I resume my diary with joy.
There is so much running through my mind these days!
—Diary entry of June 28, 1934
Diary writing, or journaling as it is sometimes called, has a variety of origins and functions. In part, it evolved from record-keeping as it has existed from ancient times. Instead of a method of accounting for inventory or finances, though, a diary is a way to account for oneself and—its entries being dated—to manage personal time. Parallel to this, journaling has been recommended since ancient times as a spiritual exercise; according to Philippe Lejeune, the technique of examining one’s conscience every night “seems to have come from Pythagoras” in the sixth century BCE. In more modern times, a collection of day-by-day entries of thoughts and events began to serve as a keepsake to be passed down to children and grandchildren as well as a record from which the diarist could revisit earlier stages of their life.
Diaries of public personas, and particularly female musicians of the past, are rarities, also because, as Lejeune has noted, “it is the fate of the great majority of journals to be, at some point, destroyed, either by the authors or their descendants.” From this point of view, survival of even a sporadically-kept diary from Jeanne Demessieux’s days as a Paris Conservatory student (the diary of 1934–1938) and preservation of mere excerpts from her letters from the 1930s, are strokes of good fortune.
The diary of Demessieux’s adolescent years is, in part, confessional in genre. In many entries, to be discussed further below, she does not simply describe events. Instead, Demessieux reveals her soul’s mental turmoil, owns up to feelings such as anger and desire for vengeance, or professes joy. This style of diary had a precursor in the sort of writing that the Medieval church urged upon members of religious communities in preparation for formal confession. Moreover, in nineteenth-century France the Roman Catholic Church strongly encouraged diary writing upon young women as a spiritual practice.
Without meaning to suggest that preparing for confession was Demessieux’s primary motivation for keeping a diary, I note that as a devout Roman Catholic she likely attended confession regularly: on August 20, 1938 she logged an occasion when Father de la Motte heard her confession in his office. She then noted, “Afterwards, we talked from the heart. I hide none of my thoughts from him, and he does the same: he is my spiritual advisor.”
Three years earlier, on June 2, 1935, Demessieux had affirmed the following in her diary: “My only confidant is my piano. When I speak to it, it understands and it tells me so; I am immediately soothed, but not consoled.” In other words, even though the diary was a non-judgmental companion of sorts with which to share her innermost feelings, it was not Demessieux’s only outlet. Piano playing evidently allowed her to express her tribulations and joys that were too profound to express in words for a teenager. At the same time, dialogues with Father de la Motte, like entries in her diary, provided opportunities to put into words thoughts and feelings that would otherwise have remained nebulous. However, only Demessieux’s diary entries left permanent traces that she could return to, and that modern readers can try to understand—from their own distant and varied perspectives.
In contrast, Demessieux’s letters from the 1930s serve a different purpose and thereby complement her diary. They were always intended to be read by someone else (her sister Yolande, in most cases). They deal mostly with the writer’s outward life, and recount her activities in a more consistently positive way than the diary does.
Taken together, Demessieux’s earliest self-writings divulge the following:
1) An outward life: what it was like in the 1930s for one adolescent girl from the south of France to study music at the Paris Conservatory.
2) An inward life: impassioned thoughts and feelings of a young female whose public persona as an adult would be that of cool and detached woman of the world.
3) A critical thinker: inciteful observations about her environment in southern France, and of people in Paris, that are beyond her years.
4) A person creating her identity: her earliest writings as a teenager establish who she felt herself to be.
Both the letters and diary feature a narrating “I” that creates the narrated “I,” thereby shaping the character of the young Jeanne Demessieux. Before a public performance, she was habitually in control of her emotions: “Once there [in the green room], I became very reserved, as I always force myself to be before playing” (June 28, 1934, age 13). In a letter to her sister Yolande, she quietly claimed confidence concerning her performances, “I played as you know your little sister plays” (May 29, 1936, age 15). Demessieux was also ambitious and resolute as a young woman. Explaining to her sibling why she kept up a strenuous schedule of study and practice that worried her mother, young Jeanne wrote, “You know that when I want something, I insist on it” (October 20, 1935, postscript). Less than two months later, she positioned her musical taste above that of the average concert-going Parisian, indicating that she much preferred listening to Beethoven’s Ninth—even from the worst seats—to a warhorse of a grand opera heard from a centre box (December 16, 1935). Statements such as these arguably indicate that Jeanne Demessieux was a musician of serious intent already at a young age.
At the same time, the narrated “I” of Demessieux’s letters and diary revels in jests and sarcasm, as exemplified by:
1) Demessieux’s reference to “that ‘lovely’ little hill” that she ascended when returning home by bicycle (letter of October 11, 1933).
2) Her description of the morning of the 1934 piano competition: “. . . I was reminded to be passionate in the ballade. I responded by opening one eye and yawning my head off. . .” (diary entry of June 28).
3) Her list of the paraphernalia needed for an eighteen-hour-long written examination: “food, thermos, dressing gown, slippers and, of course, the satchel-full of paper with alarm clock, pot of glue, corrector… And last but not least: a deckchair!” (undated letter from summer 1937).
Other statements of the narrating “I” reveal that Demessieux identified as being unlike her classmates and Parisians in general. In a letter to her father from November 17, 1935, she noted: “When I am in class, and another student is playing, I suffer from a violent desire to push him out of the way and take his place to play ‘with fire.’ You see, I’m from the land of the sun” (meaning, from the south of France, unlike most of her classmates). Savouring her summer vacation in the Midi, she hyperbolized in a letter to an unidentified teacher, “I think I’m becoming a countrywoman [paysanne]” (undated; likely from summer 1939).
The narrative formed by the diary and letters is disappointingly uneven, especially to the modern reader. The letters begin in the autumn of 1932 shortly after Jeanne Demessieux’s arrival in Paris on a sunny October day. The motivation for beginning the diary (in a notebook entitled “Memories – Impressions – Diary”) appears to have been a desire to chronicle the momentous day of the June 1934 women’s piano competition.
Both the diary and the letters end abruptly. The diary concludes several weeks prior to the onset of the 1938–1939 academic year with brief entries of trivia; fortunately, letters of September and October 1938 broach some significant topics, to be discussed in more detail below. The surviving letters end on June 2, 1940 with mention that “Paris was bombed for the first time by the Germans,” and that Demessieux was preparing for the upcoming composition competition.
Between beginnings and endings, and even when these two sets of writings are taken together, the sequence of events chronicled is discontinuous. Nevertheless, by tying together separate references to the most prominent of topics discussed by Demessieux, and carefully reading between the lines of her letters and diaries, some larger understandings can be formed.
The interpretations of these self-writings provided below are my own; other present-day readers will necessarily draw their own conclusions. What matters is that because the diaries and letters are elliptical, it is only by engaging deeply with them that a reader can begin to understand what they disclose about one young musician’s experience in 1930s Paris.
“Monsieur Riera remains to be convinced”—Between hope and anger
Scattered among the letters and diary between 1933 and 1935 are references to Demessieux’s thwarted hopes for admittance to Lazare-Lévy’s piano class at the Paris Conservatory. When there was more than one class in an area of study, pupils were frequently accepted to the class of the teacher they had already been studying with; yet this was not the case for Demessieux and piano after her successful audition in the autumn of 1933.
In all likelihood, she was initially refused entry to Lazare-Lévy’s piano class because (as was previously discussed in Chapter 2) his class had already reached the maximum number of students, while Santiago Riera’s had not. And, as was his right, Riera forbade Lazare-Lévy to coach Demessieux privately once she was accepted into his class in the autumn of 1933.
