The brilliant career of Paul Paray the conductor eclipsed somewhat his life as a composer. It is remembered that his direction of the Lamoureux and Colonne orchestras was a model of clarity and elegance, and that he was, after the Second World War, an indefatigable ambassador of French music, in particular on the American continent. His own works, so rich in rhythmic and melodic invention, have now at last been collected and published by Editions Jobert.

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 village of Tréport, in Upper Normandy, the young Paul studied piano with his father, 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 the repertory of French art song, and himself composed Paroles B 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, 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.

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 songs 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 Tréport, more somber and stark, seems to testify to his discovery of the tragic element of life at this time.

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 a talent for forming an orchestra, an experience of which the greatest composers have often been deprived. From his first concert in Paris, on 20 March 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 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. 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 Lamouruex, 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" (Jean-Philippe Mousnier);

- 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 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 Monaco, where he was offered the post of co-director and principal conductor of the Opéra. Forced to limit the frequency of his public concerts after the invasion of the ‘free zone’, he 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.

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, 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.

When he was seventy-five 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 Academy of Fine Arts, Grand Croix of the Legion of Honor, Honorary Citizen of Monaco, Detroit, and several other cities around the world.

Jacques Paray is a nephew of Paul Paray
 

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Le Tréport

Photos supplied by Walter Nones (June 1999)