25 August 1944, the final day of the Battle for Paris, saw Darius Milhaud in Stanford Hospital in San Francisco, where he was undergoing an experimental three-week penicillin treatment—a “vacation at ‘Penicillin-Beach,’” as he termed it in a letter to Claire Reis.1 On that day, he began writing his autobiography, Notes sans musique.2 He wrote in the preface:
It is August 25, 1944. Paris has just been liberated, foreshadowing the final victory after these four dramatic years, where, in exile, our despair conflicted with the hospitable comfort we found in the United States. After a seven-month illness, I am forced to rest in a San Francisco hospital. I have time to look back upon the half-century I have lived. But this is not a private diary. I will not speak about the painful tragedy that turned my life upside down before finding a happiness of exquisite mellowness in every moment.3 After returning from the hospital, Milhaud wrote to Reis: “We are so full of a mixture of happiness and anxiety with the news of my France. Liberation is also at the price of so many
1 Darius Milhaud to Claire Reis, [September 1944], New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music
Division, League of Composers/ISCM Records, JPB 11-5, Box 6, Folder 66. A military study published later in 1944 indicated that penicillin was likely not an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, though Milhaud did experience temporary relief. Edward W. Boland, Nathan E. Headley, and Philip S. Hench, “The Effect of Penicillin on Rheumatoid Arthritis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 126, no. 13 (25 November 1944): 820–23.
2 It is possible that Milhaud actually began writing on a different day and claimed 25 August for its symbolic
resonance; however, I have found no evidence to support such a conclusion. In the manuscript, the preface (signed “D.M., Stanford Hospital, San Francisco, 25 Août 1944) is drafted on the first two pages of the notebook, and the number of deletions and insertions in the text suggests that it was indeed the first draft. On 27 August, the day before leaving the hospital, Milhaud wrote to the Hoppenots: “Don’t laugh: I have started writing my memoirs!” (“Ne riez pas: j’ai commencé à écrire mes mémoires!”) Darius Milhaud to Henri and Hélène Hoppenot, [27 August] 1944, C- Hoppenot, 278. Therefore, if he did not begin writing on 25 August, it could not have been more than one or two days later.
3 Darius Milhaud, Notes sans musique manuscript, 2, Library of Congress, Music Division, ML95.M459 (case):
“C’est le 25 Août 1944. Paris vient d’être libéré, laissant prévoir la victoire finale après ces quatre années
dramatiques, où en exil, notre désespoir s’accordait mal avec le confort hospitalier trouvé aux Etats Unis. Je suis en repos forcé, après une maladie de sept mois, dans un hôpital de San Francisco. J’ai le temps de regarder le demi- siècle que j’ai vécu. Mais ce n’est pas un journal intime. Je ne parlerai point du drame douloureux qui a bouleversé ma vie avant de trouver un bonheur d’une douceur exquise de tous les instants.” The published version of the preface (MVH, 7) is slightly different and does not include the last two sentences of this excerpt, which are crossed out in the manuscript.
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destructions—and very soon we will hear about so many bad news from relatives and friends that happened during those 4 years of nightmare during the occupations of the Nazis-Germans- Boches-Pigs and Co.”4 Indeed, as he would soon learn, more than twenty members of his and his wife’s extended family were killed in the concentration camps.5 Among them were Eric Allatini (a cousin on Darius’s mother’s side) and his wife, Hélène Kann, who both spent the first two years of the occupation engaged in Resistance activity in Paris. In October 1942, the Gestapo found them in the process of making false identity papers for a group of refugees; after first being sent to separate prisons, they were reunited at the Drancy internment camp north of Paris, where they were held before being sent to Auschwitz.6 Jean Milhaud, the seventeen-year-old son of Madeleine’s older brother Etienne, was arrested in Domfront on the way to his baccalaureate exam and deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in October 1943.7 Etienne, his wife, and their younger son were later arrested as well, but they narrowly escaped deportation and spent the next year in hiding.8 Darius Milhaud’s professional networks were also fractured: Raymond Deiss, one of his primary publishers, was executed in a German prison for using his printing equipment to publish a Resistance newsletter. The Milhauds also learned of other family members who had survived, as Darius recounted to Alexandre Tansman:
Yesterday, we received some news through an American soldier in Aix. He wrote to his brother here that he went to the synagogue for Yom Kippur and that he was invited afterwards to have dinner with a family where everyone spoke English: my mother-in-
4 Darius Milhaud to Claire Reis, [September 1944], New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music
Division, League of Composers/ISCM Records, JPB 11-5, Box 6, Folder 66.
