Darius Milhaud and Judaism Philosophy
One of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, Darius Milhaud, whose opera contains nearly 450 works, belonged historically to the group of French intellectuals and composers known as Les Six. They were initially united by their support for Jean Cocteau's antisentimental aesthetic ideas as well as their adherence to Erik Satie's spiritual-musical guidance. Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey were all a part of the ensemble. But Milhaud is also among the large group of Jewish émigré composers from Europe who fled to America in the 1930s and 1940s to escape the anti-Jewish persecution that originated in Germany and resulted in the Holocaust.
Although Milhaud was raised in Aix-en-Provence, he believed that Marseilles was his actual ancestral home. His family has origins in the Comtat Venaissin, a remote area of Provence, going back at least to the 15th century. They were a long-established Jewish family. Milhaud's father was Jewish, but his lineage was Provençal—dating to Jewish settlement in that region of southern France as early as the first centuries of the Common Era—rather than Ashkenazi or Sephardi (i.e., stemming from neither pre-16th-century Spanish/Iberian Jewry nor from medieval German-Rhineland Jewry). His paternal great-grandfather Joseph Milhaud published exegetical works on the Torah, oversaw the census of Jews who had returned to France after the Revolution, and was one of the founders of the synagogue in Aix.
The Provençal Jewry had a distinctive musical heritage that evolved over many centuries, much like its Ashkenazi and Sephardi contemporaries. On the other hand, Milhaud's mother had some Sephardi ancestry on her father's side. This could have given his internalized Jewish musical senses a another angle. Both parents were musicians and hailed from middle-class families who had operated reputable businesses effectively for many years. At the age of seven, Darius started learning the violin, and he also started writing music. He started his studies at the Paris Conservatoire in 1909, when one of his professors, Xavier Leroux, saw right away that his pupil had developed a unique harmonic language.
According to Milhaud's autobiography, he was already aware of the Impressionist route when he first started composing. He saw Impressionism as the culmination of a mawkish creative movement that he considered repulsive. Literature and Satie's dedication to the idea of creative wholeness, researching and incorporating the numerous art forms in complimentary expression, had a significant impact on him as a composer. At the French Consular Mission in Brazil, where he worked as a secretary from 1917 to 1919, Milhaud became interested in local folk rhythms and regional musical traditions. Later, he used similar ideas in a few of his compositions, and his first two ballet soundtracks had a strong Brazilian influence.
Milhaud first worked with Cocteau in the 1920s after being profoundly influenced by his pioneering aesthetic critique of the modern trend in "serious" music and its lofty "romantic bombast." Together with the other composers who made up Les Six, Milhaud was inspired by Satie and his own musical models to embrace elements of this aesthetic principle, particularly with regard to simplicity, directness, avoiding overly sentimental sounds, sounds from nature and daily life, and, perhaps most importantly, that quality so cherished by some French poets of an earlier era: la clarité—clarity.
Perhaps more than the other members of his circle, Milhaud shared Satie's love of music halls, circuses, and other unrefined forms of entertainment. He also adopted popular music, including jazz, Latin American dance rhythms, Jewish secular and sacred melodies, French folk music, and Latin American dance rhythms.
Early in the 1920s, Milhaud first heard jazz in London. Later, in 1922–1923, on a concert tour of the United States, he went to Harlem dance clubs. He was immediately drawn to the music's syncopated rhythms, improvisatory flexibility, authenticity, and even purity, and he caused some controversy when he was cited as calling jazz "the American music" and endorsing it on par with classical repertory. After then, he frequently included jazz influences in his compositions. Later, he was cited as saying that jazz could only have developed as a result of a people being oppressed.
That can only have had further meaning for him following the establishment of the Nazi puppet Vichy administration in France and his flight to America as a Jewish refugee—as well as the German murder of more than twenty of his relatives. It is no coincidence that he went even more frequently to his Jewish roots for musical inspirations in his American time and subsequently, despite the fact that he had written numerous pieces that dealt with Jewish themes before to World War II.
Starting with his Poèmes Juifs (1916) and continuing with other prewar works with overtly Jewish names and subject, Milhaud's compositions were significantly influenced by both his personal Judaism and his familial history. However, he constantly and especially drew on the Provençal liturgical tradition that he was familiar with from his boyhood in Aix-en-Provence in his later Jewish compositions. Cain and Abel, for narrator, organ, and orchestra; Candélabre à sept branches; David, an opera written for the Israel Festival; Saul (incidental music); Trois psaumes de David; Cantate de Job; Cantate de psaumes; and others are among his works with a Jewish theme from the time after his immigration to America.
