The return of luck of a forgotten composer.

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In a photographic portrait, Elsa Barraine (1910-1999), sitting at the piano, resembles the young Greta Garbo outside the studio: an almost androgynous face, short hair, serious and determined features that seem to reflect the strong theme that was the composer, who won several prizes at the Conservatoire and the first Grand Prix de Rome when she was still a minor. Before her, in 1929, only Lili Boulanger (1913), Marguerite Canal (1920) and Jeanne Leleu (1923) had conquered this Grail.

From an early age he became politically involved on the left, writing in 1933, Pogromswhich denounced the anti-Semitic acts of the Nazis who had just come to power in Germany. Firmly linked to music accessible to the people, in 1937 she joined the Popular Music Federation and the following year she joined the Communist Party.

Escape from the Gestapo

Elsa Barraine joined the Resistance and was very active in the National Front of Musicians, although she lost her job because she was Jewish by her father, himself excluded in 1941 from the Opera Orchestra where he was the cello soloist. She escaped two arrests by the Gestapo. Symphony No. 2Composed in 1938, it was successfully performed after the war, especially in London, by the conductor Manuel Rosenthal, who was close to the composer. The piece was broadcast in France on several occasions, conducted by Rosenthal or, in particular, by André Cluytens (online on YouTube).

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century^my century, Elsa Barraine’s music, essentially anchored in tonality, seems less avant-garde. Distanced from communist circles after her withdrawal from the Party in 1949, Barraine probably also suffered from not having taken the train of institutional modernity.

But, thanks to feminist demands movements, these institutions began, almost at the same time, to take an interest in female conductors – who now occupy leading positions and conduct Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival, such as the French Nathalie Stutzmann – and in the often unjustly forgotten composers.

Inevitably, this movement of positive discrimination towards the latter will focus on those musicians whose oblivion will not always mean, by any means, that they have been neglected because they are women. But then it will be enough to remember the colossal number of mediocre and forgotten composers who were given priority because they were men.

In 2022, the “label of female composers” La Boîte à pépites, founded that year, revealed powerful scores signed by a name still unknown in the histories and memories of French music, thanks to a box of records dedicated to Charlotte Sohy (1887 -1955). It is not enough to alter the image of French music of the 20th century.^my century, but good, even very good music.

Very beautiful funeral march.

In this spirit, Cristian Macelaru, musical director of the Orchestre National de France, had the good idea of ​​including in his program – which is also very “plan-plan”: Violin Concertoby Brahms, and Photosby Debussy − the short and dense Symphony No. 2 By Elsa Barraine. It is also a way of saluting the work carried out by the latter in national broadcasting, where she was a choir coach, a singing director and even a sound engineer, before becoming a teacher of deciphering and then analysis at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris and ending her career as an inspector of opera houses.

This symphony has the subtitle “Voïna” (“war” in Russian), which explains the dull anguish that peeks through its solid structure. Is it an absolute, revelatory masterpiece? No. His music seems to have taken root in Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger, Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev (Barraine’s “red” fibre was also revealed in his musical tastes).

But it is well done, of course, with a flow of themes that is both erudite and free, and a very beautiful central funeral march, very well played by the Orchestre National de France (magnificent flutes and oboes!) and its conductor. We look forward to further work on the catalogue of this composer who deserves serious reconsideration.