La Création du Monde, Op.81

Milhaud’s first serious encounter with jazz was at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse in 1920. He was in London for a series of performances of Le Boeuf sur le toit at the Coliseum but he spent much of his time listening to Billy Arnold and his band at the Palais. “Straight from New York,” these jazz musicians fascinated the composer who went to hear them night after night “to analyse and assimilate” what he heard. He was impressed by “the saxophone breaking in, squeezing out the juice of dreams, the clarinet frequently played in its upper register, the lyrical use of the trombone… the whole held together by piano and subtly punctuated by the complex rhythms of the percussion, a kind of inner beat… The constant use of syncopation in the melody was of such contrapuntal freedom that it gave the impression of unregulated improvisation, whereas in actual fact it was elaborately rehearsed daily…”

In the next few years he was to assimilate still more jazz, not least through his experience of the New Orleans style in the theatres and dance halls of Harlem on a visit to New York in 1922. “This authentic music,” he said, “had its roots in the innermost recesses of the black soul, the vestigial traces of Africa no doubt.” So when he was invited to collaborate with the painter Fernand Léger and the avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars on a ballet based on the story of the creation of the world, not the biblical version but one culled by Cendrars from African folklore, Milhaud knew exactly what he had to do. “At last in La Création du Monde I had the opportunity I had been waiting for to use those elements of jazz to which I had devoted so much study.” First performed in Paris in 1922, when the score was condemned as “frivolous and more suitable for a restaurant or dance hall than the for the concert hall,” it has since come to be recognised not only as one of Milhaud’s best works but also as a classic of its kind.

If ever there was a saxophone “squeezing out the juice of dreams” it is in the opening bars of La Création du monde as Milhaud’s alto sax sings out the expressive main theme of the piece over quietly undulating strings. At this introductory stage the jazz element is not specially prominent, although its presence is clear enough from the first entry of the two trumpets and the developing tendency in wind and percussion to project syncopated rhythms against the steady beat of piano and bass drum. As the curtain rises on the first scene of the ballet, however, the jam session begins in earnest with what must be the earliest of all jazz fugues. If it sounds like chaos, as more and more instruments take up the theme introduced by double bass and taken up first by trombone and saxophone, that is the composer’s intention - although, like the apparently “unregulated improvisations” he had observed with Billy Arnold’s dance band, it is rigorously worked out.

After that brilliant representation of chaos, the tempo slows down for the first stage of creation, the beginning of plant life, featuring a recall of the dreamy saxophone melody from the introduction and a lyrical variant on oboe of the once vigorous fugue subject. The animals makes their entry to a ragtime march starting on violins but eventually, and by way of interjections of the fugue subject from the saxophone, involving the whole ensemble. The first man and woman make their appearance to an oboe blues and then, in the next section, perform the “dance of desire” - a virtuoso clarinet improvisation which, unexpectedly, subsides into a another expressive oboe solo and a reminder of the tranquil mood of the introduction. Just as unexpectedly, the jam session is resumed, this time round an inspired melodic line drawn by an independently minded saxophone. More blues material leads to a last, brief echo of the saxophone dream. “It is,” according to the Cendrars scenario, “the springtime of human life.”