Chiarina co-artistic director Carrie Bean Stute speaks with Dr. Sylvia Kahan about one of this spring’s featured composers, Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983). Dr. Kahan is a Professor of Music at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, and is the author of Music’s Modern Muse and In Search of New Scales (University of Rochester Press).
CBS: Germaine Tailleferre was a member of Les Six, a group of composers who lived in and around Paris in the 1920s. (Its other members were Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey.) What were they all about?
SK: The music of Les Six took its influences from everyday life: from the café, the fairground, the circus. It was the antidote to the overripe post-Romanticism of Mahler, Strauss (and, for the French, Franck) of the late 19th-century. This music was at the foreground of the neo-classical movement: It was informed by the style of Igor Stravinsky (whose influence was felt nearly everywhere) but maintained its own distinct character. While each of the six composers in Les Six developed an individual voice, their music shared some commonalities—most notably, a youthful freshness and insouciant temperament that instantly appealed to its Parisian audience.
CBS: Was it unusual to maintain a career as a female composer at this time in Paris? Certainly Tailleferre achieved recognition as a composer, but do we know if she sensed a glass ceiling?
SK: Tailleferre was a terrific composer, a terrific virtuoso pianist, and she was charming. People liked her and they wanted to play her music. She had influential friends. I don’t think her being a woman impeded her professionally, but her father and her two husbands certainly did their best to stand in her way! But she was determined – she overcame a lot of personal hardships and composed an extraordinarily large output, most of which was played during her lifetime. Unfortunately, because of issues with her estate, a lot of her music remains unpublished.
Reviews of her music from the time affirm her popularity, describing performances of her newest works with optimism and praise. Yet upon closer inspection, some of the critiques do frame their narrative in gendered terms—one review from 1923 in Le Figaro, for example, describes a work that “gives off a delicate perfume of poetry, that denotes an exquisite sensitivity….” So some of her listeners, and perhaps even the musical circles she was a part of, experienced her music as an expressly “female” creation.
CBS: Tailleferre also achieved recognition in the United States. How did that come about?
SK: Eager to expand her career, Tailleferre actually moved to the United States in 1925. Her association with “Les Six” and her wave of personal successes at home helped her to connect with some of the most important American musical figures of the day. Artists like Leopold Stokowski, Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky, and Alfred Cortot performed her compositions. Her marriage to New Yorker magazine artist Ralph Barton augmented her star power and introduced her to soirées that included guests like Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin. At one gathering, she even performed a four-hand version of Rhapsody in Blue with the composer.
CBS: Sounds like a fairy tale. What happened?
SK: Unfortunately, the marriage was unhappy and brief. Barton became jealous of Tailleferre’s growing success and popularity, and he discouraged her from composing. Hoping to turn over a new leaf, the couple moved to France, and his psychological condition worsened. Tailleferre recounted one manic fit in which he threatened to shoot her in the stomach after finding out she was pregnant. (She later miscarried.) The two divorced in 1929. Barton deteriorated further and committed suicide in 1931.
Tailleferre’s second marriage to lawyer Jean Lageat also ended in divorce. The couple had one daughter, Françoise, who became a pianist.
CBS: How would you describe Tailleferre’s musical style, and did it change over the course of her (very long) life? Who were some of her influences?
SK: Tailleferre’s early compositions – such as the 1909 Impromptu for piano – sound a lot like Fauré. These works are lovely, but not particularly adventuresome. What we think of as her style crystallized in the 1920s, during the epoch of Les Six. Her style is crisp, clear, and typically neo-classical – very “back to Bach.” In some of the works (the Piano Concerto, Le Marchand d’oiseaux), she wears her “neo-Baroque” bona fides on her sleeve. Her music is not at all sensual, and there’s lots of contrapuntal rigor and sense of direction.
Tailleferre’s influences were diverse. She was a close friend of Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel (with whom she studied at the Conservatoire, alongside Debussy and Widor). She was mentored by great musicians, like Koussevitzky. She learned from her talented friends in Les Six, and from the other musicians and artists in her various circles. These included figures like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, George Balanchine, Sergei Diaghilev, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Tailleferre once remarked that Picasso gave her the “best lesson in composition” she’d ever received, when he encouraged her to “constantly renew yourself; avoid using the recipes that you have already found.”
CBS: In February, Chiarina featured Tailleferre’s Sonata for Harp; coming up on April 11, we’ll perform her Piano Trio. What are some of other works you’d recommend listening to? Is there a particular genre that played to her strengths?
SK: Tailleferre wrote music for opera and ballet, symphonic works and concerti, chamber music, solo piano music and songs, and film soundtracks—in other words, a very broad spectrum! Among my personal favorites are some works for solo piano, a violin sonata, piano concerto, ballet, and song cycle, Six chansons françaises. The poems of the songs recount women’s misfortunes with men—in particular, amorous or marital difficulties—and take on the feminine condition as a subject. The cycle is considered to be Taillefere’s most feminist work, and analyses have found a relationship between the selected poems and biographical details from her own life.
CBS: We’ll include links to these favorites below, for our listeners to explore further. Thanks for sharing your insights with Chiarina and our audience community here in DC!
Dr. Sylvia Kahan’s shortlist: works by Germaine Tailleferre
For Piano
Impromptu (1909)
Hommage à Debussy (1920)
Pastorale (1920)
Chamber Music
Violin Sonata no. 1 (1921)
Ballet
Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1923)
Concerto
Piano Concerto (1924)
Song repertoire
Six chansons françaises
- Non, la fidélité
- Souvent un air de vérité
- Mon mari m’a diffamé
- Vrai Dieu, qui m’y confortera
- On a dit mal de mon ami
- Les trois présents