Igor Markevitch (1912-1983)
Complete Orchestral Music, Vol. 7: J. S. Bach: The Musical
Offering
Dear M. Markevitch:
Please
permit a colleague who does not have the honour of knowing you to thank you for
your marvelous ‘Icare’. It required some time for me to study and understand
all the beauty of your score, and I think it will take many years for full
appreciation to come. I want to tell you it is my conviction that the day will
arrive when serious attention will be given to all you produce. You are the
most striking personality in contemporary music, and I rejoice in profiting by
your influence. With my respectful admiration,
Béla
Bartók.
Apart from one work preserved on 78rpm discs, and a handful
of radio broadcasts, the present series of recordings is the first ever made of
the arrestingly original orchestral music of a composer hailed in the 1930s as
one of the singular voices of his time, yet subsequently ignored - not least by
himself. Thus, these discs may offer the beginnings of an opportunity to
decipher the mystery that is Igor Markevitch. The sole precedent of Rossini,
who retired from opera at 38 to interest himself in cuisine, but continued to
write salon music and sacred works, seems hardly comparable. Markevitch’s
renunciation at 29 of his identity as a composer is a unique case in the
history of music. To quote David Drew: “It is a silence like no other in the
music of this century or before.”
At first glance, the eclipse during his lifetime of
Markevitch’s reputation as a composer appears due, more than any other single
factor, to the dimensions of his success as a conductor. What has yet to be fully
explained, however, is why his life divides so dramatically and
uncompromisingly into two halves - clearly a conscious decision on his part,
and one whose true reasons this intensely private man seems to have sought to
keep hidden. Markevitch’s last original composition was written in 1941 at the
age of 29, and he never again returned to the creative endeavours that had
brought him such renown and adulation when barely in his twenties. The trauma
of the Second World War marks a sharp dividing line during which the composer
appears to have undergone a mental, as well as physical crisis – for in 1942
Markevitch suffered a serious illness while living in Tuscany, and in a letter
of the same year written during his recuperation declared that he sensed himself
“dead between two lives”. But this alone cannot fully explain the reasons for
his abandoning composition; and his autobiography Être et avoir été, published
in 1980, obfuscates and misleads even as it makes a show of revealing the
writer’s inner life.
Markevitch is in no sense a “conductor-composer”, as were
Furtwängler, Klemperer, Weingartner and many others between the wars. On the
contrary, he emerged first as a phenomenally gifted adolescent composer exalted
by his contemporaries on the basis of an astoundingly assured series of early
scores, turning to conducting almost reluctantly when required by his own work.
Yet, after changing course to this new career exclusively as conductor at
thirty, he all but denied the existence of his own music until nearly seventy
years old. When questioned in 1958 about his early life as a composer, he
diffidently replied:
I would say to you, very frankly, that I am objective enough
to claim that there is music which needs to be heard before mine, and for which
the need is more urgent. Apart from that, if my works are good enough, they can
wait; and if they cannot wait, it is pointless to play them.
The facts of his ‘first life’ are remarkable enough. Born in
Kiev on 27th July, 1912, his family moved to Paris in 1914, before settling in
Switzerland. As early as the age of thirteen he played his piano suite Noces to
Alfred Cortot, who recommended the work to his publishers and invited the boy
to study with him. In January 1929, before his seventeenth birthday, he enraptured
Dyagilev with his Sinfonietta in F, leading in a matter of months to the young
composer completing and playing his new Piano Concerto at Covent Garden (in
concert form between L’après-midi d’un faune and Renard, at what the
influential social columns of London’s Sketch referred to as a “rehearsal
party” for a select group of intelligentsia including, apparently, Virginia
Woolf). Soon after, he began work on a major ballet score, L’habit du roi (The
Emperor’s New Clothes), to be choreographed by Lifar with décor by Picasso. In
short, he was at seventeen launched by Dyagilev on a path that brought
worldwide fame as a composer by the time he was twenty.
“I was his last discovery” were Markevitch’s words in a
revealing 1972 interview with John Gruen; and indeed, the manner in which
Dyagilev, “the greatest agent-provocateur that ever existed”, took him up must
at least in part have been a journey into nostalgia for the impresario.
