Charles Koechlin and the Early Sound Film

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) trained at the Paris Conservatoire between 1890 and 1897. He studied with Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré and André Gedalge, later orchestrating (in part) Fauré’s incidental music Pelleas et Melisande Op. 80. Music dictionaries indicate Koechlin was a late developer and, like Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), was an extremely prolific composer reaching 226 opus numbers, including eighty-nine miniatures within a single opus number, e.g. Op. 140 ‘Le Portrait de Daisy Hamilton.’ He is best known today as a pedagogue and the teacher of Cole Porter, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre and a generation of French composers. Koechlin became fascinated with early sound film. He experimented with film music, writing a number of works and ‘imaginary’ film scores inspired by watching silent and talking movies in Paris, mainly 1930s films starring the Anglo-German actress and singer Lilian Harvey (1906-1968) and, later, Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow, as recounted in the lecture here by British musicologist and French music scholar Robert Orledge.

Charles Koechlin and the Early Sound Film 1933-38

Copyright © 1972 by Robert Orledge / Reprinted by permission of the author
Source: Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association Vol. 98 (1971 - 1972) pp. 1-16

Charles Koechlin showed little interest in silent films, and saw the film industry both at the beginning and end of his musical career as the worst aspect of the debased world of commercial art he so detested. According to his diaries, Koechlin first visited the cinema on 1 December 1912, and between this and his important visit to see Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in THE BLUE ANGEL on 29 June 1933 he apparently went only eighteen times. Charlie Chaplin was the only silent film star that Koechlin really respected, for he represented eternal hope in misfortune, an escape from everyday problems into a world of fantasy, the ‘chimérique’ as Koechlin called it; all of this was relevant to his own existence as a composer. From the series of essays entitled Stars (1) which he wrote in 1934 as a commentary to his Seven Stars’ Symphony it is evident that Koechlin found silent film subtitles pretentiously banal, their stories conventional and superficial, often mutilating his favourite authors such as Jules Verne and Hans Andersen. With the arrival of the first sound films in the early 1930s, however, Koechlin suddenly found himself drawn to the cinema, and a curious, fascinating period of his life began, which brought to a head his inner conflict between the necessity to exist as a composer in real life despite serious financial difficulties, and his desire to escape into a private fantasy world in which he could compose. A passage from Tristan Klingsor’s Scheherazade poem Le Voyage, which Koechlin set in 1922-23 (2) and to which he often referred, summarizes his philosophy. The first phrase is the crucial one.

For the dream is more beautiful than the reality,
For the most beautiful countries are those one does not know,
And the most beautiful journey is that made in a dream.

Koechlin was attracted by the brilliance of the photography in the early sound film; but mainly, as he said in a later commentary on his works, it was the spiritual grace and insolent beauty of certain female stars which caused this unique volte-face in his life and led to the composition of his Seven Stars’ Symphony in 1933. The first star portrayed in this work is Douglas Fairbanks senior in the title role of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. Although this was a silent film, Koechlin admired Fairbanks’s agility, elegance and spontaneity in it, and decided to include him for these reasons. The music of his ‘little oriental improvisation’ (3) provides a mysterious, diaphanous veil of sound portraying the thief’s lithe cunning and the perfume of an eastern night rather than any specific exploit from this exceptionally long film. The solo violin passage at the outset derives from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, (4) although here the idea is non-recurring. Koechlin is at his most harmonically advanced in this movement, and the wide, luminous spacings of the polytonal chords, and the opening fourth-based arabesques are typical features of his mature style. (a)

The second and fourth movements of the symphony were inspired by photographs of the early sound stars Lilian Harvey and Clara Bow, before Koechlin saw any of their films. They constitute the minuet and scherzo of the work, and Clara Bow is associated in the title of her movement with the ‘joyous California’ that Koechlin knew and loved from his visits there in 1928 and 1929. Curiously, however, he never felt any desire to visit Hollywood, or to see the stars as they really were. The presence of Charlie Chaplin at a Hollywood Bowl concert on 15 August 1929, two days after the performance there of his prize-winning La Joie païenne (5) is only mentioned in passing in his diaries. Koechlin does not appear to have tried to meet him.

