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Inventory of the Charles Koechlin manuscripts, 1905-1945
ARCHIVES KOECHLIN 1
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Title: Charles Koechlin Manuscripts
Date (inclusive): 1905-1945
Collection number: ARCHIVES KOECHLIN 1
Creator:
Koechlin, Charles, 1867-1950
Extent: Number of containers: 6 boxes
Repository: The
Music Library
Berkeley, California 94720-6000
Shelf location: For current information on the location of
these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog.
Language:
English.
From the estate of Charles Shatto, received in the spring of 1983. See also the
collections in this catalog under Charles Shatto and Catherine Urner.
Collection is open for research.
All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in
writing to the Head of the Music Library.
[Identification of item], Charles Koechlin manuscripts, ARCHIVES KOECHLIN 1, The Music
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
This inventory was compiled by Professor Robert Orledge, Department of Music,University
of Liverpool, Liverpool, England. This inventory forms part of an unpublished article by
Professor Orledge, and he retains full rights to this inventory. If publication of data
from this inventory is contemplated, permisssion must be received directly from Professor
Orledge. John A. Emerson, September 26, 1986.
Following the death of Charles Shatto on New Year's Day 1983, the UCB inherited a large
collection of manuscripts by Shatto himself, his wife Catherine Urner (1891-1942), and
their principal composition teacher, Charles Koechlin (1867-1950). The manuscripts by
Shatto and Urner were catalogued by David Zea in 1977, and it has been my privelege to be
entrusted with the preparation of a full inventory of the Koechlin manuscripts, in which
task I was greatly assisted by the preliminary classification made by John Emerson of the
UCB Music Library.
Catherine Urner was recommended to Koechlin by her harmony teacher at Berkeley, William
MacCoy, at a Christmas dinner in San Francisco on 19 December 1918 during Koechlin's
first American tour (as the musical representative on a French cultural mission headed by
Théodore Reinach).
1.
During her postgraduate studies at UCB, Catherine had shown considerable promise
as a composer, and she was the first person to win the coveted George Ladd Prix de Paris
for 1920-1 which enabled her to travel to France and receive regular lessons from
Koechlin. She returned to Paris to study with Koechlin for four futher periods: December
1922 to July 1923, June 1924 to June 1925, November 1928 to April 1929, and from August
1929 to June 1933, when she lived
en famille as part of
the Koechlin household. In the interim periods the lessons continued by post and Koechlin
began sending Catherine examples of his work in progress (all hand-copied) which form the
basis of this important archive.
In return, Catherine was instrumental in arranging Koechlin's three teaching visits to
the USA: May to October 1928 (Berkeley), June to August 1929 (when Koechlin won the
Hollywood Bowl prize for his symphonic poem
La joie païenne (Op. 46 no.
5)), and late July to late September 1937 (when Koechlin gave lessons at Urner's studio
in San Diego,wrote a great deal of music, and gave lectures in Montreal and Quebec on his
way back to France). Shortly after this, with Koechlin's encouragement, Catherine married
the young organist and composer Charles Shatto on 10 October 1937, both of them sharing a
love of their teacher's music. However, their happiness was cut tragically short when
Catherine was killed in a car crash in San Diego on 30 April 1942. Due to the vagaries of
the wartime mail service, Koechlin only learnt the sad news in a letter from Darius
Milhaud written on 21 March 1945,
2.
and as a touching tribute to his favourite American pupil he
orchestrated her
Esquisses Normandes for piano (1929) in early November
1945 (see MSS ii and 134-5).
Koechlin and Catherine Urner were kindred spirits in their undogmatic approach to music,
and their belief that true artisitic independence could only be acchieved in composition
by maintaining the delicate balance between liberty and discipline. They shared a total
devotion to their art in the face of a general lack of recognition and its concomitant
state of financial hardship. Koechlin's solution to this situation after 1925 was to turn
increasingly towards pedagogic and teaching activities, which accounts for the large numbers of
chorale realisations in the UCB collection (see MSS 93-120), though he placed these on a
par with ostensibly more significant compositions like the contemporaray symphonic poem
La course de printemps (Op. 95). The overall direction taken by Koechlin's
music in this period was towards textural clarification, order and increased contrapuntal
strength, ultimately leading to the concentration of his musical thought into a single
melodic line (or monody) in the 1940s. In this process Catherine Urner acted as a
catalyst, for Koechlin recognised her melodic gift from the start and saw his role as
developing her harmonic and contraptual skills. But what began as a teacher-pupil
relationship, with Koechlin writing themes for Urner to harmonise (as well as doing so
himself), soon developed into a beneficial artisitic cross-fertilisation founded in deep
mutual respect. Indeed, between the summer of 1928 and February 1934, no less than 14 of
Koechlin's compositions between Opp. 102 and 137 included themes by Catherine, and the
process only ended with the fourth movement of Koechlin's Second Symphony,
a Fugue
modale (sur un sujet de Catherine Urner)
in 1943-4 (op. 196). Whilst there are,
surprisingly, no manuscripts of their first major collaboration, a symphonic poem based
on a Hindu legend entitled
The Bride of a God (Op. 106, 1929), both short
and full scores of
Sur les flots lointains (op. 130) of 1933 figure as
important items in the UCB collection (MSS 12-13). As always, Catherine provided the
thematic outline; Koechlin the remainder.
