Music is a quixotic profession, but few of its practitioners were as quixotic as Charles Koechlin. This Thursday morning on WPRB, we’ll play Sancho Panza to the impossible dreamer of French music.
Here was an idealist of passionate enthusiasms. A pantheist and a communist, Koechlin’s sophisticated naïveté carried over into works like the mostly stagnant piano cycle “Les Heures persanes,” a dreamy sojourn across Persia, which in performance spans well over an hour. He staked out the home of (much younger) movie actress Lilian Harvey, hoping to propose. Prior to that, he had attempted to court her with reams of music, including alternate scores to scenes in her movies. It’s fascinating to contemplate that this footnote of world cinema (Harvey) has been kept alive for music-lovers by a footnote of classical music.
Koechlin wrote whatever he pleased. His music is difficult to pigeon-hole. Some of his works are kind of impressionist, some are polytonal. He loved Bach, and even wrote a 50-minute meditation on the composer’s name, which stands as a kind of 20th century “Art of Fugue” (employing the ondes martenot!). In some of his works, he crosses over into serialism. He didn’t seem to care for boundaries, whether in his personal relationships, his religious and political convictions, or his music. What he did care for was following his muse, wherever it happened to lead him. Of course, he paid the price – beyond his work as an orchestrator for famous composers such as Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Cole Porter (!), he is almost wholly forgotten.
I hope you’ll join me as we tilt at windmills with Charles Koechlin, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth (November 27, 1867), this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. The ideal becomes real, on Classic Ross Amico.
