Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse, a naturalized American composer from France, was born in Paris on December 22, 1883. At various times, he would use Edgar or Edgard as his first name. The son of an Italian engineer and a Burgundian mother, he spent his early years living with his grandparents in Villars, Burgundy. His grandfather, Claude Cortot, was also the grandfather of his first cousin, pianist Alfred Cortot. When he was nine, he was reunited with his parents, who moved to Turin the following year. It was there that his musical adventure began, with the director of the conservatory, Giovanni Bolzoni, who taught him composition. Three years later, he produced a lost opera, Martin Pas. At his father's insistence, he entered the École polytechnique and completed his studies, but the conflict between them led to his departure for Paris to devote himself to music. In 1904, he studied at the Schola Cantorum with Albert Roussel, Charles Bordes and Vincent d'Indy, then at the Paris Conservatoire with Charles-Marie Widor until 1907. He composed the orchestral works Prélude à la fin d'un jour and Rhapsodie romane, then founded a choral ensemble at the Université Populaire. In 1907, he married actress Suzanne Bing, and the pair moved to Berlin, where, on Romain Rolland's recommendation, Varèse met Richard Strauss, who took an interest in his works and had the symphonic poem Bourgogne performed. He found further support in Ferruccio Busoni and Claude Debussy. In 1913, three years after the birth of their daughter Claude, the couple separated and the composer returned to Paris. He composed the symphonic poem Gargantua and the opera Œdipe et le Sphinx to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but both works remained unfinished. Called up to serve in the army at the start of the First World War, he was demobilized due to lung disease, and on December 29, 1915, Varèse decided to leave for the United States. It took him several years to make a name for himself, and he had to accept various jobs before receiving financial support from Gertrude Vanderbilt. In 1917, he conducted Berlioz's Requiem in New York, and two years later founded the New Symphony Orchestra. In 1921, he completed Amériques, a dissonant symphonic piece with percussion and sirens, which was not premiered until five years later by Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Varèse founded the International Composers' Guild with Carlos Salzedo, who in March 1922 conducted the premiere ofOffrandes, for soprano Nina Koshetz and a chamber orchestra. The organization, active until 1927, aimed to promote contemporary works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berg, and had as its manifesto: "Today's composers refuse to die". In 1922, he also met Louise Norton, whom he later married and became a translator of French poetry. On March 4, 1923, the four-minute Hyperprism for wind instruments and percussion caused a scandal. As with each of his works, the title refers to a science, be it mathematical, physical, chemical or other. Octandre, a piece for eight solo instruments premiered in January 1924, is no exception, evoking botany. This was followed in 1925 by Intégrales, with its unusual instrumentation including gong, tam-tam, whip, bells, chains and drums. In 1926, Varèse founded the Pan American Society, dedicated specifically to the promotion of American music. The last piece of this period, the alchemical Arcana (1927), preceded his return to Paris from 1928 to 1933. Building on his research, the composer enunciated the concept of "organized sound", developing his musical aesthetic around timbre and rhythm, working on sound matter as a living organism and comparing the effect of orchestral mass to the phenomenon of crystallization. He added ondes Martenot to the score ofAmériques and took an interest in the theremin with its creator, Léon Thérémine. Completed in 1931, his best-known non-electronic piece, Ionisation, features an ensemble of thirty-seven percussion instruments played by thirteen soloists. Two years later, he entrusted its New York premiere to Nicolas Slonimsky, who also conducted Ecuatorial, in which two theremins (later replaced by ondes Martenot) mingle with a bass choir and a wind and percussion ensemble. Back in the U.S., Varèse travels up and down the West Coast giving theremin demonstrations at conferences, notably at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He writes the piece for solo flute Densité 21.5 (1936), which is prolonged by a silence of several years. When he returned to New York in 1938 to find him, the inventor had already gone back to Russia. In 1947, he reworked an old score from 1929, the choral symphony Espace, founded the New York Chorus, taught at Columbia University and in Darmstadt, where his pupil was Luigi Nono, and began composing Déserts, a work for orchestra and magnetic tape whose premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Éysées in Paris on December 2, 1954, conducted by Hermann Scherchen, was both a scandal and a consecration. Blending musique concrète and electronics, this revolutionary piece of "mixed" music combines a live instrumental part with recorded sequences. On May 2, 1958, Varèse presented his Poème électronique at the Brussels World Fair, an electroacoustic work initiated at Le Corbusier's request for the Philips pavilion. The eight-minute recording on magnetic tape is a work on the spatialization of sound, broadcast through three hundred and fifty loudspeakers. After this coup d'éclat, Varèse left two works unfinished: Nocturnal (1959-1961), for soprano, choir and orchestra, completed by his pupil Chou-Wen-Chung, and Nuits, based on a poem by Henri Michaux, for soprano, double bass, winds and percussion, left unfinished. On November 6, 1965, Edgard Varèse died in New York at the age of 81.

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