Paul Paray insisted that "all music worthy of the name must be able to be
sung" and so it is not by chance that in his compositions melody is so
prominent. Born in 1886 in the little costal town of Le Tréport,
in Upper Normandy, the young Paul studied piano with his father Auguste Paray, organist of the
church of Saint-Jacques, and discovered at his father’s side, during the summer
seasons, the great oratorios of Haydn, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Gounod, and Saint-Saëns.
It was at the choir school Saint-Evode in Rouen that he received a solid
literary and musical formation. There he sang music of the Renaissance masters,
practiced the cello, timpani, piano and organ. At age fourteen, he played from
memory, on the great organ of the cathedral, all the organ works of J.S. Bach,
and composed his first Magnificat for Christmas vespers. He spent many
hours, with his classmate Marcel Dupré,
interpreting the organ symphonies of Widor and Vierne, and played at sight the
scores of Franck, Bruckner and Reger. He soon discovered Gabriel Fauré and the repertory of French
art song, and himself composed Paroles à la lune in 1902, on verses of a poem by Anna de Noailles.
At age seventeen, entering the Paris Conservatory, he attended the courses of
Xavier Leroux and Georges Caussade. He wrote at that time his first series of
songs (French Mélodies), and a delightful Pastorale de Noël (1904), which he conceived "in a single night". He used his free time to test
his abilities: he became cellist at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater, then, in 1909,
after his period of military service, pianist for the cabaret Les Quat’Z’Arts,
where he signed several popular-style songs of his under the pseudonym Paul
Apria. He composed an elegant Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, a Sonata for violin and piano, and made acquaintance with Jean Jobert, who
became his publisher beginning in 1912.
The Prix de Rome and the war
A first prize in harmony and a second prize in counterpoint permitted him to
enter the contest for the Prix de Rome in 1910. His cantata Acis et Galatée won him the second Grand Prix as well as the esteem of Gabriel Fauré.
In the following year, in November 1911, he obtained the first Grand Prix, with
the cantata Yanitza, by an unanimous jury presided over by Camille Saint-Saëns.
Paul Paray recalled his stay at the Villa Medici, rudely interrupted by the
war, as the happiest period of his life. At Rome, he wrote the orchestral suite Adonis troublé (which was later to
become the ballet music Artémis troublée,
with a libretto and scenic designs by Léon
Bakst, in April 1922 at the Paris Opera), several pieces for piano, a Nocturne for violin and piano, and some new Mélodies on texts of Théophile
Gautier, Jean Aicard, Albert Samain and José-Maria
de Hérédia.
He worked for some time on his oratorio Jeanne d’Arc, which would later
be sung in the Rouen Cathedral for the commemorative festivals in May of 1913.
War put a temporary end to this creative work. After two months of combat,
Paul Paray was taken prisoner and sent to the detention camp at Darmstadt.
Refusing any musical association with the Germans, he submitted to a harsh
four-year period of captivity, while developing the astonishing ability to
compose music without the aid of an instrument, conceiving and formulating all
the musical details mentally which he would later transcribe on paper in a
single stroke, without erasure. His String Quartet, completed at Le Tréport,
more somber and stark, seems to testify to his discovery of the tragic element
of life at this time.
The rise of the young orchestral conductor
During the year 1919, pressed by economic necessity, he agreed to conduct the
orchestra of the Cauterets Casino, and there he had a decisive experience: the
pianist proved that he had "an arm", a talent for forming an orchestra, an experience of
which the greatest composers have often been deprived. From his first concert in
Paris, on 29 Feb. 1920, the public accorded an enthusiastic welcome to the
young conductor (in a program of Wagner, Berlioz, Chabrier, Duparc and Debussy)
who was soon named co-conductor with Camille Chevillard, then director of the
Lamoureux Orchestra.
Paul Paray devoted himself fervently to the task of
interpretation. His vast culture and prodigious musical memory permitted him to
excel in the classical orchestral repertory, whether it be German, French or
Russian, and to conduct the numerous premiers his contemporaries asked of him:
those of Gabriel Fauré, Pierre de Bréville,
Gabriel Pierné, Maurice Ravel, Florent
Schmitt, Albert Roussel, André Caplet,
Marcel Dupré, Claude Delvincourt, Jacques
Ibert, and Maurice Duruflé, among others. He
also introduced to the Parisian public several new instrumentalists of
exceptional talent, such as violonist Jascha Heifetz (in February 1921) and the young
prodigy Yehudi Menuhin (in February 1927).
