Pieces (14) for flute & piano, Op. 157b

• Date: 1936
• Composer: Charles Koechlin
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

Koechlin never met film star Lilian Harvey, but his infatuation with her screen personae consumed him while giving renewed impetus to his creativity from the summer of 1933 to the spring of 1936, when he backed away from an attempt to meet her on location at Antibes, though he sent his wife to deliver his latest spate of Harvey-inspired compositions. These came to include a novel, a film scenario, and the Albums de Lilian, Opp. 139 and 149. As late as July 1935 he entertained the notion that a film based upon his scenario, featuring himself and Harvey as leads, was a real possibility. "I am convinced that many of the scenes in this scenario, accompanied by my music, and properly filmed as regards production and photography, would be a thing of real beauty, and would reveal a nature which combined charm, poetry, and depth." But the lady's continued refusal to answer his letters or acknowledge the receipt of his manuscripts eventually broke the spell and Koechlin was left to look back on his adventure with a mixture of gratitude and defensiveness. The point to notice about the Harvey-inspired pieces is that they flirt with popular appeal and, in brief compass (the longest of them play around five minutes), they offer up the salient features of Koechlin's utterance in their most smiling and transparent guise. Koechlin's previous decade had been obsessively preoccupied with counterpoint -- with pedagogical volumes on harmony, the chorale, and fugue, and with the composition of fugues, chorales, and "réalisations de divers chants données" in which he threatened to immure himself. The discovery of Harvey -- and such other screen divas as Greta Garbo, Marlène Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Ginger Rogers -- challenged him to make himself intelligible to something wider than a coterie audience of professional musicians, but there was doubt. Of the first Album de Lilian, he wrote, "There is no concession to vulgarity, or popularity, or to the tradition of the 'genre cinéma.' If some themes appear facile and are accompanied by well-known harmonies...it is the nature of the subject which led me there." But, in fact, his rejuvenation survived his disillusionment with Harvey, while the simplicity of style and immediate appeal he cultivated for her continued to manifest themselves in music that had nothing to do with her -- for instance, in the 14 Chants pour flûte composed in April 1936 for flute solo and arranged the same month for flute and piano. ~ Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Charles Koechlin: Music for Flute	1990
Koechlin: Flute Music
Koechlin: Music for Flute	1990
La flûte magnifique	2002
Music for Flute and Harp	2005

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