The composer who defied the Nazis

Eight pieces to start listening to French Resistance composer Elsa Barraine

I was thrilled to see Elsa Barraine’s name on the Proms programme this year — her Proms debut, to the best of my knowledge (you can catch up on the concert here, with yours truly speaking in the interval). It marks a recent increase in interest in this twentieth-century French composer, who wrote powerful, opinionated, and often explicitly political music.

Barraine was a truly extraordinary woman. Born in 1910 to a Catholic mother and Jewish father who was principal cellist of the Orchestre de l’Opera, Barraine grew up around music. She started composing at an early age, was accepted to study at the Conservatoire when she was just nine years old, and won the prestigious Prix de Rome composition prize when she was nineteen for a cantata about Joan of Arc.

When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Barraine proved one of the more astute observers of his rise to power. Many viewed him as both manipulable and naive, and expected him to be as short-lived as his predecessors. Not so Barraine. She seems to have quite quickly grasped the unusual threat that the Nazis posed. Between 1930 and 1933 she had been in Italy for her Prix de Rome residency, so had witnessed the rise of Mussolini first-hand. Watching the country slide into fascism strengthened her left-wing politics, and she recognised in Hitler much of what she had seen in Mussolini.

Music would become Barraine’s mode of resistance, her way of making sense of events unfolding around her and speaking out against them. In 1933 she penned a symphonic poem Pogromes, on a text by Jewish poet André Spire about responding to antisemitism, which she found ‘tragically topical in August 1933.’ The poem contrasts the voices of younger and older generations, the young urging Jews to fight back, and the old counselling acceptance and resignation. In Pogromes Barraine clearly brings out this sense of conflict, and the desolate tone of the work manages to capture a feeling of both desperation and defiance:

She followed Pogromes with her Second Symphony in 1938, subtitled ‘Voïna’, the Russian for ‘war’. By 1938 Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy had made a European war seem almost inevitable. Barraine was not alone in feeling as though the world stood on the edge of a precipice. British pianist Myra Hess said that in 1938 she felt as though ‘we were perilously teetering between war and peace, sanity and insanity.’ Barraine’s symphony begins with an outburst of aggression after a short slow introduction, the winds and brass hammering out the thematic material over martial percussion. The second movement is a funeral march, while the third movement sounds a note of optimism, ending in a brief flurry of trumpets and timpani. Perhaps this is Barraine expressing a hope that war can be averted, although coming after the devastation of the first two movements the cheeriness of the third rings a little hollow. Perhaps, as in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, also written in a time of political turmoil, the surface bombast of Barraine’s final movement overlies a more sinister substructure:

When France was occupied by Germany, Barraine was one of the few musicians who decided not to comply with the new regime. Instead, she actively resisted, and was instrumental in setting up the musical arm of the Resistance, the Front National des Musiciens, with fellow composer Louis Durey and conductor Reger Désormière. Under Barraine’s leadership the group published a clandestine journal, and encouraged other musicians to carry out covert acts of resistance and avoid performing in occupied areas. Barraine’s work led her to be arrested by the Vichy police in 1942, and she spent much of the rest of the war in hiding and living under a pseudonym. During this time she wrote Avis for chorus, setting Paul Éluard’s poem about a condemned man waiting on the night before his death. Éluard’s poem was written in memory of Lucien Legros, executed for his resistance activities, and Barraine would in turn dedicate her setting to Georges Dudach, also executed for resistance involvement.

Not all Barraine’s work was so directly politically focused. But her music was always rooted in the world around her and intellectually challenging, often responding to literary and philosophical ideas, or in dialogue with contemporaries or predecessors. Her Hommage à Prokofiev for orchestra was written after the death of the Russian composer in 1953, while in the same year her Musique funèbre pour la mise au tombeau du Titien for piano and orchestra was inspired by the Italian artist Titian:

Women’s lives and personalities were also recurring themes of interest. One of her ballets is based on Colette’s controversial, homoerotic first novel Claudine at School, which dealt frankly with young women’s sexuality. Ouvrage de Dame for wind quintet is in eight movements, each depicting a fictional woman’s personality (personally I most want to meet Berthe and Barbe):

Her early song ‘Ne jamais la voir’, meanwhile, sets a love poem by Sully Prudhomme. Barraine dedicated the piece to her mother — but the tone of the song is somewhat more romantic than the dedication would suggest. It is a real gem, with a directness and immediacy that will surely appeal to fans of Debussy and Duparc:

Later in her life, Barraine moved away from the impressionist and neo-classical styles of her youth, and experimented with serialism. Her immense Musique Rituelle for organ and percussion (1967) was inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, reflecting her ongoing preoccupation with spirituality and religion:

And I’ll leave you with her typically multi-faceted Fanfare de Printemps (‘Spring Fanfare’) for cornet and piano, joyful one moment and ominous the next:

If you want to hear more from Elsa Barraine, the BBC Philharmonic’s performance of her Second Symphony at the Proms is available on BBC Sounds, in a programme with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Martin Fröst playing Shaw and Copland’s Clarinet Concertos. I’m speaking during the interval about music in wartime. Listen to the concert here.

In other news I have a Big Announcement next fortnight that I am extremely excited about. Stay tuned!!