La Musique et la Politique

Amidst the happy tohu-bohu of the liberated Parisians, French musical culture began to be heard from. Most of the musicians, French and foreign, who had made Paris a prewar center of musical fashion had escaped into exile. Among those still in the U.S. were Composers Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martinu, Conductor Pierre Monteux, Pianist Robert Casadesus, Piano Teacher Isidor Philipp.

Well ahead of the Nazi evacuation, Paris' wartime musical Fuehrer, a thin, rather Goebbels-like German composer named Werner Egk, had packed his trunks and left in a hurry. Last week Egk's few Parisian friends were in the doghouse.

Chief among these in world prestige was probably the brilliant 66-year-old pianist Alfred Cortot. He had a bad record. An outspoken advocate of Vichy, he had been named State Director of Music under Petain, had played widely in Germany. Last week Cortot was released from F.F.I, custody because of age, failing health, and a record of occasional efforts to keep young French musicians from service in Hitler's labor battalions.

Still in jail was Lorraine-born Composer Florent Schmitt, whose symphonic and chamber music scores were among the most massive if not the most remarkable produced in prewar France. Schmitt had an enthusiastic collaborationist record.

Spectacular Serge. By far the most spectacular collaborationist in Parisian musical circles was the famed Russian ballet dancer, Serge Lifar, whom some critics regard as the inheritor of the pink tights of the great Vaslav Nijinsky. Lifar had not only spent the days of German occupation as the toast of the Wehrmacht's more sybaritic officer set; he crowed publicly over each new feat of German arms. Up to last week, the F.F.I, had been unable to find Serge Lifar. He was in hiding, periodically telephoning his friends.

Composer Francis Poulenc, whose frothy, nose-thumbing ballet and cinema music had been the rage of the prewar Left Bank, was last week the most popular musician in Paris. His latest ballet score, Les Animaux Modeles (commissioned by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), had been prevented from delivery by the German occupation. But when the German authorities offered to produce it at the Paris Opera, Poulenc refused coldly, maintained an unimpeachable record of resistance.

War had utterly failed to deflect-French Jazz Pundit Hugues Panassie from listening to innumerable U.S. phonograph records. Paris kept up its hot concerts. When the German authorities, sensing sedition, looked in, they found the St. Louis Blues had become La Tristesse de St. Louis. The said St. Louis, the Germans were told, was of course none other than Louis XIV.

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