5
MVH, 234.
6 Robert de Mackiels, “Éric et Hélène Allatini,” in Anthologie des écrivains morts à la guerre 1939–1945 (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1960), 7–10.
7 Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, ed. and trans. Howard M. Epstein (New York:
New York University Press, 1996), 1030. Darius and Madeleine knew by April 1944 that Jean Milhaud had been deported; see Darius Milhaud to Hélène Hoppenot, April 1944, C-Hoppenot, 266.
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law, my aunt, my cousins. So we know that they were able to leave their hiding place in the mountains and return to Aix.9
Even after Paris and other regions of France were liberated, the ongoing war made the transmission of news across the Atlantic difficult. The censors were strict, and letters could still take months to reach their destinations, if they arrived at all. For Milhaud and others on the West Coast, the distance from New York and Washington posed an additional barrier. When possible, Milhaud and his friends in Europe sent letters, musical scores, and other material through diplomat friends such as Pierre and Henri Claudel, bypassing the censors and increasing the likelihood that everything would eventually arrive. Through these channels, Milhaud wrote long letters to Francis Poulenc, Paul Collaer, and others, summarizing his activities of the past four years. Collaer, having resumed his radio work in Brussels as soon as that city was liberated in September 1944, invited Milhaud, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartók to record spoken messages that would be aired on Belgian radio during a concert of their works. Hindemith chose not to participate, perhaps feeling that a message from a German would be unwelcome, but the other three composers did. In this way, European listeners had an opportunity to hear Milhaud’s voice three years before his actual return.10 As requested by Collaer, the three composers provided summaries of their compositional activity during the war, with Milhaud’s the longest by far. In
9
Darius Milhaud to Alexandre Tansman, [1944], PSS-DM: “Nous avons eu hier des nouvelles par un soldat américain qui est à Aix. Il a écrit à son frère ici qu’il était allé à la synagogue pour Kippour et qu’il avait été invité après à dîner chez une famille où tout le monde parlait anglais: ma belle mère, ma tante, mes cousins. Nous savons donc qu’ils ont pu quitter leur cachette dans les montagnes et retourner à Aix.” Yom Kippur was on 26–27 September in 1944. Aix-en-Provence was liberated in late August as part of Operation Dragoon.
10 C-Collaer, 49. What Alexander Stalarow terms “the transatlantic travel of sound” also operated in the other
direction through Pierre Schaeffer’s 1945 tour of the United States, in which audiences and individuals across the country heard recorded music, poetry, and radio broadcasts from liberated Paris. Alexander Stalarow, “Franco- American Exchange in Pierre Schaeffer’s Radio Art and Musique concrète” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, Boston, MA, 10 March 2016). On this tour, Schaeffer spent time at Mills College with the Milhauds in May 1945 and played them music by Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Serge Nigg, and Roland-Manuel; an interview with Paul Claudel; François Mauriac reading an article he had written for Le Figaro; poems by Charles Péguy recorded in a church; and other records. Darius Milhaud to Igor Stravinsky, [May 1945], PSS-DM.
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addition, Bartók offered praise for the resilience of the Belgian people, while Stravinsky expressed astonishment that Collaer reached out to him in this way when it was those in exile who hungered for news from Europe.11 In a personal note to Collaer attached to the description of his work in the United States, Milhaud wrote: “Since the liberation of France, I no longer have the feeling of exile. It is something else. It is no longer this incessant mental anguish, but an immense hope, life returning to one’s very being.”12
While the liberation and the end of the war transformed his sense of being in exile, Milhaud knew that he would have to wait before returning to France. After being severely ill for most of 1944—which forced him to skip his yearly visit to New York—he did not know if he would ever regain the ability to walk. In post-occupation Paris, food and fuel were scarce, and as he would have been physically unable to use the overcrowded Métro, the family would need both a car and sufficient fuel. Writing to Tansman, who was planning his own return to Paris, Milhaud described the situation and said: “All of that is impossible for me. And that upsets me, because I was offered the composition class at the Conservatoire and had to refuse. And that is the one thing in the world I would most have loved to do.”13 Claude Delvincourt, the director of the Conservatoire, had written to Milhaud in 1945 to ask him to succeed Henri Büsseras professor of composition.14 Büsser, who had to step down as director of the Opéra-Comique when he was mistakenly listed in the first edition of the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, had written an article
11 Béla Bartók to Paul Collaer, 24 October 1944, and Igor Stravinsky to Paul Collaer, 14 November 1944, C-Collaer,
373–76.
