Arthur Honegger - durand-salabert-eschig

ARTHUR
HONEGGER
(1892-1955)
Born in Le Havre, France, into a Swiss-German family,
Honegger was an heir to this double culture, both French
and Germanic. In the early twentieth century, both the one
and the other offered the most varied solutions to all kinds
of new musical questions: What should one do with tonality?
What is expression? What could be the ties between music
and the other arts, between music and philosophy? What
are to be the new forms in music?
To all these questions Honegger seemed to bring clear yet
tolerant answers. Atonality interested him only as a passing
means for expressing tension or chaos (he considered
serialism an arbitrary diktat). The use of musical forms
that had stood the test of time (symphony, oratorio, quartet)
gave rise in his production to works that are as original in
their spirit as they are in their configuration. The interest
in the arts of the spectacle that marked the first decades
of the century, particularly in France, was of the utmost
concern to him, including in its most entertaining aspects,
even though his humanism led him to reflect in depth on
the moral function of the artiste in society.
As a composer receptive to all the murmurings of the
century, be they æsthetic, scientific or social, it seemed that
Honegger, throughout his whole career, was in search of
the most intense and most honest expression of his creative
drive, one that led him to compose pieces of great diversity.
It is clear, however, that it is the voice and above all the
chorus that play a favoured role in his output. The great
collaborations with René Morax (Le Roi David, Judith) and
later Paul Claudel (Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, La Danse des
morts) reveal Honegger’s primary interest in philosophical
and religious subjects, and yet he is also the composer of a
pretty earthy operetta (Les Aventures du Roi Pausole, with
a libretto by Willemetz), as well as of numerous songs.
If Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1935) is considered to be his most
representative work, this is probably because it combines
the utmost simplicity (use of the spoken voice, the tranquil
beauty of the narratives of Jeanne’s childhood, of French
folklore) with an imagination of particular strangeness
(ondes Martenot for expressing the terrors of hell, the
jubilant pounding of the chorus as an evocation of joy in the
final sequence). This is a mix of medievalism and modernism,
of the art of cathedrals and that of the street (fairground
music, jazz, etc.), and people in the immediate post-war
period felt that Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher was an expression
12