaniment class [at the Conservatoire], and several others.”173 Thebrancardier Jules Bompoix wrote in

169 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’en profite pour travailler un peu et récréer les camarades de chambre. À mes heures de loisir, je m’amuse également à griffonner un peu d’harmonie et de contrepoint.” 170 Joseph Boulnois to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 8, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1), No. 8 [1917]: 5: “je travaille à la table et je me suis donné l’illusion de la vie civile en me confectionnant un minuscule piano à queue en carton.” 171 André Pézard, Nous autres à Vauquois, 1915–1916 (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992). For more information on music in Pézard’s novel, see Rogers, “Ties That Bind,” 415–443. 172 Roger Penau to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 (1915), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 21–22: “Tout en faisant de la musique à nos heures de repos”; “l’inévitable et chère Marseillaise . . . quelques morceaux de concert, du Rameau, du Berlioz, du Palestrina, et mieux du Beethoven et du Mozart.” 173 Pierre Tesson to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 29, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 2 (February 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 22– 23: “Le dimanche, lorsque nous étions au repos, le médecin divisionnaire réunissait à son ambulance 90 Resonant Recoveries the fall of 1916 about occasionally having the opportunity to join Jean Vaugeois, Maurice Sénard, and Fourestier in playing “the quartet of Fauré, the trio of Saint- Saëns . . . or string quartets—Beethoven, Debussy, Chausson, Borodin, and other good works that fill the inside of the ambulance.”174 Louis Marzo told a similar story when he related that “we have been able to get twenty musicians together and every week we have the pleasure to be able to spend a few good hours with our dear resting comrades.”175 J. H. Debrun wrote that in playing music with others, “memories . . . arrive in masses: you remember someone in such and such a role, and the orchestra in this passage . . . etc.” Even so, Debrun added, these performances were “insufficient for us, professional musicians.”176 Chantôme echoed Debrun in his discussion of recent music making: “from time to time I’m lucky to find a pianist or an organist in the neighboring regiments; I enjoy then re-immersing myself in the delights of music. Alas! This happens too rarely, [and] I am reduced to play with my comrade Chedel some modest duos for two violins. This is very little, but what do you want?”177 But, as Combelle made clear, even these all-too-rare opportunities for music making helped soldiers deal with the difficulties of their daily lives: “Here, for the last two months, we have had the luck to remain a little bit behind the front lines, which has permitted us to make a bit of music. This soothes us and makes disappear momentarily this terribleca - fard, which is the greatest enemy of the poilu.” 178

les musiciens d’alentour, et sur un beau Pleyel, nous faisions des bombances musicales de choix— C’est là que j’ai eu le plaisir de retrouver Cloëz, que j’avais connu en classe d’accompagnement, et quelques autres.”

174 Jules Bompoix to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated September 8, 1916, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 4 (November 27, 1916), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 4: “d’exécuter le quatuor de Fauré, trio de Saint-Saëns [ . . . ] ou des quators [sic] à cordes: Beethoven, Debussy, Chausson, Borodine et d’autres bonnes œuvres qui bourrent la caisse de la voiture d’ambulance.” 175 Louis Marzo to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated October 10, [1916], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 5 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 23: “nous avons pu nous réunir une vingtaine de musiciens et toutes les semaines nous avons le plaisir de pouvoir faire passer quelques bonnes heures à nos chers camarades au repos.” 176 J. H. Debrun to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated January 9, [1917], published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 6 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 12–13: “Ah! Voici les souvenirs qui arrivent en foule: te rappelles-tu un tel dans tel rôle, et l’orchestre à ce passage . . . etc”; “ces exécutions sont insuffisantes pour nous, musiciens professionnels.” 177 Chantôme to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 1, 1917, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 9 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 10: “de temps en temps j’ai la chance de trouver un pianiste ou un organiste dans les régiments voisins; j’en profite alors pour me retremper dans les délices de la musique. Hélas! Cela se produit trop rarement, j’en suis réduit à jouer avec mon camarade Chedel de modestes duos pour deux violons. C’est bien peu, mais que voulez-vous?” 178 Combelle to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 24, 1917, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 9 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 11: “Ici, depuis deux mois, nous avons eu la chance de rester un peu à l’arrière, ce qui nous a permis de faire un peu de musique. Cela nous délasse et nous fait disparaître momentanément ce terrible cafard, qui est le plus grand ennemi du poilu.” Music Making as Emotional Care 91

