Arthur Honegger - durand-salabert-eschig

Horace
victorieux
(1920-21)
Honegger found his own style very early on, after
astonishingly little groping around in youthful
experimentation. He is to be found whole and entire in
his first score for large orchestra, Le Chant de Nigamon,
of 1917, and, three years later, he gave us one of his most
powerful and daring scores, Horace Victorieux, a work
that he subsequently considered, along with Antigone,
to be his most successful work, which goes to prove the
lucidity of his judgment.
Rapidly composed between December 1920 and February
1921, Horace Victorieux was not, however, orchestrated
until August 1921, for in the meantime Honegger had had
to respond to the urgent commission of Le Roi David. One
cannot think of two more contrasting works, and indeed
Horace has never met with the popularity of Le Roi David,
something the composer in fact understood very well.
Even today, the work retains a singular freshness, and its
harshness has in no way been attenuated.
At first the project was for a ballet-pantomime, with
scenario, scenery and costumes by Guy Fauconnet, but the
latter’s sudden, premature death led Honegger to rework
his score for the concert hall in the shape we know today,
that of a “mimed symphony” in eight linked episodes for
large orchestra lasting some eighteen minutes. Ernest
Ansermet conducted the first performance in Lausanne
only a few weeks after it had been finished, on 31 October
1921, though it was not until December 1927 that it was
finally given a stage premiere, in Essen, in Germany.
No other work by Honegger so clearly underlines the
huge distance that separated him from his comrades in
the Groupe des Six. As far removed from their “cult of the
fairground and the music-hall” as from the refinement
of the impressionists, Honegger offers us here the most
vehement and the most expressionist of all his scores
written in France up till then, and even afterwards. One
notices his predilection for clear-cut, dotted rhythms, for
packets of dissonant chords in the trumpets and trombones
(often with mutes on to bring out the bite), for extremely
tense violins in the high tessitura, for bristly, chromatic
counterpoint with unbending harmonic tension, within
which only rough fourths and fifths refer, ever more
distantly, to a tonality that is in fact absent for most of
the time.
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