Four Duos (1979)

L’Ardente

L’Interdite

La Toute-Vive

La grande Irenée

After the death of Olivier Messiaen, whom she succeeded as Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire, Betsy Jolas must rank alongside

Henri Dutilleux and Pierre Boulez as one of the three most distinguished of present-day French composers. Ten years younger than Dutilleux and one year younger than Boulez, she registers somewhere between the two on the scale between conservatism and radicalism. The difference between Jolas and Boulez in this respect is only partially attributable to the fact that she was a pupil of Milhaud while he studied with Messiaen and Leibowitz: she soon branched out in serialist directions that Milhaud did not much approve of. It has much more to do with her faith in the voice as the basis of her musical language, whether voices are actually involved or not. In 1967, for example, she wrote D’un opéra de voyage, where the protagonists are instruments rather than voices, and among later works are the Lieder for trumpet and chamber orchestra and Frauenleben for viola and orchestra.

The Four Duos for viola and piano is a work of the same kind. The first of the four movements to be written was L’Ardente, which was commissioned as a pièce de concours by the Paris Conservatoire. It is a formidably difficult piece for both the violist and the pianist, who have to cope not only with the usual virtuoso problems but also with Jolas’s characteristic rhythmic and metrical complexities at the same time as tempos so flexible that at times there is no definite tempo. The final-year students who performed it at the Conservatoire in 1979 must, however, have been exceptionally talented. “As I listened to it on exam day, excellently performed by ten students,” Jolas has said, “I felt the desire to continue along that line. Thus came to light in the next few months three additional female images,” to which she gave similarly obscure but evocative, Couperinesque titles.

Bearing in mind the vocal orientation of so much of her music, there is some truth in Jolas’s claim that “Melody is perhaps the area of my contribution to contemporary music.” There is little point, on the other hand, in looking for distinctive melodic shapes or themes in the Four Duos. The vocal element manifests itself in all kinds of ways, some of them corresponding to recitative or arioso but most of them representing the extremes of passionate expression. L’Ardente (The Ardent Woman) begins with a long-held monotone sigh on the viola which, as the piano part declines in vehemence, develops into fervent eloquence. If the rapid staccato passage following a climax of trills on the viola cannot be described as vocal, the poised and shapely line accompanied by quiet trills on the piano certainly can.

L’Interdite (The Forbidden Woman), which twice requires the pianist to make direct contact with the strings rather than the keyboard, is very different from L’Ardente. Although the metres vary constantly between three and fifteen to the bar (including eleven and thirteen), the time units are more even. Both instruments, separately and together, are given successions of dissonant chords at fluctuating tempos but in regular crotchets. Again, while these passages can scarcely be described as chorales, the viola does at one fairly early point sustain a flexible line against the crotchets in the piano part. La Toute-Vive (The All-lively Woman) is just that, a scherzo perhaps which involves both instruments in flurries of rapid legato articulation before they find themselves in three-part melodic counterpoint and, finally, in a fragmented staccato texture not unlike that in L’Ardente. As for La Grande Irenée (The Great Irene), although she shares some characteristics with L’Ardente - including a sustained sigh at the climax of the piece - she is the most thoughtful and the most melodious of all.