The third movement of the Seven Stars' Symphony, based on Greta Garbo, is an unexpected ‘pagan chorale’; an austere monody for the recently invented ondes martenot. When Koechlin later used this movement in Voyages he renamed it ‘Norvège, paysage de neige’. (6) Although Koechlin’s commentary on the 1933 movement shows his awareness of Garbo’s female charms, these are ignored in the music, which rather seems to represent her Scandinavian origins. Perhaps the ending in the Lydian mode was intended to imply that she could be licentious too.

The fifth, sixth and seventh movements, depicting Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Charlie Chaplin, are based on a cipher system of Koechlin’s own devising, in which the themes spell out the stars’ names, and in the case of the Emil Jannings movement virtually tell a film story in music. The extraordinary piece, subtitled a ‘chorale for the repose of the soul of Professor Rath in THE BLUE ANGEL’, is really meant to be played after the professor’s tragic death at the end of von Sternberg’s film. The disastrous marriage of the shy, emotionally repressed professor to the cabaret artist Lola-Lola (played by Marlene Dietrich), and his humiliation and eventual death, moved Koechlin greatly, and seeing this film for the first time in 1933 really marks the beginning of his interest in the early sound film, which lasted till 1938.

In the movement itself, the chorale of repose only occurs as a serene, Fauréen coda to a traumatic, powerful Adagio, and the main movement would seem to portray the professor’s thoughts and emotional conflicts, as the Dietrich and Lola-Lola themes predominate. Their effect on him forms the climax of the movement in which the Emil Jannings theme is thundered out in crashing discords. In his compositional process, Koechlin followed the path of his inspiration as it immediately took him, without alteration, and the piece, intended to be just a chorale, came out very differently, as he describes: ‘I wished to contribute to the repose of his soul, but the chorale at the start could not be other than horribly dissonant’. (7) As we can tell from his commentaries and manuscript annotations, Koechlin invariably conceived his music in vivid pictorial terms, and it is reasonable to see in the opening of this movement the tragic, ill-fated relationship of these two such dissimilar people. The section after the climax in which the themes of Dietrich and Jannings briefly combine is even more hopeless and desolate in its sparseness. (b)

The finale, which represents Charlie Chaplin, Koechlin considered the best music of the Seven Stars’ Symphony. Based on the burlesque adventures of Charlot, especially those of THE GOLD RUSH (1925), and THE CIRCUS (1928), the whole is only paralleled in its graphic detail by the earlier symphonic poem La Course de printemps, (8) based on Kipling’s Jungle Book story. It represents what Koechlin considered to be ideal cinéma music: music that added to the film in the form of profound comment, as well as being faithful to the details and mood of the subject and forming a self-contained, balanced musical work in its own right. At the time, he thought the piece could well form the basis of a much longer film score, which he clearly saw himself writing. The orchestral style is often fragmentary and agitated, and shows Koechlin at his most avant garde. It also contains, near the end, Koechlin’s only piece of real musical humour, recreating Chaplin’s disappearance over the horizon at the end of THE CIRCUS. (c)

The Seven Stars’ Symphony marks the beginning of Koechlin’s musical response to the early Sound film, although, as we have seen, some of the movements were based on photographs of stars before Koechlin saw any of their films. But the event which turned an interest into almost a passion occurred on the afternoon of 7 August 1934 when he saw Lilian Harvey in PRINCESSE À VOS ordres. (9) Although now forgotten and a failure from the moment she transferred to Hollywood, Lilian Harvey was, with such films as LE CONGRÈS S’AMUSE and LE CHEMIN DU PARADIS, as popular in France in the early 1930s as Clara Bow or Greta Garbo. Born in London in 1907, she grew up in Berlin from 1914 onwards, and remained in Germany to begin her film career with THE CURSE in 1923. Her greatest successes were in German film-operettas and their French cover-versions between 1930 and 1933, in which she radiated an innocent purity akin to that of Lilian Gish in American films. Koechlin’s infatuation with her beauty, grâce and apparent naivety lasted for two years during which he composed 113 pieces in her honour, the two Albums de Lilian, the 89 pieces comprising the Portrait de Daisy Hamilton, and the seven Chansons pour Gladys commemorating her performance as Gladys Allauran in the film CALAIS-DOUVRES. Above all, Koechlin loved her ‘rapid dialogue, delivered with such amusing, varied and lively conviction’, (10) and frequently accorded her his highest honour by comparing her performances with those of Mary Garden in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

