1.1 The Emerging Musician: From the Conservatoire to the ‘Lyre et Palette’ Concerts

When Tailleferre won the first prize for her solfège (ear training) study, her father was apparently proud of her success when her name was published in the local newspaper, but he refused to support her financially and Tailleferre was obliged to give private lessons from her teenage years in order to pay for her own studies.Footnote ¹⁵ Tailleferre ultimately won more first prizes at the Conservatoire than any other member of Les Six. In 1913, the year of her harmony prize, she met Auric, Honegger, and Milhaud in Georges Caussade’s counterpoint class. Her music of this period shows the influence of Fauré above all, but Milhaud introduced her to more contemporary composers; she eagerly devoured their music and came to detest the reactionary atmosphere of the Conservatoire. The culmination of her studies was the organ class taught by Eugène Gigout, but Tailleferre resigned, claiming that ‘my improvisations, strongly influenced by Stravinsky, made him cry out in horror’.Footnote ¹⁶

This marked the end of her studies, but after World War I, Ravel suggested she enter the Prix de Rome because of the financial benefits of winning a prize. However, Tailleferre claimed she ‘was completely refused … I was simply requested not to apply’Footnote ¹⁷ because of the notoriety associated with Les Six; in the same interview she recalls she was even considered a ‘bolchévique’ by the Conservatoire authorities.Footnote ¹⁸

As a young woman, Tailleferre could play Wagner operas and Stravinsky ballets from memory, and she composed with great facility. From around 1916, Auric, Honegger, Milhaud, and Tailleferre appeared on concert programmes together in unconventional venues in Montparnasse, many traditional concert halls being closed because of the war. One of these venues was 6 rue Huyghens, an artist’s studio owned by the Swiss painter Émile Lejeune (1885–1964). He suggested to a friend, the concert impresario Arthur Dandelot, that his studio be used as a concert venue; Dandelot took up this suggestion but soon passed the role of organiser to the Swedish composer Henrik Melchers (1882–1961). Many of these concerts were given in conjunction with poetry readings and exhibitions.Footnote ¹⁹ There was another Swedish connection to these programmes: Arvid Fougstedt provided an artist’s impression of an event at 6 rue Huyghens. The first concert, on 8 April 1916, was a Debussy festival, and ten days later a Satie–Ravel festival included the premiere of Satie’s Trois Mélodies and a performance of his Trois morceaux en forme de poire by the composer and Ricardo Viñes. Around twenty events took place in the venue from 1916 to a Nouveaux Jeunes concert on 5 April 1919,Footnote ²⁰ and the idea of combining different art forms in these events under the heading ‘Lyre et Palette’ originated with the author Blaise Cendrars.Footnote ²¹

Tailleferre took drawing lessons at the Académie Ranson in Montparnasse while studying at the Paris Conservatoire, and she was for a time torn between art and music. This interest in both art forms meant that the ‘Lyre et Palette’ activities particularly appealed to her. Her decision to focus on music was made partly thanks to Melchers, and in fact she was the first future member of Les Six to participate in an event at the venue, during the third Lyre et Palette concert. A drawing of Melchers by Matisse appears on the cover of the 8 June 1916 programme,Footnote ²² and Tailleferre appeared in this concert not as a composer, but as a pianist, performing Melchers’ Rapsodie suédoise in a two-piano version with him.

It must be remembered that before recordings were easily available, piano transcriptions for one or more players were an important means of disseminating orchestral music. As an excellent pianist, Tailleferre was involved in several private and public concerts in Paris in the late 1910s, often appearing alongside another pianist in a transcribed work. She performed the piano duet version of Satie’s Parade (1917) with the composer on several occasions and they also joined forces for his Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903). Her own transcriptions of Stravinsky’s ballets were also popular with private audiences; the piano roll manufacturer Pleyel even planned to release a piano roll recording of The Rite of Spring piano duet transcription played by Stravinsky and Tailleferre, but this project sadly did not come to fruition.Footnote ²³ The two-piano formation was also popular with emerging composers of the period: Durey’s very Ravelian Carillon and Neige (1916–1918) appeared on a number of concert programmes, as did Tailleferre’s Jeux de plein air (Outdoor Games; 1917). Some of these works were later orchestrated, suggesting the two-piano pieces were in some cases the first stage in the development of a work.

1.2 Early Public Performances of Tailleferre’s Music

Jeux de plein air was first performed by Tailleferre and Ricardo Viñes (1875–1943), a Spanish concert pianist based in Paris who premiered many contemporary works and was the dedicatee of pieces by Ravel, Satie, Poulenc, and many others. Tailleferre recalled in her Reference Tailleferre1971 filmed interview that Viñes suggested the title of each movement (‘La Tirelitentaine’ and ‘Cache-cache mitoula’), which he drew from Rabelais: the reference is to card games, ironically therefore to indoor rather than outdoor games.Footnote ²⁴ This piece played a vital role in Tailleferre’s musical emergence, as Satie overheard the composer and Marcelle Meyer play Jeux de plein air at Meyer’s home. When he discovered Tailleferre was the composer, he kissed her, called her his ‘fille musicale’, and invited her to participate in a rue Huyghens concert.Footnote ²⁵ This was a turning point for Tailleferre, and she never looked back in pursuing a musical career. Her compositional début at rue Huyghens took place on 29 November 1917, when her music appeared alongside that of Satie, Honegger, Auric, and Durey.Footnote ²⁶

When the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier programme was taken over by the singer and great supporter of contemporary music Jane Bathori in 1917, works by these young composers were also promoted at that venue.Footnote ²⁷ A concert at the theatre on 11 December 1917 included Tailleferre’s Piano Trio performed by Marcelle Meyer, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (violin), and Félix Delgrange (cello),Footnote ²⁸ closing with the premiere of Poulenc’s Rapsodie nègre, in which the composer replaced the original singer who had to cancel due to illness. Tailleferre’s three-movement piano trio was composed in 1916, but not published until 1980, in a reworked four-movement version.

Tailleferre also encountered the writer, artist, and polemicist Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) during this period. Although not himself a musician, he set himself up as the spokesman for young avant-garde composers in his tract Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918), which was dedicated to Auric. The cockerel, a symbol of France, is here contrasted with the harlequin, representing eclectic foreign influence. While Satie was not then as well known as his near-contemporaries Debussy and Ravel, he was promoted as a role model for young composers. Satie (who was in fact half Scottish) was praised as the composer of ‘everyday music’, as opposed to Wagner’s lengthy operas and the elaborate orchestral textures of Debussy. Cocteau called for music that drew on popular styles, not music to be listened to ‘with your head in your hands’.Footnote ²⁹

The number of female performers active in Paris wartime concerts is noteworthy. The pianist Marcelle Meyer is at the centre of Jacques-Émile Blanche’s 1921 group portrait of Les Six (Tailleferre is crouching in the bottom left-hand corner), and the war years saw the emergence of the all-female Quatuor Capelle and Quatuor Jourdan-Morhange, both of which played Tailleferre’s 1917 quartet. Under the title Sonatine, the two-movement work was first performed by the Quatuor Jourdan-Morhange on 15 January 1918 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (its first violinist, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, was a close friend of Ravel).Footnote ³⁰ Jeux de plein air was performed on the same programme, by Tailleferre herself and Marcelle Meyer.Footnote ³¹ Tailleferre’s quartet was heard again less than a month later, on 5 February, again at Vieux-Colombier but this time as part of a programme including the poet and humourist René Chalupt and a ‘causerie’ by Satie. Another pianist who often appeared at 6 rue Huyghens and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier was Juliette Méerovitch (1895–1920). She is the dedicatee of ‘Cache-cache mitoula’, the second piece of Jeux de plein air, while Meyer is the dedicatee of the first.

In an introduction to a concert in early 1918 (either the Vieux-Colombier concert on 15 January or the one on 5 February), Satie referred to the composers on the programme as the Nouveaux Jeunes and dubbed Tailleferre ‘our Marie Laurencin’,Footnote ³² a description borrowed by Cocteau the following year. Perhaps he detected a similar use of striking colour and a contemporary approach to line in their work, but it is more likely that he made the comparison because they were both women working in male-dominated fields. Tailleferre remained close to her friends and always stressed the fun and camaraderie of the early 1920s, but she was independent-minded and also regularly visited Ravel at his home in Montfort l’Amaury, despite Cocteau and Satie’s disapproval. She would play her Stravinsky piano transcriptions on these occasions, and Ravel would advise her on orchestration. For his part, Ravel did his best to promote Tailleferre’s music, as shown in several surviving letters from Ravel to other people in which he mentions he voted for her work to be included in a concert or recommended her for an award.Footnote ³³

Tailleferre was highly sought after both as performer and composer. Besides her Montparnasse activities, she was involved in several Montjoie! festival events in the late 1910s, organised by the Italian critic Ricciotto Canudo. As is typical of the period, music performances for these events were part of a broader artistic presentation: for instance, in the first festival Tailleferre was the pianist for a music and poetry evening, and on 20 February 1918, she played the piano in a performance of Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis.Footnote ³⁴

1.3 The Emergence of Les Six

Another noteworthy concert of the period, the first to be exclusively devoted to works by Les Six, was given on 5 April 1919 at 6 rue Huyghens. It included Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels and his Sonata for two clarinets; Durey’s Images à Crusoé; Tailleferre’s Image for flute, clarinet, string quartet, piano, and celesta; three of Auric’s Cocteau settings; Milhaud’s Fourth String Quartet; and Honegger’s furniture music pieces ‘Entrée’, ‘Nocturne’, and ‘Berceuse’. The group appeared on the same programme outside France for the first time in Brussels at the Institut des Hautes-Études on 17 December 1919, an event presenting compositions by all members of Les Six and preceded by a talk by Cocteau. This event was organised by the Belgian musicologist Paul Collaer, and Auric, Milhaud, and Tailleferre were present. The programme comprised Parade in its piano duet version played by Auric and Milhaud; Durey’s String Quartet; four songs by Honegger; Chandelles romaines for piano duet by Auric; Milhaud’s second sonata for violin and piano; Tailleferre’s Pastorale for piano, string quartet, flute, clarinet, and celesta, and Poulenc’s Rapsodie nègre.Footnote ³⁵ As a composer, Tailleferre was therefore a core participant in Paris concerts in the late 1910s that foreshadowed the official naming of Les Six.

The group of composers had been moving in the same circles for several years before Les Six were baptised by the journalist Henri Collet early in 1920. Collet had a regular column in the arts newspaper Comoedia, and in two articles, he drew a direct comparison between the six composers and the Russian Five of the late nineteenth century (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov). He also positioned Satie as a key influence on the group. The formation of Les Six dates from one evening in December 1919, when

In his second article, Collet explicitly calls the group of composers ‘Les Six’ and considers to what extent they might have followed Cocteau’s precepts as stated in his polemical tract Le Coq et l’Arlequin, which was dedicated to Auric. He states that ‘Cocteau’s aesthetic philosophy and Satie’s harmonic audacity opened the way for Les Six’,Footnote ³⁷ though Collet recognised that it is hard to pin down Cocteau’s influence to specific works. Indeed, he admits that Cocteau’s statement in Le Coq et l’Arlequin, ‘soon we can hope for an orchestra without caressing strings. A rich wind band with woodwind, brass and percussion’ was specifically ignored by group members, including Tailleferre in her Fantaisie for piano and orchestra (later titled Ballade).Footnote ³⁸ Collet sums up Tailleferre’s current work as ‘a trio, a string quartet, a Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, a Pastorale for small orchestra, her well-known Jeux de plein air and songs’, concluding ‘this fertility from members of Les Six gives us admirable proof of musical health and bubbling inspiration’.Footnote ³⁹

Le Coq et l’Arlequin and Collet’s articles certainly drew attention to the young composers, and in 1920 a short-lived journal, Le Coq, was another Cocteau-driven opportunity for the composers to promote their work. Four issues of Le Coq were published in that year (the fourth was titled Le Coq parisien), and the journal featured some short texts by Satie that would become notorious; he wrote in the second number: ‘Ravel refuses the Legion of Honour but all his music accepts it.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Tailleferre, however, did not contribute to Le Coq and was never deeply involved in group polemics. As we have seen, she remained friendly with Ravel and there is no real evidence that she took note of Cocteau’s aesthetic preferences. It is also true that Cocteau mentioned her only rarely in his writings, suggesting that he took little or no interest in her music.