Many musician-soldiers underlined the importance of making music with instruments found during military service in coming to terms with their environments. Duhamel recounted that “one of our companions, who knew how to play the piano, discovered on Avenue de la Gare, a small bourgeois home where some brave people lived, two older married people who possessed an upright piano . . . the instrument, long out of tune, groaned and vibrated to the noise of the artillery. We were able, though not without effort, to give it a soul again.”179 In this instance of anthropomorphization, musicians brought “a soul” to an instrument that had thus far only had the opportunity to react in relation to the sounds of war. Leleu wrote about coming across a partially destroyed church with an intact organ, and how the sound of this organ among the ruins of the church was moving in part because of the difference between this sound and the sound he was accustomed to hearing from an organ:

The music resonated strangely in this gaping ruin in which the demolished ceiling littered the nave with enormous chunks of debris. The walls were equally punctuated with awful mutilations, [and] there was none of the solemn resonance, so captivating, so profound, of churches and cathedrals. The sounds lacked range and strength, and disappeared, meager and thin, in the immense gaping openings. This evanescence, of tragic beauty, had something infinitely gripping, infinitely sad and moving about it.180

For many soldier-musicians, finding instruments in their wartime surroundings offered unexpected opportunities for considering music and sound in relation to their environments, which bore traces of the war’s trauma. These instruments engendered emotionally meaningful moments that may have helped musician- soldiers cope with trauma that they had encountered by offering opportunities for reflection regarding how they and the world around them had been changed by the war’s violence.

179 Duhamel, La Musique consolatrice, 74: “L’un de nos compagnons, qui savait jouer du piano, avait fini par découvrir, dans l’avenue de la Gare, une petite maison bourgeoise où résidaient de braves gens, deux vieux époux qui possédaient un piano droit, honnête meuble de province avec housse à pompons et cache-pot de faïence. L’instrument, désaccordé depuis longtemps, gémissait et vibrait au bruit de la canonnade. Nous parvînmes, non sans effort, à lui redonner une âme.” 180 Leleu, Des Flandres aux Vosges, 115: “La musique résonnait étrangement dans cette ruine béante dont le plafond effondré jonchait la nef de ses énormes débris. Les murs avaient également subi d’affreuses mutilations, il n’y avait point cette plénitude de solennelle résonance, si prenante, si profonde, des églises et des cathédrales. Les sons manquaient de portée et de puissance et s’évanouissaient, maigres et fluets, par les immenses ouvertures béantes. Cette évanescence, de tragique beauté, avait quelque chose d’infiniment saisissant, d’infiniment triste et émouvant.” 92 Resonant Recoveries

Privileging Consolation amidst Wartime Musical Politics

Music making—as a set of practices that brought people together, allowed them to express their fears and sorrows, and offered them sonorous escapes from the daily violence or boredom they encountered—held consolatory potential for French musicians during World War I. Soldier-musicians’ preferences for listening to and performing the compositions of Richard Wagner—arguably the most contentious of Austro-German composers whose music was nearly banned by French composers on the home front—provides one especially striking example of how music’s abilities to make people feel better superseded long-standing, divisive political concerns. In the remainder of this chapter I demonstrate through the example of musician-soldiers’ wartime reception of Wagner’s music that for many French musicians, the consolatory potential of this composer’s music lay in its ability to take soldiers even momentarily out of their current wartime situations, helping them to feel physically better, and to remember what their lives used to be like before the war. Pointing out the ways that musician-soldiers responded positively to Wagner’s politically charged music affirms Moore’s assertion inPerforming Propaganda that through its mixed though largely negative reception, Camille Saint-Saëns’s wartime anti-German and anti-Wagner tract, Germanophilie, proved the existence of a significant divide between theory and practice when it came to musical propaganda.181 Although many, if not all, French musicians fighting in the war would have been familiar with the negative stance many musicians took toward performing the works of Austro-German composers, for at least some, the nationality of the composer of the music they enjoyed most seemed to matter very little.182 This more open-minded perspective on composers’ nationalities differed substantially from the concerns of many of the older, more established composers, critics, and musicians who lived on the home front during the war. In March 1916, Gustave Charpentier, Théodore Dubois, Vincent d’Indy, Xavier Leroux, and Camille Saint-Saëns established the Ligue pour la défense de la musique française, the aims of which were to increase the performance