After she had been part of Riera’s class for one year, and in view of her disappointing showing in the 1934 women’s piano competition, the possibility of Demessieux being allowed to transfer from Riera’s to Lazare-Lévy’s class was predicted by the latter’s teaching assistant: “‘Mr Lévy will now have less difficulty taking you in his class. Mr Riera remains to be convinced: that is the most difficult’” (June 29, 1934). That prior to the start of classes in autumn 1934 Lazare-Lévy did try to get Riera’s agreement to this transfer, is suggested by a retrospective diary entry made by Demessieux on January 31, 1935: “. . . the [academic] year began well, except for the disappointment of Mr Lévy’s final response that it is impossible for him to admit me to his class without causing me serious harm.” In other words, should she transfer out of Riera’s class, Demessieux’s progress as a pianist was somehow threatened.
How is this unfolding of events to be understood? It is conceivable in my opinion that, given no politic reason for overriding this regulation, the Paris Conservatory in the 1930s could be so intransigent concerning class size to refuse a student and teacher from choosing one another. It is harder for me to imagine that allowing a student to transfer from one class to another would harm their advancement as a musician. For instance, could a competition jury’s evaluation of a student be influenced by a jury member who was resentful that they had dropped his class? The answer “yes” is plausible because competitors were not anonymous: the printed program gave their surnames, ages, and standing in the previous competition, if any.
Whatever threat had been made, imbalances of power likely also played a role in Demessieux’s hope not being fulfilled—specifically, Riera and Lazare-Lévy’s unequal potential to exert influence, and the Demessieux family’s lack of social connections. Specifically:
1) Riera had taught an advanced piano class since 1913, Lazare-Lévy since only 1923.
2) Riera was fifteen years older than Lazare-Lévy and nearing retirement age; his self-pride would have demanded that his class size be boosted.
3) Lazare-Lévy was only 52 years old in 1934, in demand as a teacher, and of Jewish background at a time when antisemitism was growing in France.
4) Because the Demessieux family did not, in 1934, move in the same circles as sufficiently influential musicians in Paris, Jeanne Demessieux had no one else to pull the necessary strings for her.
As a result, her hope of moving to Lazare-Lévy’s class turned out to be, as she puts it in the diary entry of January 31, 1935, “A poor thread of silk,” while her anger—“a monstrous ocean against a hard rock”—could only be suppressed.
“Opposing personalities” or emotional swings?
At age fourteen, Demessieux wrote in her diary, “Sometimes I would like to take over the world, but I immediately have the opposing wish to close myself in and be impenetrable” (June 2, 1935). A week later she wondered, “Why are there, in my nature, two opposing personalities…? On the one side, passion, on the other, painful or overwhelming sadness” (June 10, 1935).
Trieu-Colleney, who had identified dualities in many areas of Demessieux’s personality and life, took literally the notion of contradictory character traits. She believed that these were born from the opposite temperaments of Demessieux’s parents, Madeleine tending to be emotional and Étienne calm and composed. Trieu-Colleney also described a specific duality in Demessieux’s personality that she had likely recognized during discussion with Yolande, her sister: Jeanne was evidently very sensitive (and, therefore, able to intuit) but also had a need to analyze and rationalize.
This may, possibly, explain a contradiction in Demessieux’s diary entry of June 29, 1934 compared to the previous day’s entry describing the piano competition of June 27. According to what she wrote on June 28, the day after the competition, after hearing the results, Demessieux cried all evening in disappointment. But on June 29, when asked by one of her piano teachers, Lélia Gousseau, if she were satisfied with her Second Mention, Demessieux replied “Oh! Yes, Mademoiselle!” This reply was, perhaps, made simply to appear agreeable in polite company. Another possibility is that in the intervening day Demessieux had analyzed the competition results as a whole and come to the realization that standing third among the Second Mentions was an acceptable showing, in light of many factors, including:
- At 13, Demessieux was one of the youngest competitors, the average age being 20.
- She was in her first year of study at the Conservatory.
- Among her competitors were pianists who had studied there for a number of years and competed as many times before.
- Many of the forty-nine competitors were not mentioned at all in the results.
- It is likely there were quotas as to how many awards could be made in each category.
In other words, a teenager’s initially emotional reaction had given way to sober reflection of a young woman who was trying to behave more like an adult.
But as for the notion of “opposing personalities,” this need not be taken literally: feeling passion one day and sadness the next was, arguably, the result of common adolescent angst being experienced by a normally cheerful, vivacious, and enthusiastic individual. Demessieux’s mood swings can, in fact, be explained with reference to brain chemicals and the functions of different parts of the brain.
First, it is generally acknowledged that the sex hormones which spike during adolescence influence not only physical development but mood and behaviour. Fluctuations in levels of estrogen and testosterone (which are found in differing proportions in both females and males) can cause anxiety, low self-esteem, and social withdrawal, among other symptoms, in previously well-balanced individuals. Another culprit is the brain chemical allopregnanolone, which is released under stress. In adults and children, release of allopregnanolone calms anxiety-producing brain cell activity, thus alleviating the effects of stress. Studies have shown that in adolescents’ brains, particularly those of females, when allopregnanolone is released in response to stress it allows anxiety-producing brain activity to carry on unimpeded.
Second, the prefrontal cortex of the brain—which foresees and weighs possible consequences of behaviour, inhibits inappropriate behaviour, and initiates appropriate behaviour—is not fully developed in an adolescent. As a result, activity in the prefrontal cortex is overbalanced by the more primitive limbic brain, which is the seat of emotions. The limbic system also signals release of stress hormones like cortisol or soothing hormones like oxytocin. The result of this imbalance is more intense emotions, and more frequent and wider changes of emotional state.
More specifically in adolescents, the parts of the limbic system that register signs of social acceptance and rejection are particularly sensitive: every compliment is perceived as acceptance and every slight as rejection. This makes release and withdrawal of hormones more frequent and more intense, which, it may be argued, is the reason why adolescents place a higher value on peer acceptance than adults do. But peer acceptance among classmates averaging age 20 would have been a particular challenge for Demessieux. According to her diary entry of June 28, 1934, despite an age difference of six years, Demessieux had one close friend amongst her fellow students in her piano class, Françoise Labroquère: “We are always together.” However, by making an angry retort to the instructor in class (diary entry of May 11, 1935, to be discussed further below), Demessieux embarrassed her classmates and promptly lost status with them: “Even Françoise avoided my eyes: I was alone.” Weeks later, she still felt disgraced, noting, “Nowadays, everyone shuns me” (June 2, 1935).
Psychologically, the teenage years also involve a surge in the importance of competence-based social status as opposed to one based on size, age, or entitlement at birth. For Demessieux and other adolescents in the 1934 women’s piano competition, to be ranked lower than had been expected not only effectively lowered their status—it also resulted in the withdrawal of pleasant and soothing hormones and a rush of negative emotions. No wonder, then, that at age thirteen Demessieux wrote of this event, “Never has an exam affected me so profoundly as this one” (June 28, 1934).
“He was pushy with, me, as usual”—Tension in the piano class
In a letter of February 21, 1934 to her sister Yolande, Demessieux wrote concerning a piano class with Riera, “He was pushy with me, as usual.” Trieu-Colleney was the first to draw attention to Demessieux’s difficult relationship with her principal piano teacher at the Conservatory. She attributes the discord between them to “differing artistic conceptions”—without specifying this difference—combined with their both being native to southern climes. But then, Riera was not known for cultivating rapport with his students. When Demessieux was ranked lower than had been expected at the 1934 piano competition, he had only offhand remarks, not reassurance, for her (diary entry of June 28, 1934). Indeed, Riera may well have treated his entire class of students appallingly on occasion, as Demessieux described in her diary entry of May 11, 1935:
My classmates were merry; they were laughing. Riera arrived, in a bad mood. First, we received a whopping outburst; it seems this gentleman believed himself in a henhouse, which truly upset us. We entered and the class commenced . . . we played the Debussy étude. Abusive words, curses, with no attempt to avoid being offensive.
Or had Demessieux’s attempts to get out of his class possibly cemented in Riera a belief that she haughtily regarded herself as above his level of teaching? This, it may be argued, could have predisposed him to single her out when he needed another scapegoat on whom to release his temper, as when, according to the same diary entry, he said angrily,
“Her, the one who’s been day-dreaming over there: the last time [too] she stood there (sniggering) with no pencil to mark the fingering I indicated; doubtless, she is already an expert’ (furious) She listens to nothing; no, you are undisciplined, you know it all too well.”