A concert given on 19 June 1920 was explicitly advertised as a ‘Concert donné par le groupe des Six’, in which works by each composer, including Tailleferre’s String Quartet, appeared alongside four songs from Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens (1908–1909), a French premiere. It is clear that the formation of Les Six as a group had more to do with who attended a dinner party on one particular evening than on common musical affinities. The group’s existence as a composer collective was short-lived: they produced only one joint publication, a set of six short piano pieces titled L’Album des Six (1920), for which the composers were presented in alphabetical order (the final piece, Tailleferre’s ‘Pastorale’, was dedicated to Milhaud and finished on his birthday, 4 September). However, their friendship lasted and Tailleferre always insisted that Les Six was a group of friends that was not bound by a shared musical style.

While Tailleferre was very much present on concert programmes in the late 1910s alongside future members of Les Six, she was marginalised in the professional musical sphere compared to her contemporaries. Both Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars acted as literary advisors to the publisher La Sirène which, at the suggestion of Cendrars, expanded its activity from literary to music publishing: one of its first music scores was Satie’s Socrate, published in 1919. Five composers in Les Six were published by La Sirène, Tailleferre being the only exception. Even her String Quartet, which as we have seen was performed in public several times, remained unpublished until Durand picked it up in 1921. When Poulenc wrote to Paul Collaer on 21 January 1921, responding to a query about Les Six publications, he specifically mentioned that for Tailleferre, only Jeux de plein air for two pianos was published by the time of Henri Collet’s article (and Poulenc refers to this work not quite accurately as being for ‘piano 4 mains’ – it is for two pianos, not piano duet as Poulenc stated).Footnote ⁴¹ This lack of access to published work ensured that when people discussed Tailleferre’s music in writing, they did so without any detailed knowledge of it at a time when access to published scores was essential for critics. It is true that Honegger was also slow to be published compared to other members of Les Six, though his first string quartet, viola sonata, and cello sonata were all taken up by La Sirène in the early 1920s.

Satie disapproved of Tailleferre’s friendship with Ravel. Tailleferre described Satie as ‘Ravel’s intimate enemy’ and when Satie found out that she had been visiting Ravel, he said ‘I disown you, you’re no longer my daughter, I’m not talking to you any more!’Footnote ⁴² Beyond this momentary animosity, it is true that Satie’s view of Tailleferre’s music was inconsistent. Satie was again drawn into Les Six activity during his first trip abroad as an adult, when he visited Brussels for a performance of his work and that of other contemporary French composers. Cocteau was to have introduced the Les Six concert on 11 April 1921 and a Satie programme which was performed on the following day, but as his lover, the writer Raymond Radiguet, was ill, Satie replaced Cocteau at the last minute. Satie’s introduction features the highly individual punctuation style he used for spoken texts, indicating the place and length of pauses, and has an odd tone for a publicity talk. He starts by evoking his pleasure at introducing these composers, even saying ‘I have shared great joy with them … Yes … I am very proud to find myself with Les Six. They know I love them very much. So … they keep me near them. They keep me as a fetish object – which is pretty odd.’Footnote ⁴³

When Satie starts talking about the composers individually, his views are more nuanced. Discussing Apollinaire’s concept of the ‘Esprit Nouveau’, which the writer used in his programme note for Parade, Satie said:

Despite his early support of Tailleferre, Satie’s words on this occasion suggest he was no longer very familiar with the music of the composer he once called his ‘fille musicale’. Lumping Durey, Honegger, and Tailleferre together as ‘pure impressionists’ perhaps shows his essential lack of interest in their music: there is a world of difference between Honegger’s experimentalism in his 1919 furniture music pieces and the multimedia Le Dit des jeux du monde (1918), for instance, and Tailleferre’s harmonic daring in her quartet and Jeux de plein air, and what they are certainly not is impressionists.

However, it is always dangerous to assume that Satie had a single, consistent viewpoint, and other evidence suggests that he continued to follow Tailleferre’s career and appreciate her collaboration. Satie’s short songs to texts by Léon-Paul Fargue, Ludions and his even shorter Divertissement: La Statue retrouvée, were both premiered at one of the most sumptuous costume balls of the era, Comte Étienne de Beaumont’s ‘Bal baroque’, on 30 May 1923. No expense was spared for La Statue retrouvée, a 53-bar-long piece for organ and trumpet: Picasso designed sets and costumes for the private performance and Massine was engaged at the last minute as choreographer. Both of Satie’s pieces showcased the newly restored eighteenth-century organ in the Beaumonts’ music room and Tailleferre played the instrument for these works.Footnote ⁴⁵ And in one of his last surviving letters, written to the pianist and composer Jean Wiéner on 20 January 1925, Satie wrote: ‘Alas! I can’t come to the concert this evening: I’m too ill […]. I would have liked to hear Tailleferre’s concerto. Please send her my best wishes.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Less than six months later, Satie died.

1.4 Tailleferre’s First Orchestral Works

Around 1920, Tailleferre met the violinist Jacques Thibaud (1880–1953) and fell in love with him. Thibaud was married, a father, and notorious for his affairs with women, and his busy international concert schedule meant that Tailleferre had few opportunities to see him, which caused her much pain. In the summer of 1920, Tailleferre visited England with Louis Durey at the invitation of a Swedish singer Louise Alvar (1883–1966), who was married to a wealthy British lawyer, Charles Harding; the family also knew Ravel well and hosted him when he visited the UK in the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁷ Tailleferre’s Image for eight instruments (1918) in a transcribed version for piano duet and Ballade for piano and orchestra (1920–1922) were published by Chester, probably as a result of this visit.

The Ballade has a complex history. It began as a Morceau symphonique, finished at Alvar’s country home in Littlehampton in August 1920, but Tailleferre was evidently not happy with it – specifically, the piano part is unchallenging and the orchestration rudimentary – and in letters to Alvar she wrote of her struggles with the work. In a letter postmarked 4 September that almost certainly followed this visit, Tailleferre wrote of the orchestration of the work, which at this stage was titled Fantaisie: ‘it’s giving me a lot of trouble … it’s very difficult not to be guided by anyone for work of this type when one has so little experience’.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, in another letter to Alvar, written after she had been suffering from an abscess on a finger that prevented her from playing the piano and writing, she shows that she was able to obtain some expert advice: ‘I have, nevertheless, finished the orchestration of the Fantaisie – I even have to show it to Stravinsky on Saturday.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Tailleferre was no doubt apologising about her enforced lack of piano practice because she was about to accompany Alvar on a tour of Scandinavia. In the letter in which she writes about the orchestration of the Fantaisie being finished, she is also trying to reschedule a rehearsal with Alvar. She wrote at length about the Scandinavian tour in her Mémoires, though without naming the singer ‘who was travelling with her impresario, a man of letters who was also her lover’.Footnote ⁵⁰ While Tailleferre enjoyed visiting cities including Stockholm, she was disappointed to discover that there was so little daylight during this winter tour. But above all, she was deeply pained to be away from Thibaud for such a long period and felt very awkward as a third person travelling with Alvar and her lover. Tailleferre’s letters to Alvar suggest she appreciated her friendship and was very fond of her two young children, but her relationship with the singer deteriorated sharply during the tour. She claimed the singer ‘disapproved of and did not forgive my love story with someone so well-known’, and to top it all, the singer gave her insufficient money to cover her return journey.Footnote ⁵¹ It is hardly surprising that the correspondence between Tailleferre and Alvar appears to have ceased after a final difficult letter in which Tailleferre explained the return journey she was obliged to make, including a night spent on a train to avoid paying for a hotel.

The Ballade was first performed in Paris on 3 February 1923 by its dedicatee, Ricardo Viñes, and the Orchestre Pasdeloup under Rhené-Bâton. One critic, Pierre de Lapommeraye, considered it to be the epitome of the avant-garde: ‘Mlle Germaine Tailleferre is a member of the Groupe des Six; that is to say that she treats consonance and harmony with the same lack of respect as young people of today treat their parents.’Footnote ⁵² At this stage, Tailleferre was still absorbing influences: that of Debussy is heard in the lush orchestration, and the bitonal opening recalls Stravinsky, specifically Petrushka. The Ballade is, in fact, the closest of all Tailleferre’s works to the impressionist style, and its large-scale conception further emphasises Tailleferre’s determination to follow her own path rather than adhere to Cocteau’s pronouncements.

In her last surviving letter to Louise Alvar, written after the unfortunate concert tour to Scandinavia, Tailleferre wrote: ‘At the moment I am writing 5 Chants for violin and orchestra and am going to start a quadrille for the Ballets Suédois.’Footnote ⁵³ The Quadrille was one of her contributions to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), and no doubt she had Thibaud in mind for the violin and orchestra project. While this work appears not to have moved forward, she began a large-scale violin sonata late in 1920. This sonata, dedicated to Thibaud and premiered by him and Alfred Cortot in June 1922, has affinities with the Viola Sonata by Charles Koechlin, from whom she took lessons in both orchestration and composition at various times from 1916 to 1924. Both works are substantial, four-movement pieces and feature harsh bitonal effects. In a talk entitled ‘The Contemporary Moment’ delivered in the US in the summer of 1928, Koechlin wrote: ‘But it is a fact that (except as concerns Germaine Tailleferre, who never shook off the influence of Ravel), the “Six” wished for and practised an art purposely less refined than that of this fine composer.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Thibaud edited the violin part before the sonata was published by Durand in 1923; Tailleferre sent him a letter on 5 August 1922 begging him to do this. The tone of this letter suggests that their relationship had fizzled out by this point.Footnote ⁵⁵

In a lighter vein, the ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel proved to be the last collective work by members of Les Six. This work, conceived for the Ballets Suédois, put into practice some ideas Cocteau had for Parade, his 1917 collaboration with Satie and the Ballets Russes, which ultimately were rejected. Most particularly, he was eager to include a spoken word part in Parade, to be performed by himself by speaking through a megaphone. Cocteau’s proto-surreal text was first titled La noce massacrée,Footnote ⁵⁶ which alludes to a fairground amusement ‘le jeu de massacre’ that involves throwing a ball at figures representing a wedding party. (Cocteau was evidently fond of this title as he used it for a collection of poetry that was published by La Sirène in 1921.) In Les Mariés, the child of the newlyweds bombards the guests with ping-pong balls. Cocteau changed the title of the ballet at the last minute, considering the new idea to be ‘more alluring and more Parisian’.

What could be more Parisian than the Eiffel Tower? The action takes place on 14 July, the French national day, and Irène Lagut’s backdrop represents a bird’s eye view of Paris. A wedding party is having photographs taken on the tower, but each time the photographer exhorts them to ‘Watch the birdie!’, something emerges from his camera lens: an ostrich pursued by a hunter who accidentally shoots a telegram girl, a bathing beauty, a lion, and an art dealer. The presence of the Eiffel Tower’s flustered manager provides a further link with Parade, which featured three managers as characters (two huge cubist cardboard figures and one in the form of a pantomime horse). Two actors at either side of the stage declaim Cocteau’s text from within huge phonograph costumes: the author praised the diction of the first phonographs, Pierre Bertin and Marcel Herrend, describing their delivery as ‘black as ink, as big and clear as the capital letters of an advertising slogan’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Rolf de Maré, the director of the Ballets Suédois, originally commissioned Auric to write all the music, but he claimed to be short of ideas. He must have been, as his breezy Ouverture is nothing more than an orchestration of his piano ‘Prélude’ from L’Album des Six (1920) preceded by a 70-bar fanfare. (In his preface to the published text, Cocteau calls this movement ‘Le Quatorze Juillet’.)Footnote ⁵⁸ This overture is dedicated to ‘Général Clapier’, contemporary slang for a brothel, and the name Cocteau originally wanted to give to the general in his farce. The plot is deliberately broad and vulgar in character: Cocteau wanted the ballet to be ‘poetry of the theatre’, which he defined as ‘large-scale lace, made of rope, a boat on the sea’ (as opposed to lace which could never be seen on stage from the auditorium).Footnote ⁵⁹

Durey was originally to have composed the ‘Valse des dépêches’ (Waltz of the telegram girls), but he withdrew at a late stage and Tailleferre wrote this number in his stead at very short notice. Tailleferre’s two contributions reflect Cocteau’s wish for a bold-coloured, witty, and direct score that echoed popular musical style. The barrel-organ-like ‘Valse des dépêches’ is danced by five telegram girls, and the ‘Quadrille’ has the five sections traditionally associated with this dance: Pantalon, Été, Poule, Pastourelle, and Final. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel was first performed on 18 June 1921 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. The premiere provoked an uproar in the auditorium, though later performances were better received.