181 Moore, Performing Propaganda, 96. 182 For an overview of and more information on Saint-Saëns’s perspectives on Wagner and other Austro-German composers, see Moore, Performing Propaganda, especially chapter 3, in which Moore makes the important point that Saint-Saëns’s—and many anti-Wagnerian writers’— arguments demonstrate (and were understood contemporaneously as showing) a division between theory and practice that was largely based on generational differences in understanding the French musical scene and Wagner’s role within it (pp. 65–96). See also Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Marion Schmid, “À bas Wagner!: The French Press Campaign against Wagner during World War I,” inFrench Music, Culture, and National Identity, ed. Barbara Kelly (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2008), 77–94; Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 19–85. Music Making as Emotional Care 93 and proliferation of French music in and beyond France, in part by banning performances of contemporary Austro-German music, and performances by Austro-German conductors and performers within France.183 Rather famously, Ravel, Koechlin, Roland-Manuel, and a handful of other composers refused to be part of the Ligue, citing the danger of “systematically ignoring the productions of their foreign colleagues.”184 Many nationalist French composers, especially of the older generation that had lived through the Franco-Prussian conflict, conceived of Wagner as one of the more offensive Austro-German composers of the last fifty years, in part because of his own staunch German nationalism, which many understood as contributing to the Franco-Prussian war and the current conflict, but also because he was the favorite composer of the current German Kaiser. From the fin de siècle onward, many French musicians had been complaining about what they considered Wagner’s overwhelmingly negative and “invasive” influence on French music.185 And yet, during the war, numerous French musicians, when seeking consolation, turned to Wagner’s music. Maréchal, for instance, indicated in his war diary that he and many French musician-soldiers continued to perform and listen to Wagner’s music throughout the war. During his service with the infantry, Maréchal wrote about hearing Wagner’s music played on a phono- graph in October 1915, and about being present at a concert in January 1916 where the Conservatoire-trained tenor-turned-soldier Taillardat sang excerpts from Wagner operas.186 In 1915, the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire published Fourestier’s statement that when he came across a piano, he played “the most [music] from Wagner, naturally”—a perspective that drew fire from Conservatoire director Théodore Dubois, who wrote to Nadia Boulanger to criticize Fourestier’s statement as “absolutely deplorable,” especially during the

183 For more on the Ligue and wartime musical politics, see Michel Duchesneau, “La Musique française pendant la Guerre 1914–1918: Autour de la tentative de fusion de la Société Nationale de Musique et de la Société Musicale Indépendante,” Revue de musicologie, T. 82e, No. 1er (1996): 123– 153; 128–30. 184 Ibid., 130. 185 Moore makes this point about Wagner’s “invasiveness” being a rhetorical means for composers like Saint-Saëns to relate the composer’s influence to the war in Performing Propaganda (see chapter 3). Addressing in detail the complex reception of Wagner in France in the early twentieth century falls outside the scope of this chapter and this study. However, numerous scholars have addressed this more fully. See Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept Through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988); Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual; Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Huebner, French Opera at the Fin-De-Siècle; Puri, “The Passion of the Passacaille,” 285–318; Schmid, “À bas Wagner,” 77–94. 186 Maurice Maréchal, entries dated [October 14, 1915] and January 21, 1916, in “Carnets de guerre,” 264, 276–277. 94 Resonant Recoveries war.187 But Fourestier was not alone in his preference for Wagner. In addition to the large number of music critics who wrote articles in support of Wagner (many of whom were also soldiers), Charles Koechlin wrote a letter to Nadia and Lili Boulanger in which he responded to Fourestier’s statement with “Bravo!”188 Georges Dandelot wrote about going to massage sessions in the hospital in which his massage therapist—a music enthusiast—launched into “lengthy discussions of Wagner.”189 Composer Albert Roussel confessed to his friend Henry Woollett in 1916 that he would “give much to listen again from time to time to a Beethoven symphony or the Walkyrie or Tristan.” 190 French generals were also among those who enjoyed listening to Wagner’s music during the war. Georgie Durosoir recounts that “general Mangin, himself an amateur pianist, played a major role in protecting his musicians; he loved to hear [André] Caplet play for him reductions and orchestral scores, by Wagner in particular.”191 Musicians’ responses to Nadia Boulanger’s questionnaire to the Gazette des classes du Conservatoire’s readership in May 1918 about the place German composers such as Wagner and Brahms should hold in the performed concert repertoire after the war demonstrate the overwhelming support for continuing to perform Wagner’s music among soldier-musicians. The vast majority of musicians responded that both composers’ music should continue to be performed, although many also felt that—in an attempt to “correct the abuses” of the pre-war period—French composers should take priority over Austro- German ones, even if composers of both nationalities appeared on French concert programs.192 More conservative respondents felt that it was necessary to