Rather than accepting this punishment for having appeared not to be paying attention, Demessieux impulsively fired back a retort, concluding with, “I’ve had enough of this!” Judging from this response, only Demessieux’s limbic brain seemed to be activated: she spoke emotionally, as is typical of adolescents in situations of high anxiety, and she acted out her anger without considering the consequences. Worse, the immediate consequence was that she lost any chance of receiving the sympathy of her classmates.
Use of reason, I suggest, would have dictated that the class instructor was of a higher status and, whatever his behaviour, was to be deferred to. A mature response (governed by the prefrontal cortex) might have been to apologize briefly right then for appearing inattentive, and after the class calmly explain one’s actions to the instructor. A very brief diary entry two weeks later suggests to me that the next time Demessieux was the object of Riera’s ire, she refrained from answering him back: “Can inner dramas be commented upon? Yesterday, I was the fitting object of one of these dramas” (May 26, 1935).
Past the spring of 1935, the diary does not refer to experiences in the piano class, though Demessieux continued in it. I can only speculate that she learned over time to accept her teacher as always ranking higher, whatever he did or said, and that feeling rapport with him was not necessary to benefiting from the class. On February 6, 1937 Demessieux was able to write to Yolande, “The piano class, at the moment, is close to being a triumphant success.”
“My sincerest thanks for the advice”—Career planning (1938)
One of the issues that occupied Demessieux in 1938, which neither the diary nor letters brings to a satisfying conclusion, is her plan to develop a career as a concert pianist. Following Demessieux’s First Prize in piano that year, she was no longer eligible to participate in a Paris Conservatory piano class. As a result, her performance opportunities at the Conservatory became limited to playing student composers’ works for juries.
Judging from the biographies of twentieth-century concert pianists, a First Prize, even from France’s national Conservatory, was not in itself a sufficient launching point for a successful performing career. More common in the twentieth century was to go on to broaden one’s education. For instance, one could study with another teacher who would impart a different perspective on performing the canon of piano literature, introduce piano repertoire not previously studied, and serve as a mentor. Or one could work with a contemporary composer, becoming the performer of newly composed music. Magda Tagliaferro (b. 1893), for example, who earned a First Prize in piano at the Conservatory in 1907, went on to study with Alfred Cortot for three or four years. While a student at the Conservatory, Tagliaferro had managed to snag the attention of the celebrated composer Fauré with whom she took lessons in interpretation of his piano works; this led to her occasionally premiering works by Fauré. Another Conservatory laureate, Monique Haas (b. 1909), after her First Prize in piano (1927), studied in Switzerland with Rudolf Serkin and in Paris with Robert Casadesus. Yvonne Loriod (b. 1924; First Prize in piano, 1943) famously allied herself with Olivier Messiaen; she had met him in 1941 when participating in one of his Paris Conservatory classes and became the chief interpreter of his piano works.
In ways such as these, a career as a concert pianist might also have been built up for Jeanne Demessieux. She needed coaches and mentors who would recommend to her small, then gradually larger, opportunities to perform—in Paris, in France, and then all over Europe. As well, seeking out an ongoing position as a piano accompanist in Paris would, arguably, have brought Demessieux to the attention of more concert organizers.
Faint traces of her attempts to launch a career as a concert pianist are evident in her letters and diary entries. Writing to Magda Tagliaferro from the Midi on July 21, 1938, Demessieux refers to a concert to take place in Montpellier, seemingly planned in coordination with Montpellier Conservatory director Maurice Le Boucher: “I think looking forward to this concert will be very beneficial for me; it will make up for the training in class that I will so dearly miss next year.” But nothing is known about how this concert was received, let alone that it led to other concerts. A long and retrospective diary entry of August 16, 1938 ends with the statement, “I received a letter from the impresario Alfred Lyon asking me for an interview,” while a draft of her July 22 reply to Lyon agrees to set up a meeting with him when she returns to Paris in August. That same day, Demessieux wrote to Tagliaferro, enclosing a copy of Lyon’s letter and asking for her teacher’s advice. She explained, “I do not wish to become involved in anything whatsoever without your consent” and then emphasized that “it would be a joy to be guided by you at the start of my career.” Tagliaferro’s reply to this letter does not survive, but Demessieux’s August 11, 1938 response to the reply begins as follows:
My sincerest thanks for the advice you have given me. I now understand the situation and will take serious action in the ways you have indicated to me. When I have news for you, I will make a point of writing to you.
One facet of the “situation” Tagliaferro outlined to Demessieux was likely her busy international career as a performer, which was making it difficult enough just for Tagliaferro to teach her piano class at the Conservatory. Consequently, she would have foreseen that upon returning to Paris in autumn 1938, she would have little time to coach or mentor Demessieux.
With no further reference in surviving documents to the “serious action” Demessieux was willing to undertake, it is impossible to know what Tagliaferro’s advice to Demessieux had been. Presumably, she did not outright refuse to give her student further coaching, as indicated by a statement in a letter that Demessieux drafted in October 1938: “I have put myself back to work very seriously, thinking that you must be satisfied when you hear me again upon [your] return.” Tellingly, nothing in the diary or subsequent correspondence suggests that they ever met again. Even Trieu-Colleney refers only to “their faithful friendship supported by occasional but continual correspondence.”
With regard to Demessieux continuing piano study, there is no doubt that her family had little in the way of financial resources to fund private lessons or to pay for further piano study, for example, at Paris’s École normal de musique where Cortot then taught. Of course, Demessieux could have begun earning more money herself from piano teaching, or by taking a piano accompanying position. But during the academic year 1938–1939 (the year her diary-writing lapsed) she took two time-intensive Conservatory classes—the organ class to which she had just been admitted as well as the fugue class in which she had a second opportunity to aim for a First Prize. Choosing to focus on her academic studies would have been an excellent reason not to take more piano students. If Demessieux continued to practice piano seriously after October 1938, readying herself to participate, for example, in open masterclasses, there is no indication of this in extant letters.
As for the interview with concert agent Alfred Lyon that was to be set up in August 1938, it seems never to have taken place. As far as piano performances are concerned, surviving letters of 1938–1940 make only one mention of Demessieux appearing as a pianist: this was in a two-piano rendition of a cantata entered for the 1939 Rome competition (letter of July 2, 1939). Granted, the letters that survive are principally those from which Trieu-Colleney quoted. But if Demessieux had ever reported in a letter to her sister a performance before a wider public than the Rome prize audience, this would surely have found a place among the excerpts Trieu-Colleney included in her Demessieux biography. As a result, readers are left wondering why, in the two years following her First Prize, she appears to have accomplished nothing towards forging a career as a pianist.
“As a token of favour”—Social acceptance (1937–1939)
An important theme running through Demessieux’s letters and diary during the period 1937–1939 is perception of her rising status in the eyes of her Paris teachers. After a private organ lesson with Marcel Dupré in early 1937 she wrote to Yolande, “It appears I have made immense progress” (February 6, 1937). Though only in her first year in a harmony class in 1936–1937, Demessieux was also able to report that her teacher “Jean Gallon was delighted; he loaned me the Honour Book as a token of favour” (February 14, 1937).
Excelling in her studies paved the way for social relationships with some of the eminent musicians who were her teachers, as is evident from surviving correspondence. Her July 21, 1938 letter from the Midi to Tagliaferro abounds in affection. Near the beginning is this fulsome declaration:
. . . what is even more comforting is the wish that I am making with all my heart that the summer vacation permits you complete respite from the strains and stresses of the year.
And near the end, Demessieux confesses:
I think of you every day . . .
In fact, this letter confides her innermost feelings, as in,
You will be happy to note the sense of well-being I have here,
and
the life I lead, amidst a well-loved countryside liberates my spirit . . .
