Spring Symphonies No 68 - Honegger: Symphony No 3 "Liturgique"

Arthur Honegger (1892 - 1955) was Swiss, but seems French.  He was  born to Swiss parents but he was born in France and lived much of his life including during the Second World War in Paris.  he studied with French composers in the Paris Conservatoire.  His teachers, Widor and d’Indy are not  household names now nor were they the greatest symphonists, though both wrote symphonies.  They were teaching in a musical world of high pedigree and expectations, but composers of the time lived - happily - in the shadow of Debussy and Ravel.  Honegger was a product of that time and a member of that unique composer’s cabal Les Six who worked in France from the 1920s as a group of like minded souls it’s members were Honegger, Auric, Durey, Milhaud, Poulenc and Tailleferre. These six and others looking at the French influence - this included Vaughan-Williams and Gershwin - were looking to move in new directions.  Honegger and Milhaud were the only two to return to and develop their ideas in symphonic form.  Milhaud with a host of short symphonies many under ten minutes long and Honegger - much more of a classicist in matters of form - wrote five. 

Honegger wrote five symphonies but was no stranger to writing for orchestra and his major claim to fame was his symphonic movement “Pacific 231” of 1923: a tribute to his devotion and love of trains.  Honegger’s main preoccupation for large scale forces in the 20s and 30s was opera and oratorio but his first symphony was written in 1930.  In 1941, he was trapped in Paris teaching music but also a member of the French Resistance.  He wrote his Second symphony (for strings and trumpet) under the German yoke.  It’s a spirited and somewhat classically derived work - more like a Bach concerto than a symphony at some points.  His Third and Fourth symphonies were written in 1946. The Fifth symphony was written in 1950.  These five mature symphonies were all it is said, related to the war and his acute emotional reaction to it and written in a short period.

The Third symphony hit me like a bus when I first heard it many years ago.  The route to the symphony for me was the route for many people.  It seems a ridiculous notion of marketing now but I suspect many of us thought: “Karajan has recorded it so it must be worth hearing...”.  I bought it and gloried in one of DG's finest recordings of modern music and a performance which showed Karajan's great affinity to it.  The effect was immediate and direct - deeply moving from the first audition and each time it yielded both the brutality and the beauty of the centuries of wars and peace and most immediately the Second World War which so effected the composer and the conductor (though from entirely different standpoints). 

The work has an extensive programme written by the composer which I haven’t read.  I don’t think such things always help.  This symphony is about war and it’s terrible effects on him and on the life of a continent where the two sides of the cultural divide where at each others throats.  I think it’s rather naive to place the Swiss Honegger on both sides of that divide musically (hints of Germanic and Gallic musical influences in the work).  His unique voice seems to me to grow from both tradition and the urge - represented by Les Six - to do something new.  He belongs to neither to the French musical tradition of his teachers or that of those two giants overshadowing French music.  He has energy, raw emotional power and a pleasing concision,

There’s no guess work to be done here on the topics involved.  It is very graphic is the musical picture one could pretty much guess at the content.  It was premiere 17 August 1946 in Zurich by the Suisse Romande Orchestra under Charles Munch and the same conductor gave it it’s recording debut some ten years later.  It’s interesting to note that Karajan started conducting it in 1954 and gave many performances until the end of that decade.  He returned to it again in the 1970s and in 1984 with two final performances - one of which is available on YouTube. He also conducted the Second symphony though less often. 

The Third symphony represents a working through of the sensations of  the war from a witness right at the centre of the fight.  The second movement ends with a pictorial and metaphorical heart breaker of a bird singing over the ruins of the conflict.  It is - I suspect – not played often enough now to sit with contributions by Britten, Shostakovich, Messiaen and Vaughan Williams to the literature of war works – but it should be right up there.  Shostakovich arranged the score for 2 pianos a year or so after its premiere – a mark of his interest in the piece and you can here how the great Russian would have found the language as fascinating and direct as his own..

The three movements have titles which confirm its journey: Dies Irae (Day of wrath), De profundis clamavi (From the depths I have cried…) and Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant us Peace).

The first movement starts with a hectic, desperate bustle – a taut and anxious mix of the melodic (but not lyrical) and stabbing interjections both discordant and anti-harmonious, the tone is dark and the tension unremitting.  None of this symphony is easy listening but  this is particularly dark and uncomfortable which builds to a crisis which has the weight of Verdi, the colour of Shostakovich and the rhythmical insistence of Berlioz.  Throughout this movement (and the rest of the symphony) we get two opposing forces – ideas that struggle to be heard and intrusive mottos and rhythms that are difficult to shake off.  Add to that mix use of the brass that must blare a raw sound.  The decaying march that ends this movement says it all and leaves one battered and cold.

De profundis starts with veils of sound, peaceful and distant and develops into a full string hymn or perhaps a threnody.  It’s reminiscent of Vaughan Williams in my head – though it could be referenced to Copland, Villa-Lobos or Respighi - a mix of models but with something immediately hints of the sorrows of Bach’s music too.  It is lush and by turns spare and tranquil but fragile as hell.  It keeps winding, it never settles and part pastoral idyll and part prayer.  I find it hypnotic.  The music idles and soon is captured by a low string brass and piano stream which carries the music and eventually dominates.  The material soon turns to mortal fear and screaming strings, strident brass offer a chaotic destructive climax which dissipates after the low drum shatters the world.  The music now displays all of that fragility. In the final third of this long movement Honegger finds hope in the musical and no doubt real carnage which has preceded.  There’s some difficult harmonies and some passages straight out of wartime Vaughan Williams with divided strings but it so much more as it rises to a climax which abruptly ends with a quiet flute - and subdued but wonderfully pastel shaded orchestral palette giving us more of that forward movement but to a more comforting goal.  In many ways this is a more complex and personal movement than the wartime associations would allow.  The music decays to a distant haze.

The final movement is again about forward movement - a march of muted dark colours at first.  We can guess where this is going.  Hard to know if this is the aggressors army or the defensive force at this stage.  The music bursts into the open and proceeds to a show of force in much more orderly fashion than he showed in previous movements.  In many ways the ensuing climax is a violent as what has preceded but perhaps the case was for the greater good.  The ambiguity is both necessary and inevitable.  What follows though is an ethereal coda as moving as any in 20th century music and seemingly both ethereal and ancient.  In Karajan’s recording it is unmistakably James Galway who lifts the music heaven.  In this rapture we here so much of this music boiled down to it’s simplest parts.  A cynic would perhaps say this is scarcely more than a series of musical ideas pinched from three centuries of destruction and a strong faith in our ability to rebuild ourselves.

Honegger reminds us in both ancient and modern ways about the inhumanity of war and conflict.  My feeling is that if anyone wants to dismiss his thoughts as being superficial I would remind them in our time these horrors still happen.  Sometimes on our doorsteps, the past does not have the monopoly on human suffering.  My sense is that these reminders come best from those intimately involved. Honegger lived through and participation in opposition to occupation.  We don’t listen to these stories on the news so much any more - maybe the visceral feelings in this music are a more pressing reminder of how narrow the road of peace is.