Home | Archive | Winter 2001 | In memoriam

Jeanne Loriod 1928–2001

On 20 April 1928 Dimitrios Levidis’s Poème symphonique was premiered at the Paris Opéra, The soloist was Maurice Martenot, performing for the first time in public on an electronic device of his own invention. The composer has all but been forgotten, but the ondes martenot continues to startle and seduce listeners with its feverish swoopings and shimmerings, thanks largely to the tireless promotion of its leading exponent, Jeanne Loriod.

Although Martenot was himself a skilled ondist, it was Loriod, born only three months after that historic concert, who was to unlock the instrument’s full expressive range. Under her fingers, whether applied to the seven-octave keyboard or the touch-sensitive wire which made possible all manner of heady glissandos, a potentially impersonal resource became a conduit for some of twentieth-century music’s most haunting and unforgettable sounds, given perhaps their widest publicity in two minor classics of the silver screen, Lawrence of Arabia and Mad Max, both with scores by a fellow ondist, Maurice Jarre.

Equally if not more important than her film work in promoting the instrument, at least in the minds of concert-goers, was Loriod’s brother-in-law Olivier Messiaen, whose Turangalîla symphony (1946—48) features a prominent concertante part, written for Martinot’s sister Ginette, but popularised by Loriod. She went on to record the work no less than six times, the first for Véga in 1950 under the direction of Maurice Le Roux, the last for DG in 1988 with the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Paris under Myung-Whun Chung.

Messiaen enhanced her repertoire with two further masterworks: the earlier Trois petites liturgies de la Présence divine (1943—44), in which the instrument provides an alluring patina to women’s voices, piano, strings and percussion; and his compositional summa, Saint François d’Assise (1975—83), where the ondes features in three of the nearly four-hour work’s eight tableaux.

But Messiaen was not the only leading composer to find inspiration in the sons nouveaux. Older maîtres such as Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Edgar Varèse, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt, André Jolivet and Jacques Ibert had all contributed pieces to the repertoire, and Loriod was quick to take them up. At her behest, these were gradually augmented by works from a younger generation of composers, mainly French and often composition pupils of her brother-in-law. At the time of her death she had performed in over five hundred works, fourteen of them concertos.

Jeanne Loriod was born four years after her pianist sister — and future Madame Messiaen — Yvonne. After lessons with a certain Madame Sivade, she enrolled, as had her elder sibling before her, in the piano class of Lazare Lévy at the Paris Conservatoire, where she soon became intrigued by the new instrument. Before long she was studying with its inventor, whose class there had only just been inaugurated. She was duly awarded a première médaille and joined the quartet founded by Ginette Martenot.

After her official debut concert, with the Academia Santa Cecila of Rome, her career as an ondiste was assured. Wherever Turangalîla was playing, Loriod, often with her sister taking the virtuoso piano part, was to be found, handbag at her side. She performed all over Europe, in North and South America, Russia, Africa, Australasia and the Far East, with most of the world-class orchestras, under the direction of many of the great post-war conductors, including Boulez, Ozawa, Previn, Cluytens, Munch and Mehta.

At the same time, she continued to participate in chamber music, and founded a sextet in 1974, initially to revive Messiaen’s first ondes piece, La Fête des belles eaux, of 1937. She also threw herself into teaching, firstly at the Conservatoire in the Saint-Maur region, and then in the three major Parisian music colleges, the École Normale de Musique, the Schola Cantorum and the Conservatoire, where in 1970 she succeeded Maurice Martenot himself. Her three-volume magnum opus, Technique de l’onde electronique type martenot, was published by Leduc in 1987 and immediately became the standard text.

Shortly before her sudden death from a stroke, she had hoped to perform with the British pop group Radiohead. Sadly, a new era in the history of the twentieth century’s weirdest classical instrument was not to commence.

Jeanne Loriod: born 13 July 1928, Houilles; died 3 August 2001, Juan-les-Pins.