Another letter by Demessieux from the Midi, drafted on an unspecified date in July 1939 to Marcel Dupré (who had left on an overseas concert tour in June), similarly indicates an established bond of friendship:
How the days have been since your departure! When I think of the long silence that followed, I am sorry and embarrassed. I hope that you will forgive my apparent negligence that is so inconsistent with my feelings.
In that same letter to Dupré, Demessieux imparts the news of her First Prize in fugue—“I cannot help but believe that you will share a bit of my joy”—and, promising that her letter will not be long, closes with a gracious formula: “Please accept my respectful admiration and my devotion.”
Letters and a diary entry from the late 1930s provide an especially full picture of Demessieux’s friendship with her counterpoint teacher Noël Gallon and his wife. She addresses them both in a letter from the Midi dated July 19, 1938. After an opening expressing her affection, Demessieux writes, “But I know that I no longer have need of polite formulas: your generosity is too sincere for me to give back so little.” That their relationship had gone beyond “polite formulas” arguably suggests that Demessieux knew the Gallons well from past social encounters. In keeping with this, that same letter mentions people with whom they were mutually acquainted: Demessieux expresses wishes for the Gallons’ health and happiness as well as for that of a certain Mme Espinasse. She then includes greetings from her own family: “My parents and Yolande have tasked me with expressing to you their most sincere friendship and the joy they will feel at seeing you again in August.”
The closeness of Demessieux’s social relationship with Noël and Mme Gallon is borne out further by her diary entry of August 25, 1938. Evidently, she dined at their home and was received “as informally as if I were their daughter.” The brief account continues with, “After the meal, we made music for nearly two hours.” Demessieux then lists her own compositions that she played, closing with “One of the most beautiful days of my life!” As a child of a lower middleclass family, the sixteen-year-old Jeanne Demessieux must have been proud to be accepted into the bosom of a very cultured, upper middleclass family.
That Noël Gallon also paid compliments on her musical compositions on that occasion was equally important to Demessieux, judging from a September 24, 1938 letter to Yolande:
He found my prelude “perfect,” and the general idea handled very well. I’ll not hide from you (not to boast, but to please you) that he was even moved… That’s how well he understands my music!
Social acceptance into higher echelons would, incidentally, play an especially prominent part in Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946, as will be described in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 6.
“The poetry of the region where I was born”—Geographical identity
Demessieux’s most fervent expressions of joy in her diary of 1934–1938 do not describe musical performances, but her homeland, the Occitanie region of southern France. In these portrayals, she waxes lyrical. One such passage was written on October 27, 1935 in Paris, during a moment of yearning. It is arguably characteristic of Demessieux’s ability to use metaphor, symbol, and rhythm to create an elevated plane of thought:
How moving are the things of which one has been deprived, this air whose salt makes the nostrils quiver, this wind whose touch is as sweet as a mother’s caress of one’s hair? Provence, Camargue, Languedoc!… These names conjure up for me a single intimate scene whose image is engraved in my memory. A great avenue of plane trees at whose feet wild grass pushes up, filled with crickets and dragonflies. The path is strewn with gravel.
Similarly poetic is her fanciful description from August 16, 1938 that refers to a late-evening encounter with the town walls of Aigues-Mortes, where she and her parents vacationed. Knowing some of the walls’ history and some of the ancient Provençal language, Demessieux let her imagination roam:
Such romantic prose by a teenager makes it easy to imagine that Demessieux expected that one day someone else, perhaps Yolande or another relative, would read this diary. Equally possible is that she was not writing for posterity, but simply delighted in being creative in words, just as she was in music.
“An expression I shall never forget”—The gift of observation
Following the description of a visit to the home of Noël Gallon mentioned above, Demessieux’s diary entry of August 25, 1938 recounts an incident that occurred earlier that evening as she was leaving church with her grandmother:
. . . a child of about eight who is in the choir, and whom I’ve often noticed for his gentleness, passed by us with his mother. I leaned towards Grandmother and said to her, “He’s so sweet, that little one!”
Demessieux then repeated her remark a little louder, which was heard by the boy’s mother. At that,
… his mother turned and her face, amid her humble clothes, took on an expression I shall never forget. It was as if an involuntary feeling overcame her shyness and she showed a hint of a timid smile that greatly resembled her son’s.
Seventeen-year-old Demessieux’s remark about the child, specifically his gentleness and sweetness, strikes me as typical of an adolescent girl. Her observation concerning the mother shows remarkable insight, however. As well as capturing the woman’s demeanor, Demessieux registered from her facial expression a change in her innermost feelings, from insecurity to willingness to acknowledge the words of a stranger. Moreover, even though that day Demessieux had the memorable visit to the Gallons to report on as well, she was sufficiently struck by her detection of the woman’s “involuntary feeling” to record the incident in her diary.
Demessieux also described people acting in an involuntary way in her diary entry of September 6, 1936. Being in a crowd gathered at Place de l’Étoile in Paris to see a procession of soldiers pass by, she observed people she assumed were “former soldiers and elderly patriots.” As the French flag passed by, they removed their hats “to salute our homeland” in what Demessieux felt to be a sincere gesture. At the same moment, another action—people raising their arms and stretching out their hands “like a supreme and solemn oath”—spread through the crowd of onlookers. This movement and its spreading were so powerful that a teenage Jeanne, too, was tempted to reach out her hand as if “to protect the flag . . . But I immediately took control of myself.”
The diary entry then continues with a series of existential questions, specifically, how to know what is true and what is not, which actions are good, and which, though seemingly good, may actually be cursed (maudit). And why, Demessieux wondered, would “a man” act against his will? The diary entry concludes with a brief answer to the last question: “Weakness, always, even among the strongest.”
In other words, at age fifteen Demessieux seemed already to have discerned the notion of herd mentality—people, swept along by a crowd, illogically acting in a way they would not have acted when alone, as if powerless to assert their own will. Therefore, it appears that, just as her musicianship matched that of classmates five and six years older, in ability to pose philosophical questions, too, Demessieux in her mid-teens was a thinker beyond her years.
In the foregoing commentary, I have treated Demessieux’s diary and letters of 1932–1940 in a variety of ways. Some passages have been understood in a forthright fashion by pointing out that the adolescent Demessieux was a serious musician, hard worker, and confident performer; a perceptive thinker of intelligence, spirit, and wit; a young woman who delighted in her friendships and who identified strongly with the Midi. The trials and tribulations to which she confesses—apparent opposing personalities and an outburst in Riera’s class that caused her to lose face with her classmates—I have interpreted through the lens of what modern science attributes to the hormonal imbalances and still-developing brain of an adolescent. I acknowledge two of the issues raised in Demessieux’s self-writings to be open-ended: how she succeeded in carrying on in Riera’s class, and what became of her plans for developing a career as a concert pianist.
In contrast, Demessieux’s next diary—which covers the six years from December 1940 to December 1946—charts a very detailed career path, and largely refrains from recording personal feelings. It also differs from the earlier diary by devoting many pages to the actions and words of another person, Marcel Dupré. To provide a context for these, Chapter 6 will sketch the life of Demessieux’s teacher and mentor, and Chapter 7 will describe the historical conflict between Dupré and an opposing faction in the Paris organ world.
NOTES:
31 The close friendship between the Demessieux and Dupré families that developed in the 1940s is one of the subjects of the diary of 1940–1946.
I resume my diary with joy.
There is so much running through my mind these days!
—Diary entry of June 28, 1934
Diary writing, or journaling as it is sometimes called, has a variety of origins and functions. In part, it evolved from record-keeping as it has existed from ancient times.1 Instead of a method of accounting for inventory or finances, though, a diary is a way to account for oneself and—its entries being dated—to manage personal time.2 Parallel to this, journaling has been recommended since ancient times as a spiritual exercise; according to Philippe Lejeune, the technique of examining one’s conscience every night “seems to have come from Pythagoras” in the sixth century BCE.3 In more modern times, a collection of day-by-day entries of thoughts and events began to serve as a keepsake to be passed down to children and grandchildren as well as a record from which the diarist could revisit earlier stages of their life.4
Diaries of public personas, and particularly female musicians of the past, are rarities, also because, as Lejeune has noted, “it is the fate of the great majority of journals to be, at some point, destroyed, either by the authors or their descendants.”5 From this point of view, survival of even a sporadically-kept diary from Jeanne Demessieux’s days as a Paris Conservatory student (the diary of 1934–1938) and preservation of mere excerpts from her letters from the 1930s, are strokes of good fortune.