So impressed was Koechlin with PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES that he went again the same evening, and returning home in a state of great excitement penned the first of his film miniatures, a Valse-Caprice entitled ‘Tout va bien’. He combined this with another song written earlier in 1934 for the soprano Jane Bathori, a commentary on the Palmolive soap advertisement called ‘Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion’, and the two pieces formed the basis of the first Album de Lilian (Op. 139). In a fascinating commentary on what he saw in Lilian Harvey and her films, entitled En marge de l’Album de Lilian, (11) Koechlin describes the compositional process of ‘Tout va bien’.

I confide to you nevertheless that I wrote the melody of this vocalise on 7 August [1934], in the evening, my head still full of the things I had seen at the Cinéma de Cluny where I had gone to see PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES. The final scene of this delightful story consisted of a waltz, danced and sung by Lilian and [Henri] Garat. The theme (12) did not lack charm, but I thought that another melody could better capture the gracious suppleness of [the Princess] Marie-Christine, and therefore I wrote, all at one go (but, I must confess, not without covering my paper in tears) this vocalise in commentary on Lilian Harvey in PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES. On the following days I composed the accompaniment in several parts in the purest contrapuntal style, and finally, I added the words. (13)

This was invariably Koechlin’s method of composing: melody, accompaniment, and then if suitable, words. A similar process occurs with the gigantic Hymne à la vie of 1919, for which Koechlin also acted as his own librettist.

Some of Koechlin’s shorter film pieces were again inspired by his collection of photographs of Lilian Harvey, but most derive from actual film sequences. According to Darius Milhaud, (14) they were written to replace existing musical sequences that Koechlin considered particularly unsuitable, and records in his Paris home show that he timed actual passages with a stopwatch on return cinema visits. But the process of composition invariably followed the course of Koechlin’s first melodic inspiration. None of these pieces is exactly timed, as parts of his film score Victoire de la vie are, and this timing of film sequences was probably rather to give him ideas on the usual lengths of scenes for the scenarios he was himself compiling at the time. One of these was based on Erckmann-Chatrian’s short romance The Confidences of a Clarinet Player, and the other was a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy starring Lilian Harvey and himself entitled The Portrait of Daisy Hamilton. In the latter frequent references are made to scenes being acted in the manner of specific Lilian Harvey films, and Koechlin carefully timed three scenes from Suzanne, c'est moi which are strikingly similar to the portrait-painting scene around which Koechlin’s scenario revolves.

The Portrait of Daisy Hamilton exists in novel and scenario form, (15) and Koechlin seriously considered its being made as a real film, starring himself and Lilian Harvey, of approximately 65 minutes duration. He carefully worked out timings, and lighting and stage directions for most of its twenty scenes. Koechlin in effect appears twice in the film scenario: first as a painter with all Koechlin’s artistic ideals who, after a stormy relationship, finally succeeds in winning Daisy Hamilton (i.e. Lilian Harvey) ; and second as Charles Koechlin himself, here an internationally famous composer, visiting Hollywood en route from Japan to give Daisy fatherly advice. Daisy has a great affection for ‘son vieux musicien’, and on various occasions begs to hear his music. The whole represents a dream of Koechlin’s ideal situation at that time, although as far as possible the scenario is based on facts on Lilian gleaned from such magazines as Ciné-Monde, and the opening scene takes place in the salons of the Revue musicale with Darius Milhaud defending Koechlin against his misinformed critics exactly as he did, and continues to do, in real life. The central section of the film concerns the very real struggle in Koechlin’s mind as to the similarity of the real Lilian Harvey with her screen image. Again the key-phrase is ‘for the dream is more beautiful than the reality’, and Koechlin was always afraid that if he actually met Lilian in person she would not live up to the screen image of perfection that inspired his pieces, and so would cause an artistic and personal crisis which might be irreparable. Although happily married with five children, Koechlin was clearly infatuated with Lilian Harvey, and some of his writings on the subject verge on the erotic.

