It’s always enjoyable to find a composer whose music I’ve never heard before. It’s even better when I like it. There are many unknown composers, at least several thousand times the number who are well-known. Why are some composers remembered and so many forgotten? Frank Zappa once said in an interview that it was because the famous ones were better at being ass-kissers in the royal court.
I don’t agree. He tried to break into the classical music world but couldn’t quite do it; his style was not transposable. But who knows, the future may judge him differently.
Recently I discovered the music of Igor Markevitch. I’d known about him for years but only as a conductor. I have a recording of him performing the First Symphony of Shostakovich which is one of the best I’ve heard.
I found a piece he wrote called L’Envol d’Icare, composed in 1932 and was surprised at how interesting it was. There was something unusual about it, familiar yet strange. He had something to say. I learned he used quarter-tones and polyrhythms in very original but, more importantly, musically convincing ways. I found a piano piece from 1941 called Variations, Fugue and Envoi on a Theme of Handel and again, was amazed. It was different than the other music composed at the time. I had the impression that I’d discovered the “missing link” between past music and an alternative modernity. For, unlike Arnold Schoenberg, who developed the 12-tone system and effectively broke with past musical practices, the music of Markevitch was like a synthesis, moving forward while not rejecting the past. Although Schoenberg claimed his music was a continuation of the “tradition,” he was disingenuous, for it wasn’t audible in his music. In Markevitch, it was.
Why isn’t he better known? Nadia Boulanger, the famed Parisian music teacher whose students included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Philip Glass, as well as the more popular figures Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin, reportedly said that Markevitch was her most talented pupil. She relates a story to give a feeling for his natural abilities. She was giving a class on counterpoint, and she’d played a four-part example to her students. She asked if anyone would like to play it back to her. She expected the usual silence from the students. Instead, her new student Markevitch, who was 15, raised his hand. She said he could never do it, for he hadn’t studied counterpoint. He did it perfectly. She said this earned him admiration from half the class and resentment from the other half.
He was in her class at the recommendation of the great pianist Alfred Cortot who, after hearing Markevitch’s first serious composition, a piece for piano, helped arrange for him to study at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, one of the most prestigious in France. He was 14. Two years later, Serge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario who launched the careers of Stravinsky, Satie, Cocteau, Nijinsky and many others, heard Markevitch’s piece Divertimento and declared that he was the composer the world was looking for, having come to wipe away the “cynical-sentimental simplicity” which he felt had taken over the music world. Diaghilev commissioned a piano concerto from him. Later, Diaghilev planned a ballet project for him in collaboration with the librettist Boris Kochno. Unfortunately, Diaghilev died before this project was realized. Markevitch later composed Rébus for a projected ballet with Léonide Massine, and L’Envol d’Icare in collaboration with Serge Lifar, one of the great ballet choreographers who was part of the Ballets Russes. Unfortunately, neither project was realized in its original form.
Still, his career continued to mount through the early years of World War II. His music was enthusiastically played on both sides of the Atlantic. He collaborated with Jean Cocteau on a cantata and had the obligatory scandal, complete with catcalls and screaming. He was part of Parisian High Society, attending the salons of artistic patrons Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, and Marie-Laure de Noailles. He married Vaslav Nijinsky’s beautiful daughter, Kyra, a dancer and choreographer. Bartók called Markevitch “the most striking personality in contemporary music” and said he was influenced by his work. And he received a dubious compliment from Igor Stravinsky, who was kind enough to criticize him behind his back, showing perhaps his irritation at the possibility of being replaced in the public eye as the new wunderkind. It’d be difficult to imagine a career that was more promising.
Then in 1941, after composing the Handel Variations, he fell seriously ill. Next, he found himself displaced due to the war. When he recovered, and got some stability back into his life, except for revising L’Envol d’Icare as Icare (removing the quarter-tones and simplifying the rhythms) and making a few arrangements of pieces by other composers, he stopped composing original music and pursued conducting. He did this until he died in 1983. Why he stopped writing original music has been the subject of speculation ever since. Nadia Boulanger said she couldn’t explain it, and this is echoed wherever the question is posed.
There are some reasons that might explain his choice. World War II brought an end to the world in which his career began. The interwar period, with its salons, with the Le Bœuf sur le Toit ambiance, was over. Furthermore, Markevitch wasn’t wealthy and composing isn’t a career known for generating high incomes. Conducting, however, can be. He studied conducting with Hermann Scherchen and Pierre Monteux, two great conductors, and his career was launched. Next, he divorced Kyra Nijinsky and, in 1947, married Donna Topazia Caetani, a member of an old Roman noble family.
But perhaps the reason which determined his choice was the rise of a new modernism in music and the arts, one that broke completely with the past. These composers claimed Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School as their spiritual leaders—composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage—and the new Modernist ideas they espoused became a rallying call to build a new world out of the ashes of the destruction caused by the war.
As a coda to this unusual musical life, it was revealed in Italian investigations that Markevitch—who never hid his left-wing sympathies—was suspected of being involved with the Red Brigades terrorist network, responsible for scores of murders in the 1970s and the kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Markevitch was alleged to have been present at his interrogation and perhaps even ordering his death.