The diary of Demessieux’s adolescent years is, in part, confessional in genre.6 In many entries, to be discussed further below, she does not simply describe events. Instead, Demessieux reveals her soul’s mental turmoil, owns up to feelings such as anger and desire for vengeance, or professes joy. This style of diary had a precursor in the sort of writing that the Medieval church urged upon members of religious communities in preparation for formal confession.7 Moreover, in nineteenth-century France the Roman Catholic Church strongly encouraged diary writing upon young women as a spiritual practice.8
Without meaning to suggest that preparing for confession was Demessieux’s primary motivation for keeping a diary, I note that as a devout Roman Catholic she likely attended confession regularly: on August 20, 1938 she logged an occasion when Father de la Motte heard her confession in his office. She then noted, “Afterwards, we talked from the heart. I hide none of my thoughts from him, and he does the same: he is my spiritual advisor.”
Three years earlier, on June 2, 1935, Demessieux had affirmed the following in her diary: “My only confidant is my piano. When I speak to it, it understands and it tells me so; I am immediately soothed, but not consoled.” In other words, even though the diary was a non-judgmental companion of sorts with which to share her innermost feelings, it was not Demessieux’s only outlet. Piano playing evidently allowed her to express her tribulations and joys that were too profound to express in words for a teenager. At the same time, dialogues with Father de la Motte, like entries in her diary, provided opportunities to put into words thoughts and feelings that would otherwise have remained nebulous. However, only Demessieux’s diary entries left permanent traces that she could return to, and that modern readers can try to understand—from their own distant and varied perspectives.
In contrast, Demessieux’s letters from the 1930s serve a different purpose and thereby complement her diary. They were always intended to be read by someone else (her sister Yolande, in most cases). They deal mostly with the writer’s outward life, and recount her activities in a more consistently positive way than the diary does.
Taken together, Demessieux’s earliest self-writings divulge the following:
1) An outward life: what it was like in the 1930s for one adolescent girl from the south of France to study music at the Paris Conservatory.
2) An inward life: impassioned thoughts and feelings of a young female whose public persona as an adult would be that of cool and detached woman of the world.
3) A critical thinker: inciteful observations about her environment in southern France, and of people in Paris, that are beyond her years.
4) A person creating her identity: her earliest writings as a teenager establish who she felt herself to be.
Both the letters and diary feature a narrating “I” that creates the narrated “I,” thereby shaping the character of the young Jeanne Demessieux.9 Before a public performance, she was habitually in control of her emotions: “Once there [in the green room], I became very reserved, as I always force myself to be before playing” (June 28, 1934, age 13). In a letter to her sister Yolande, she quietly claimed confidence concerning her performances, “I played as you know your little sister plays” (May 29, 1936, age 15). Demessieux was also ambitious and resolute as a young woman. Explaining to her sibling why she kept up a strenuous schedule of study and practice that worried her mother, young Jeanne wrote, “You know that when I want something, I insist on it” (October 20, 1935, postscript). Less than two months later, she positioned her musical taste above that of the average concert-going Parisian, indicating that she much preferred listening to Beethoven’s Ninth—even from the worst seats—to a warhorse of a grand opera heard from a centre box (December 16, 1935). Statements such as these arguably indicate that Jeanne Demessieux was a musician of serious intent already at a young age.
At the same time, the narrated “I” of Demessieux’s letters and diary revels in jests and sarcasm, as exemplified by:
1) Demessieux’s reference to “that ‘lovely’ little hill” that she ascended when returning home by bicycle (letter of October 11, 1933).
2) Her description of the morning of the 1934 piano competition: “. . . I was reminded to be passionate in the ballade. I responded by opening one eye and yawning my head off. . .” (diary entry of June 28).
3) Her list of the paraphernalia needed for an eighteen-hour-long written examination: “food, thermos, dressing gown, slippers and, of course, the satchel-full of paper with alarm clock, pot of glue, corrector… And last but not least: a deckchair!” (undated letter from summer 1937).
Other statements of the narrating “I” reveal that Demessieux identified as being unlike her classmates and Parisians in general. In a letter to her father from November 17, 1935, she noted: “When I am in class, and another student is playing, I suffer from a violent desire to push him out of the way and take his place to play ‘with fire.’ You see, I’m from the land of the sun” (meaning, from the south of France, unlike most of her classmates). Savouring her summer vacation in the Midi, she hyperbolized in a letter to an unidentified teacher, “I think I’m becoming a countrywoman [paysanne]” (undated; likely from summer 1939).
The narrative formed by the diary and letters is disappointingly uneven, especially to the modern reader. The letters begin in the autumn of 1932 shortly after Jeanne Demessieux’s arrival in Paris on a sunny October day. The motivation for beginning the diary (in a notebook entitled “Memories – Impressions – Diary”) appears to have been a desire to chronicle the momentous day of the June 1934 women’s piano competition.
Both the diary and the letters end abruptly. The diary concludes several weeks prior to the onset of the 1938–1939 academic year with brief entries of trivia; fortunately, letters of September and October 1938 broach some significant topics, to be discussed in more detail below. The surviving letters end on June 2, 1940 with mention that “Paris was bombed for the first time by the Germans,” and that Demessieux was preparing for the upcoming composition competition.
Between beginnings and endings, and even when these two sets of writings are taken together, the sequence of events chronicled is discontinuous. Nevertheless, by tying together separate references to the most prominent of topics discussed by Demessieux, and carefully reading between the lines of her letters and diaries, some larger understandings can be formed.10
The interpretations of these self-writings provided below are my own; other present-day readers will necessarily draw their own conclusions. What matters is that because the diaries and letters are elliptical, it is only by engaging deeply with them that a reader can begin to understand what they disclose about one young musician’s experience in 1930s Paris.
“Monsieur Riera remains to be convinced”—Between hope and anger
Scattered among the letters and diary between 1933 and 1935 are references to Demessieux’s thwarted hopes for admittance to Lazare-Lévy’s piano class at the Paris Conservatory. When there was more than one class in an area of study, pupils were frequently accepted to the class of the teacher they had already been studying with; yet this was not the case for Demessieux and piano after her successful audition in the autumn of 1933.
In all likelihood, she was initially refused entry to Lazare-Lévy’s piano class because (as was previously discussed in Chapter 2) his class had already reached the maximum number of students, while Santiago Riera’s had not. And, as was his right, Riera forbade Lazare-Lévy to coach Demessieux privately once she was accepted into his class in the autumn of 1933.11
After she had been part of Riera’s class for one year, and in view of her disappointing showing in the 1934 women’s piano competition, the possibility of Demessieux being allowed to transfer from Riera’s to Lazare-Lévy’s class was predicted by the latter’s teaching assistant: “‘Mr Lévy will now have less difficulty taking you in his class. Mr Riera remains to be convinced: that is the most difficult’” (June 29, 1934). That prior to the start of classes in autumn 1934 Lazare-Lévy did try to get Riera’s agreement to this transfer, is suggested by a retrospective diary entry made by Demessieux on January 31, 1935: “. . . the [academic] year began well, except for the disappointment of Mr Lévy’s final response that it is impossible for him to admit me to his class without causing me serious harm.” In other words, should she transfer out of Riera’s class, Demessieux’s progress as a pianist was somehow threatened.
