Ventajas del Telemercadeo 29 

In the late 1930s, Darius Milhaud enjoyed considerable success as a composer in Paris. Having surpassed his earlier reputation as an enfant terrible, he had entered the French musical

establishment alongside his contemporaries, and his work during this time encompassed a range of compositional activity, including concert pieces (such as the internationally popular

Scaramouche, published in 1937); scores for the theatre, radio, and film; and music for state- sponsored events.1 While he had begun to experience severe arthritic attacks, his medical condition did not yet restrict his mobility to the extent that it would in the following decades. Less than a decade after starting a professional acting career, Madeleine Milhaud performed regularly with several respected theatre companies, read poetry on the radio, and held the position of Professor of Dramatic Art at the Schola Cantorum.2 Their son, Daniel, born in 1930, was already taking an interest in drawing and painting.

The German invasion of France in June 1940 disrupted all of this activity. As a well- known Jewish family, the Milhauds knew that they could not safely remain in France under Nazi control. Through connections in the United States and diplomatic officials willing to violate protocol to help them, they were able to leave France just as the terms of surrender to Germany were being negotiated. Avoiding many of the obstacles faced by those who tried to leave in the

1 _{On Milhaud in the context of late-1930s Paris, particularly the relationship between his career and the Popular}

Front government, see Leslie A. Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936– 1946” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 1–99; Christopher Moore, “Music in France and the Popular Front (1934–1938): Politics, Aesthetics and Reception” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2007).

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following months, they reached New York just a month after their departure, then drove across the country to Oakland, California, where the composer had been invited to join the music faculty of Mills College.3 This teaching position provided essential stability for the family, but it also separated them from the large émigré communities in New York and Los Angeles: while Milhaud did visit both cities every year, his responsibilities at Mills generally kept him in Oakland.

Musicologists including Brigid Cohen and Sabine Feisst have recently questioned the appropriateness of the term “exile” for experiences of migration that are often more complex than that often-essentializing label allows us to understand.4 While I recognize these critiques, I use “exile” without reservation to characterize the period between Milhaud’s departure from France in 1940 and his initial return in 1947. Using this term enables me to make a meaningful distinction between these years, in which he was cut off from his homeland, and his later pattern of voluntary alternation between France and the United States. Additionally, Milhaud

consistently referred to himself as exiled during the years covered in this chapter (1940–44), when France was under German occupation. In chapter 2, I will discuss how the end of the occupation and the reopening of communications with France altered his sense of being in exile.

This period of Milhaud’s life cannot be reduced to an exile narrative, of course, and in subsequent chapters, I will address the teaching and musical activities through which he formed lasting connections in the United States. Here, I am concerned primarily with exile as an array of logistical concerns (beginning with the departure from France), as an affiliation with intersecting communities of fellow displaced Europeans across the United States, as a new relationship to

3

See chapter 4.

4

Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12– 22; Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46.

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one’s national identity, and as a complex and often contradictory state of mind. I begin by presenting an account of the Milhaud family’s last months in France, their decision to leave at the time of the invasion, and the two-month journey to California, adding new details and context to the narrative in Milhaud’s autobiography. Once the family settled in Oakland, the distress of their separation from France was compounded by their distance from major émigré communities. Using unpublished letters and other primary sources, I explore the ways in which written communication connected Milhaud to his parents in Aix-en-Provence, to friends

elsewhere in Vichy France, and to former residents of Paris who had dispersed across the Americas. I then consider the effects of Milhaud’s geographic isolation on his relationships to the New York and Los Angeles émigré communities, including his perspective on the divisions between Gaullists and Vichy supporters that preoccupied other French exiles. Rather than engaging with this debate, which would have forced him to take a public partisan stance, he aimed to “defend French culture” through his role as a composer. Indeed, over the course of his first four years in the United States, Milhaud’s French identity was integral to every aspect of his experience of exile.