Between 1934 and 1936 Koechlin wrote a series of letters to Lilian Harvey in which he expressed his admiration for her and told her of the compositions she was inspiring. Only the first letter ever received a reply, evidently because its reassurance of her Parisian popularity came at a much-needed moment in her career. Lilian predictably never lived up to the wave of publicity which accompanied her entry into Hollywood, and at the time of the letter she had just terminated her contract with Fox Films and was trying to get work with British International and Columbia. Koechlin, however, was unaware of her troubles when he first wrote to her on 7 November 1934.

There is no reason to suppose that Lilian’s reply on 9 December was not sincere, and this, and later articles on her that Koechlin collected, show that the imaginary picture he built of her as both a musician and a genuine, intelligent person in real life was surprisingly accurate. Her reply runs as follows: (16)

A million, million thanks for your perfectly lovely letter. To say that I feel flattered that you singled me out for an inspiration for a musical Album, is to put it mildly. I am simply thrilled, and only hope I can live up to the lofty concept you seem to have of me.

All that you write about the Parisian public still liking me is very reassuring. All the more so, as it reached me at a time when I needed that kind of reassurance badly.

A week ago I started a new picture. As you probably know, I am no longer with Fox, but with Columbia, who, at the moment seem to be making the best pictures in Hollywood, as for example Grace Moore in ONE LIGHT OF LOVE. I have the same director and leading man (Tullio Carminati), and I hope this vehicle will serve to reestablish me again. (17)

I shall be more than delighted to read your essay about me, and if the opportunity ever presents itself, would love to meet you in person and listen to your own interpretation of your compositions.

When she came to film in the south of France in April 1936 Koechlin decided to make one last attempt at contacting Lilian, But his fear of meeting her finally triumphed, and he sent his wife Suzanne to visit her in Antibes and leave her a selection of his latest compositions. The fact that no acknowledgement of any sort was ever made provoked a final letter to her, and its unique touches of bitterness and reproach show that Koechlin was deeply hurt at being ignored. It was a turning-point in his life again, and the end of a period which saw the production of some of his best and most concise pieces.

Of the first Album de Lilian (Op. 139) Koechlin writes:

There is no concession to vulgarity, or popularity, or to the tradition of the ‘genre cinéma’. If some themes appear facile and are accompanied by well-known harmonies . . . it is the nature of the subject which led me there.

Then he adds, further summarising his compositional philosophy of absolute liberty and independence : ‘I wrote these pieces to please myself, and because I was taken by my subject’, and he cites Flaubert in support of his argument: ‘It is not we who choose our subjects, but our subjects which impose themselves on us’. (18) Op. 139, ‘written with the same intentions as The Seven Stars' Symphony, tries to show what cinema music should be like’, Koechlin claims. (19) It was, at the same time, to be a music deriving from his three idols, Chabrier, Fauré and Debussy, though he wrote to Lilian in late December 1934 that the music owed something to the tradition of J. S. Bach. With Koechlin, however, this was invariably the case, and there is also an element of sixteenth-century modal counterpoint which Koechlin does not mention, but which runs through much of his film music, and especially the seven linear Chansons pour Gladys (Op. 151).

The first Album is unified by the predominance of triple time in its nine pieces, and the appealing Lilian motif which first occurred at the start of the opening fugue subject in the second (Lilian Harvey) movement of The Seven Stars' Symphony (Ex. 1). It occurs almost unaltered in Op. 139 No. 2, ‘Fugue sans protocole’ (after PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES) (Ex. 2), and again more rhapsodically at the start of No. 8, ‘Pleurs’ (based on the film Suzanne, c’est moi) (Ex. 3). The end of the final song, ‘Tout va bien’, clearly shows the verbal associations of the Lilian motif (Ex. 4). The album is scored for various combinations of soprano, flute, piccolo and piano, and Koechlin frequently uses changes of instrumentation to mark the beginning of new formal sections. A rising glissando links No. 8 to the final song, and this, and the unifying factors previously mentioned, show that the Album was probably intended to be performed together as a whole, even though it was conceived as a set of separate impressions.