Note
1. For an excellent
survey of Koechlin's visits to America, see Elise Kuhl Kirk: A Parisian in America: the
lectures and legacies of Charles Koechlin,'
Current Musicology, no. 25 (1978), 50-68.
Note
2. The extensive correspondence between Urner and Koechlin (1919-41),
together with Milhaud's letters relating to them, can be consulted by contacting Madeline
Li-Koechlin, the composer's daughter, at 121 rue de Chalias, 94240 L'Hay-les-Roses,
France.
In the following inventory, I have divided the manuscripts into three sections:
- 1. 138 autograph manuscripts by Koechlin (1905-1945) plus one letter to Charles Shatto of 15 March 1946 (MS 139). Of these, only MSS 14 & 134-8 are not Koechlin's own compositions.
- 2. Music by Koechlin copied by Catherine Urner. These compositions (dating form 1895 to 1935) are numbered from I to XII.
- 3. Manuscripts by other composers (1929-35), notably Catherine Urner, Ernest Le Grand and Jeanne Herscher-Clément. These are numbered from i to xiv.
The original manuscripts in section 1 are fully representative of Koechlin's musical
activities in the 1930s. They include film music compositions (like the
Dances for
Ginger Rogers
(Op. 163, MSS 68-77) and the
Épitaphe de Jean Harlow(Op. 164, MSS 78-9)); symphonic poems (like
La méditation de Purun
Bhagat
at a critical stage in its evolution in mid-August 1936 (Op. 159, MS 54));
chamber music (like the
Septuor à vent (Opp. 165 and 165bis, MSS
80-92)); as well as choral works (like
Liberté (Op. 158, MS 53) and
the
Requiem des pauvres bougres (Op. 161, MSS 55, 62-6)) and many other
smaller pieces. There are compositions that can be found in no other source, as with the
complete
Pastorale of 15 Dec 1924 (MS 7) - an unused movement intended for
Koechlin's
Trio d'anches (Op. 92), or the beautiful
Chant du matin
of 15 August 1939 (MS 124) - inspired by fine weather and the sound of bells from
the church of St Étienne du Mont' near Koechlin's Paris home in the rue des
Boulangers. This last is one of several important manuscripts (1924-32) from the wartime
gap in Koechlin's opus numbers between Op. 176 (August 1939) and Op. 177 (November 1941),
which alone would be sufficient to make the UCB collection one which no scholar of
Koechlin's music could afford to ignore.
As well as full scores and piano reductons of major works sent to Catherine Urners in
this remarkable display of artistic friendship, there are many final sketches for
important compositions which contain unique evidence as to their gestation and
intentions. For example, MS 11, thanks to Koechlin's copious dating, traces the evolution
of the 12-movement piano suite
L'ancienne maison de campagne (Op. 124)
over a decade (1923-1933),
3.
whilst MSS 23-4
and 29 are the only dated sources of three pieces within Koechlin's 1934 film score
Les confidences d'un joueur de clarinette (Op. 141 nos 14-16), with no. 15
(MS 23) containing extra scenic directions found in no other score. The same is true of
Le voyage chimérique (Op. 149 no. 5, MS 34), and the dedication to
Catherine on the very first of Koechlin's 113 shorter film compositions
(
Palmolive, Op. 139 no.1, MS 16) suggests that it was his reminiscences of
American life in her company in 1928-9 which again sparked off an important aand fruitful
chain of events in his compositional career.