Tailleferre’s Marchand d’Oiseaux (The Bird-Seller; 1923) was one of the most successful productions of the Ballets Suédois, who were resident in Paris in the first half of the 1920s and commissioned work from many significant Paris-based composers of the period, including Satie as well as members of Les Six. Tailleferre wrote this ballet in one month to a scenario by Hélène Perdriat, who also designed the sets and costumes. The plot is straightforward, featuring two sisters who discover two bouquets, one expensive and one of wildflowers. The younger sister finds the wildflowers more appealing – they were left by the bird-seller and their flirtation ends happily – while her older sister is seduced by the expensive bouquet left by a wealthy stranger. He is later unmasked by a naughty dancing schoolgirl and revealed to be an elderly merchant.

The ballet was choreographed by the Ballets Suédois’ principal dancer Jean Börlin with help from Tailleferre. The composer amusingly described her attempts to demonstrate the moves she imagined to the company: ‘In my enthusiasm and abandon, I started to dance, or rather run, from one end of the stage to the other, kicking up a cloud of dust with my shoes … it sounded like a cavalry charge!’Footnote ⁶⁰ Fortunately, she also wrote about her music in the weekly L’Intransigeant after the premiere on 25 May 1923. Tailleferre reveals that she ‘made allusions to several different styles, especially the light and pompous ballets of the 18th century that sparkled with good humour’.Footnote ⁶¹ She acknowledged Chopin’s influence, too, in the opening waltz. In this article, Tailleferre tends to diminish her work, referring to it as ‘une oeuvrette’ (a little piece); she also, intriguingly, mentions that she is part of Les Six alongside Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Satie, and Auric.Footnote ⁶² It is noteworthy that, according to Tailleferre, Satie has replaced Durey to make up the numbers.

There are certainly a number of allusions to other composers in Marchand d’Oiseaux; in particular, the overture is more than reminiscent of the first movement of J. S. Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. The ballet is also descended from French composers such as Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel: the dance for the bird-seller himself, a pavane, pays homage both to the eighteenth century and to the turn-of-the-century fête galante style, which was itself a homage to classical Greece viewed through the prism of eighteenth-century artists such as Watteau and Fragonard. This Pavane, originally scored for piano solo, sounds like a cross between those by Ravel and Fauré. At the same time, this is very much a twentieth-century neoclassical work, with spicy dissonances enlivening the regular phrases. More than anything, the ballet is supremely crafted for dancing, with every number having a strong rhythmic profile and genuine dramatic force.

Marchand d’Oiseaux was performed ninety-four times between its premiere on 25 May 1923 and the demise of the Swedish company in 1925, and not at all as a ballet since then. Critical reception was generally positive, and the author Colette’s review, published in Le Matin, is the most evocative of all:

But other contemporary reviews seemed unable to look past the gender of the principal creators, Tailleferre and Perdriat.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Le Correspondant, in a section unfortunately called ‘Les œuvres et les hommes’, Maurice Brillant wrote: ‘Marchand d’oiseaux is a very pleasant entertainment which, thanks to two feminine hands, is devoid of any metaphysical ambition and sensibly seeks only to please.’Footnote ⁶⁵ The end of this review alludes to two other writers: Roland-Manuel, who believes the ballet is ‘Scarlatti accommodated by Tailleferre in the same way that Stravinsky treats Pergolesi in Pulcinella’,Footnote ⁶⁶ and Auric, who published a review in Les nouvelles littéraires. Auric ‘recalls that Stravinsky, when he uses this procedure, doesn’t do it by chance, but with impeccable precision and logic’, insinuating that Tailleferre does not.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, as in her String Quartet, Tailleferre’s use of ostinati to create tonal ambiguity is sophisticated and knowing: she is nothing if not an excellent craftswoman who was highly skilled at writing to commission and, as she put it, making ‘intentional allusions’. While Auric’s review is overall a positive and supportive assessment, he is somewhat condescending towards his older contemporary, writing ‘the orchestration of Marchand d’oiseaux is very much an improvement on that of Tailleferre’s previous work, particularly the Ballade’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Diaghilev used the overture of Marchand d’Oiseaux as an interlude for his company’s foreign tours, and he commissioned a ballet based on Bougainvilliers’ Voyages autour de la terre from Tailleferre in 1929, but sadly he died soon afterwards. Another admirer of Marchand d’Oiseaux was the Princesse de Polignac. She had already supported Tailleferre by inviting her to St Jean de Luz in winter 1920 to write her First Violin Sonata in peace, and Tailleferre often played her Stravinsky transcriptions at the princess’s salon. The princess commissioned a piano concerto ‘because she had been impressed by the Scarlatti-like touches in […] Le Marchand d’Oiseaux’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Tailleferre composed the concerto at the Polignac family home in Bouzaréah, a suburb of Algiers. She could not have followed the princess’s wishes better, as the concerto is very similar in style to the ballet and is even in the same key (D major). The outer two movements are particularly closely related to the Ouverture and Final of the ballet, but they are cast in more adventurous forms. In the opening Allegro of the concerto, the piano and orchestral themes are developed simultaneously, and the finale is a lively Allegro non troppo featuring horn-calls, fugato writing, and just about every possible rhythmic permutation of quavers and semiquavers within the bar. The manuscript again reveals that orchestration was still a challenge for Tailleferre, as many thick doublings are crossed out, and there is a note by the trumpet part to all three movements reminding her to ‘transpose a tone lower’. Alfred Cortot shared the first performances of the concerto with Tailleferre, saying of the second movement: ‘Voilà ce qui n’est pas moins beau que Bach’ (‘this is no less beautiful than Bach’). And Tailleferre was particularly flattered that Stravinsky, whom she considered to be ‘the greatest contemporary composer’, admired the concerto, calling it ‘honest music’.Footnote ⁷⁰

1.5 Beyond Les Six: Tailleferre Between Paris and the USA

By 1924, the attention Tailleferre had received as a member of Les Six was fading, and she now had the responsibility of supporting her elderly mother as her older brothers and sisters had all married. While she was often invited to dinner by society friends, Tailleferre’s own domestic circumstances were very different; she lived in a tiny rented flat with her mother and she embroidered scarves and trimmed hats to earn a little more money. She decided to try her luck in the United States, and her friend Marion Dougherty invited her to spend the first few months of 1925 in New York. Dougherty introduced her to Leopold Stokowski, who booked Cortot to play her Piano Concerto. On 2–3 April 1925, Tailleferre herself performed the concerto with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Willem Mengelberg. Cited in the programme note, the composer explained that ‘The classic form which I have used in this work may be regarded as in a way a reaction against Impressionism and Orientalism, and as an indication of an attempt to find an expression purely musical, exempt from all literary implications.’Footnote ⁷¹

But this visit was not as successful as Tailleferre hoped it would be; she would have liked to have obtained a teaching position, as Milhaud later did, and spend half the year in France and half in the United States. She returned to France in May 1925 but decided to return to the United States that September. In retrospect, she thought that continuing to try to make a name in the USA, ‘where you have to succeed first time or nobody’s interested’, was a mistake; her few private pupils did not solve her financial problems.Footnote ⁷² She made a third visit in 1926, and during this visit she met the caricaturist Ralph Barton at a party hosted by Blanche Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred Knopf.Footnote ⁷³

Ralph Waldo Emerson Barton (1891–1931) was from a modest background in Kansas, but he moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and became a celebrated caricaturist, working for titles such as Vanity Fair. When he met Tailleferre in 1926, he was recently divorced from his third wife (who later married the playwright Eugene O’Neill). Barton was famous enough to be the subject of a New Yorker article by John Updike published in 1989: Updike notes that Vanity Fair described him in 1924 as ‘the best known and most widely followed of our caricaturists’ who was paid up to fifteen hundred dollars for a single drawing. A New Yorker profile from 1927 focused on his dandified appearance, frequent travels to France, and what Updike terms his ‘highly specific tastes in champagne, wine, cigarettes, drawing pen, paper, and ink’.Footnote ⁷⁴ He had indeed come a long way from Kansas.

So, the man who met Tailleferre at a party in 1926 was famous, well-connected, and a Francophile. Almost fifty years later she recalled that ‘he was incredibly talented, he had a huge amount of money’.Footnote ⁷⁵ He was also single, though his multiple marriages suggest that this was not his preferred state, and Barton proposed to her on the evening of their first meeting. With no documented romantic attachments since her unhappy liaison with Thibaud, and at a period of transition in her career as she hesitated between life in Paris and New York, Tailleferre was vulnerable to his charm and perhaps attracted to the stable life that a successful man could offer her. If her memoirs are accurate, she was persuaded by her friends that this marriage would be the best thing for her, and they married in Connecticut on 3 December 1926.Footnote ⁷⁶

The couple mixed in New York society, and a week after their wedding, Tailleferre was introduced to Charlie Chaplin, a good friend of Barton, whom Cocteau described in his preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel as ‘the profound Chaplin’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Tailleferre and Chaplin spent time together improvising at the piano, and she advised him to write his own music for his films. Chaplin would have liked Tailleferre to return to Hollywood with him to help him write music, as he was not a trained musician. But, as the composer put it, ‘I forgot that as a married woman […] a young woman is never free.’Footnote ⁷⁸

Tailleferre was initially attracted to Barton for his charm and extensive French cultural interests. She dedicated her Concertino for Harp and Orchestra (1926–1927), a lively quintuple-metre Pastorale, and a Sicilienne for piano (1928) to him, but the marriage soon ran into difficulties. Serge Koussevitsky conducted the premiere of the new work for harp in Boston on 3 March 1927, but Tailleferre’s pleasure at hearing the work was marred by a fit of jealousy from Barton, who made it clear he would not tolerate being ‘Monsieur Tailleferre’.Footnote ⁷⁹ She had met Koussevitzky in Paris during the Les Six years, their paths also crossed on holidays in Brittany and he was a key supporter of hers in the United States. As well as the premiere of the Harp Concertino, he conducted her Piano Concerto in March and April 1925 and an orchestral version of Jeux de plein air in March 1926.Footnote ⁸⁰

Later in 1927, Barton decided they should leave for France, much to Tailleferre’s joy. On the boat they met the author Paul Claudel, whom Tailleferre had first encountered at a Ballets Suédois rehearsal of Milhaud’s L’Homme et son désir. Claudel, who had been appointed the French ambassador to the United States in February 1927,Footnote ⁸¹ immediately tried to persuade her to write incidental music for his philosophical dialogue Sous le rempart d’Athènes, written to commemorate the centenary of the scholar Marcellin Berthelot’s birth. But Tailleferre was anxious about agreeing to work with a man who regularly collaborated with Milhaud and Honegger, and she insisted on obtaining Milhaud’s authorisation to proceed.Footnote ⁸² This deferential attitude was to become typical of her.

Claudel’s eagerness to work with her has to be viewed in the context of his sexist attitude characteristic of the era; Tailleferre recalled that he told her ‘women are a lot more flexible than men and do what I want’, and said that ‘he explained everything so clearly that he seemed to dictate my music’.Footnote ⁸³ It must be said that Tailleferre’s reluctance to impose herself on the work is audible; her music plays very much a subsidiary role and it would work better as background music for television or film than for a live event. The premiere of Sous le rempart d’Athènes was, to say the least, sumptuous, hosted by President Gaston Doumergue at the Élysée Palace on 24 October 1927, and the high-society audience greeted the work with indifference. Robert Fox wrote of Claudel’s abstruse play: ‘It is hard to imagine that the audience at the Élysée Palace would have perceived the full significance of exchanges of such extreme abstraction.’Footnote ⁸⁴ This proved to be its only performance during Tailleferre’s lifetime, and her score then disappeared for many years.

In July and August 1929, Tailleferre composed her Six chansons françaises to fifteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century texts. They form a cycle through their common theme of a woman’s love life and infidelities – Frauenliebe und -leben in a far more risqué manner – but there are no significant musical links between the songs. Each song is dedicated to a different female friend of Tailleferre. The final song, ‘Les trois présents’, was encored at the premiere of the orchestral version in May 1930.

