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Germaine Tailleferre

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Germaine Tailleferre (April 19, 1892 - November 7, 1983) was a French composer and the only female member of the famous Group Les Six.

Contents

Biography

Born Marcelle Taillefesse at Saint Maur Des Fossés, Île-de-France, France, as a young woman she changed her last name to "Tailleferre" to spite her father who had refused to support her musical studies. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own and then began studying at the Conservatory in Paris where she met Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. At the Paris Conservatory she won first prize in several categories and wrote the 18 short works in the Petit livre de harpe de Madame Tardieu for Caroline Tardieu, the Conservatory’s Assistant Professor of Harp.

With her new friends, she soon was associating with the artistic crowd in Montmartre and Montparnasse including the sculptor Emmanuel Centore who would eventually marry her sister Jeanne. It was in the Montparnasse atelier of one of her painter friends where the initial idea for Les Six began. The publication of Jean Cocteau's manifest Le Coq et l'Arlequin resulted in Henri Collet's media articles that led to instant fame for the group. She was the only female member of the Groupe des Six.

The group published an album of piano pieces together (the famous "Album des Six"). Five of the members also collaborated together on the music for Cocteau's work "Les Mariés de La Tour Eiffel". Cocteau had originally proposed the project to Auric, but as Auric did not finish rapidly enough to fit into the rehearsal schedule, he then divided the work up among the other members of the Les Six. Durey, who was not in Paris at the time, did not participate. It is not correct to say that this marked "the end of the Group des Six", as Durey was present for every concert and other manifestation that marked the annversaries of the founding of the Group. Les Six did not ever cease to exist, they simply took their own individual paths that they had annonced from the beginning. The legacy of Les Six is present even today in their surviving children, spouses and associates.

In 1923, Tailleferre began to spend a great deal of time with Maurice Ravel at his home in Monfort-L'Amaury. Ravel encouraged her to enter the Prix de Rome Competition. In 1925, she married Ralph Barton, an American caricaturist, and moved to Manhattan, New York. She remained in the United States until 1927 when she and her husband returned to France. They divorced shortly thereafter.

Tailleferre wrote many of her most important works during the 1920s, including her 1st Piano Concerto, The Harp Concertino, the Ballets "Le Marchand d'Oiseaux" (the most frequently performed ballet in the repertoire of the Ballets Suédoises during the 1920s) and "La Nouvelle Cythère" which was commissioned by Diaghilev for the ill-fated 1929 season of the famous Ballets Russes, and "Sous le Ramparts d'Athènes" in Collaboration with Paul Claudel, as well as several pionerring film scores, including "B'anda" in which she used African themems.

The 1930s was even more fruitful, with the Concerto for Two Pianos, Choeurs, Saxophones and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, The Operas "Zoulaïna" and "Le Marin de Bolivar",and her masterwork, "La Cantate de Narcisse" in collaboration with Paul Valéry. Her work in film music included "Le Petit Chose" by Maurice Cloche and a series of documentaries.

At the outbreak of World War II, she was forced to leave the majority of her scores at her home in Grasse, with the exception of her recently completed Three Etudes for Piano and Orchestra. Escaping across Spain to Portugal, she found passage on a boat that brought her to America where she lived the war years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After the war, in 1946, she returned to her home in France where she composed orchestral and chamber music, plus numerous other works including the ballets "Paris-Magie" (with Lise Delarme) and "Parisiana" (for the Royal Ballet of Copenhaugen), The Operas "Il était un Petit Navire" (with Henri Jeanson), "Dolores", "La Petite Sirène" (with Philip Soupault) and "Le Maître" (to a libretto by Ionesco), The Musical Comedy "Parfums", The Concerto des Vaines Paroles, for Baritone Voice, Piano and Orchestra, the Concerto for Soprano and Orchestra, the Concertino for Flute, Piano and Orchestra, the Second Piano Concerto, the Concerto for Two Guitars and Orchestra, her Second Sonata for Violin and Piano, her Sonata for Harp as well as an impressive number of film and television scores. The majority of this music was not published until after her death.

In 1976, she accepted the post of accompanist for a children's music and movement class at the École alsacienne, a private school in Paris. During the last period of her life, she concentrated mainly on smaller forms, due to increasing problems with arthritis in her hands. She nevertheless produced the Sonate Champêtre for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Piano, The Sonata for Two Pianos, Choral and Variations for Two Pianos or Orchestra, a series of children's songs (on texts by Jean Tardieu) and pieces for young pianists. Her last major work was the Concerto de la Fidelité pour Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra, which was premièred at the Paris Opera the year before her death.

Germaine Tailleferre continued to compose right up until a few weeks before her death, on November 7, 1983 in Paris. She is buried in Quincy-Voisins, Seine-et-Marne, France.

Chronological Works List

This list of works includes serious concert works, film and television score and popular works. It does not include arrangements, harmonisations or transcriptions. In the interests of clarity, some works which are essentially the same works with different titles (the Concerto for Soprano and Orchestra and the Concerto de la Fidelité, for example) have been omitted.

There is a great deal of discussion amongst musicologists as to the authenticity of the various catalogs already published in the handful of biographical works devoted to Germaine Tailleferre, one of which even includes a category of "titles which were not given by the composer". Many works included in those catalogs are missing from this list because they cannot be verified by either published scores or primary manuscript sources. In order to establish this catalog, we used three types of sources:

1. Works which are easily verifiable through either published scores, recordings, copies of film and television presentations kept in national archives and works for which concert programmes have been kept at libraries or archives.

2. The records kept at the SACEM (the French performing rights association), using both the old paper catalog and the new computerized catalog.

3. Robert Orledge's catalog of manuscript sources in Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) : A Centenary Appraisal" Muziek & Wetenshap 2 (Summer 1992) which he examined in Paris during September, 1991, which include complete scientific descriptions of the manuscript objects.

Other works may indeed exist, but they would have to be authenticated by the Tailleferre estate (through an examination of the source material) in order to be accepted as works by Tailleferre. For this reason and in the interests of scientific procedure, it would be preferable that other works cited in other sources not be added to this list unless primary source material is available.

Selected bibliography

External links

 

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