The second Album de Lilian (Op. 149) dates from the summer of 1935, and consists of a further suite of eight widely contrasted pieces. The second, ‘Habanera créole’, is unique among the Lilian pieces in being based on one of her earlier silent films, Quand tu voudras donner ton coeur of 1929. It also shows distinct similarities to the ‘Berceuse créole’ from Le Plumet du colonel which Henri Sauguet wrote whilst a pupil of Koechlin’s in 1924. The last two pieces in this Album, a wide-leaping, chromatic scherzo (‘Jeux de clown’) and a beautiful, serene Satiean chorale (‘La Prière de l’homme’), are both based on the film QUICK, and bring the conflict between fantasy and reality, between clown and man, into close proximity. Significantly, these were two of the pieces that Koechlin sent to Antibes in April 1936 in his final attempt to interest Lilian Harvey in his music. The second Album de Lilian also contains Koechlin’s most extraordinary piece, ‘Le Voyage chimérique’. This is the only one of his film compositions that minutely describes one actual film sequence, in this case scene 10 of A Blond Dream, in which Lilian, in the rôle of Jou-Jou, dreams of a little train making a fantastic journey across America to California. In graphic musical detail, the train crosses the roofs of houses, the winter snowdrifts, the ocean depths, and finally the Arizona desert to Hollywood, steaming in to the strains of ‘The Star- Spangled Banner’, to which Koechlin adds, tongue-in-cheek, ‘Hymne USA - levez-vous!’. (20) At the end we see the dreamer herself, the beautiful star with limpid, clear eyes before the forbidding controller of the film studio. Then the dream ends in a diaphanous, almost cosmic coda as Jou-Jou slowly awakens. The widely-spaced harmonies and timeless, ethereal melodic line are typical of Koechlin. (d) A similar passage occurs in the opening section of the symphonic poem Les Bandar-Log, Op. 176 (1939).

The musical album Le Portrait de Daisy Hamilton (Op. 140) is a series of no less than 89 miscellaneous pieces written between 1934 and 1936. (21) They range from simple monodies to miniature symphonic poems, and were curiously not intended to form a musical score to Koechlin’s film scenario of the same title. The scenario refers specifically to only three of the Op. 140 pieces, Nos. 8, 24 and 34. The other pieces used come from quite different sources: No. 12 of the piano suite L'Ancienne Maison de campagne (Op. 124); the two early songs ‘Un jour de juin’ (Op. 24 No. 2), and ‘La Chanson des ingénues’ (Op. 22 No. 1); and the songs ‘Palmolive’ and ‘Tout va bien’ from the first Album de Lilian. Again the Op. 140 miniatures were mostly inspired by photos or films of Lilian, and the order of the suite is a purely chronological one, the subjects depending largely on which film was currently showing in Paris, and which particular scene or aspect of it inspired Koechlin on that day. However, there are certain recurring themes in the collection, particularly dance rhythms (ten pieces), light (ten pieces), water, sea, and swimming (nine pieces), and the speed and joy of Hollywood life as Koechlin imagined it (five pieces).

After his final attempt to interest Lilian in his music failed in 1936, most of Koechlin’s interest in films disappeared. What remained switched briefly to Ginger Rogers, whose performance in SWING TIME inspired the five Danses pour Ginger (Op. 163) in 1937. But she was always second-best for Koechlin. When considering the very real possibility that Lilian would not want to be in his film The Portrait of Daisy Hamilton, he wrote: ‘I see no-one else in her place but Ginger Rogers. She has neither her distinction, nor her sensibility, but she has a kind, seemingly naive expression, and she dances marvellously’. (22) Koechlin showed no interest in visiting Hollywood whilst on his final teaching visit to San Diego in 1937, though he did go as far afield as Montreal and Quebec for conferences on his way home. He still followed Lilian’s fading career with interest, and occasionally went to her films as late as 1945. His last short film composition, the Épitaphe de Jean Harlow (Op. 164) may well have been inspired by Lilian originally, as it is strikingly close in material, and identical in mood and key to ‘Skating-Smiling’ from the first Album de Lilian, which was inspired by his favourite skating scene from PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES. This romantic, voluptuous sicilienne for alto saxophone, flute and piano was in fact written in February 1937—before Jean Harlow’s death at the age of 26. But Koechlin thought that the melody so suited her screen image that he had no hesitation in dedicating it to her as a sort of obituary. (e)