For Barton, their life in Paris was too peaceful; he became restless and his mental health difficulties came to the surface. They moved to the South of France, where he took an American lover, and one evening, having discovered that Tailleferre was pregnant, he held a revolver to her stomach and threatened to shoot the baby. This resulted in a miscarriage; Tailleferre was never to see Barton again as he fled to New York and took his own life in May 1931 before their divorce proceedings were completed.Footnote ⁸⁵

1.6 Tailleferre in Paris in the 1930s: Second Marriage, Orchestral Works

After her separation from Barton, Tailleferre’s only wish was to adopt a child and bring it up alone, but she found she was not permitted to do this. When she moved back to Paris in 1930, she started a relationship with Jean Lageat (1901–1965), a lawyer with political connections who was nine years her junior. There was instant attraction between them and, while Tailleferre was reluctant to plunge into a new relationship, ‘the desperate wish to have a child overrode that. It seemed to me that I would surely have a beautiful child with a boy like that!’Footnote ⁸⁶ She soon became pregnant. Understandably after her experience with Barton, Tailleferre was not eager to marry again, but it appears from her Mémoires that Lageat insisted on them getting married, which happened on 29 September 1932, just over a year after the birth on 4 June 1931 of their daughter Françoise. They married discreetly in London; the marriage certificate shows that Tailleferre’s legal surname was then ‘Barton’ and that her age is given as 30, ten years younger than her true age. She was described as a ‘widow’ with no profession listed, while Lageat was divorced from his first wife, Lucie Poisson.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tailleferre started writing film music in the 1930s, including a score for a documentary on the birth of train travel, Sur les routes d’acier (1938).Footnote ⁸⁸ She also composed some of her finest works in this decade, despite the demands of a small child and frequent domestic crises with Lageat, whose difficult personality was aggravated by frequent ill health.

In an interview with Odette Pannetier in November 1931, Tailleferre said that she was working on the third act of an opéra-comique, Zoulaina, which she hoped would be performed in Brussels.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, only the overture survives, following another commission from the Princesse de Polignac; it was first performed on 25 December 1932, conducted by Pierre Monteux. The harpsichord’s timbre is audible in its unusual orchestration, and the audience of this joyous, frenetic Ouverture was so enthusiastic that they demanded an encore. But Tailleferre said ‘This success, which should have delighted me, was chilled by my husband’s response: he was furious and did not hide that he would never put up with playing the role of “Monsieur Tailleferre.” Exactly like Barton.’Footnote ⁹⁰ This Ouverture proved a fertile resource for Tailleferre: she recycled it as the overture of her comic opera Il était un petit navire and later arranged it for wind band.

Monteux championed Tailleferre’s music throughout the 1930s, and the Concerto Grosso for two pianos, mixed chorus, saxophones, and orchestra (1933–1934) is dedicated to him. Tailleferre always sticks to the traditional three-movement form in her concertos, but the instrumentation is often anything but conventional. In this work, the two pianos play a concertante role; the horns, oboes, and bassoons are replaced by a saxophone quartet; and a wordless double vocal quartet adds another unusual timbre. The slow movement, an eerie nocturne, further eliminates violins and violas. It was premiered in Paris at the Salle Pleyel on 3 May 1934 with Tailleferre and François Lang performing the piano parts, and the critic of Le Ménestrel drew attention to the ‘sense of classical construction, fresh inspiration, sobriety of means and delicate sensibility which characterise Mme Germaine Tailleferre, that spiritual daughter of Scarlatti’.Footnote ⁹¹ The British premiere took place a year later on 3 October 1935 as part of the Promenade Concerts season at Queen’s Hall, when the well-known British piano duo Rae Robertson and Ethel Bartlett and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were conducted by Henry Wood. Despite this promising start, the work was not played again until 1998, when it was recorded following Paul Wehage’s rediscovery of the score.Footnote ⁹²

In 1935, Tailleferre moved with her husband, who suffered from tuberculosis, to a sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland, near the French border. Life was made bearable for her by friends visiting from Paris and, no doubt, by the composition of works including her Violin Concerto. In 1948 she effectively converted the concerto into her Second Violin Sonata, which was published in 1951, by eliminating the opening cadenza and other sections, and by generally simplifying the violin part. Its rhythmic fluidity and the naturalness of its transition sections show how much she had developed as a composer since her First Violin Sonata. Its slow movement, a continuous melancholy song with gorgeous enharmonic modulations and a passionate central section, represents Tailleferre at her best, as does the finale, an inexhaustible fund of invention. The composer and conductor Igor Markevitch was staying near Leysin at the same time as Tailleferre, and when he saw the concerto he told Tailleferre that he would like to orchestrate the slow movement. Tailleferre agreed to this, much to the astonishment of Monteux, who conducted the premiere given by its dedicatee, Yvonne Astruc, on 22 November 1936. Tailleferre agreed to Markevitch’s suggestion because ‘it was fun to see what he would make of it […]. One ought to have some fun in one’s profession, not be rigorous all the time.’Footnote ⁹³

On her return to Paris in 1936, Tailleferre helped to launch La Jeune France, another short-lived grouping of composers attached more by friendship than anything else; perhaps in doing so she hoped to relive vicariously the happy days of Les Six? She was also professionally reunited with Ricardo Viñes on this occasion: he was the soloist in her Ballade at the inaugural Jeune France concert on 3 June 1936,Footnote ⁹⁴ which was attended by many leading Parisian artistic personalities including the poet and playwright Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The following year, the Paris Exposition brought two commissions, a piano piece ‘Au pavillon d’Alsace’ for the multi-author collection À l’exposition, to which several of her friends also contributed, and a comic opera Le marin de Bolivar to a libretto by Henri Jeanson.Footnote ⁹⁵ She was also for the first time awarded an official decoration as she was named Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in the 1937 list,Footnote ⁹⁶ the award Ravel had refused in 1920.

1.7 To the South of France; Cantate du Narcisse

But in 1938 Tailleferre’s husband suffered a relapse, and this time they moved to Grasse, in Provence. She regularly met Valéry for dinner in Nice, and he offered to collaborate with her when she received a government commission to write a cantata early in 1938. Valéry wrote in the preface to the published text: ‘it was written from April to September 1938 at the request of Mme Germaine Tailleferre to serve as a libretto for a cantata composed by this eminent composer’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Tailleferre was ‘paralysed’ by her ‘lack of confidence in [her] musical abilities’, but Valéry’s desire that the work should be in the style of Gluck reassured her. As Tailleferre explained: ‘Conceiving a piece in a given style was a great help. In my earlier works, I had already shown a certain return to classicism; therefore I felt less lost.’Footnote ⁹⁸

The designation ‘cantata’ might simply refer to a work for voices and instruments, and additionally in the French context it evokes the most celebrated composition competition held by the Paris Conservatoire until 1968, the Prix de Rome. For this competition, the candidates had to pass preliminary rounds for which they composed a fugue and a text setting for chorus and piano, and six finalists were selected to write a cantata for three voices and orchestra. As a Conservatoire pupil whose period of study ended during World War I, Tailleferre never had the opportunity to compete for the prize during her student years, as it did not take place from 1915 to 1918 because of the war. While the duration and format of the Cantate du Narcisse goes beyond the requirements for the Prix de Rome cantata, it is reasonable to speculate whether Tailleferre viewed the work in part as the opportunity to write for a genre that was denied to her during her student years.

Cantate du Narcisse has two main characters, Narcisse (classified as a baryton Martin, a light baritone which is also the vocal type Debussy sought for Pelléas), and the principal Nymph (soprano) plus a four-part female chorus of nymphs, an Echo which appears briefly to echo significant words of the chorus, and an instrumental ensemble of a string orchestra, timpani, and suspended cymbal. For his text, Valéry returned to the Narcissus myth which fascinated him throughout his career, the story of a male character who is renowned for his beauty and loves only himself. In her Mémoires, Tailleferre recalled that Valéry would bring a new scene with him every time he visited her, and like Claudel, he knew exactly what he wanted. Tailleferre stated ‘If he did not like a passage, all I could do was start it again’,Footnote ⁹⁹ and she was always willing to submit to the demands of her collaborators. In fact, Tailleferre rewrote the third scene three times, and her first version of the short fifth scene was not at all what Valéry had hoped for, but he overcame her difficulties with the prosody by reciting the text to her. Despite everything, this collaboration remained Tailleferre’s happiest musical memory, although she told Laura Mitgang that her husband would constantly interrupt her work when Valéry was not there. Far worse, the author Frédéric Robert told Mitgang that Lageat would often beat his wife and deliberately spatter her manuscripts with ink; he also hit their daughter.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ I have seen Tailleferre manuscripts, including Cantate du Narcisse and her Violin Concerto, on which large ink splats and slashes made with a razor are visible.

Despite Valéry’s wishes, Cantate du Narcisse cannot be considered to be ‘in the style of Gluck’. The highly taxing vocal writing for the main characters, Narcisse and the first nymph, is as far from Gluck as can be imagined, and the mostly wordless chorus of nymphs which opens and closes the work is more reminiscent of Debussy than of eighteenth-century music. Rather, there is an antique flavour to many of the cadences with their modally flattened sevenths, to the vocalises of Narcisse’s scene 6 aria ‘Ô Palpitante, ô Tendre …’ and to dotted rhythms which evoke the French overture. Tailleferre responds to the few dramatic moments in the text; the third scene, in which the nymphs attack Narcisse, has the character of a ritual dance and even ends with a bitonal F sharp major/F major chord evocative of The Rite of Spring. The Nymph’s vocalise, when she tells Narcisse of the Gods’ order that he should love another, is suitably grand. But Tailleferre can do little with the overlong soliloquies Valéry writes for Narcisse and the Nymph, particularly towards the end of the sixth scene. The final, seventh scene is a varied reprise of the first; the characters’ situations have not changed since the beginning of the drama and no amount of entreaties from the Nymph will persuade Narcisse to love someone else.

This major work, written as a result of a state commission in collaboration with a leading writer, should have raised Tailleferre’s profile as a composer, but the advent of World War II resulted in a delayed premiere that Tailleferre was unable to attend as she was obliged to follow her husband to the United States during the war. The cantata was premiered in Marseille on 19 January 1942 by the Orchestre de la Radio conducted by Jean Giardino (1906–1983),Footnote ¹⁰¹ and its first Paris performance was on 14 January 1944, by the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire conducted by Alfred Cortot; Valéry attended this concert, held a year before his death.Footnote ¹⁰² A recording conducted by Roger Désormière was made in 1949, featuring Ginette Guillamat and Jean Planel in the roles of the first nymph and Narcisse,Footnote ¹⁰³ and the cantata was also performed in London in 1953, with Tailleferre’s close friend and collaborator Bernard Lefort and Janine Micheau in the roles of Narcisse and the Nymph and an orchestra conducted by Clarence Raybould.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But the work’s public performance history then ground to a halt, and at the time of writing Narcisse awaits a modern professional performance and recording.

1.8 World War II: Exile in the USA

Another major work composed in Grasse was Trois Études (1940), intended for piano and orchestra. On one surviving manuscript, the work is dedicated to Marguerite Long (another copy is dedicated to François Lang, the French pianist who had played alongside Tailleferre in the premiere of her Concerto Grosso, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1945).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Trois Études are a concerto in all but name, with two lively outer movements framing a poignant central Larghetto; all three feature a cadenza or cadenza-like passage for piano solo towards the end of the movement, the traditional place for solo virtuoso display in a concerto. The first Étude is akin to the opening of Tailleferre’s Concerto Grosso and the third movement, marked ‘Allegro (Toccata)’, is very much in the style of Ravel’s ‘Toccata’, the final movement of Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–1917). Tailleferre surely associated Long with this style of piano writing and performance.