Aix-en-Provence, 1939–40

My account of the Milhaud family’s exile begins in Aix-en-Provence, the city with which the composer identified the most closely throughout his life. His family had two homes there: Le Bras d’Or, in the center of town, was also the site of his father’s almond-exporting business, and in the summer, they lived at L’Enclos, in the countryside. Though he moved to Paris in 1909 to begin studying at the Conservatoire, Milhaud continued to spend his summers in Aix with his parents, Sophie and Gabriel Milhaud, through the 1930s. He would also go there when he needed

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to focus on composing away from the distractions of Paris; nearly all of his pre-1940 operas were written partially or entirely at L’Enclos.5 Madeleine Milhaud always accompanied him after their marriage, though she found Provence rather boring in comparison to Paris, where she was born and raised.6 In the summer of 1939, the family went to Aix as usual, but this routine trip turned into a year-long stay, due to Milhaud’s health issues and the outbreak of war. In June 1940, it ended with the decision to leave France for the United States.

At the beginning of the summer of 1939, Milhaud was invited by Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to compose a symphony for the orchestra’s upcoming fiftieth-anniversary season and to conduct its premiere.7 This would be the first of Milhaud’s twelve symphonies for full orchestra. At some point after the commission was made, the U.S.-based concert manager Albert Morini met with Milhaud in Aix to discuss plans for a full tour surrounding the Chicago concert. Morini’s efforts to publicize what would have been Milhaud’s first U.S. concert tour in over a decade suggest that he and Milhaud both fully believed that it would take place. In December, Morini wrote to Serge Koussevitzky to notify him of the tour and to suggest an appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Calling Milhaud “the great French composer and conductor” and “one of the foremost musicians of our

5

Madeleine Milhaud, Catalogue des œuvres de Darius Milhaud (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), 506–10.

6 _{Madeleine Milhaud, My Twentieth Century, trans. Mildred Clary (Cleveland: Darius Milhaud Society, 2008), 39.}

Michel Milhaud, Madeleine’s father and Darius’s uncle, moved from Aix-en-Provence to Paris in the late nineteenth century to attend law school, and Madeleine (born in 1902) spent her childhood there, apart from an extended stay in Aix during World War I. See chapter 5.

7 _{The other composers commissioned included Alfredo Casella, Zoltán Kodály, and William Walton, with a separate}

competition held to choose a work by an American composer. Stock traveled to Europe to meet with these composers, but according to Milhaud, the two of them did not discuss the commission in person. This may have been because Milhaud was not in Paris at the time, having gone with his family to Sion, Switzerland, for a short vacation before continuing on to Aix-en-Provence. Rather, Milhaud received a call from Henry Voegeli, the orchestra’s manager, the day before leaving Switzerland. MVH, 213.

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epoch,” the letter is cast in the impersonal language of publicity—as if Koussevitzky did not know Milhaud—and was likely sent to other conductors as well.8

The 15 January 1940 issue of Musical Courier included a long article titled “Milhaud Returning to America Next Season,” which began by describing the change in his reputation as a composer since his last U.S. tour:

A new Milhaud will return to the United States next autumn for his fourth visit to the country. No longer an “enfant terrible” of music, in the sense that he was two decades ago when his productions startled or amused, but a representative of the more substantial French traditions, M. Milhaud, who last was heard in this country in 1926–7, will appear as pianist and guest conductor with a number of leading symphony orchestras.

Since Milhaud returned to Paris after two years’ service at the French Legation in Rio de Janeiro more than twenty years ago, he has become France’s “No. 1 composer.” In that time he has created works of such value and solidity . . . that he has taken his place beside the “older men of France,” Debussy and Ravel.9

While this tour was being planned, Ballet Theatre, a new company based in New York City, prepared to stage a production choreographed by Agnes de Mille to Milhaud’s score for La Création du monde (1923).10 Titled Black Ritual, the ballet replaced the African creation myth of the original scenario with a depiction of a ritual sacrifice “set vaguely somewhere in the West Indies” and featured a cast of sixteen African American women.11 This was the first time La Création du monde had been staged in the United States, but the music had been introduced to U.S. listeners in the 1930s.12 Black Ritual was performed only three times in January and

8 _{Albert Morini to Serge Koussevitzky, 18 December 1939, Library of Congress, Music Division, Serge}

Koussevitzky Archive, ML31.K66, Box 43, Folder 19.