As well as all these shorter pieces inspired by Lilian Harvey, Koechlin also wrote several film scores. The first was commissioned in 1934 by his friend, the director of Éditions Éco and critic, Roland-Manuel. Koechlin characteristically began composing the same night and swiftly produced a vibrant symphonic piece in Spanish style for the Andalusian in Barcelona sequence of the film, CRUISES WITH THE SQUADRON. When it came to making the film, however, important modifications were made to this section, and the music was rewritten by a Monsieur Boher, who in fact composed most of the rest of the score. No reason was ever offered to Koechlin for all this, and he only discovered the truth on going to see the film at the Cinéma Omnia on 12 June 1934. The score is Koechlin’s only major pièce de circonstance, with regular phrasing, melodies and functional harmonies along the lines of Chabrier’s Espana. Koechlin however attached little musical importance to it, and only mentioned it again as an example of double-dealing in the commercial world.

In August 1934 Koechlin carefully and practically began converting Erckmann-Chatrian’s The Confidences of a Clarinet Player into a film scenario on his own initiative. He obtained permission from the author’s widow to proceed, but unfortunately Éditions Coda rejected the project in 1935 as ‘terribly slight’ (23) and unsuited for a full-length film. Koechlin was very upset by this too, as his intention was only for a short picture anyway, and he seriously considered the subject to be ‘representative of the psychology, profundity and finesse of real life’. (24) It was certainly as good as many scenarios that were accepted, and Koechlin was justified in regarding the commercial world as unfairly discriminating in this case, although he tended to adopt a rather fatalistic attitude in all commercial transactions, which precluded any sort of practical success.

Koechlin made no attempt to get The Portrait of Daisy Hamilton produced, and his only practical film experience came in 1938, when, in only four days, he wrote the score for the Centrale Sanitaire Internationale film, VICTOIRE DE LA VIE, made to gain French aid for the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. Koechlin, like so many intellectuals at the time, firmly identified with the people’s struggle for liberty, and the film is really a transition work into his next sphere of interest, music for the people. Koechlin worked in close, friendly collaboration with the producer, Henri Cartier, and proved himself surprisingly accommodating, writing sections to exact time-limits, and permitting musical sequences to be cut in the final version. This had its first of three screenings at a Salle Pleyel Soirée de Gala in Paris on 30 June 1938, and Louis Cheronnet reviewing it in Humanité found the music complementary to this strong and moving film and hoped that Cine-Liberté would send it to as many cinemas as they possibly could. (25)

Koechlin’s chamber score for this 40-minute film, although written to fit a film which was already a fait accompli, makes no concessions musically. Koechlin adhered to his general principle of accompanying each sequence of a film with a self-contained piece which would stand up in concert performance, and which would represent the overall mood of the scene and give it unity of sentiment, rather than attempt to portray minute pictorial details. (26) A score such as Satie’s for René Clair’s Entr’acte (27) with its endless repetition of disconnected motives, was inconceivable to Koechlin, who imagined that the only way to restore the declining musical values brought on by the film world was to make each musical sequence perfect in itself. He criticised Honegger’s music for LES MISÉRABLES for failing in this respect. He did not altogether realise that the purpose of film music was often to be a contributory element to a larger whole, and that sometimes it should be of only minimal importance. His score for CRUISES WITH THE SQUADRON may well have been rejected because it would have attracted too much of the audience’s attention away from a rather mediocre film.

