Group identities: La Spirale and La Jeune France

Nigel Simeone chronicles the activities of two prominent new music societies in inter-war Paris

Front cover of the Guide du Concert, 6 December 1935, announcing the inaugural concert of La Spirale

The mid-1930s in Paris saw the emergence of two closely-related groups with a membership which overlapped: La Spirale and La Jeune France. La Spirale gave its first concert in December 1935 and its last in May 1937, while La Jeune France was inaugurated in June 1936 and continued its collective activity until the mid-1940s. In both cases, concert-giving was accompanied by declarations of artistic intent: in 1935—36, three manifestos were published within six months of each other. La Spirale proclaimed its position on the front of the programme for its concert in December 1935; Olivier Messiaen — a member of both groups — issued a slip of paper explaining his musical and theological tendencies in February 1936; and in June 1936 the manifesto of La Jeune France, written by Yves Baudrier, was published in the programme for its first concert.

La Spirale was founded in 1935 under the leadership of Georges Migot; its other committee members were Paul Le Flem, his pupil André Jolivet, Edouard Sciortino, Claire Delbos, her husband Olivier Messiaen, Daniel-Lesur and Jules Le Febvre. The common link between almost all of these musicians was their connection with the Schola Cantorum; several of them held teaching positions there after the Schola’s radical reorganisation in December 1934, with Nestor Lejeune as the new director. The president of La Spirale, Georges Migot (1891—1976), is now rather a forgotten name and he merits a few words of introduction. Like Milhaud, he was a composition pupil of Widor at the Paris Conservatoire and, like Messiaen, he studied the history of music with Maurice Emmanuel. Migot was a man of extraordinary versatility: after being badly wounded in World War I, he exhibited his paintings at two of the leading Parisian galleries of the time: those of Georges Petit and Marcel Bernheim. Deeply religious, and gifted not only as a musician but also as an artist and writer, his compositions are virtually unperformed today; as well as smaller forms, Migot wrote a series of oratorios on the life of Christ, and his Premier Livre d’Orgue was praised by Messiaen in a 1938 review. Other members of the committee already knew each other well: Messiaen and Delbos were married in 1932, and Daniel-Lesur and Messiaen had been friends since childhood (they met at the Conservatoire).

The extremely original and independent-minded Messiaen had already shown himself to be a rather unexpected enthusiast for joining groups: in December 1932 he wrote to his friend Claude Arrieu about a letter from another musician, Jacques Porte, outlining plans for a new society to be called Les Jeunes Musiciens Français. Messiaen agreed to become its vice-president, but nothing seems to have come of the project. Six months later, in June 1933, he had a frustrating meeting with Roger Désormière on behalf of the composers he described to Arrieu as ‘les quatre’, all of them Dukas pupils: Elsa Barraine, the recently-deceased Jean Cartan, Arrieu and Messiaen himself; during the early 1930s Messiaen and Arrieu organised concerts featuring all four composers.

Messiaen first met Jolivet in 1934: he had read Jolivet’s String Quartet in his capacity as a member of the selection committee for the Société Nationale, and wrote an enthusiastic note to its composer: ‘Monsieur, you write the music I would like to write. Can we meet?’ Hilda Jolivet — in a characteristically acerbic account — described the occasion when the Jolivets and the Messiaens first met for an evening together, at the Messiaens’ apartment in the rue des Plantes: ‘We had heard about the white wedding of these two ethereal beings, so I was astonished when my hostess started to confide in me about her difficulties with pregnancy, and her regret at not having children. The conversation between our two husbands must have been more enthralling, because it went on, and on…’ Jolivet was three years older than Messiaen and Daniel-Lesur, and he introduced his younger colleagues to new music from the rest of Europe: ‘Thanks to Paul Le Flem and Varèse, Jolivet was familiar with the Second Viennese School, Bartók, etc., and he guided his friends. These young musicians often met at our house to look at every work possible, especially the most recent.’