9 _{Friede F. Rothe, “Milhaud Returning to America Next Season,” Musical Courier, 15 January 1940, 12.} 10

Erin K. Maher, “Ballet, Race, and Agnes de Mille’s Black Ritual,” The Musical Quarterly 97, no. 3 (2014): 390– 428.

11 _{Black Ritual program, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division,}

Lavinia Williams Clipping File, *MGZR.

12

In 1931 and 1932, Robert Schmitz performed Milhaud’s arrangement for piano quintet in California, and Bernard Herrmann conducted the premiere of the original chamber-orchestra version in New York in December 1933. I. M.J. [Isabel Morse Jones], “Chamber Music Programs to End Wednesday,” Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1931; I. M.J., “Milhaud Work Origin Told by French Pianist,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1932; H. H., “Orchestra Debut is Vital Concert,” New York Times, 4 December 1933. Earlier in 1933, a recording conducted by Milhaud, featuring

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February 1940, after which the company disbanded its Negro Unit for financial reasons. Letters from Madeleine Milhaud to Kurt Weill reveal that Ballet Theatre may have obtained the

orchestra parts for La Création du monde without going through Editions Max Eschig (the score’s publisher) or paying the rental fees.13

By this point, however, Milhaud had decided to postpone the planned concert tour indefinitely, not only because of the war, but also because of his health. In August and

September 1939, he experienced a severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis that left him unable to get out of bed for several weeks. During this time, the worsening international situation—including the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in August and the invasion of Poland in September—also precipitated a depressive episode and, with it, an inability to compose. He wrote to Henri Sauguet in November: “I am in a mental daze, without reaction. I can only think about all of these young people who defend us and die every day.”14

In his autobiography, Milhaud credited the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s commission, which he began writing in November, with bringing him out of this low mental state, at least enough to resume productivity: “I felt incapable of getting to work, yet I had to deliver a work for the Chicago orchestra’s anniversary. The idea that it would be the only French composition on the program shook me from inactivity, and I started my First Symphony. . . . Once my

the French saxophonist Marcel Mule, was released by Columbia Records. Between 1938 and 1941, the critic Irving Deakin played the recording four times on his New York radio program Music and Ballet, interspersing sections of the music with descriptions of the scenario. Radio scripts, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Irving Deakin Papers, (S) *MGZMD 18, Box 4.

13 _{Madeleine Milhaud to Kurt Weill, 22 February 1940 and 4 March 1940, Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music}

Library, Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, MSS 30, Box 49, Folder 47.

14

Darius Milhaud to Henri Sauguet, [November 1939], Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique, N.L.a. 322 (132): “Je suis moralement abruti, sans réaction. Je ne puis que penser à toute cette jeunesse qui nous défend et qui meurt tous les jours.”

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symphony was finished, renewed impetus was given; I continued to compose.”15 The other pieces he wrote during this time included Cantate de la guerre, on a text by Paul Claudel—a companion to the Cantate de la paix of 1937—and a “Fanfare” for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Milhaud’s connection to that orchestra was its music director, the French-born Vladimir Golschmann. A key advocate for Milhaud’s music during the composer’s early career, Golschmann had conducted the first performances of the ballets Le Bœuf sur le toit (1920) and La Création du monde (1923) in Paris; after taking up the St. Louis post in 1931, he returned to France periodically for conducting engagements there until the outbreak of war.