How is this unfolding of events to be understood? It is conceivable in my opinion that, given no politic reason for overriding this regulation, the Paris Conservatory in the 1930s could be so intransigent concerning class size to refuse a student and teacher from choosing one another. It is harder for me to imagine that allowing a student to transfer from one class to another would harm their advancement as a musician. For instance, could a competition jury’s evaluation of a student be influenced by a jury member who was resentful that they had dropped his class? The answer “yes” is plausible because competitors were not anonymous: the printed program gave their surnames, ages, and standing in the previous competition, if any.
Whatever threat had been made, imbalances of power likely also played a role in Demessieux’s hope not being fulfilled—specifically, Riera and Lazare-Lévy’s unequal potential to exert influence, and the Demessieux family’s lack of social connections. Specifically:
1) Riera had taught an advanced piano class since 1913, Lazare-Lévy since only 1923.
2) Riera was fifteen years older than Lazare-Lévy and nearing retirement age; his self-pride would have demanded that his class size be boosted.
3) Lazare-Lévy was only 52 years old in 1934, in demand as a teacher, and of Jewish background at a time when antisemitism was growing in France.
4) Because the Demessieux family did not, in 1934, move in the same circles as sufficiently influential musicians in Paris, Jeanne Demessieux had no one else to pull the necessary strings for her.
As a result, her hope of moving to Lazare-Lévy’s class turned out to be, as she puts it in the diary entry of January 31, 1935, “A poor thread of silk,” while her anger—“a monstrous ocean against a hard rock”—could only be suppressed.
“Opposing personalities” or emotional swings?
At age fourteen, Demessieux wrote in her diary, “Sometimes I would like to take over the world, but I immediately have the opposing wish to close myself in and be impenetrable” (June 2, 1935). A week later she wondered, “Why are there, in my nature, two opposing personalities…? On the one side, passion, on the other, painful or overwhelming sadness” (June 10, 1935).
Trieu-Colleney, who had identified dualities in many areas of Demessieux’s personality and life, took literally the notion of contradictory character traits.12 She believed that these were born from the opposite temperaments of Demessieux’s parents, Madeleine tending to be emotional and Étienne calm and composed. Trieu-Colleney also described a specific duality in Demessieux’s personality that she had likely recognized during discussion with Yolande, her sister: Jeanne was evidently very sensitive (and, therefore, able to intuit) but also had a need to analyze and rationalize.13
This may, possibly, explain a contradiction in Demessieux’s diary entry of June 29, 1934 compared to the previous day’s entry describing the piano competition of June 27. According to what she wrote on June 28, the day after the competition, after hearing the results, Demessieux cried all evening in disappointment. But on June 29, when asked by one of her piano teachers, Lélia Gousseau, if she were satisfied with her Second Mention, Demessieux replied “Oh! Yes, Mademoiselle!” This reply was, perhaps, made simply to appear agreeable in polite company. Another possibility is that in the intervening day Demessieux had analyzed the competition results as a whole and come to the realization that standing third among the Second Mentions was an acceptable showing, in light of many factors, including:
In other words, a teenager’s initially emotional reaction had given way to sober reflection of a young woman who was trying to behave more like an adult.
But as for the notion of “opposing personalities,” this need not be taken literally: feeling passion one day and sadness the next was, arguably, the result of common adolescent angst being experienced by a normally cheerful, vivacious, and enthusiastic individual. Demessieux’s mood swings can, in fact, be explained with reference to brain chemicals and the functions of different parts of the brain.
First, it is generally acknowledged that the sex hormones which spike during adolescence influence not only physical development but mood and behaviour. Fluctuations in levels of estrogen and testosterone (which are found in differing proportions in both females and males) can cause anxiety, low self-esteem, and social withdrawal, among other symptoms, in previously well-balanced individuals.14 Another culprit is the brain chemical allopregnanolone, which is released under stress. In adults and children, release of allopregnanolone calms anxiety-producing brain cell activity, thus alleviating the effects of stress. Studies have shown that in adolescents’ brains, particularly those of females, when allopregnanolone is released in response to stress it allows anxiety-producing brain activity to carry on unimpeded.15
Second, the prefrontal cortex of the brain—which foresees and weighs possible consequences of behaviour, inhibits inappropriate behaviour, and initiates appropriate behaviour—is not fully developed in an adolescent.16 As a result, activity in the prefrontal cortex is overbalanced by the more primitive limbic brain, which is the seat of emotions. The limbic system also signals release of stress hormones like cortisol or soothing hormones like oxytocin.17 The result of this imbalance is more intense emotions, and more frequent and wider changes of emotional state.
More specifically in adolescents, the parts of the limbic system that register signs of social acceptance and rejection are particularly sensitive: every compliment is perceived as acceptance and every slight as rejection.18 This makes release and withdrawal of hormones more frequent and more intense, which, it may be argued, is the reason why adolescents place a higher value on peer acceptance than adults do.19 But peer acceptance among classmates averaging age 20 would have been a particular challenge for Demessieux. According to her diary entry of June 28, 1934, despite an age difference of six years, Demessieux had one close friend amongst her fellow students in her piano class, Françoise Labroquère: “We are always together.” However, by making an angry retort to the instructor in class (diary entry of May 11, 1935, to be discussed further below), Demessieux embarrassed her classmates and promptly lost status with them: “Even Françoise avoided my eyes: I was alone.” Weeks later, she still felt disgraced, noting, “Nowadays, everyone shuns me” (June 2, 1935).
Psychologically, the teenage years also involve a surge in the importance of competence-based social status as opposed to one based on size, age, or entitlement at birth.20 For Demessieux and other adolescents in the 1934 women’s piano competition, to be ranked lower than had been expected not only effectively lowered their status—it also resulted in the withdrawal of pleasant and soothing hormones and a rush of negative emotions. No wonder, then, that at age thirteen Demessieux wrote of this event, “Never has an exam affected me so profoundly as this one” (June 28, 1934).
“He was pushy with, me, as usual”—Tension in the piano class
In a letter of February 21, 1934 to her sister Yolande, Demessieux wrote concerning a piano class with Riera, “He was pushy with me, as usual.” Trieu-Colleney was the first to draw attention to Demessieux’s difficult relationship with her principal piano teacher at the Conservatory. She attributes the discord between them to “differing artistic conceptions”—without specifying this difference—combined with their both being native to southern climes.21 But then, Riera was not known for cultivating rapport with his students.22 When Demessieux was ranked lower than had been expected at the 1934 piano competition, he had only offhand remarks, not reassurance, for her (diary entry of June 28, 1934). Indeed, Riera may well have treated his entire class of students appallingly on occasion, as Demessieux described in her diary entry of May 11, 1935:
My classmates were merry; they were laughing. Riera arrived, in a bad mood. First, we received a whopping outburst; it seems this gentleman believed himself in a henhouse, which truly upset us. We entered and the class commenced . . . we played the Debussy étude. Abusive words, curses, with no attempt to avoid being offensive.
Or had Demessieux’s attempts to get out of his class possibly cemented in Riera a belief that she haughtily regarded herself as above his level of teaching? This, it may be argued, could have predisposed him to single her out when he needed another scapegoat on whom to release his temper, as when, according to the same diary entry, he said angrily,
“Her,23 the one who’s been day-dreaming over there: the last time [too] she stood there (sniggering) with no pencil to mark the fingering I indicated; doubtless, she is already an expert’ (furious) She listens to nothing; no, you are undisciplined, you know it all too well.”
Rather than accepting this punishment for having appeared not to be paying attention, Demessieux impulsively fired back a retort, concluding with, “I’ve had enough of this!” Judging from this response, only Demessieux’s limbic brain seemed to be activated: she spoke emotionally, as is typical of adolescents in situations of high anxiety, and she acted out her anger without considering the consequences. Worse, the immediate consequence was that she lost any chance of receiving the sympathy of her classmates.
