A Less Familiar Side of Darius Milhaud

Cover of the album being discussed

Every month I receive, through electronic mail, a newsletter from Naxos entitled Musical Discoveries. The title of this month’s release was Les Six: Celebrate the Iconic French Composer Group. This past Sunday, when I wrote about the Naxos release of solo piano compositions by Darius Milhaud, I provided little information about the composer’s background, other than his membership in Les Six. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this biography is that, as can be found on his Wikipedia Web page, he was born into “a long-established Jewish family of the Comtat Venaissin—a secluded region of Provence—with roots traceable there at least to the 15th century. On his father's side, Milhaud's Jewish lineage was thus neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, but specifically Provençal—dating to Jewish settlement in that part of France as early as the first centuries of the Common Era. Milhaud's mother was partly Sephardi on her father's side, via a Sephardi family from Italy.”

In my past encounters with Milhaud’s music, I never gave much thought to his religion. However, one of the compositions cited in the newsletter was his Sacred Service, composed for baritone soloist, narrator (speaking), choir, and orchestra. The liturgical texts are all sung in Hebrew, and there are three “interventions” from the narrator. The Mourner’s Kaddish is first spoken and then sung by the choir.

Since I was born Jewish, my pre-teen years included preparation for the bar mitzvah celebration of my thirteenth birthday. As a result, I was familiar with almost all of the texts that Milhaud had set. I am pretty certain that, at that time, no one I knew was aware of Milhaud’s undertaking.

The album was originally released in October of 2004, and it would not surprise me to learn that it has attracted little attention. The only performer familiar to me is the conductor, Gerard Schwarz. Rabbi Rodney Mariner delivers the spoken texts, and the solo vocal work is sung by baritone Yaron Windmueller. The Prague Philharmonic Choir joins forces with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

It goes without saying that I was drawn to this album by pure curiosity. Madeline Milhaud is quoted as calling it “a work of love,” suggesting that both she and her husband took their Jewish ancestry (if not religion in day-to-day life) seriously. From my own atheist perspective, I am more interested in how the composition came to be. It was commissioned by Congregation Emanu-El, one of the three oldest synagogues in San Francisco. It is located on the northwest corner of Arguello Boulevard and Lake Street, about halfway between California Street and the Presidio grounds.

However, the music was not given its first performance at that site (since it would go against constraints imposed by the service itself). Instead, it was given its first performance on May 18, 1949 by the San Francisco Symphony with Milhaud himself on the podium. The narrator in baritone solo is not identified on the Wikipedia page, but the choral performance was by the Berkeley Chorus of the University of California. Since I was not yet three years old at that time, I was unable to attend!