Germaine Tailleferre

Germaine Tailleferre: (b Parc-St-Maur, nr Paris, 19 April 1892; d Paris, 7 Nov 1983). French composer.

Despite her father’s opposition and her equal skills in art she entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1904, her formative studies being undertaken with Eva Sautereau-Meyer. As a pianist prodigy with an amazing memory she won numerous prizes, and in 1913 she met Auric, Honegger and Milhaud in Georges Caussade’s counterpoint class. In 1917 Satie was so impressed with her two-piano piece Jeux de plein air that he christened her his ‘musical daughter’, and it was he who first brought her to prominence as one of his group of Nouveaux Jeunes. She then went on to become the only female member of Les Six when it was formed in 1919–20. Her career was also assisted by the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who liked her ballet Le marchand d’oiseaux (1923) enough to commission a Piano Concerto (1923–4), which proved similarly successful and demonstrated her natural affinities with the 18th-century clavecinistes. Tailleferre’s talents fitted in perfectly with the prevailing spirit of Stravinskian neo-classicism, though she was also influenced by Fauré and Ravel, remaining in close contact with the latter throughout the 1920s.

Unfortunately, Tailleferre never regained the acclaim she had enjoyed through her early associations with Les Six. Two unhappy marriages (to the caricaturist Ralph Barton in 1926 and to the lawyer Jean Lageat in 1931) proved a considerable drain on her creative energies, and her continual financial problems led her to compose mostly to commission, resulting in many uneven and quickly written works. Also, her natural modesty and unjustified sense of artistic insecurity prevented her from promoting herself properly, and she regarded herself primarily as an artisan who wrote optimistic, accessible music as ‘a release’ from the difficulties of her private life. However, her concertos of the 1930s enjoyed a measure of success, as did her impassioned Cantate du Narcisse (1938, words by Paul Valéry), and she was much in demand as a skilful composer of film music. After a fallow period in the USA (1942–6) she produced the superb Second Violin Sonata (1947–8) and turned her attention towards opera – her lighthearted approach being epitomized in the four short comic pastiches written with Denise Centore in 1955 (‘Du style galant au style méchant’). She also gave successful concert tours with the baritone Bernard Lefort, for whom she wrote the Concerto des vaines paroles (1954), and in 1957 she experimented briefly with serial techniques in her Clarinet Sonata. Although she continued to compose prolifically and teach until the end of her life, she resorted increasingly to self-borrowing and familiar formulae (like the perpetuum mobile), and the circularity of her career can be seen in the stylistic ease with which she was able to complete her 1916–17 Piano Trio in 1978. Meeting the conductor Désiré Dondeyne in 1969 led to a new interest in composing for wind band and she also remained devoted to children and their music, a link which helps explain the spontaneity, freshness and charm that characterize her best compositions.