However, Tailleferre never completed the orchestration of the Trois Études, and one of few articles she wrote, for the journal Modern Music, suggests there were practical reasons for this. Tailleferre wrote: ‘Musical composition is made practically impossible through lack of music paper. For more than a year, I sought in vain to find paper in Lyon, Marseille and Nice on which to copy an orchestral score.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While she does not name the Trois Études, this is the work most likely to have been affected. A two-piano version and the orchestrated versions of the first two movements survive: as Paul Wehage speculates, ‘Musical life in France had been completely changed by the War years. Tailleferre put the work aside and forgot about it, perhaps wanting to forget the hardships that she had lived through and the loss of many of her friends associated with these years.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

When Lageat obtained a post in Washington in 1942, Tailleferre and their daughter Françoise first settled in New York and then Philadelphia, which Tailleferre greatly preferred. In her article for Modern Music, she showed she was aware of the deplorable conditions for artists in France under the Nazi occupation who, unlike her, were not able to leave. In the United States, Tailleferre met old friends, including Stravinsky, Milhaud (to whom she played Narcisse from memory), and the poet Philippe Soupault, whom she had first met at the end of World War I. She also had a few private pupils, but hardly composed at all from 1942 until she left the United States in 1946. Tailleferre was naturally worried about her family in France and never felt at home in the USA; moreover, Mitgang attests that ‘she never learned to speak English well’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Crucially, she was away from her professional contacts and no longer had the stimulus of commissions; only one piece was published in the United States, a short Pastorale for flute and piano (1942).

1.9 Return to France, Resumption of Composition

Tailleferre returned to France in spring 1946. She gradually resumed working by collaborating on a film score with Auric, Torrents (1946), and by transcribing her Violin Concerto for violin and piano, but at this juncture, she had ‘rather lost enthusiasm’ for creative work.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Her next major project, the comic opera Il était un petit navire (1948–1950), brought her back to public attention, though not in the way she might have hoped. This project started life as Le marin de Bolivar, a single-act work composed for the 1937 Exposition, which was premiered by Radio Marseille just before the outbreak of World War II.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The director of the Opéra-Comique, Henry Malherbe, persuaded Jeanson and Tailleferre to lengthen the work from one to three acts. Tailleferre considered the plot too thin for this, but she was either overruled or kept her objections to herselfFootnote ¹¹¹ and she recalled being infuriated at waiting for the librettist Henri Jeanson to send her new scenes. Personal infighting at the Opéra-Comique added to the problems surrounding the commission, and there are disturbing reports that the composer was insulted in front of the orchestra by the conductor Pierre Dervaud, who also made significant cuts to the score without consulting Tailleferre.Footnote ¹¹² Il était un petit navire sank in March 1951 after only two performances in the face of public uproar and critical hostility, though this was more directed at the farcical libretto than Tailleferre’s music.

In the early 1950s, Tailleferre divorced Lageat and moved to St Tropez, where she was a neighbour of Durey. For a time, she took to restoring antiques and doing trompe l’oeil painting to alleviate her financial worries, but she also found time to compose a great deal of film music. And her old friends were always very important to her. In 1951, a Les Six exhibition toured Europe, and Poulenc was present when it arrived in London in March 1952. In a speech he gave on this occasion, he frankly described Tailleferre as ‘paresseuse’Footnote ¹¹³ (lazy) – not only an insult, but also inaccurate, considering her extraordinary productivity and her far more challenging financial situation than Poulenc’s own.

Tailleferre was involved in another collaborative project in 1952, La guirlande de Campra, a work based on a theme from the prologue to André Campra’s opera Camille (1717). The musicologist Marc Pincherle conceived the project and he orchestrated the theme on which Honegger, Daniel-Lesur, Roland-Manuel, Tailleferre, Sauguet, Poulenc, and Auric each based a short movement. Tailleferre’s ‘Sarabande’ stays very close to the original melody, but she goes beyond Campra harmonically by frequently using pedal notes that clash with the rest of the harmony, a good example of her approach to neoclassical style.

Hoping to emulate Poulenc’s successful concert tours with Pierre Bernac, Tailleferre started giving recitals with the baritone Bernard Lefort (1922–1999). They toured Europe, visiting London in November 1954 and the Edinburgh Festival, where Tailleferre’s ballet Parisiana was also performed. Their two concerts at the Institut Français in South Kensington concentrated on French music, one ranging from Lully to Messiaen and the other focusing on five members of Les Six, Tailleferre’s being the missing name. Many of her colleagues, including the pianist Robert Fizdale, felt her career suffered because she ‘did not feel a driving need to exploit her talent’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Her performing association with Lefort resulted in one large-scale work, the Concerto des vaines paroles (1954) for baritone, piano, and orchestra, a transcription of her Concerto Grosso for which her childhood friend, the poet Jean Tardieu, wrote a text. According to Tardieu, Tailleferre explained that the work was divided into three sections: Expressif; Fortissimo, puis Staccato; Expressif, but otherwise she left him free to write whatever he wished. This text was padded out with poems from Tardieu’s recently published collection Monsieur MonsieurFootnote ¹¹⁵ and the work was premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 21 September 1956, conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht.

Tailleferre’s attraction to pastiche and keen sense of humour also came to the fore in the mid-1950s. French Radio commissioned a series of four 20-minute operas each in a different musical style, Du style galant au style méchant (1955), for which her niece, Denise Centore (1911–1989), wrote the texts. They take us on a lightning tour of French operatic history from Rameau to Gustave Charpentier in four very clever pastiches whose dimensions hark back to Milhaud’s opéras-minute. Tailleferre considered the third opera, the Offenbach-style Monsieur Petitpois achète un château, to be the most successful. Its sparkling overture sets the tone, and the story of wealthy moustache maker Monsieur Petitpois buying Le Duc de la Bombardière’s chateau is told through a series of numbers including a Tyrolean waltz, a soupy love duet, and a hilarious ‘patter’ song, in a fluent and witty pastiche of Offenbach’s style. Tailleferre and Centore also wrote several songs together, including Le rue Chagrin (1955), a slow ballad which was recorded in the United States by Frank Melville.

In this context, one might expect Tailleferre’s operatic treatment of Hans Christian Andersen’s La petite sirène (1957–1958) to be a light divertissement, but Tailleferre and her librettist Philippe Soupault surprise with a serious and occasionally anguished treatment of the fairy story. The music is often astringent, in keeping with the true implications of the story, and the mermaid (a high soprano) is given some ethereal vocalises. Another collaboration in the late 1950s was Le Maître, a setting of Eugène Ionesco’s play commissioned by Radio France which won the Prix Italia. The repetitiveness and insistence of the music aptly convey Ionesco’s vision of a totalitarian state, and Tailleferre responds to his black humour in the final parodistic chorus. Much of the action takes place off-stage, and Le Maître appears only once, at the end, without a head.

Tailleferre was more at home in her instrumental works of this period. Her Harp Sonata was written in 1953 for the Spanish virtuoso Nicanor Zabaleta (1907–1993) whose musicianship she much admired. The pure line and permutational rhythms of the first movement recall her String Quartet, and the second movement has the feeling of a serenade. Its tango rhythm is perhaps a homage to Zabaleta’s origins, as are the acidulous guitar-like chords that underline her affinity with Domenico Scarlatti. The finale is a bubbling perpetuum mobile, a favourite style of Tailleferre in these years. The manuscript of this work, which is now housed in the Royal College of Music library in London, shows that Zabaleta edited the score to make it more easily playable on the harp.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Tailleferre’s Partita for piano (1957) opens with another perpetuum mobile, this time in a ‘stripped-down’ two-part invention style with piquant bitonal touches. The work is dedicated to her daughter Françoise, who at the time had ambitions to be a concert pianist.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Tailleferre told Hélène Jourdan-Morhange in 1955: ‘twelve-tone music, which attracts me, represents such a task that I no longer have the strength to undertake it. It would almost be like wanting to express myself in Chinese! It is a bit late to learn.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ But she did experiment in ‘this mysterious and complex universe’ once, in her Sonata for solo clarinet published in New York in 1958. This is a short, three-movement piece that Tailleferre described as a ‘melodic’ approach to the new technique.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It is, however, far from being strictly serial; she happily repeats notes before the row has been fully stated, and the repetition of short phrases and pedal notes plays an important role in the piece, to the extent that it is hard to fathom in what sense it could be described as a serial composition.

Tailleferre continued working until the end of her life, though self-borrowing played an increasingly important role in her music from the late 1950s onwards. In 1957, she transcribed her Harp Sonata as a Concerto for soprano when she received a commission from Janine Micheau (1914–1976). The same sonata also served as a repository for ideas used in her 1964 incidental music for Sans merveille, a TV drama scripted by her friend Marguerite Duras and Duras’ one-time lover Gérard Jarlot; the main themes of both the first and second movements of the Harp Sonata are reworked here. After the title sequence, Sans merveille opens with a sinister and lengthy quiet cymbal roll, an effect Tailleferre termed ‘bruitage’, intended to evoke the fatal passion of the two lovers at the centre of the drama.Footnote ¹²⁰ Hacquard mentions that Tailleferre and Duras had other ideas for collaborative projects, including one to write ‘verismo’-style songs, but sadly these did not come to fruition.Footnote ¹²¹ Another idea in Sans merveille strongly resembles an unusual short orchestral piece titled Jacasseries (Chatterings), a study in staccato for flute, oboe, clarinet, celesta, harp, and strings. This is one of a group of four studies now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the others being Amertume (Bitterness), Étonnement (Astonishment), and Angoisse (Anguish), which were perhaps used as repositories of ideas to depict different emotional moods in incidental music.

In 1962 Tailleferre wrote an unusual Partita for flute, clarinet, oboe, and string orchestra which was broadcast by Dutch Radio. The conductor and arranger Désiré Dondeyne (1921–2015) transcribed the orchestral accompaniment for wind band for a performance on 14 February 1970, as part of a Les Six fiftieth anniversary concert, which marked the start of a collaboration that lasted until the end of Tailleferre’s life.

Tailleferre’s self-borrowings were not limited to simple transcriptions for different forces. In 1964, she based the two fast movements of her Partita for two pianos and percussion, subtitled ‘Hommage à Rameau’, on themes from her 1950s operas. The reference to Rameau highlights Tailleferre’s neoclassical intentions in this piece, one of her finest. A short passage based on dotted rhythms, whimsically titled ‘Introduciomente’, leads straight into an Allegro brioso, yet another perpetuum mobile that is based on the first theme of the introduction to Act II of La petite sirène. The second movement, ‘Melodiosamente’, is a Ravelian melody over an ostinato accompaniment, of the same type as the slow movements of her first Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto. The percussion underline the pianos in this movement, rather than cheekily interrupting as they do in the fast movements. Tailleferre bases the effervescent finale on the Introduction to Le maître, developing the theme by imitation and interrupting its constant motion with melodic snatches and jerky rhythms. All three movements contain much imitative writing and, as in the 1957 Partita for solo piano, the keyboard writing is often reduced to two lines. The piece is as well written for the ensemble as Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) and it was first performed on 25 November 1964 by Geneviève Joy, Ina Marika, and as many as five percussionists, though a maximum of four are really necessary.

1.10 Tailleferre’s Final Years

Tailleferre remained youthful in spirit until the end of her life. She was perhaps rejuvenated by her granddaughter, Elvire, whom she brought up, and she loved the company of children and young people above all. In the 1970s and 1980s she combined her creative work with teaching, and as a composer she produced several pieces for children and for wind band. The move towards wind band music was a result of her friendship with Dondeyne, a composer, arranger, and then conductor of the Musique des Gardiens de la Paix, whom she had met in 1969. His transcription of the Partita for wind trio and string orchestra has already been mentioned, and he was to orchestrate all Tailleferre’s subsequent works as she no longer had the inclination to do so herself. In 1982, Madeleine Milhaud described Dondeyne and Bernard Lefort, who became the director of the Paris Opéra after an illness ended his singing career, as Tailleferre’s ‘guardian angels’,Footnote ¹²² as they both commissioned a number of works from her in her last years. In her Mémoires, Tailleferre wrote ‘the wind band was a real discovery and a great joy for me. If I could start again, I would only write for this medium’.Footnote ¹²³ This enthusiasm for a more popular medium could be attributed to her lack of sympathy for more contemporary musical styles, especially electronic music, her admiration for Dondeyne, and perhaps to her membership of the Communist Party, which she joined in 1968 as a gesture of sympathy with the student rioters.

From 1970 to 1972, Tailleferre taught piano accompaniment at the Schola Cantorum, and she had private pupils throughout the 1970s. Her last post was as an accompanist for children’s dance classes at the École Alsacienne, a private school in rue d’Assas very close to her final Paris home, and she continued in this job until shortly before her death, aged 91, on 7 November 1983. She also continued composing almost until the end: her Sonate champêtre (1976) for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and piano was premiered at the school.