Whenever conflicting sentiments or moods occurred within a film sequence, Koechlin thought the composer would do better to remain silent than to try and portray them if they were incompatible with the plan of his music as a whole. Although occasional synchronised theme changes do occur within the fourteen sequences of VICTOIRE DE LA VIE, Koechlin on the whole supports his theories in practice. The score is completely un-Spanish in feeling, its main musical aim being to express the idea of the fight for liberty that was so dear to Koechlin personally, and this it does best in the triumphant chorales which enclose and unify the work.

In general, Koechlin was far less practical than his colleagues Auric, Milhaud, Honegger and Ibert, in film music as in most other matters. His almost accidental interest in this commercial art-form was the nearest he ever came to descending from his ivory tower and making any sort of artistic concessions to the outside musical world. The only aspects of the early Sound film he considers are the stars and the composers, whom he imagined to be wholly responsible for their films. Curiously, the case of the star directing or writing his or her own film belonged more to the province of the silent cinéma, in which Koechlin was little interested. Directors, producers, script-writers and cameramen never receive a mention; they did not interest Koechlin, and although by training he was a mathematician, there is no evidence to show that he was at all concerned with the technical side of film-making. All this is best shown in the series of articles by various composers on music and the cinéma which the Revue musicale included in its issue of December 1934. (28) Honegger, instead of being limited by the new techniques of the cinéma, was in fact inspired by them, and Ibert rightly saw film music as the only expanding side of the music industry in France at the time, and an exciting challenge as well. Constant Lambert, writing in the same year, is equally practical, in a way Koechlin never was:

... the cinema not only offers opportunities for the pure craftsmanship which is so meaningless in art but, being mainly a selective rather than a Creative art, offers to the minor artist a positive montage instead of a negative pastiche. (29)

Nonetheless, there is a lot of truth in Koechlin’s opinion that cinema scores invariably fell below the standard of the other parts of the early sound film. He could never see commercial and musical ends as being in any way compatible, and feared a rapid decline in the lighter side of music generally, which he considered very much a French prerogative stemming from Chabrier. Like Ibert, he was correct in asserting that good music would certainly never fail a film, and that films could easily be conceived to pre-composed scores, as the success of Symphonie inachevée and The Threepenny Opera showed. (Indeed, Koechlin’s objection to silent films may well have been because the music was always added afterwards, and never conceived as part of the original project.) He frequently cited the Ballets Russes as a case of good music not detracting from the visual impact of a production, but adding to its depth of appeal. He was also imaginative in spotting the cinematographic possibilities inherent in other composers’ music. Ken Russell’s realisation of Debussy’s Nocturne Fêtes in his television documentary on the composer fulfils an earlier prophecy of Koechlin’s.

The shorter cinéma pieces show Koechlin to be an excellent miniaturist. His pronounced eclecticism, and the general lack of self-criticism which sprang from his firm belief in the infallibility of his original melodic inspiration, could result in unevenness in Koechlin’s larger works. But these pieces inspired by Lilian Harvey, with their freshness and naive originality, rarely suffer from the same weakness.

VICTOIRE DE LA VIE in 1938 was an isolated practical event in Koechlin’s cinema career and the end of a period. By 1948 cinéma music is equated with all Koechlin hated most in the contemporary musical world. As he says bitterly in one of his autobiographies :

The tendency to flatter the crowd, the desire to be accepted at first hearing (to gain more money), briefly, this demagogy which keeps the pernicious practices of cinéma music going, constitutes the greatest injustice to the art of our time. (30)

The following musical illustrations from Works by Koechlin were heard during the course of the lecture:

• a) A tape-recording of the first movement (‘Douglas Fairbanks’) of the Seven Stars' Symphony: the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Norman Del Mar.
• b) The sixth movement (‘Chorale for the repose of the soul of Professor Rath in the film THE BLUE ANGEL’) of the Seven Stars' Symphony.
• c) Part of the seventh movement (‘Charlie Chaplin’) of the Seven Stars' Symphony.
• d) The coda (‘Le réveil’) of‘Le Voyage chimérique’, Op. 14g No. 5, played by the author on the piano.
• e) A gramophone recording (2C 063-10734) of Épitaphe de Jean Harlow, Op. 164: Jean-Marie Londeix (alto saxophone), Jacques Castagner (flute) and Henriette Puig-Roget (piano).