12 Darius Milhaud to Paul Collaer, November 1944, C-Collaer, 378: “Depuis que la France est délivrée je n’ai plus
le sentiment de l’exil. C’est autre chose. Ce n’est plus cette souffrance morale de toutes les minutes, c’est un vaste espoir, la vie qui revient dans l’essence même de l’être.”
13 Darius Milhaud to Alexandre Tansman, [1945], PSS-DM: “Tout cela est impossible pour moi. Et cela me navre
car on m’a proposé la classe de composition au Conservatoire et j’ai dû refuser. Et c’est la chose au monde que j’aurais aimé faire.”
14
See MVH, 243; Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 159–60. The letter from Delvincourt to Milhaud does not survive.
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in October 1940 for La Gerbe, an aggressively collaborationist newspaper, in which he referred to Les Six as the “Cinq jeunes”; Yannick Simon writes that he did so “certainly with the
ambition of crossing off Darius Milhaud’s name from the French musical landscape.”15
Further complicating the Milhauds’ plans to return was the knowledge that their homes in both Paris and Aix-en-Provence had been looted by the Nazis. Herbert Gerigk, co-author of the Lexikon and head of the Sonderstab Musik—the music division of the Nazi task force in charge of confiscating cultural property in occupied regions—targeted their Paris apartment in the first months of the occupation.16 Gerigk and his associates first entered the apartment at 10 Boulevard de Clichy in the fall of 1940, and on 2 November, he produced the following report:
The Jew Darius Milhaud is regarded today as the most notable contemporary French composer, and he is also claimed by world Jewry as a representative of Jewish cultural activity. At the beginning of 1940, the Paris Grand Opera even gave the world premiere of a new work by Milhaud in a festive atmosphere.
The search of his apartment and the seizure of materials important to us were essential for ideological and professional reasons. Milhaud has fled; the building manager could not confirm residence, so his possessions were deemed unclaimed Jewish property. We found a very carefully arranged collection of exotic records from all over the world. This collection was taken away for the Hohe Schule. Furthermore, a large number of Milhaud’s manuscripts were seized, and Jewish literature, Jewish and atonal music, and numerous collections of folk songs from around the world were taken from his private library. Correspondence was almost nonexistent.
The apartment was in a very neglected state, and we found out from the building manager that Milhaud had resided mainly at a country estate in the unoccupied zone, where the correspondence with German individuals that we consider so important can probably be found.17
15 Yannick Simon, Composer sous Vichy (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009), 35–36: “dans un article intitulé ‘L’avenir de la
jeune musique’ et publié dans le quotidien collaborationniste La Gerbe, Henri Busser rebaptise le groupe des Six ‘groupement des Cinq jeunes’ certainement avec l’ambition de rayer le nom de Darius Milhaud du paysage musical français.”. From other letters, it seems that Milhaud disliked Büsser for being too conservative musically, but it is unclear whether he was aware of the older composer’s collaborationist writings.
16 See Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under
the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).