Use of reason, I suggest, would have dictated that the class instructor was of a higher status and, whatever his behaviour, was to be deferred to. A mature response (governed by the prefrontal cortex) might have been to apologize briefly right then for appearing inattentive, and after the class calmly explain one’s actions to the instructor. A very brief diary entry two weeks later suggests to me that the next time Demessieux was the object of Riera’s ire, she refrained from answering him back: “Can inner dramas be commented upon? Yesterday, I was the fitting object of one of these dramas” (May 26, 1935).
Past the spring of 1935, the diary does not refer to experiences in the piano class, though Demessieux continued in it. I can only speculate that she learned over time to accept her teacher as always ranking higher, whatever he did or said, and that feeling rapport with him was not necessary to benefiting from the class. On February 6, 1937 Demessieux was able to write to Yolande, “The piano class, at the moment, is close to being a triumphant success.”
“My sincerest thanks for the advice”—Career planning (1938)
One of the issues that occupied Demessieux in 1938, which neither the diary nor letters brings to a satisfying conclusion, is her plan to develop a career as a concert pianist. Following Demessieux’s First Prize in piano that year, she was no longer eligible to participate in a Paris Conservatory piano class. As a result, her performance opportunities at the Conservatory became limited to playing student composers’ works for juries.
Judging from the biographies of twentieth-century concert pianists, a First Prize, even from France’s national Conservatory, was not in itself a sufficient launching point for a successful performing career.24 More common in the twentieth century was to go on to broaden one’s education. For instance, one could study with another teacher who would impart a different perspective on performing the canon of piano literature, introduce piano repertoire not previously studied, and serve as a mentor. Or one could work with a contemporary composer, becoming the performer of newly composed music. Magda Tagliaferro (b. 1893), for example, who earned a First Prize in piano at the Conservatory in 1907, went on to study with Alfred Cortot for three or four years.25 While a student at the Conservatory, Tagliaferro had managed to snag the attention of the celebrated composer Fauré with whom she took lessons in interpretation of his piano works; this led to her occasionally premiering works by Fauré. Another Conservatory laureate, Monique Haas (b. 1909), after her First Prize in piano (1927), studied in Switzerland with Rudolf Serkin and in Paris with Robert Casadesus.26 Yvonne Loriod (b. 1924; First Prize in piano, 1943) famously allied herself with Olivier Messiaen; she had met him in 1941 when participating in one of his Paris Conservatory classes and became the chief interpreter of his piano works.27
In ways such as these, a career as a concert pianist might also have been built up for Jeanne Demessieux. She needed coaches and mentors who would recommend to her small, then gradually larger, opportunities to perform—in Paris, in France, and then all over Europe. As well, seeking out an ongoing position as a piano accompanist in Paris would, arguably, have brought Demessieux to the attention of more concert organizers.
Faint traces of her attempts to launch a career as a concert pianist are evident in her letters and diary entries. Writing to Magda Tagliaferro from the Midi on July 21, 1938, Demessieux refers to a concert to take place in Montpellier, seemingly planned in coordination with Montpellier Conservatory director Maurice Le Boucher: “I think looking forward to this concert will be very beneficial for me; it will make up for the training in class that I will so dearly miss next year.” But nothing is known about how this concert was received, let alone that it led to other concerts. A long and retrospective diary entry of August 16, 1938 ends with the statement, “I received a letter from the impresario Alfred Lyon asking me for an interview,” while a draft of her July 22 reply to Lyon agrees to set up a meeting with him when she returns to Paris in August. That same day, Demessieux wrote to Tagliaferro, enclosing a copy of Lyon’s letter and asking for her teacher’s advice. She explained, “I do not wish to become involved in anything whatsoever without your consent” and then emphasized that “it would be a joy to be guided by you at the start of my career.” Tagliaferro’s reply to this letter does not survive, but Demessieux’s August 11, 1938 response to the reply begins as follows:
My sincerest thanks for the advice you have given me. I now understand the situation and will take serious action in the ways you have indicated to me. When I have news for you, I will make a point of writing to you.
One facet of the “situation” Tagliaferro outlined to Demessieux was likely her busy international career as a performer, which was making it difficult enough just for Tagliaferro to teach her piano class at the Conservatory.28 Consequently, she would have foreseen that upon returning to Paris in autumn 1938, she would have little time to coach or mentor Demessieux.
With no further reference in surviving documents to the “serious action” Demessieux was willing to undertake, it is impossible to know what Tagliaferro’s advice to Demessieux had been. Presumably, she did not outright refuse to give her student further coaching, as indicated by a statement in a letter that Demessieux drafted in October 1938: “I have put myself back to work very seriously, thinking that you must be satisfied when you hear me again upon [your] return.” Tellingly, nothing in the diary or subsequent correspondence suggests that they ever met again. Even Trieu-Colleney refers only to “their faithful friendship supported by occasional but continual correspondence.”29
With regard to Demessieux continuing piano study, there is no doubt that her family had little in the way of financial resources to fund private lessons or to pay for further piano study, for example, at Paris’s École normal de musique where Cortot then taught. Of course, Demessieux could have begun earning more money herself from piano teaching, or by taking a piano accompanying position. But during the academic year 1938–1939 (the year her diary-writing lapsed) she took two time-intensive Conservatory classes—the organ class to which she had just been admitted as well as the fugue class in which she had a second opportunity to aim for a First Prize. Choosing to focus on her academic studies would have been an excellent reason not to take more piano students. If Demessieux continued to practice piano seriously after October 1938, readying herself to participate, for example, in open masterclasses, there is no indication of this in extant letters.
As for the interview with concert agent Alfred Lyon that was to be set up in August 1938, it seems never to have taken place. As far as piano performances are concerned, surviving letters of 1938–1940 make only one mention of Demessieux appearing as a pianist: this was in a two-piano rendition of a cantata entered for the 1939 Rome competition (letter of July 2, 1939). Granted, the letters that survive are principally those from which Trieu-Colleney quoted. But if Demessieux had ever reported in a letter to her sister a performance before a wider public than the Rome prize audience, this would surely have found a place among the excerpts Trieu-Colleney included in her Demessieux biography. As a result, readers are left wondering why, in the two years following her First Prize, she appears to have accomplished nothing towards forging a career as a pianist.
“As a token of favour”—Social acceptance (1937–1939)
An important theme running through Demessieux’s letters and diary during the period 1937–1939 is perception of her rising status in the eyes of her Paris teachers. After a private organ lesson with Marcel Dupré in early 1937 she wrote to Yolande, “It appears I have made immense progress” (February 6, 1937). Though only in her first year in a harmony class in 1936–1937, Demessieux was also able to report that her teacher “Jean Gallon was delighted; he loaned me the Honour Book as a token of favour” (February 14, 1937).
Excelling in her studies paved the way for social relationships with some of the eminent musicians who were her teachers, as is evident from surviving correspondence. Her July 21, 1938 letter from the Midi to Tagliaferro abounds in affection. Near the beginning is this fulsome declaration:
. . . what is even more comforting is the wish that I am making with all my heart that the summer vacation permits you complete respite from the strains and stresses of the year.
And near the end, Demessieux confesses:
I think of you every day . . .
In fact, this letter confides her innermost feelings, as in,
You will be happy to note the sense of well-being I have here,
and
the life I lead, amidst a well-loved countryside liberates my spirit . . .
Another letter by Demessieux from the Midi, drafted on an unspecified date in July 1939 to Marcel Dupré (who had left on an overseas concert tour in June), similarly indicates an established bond of friendship:30
How the days have been since your departure! When I think of the long silence that followed, I am sorry and embarrassed. I hope that you will forgive my apparent negligence that is so inconsistent with my feelings.31
In that same letter to Dupré, Demessieux imparts the news of her First Prize in fugue—“I cannot help but believe that you will share a bit of my joy”—and, promising that her letter will not be long, closes with a gracious formula: “Please accept my respectful admiration and my devotion.”