Notes

1. Stars - En marge de ‘The Seven Stars’ Symphony (9-16 August 1934), unpublished. The manuscript (and all other unpublished sources referred to in this paper unless otherwise noted) is now in the possession of M. Yves Koechlin. I am deeply grateful to M. Koechlin, to Messrs. Max Eschig & Cie. of Paris, and to the Bibliothèque Nationale, for allowing me to consult their Koechlin material.
2. Op. 84 No. 2.
   
3. Stars, VI: ‘Les Rôles masculins’, p. 4.
   
4. As Koechlin points out in the piano reduction (Max Eschig & Cie., MS 1192).
5. Op. 46 No. 5, composed 1908-16.
6. Voyages, Op. 222, was a ballet based on the Seven Stars' Symphony and the Interludes de style atonal-sêriel (Op. 214) which Koechlin made for Charles Malherbe of the Opéra-Comique in June 1947. He thought it could equally well be used as a ‘film dansé’, and also compiled cinematographic scenarios for several of his early ballet and orchestral works, notably Nuit de Walpurgis classique, Op. 38, and La Forêt païenne, Op. 45. In the end Voyages was replaced by another ballet, L’Ame heureuse, based on the Préludes, Op. 209, Calme sur la mer, Op. 205 No. 4, and the introduction to Op. 214, which received its première at the Opéra-Comique on 20 February 1948.
7. Stars, VI: ‘Les Rôles masculins’, p. 6.
8. Op. 95, composed 1925-7.
9. Most of the Lilian Harvey films were made in Germany under the auspices of U.F.A. (Alliance Cinématographique Européene), and were generally produced by Erich Pommer, with lyrics by Jean Boyer (or Bernard Zimmer) and music by Werner R. Heymann which proved such a trial to Koechlin. Lilian Harvey only appeared in the French cover version of PRINCESSE À VOS ORDRES, the original German ‘Princess’ was Kate de Nagy.
10. En marge de l’Album de Lilian, 2nd version, p. 2 (see note 11).
11. First version 30 August 1934-1935, 94pp.; second version (révision for possible publication) September-December 1934, rev. 3-10 June 1935, 77pp. Neither version was published.
12. By Wemer R. Heymann.
    
13. En marge de l’Album de Lilian, 1st version, pp. 38-39.
    
14. ‘Charles Koechlin and the Movies’ (interview with Michael Chanan), The Listener, lxxxii (1969), 644.
    
15. ‘Petit roman pour un film de Lilian Harvey’ (1-3 September 1934), and ‘Scénario pour un film’, both unpublished.
16. By kind permission of M. Yves Koechlin.
    
17. The film was to be LET'S LIVE TONIGHT, directed by Victor Schertzinger, 1935.
    
18. En marge de l'Album de Lilian, 1st version, p. 41.
    
19. From notes in Koechlin’s list of his own compositions.
    
20. In the original manuscript (Max Eschig & Cie.), p. 12.
    
21. No. 89, ‘Retour de l’insouciance’, was harmonised on 20-21 November 1938, though its melody was composed on 9 February 1936.
    
22. Letter to his wife Suzanne, ‘partie pour Menton et devant d’aller de voir Lilian au Cap d’Antibes’, 3 April 1936.
    
23. Letter from M. Neuberger, 5 February 1935.
    
24. Koechlin’s reply to Neuberger, 9 February 1935.
25. Humanité, 16 July 1938.
26. The Charlie Chaplin finale of the Seven Stars' Symphony presents a different case. Pictorialism is necessary in this idealised film music, because the music takes on the role of the film itself, the orchestra assumes the function of the screen. Both works, however, are self-sufficient and musically balanced throughout.
27. Part of the Picabia/Satie/Berlin spectacle Relâche of 1924.
28. Le Film sonore: l’écran et la musique en 1935’, La Revue musicale, xv (1934), 321-432.
29. Music Ho!, London, 1934, p. 226.
30. Étude sur Charles Koechlin [par lui-même], pour M. Jean Farger (unpublished), p. 28.

Appendix
Films as the inspiration for Koechlin's music (films in chronological order as seen by Koechlin)