17 Herbert Gerigk, 2 November 1940, http://www.ebay.fr/itm/Dokument-SONDESTAB-MUSIK-Plunderung-von-
judisches-Besitztum-Darius-Milhaud-1940-/111233331841?pt=Militaria&hash=item19e605f281 (accessed 9 December 2013): “Der Jude Darius Milhaud gilt heute als der namhafteste zeitgenössische französische Komponist, und er wird gleichzeitig vom Weltjudentum als ein Repräsentant jüdischen Kulturschaffens in Anspruch genommen. Die Pariser grosse Oper brachte noch Anfang 1940 die Uraufführung eines neuen Werkes von Milhaud in festlichem Rahmen heraus. Die Durchsuchung seiner Wohnung und die Sicherstellung des für uns wichtigen Materials war aus
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The Milhauds were notified of the raid by Henri Sauguet, who informed them that Gerigk had been accompanied to the apartment by Jacques Benoist-Méchin, a high-ranking Vichy official who—before his turn to fascism in the 1930s—had once been friends with Milhaud as part of the circle of young composers around Erik Satie. Sauguet also reported that the Nazis had left a copy of the score of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde on the piano.18
In October 1944, the conductor Roger Désormière wrote Milhaud a letter—spread across two densely-filled postcards stamped “Examined by U.S. Censorship”—detailing what had happened to the apartment. In addition to the Nazi break-in of 1940, there were two burglaries in 1942 and 1943; then, in early 1944, “the Germans requisitioned the apartment, then completely emptied it.”19 Before that, however, Désormière organized a group of Milhaud’s friends to take away and store as much as they could without attracting attention or causing trouble for the building’s manager. Honegger and Sauguet held Milhaud’s papers and music, while
Désormière—who also paid the rent for the apartment throughout the occupation—stored the piano.20 Additionally, a number of Milhaud’s manuscripts were already with his brother-in-law in Domfront, where he had sent them before leaving France.
weltanschaulichen und fachlichen Gründen unbedingt erforderlich. Milhaud ist geflüchtet; ein Aufenthalt konnte vom Hausverwalter nicht angegeben werden, und sein Besitz war demnach als herrenloses jüdisches Gut anzusehen. Wir fanden eine besonders sorgfältig angelegte Sammlung exotischer Schallplatten als allen Teilen der Erde vor. Diese Sammlung wurde für die Hohe Schule abtransportiert. Ferner wurden zahlreiche Manuskripte Milhauds beschlagnahmt und aus seiner Privatbibliothek das jüdische Schrifttum, jüdische und atonale Musik, sowie zahlreiche Volksliedersammlungen aus aller Welt entnommen. Korrespondenz war fast gar nicht vorhanden. Die Wohnung befand sich in einem sehr verkommenen Zustand, und vom Hausmeister erfuhren wir, dass Milhaud sich in der Hauptsache auf einem Landsitz im unbesetzten Gebiet aufgehalten hat, wo wahrscheinlich auch die für uns besonders wichtigen Briefwechsel mit deutschen Persönlichkeiten zu finden sein werden.” The typed document bears Gerigk’s signature.
18 The letter from Sauguet does not survive, but Hélène Hoppenot described it in a diary entry of 16 August 1943, C-
Hoppenot, 244. Other sources identify the object left on the piano as the score of Parsifal—Armand Lunel, Mon ami Darius Milhaud, ed. Georges Jessula (Paris: Edisud, 1992), 96—or a portrait of Wagner (CWMM, 71).
19
Roger Désormière to Darius Milhaud, 23 October 1944, PSS-DM: “Au début de 44, les allemands ont réquisitionné l’ap. puis ils l’ont entièrement vidé.”
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Désormière and his friends took these actions during the occupation with the conviction that Darius and Madeleine Milhaud would someday return to a liberated Paris, and indeed, the couple never seriously considered remaining in the United States permanently if going back would become an option. The decision to return—which rested on the hope that there was something worthwhile to return to—aligned the Milhauds with larger trends in postwar
remigration. Whereas many German Jewish exiles saw Germany as permanently compromised and did not view remigration as a viable prospect, most of their French counterparts had sustained a belief in a true France that would re-emerge after the shadow of occupation had lifted.21 The Milhauds, who spent the war years working to promote and celebrate French culture in the United States, certainly shared this belief, and the letters Darius Milhaud received from his friends in France after the liberation repeatedly called on him to aid in rebuilding the musical life of his homeland.
Milhaud knew, however, that remigration carried personal and professional risks, and he had also developed important connections in the United States. The Mills College campus was significantly more wheelchair-accessible than Paris, and the college had served as an
indispensable support network in a time of crisis. There was no guarantee that he would be fully welcome in his former artistic circles; his wartime faith in the heroism of French musicians clashed with the reality that a number of his friends and associates had made compromises with