Tailleferre loved teaching because, as she said, ‘I feel as though I become a pupil again, which is a good way of ending your life: by restarting it.’Footnote ¹²⁴ This circularity is also apparent in her composing career. Éditions Henry Lemoine published several of her short pieces for wind instruments and piano in 1973–1974, none of which are harmonically more adventurous than her earliest pieces. The topic of self-borrowing continues, too, as the Arabesque for clarinet and piano (dedicated to Dondeyne) is based on a theme from the introduction to Act II of La petite sirène. But the ending of her career as it began is best illustrated in her Piano Trio. This work was first conceived as a three-movement piece in 1916–1917, when she was still a student. In 1978, Tailleferre used the outer two movements as the basis for another piano trio, adding a simple scherzo and a new slow movement. The two old movements were slightly condensed and given more contrapuntal interest, but one would never suspect that the movements were not all composed at the same time. This shows just how little her style really changed over sixty years.

Why did Tailleferre so often resort to self-borrowing? The most likely reason is that she did not wish to waste works on which she had spent much time and effort, but which she realised were unlikely to be frequently performed, such as the Concerto Grosso and La petite sirène. Also, it is likely that financial pressures led her to accept every commission; in 1957 alone, she wrote a film score, an orchestral suite (Petite Suite), an opera, and songs, as well as several chamber works. She admitted that the Concerto for Soprano of the same year was a transcription of the Harp Sonata ‘because Janine Micheau [the dedicatee] was in a hurry and I was short of ideas’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Self-borrowing is most apparent in the works of her final decade, but this can be attributed to the fact that Tailleferre had to earn a living as a teacher in her 80s, leaving little time and energy for original creative work.

Her last major work, Concerto de la fidélité (1981) for wordless high soprano and orchestra, was another transcription of the Harp Sonata via the Concerto for Soprano commissioned by Micheau. It was well received by the public and critics after its premiere at the Paris Opéra on 7 March 1982, a few weeks before Tailleferre’s ninetieth birthday, with the eminent American coloratura soprano Arleen Augér (1939–1993) as soloist. Its title could not be more appropriate: fidélité (loyalty) – to her friends, her family, and her musical style – is the key word in Tailleferre’s life and work.

2.1 Tailleferre and the French Musical Tradition

In 1927, Milhaud published a book titled Études, a personal assessment of recent trends in French music. In the chapter ‘La musique française depuis la guerre’ (French music since the war), he wrote of Tailleferre: ‘her propensities have led her along the same route as the impressionists, whose taste, harmonies and love of intricate detail she has inherited. Her [1924] Piano Concerto marks a return to a more sober style and is inspired by the Brandenburg Concertos.’Footnote ¹²⁶ The term ‘impressionist’ was not a compliment in Milhaud’s vocabulary. In the same chapter, he criticised the followers of Debussy (though not by name) because their music was ‘needlessly complex, vague, devoted to sonorous effects and unusual instrumental combinations, aiming to follow a literary programme’.Footnote ¹²⁷

It is impossible to be certain which, if any, works by Tailleferre were in Milhaud’s mind when he described her as an ‘impressionist’. The lush orchestration and fluid rhythms of the first section of the Ballade for piano and orchestra best fit his description, though this work is not typical of Tailleferre’s style. Milhaud’s approval of Tailleferre’s ‘return to a more sober style’ is significant because, in the same chapter, he stated that this was a quality that French music should possess. It is worth briefly exploring what the French musical tradition was considered to be in this period. According to Milhaud, the characteristics of French music ought to be ‘a certain clarity, sobriety and ease, a sense of decorum in romantic expression, a concern for proportion, line and construction, with the aim of expressing oneself clearly, simply and concisely’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Debussy prefigured this opinion in his review of the first two acts of Rameau’s opera Castor et Pollux, performed at the Schola Cantorum on 2 February 1903. He defended Rameau against Gluck, writing ‘We could regret that […] for too long, French music followed paths which dangerously led her astray from the clarity of expression and precision and concentration in formal matters which are hallmarks of the French genius.’Footnote ¹²⁹ Both Debussy and Milhaud wished to be seen as the guardians of a tradition stretching back to Couperin and Rameau, and they were anxious to assert this tradition in the face of German music, specifically Wagner.

To some degree, Debussy’s praise of clarity and precision in the context of a review of a Rameau opera was an idealisation of a ‘golden age’ in French musical history rather than a matter of direct technical influence. This rose-tinted view of eighteenth-century France is also apparent in Verlaine’s collection of poems, Fêtes galantes (1867–1868) which were inspired by painters such as Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher. A combination of Verlaine, eighteenth-century painters, and composers of the French classical era such as Couperin and Rameau inspired pieces including Chabrier’s ‘Idylle’ from his Pièces pittoresques (1881), Debussy’s settings of selected Fêtes galantes (1891 and 1904), and Poulenc’s Concert champêtre (1929). The musical fête galante style certainly drew on classical models, including dances of the period; the style is witty, charming, and fundamentally lighthearted, though not without touches of nostalgia.

How does this view of French music relate to Tailleferre’s musical language? One work that is linked to the ‘fête galante’ style is her ballet Marchand d’oiseaux (1923), particularly the movement titled ‘Pavane’ which is modelled on a classical dance. From her vantage point in the early 1920s, Tailleferre evokes not only a distant classical past, but also her more recent French forebears. Her ‘Pavane’ has from the start the simple melodic line and rocking accompaniment of pieces like Fauré’s Pavane (1887) and Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899). The use of a solo horn for the principal melody further links Tailleferre’s ‘Pavane’ with Ravel’s orchestration of his identically titled work. However, Tailleferre combines classical style with something more biting and contemporary: by the fourth bar, a sidestepping chromatic accompaniment underpins a two-part melody. Another archaic dance form used by Tailleferre is the quadrille, one of the two movements she composed for Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. The composer divided the dance into the customary five sections.

One specific example of Tailleferre’s connection to eighteenth-century French classicism is her echoing of the French overture. This musical genre has two distinct characteristics: dotted rhythms and rapid ascending scalar passages. Both these features are particularly prominent in Cantate du Narcisse (1938); for instance, a passage in double dotted rhythm heralds Narcisse’s first entry in scene ii, and the dotted rhythm is associated with the character throughout the work. In scene iii, Narcisse’s important statement addressed to the chorus of nymphs ‘Je les vois, je les hais!’ (I see them, I hate them!) is accompanied by a rapid ascending scale culminating in a passage in dotted rhythm, a gesture that directly evokes the two key characteristics of the French overture. Similar material appears in the introduction to Tailleferre’s Partita for two pianos and percussion (1964); as this work is subtitled ‘Hommage à Rameau’, we can assume that Tailleferre employed the rhythm in this context for an archaic effect. At the end of several phrases in Narcisse and the last bar of the second movement of the 1924 Piano Concerto, a tierce de Picardie similarly creates a deliberately archaic effect, changing the chord from minor to major in the eighteenth-century style.

2.2 Tailleferre and Satie

Satie had a crucial impact on the young Tailleferre and she was eloquent about the emotional impact of his music. In an interview with Jean-Marie Drot, she said: ‘But Satie is tenderness itself, most especially his Gymnopédies. Satie wanted to give a dry impression, he said “I write music that’s punchy.” And yet we are transported when we listen to these ravishing works, lifted up by a sense of humour that is unique in musical history. Satie is never hard.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Like many composers, Tailleferre was attracted to the simplicity of Satie’s music and specifically to the lulling rhythm and modal musical language of his Gymnopédies for piano (1888).Footnote ¹³¹ The simple melody and ostinato accompaniment in a different key of the opening of ‘Cache-cache mitoula’, the second piece of Jeux de plein air, is a typical example of her early use of ‘wrong-note’ bitonality (the clash of B flat and B natural), coupled with modally flattened leading notes in the melodic lines that are reminiscent of Satie (Example 1 shows the opening bars).

Example 1 Tailleferre, Jeux de plein air (1917), 2 (‘Cache-cache mitoula’): bars 1–6

Other early works premiered in Montparnasse venues such as 6 rue Huyghens, including Image (1918), have modal touches and a melodic simplicity which could be compared to Satie’s early piano works. It is also remarkable how little Tailleferre’s musical language changed during her long life: piano pieces such as Valse lente (1948) also show Satie’s influence.

2.3 Tailleferre and Neoclassicism

Tailleferre’s music is often described as neoclassical in style. Although this was an international movement, it had a specifically French incarnation that overlaps considerably with Debussy’s description of the ideal path for French music. In his 1921 ‘Conférence sur les Six’,Footnote ¹³² Satie divided the members into two groups, the more adventurous trio of Auric, Milhaud, and Poulenc whose music is typified by a ‘return to classic forms … but with a modern sensibility’, with the remaining members Tailleferre, Honegger, and Durey denigrated as ‘pure impressionists’, On purely musical grounds this division makes no sense whatsoever, not least because the combination of classicism and modern harmonic language is absolutely typical of Tailleferre’s work. When discussing the composition of Narcisse, Tailleferre referred to ‘a certain return to classicism’Footnote ¹³³ in her music, showing that she was conscious of this, and she was inspired by eighteenth-century classicism in general as much as by anything specifically French.

As neoclassicism and neobaroque language are central features of Tailleferre’s music, it is necessary to explore what these terms mean and what is ‘neo’ about her approach to music of the past. Martha Hyde essayed a definition – or rather definitions – of neoclassicism:

Hyde further categorises different types of neoclassical approach: ‘reverential imitation’, exhibited for instance in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin; ‘eclectic imitation’, exemplified by Stravinsky’s Octet, which features allusions to a variety of source materials, ‘a kind of rhetorical confrontation between various classical forms’; and ‘dialectical imitation’, featuring a ‘more aggressive dialogue between a piece and its model. It is often historically and culturally savvy, acknowledging anachronism but exposing in its model a defect or irresolution or naivete.’Footnote ¹³⁵

The term ‘neoclassicism’ was first used in print in France in Boris de Schloezer’s 1923 article on Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments (which was composed, of course, as a tribute to Debussy).Footnote ¹³⁶ But both Debussy and Ravel also participated in debates about the return to classicism in music, in the case of Debussy well before Schloezer’s article. Debussy wrote on 1 November 1913, ‘We should think about the example Couperin’s harpsichord pieces set us. They are wonderful models of grace and naturalness that no longer exist.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Ravel was anxious not to be overlooked as a French neoclassical pioneer, telling the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in 1931: ‘Stravinsky is often considered the leader of neoclassicism, but don’t forget that my String Quartet was already conceived in terms of four-part counterpoint, whereas Debussy’s Quartet is purely harmonic in conception.’Footnote ¹³⁸ Here, Ravel is referring to his String Quartet in F (1903), written ten years after Debussy’s quartet, and it is Ravel that had the strongest impact on Tailleferre.

Tailleferre’s music moves beyond the Baroque and Classical eras essentially through a harmonic language that can only have been composed in the early twentieth century, and it is this blend of classical forms and textures with contemporary harmony that is at the heart of neoclassicism. Of her contemporaries in Les Six, Tailleferre told Jean-Marie Drot, ‘For me, it would principally be Darius Milhaud who showed the greatest harmonic daring’,Footnote ¹³⁹ exhibited through specifically ‘neo’ musical traits such as polytonality. When they were both students at the Conservatoire, Tailleferre recalls discovering contemporary music thanks to Milhaud, and her experiments with bitonality are most frequent in her early works, no doubt reflecting the influence of Stravinsky, Koechlin, and Milhaud. She soon moved away from the systematic use of key superposition: in a letter to Poulenc from August 1921, Tailleferre assured him ‘I’m following your good advice and not doing polytonality any more.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Like Stravinsky, Tailleferre often creates gentle dissonance through pedal notes or ostinati that clash with the foreground harmony and melody, and the multiple layers of Image superpose simple phrases to create friction in the harmony. This example shows her layering a pentatonic treble line, played by the celesta in the eight-instrument version, over clusters played by the piano and a C sharp pedal note; this four-bar phrase is then immediately repeated (Example 2).

Example 2 Tailleferre, Image (1918): bars 33–36

Another example of Tailleferre’s harmony that goes beyond classical common practice is her use of parallel fifths. This parallelism has many French antecedents, one of the best known being Debussy’s prelude ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ (1910): the parallel chord progressions of the opening section are tonally ambiguous because they lack the third of the chord (meaning the chord cannot be identified as either major or minor). Both Jeux de plein air and Tailleferre’s String Quartet feature chains of parallel fifths, as does the first movement transition section of her Second Violin Sonata.

