ARTHUR HONEGGER (1892-1955)
Symphony No 3 "Symphonie liturgique", H 186 (1945-46)
Version for two pianos (c.1947) by Dmitri Shostakovich
OLIVIER MESSIAEN (1908-1992)
"Visions de l'Amen" for two pianos (1943)
Piano Duo Soos Haag - Adrienne Soos & Ivo Haag
DDD 75:40, Radiostudio Zurich, 14-16 February 2009
Arthur Honegger was born in Le Havre of Swiss parentage and although he was popularly regarded as a French composer (he was included as a member of ‘Les Groupe des Six’ by Henri Collet in 1920), at the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of France, Honegger’s decision - taken much earlier in life - to retain his dual Swiss-French nationality meant that on choosing to remain in Paris during the Occupation he was taking a calculated risk. Honegger could expect no favours from the Germans - nor did he receive any - although his wartime visit to Vienna and his writings on contemporary composers, some of them German, during the period of the Occupation, led him to be wrongly accused of collaboration with the Nazis (although he was never charged - the accusations were without substance) after the Liberation.
By January, 1945, with France liberated and the end of the War in sight, Honegger had begun his artistic response to the conflict. This was to become, in a little over a year, his Third Symphony, subtitled Symphonie liturgique. Ten years later, towards the end of his life, Honegger wrote that at the time of the composition of the work ‘I was most completely in possession of my powers.’ The first performance, on August 17, 1946, was in Zurich by the Tonhalle Orchestra under Charles Munch, to whom the symphony is dedicated. By the end of 1947, the Symphony had been performed no fewer than nineteen times across Europe, including one at the Prague Spring Festival.
A distinguished visitor to that Festival was Dmitri Shostakovich, where he undoubtedly heard the latest symphony by Honegger, performed there under Paul Sacher on April 24th - eight days after the British premiere under Basil Cameron. Honegger and Shostakovich had met in 1928 in Leningrad, where Honegger had been invited to conduct three concerts on the strength of the popularity within Soviet Russia of his orchestral picture of the great locomotive Pacific 231. This was the only time the two composers met; Honegger did not attend the 1947 Prague Spring himself. The miniature score of the Symphonie Liturgique had just been published, and Shostakovich acquired a copy.
By 1947, Shostakovich had been professor of composition at the Leningrad Conservatoire for ten years. His teaching method was, first, to have one-to-one sessions with each student, and then invite them back in groups when they would play through the symphonic repertoire in four-hand arrangements, ranging from Haydn to Mahler. We do not know the exact circumstances which led Shostakovich to make his transcription of Honegger’s Liturgique, but as we know he had made a similar version of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms for his pupils - the music was unavailable in Russia during that period - it is more than likely that the Honegger transcription was prepared for a similar purpose, some time between May 1946 and Shostakovich’s dismissal from the Conservatoire following the notorious Central Committee's Decree on Music, issued in February 1948, in which leading Soviet composers, including Shostakovich, were humiliated, their work publicly torn to shreds for failing to appeal to ‘the people’.
In such circumstances, this was clearly not the time for Shostakovich to bring to official notice his version of a work by someone wrongly thought to have collaborated with the Nazis - moreover, a symphony whose movement titles carried religious connotations. And so it remained unknown, in manuscript, until it was published for the first time by Durand in 2005.
One need hardly say that Shostakovich’s transcription is an extremely fine one. Honegger’s music does not readily lend itself to pianistic treatment; Shostakovich’s solutions of the inherent problems thus posed are remarkable, of the kind that could only have been made by a truly exceptional and sympathetic fellow-composer.
Speaking of his Third Symphony, Honegger said that in the first movement, Dies Irae (Day of wrath): Allegro marcato, ‘I was concerned with depicting human terror in the face of divine anger, with expressing the brutal, unchanging feelings of oppressed peoples, delivered to the whims of fate and seeking in vain to escape the cruel snares of destiny.’ The Adagio second movement, De Profundis Clamavi (Out of the depths have I called unto Thee), was characterised by Honegger as ‘..the sorrowful meditation of mankind abandoned by the Divinity - a meditation that is already a prayer.’ The mainly slow finale, Andante - Adagio, entitled Dona Nobis Pacem (Give us peace), begins with a heavy march, ‘of the robots against the bodies and souls of men’, leading, by way of ‘a feeling of rebellion’, to a ‘vision of a peace so long wished for. Amid the glory of the rising sun, for the last time, the bird sings…just as once the dove hovered over the immensity of the waters.’ ( Guild Music )