187 Louis Fourestier to the Comité Franco-Américain, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 1 (1915), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 12: “le plus de Wagner possible.” Théodore Dubois to Nadia Boulanger, January 8, 1916, BnF, Mus., Fonds Gazette des Classes du Conservatoire, Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (7), letter 22. 188 Jean Marnold, Le Cas Wagner: La Musique pendant la guerre, 5th ed. [originally published as a series of articles in Mercure de France in 1915–1916] (Paris: Brossard, 1917); Émile Vuillermoz, “Stratégie musicale,” La Grande revue (March 1916): 288; Michel Brenet, “La Musique allemande en France,” Le Correspondant (May 25, 1915): 659–684; Louis Laloy, “Le Cas Wagner,” Théâtres et concerts (February 1916): 2; Charles Koechlin to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated February 2, 1916, BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (7). See also Mastin, “Naissance d’un chef,” 80, n. 28. 189 Georges Dandelot to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated March 4, 1917, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 7 [1917], BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 9–10: “de grandes dissertations sur Wagner.” 190 Albert Roussel to Henry Woollett, February 7, 1916, published and translated in Moore, Performing Propaganda, 92. 191 Durosoir, “Faire œuvre de musique en guerre,” 97–120; 107: “Le général Mangin, lui-même pianiste amateur, joua un rôle majeur en protégeant ses musiciens; il aimait entendre Caplet lui jouer des réductions de partitions d’orchestre, de Wagner en particulier.” 192 Out of the 70 musicians who responded to Boulanger’s questionnaire, 52 answered yes to the question of whether Brahms and Wagner should hold a place in concert halls after the war; by con- trast, 8 musicians answered this question in the negative, and 10 musicians were undecided or did not provide an answer to this question. See Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1). Music Making as Emotional Care 95

“leave tears to dry” before placing Wagner’s compositions on French concert programs once more.193 Many of the questionnaire’s respondents wrote to Boulanger about the consolatory powers of Wagner’s music in the midst of war. Jean Déré explained,

Right now I live in the middle of the woods and sometimes, during walks where, alone, I gather my thoughts, I sense rising in myself the fragrances of Tristan, I recall the emotions I felt, the enthusiasm that transported me into a world more beautiful than ours, and then I have the impression that the great minds elevating themselves up to such regions should be venerated by the entirety of humanity. Let’s be fair since we fight for justice and think that, once duty is ac- complished, art will be one of the great comforts after the war.194

Similarly, Félix Taillardat drew on the comfort he had experienced in listening to and playing Tristan und Isolde in order to support the continued inclusion of Wagner on postwar concert programs:

I assure you that for my part, after having received the heavy gunfire of the Ludendorff offensive or others from Arnim, I was often thrilled, in arriving on rest, to find a piano, and, with my friend Fourestier as accompanist, to go through Tristan from one end to the other, or to hear the funeral march from Götterdämmerung—and I would wish for the orchestra!195

Jacques Pessard wrote of how silly he felt it was that people who may have loved to listen to or play Wagner’s, Beethoven’s, or Brahms’s works before the war would

193 Pierre Vizentini to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 18, 1918, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 47: “il faut laisser sécher les larmes.” J. H. Debrun suggests a similar waiting period in a letter to Nadia Boulanger, dated May 22, 1918, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 77–78. 194 Jean Déré to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 11 or 17 1918, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos 88 (1): 59–60: “En ce moment je vis au milieu des bois et parfois, au cours de promenades où, seul, je me recueille, je sens moter [sic] en moi les effluves de Tristan, je me rappelle les émotions ressenties, les enthousiasmes qui me transportaient dans un monde plus beau que le nôtre, et alors j’ai l’impression que ses cerveaux s’élevant jusqu’à de telles régions doivent être vénérés par l’humanité tout entière. Soyons justes puisque nous combattons pour la justice et pensons que, à côté du devoir accompli, l’art sera un des grands réconforts de l’après guerre.” 195 Félix Taillardat to Nadia Boulanger, undated letter, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 44: “Je vous assure que pour ma part, après avoir reçu les marmites des Ludendorff ou autres von Arnim, je fus souvent ravi, en arrivant au repos, de trouver un piano, et, avec mon ami Fourestier comme accompagnateur, de parcourir Tristan d’un bout à l’autre ou d’entendre la marche funèbre du Crépuscule—et je souhaitais l’orchestre!” 96 Resonant Recoveries choose, after the war, “to deprive themselves of an immense pleasure,” especially if this was in an effort to “punish” the Germans.196 Recognizing Wagner’s appeal for French soldiers during World War I demonstrates the extent to which the need to achieve consolation was paramount—even at times exceeding the need to be on the “right” side of politics in wartime. Wagner—though a symbol of Austro-Germanness at this particular moment, and modern Austro-German music more broadly speaking—continued to offer musicians opportunities for personal reflection and consolation, for remembering their past lives as musicians, and, we might imagine, for its pleasurable (even perhaps orgasmic) bodily and affective effects. Wagner’s music had the potential to temporarily transport performers and listeners out of their horrific situations and into another, more nurturing and pleasurable bodily state. Such corporeal effects, after all, had by World War I been framed as major aspects of Wagner’s appeal (or danger) for numerous decades, with some listeners even claiming that listening to Wagner’s music had therapeutic benefits.197

