Sarah Lavaud - Antigone Quartet

Peace regained or A transfiguration of the abominable

Charles Koechlin, an atypical and endearing figure who is a true original in the world musical landscape, is only just beginning to be recognised by music lovers. Looking at his photos, it is obvious that this tall, bearded man with a friendly, secret face was a gentle dreamer. But a productive dreamer with a rich catalogue of more than two hundred scores, a tangible sign of the total commitment of the artist as well as the man. This is perhaps one of the keys to the inner world of this musician. For the word commitment must be understood in the full sense of the term. In a way, his music reflects not only a completely personal poetic expression but also his involvement in the life of the city. Thus, it is not surprising to find him in the founding board of the Société Musicale Indépendante or within the French Communist Party between the wars. Deeply honest, convinced of the capacity of art to help man rise, to make him better, imagination and will are therefore at the heart of each of his works. Like Bachelard, he could have said: "To the imagination that illuminates the will is united a will to imagine, to live what we imagine. Between reverie and laborious craft, each work is therefore the fruit of a deep sincerity, of a slow maturation, which expects the same intensity in listening from the listener.

It is undeniable that the shock provoked in him by the first world conflict constituted the unconscious impulse for the works presented here. Anger was the initial act and determined his active impression. While the Third Quartet only explicitly evokes the absurdity of the 'slaughter' in its scherzo, the feelings experienced in the face of the terrible tragedy triggered the genesis of the Piano Quintet. After the appalling horror of the First World War, Europeans were entering the modern age, the age of shaken faith in the ability of human beings to live together, the age of increasingly inhuman management by machines. This end of illusions is also felt by musicians. While some plunged into denial and took refuge in the exhilaration of another, more frivolous, sometimes superficial life (the Group of Six, Kurt Weil, Respighi), other composers marked their assertive pessimism (Ravel, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Berg). We can therefore understand how these two works by Koechlin are part of this testimony.

Unlike the Second Quartet, which had to wait more than sixty years for its premiere - Op. 57 was performed in Lüneburg on 28 November 1987 by the Charles Koechlin Ensemble (Otfrid Nies, Jürgen Klein, Martin Straakholder, Claudia Schwarze) - Koechlin's last quartet was quickly given in concert. The main ideas of the Third Quartet were developed between 13 June 1913 and 18 August 1919, but it was between 19 August 1919 and 15 August 1921 that Koechlin completed it, as evidenced by the drafts held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The premiere took place three years later, on 20 January 1924 in Mulhouse. It was played several times by the founding quartet, the Quatuor Pro Arte, and quickly gained a reputation, as other performers incorporated it into their repertoire, such as the Krettly Quartet, which played it again in 1925 in Paris at a concert of the SMI. Compared to his first two quartets, this one is more concise and freer in style, confirming an obvious evolution in the composer's aesthetic. Although the form of the movements is less and less pre-established, there is no superfluousness or sloppiness. On the contrary, everything seems essential. The first movement could be summed up as a succession of melodies, in the archaic yet modern atmosphere so typical of Koechlin, somewhat in the manner of the Piano Sonatas (it is interesting to note that the finale of this quartet was originally intended to serve as the final movement of the Second French Sonatina, Op. 60, for piano four hands). As in many of his works, Koechlin seems to adapt the flowery counterpoint of the Renaissance, not only through the use of modality, but also because all the parts sing in themselves. And why not also see in this great flexibility of lines the lesson learned this time from the musical principles of the Middle Ages? Let us remember that Koechlin was a specialist in Gregorian modality. However, the ensemble hardly sounds like a slavish imitation; through such harmonic superimposition or such friction, it is indeed 20th century music. The conception of the Scherzo is in complete contrast. One can hear trumpet arpeggios or timpani sounds (indications present on the score) which, far from exalting heroism, sound sarcastic. This page, which paves the way for Shostakovich, was not without influence on the Groupe des Six, a fact that is rarely emphasised, even though Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre all attended Koechlin's classes. The whole of this first movement, with its acidic harmonic context, oscillates between polytonality and tonality, even going as far as atonality in its central part. In total contrast, the Adagio that follows begins in an absolutely peaceful C major. Rapidly modulating, the serenity turns into a strange and bewitching ecstasy before returning to the initial fullness. In the manner of baroque suites, Koechlin imagines a playful jig to end his work. Revealing a new facet of his personality, he offers us music that is frank and direct, with an almost popular verve. In a central episode, we hear a new theme which, although it seems to have come from the land, is nonetheless from the composer's pen. After crossing the arpeggios of the scherzo, but erased of any derision, this finale, which will have traversed the most distant keys, concludes in a luminous and whirling peroration in unison.