Auric’s and Poulenc’s early work was notorious for what some critics have termed ‘wrong-note’ harmony. Auric’s ‘Prélude’, written for L’Album des Six (1920), exemplifies ‘wrong-note’ harmonisation of a simple diatonic melody and is cruder than anything in Tailleferre. There is also an unexpected note in the opening bars of the second movement, ‘Intermède’, of Tailleferre’s String Quartet. This movement has a regular four-bar phrase structure which is typical of the classical style, and in the cello it features what appears to be an example of wrong-note harmony, where the ostinato oscillates between C sharp and G natural, not the expected dominant G sharp (Example 3).

Example 3 Tailleferre, String Quartet (1917): 2nd movement (‘Intermède’), bars 1–9

Although the key signature of this movement suggests C sharp minor, the upper strings’ chords are in the Phrygian mode on E, and in this harmonic context, it is the cello’s C sharp that is the ‘wrong note’, not the G natural. As the first movement had ended on the dominant of C sharp minor and Tailleferre indicates there is to be no break between the movements, the cello seems to epitomise the conflict between the expected C sharp minor and the actual Phrygian harmony. Tailleferre’s harmony is therefore far more subtle than it might appear to be on the surface.

Later in the same movement, Tailleferre shows that she is as fond as Poulenc of unprepared modulations. At fig. A in the published score, we hear a reprise of the opening melodic idea of the second movement, but this time it is a whole tone higher and reworked with an ascending accompaniment that echoes the opening of Ravel’s String Quartet (it specifically recalls Ravel’s ascending cello line). At the same time, Tailleferre layers highly unacademic ascending parallel fifths or tritones in the cello part. The quartet is a good illustration of Tailleferre creating tonal ambiguity or so-called bitonal harmony by superimposing two or more different ostinati or scalar passages, and it shows how she combines straightforward classical tonal material with complexifying harmony.

Tailleferre’s String Quartet, one of her most noteworthy early works, was originally composed as a two-movement work in 1917 entitled Sonatine, a title that suggests a wish to concentrate on small-scale classical forms and textures. The first movement opens with a theme in a modal E major, but at bar 15 we have a sidestepping modulation to E flat minor with chromatic touches. This semitone modulation does not, however, coincide with a change of theme. This occurs later, at bar 26, when the second theme is presented in a modal E flat major and repeated twice, each time a semitone higher. But the rest of the movement, including a short development section and recapitulation, is dominated by the first theme; this is no traditional sonata form in which both principal themes are recapitulated.

A third movement was added to the Sonatine in 1919 and the title changed to String Quartet. This fast finale includes three themes, but only two of them recur in the recapitulation. Her recapitulations are never straightforward repeats of the exposition; she typically reharmonises material and introduces new ideas. The finale of the String Quartet is as long as the other two movements put together, and it has the character of an obsessional dance: its rhythm evokes the tarantella.

Tailleferre’s first Piano Concerto (1924) is a particularly fine illustration of the neoclassical and neobaroque aspects of her music. Opening with a punchy ostinato in the left hand of the piano alternating intervals of an octave and ninth, the right hand enters with a rapid scalar passage that culminates in a trill (Example 4). At the same time, the orchestra’s descending theme underlines the home key of D major; the rhythmic syncopation of this theme is another ‘neo’ feature.

Example 4 Tailleferre, Piano Concerto (1924): 1st movement, bars 1–5

In one manuscript of this work, now housed in the Library of Congress, the work is termed ‘Concerto pour piano et 12 instruments’,Footnote ¹⁴¹ a small instrumental formation that immediately evokes Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. The second of Bach’s concertos, like Tailleferre’s Piano Concerto, has a prominent trumpet part and is clearly a model for the twentieth-century work.

The second, slow (Adagio) movement of Tailleferre’s piano concerto starts in the relative minor key of B minor, though its final chord is the dominant F sharp major, which in context represents a sudden shift to a major chord, evoking the Baroque tierce de Picardie. In this movement, ostinati sometimes overlap, producing spicy dissonances which epitomise neoclassical harmony. Tailleferre’s contrapuntal ingenuity is further demonstrated here, a counterpoint that flows naturally from the material and is not forced into preset academic models. The lively finale returns to the tonic D major and is highly contrapuntal, though its metrical shifts and abrupt modulations move us well beyond the Baroque era. These unprepared modulations are a stylistic characteristic she shares with Poulenc (though it appears in Tailleferre as early as 1917).

2.4 Tailleferre and Rhythm

The central section of Tailleferre’s piano Pastorale in A flat major (1928) with its trills and hand crossing, strongly evokes Scarlatti and is one of the clearest examples of her affinity with the Baroque composer, an affinity noted in reviews of her 1923 ballet Marchand d’oiseaux by Roland-Manuel, Auric, and others.Footnote ¹⁴² This Pastorale is one of many examples of her early fondness for the quintuple metre; her identically titled piece composed for L’Album des Six was also in 5/8. The second movement of her Violin Sonata no. 1 is a scherzo in 3/8 plus 2/8 metre, and the unusual ‘waltz’ rhythm of the second movement of the Ballade, which like the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphony is in 5/4 time, which Tailleferre subdivides as 2/4 plus 3/4. This type of three-plus-two metre is also heard in the first movement of her Second Violin Sonata (1948).

When Tailleferre is not following a dance rhythm, her melodic lines tend to be fluid, without a strong downbeat, another characteristic of French music which perhaps relates to the spoken language (which lacks strong stresses) and to French poetic metre where the number of syllables is counted.

Tailleferre’s Valse lente (1948) is a short piano piece that exemplifies many of the typical fingerprints of her musical style:Footnote ¹⁴³ a simple yet haunting melodic line is underpinned by a much more sophisticated harmonic language. An instantly recognisable dance rhythm is omnipresent, here combined with the low bass note on the first beat of the bar rising to a chord on the second beat, a gesture that also echoes Satie’s ‘gymnopédie’ rhythm (Example 5). The key signature suggests C sharp minor, though the flattened seventh (B natural) in the melodic line produces tonal/modal ambiguity characteristic of Tailleferre, and the crunchy added-note chords in the left hand accompany the melody with gentle dissonance.

Example 5 Tailleferre, Valse lente (1948), bars 1–4

There is an unprepared modulation to D flat major at bar 9 and a similarly abrupt twist to G major two bars later, and Tailleferre often adds dissonant notes to the chords, producing a piquant, acidulous effect (in the final section of the piece, these dissonances pile up to become a mini-cluster). In the G major-based section, the melodic line is doubled at the fifth. From the last beat of bar 31, a three-bar transition passage omits the bass and provides a winding chromatic interlude that ultimately leads to a reprise of the opening material. The transition is the only place where the waltz rhythm is disrupted, here suggesting two beats in the bar rather than three. And when the original melody returns, it is an octave higher, doubled by the left hand and subtly reharmonised.

2.5 Tailleferre’s Instruments: 1. Piano

As an excellent pianist herself, Tailleferre wrote idiomatically and imaginatively for the instrument, though she often requires a large span; unbroken chords spanning a tenth are common in her music (including Valse lente). Like Poulenc and Debussy, she sometimes uses three staves to notate piano scores; in Tailleferre’s case, as in the manuscript of her Trois Études (1940), this seems to be a wish to avoid ledger lines as much as possible, as well as an indication of the wide range of the instrument that she uses.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The solo part of her first Piano Concerto is already characteristic of her writing for the instrument, with widely spaced chords being especially prominent in the cadenza section of the final movement.

One of Tailleferre’s favourite piano genres is the toccata, a style associated with the Baroque period that combines lively virtuosity with rhythmic incisiveness. Tailleferre had a more recent model of this genre in the last movement (‘Toccata’) of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–1917). Each movement of this work was dedicated to a friend of the composer who had been killed on active service in World War I. Ravel’s ‘Toccata’ was dedicated to Joseph de Marliave, the husband of the pianist Marguerite Long (1874–1966). One of the most celebrated French pianists of her age, Long premiered Le Tombeau de Couperin on 11 April 1919 and also gave the first performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (1929–1931).

Tailleferre also dedicated works to Long. Her ‘Au pavillon d’Alsace’ is one of a set of eight pieces, each by a different composer, composed for the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle and collectively titled À l’exposition. ‘Au pavillon d’Alsace’ comprises a slow introduction followed by a lively section with several toccata characteristics such as rapidly alternating ideas and rapid scalar passages. This type of piano writing is ideally suited to the detached ‘jeu perlé’ technique which, thanks to exponents such as Long, was particularly associated with the French piano school of the mid twentieth century. Tailleferre’s Trois Études for piano and orchestra are, in one surviving manuscript, dedicated to Marguerite Long. This is a concerto in all but name, with two lively outer movements framing a poignant central Larghetto; all three feature a cadenza or cadenza-like passage for piano solo towards the end of the movement, the traditional place for solo virtuoso display in a concerto, and the two outer movements exhibit the toccata style beloved of the composer.

Tailleferre’s Partita for piano is one of her most typical and engaging works. Composed in 1957 and dedicated to her pianist daughter Françoise, it has three movements, the outer two of which are toccatas. The texture of both these movements is often reduced to two parts, with the left hand frequently given an ostinato figure. The piquant dissonances that result with the right hand clashing with the ostinato move the work into neobaroque territory. While the first movement is generally quiet and introspective, the third is louder and more extroverted. Sidestepping modulations in the last movement are another Tailleferre characteristic.

2.6 Tailleferre’s Instruments: 2. Harp

The other instrument Tailleferre learned to play well was the harp. This instrument is closely associated with French music, not least because France is a major centre of manufacture of the instrument and of advanced teaching. The harp was also historically considered suitable for female performers, as an instrument whose playing position is both appropriately modest and allows for display of the arms and hands; as a large, expensive, and visually striking instrument, its possession also indicated the comfortable financial status of its owners. While it is likely that Tailleferre had harp lessons as a young woman because in the early twentieth century, it was still considered to be an appropriate instrument for middle-class young women to learn, her harp compositions span her career and demonstrate many different facets of the instrument in both solo and orchestral contexts.

Some of Tailleferre’s earliest works were brought together and published as Le petit livre de harpe de Madame Tardieu. This set of eighteen studies, composed from 1913 to 1919, are dedicated to her harp teacher Caroline Tardieu-Luigini, who commissioned works from many French composers of the period. Two of Tailleferre’s most significant works were composed for the harp: her Concertino (1926–1927) and her solo harp sonata composed for Nicanor Zabaleta in 1953. The Concertino was premiered in Boston in 1927 and later in Paris, where the soloist was Lily Laskine, one of the most celebrated French harpists of the period. Tailleferre’s fondness for neobaroque-style perpetuum mobile movements proved ideally suited to the incisive qualities of the harp, and both outer movements of the Concertino are in this style. Its central slow movement shows off the melodic capabilities of the instrument and the ethereal sound of its harmonics, as well as its ability to play rapid glissando passages.

Tailleferre also composed Sonata alla Scarlatti for harp (1964), which exhibits the influence of Domenico Scarlatti’s short keyboard sonatas on her work. As a plucked instrument, the harp is an ideal harpsichord substitute for music in the style of Scarlatti. But there are other, more incongruous, sources for this sonata, as it also draws on music she wrote in the same year for a TV series on the short life of the nineteenth-century French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832).

2.7 Tailleferre and the Voice

Tailleferre’s approach to the voice is highly varied, and the fact that she continued to compose operas even though none of them obtained repeat performances shows her determined enthusiasm for the genre. Text settings of authors from a wide range of periods can be found throughout her oeuvre, though she had an unusual affinity with the untexted vocalise. Her love of pure vocal display culminated in her last work, Concerto de la fidélité (1981) for coloratura soprano and orchestra.