In 1928, he surrendered his baton at the Lamoureux to Albert Wolff, and
conducted in succession, and sometimes simultaneously, the orchestras of the Opéra
of Monte-Carlo, the Casino de Vichy, the Concerts Colonne, and the Paris Opera,
where he mounted several Wagner cycles.
Works of his mature years
Yet orchestral conducting did not
exhaust all his energies. He composed some perfectly masterful works of an
astonishing vigor, whose Apollonian esthetic and lyrical phrases never yielded
to atonality or serialism:
- The Mass for the fifth centenary of the death of Joan of Arc, first
performed at Rouen in May 1931, with the finest instrumentalists of the
Lamoureux, Colonne and Conservatory orchestras, which prompted the enthusiasm of
Florent Schmitt: "The Mass of Joan of Arc is a work of an intensity and a
loftiness that lifts it straight to the heights";
- The First Symphony in C, premiered in March 1935 at the Concerts
Colonne, where orchestral skill is put at the service of an "optimism that all
ironies and skepticisms could not suppress";
- The Second Symphony in A, first given at the Châtelet
in April 1940, by turns meditative, nostalgic, tumultuous and serene, conceived
during long promenades along the cliffs of Le Tréport,
and composed a short time after the death of his father, Auguste Paray.
War once again interrupted the musical activity of Paul Paray, who resigned
leadership of the Concerts Colonne and left Paris in October 1940 when the
authorities of the occupation demanded from him the names of Jewish musicians,
and a change of name for the orchestra. He exiled himself to Marseille, and later to Monaco after the invasion of the 'free zone'. He
was offered the post of co-director and principal conductor of the Monte-Carlo Opera. During this dark period, he joined to his orchestra several Jewish musicians whose lives were threatened in France.
Forced to limit the frequency of his public concerts, Paul Paray availed himself of the opportunity to transform certain of his
earlier works:
- he expanded his String Quartet into a String Symphony, which
he directed in Monte-Carlo in March 1944;
- he orchestrated ten or so of his Mélodies,
the series of which he completed in 1921 with settings of poems by Jean Lahor.
The international career
Soon after this, at the time of the Liberation, absorbed by intense
programming at the Colonne Orchestra, by traveling about Europe conducting,
notably the Vienna Philharmonic, by creating the new Israël Philharmonic Orchestra, and by the concerts that he gave as guest
conductor of the world’s greatest ensembles, Paul Paray ceased his activity as a
composer.
He had already made a deep impression in the United States in 1939 at
the head of the New York Philharmonic, and had refused the post of co-director,
at Toscanini’s side, of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. In 1951, at the end of a
prestigious series of concerts with the orchestras of Boston, New York,
Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, he accepted to rebuild the
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which, during an eleven year tenure, he was to mold
into the ‘first French orchestra of the USA.’
At the same time, he conducted
numerous premiers, in close collaboration with some American composers. To those
who expressed surprise that he had abandoned musical composition, he responded
that although "nothing can equal the joy of creating", his work of interpreting,
often enriched with a fruitful dialogue with the composers, gave him "a palpable
and very real satisfaction, more direct than composition, even if it is
ephemeral". It was in Detroit that Paul Paray made his most beautiful
recordings, aided by the new "Living Presence" technique of Mercury Records (today some of them are re-edited in SACD).
An indefatigable guest conductor
When he was seventy-six years old in 1962, he undertook the last phase of
his career, that of guest conductor. Always preceded by his reputation as a
‘builder of orchestras’, he was regularly invited by the greatest symphonic
ensembles, in the United States, France, Israel, and on every continent. It was
at Monte-Carlo that death overtook him, the tenth of October 1979, shortly
following a concert with his old friend Yehudi Menuhin, just at the time he was
preparing three new programs with the Orchestre de Paris.
Paul Paray was a member of the French Institute, Academy of Fine Arts, Grand-Croix of the
Legion of Honor, Honorary Citizen of Monaco and Detroit.
Text by Jean Cabon
* The new publication of the complete Paul Paray’s works, now collected by Editions Jobert, Paris, owes much to the research of Jean-Philippe Mousnier (Paul Paray, L’Harmattan Publishers, 1998) and to the admirable work of analysis and transcription of the manuscripts accomplished since 1999 by an American musician, the Reverend Eduard Perrone, who knew the composer-conductor when he presided over the destiny of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Eduard Perrone, pianist and orchestral conductor, is also the driving force behind a complete recording The Works of Paul Paray on CD (in eight volumes), recorded in Detroit and published by the label “Grotto Productions”.