The Piano Quintet, Op. 80, is a masterpiece and a rather unique experiment in chamber music. Koechlin attempts to express the sufferings of war through 'pure' music. Only Hermann Zilcher (1881-1948) and Franz Schmidt (1874-1939) tried the same experiment on the other side of the Rhine. Although he never came face to face with enemy bullets in the trenches - he was discharged from the army after contracting tuberculosis in the 1880s - he felt the pangs of disaster in his flesh. For a hyper-sensitive person like the musician, the cannon shots heard in the distance, the ration coupons, the stories of comrades or the sight of 'broken faces' are more than enough. Koechlin thus elaborates a sort of imaginary scenario, the framework of which can be found in the titles given to each of the movements: "L'Attente obscure de ce qui sera? The Beethovenian character of the work - through this progression from darkness to light but also in the same excessiveness, the same concern for uncompromising musical research - reveals Koechlin's deliberately optimistic and resolutely militant (and not military!) nature.

Once again, the archives of the BNF are a precious help in reconstructing the development of the Quintet. The drafts and sketches range from 2 May 1917 to 29 June 1921. There are also short sketches of the scherzo dating from 1908 and others, concerning the finale, written in 1911. Finally, this perfectionist revised the first movement in 1933, shortly before the premiere at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels on 24 April 1934 by Paul Collaer at the piano and the Brussels Quartet (Henri Desclin, Theo Delvenne, F. Van Schepdael, Léon Roy).

Without appearing to be so, the performance of the first movement demands great mastery. The performers are stripped bare, unable to blind us with pyrotechnic flashes, and have to deal with a virtuosity of slowness. Koechlin uses astonishing compositional devices to make the listener feel his own sensations. Using the smallest nuances, he also adds numerous indications to his score - 'very distant', 'very even and unhurried' or 'very extinct' - in order to make his thoughts more precise. The harmonic sequences underline the anguishing immobility of waiting, especially during certain atonal passages, where the chords are so many grey shades of a possible ambient fog; this would not leave Olivier Messiaen indifferent. One might even think that the 'sur place' of the perpetually scattered eighth notes throughout this first part, in the manner of Escher's paintings for example, foreshadows some of Ligeti's Études. The French composer was perfectly aware of the absolutely innovative character of his Quintet. After this ghostly movement, the scherzo is more like a realistic scene, as it attempts to transpose a military confrontation into music. In this sense, Koechlin's music borrows from the techniques of the symphonic poem. Indeed, without being able to resort to the multiple timbres of the orchestra, he manages with only five instruments to render musically what the different titles announce to the listeners. However, this is certainly not a description in the primary sense of the word, and it would be risky to imagine the use of bitonality as symbolising a confrontation between the two sides, for example. Koechlin conducts his pages in a logic that is above all musical and not narrative, which is confirmed by the deliberate absence of argument. Thus, at the beginning of the movement, in four bars, he gives voice to two elements that will generate the whole of the rest. The first, a sort of very brief out-of-tune fanfare played on the strings, precedes a succession of fifths played on the piano, constituting the second element. After multiple confrontations, clashes and clashes, the movement ends in stunned silence. The motifs will never return to their original forms, the concluding empty fifths perhaps representing the gaping wound evoked by the title. In 'La Nature consolatrice...', Koechlin contemplates and meditates. Like the sunlight streaming through the foliage of the trees, the harmonic colours are constantly changing. These few minutes of highly scientific music exude an unaffected naivety, in the spread-out conception of time so characteristic of the French composer. The finale opens with an explosion of bells played by the piano. Confirming the religious tone, the strings respond in a counterpoint imitating the severe ecclesiastical style. After a modified repetition, the entire central passage unfolds long melodic lines in the ternary meter of the Pastoral Symphony, in a kind of unbridled pantheism. Perhaps reflecting the composer's ecumenical vision, the explosive final peroration combines its joyful melodies with the bell motif and church polyphony of the movement's opening.

With this work, as with a number of his scores, Koechlin succeeds in conceiving a music of rigorous construction from which emerges a sensation of improvisation of rare freshness. A demanding work, it nevertheless reveals itself as a unique musical experience, which lifts the soul of all those who do not fall into the trap of impatience, a feeling that is the antithesis of Charles Koechlin's thinking.

Ludovic Florin