When the poet Jean Tardieu asked her why she initially composed her concerto for baritone, piano, and orchestra (1954) without words, Tailleferre replied, according to Hacquard: ‘I must admit: because we rarely understand what singers say! So I preferred to make them vocalise. I limited the effort that listeners have to make!’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Although ultimately Tardieu provided texts for this work, Tailleferre tellingly gave it the title Concerto des vaines paroles (Concerto of words in vain). At the same time, the contested importance of semantic meaning is something that resonated with Tardieu in this period; he wrote in a commentary to the work that he ‘was then concerned, as in the majority of his works, with the problems of language, especially the search for a sort of “non-signification” close to musical expression’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Tailleferre worked both with texts by contemporary authors, such as Tardieu, and with poetry of the past. In Six chansons françaises (1929), she chose texts from French writers from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries that surely had a highly personal meaning for her as she emerged from her disastrous marriage to Ralph Barton. The third, fourth, and fifth songs are settings of anonymous fifteenth-century texts: ‘Mon mari m’a diffamé’ (My husband defamed me); ‘Vrai Dieu, qui m’y confortera’ (True God, who will comfort me); ‘On a dit mal de mon ami’ (They said bad things about my lover). The first song, ‘Non, la fidélité’ (No, fidelity) sets the eighteenth-century writer Gabriel-Charles de Lattaignant, the second ‘Souvent un air de vérité’ (Often an air of truth) takes the words of Voltaire (1694–1778) as its starting point, and the last song ‘Les trois présents’ (The three here present) sets a seventeenth-century author, Jean-François Sarrasin. All six songs are linked by the theme of love – generally an affair and not a lasting, state-sanctioned relationship – and although all the texts ascribed to an author are by men, they are all written from the perspective of a female protagonist.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Tailleferre’s piano accompaniments skilfully underline the meaning of each text. In ‘Non, la fidélité’, the semitone modulation from A minor to A flat major at bars 8–9 reflects the words of the poem: as the singer celebrates a new lover, the music moves to a new key and there is a change of texture in the piano accompaniment. ‘Non, la fidélité’ is comparable to Poulenc in its four-square phrasing and abrupt modulations, and this technique of modulating to keys a tone or semitone higher reaches an extreme point in ‘On a dit mal de mon ami’, which begins in F major and progresses through E, F, F sharp, G, A, B, and C sharp minor, somehow ending in the tonic key. Also, like Poulenc, Tailleferre often reserves a harmonic surprise for the final bars of a piece; the last chord of ‘Non, la fidélité’ is unexpectedly dissonant.

More subtle harmonic surprises in Tailleferre might appear in the final phrase of a piece rather than the final bar. One of the most attractive of these is her setting of Voltaire, ‘Souvent un air de vérité’, which in many ways is typical of Tailleferre’s harmonic language and therefore merits close examination. The diagram in Figure 1 is a harmonic reduction of the song in which the void noteheads represent notes of greater harmonic significance than black noteheads. Chords are assumed to last until they are replaced: for example, at bars 19–22 there are only slight harmonic alterations to a single chord. The reduction shows that the perfect fifth ostinato in the bass is present almost throughout the song, whatever the harmonic changes above. It also reveals that there is a harmonic ascent, progressing by semitones, from the beginning of the song to bar 17, which was surely a deliberate strategy, as the text of the first verse (which ends at bar 17) is as follows:

This ‘rise’ is thus reflected in the harmony, and more obviously in the melody which has leaps of an octave at the words ‘j’étais monté’. The subsequent fall by step balances this, though there is no direct parallel in the poem.

Figure 1 Tailleferre, Six chansons françaises, 2 (‘Souvent un air de vérité’): harmonic reduction

Tailleferre varies the piano texture at bars 27–32 from crotchets to triplets, and the reversion to the opening texture at bar 33 is accompanied by an unexpected change of harmony: for the only time in the song, the ostinato is replaced, falling by a whole tone to create a modal effect through a flattened seventh. Although the vocal line resolves onto the tonic at this point, the accompaniment does not resolve until the final chord. Similarly, in the final phrase of ‘Les trois présents’, ‘Bonjour, bonsoir et bonne nuit’ (Hello, good evening and goodnight), the piano has the last word, pivoting in a Fauré-like manner from C major to E flat major for the postlude.

‘Les trois présents’ and ‘Souvent un air de vérité’ were recorded in 1952 by Irène Joachim, one of the most distinguished French singers of Tailleferre’s era, and issued in 1968 on an LP devoted to all the members of Les Six.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ However, the text of ‘Les trois présents’ is here changed to a less explicit version: the female character in the song is asked to choose from three potential lovers: ‘celui des trois qui plus vous duit’ (the one of the three who most owes you), and in the recording by Joachim this is modified to ‘qui plus vous plaît’ (who you like most).

2.8 Tailleferre and the Orchestra

It is clear from Tailleferre’s Mémoires that when she was emerging as a composer she found orchestration a challenge. This is hardly surprising as she had no opportunities to compose for the orchestra until after World War I, though some of her early chamber works display an unusual ear for sound combinations that would ultimately feed into her orchestral pieces. For instance, the six-minute-long Image, premiered at 6 rue Huyghens in 1919, is scored for flute, clarinet, string quartet, piano, and celesta.

When she embarked on orchestral works in the 1920s, she sought advice from friends and acquaintances who included orchestrators of the calibre of Koechlin, Stravinsky, and Ravel. She told an interviewer that Ravel was not really her teacher (‘not in the scholastic sense’), but they ‘discussed pieces for hours, how they were orchestrated’. Ravel once told her that ‘you should have the courage to take a Chopin waltz and then orchestrate it ten times, each time differently’; as Tailleferre said, ‘one had to be Ravel to do something similar’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ She mentioned in the same interview that she met Koechlin through their common friend Milhaud, and he advised her on the orchestration of Marchand d’Oiseaux (Koechlin’s diaries indicate that Tailleferre came to see him for lessons five times in the two months preceding the premiere of the ballet; he also attended a rehearsal). As for Stravinsky, she wrote in a letter to Louise Alvar that she sought his advice while she was orchestrating the Ballade in the early 1920s. It took Tailleferre some time before she was satisfied with the orchestration of this work: the manuscript features several alterations which substantiate Alfred Cortot’s remark that ‘we have every reason to suppose that there were many last-minute revisions’Footnote ¹⁵⁰ to the piece.

The Ballade went through several iterations before it reached its final form, and unusually for Tailleferre, evidence of its evolution survives. It represents a turning point in her career, being her first orchestral work and perhaps an attempt to move away from the short, often dance-like movements that typify her early chamber works. Although there are four main sections in the work, there is some thematic recall and it concludes with a brief reprise of the opening material. The first version was titled Morceau symphonique (Symphonic piece) and the title page indicates it is for ‘orchestre et piano’ and not the other way around. This Morceau symphonique, whose manuscript I studied in the archives of Chester Music (now Wise Music), was signed at the end ‘Littlehampton, août 1920’, showing that Tailleferre completed it during her visit to Louise Alvar’s country home. Table 1 compares the structure of the two versions.

In section 1, the opening material is similar but the piano texture is distinct. Both versions feature gently bitonal figurations, with the left hand on the black keys and the right hand on the white keys, as in the cadenza section of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901): the opening bar of the Ballade, an orchestral ostinato in her favoured 5/4 metre, was, in the Morceau symphonique, given to the solo piano. But the pieces diverge from bar 25, where the piano is soon overwhelmed by a loud orchestral texture in the Morceau symphonique; this imbalance is corrected in the Ballade. The second sections feature a dotted rhythm-based theme in 9/4 time in both versions, but while this theme is varied and extended in the Ballade, it is combined in the Morceau with three other ideas which are juxtaposed but not effectively linked. In the Ballade, there is a 5/4 waltz in section 3, while the Morceau combines a more conventional triple-time waltz with a 6/8 accompaniment. In this section of the Morceau, there is a long, rambling flute melody, somewhat in the style of Koechlin, but this is ditched in the Ballade. The idea of a coda that recalls the opening material survives from the Morceau to the Ballade, and both versions feature a pentatonic oboe theme and an expressive flute melody. The use of harp and celesta in the Ballade creates an ethereal atmosphere, and this sonority is one that Tailleferre used in several subsequent orchestral works.

There is a note in English, which is not in Tailleferre’s hand, on the manuscript of the Morceau stating that the work is ‘only to be judged after having heard on orchestra’. It is not known whether the piece was tried out at the time, but the note suggests that someone, most likely the publisher, had reservations about the Morceau. Although the piece is dedicated to Ricardo Viñes, one of the most distinguished pianists active in Paris in the 1920s and dedicatee of many works by Ravel, the piano part of the Morceau symphonique is no more important than any other instrument in the orchestra; it would not even tax the average amateur pianist. This is surprising from a composer who was herself an excellent pianist, all the more so because in her Piano Trio of 1916–17, the piano has the most important role. The Morceau symphonique represents a swing to the other extreme.

However, Tailleferre developed into a highly inventive and original orchestrator, and her catalogue includes orchestral works in truly one-of-a-kind formations. Her Petite Suite (1957) requires what is described on the score as a ‘small orchestra’, though it includes harp, celesta, and piano as well as strings, wind, brass, percussion (including a xylophone), and timpani. In its ‘Prélude’, the first of three brief movements, folk-like wind solos are accompanied by celesta and harp that together sound like a music box. This sparkling sonority can be traced back as far as Image and the Ballade.

There are many timbral connections between Marchand d’Oiseaux and the Piano Concerto no. 1, and their faster movements in particular are very much in neobaroque style: both have an important trumpet part, and Marchand d’Oiseaux features the piano as a member of the orchestra. While the lively opening movement of the ballet strongly resembles J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2, Tailleferre’s abrupt modulations and sidestepping chromaticism situate the work in the twentieth rather than the eighteenth century. Her orchestra also moves beyond the Baroque period as it includes a celesta and harp as well as the piano.

The Concerto Grosso for two pianos, mixed chorus, saxophones, and orchestra (1933–34), commissioned by Pierre Monteux, is one of Tailleferre’s most extraordinary pieces. She did not like talking about her music and often minimised her achievements: she told an interviewer that this piece was ‘the only fairly important work I wrote’ in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁵¹ This excessively modest statement does not reflect the strikingly original work that reinvents the Baroque concerto grosso form with wit and élan. The two pianos play a concertante role, the eight-part chorus has no text, and a saxophone quartet replaces the oboes, bassoons, and horns in the orchestra. A celesta and harp add distinctive timbres that are characteristic of the Tailleferre sound, and the slow movement further eliminates the violins and violas.

Tailleferre stated that she wanted ‘to treat the voices in the orchestra like instruments’ in this concerto,Footnote ¹⁵² as in Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) and Debussy’s ‘Sirènes’, the third movement of his Nocturnes for orchestra (1899). But while Ravel and Debussy use their wordless chorus largely in a colouristic manner, for Tailleferre the eight individual voices are very much instruments without words and are often treated contrapuntally. The first movement is a lively perpetuum mobile that is characteristic of Tailleferre’s style, and repeated ostinato phrases keep the momentum going: the two piano parts often interlock, with one on the strong beats of the bar and the other on the weak beats. The tonally ambiguous first theme, sung by the chorus, sounds like Gregorian chant transfigured by twentieth-century harmony (Example 6).

Example 6 Tailleferre, Concerto Grosso (1933–34), 1: chorus, bars 9–12

In the manuscript, the theme of the second, Larghetto movement was marked ‘Thème Perse’.Footnote ¹⁵³ It is not known whether Tailleferre is referring to a specific Persian melody, or whether the winding trumpet and woodwind solos that emerge from the texture are intended to evoke this musical style. However, the movement could not sound more French, particularly when rapid ascending figures are followed by passages in dotted rhythm that evoke the classical French overture. This movement is unusually complex in its layered texture, with each instrument given a specific rhythmic identity to make it easy to identify; for instance, the celesta plays with the two pianos but its triplet figuration ensures it stands out against the pianos’ semiquavers.

The mash-up of twentieth-century and Baroque style reaches a peak in the finale, which opens as if a traditional fugue is about to get underway, starting in the lowest regions of the orchestra, with the second entry at a slightly higher pitch. An unexpected twist is the subsequent entry not of a different instrument, but of the bass voices, soon imitated in turn by the tenors, altos, and sopranos. At the climax of the movement, the vocal octet is given an unaccompanied passage at the point when a cadenza would normally be expected (see pp. 132–134 of the orchestral score). A work with such original instrumentation is not easy to programme in a standard orchestral concert, and Tailleferre, evidently not wanting to waste the effort she had put into the Concerto Grosso, reworked the piece in the mid-1950s as Concerto des vaines paroles. This is another novel format: she retains one of the solo pianos and adds a solo baritone.