Markevitch could hardly have entered more fully into the world of the Ballets-Russes,
as he went on to marry Nijinsky’s daughter Kyra, though this marriage soon
degenerated. So much so that during their wartime life in Italy, Bernard
Berenson rather amusingly related that Igor and Kyra used to visit him
alternately, since “when they were together their artistic temperaments tended
to explode”. They were estranged four years into this nine-year marriage, and
Markevitch soon married again, though not before he and Kyra had had a son,
Vaslav (nicknamed “Funtyki”), named in honour of his grandfather.
The music of this extraordinary young man betrays no hint of
immaturity: both in style and technique it is complete, utterly assured and
deeply original. His Cantata of 1930, written on a text of Cocteau (and
including music rescued from the sketches for L’habit du roi), brought forth
the comment from Henri Sauguet “. . . it bears witness to a very fine mastery,
and to a marvelous balance of intelligence and esprit.” This eighteen-year old,
indeed, was hailed throughout Europe as perhaps the brightest hope in the
musical firmament of that time. Only three years later Darius Milhaud wrote of
the première of L’envol d’Icare: “this work …will probably mark a date in the
evolution of music” – a clear allusion to the ‘éclatant’ première of Le Sacre
du printemps twenty years before.
Was this adulation more than the young composer could bear?
Had Dyagilev put pressure on him, conscious or unconscious, to be the new
Stravinsky, exactly thirty years on? His autobiography reveals a sense that the
overnight glory which assailed him as Dyagilev’s protégé caused such a break
with the normal rhythms of adolescence that he felt a stranger had been born
within, an alien persona that guided him beyond any of his desires. It is
undoubtedly more than coincidental that at nineteen Markevitch should have
turned to the Icarus myth for his first truly individual work, L’envol d’Icare,
a score which he continued to re-work in various forms for more than a decade.
Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell to earth, embodies a vivid image
of the fate of the young composer, swept along by the frenetic Paris of the
1930s. Indeed, the most striking passage of Icare is the lengthy, hypnotic,
ecstatic-obsessive “Death” that concludes the work, occupying nearly one-third
of its duration.
The series of large-scale works that followed over the
following brief eight years is a succession of masterpieces in constantly
changing languages. Rébus and Le nouvel âge both embody a Prokofiev-like
grittiness married to that motoric ‘moto perpetuo’ quality that so typifies the
music of Albert Roussel, but in a more pointed harmonic framework, and
continuing the exploration of multiple simultaneous polyrhythms that are
Markevitch’s trademark. The all-too-brief Cantique d’amour is a ravishing
Ravelian essay in evocative colour, yet curiously emotionally detached. Psaume
and the cantata-symphony Lorenzo Il Magnifico are massive and bold. The early
works Sinfonietta, Concerto Grosso and Partita are memorable for far more than
merely their youthful assurance of execution; their harmonic language explores
beyond the conventional, and their polytonal and rhythmic ideas are searchingly
original.
L’envol d’Icare remains the singular work among these
masterpieces, whether for its ascetic, pointillistic scoring; its visionary use
of quarter-tone tuning, harmonically so precisely calculated; its brilliant
exploitation of complex rhythmic simultaneities; or the sheer unique
sound-world that it evokes from the orchestra. Above all, for the poise and emotional
charge of its hypnotic “Death”.
The achievement of Igor Markevitch bridges important gaps in
our understanding of the period between the wars. His language is aggressively
individual. Not neo-classical, it has classical restraint and a poise that is
almost frigidly disciplined. In an æsthetic distant from the transmuted
romanticism that propels the music of Berg and Schoenberg, he initiated an
exploration of dissonance (through polytonality) that the perspective of the
twenty-first century can readily identify as a fertile harmonic path.
Dissatisfied with what he seems to have perceived as the indulgent prettiness
of impressionism, he sought a purity and detachment of style which were rare in
this interbellum period of excess.
Igor Markevitch has so recently begun to emerge from the
shadows in his “first incarnation” as a composer that an outline of the major
events of this early phase of his life will be illuminating; not least, because
it shows him in constant, intimate contact with innumerable other, and hitherto
better-known major figures of the century.