This Day in 1923, Milhaud’s La Création du Monde premiered
In 1922, French composer Darius Milhaud embarked on a series of performance engagements based in New York City. Amidst a whirlwind of solo performances, compositional premieres, and guest conducting throughout Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, Milhaud repeatedly made time to hear live jazz music performances. However, it was Yvonne George, the Belgian vocalist performing on Broadway connected to Milhaud by their mutual author friend Jean Cocteau, who took Milhaud to Harlem to hear jazz performed by black musicians.
As often as he could, Milhaud went to bars, dance halls, and theaters, noting that in “some of their shows, the singers were accompanied by a flute, a clarinet, two trumpets, a trombone, a complicated percussion section played by one man, a piano, and a string quintet.” An alto saxophone replaced the viola in the string quartet, and a string bass was added. The show to which he referred was Maceo Pinkard’s musical comedy Liza, and that instrumentation would be nearly duplicated in the ensemble for La création du monde. His experiences with authentic jazz in New York left Milhaud resolved more than ever to use jazz for a chamber-music work.
Upon returning to France in April of 1923, he immediately began collaborating with the artist Fernand Léger and the author Blaise Cendrars on a new ballet that Rolf de Maré had commissioned for his Ballets Suédois. The Paris art world of the early 1920s was in the grip of Primitivism, and African art and legend provided the perfect font of exoticism from which to sip. Just one year earlier in 1921, Cendrars had published Anthologie Nègre, a collection of African myths, some regarding the creation of the world. Thus, the three artists decided to create a ballet based on these myths. The ballet would premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on October 25, 1923.
La création du monde elaborates an African creation myths of the earth, its plants and animals, and the First Man and First Woman. It features a harmonic language that hybridizes Milhaud’s unique bitonal language with the mixed-mode “blue” notes of American jazz. The predominant voices are the alto saxophone, which both opens and closes the work, and the oboe, which elaborates several blues melodies as the voice of the gods creating new life on earth. The narrative takes the listener from the initial stillness of the voice and the chaos of creation, to the dance of these created beings, and through the cacophonous triumph as the First Man and Woman consummate their love. As the ballet comes to a close, the flutter of flutes and a delicate dissonance in the alto saxophone accompany the Man and Woman as they share a gentle kiss before the curtain falls.
Check out this wonderful 1978 recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Orchestre Nationale de France in Milhaud’s La création du monde.