Though Milhaud was able to return to composing, his physical health remained a serious concern, with several more periods of immobility, each followed by a slow recovery. Madeleine Milhaud wrote to Kurt Weill in mid-April 1940: “There is a possibility that he will go to

America next year, but I do not want to consider it unless I also have work: a class in French literature or poetry, diction, etc… at a college. I imagine Da bedridden for weeks in America, missing concerts and not earning a cent, and it seems quite unwise to me.”16 Her frequent letters to Weill—her former lover—during this period not only provide updates on her husband’s health, but also offer a window on her own activities in Aix and her perspective on the situation.17 Unable to continue her acting and teaching career so far from Paris, she occupied herself with knitting for French soldiers and producing short plays with the local children to

15

MVH, 214–15: “Je me sentais incapable de me mettre au travail; il me fallait pourtant livrer une œuvre pour l’anniversaire de l’orchestre de Chicago. L’idée qu’elle serait la seule composition française inscrite au programme secoua mon inaction et je commençai ma Première Symphonie. . . . Une fois ma symphonie terminée, l’impulsion était donnée; je continuai à composer.”

16

Madeleine Milhaud to Kurt Weill, 15 April 1940, Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, MSS 30, Box 49, Folder 48: “Il est assez question qu’il aille en Amérique l’année prochaine mais je ne voudrais l’envisager que si j’ai moi aussi du travail: un cours de littérature ou poésie française Diction etc… dans un collège. J’imagine Da couché pendant des semaines en Amérique, manquant des concerts et ne gagnant pas un sou, cela me paraît bien imprudent.”

17

Madeleine Milhaud’s affair with Weill occurred during his two years in Paris (1933–35), when he was temporarily divorced from Lotte Lenya.

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perform in hospitals. In late autumn, Jacques Denoël, one of her acting students from the Schola Cantorum, arrived in Aix, and she continued her lessons with him, which she described as a welcome alternative to her other, less intellectually-stimulating activities: “He forces me out of my daily exhaustion (for before he arrived, I was knitting almost fifteen hours a day), and he makes me think about my profession again, which is perhaps a good thing.” In the same letter, she contrasted her professional situation with her husband’s, remarking on the gendered expectations they faced: “A Creator”—underlining “un,” the French masculine article—“must continue to create—always, always, but a little actress like me can easily stop performing—that will not harm anyone!”18

During their previous stay in Aix in the summer of 1938, Darius and Madeleine had collaborated on a one-act opera, Médée, the result of a commission by the French government.19 They could not attend the Flemish-language world premiere in Antwerp on 7 October 1939, as Milhaud was still recovering from his recent illness and they did not want to take the risk of leaving the country.20 However, they did listen to it on the radio, in a broadcast periodically interrupted with news updates. Médée was performed alongside Richard Strauss’s Daphne; Milhaud wondered if the juxtaposition of his opera with one by a German composer was “a means of maintaining the illusion of an arbitrary neutrality” in Belgium.21

18 _{Madeleine Milhaud to Kurt Weill, 29 November 1939, Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Papers}

of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, MSS 30, Box 49, Folder 48: “il m’oblige à sortir de mon abrutissement quotidien (car avant son arrivée, je tricotais près de 15 heures par jour) et il m’oblige à repenser à mon métier, ce qui est peut- être une bonne chose – Un Créateur doit continuer à créer – toujours, toujours, mais une petite actrice comme moi peut bien s’arrêter de jouer – cela ne fera de mal à personne!” See also chapter 5.

19 _{On French government commissioning of composers in the late 1930s, see Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era,’” 1–}

99. Médée is discussed on pp. 36–53.

20

Darius Milhaud to Henri Hoppenot, [September 1939], C-Hoppenot, 160.

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The director of the Paris Opéra, Jacques Rouché, wanted to wait until after the end of hostilities to stage Médée there, but Milhaud insisted that it should be done as soon as possible.22 Originally scheduled for February or March 1940, the production was delayed several times and eventually opened on 8 May. Milhaud, who had suffered a relapse in March, remained in Aix