Manuel Rosenthal on Satie, Ravel, Poulenc, Vol. 1

One of the more influential books I've ever read and reread is a tiny pocket edition, the size of one of those free New Testament Bibles missionaries used to give out, which I picked up at the register at Skylight Books in L.A. a quarter century ago. It was the product of Hanuman Books, a short-lived experiment in quasi-samizdat micro-publishing that was in fact modeled on small Indian prayer books; they featured monographs, poems, and other ephemera by an eclectic mix of artists, from Ginsberg and John Ashbery to Bob Flanagan and Jack Smith, from Hockney and De Kooning to Robert Frank and Jean Genet. (One volume I wish I'd picked up: Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan.)

The one I found and cherished was simply titled Satie, Ravel, Poulenc, and it was credited to Manuel Rosenthal, a conductor whose version of Satie's Parade I had on LP. As these were three of my favorite composers, I eagerly snapped it up and read it in one sitting. I'm not quite sure how the book was made—it has the feel of an as-told-to interview, and since the cover photo of Rosenthal and his wife is credited to Hanuman editor Raymond Foye, it seems as likely as not that he did the interviewing too. Rosenthal, who studied with Ravel, knew Poulenc well, and saw but never met Satie, provides a clear, fascinating window into the music of fin-de-siecle France, the cradle of so much of the music I love, and he recounts scenes as vivid as any I've read: the time he dared diss Puccini in front of his teacher Ravel, who sat down and played the entire score of Tosca from memory, pausing to illustrate its brilliance; the time Milhaud, after Satie's death, discovered a closet full of paper collars and unwrapped black umbrellas, accoutrements by which the impoverished Satie had striven always to appear clean and neat despite owning few clothes; the portrait of Poulenc bobbing around Paris cafés, rubbing elbows with painters and playwrights et al.

Over the years I have wanted to cite so many of this little volume's insights, not only into composers I happen to love but into music and culture writ large. I recently had the thought: The book is out of print, and it's not that long, and I have some time on my hands. I reached out to Raymond Foye to ask if he was okay if I serialized it on this blog. He replied by quoting Negativland ("Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value") and saying, "Fine with me..."

So here goes. I'll roll this out over the coming week or so. I think you'll like it.

SATIE, RAVEL, POULENC

Manuel Rosenthal

Hanuman Books, 1987

PREFACE
by Virgil Thomson

Maurice Ravel accepted very few pupils and he never called them that. He merely “took them on,” usually at his own suggestion. There seems to have been little or no mention of money, but the discipline undergone was long and harsh. One of these pupils was the American Laurel Anderson, until retirement a teacher of musical composition at the University of Kansas. Among the French were the late Roland-Manuel, a composer, a writer on music, and professor of Musical Aesthetics at the Conservatoire. Also Manuel Rosenthal, who is not only a remarkable conductor and formerly professor of that art at the Conservatoire, but also a composer of operatic and orchestral scores unmatched for their picturesque instrumentation. Are there are other direct disciples of Ravel? If so, I don’t know who they are.

Virgil Thomson

When Rosenthal conducts Ravel, or anyone else indeed, he conducts with a composer’s authority, from inside the work, as if he were its author and knew how it ought to sound. His story here told of rehearsing over and over with the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House the opening chords of Satie’s ballet Parade reveals the urgency of his need to make the brass sound instantly alert and eager, instantly French. It is not that other conductors do not similarly insist when setting the tone of a work. Both Toscanini and Stokowski could be no less demanding. But their efforts, if I may be allowed distinction, were rather toward producing an “effect” than toward establishing a “temper,” a feeling about the work on the part of the players that would them into the groove right off.

When speaking about music Manuel also speaks with a composer’s authority, from the inside. Historians, analyzers, reviewers, unless they have also written music, seem to imagine that any composer’s aim is to interest an audience, meaning them. This is not true. No matter how much an author may off-duty yearn for successes, for being loved, he cannot afford to think that way while working. At such a time he must keep his mind on what he is writing about. Anything else, save naturally the imagination, the human understanding that may help him toward clarity, gives a divided mind that can so easily kill the foetus. Only another composer can speak about music as if he had created it himself or, at the very least, been present at its birth. This is how he helps us best to understand music that has been written in a place where he actually was, or might have been, at somewhere near the time it came to exist.

I am not saying that only composers can perform music right or that only the music of one’s own time, or near it, can be understood. But I do believe that the practice of composition and proximity to the ambience of any created work are the high avenues to comprehension. Even the faraway past is best approached through the present, and on the spot, in situ.

That is why Manuel Rosenthal, as composer, conductor, Parisian, is more revealing on the subject of modern French composers, especially those who were his friends, models, teachers, neighbors, than many a musicologist working mainly out of a library. He has touched them, been with them, felt with them, played games with them, fought in the same wars, roared with laughter at the same jokes, sat for hours with them at a café, eaten the same foods and drunk wines with them.

The musical value of this volume lies in the closeness of its author to his subjects. It is intimate, warm, jolly, neighborly, the inside observations of someone who was there when Satie, Ravel, and Poulenc were at work and at play, working at their play, and sometimes, to our delight, at play in the secret insides of their work. The joy of that is a part of the pride they all felt in being French and that Rosenthal knows by also being French, as well as by being one of them.


Next installment: Rosenthal talks about what sets French music apart, and what Satie brought to the table.