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter I have demonstrated how silence came to be the privi- leged mode of response to trauma during and after World War I, as well as how musicians in this context utilized music as a sounding and yet verbally non- communicative means of emotional care geared toward consolation. Although there were many ways in which French citizens turned to music as a soothing medium, French soldier-musicians’ love for Wagner’s highly politicized music serves as a particularly useful heuristic for considering how music functioned in ways that may have included, but also went beyond, nationalism and politics. A whole range of considerations shaped musicians’ repertoire and compositional choices. And while these considerations definitely included national and patriotic ideologies, they also included desires to forget the war and what

196 Jacques Pessard to the Comité Franco-Américain, letter dated May 16, 1918, published in Gazette des classes du Conservatoire No. 10 (1918), BnF, Mus., Rés. Vm. Dos. 88 (1): 24: “qui éprouvaient une joie, une jouissance à entendre, à jouer des œuvres de Wagner, Beethoven ou Brahms et qui—pour les punir—se privent d’un immense plaisir.” 197 Joseph Horowitz, “Finding a ‘Real Self’: American Women and the Wagner Cult of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 189–205; Carlo Caballero, “‘A Wicked Voice’: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music,”Victorian Studies 35, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 385–408. Camille Mauclair also writes in La Religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1919) that Wagner “était décidément né pour exciter (au sens électrique)” (p. 239). On the next page, Mauclair underlined Wagner’s bodily effects by comparing these (after Schopenhauer) to perfume, and then to opium. Music Making as Emotional Care 97 had happened or was continuing to happen within it. At other times, soldiers or civilians sought ways to express what they were experiencing with a certain amount of plausible deniability, especially considering how trauma was disdained, considered contagious, and understood as undermining one’s masculinity. Luckily, plausible deniability was something that music in particular could offer, as the soldier-medic- musician René Dumesnil indicated in his discussion of wartime circumstantial music in La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 :

Whether or not the musician draws inspiration from a personal memory, from felt emotion, remains virtually confidential, and can only be expressed in a sensitive manner for the listener in the printed notice in the program. [ . . . ] Does it follow then that events like those of World War I could upset a people as sensitive as the French nation without its music bearing a trace of them? No, certainly not. But it is not among the works of which the titles or the intention proposes an image of war that one finds this influence.198

As I address in the next chapter, many musicians recognized that musical sound had the potential to alter them physically, mentally, and emotionally. Understandings of music as a soothing sonic medium proliferated in France throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, so that by the time World War I began, many musicians were very much aware of music’s function as a therapeutic bodily practice that operated under and through their skin, vibrating through their organs, bones, and tissue. And yet many soldiers’ and civilians’ wartime experiences would make this realization take on even more meaning, so that, by the end of the war, they became intimately and fright- eningly aware of the vibrational capacities of sound to undo them, prompting an even greater understanding of music’s capacities to restore or, at the very least, soothe their bodies and minds.

198 René Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 (Paris: Éditions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), 24: “Que le musicien en puis ou non l’inspiration dans tel souvenir personnel, dans telle émotion ressentie, cela reste pour ainsi dire confidentiel et ne pourra s’exprimer d’une manière sensible pour l’auditeur que dans la notice imprimée du programme. [ . . . ] S’ensuit-il cependant que des événements comme ceux de 1914–1918 puissent bouleverser un peuple aussi sensible que la nation française sans que sa musique en porte trace? Non, certes. Mais ce n’est pas parmi les ouvrages dont les titres ou l’intention proposent une image de la guerre qu’il faut chercher cette influence.”