Letters and a diary entry from the late 1930s provide an especially full picture of Demessieux’s friendship with her counterpoint teacher Noël Gallon and his wife. She addresses them both in a letter from the Midi dated July 19, 1938. After an opening expressing her affection, Demessieux writes, “But I know that I no longer have need of polite formulas: your generosity is too sincere for me to give back so little.” That their relationship had gone beyond “polite formulas” arguably suggests that Demessieux knew the Gallons well from past social encounters. In keeping with this, that same letter mentions people with whom they were mutually acquainted: Demessieux expresses wishes for the Gallons’ health and happiness as well as for that of a certain Mme Espinasse.32 She then includes greetings from her own family: “My parents and Yolande have tasked me with expressing to you their most sincere friendship and the joy they will feel at seeing you again in August.”
The closeness of Demessieux’s social relationship with Noël and Mme Gallon is borne out further by her diary entry of August 25, 1938. Evidently, she dined at their home and was received “as informally as if I were their daughter.” The brief account continues with, “After the meal, we made music for nearly two hours.” Demessieux then lists her own compositions that she played, closing with “One of the most beautiful days of my life!” As a child of a lower middleclass family, the sixteen-year-old Jeanne Demessieux must have been proud to be accepted into the bosom of a very cultured, upper middleclass family.
That Noël Gallon also paid compliments on her musical compositions on that occasion was equally important to Demessieux, judging from a September 24, 1938 letter to Yolande:
He found my prelude “perfect,” and the general idea handled very well. I’ll not hide from you (not to boast, but to please you) that he was even moved… That’s how well he understands my music!
Social acceptance into higher echelons would, incidentally, play an especially prominent part in Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946, as will be described in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 6.
“The poetry of the region where I was born”—Geographical identity
Demessieux’s most fervent expressions of joy in her diary of 1934–1938 do not describe musical performances, but her homeland, the Occitanie region of southern France. In these portrayals, she waxes lyrical. One such passage was written on October 27, 1935 in Paris, during a moment of yearning. It is arguably characteristic of Demessieux’s ability to use metaphor, symbol, and rhythm to create an elevated plane of thought:
How moving are the things of which one has been deprived, this air whose salt makes the nostrils quiver, this wind whose touch is as sweet as a mother’s caress of one’s hair? Provence, Camargue, Languedoc!… These names conjure up for me a single intimate scene whose image is engraved in my memory. A great avenue of plane trees at whose feet wild grass pushes up, filled with crickets and dragonflies. The path is strewn with gravel.
Similarly poetic is her fanciful description from August 16, 1938 that refers to a late-evening encounter with the town walls of Aigues-Mortes, where she and her parents vacationed. Knowing some of the walls’ history and some of the ancient Provençal language, Demessieux let her imagination roam:
I was making my way, alone, towards the Porte de la Reine. Beautiful young women everywhere! Their youthful appearance stood out against the ramparts of old stone. I heard them laugh, chattering in their relaxed accent, calling out to me, “Good evening, Jeanne Demeucien!” Good evening, lovely ladies!33
The walls’ most famous tower—the one where Huguenot women had been imprisoned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is the Constance Tower in the northwest corner. Anthropomorphizing the latter, Demessieux painted this nighttime scene next:
. . . [T]he tower was drawing me to it; my bicycle raced towards its shadow; I circled it: what blackness! Suddenly, there was nothing there but the immense, wild plain, the old canal that the moon barely allowed me to discern, and you, Constance, overpowering in your royal majesty; the diameter of your form twice as large as in the light of day; your height rising, rising higher than the stars above, which, for a moment, are held in your arms. You grow higher and higher! Oh, Constance! You nearly crushed me like the waves of the old port.
Such romantic prose by a teenager makes it easy to imagine that Demessieux expected that one day someone else, perhaps Yolande or another relative, would read this diary. Equally possible is that she was not writing for posterity, but simply delighted in being creative in words, just as she was in music.
“An expression I shall never forget”—The gift of observation
Following the description of a visit to the home of Noël Gallon mentioned above, Demessieux’s diary entry of August 25, 1938 recounts an incident that occurred earlier that evening as she was leaving church with her grandmother:
. . . a child of about eight who is in the choir, and whom I’ve often noticed for his gentleness, passed by us with his mother. I leaned towards Grandmother and said to her, “He’s so sweet, that little one!”
Demessieux then repeated her remark a little louder, which was heard by the boy’s mother. At that,
… his mother turned and her face, amid her humble clothes, took on an expression I shall never forget. It was as if an involuntary feeling overcame her shyness and she showed a hint of a timid smile that greatly resembled her son’s.
Seventeen-year-old Demessieux’s remark about the child, specifically his gentleness and sweetness, strikes me as typical of an adolescent girl. Her observation concerning the mother shows remarkable insight, however. As well as capturing the woman’s demeanor, Demessieux registered from her facial expression a change in her innermost feelings, from insecurity to willingness to acknowledge the words of a stranger. Moreover, even though that day Demessieux had the memorable visit to the Gallons to report on as well, she was sufficiently struck by her detection of the woman’s “involuntary feeling” to record the incident in her diary.
Demessieux also described people acting in an involuntary way in her diary entry of September 6, 1936. Being in a crowd gathered at Place de l’Étoile in Paris to see a procession of soldiers pass by, she observed people she assumed were “former soldiers and elderly patriots.” As the French flag passed by, they removed their hats “to salute our homeland” in what Demessieux felt to be a sincere gesture. At the same moment, another action—people raising their arms and stretching out their hands “like a supreme and solemn oath”—spread through the crowd of onlookers. This movement and its spreading were so powerful that a teenage Jeanne, too, was tempted to reach out her hand as if “to protect the flag . . . But I immediately took control of myself.”
The diary entry then continues with a series of existential questions, specifically, how to know what is true and what is not, which actions are good, and which, though seemingly good, may actually be cursed (maudit). And why, Demessieux wondered, would “a man” act against his will? The diary entry concludes with a brief answer to the last question: “Weakness, always, even among the strongest.”
In other words, at age fifteen Demessieux seemed already to have discerned the notion of herd mentality—people, swept along by a crowd, illogically acting in a way they would not have acted when alone, as if powerless to assert their own will. Therefore, it appears that, just as her musicianship matched that of classmates five and six years older, in ability to pose philosophical questions, too, Demessieux in her mid-teens was a thinker beyond her years.
In the foregoing commentary, I have treated Demessieux’s diary and letters of 1932–1940 in a variety of ways. Some passages have been understood in a forthright fashion by pointing out that the adolescent Demessieux was a serious musician, hard worker, and confident performer; a perceptive thinker of intelligence, spirit, and wit; a young woman who delighted in her friendships and who identified strongly with the Midi. The trials and tribulations to which she confesses—apparent opposing personalities and an outburst in Riera’s class that caused her to lose face with her classmates—I have interpreted through the lens of what modern science attributes to the hormonal imbalances and still-developing brain of an adolescent. I acknowledge two of the issues raised in Demessieux’s self-writings to be open-ended: how she succeeded in carrying on in Riera’s class, and what became of her plans for developing a career as a concert pianist.
In contrast, Demessieux’s next diary—which covers the six years from December 1940 to December 1946—charts a very detailed career path, and largely refrains from recording personal feelings. It also differs from the earlier diary by devoting many pages to the actions and words of another person, Marcel Dupré. To provide a context for these, Chapter 6 will sketch the life of Demessieux’s teacher and mentor, and Chapter 7 will describe the historical conflict between Dupré and an opposing faction in the Paris organ world.
NOTES:
5 Lejeune 2009, 5. Notable exceptions include diaries kept by wives and sisters of famous nineteenth-century composers, as described in Nancy B. Reich, “The Diaries of Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann: A Study in Contrasts,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 4/2 (2007): 21–36 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review/article/abs/diaries-of-fanny-hensel-and-clara-schumann-a-study-in-contrasts/6ED68F60D556B0EC9163240AA5AD7FFE>, accessed Mar. 9, 2024.
30 Michael Murray, Marcel Dupré: The Work of a Master Organist (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 169 and 171, notes that Dupré departed Paris in June of 1939 on a voyage to the south seas, then, in July and August, played recitals in Australia.