Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud: The Man Who Heard Two Keys at Once

In 1949 at Mills College in Oakland, the Budapest Quartet played Darius Milhaud's Fourteenth String Quartet and the Paganini Quartet played his Fifteenth. Then all eight musicians sat down together and played both at the same time, as an octet. It worked. That single stunt says nearly everything about the composer: an appetite for simultaneity, a refusal to treat musical layers as mutually exclusive, and a streak of Provençal mischief that critics have never quite known what to do with.

A Family Older Than the Republic

Milhaud was born in Marseille on 4 September 1892 and raised in Aix-en-Provence, which he always regarded as the true family seat. His people were Jews of the Comtat Venaissin, a Provençal community traceable to the fifteenth century and belonging to neither the Ashkenazi nor the Sephardi worlds — a distinction he was proud of. His parents were Gad Gabriel Milhaud and Sophie Allatini. He started as a violinist before composition took over.

At the Paris Conservatoire he studied composition with Charles-Marie Widor, harmony and counterpoint with André Gedalge, and worked privately with Vincent d'Indy. He also met two students who would matter to his public identity: Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre. In 1925 he married his cousin Madeleine, an actress and reciter; their only child, Daniel, born in 1930, became a painter and sculptor.

Rio, and the Discovery of Simultaneity

The decisive interruption came in 1917. The poet and dramatist Paul Claudel, appointed French ambassador to Brazil, took Milhaud with him as secretary. The two years that followed rewired his ear. Brazilian popular music, the polyrhythmic collisions of carnival, the overlapping bands of Rio's streets — none of it obeyed the tidy harmonic hierarchy the Conservatoire taught. He collaborated with Claudel on the ballet *L'Homme et son désir* and came home with the sound of a city playing several things simultaneously and refusing to apologise.

Two works carry the residue directly. *Le bœuf sur le toit* stitches Brazilian melodies and carnival idiom into a rondo that became one of the most notorious scores of the 1920s. *Saudades do Brasil* is a suite of twelve dances, each named for a Rio neighbourhood. Out of that experience came the technique he is identified with: polytonality, the deliberate sounding of two or more keys at once. It was not novelty for its own sake. He had heard it happen in the street and concluded that the ear could take it.

Les Six, and the Company He Kept

Back in Paris he was enrolled — more by journalists than by manifesto — into Les Six, the loose group of young French composers positioned against Wagnerian solemnity and Debussyan haze. The label stuck and has been shrinking his reputation ever since, because it made him sound like a wit rather than a craftsman.

The evidence points the other way. He dedicated his Fifth String Quartet, written in 1920, to Arnold Schoenberg, and in 1921 he conducted both the French and the British premieres of *Pierrot lunaire*. A composer routinely dismissed as the boulevard entertainer of French music was, at thirty, doing the practical work of introducing Europe's most difficult modernist to two countries.

Harlem, 1922

On a trip to New York in 1922 Milhaud went to Harlem and heard jazz played by the people who had invented it — the first time, he said, he had encountered the real thing rather than its European imitations. The result was *La création du monde*, the 1923 ballet that absorbs blues inflection and jazz instrumentation into a concert score. It remains his most performed work and one of the earliest serious attempts by a European composer to take jazz on its own terms rather than as exotic decoration.

Exile to Oakland

Rheumatoid arthritis began attacking him in the 1930s and eventually put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his working life. When Germany invaded France in 1940, his Jewish ancestry made staying impossible and made any return before liberation unthinkable. The family got out to the United States, and Milhaud landed a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California.

He did not treat exile as a pause. He composed the opera *Bolivar* there in 1943, worked with the violinist Henri Temianka and the Paganini Quartet, and wrote the *Suite française*, premiered in Central Park at the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts on 13 June 1945 — a Frenchman's homesick postcard, played free to a New York crowd weeks after the war in Europe ended. From 1947 until 1971 he alternated teaching years between Mills and the Paris Conservatoire, adding the Aspen Music Festival and the newly founded Music Academy of the West, until his health forced retirement.

The Teacher Who Told Bacharach to Whistle

The student list is the strangest in twentieth-century music. Dave Brubeck came to Mills specifically to study with him and later named his first son Darius. Burt Bacharach studied with him. So, at various points, did Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Iannis Xenakis, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen and William Bolcom. Cool jazz, the Great American Songbook, minimalism, and the European postwar avant-garde all pass through the same wheelchair-bound Provençal.

His advice to Bacharach explains how one man could nourish all of them: "Don't be afraid of writing something people can remember and whistle. Don't ever feel discomfited by a melody." Almost nobody teaching composition in 1950 was saying that.

Why Darius Is Called a Genius

The case rests on fluency and range rather than on any single unrepeatable masterpiece, and it should be argued honestly on those terms. His opus list reached 443 works — operas, symphonies, eighteen string quartets, film scores, ballets, chamber music, choral settings — produced across seven decades and two continents while in constant physical pain. The specific creative faculty is a kind of harmonic tolerance: an ear that could hold several tonal centres in suspension and hear the result as coherent rather than as noise. Polytonality had been touched by others; Milhaud made it a working language and demonstrated across hundreds of scores that audiences could follow it.

The counter-case is serious and comes from his admirers. The critic Mark Morris called Milhaud "one of the unassessed quantities of 20th century music," conceding that "the reputation for the banal and the shallow has masked what is or might be — given the paucity of performances — both inspired and fascinating." That is a defence that concedes the charge. Milhaud wrote too much and pruned too little; a great deal of the 443 is competent rather than necessary, and the volume has made serious evaluation nearly impossible. Two or three works sit securely in the repertory and the rest go unheard. There is also a fair argument that his teaching — the permission he gave Brubeck, Reich, Glass and Bacharach to trust their own ears — was a larger contribution than his catalogue: a genius of influence rather than of monuments.

Legacy

He died in Geneva on 22 June 1974, aged eighty-one, and was buried in Aix-en-Provence, the town he had spent a lifetime calling home from three continents. His memoir, *Notes Without Music*, remains the most readable first-hand account of what it felt like to be young in Paris after one war and a refugee after another. A lycée outside Paris carries his name. So, arguably, does half of American music: whenever a jazz pianist thinks in two keys at once, or a minimalist lets patterns run against each other without resolving, the Provençal who came home from Rio hearing several things at the same time is somewhere in the room.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1933
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1947
• Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1958
• Notable work: Le Bœuf sur le toit
• Notable work: Symphony No. 4
• Notable work: L'Orestie d'Eschyle
• Affiliated with Conservatoire de Paris
• Educated at Conservatoire de Paris
• Worked as conductor, autobiographer and musicologist