Melodies: Plancq(S)D.top(T)Cubaynes(B)Henon(P)

The amazing world of Emile Gou (1904-1946) Following the example of Borodin, Emile Gou's career in science and at university (he occupied one of the most prestigious chairs at the Lyce Louis-le-Grand) was paralleled by continuous involvement in music - for me [music] is a metaphysical activity and an integral part of my life. He completed his musical studies under Charles Koechlin, and was also encouraged in this course by Albert Roussel. An adherent of the school of Franck, and opposed to excessive Romanticism, as a young man he showed a predilection for Bach and the Renaissance composers, while at the same time developing a personal style that was already evident in his suite for orchestra Pnombres (1931), the Pome symphonique (1934), the First Symphony (1934), as well as the opera Wanda, set in Croix-de-Vie. His colourful orchestral palette, as though carved by a sculptor's chisel, ably mixes together instrumental timbres. Trained in the ancient modes, Emile Gou considered the affirmation of tonality traditionally an essential element of French taste and character, but a wider tonality that extended to polymodality. The infinite possibilities of counterpoint allowed him a multitude of combinations of themes. In pursuit of perfection, his impassioned theorizing on form was a further development of Vincent d'Indy's. His taste for consciously creating unity, means that he preferred to make use of a single theme as the starting-point of the whole work, as in Bach. 1936 saw the beginning of a period of intensive creativity, hardly interrupted by the war. He became known in artistic circles for his Trio (1937) and the magnificent Psalm 13 (1938). Called up in 1939 as a lieutenant of artillery and made prisoner in June 1940, he spent five years in the Nienburg an der Weser Oflag XB. A natural teacher, Gou was unstinting in his work to inspire his comrades in adversity with a love of music, lecturing on, and conducting eighteen orchestral concerts of programmes ranging from the Franco-Flemish polyphonists to Arthur Honegger. Captivity, he admitted in 1942, destroys almost every contact with the real world, and the inner life, almost entirely [...]. The hardest thing is not being hungry; it's feeling one's spiritual standards declining. As with Olivier Messiaen, the war period saw the production of masterpieces which display an unrivalled mastery and artistic maturity: Renaissance (1941), a mimed oratorio, Psalm 123 (1940), Prhistoires (1943) and Thme et Variations (1945) for piano. His concern for form was increasingly evident in his later works (Quintette, IIIe Quatuor, Prlude, aria et final...) without completely suppressing his lyricism and taste for the largescale. Because one must not conceal emptiness of ideas under outpourings of counterpoint, his style, through successive stages of reduction, reaches it's high point in the period of captivity. With great perspicacity, Gou always chose texts whose philosophical content expressed man's unease before the enigmas of creation and destiny. This is the origin of the hidden anguish that underpins all his work. Drawn to the world of German fairy folklore, his perception of nature as a peculiar universe, invariably transforms itself into hallucinatory terror. Man comes up against the forces of the shadow. If this ambiance is an occasional colouring of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit (1908) and Jacqueline Fontyn's Galgenlieder (1994), it is part and parcel of all Gou's work. The vocal curves are harsh and profoundly human because they are full of emotion. Part of a harmony of extreme singularity, this striking fantasy becomes an immediately recognisable signature, one that is unique in French music. One must not look for programmatic or descriptive features, but rather for an expression of an inner life, whose intensity is demonstrated as much by the eloquent commentary of the text, as by the musical language. His first two songs La route and Le chemin (1932), are marked with fear and terror. He took six poems (1935 - 1937) from Christiane Delmas' collection, with