Of equal importance is the way that one can trace every stage of Koechlin's complex
compositional process by means of the UCB collection. Koechlin usually proceeded by what
he described as a 'series of successive approximations', working on individual pieces over
quite long periods, but keepng several pieces in train simultaneously. In the case of
major symphonic works, he would begin with purely rythmic sketches - like those for
Les bandar-log (Op. 176) in MS 123. Then, like Berlioz, he would write a
complete melodic line (or
chant) which remained unaltered as successive
layers of the composition were added in various stages. In less complex pieces the
process only involved two stages,
chant and realisation (which involved
the addition of harmonies and a textural accompaniment). The sketches for the
14
chants pour flûte et piano
(Op. 157bis, MSS 47-52) show that these separate
stages could be separated by as much as 17 months (in this case, April 1936 to September
1937). Then, again for more complex pieces, Koechlin kept recopying his earlier work and
adding further details at each stage, often concentrating on the ending, which invariably
caused him as much difficulty as the rest of the piece. The advanced sketch, mentioned
earlier, for Op. 159 (MS 54) is complete apart from its ending, and the sort of problems
he encountered can be seen in
La danse sous les étoiles (Op. 163
no. 4, MSS 75-7), inspired by Ginger Rogers' performance in the film
Swing Time(1936). Then Koechlin copied out a penultimate version (
dernier brouillon
avant le net,
or a manuscript which would serve as a piano reduction), to which
he added details of the final instrumentation, often note by note, as in MS 4 for the
Hymne à la vie (Op. 69). Then (sometimes) he made sketches in full
score of difficult orchestral passages, again as in the
Hymne à la vie(MS 5). Then finally, he prepared a defininitive orchestral score, as with
Sur les flots lointains (Op. 130, MS 13).
4.
In general, I have classified Koechlin's manuscripts chronologically by their earliest
dates, so that, by and large, they also follow a course of consecutive opus numbers.
However, this does not mean that the ordering here always follows the dates at which each
manuscript was writen out or recopied, as Koechlin meticulously recorded the dates of
earlier compositional stages on each manuscript. But the
actual dates of writing out can usually be ascertained from the final dates in columns 1
and 3 of the following list. Thus, column 1 gives the range of dates covered by each
manuscript; column 2 gives the number of pages of music in each manuscript;
5.
whilst column 3 identifies each work
and gives a brief description of the contents of the manuscript, together with more
detailed dates of composition and any other relevant information. Beause Koechlin worked
on several pieces simultaneously, a particular problem arose in the prolific years
1936-7, and for reasons of clarity I have classifed the manuscripts of Opp. 160, 161,
163, 164, 165 and 165bis in groups by opus number (MSS 56-92), though even here (as in
Op. 160 or Op. 165) it can easily be seen that Koechlin did not compose his larger works
in their final performing orders.
As this inventory was intended for publication in
Notes, I have kept it as
succint as possible. For reasons of space, most of the very large number of teaching
exercizes (without opus number) in the Shatto-Urner collection will need to be classified
separately on a later occasion. As everything associated with Koechlin proliferates and
complicates, there will doubtless be some omissions in such a concentrated list; for
these I apologise in advance, and, as always, I welcome suggestions or corrections from
interested readers.
- F-Pn Paris, Bibliothhque Nationale, Dipartment de la Musique
- F-Peschig Paris, archives of Max Eschig et Cie, 48 rue de Rome,Paris 8
- F-Pkoechlin Paris, private collection of Yves Koechlin, 26 rue des Boulangers, Paris 5
- US-BE Berkeley, University of California, Music Library
- orch. orchestrated
- realis. realisation (harmonisation, addition of textural accompaniment)
- recop. recopied
- rev. revised
Other abbreviations are as in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Stanley Sadie), (London, Macmillan, 1980).
Note
3. This
manuscript is especially valuable as the final printer's copy made for Éditions
Oiseau-Lyre in 1937 has since disappeared (as far as is known).
Note
4. It need hardly be said that this process forms a fasciniating
study in itself, and is one which I explore in detail in my forthcoming life and works
study of Koechlin, due to appear in two volumes with Toccata Press, London in 1985-6. It
is particularly interesting to trace the evolution of the
Danses pour Ginger
[Rogers]
(Op. 163) from an idea jotted down in a square in Geneva on 13August
1936 (MS 68) through to the final sketches for each of the five dances nearly a year
later (MSS 62, 69-77). Also, see MS 62 for an example of Koechlin's later practice of
constructing smaller pieces from a series of numbered musical cells, and MS 67
(Note).
Note
5. This was the only method I could adopt in
working from xerox copies of the original manuscripts in Liverpool, and it also meant
that I was unfortunately unable to distinguish between the uses of ink, pencil and crayon
in these manuscripts. Most, however seem to have been written in black ink, often with
later additions and corrections in pencil.
Title: Charles Shatto collection
Identifier/Call Number: (ARCHIVES SHATTO 1)
Title: Catherine Murphy Urner collection
Identifier/Call Number: (ARCHIVES URNER 1)