Homesick

The conductor was so stiff with arthritis that he had to lead the orchestra sitting down. France's No. 1 composer, chunky little Darius Milhaud, climbed carefully into a chair raised a foot above the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall. From the chair he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra through the first performance of his Symphony No. 2. During tranquil passages he waved his arms gently, as if they would waft him into the air like a weightless blimp. When the music was loud he slid from his chair and stood threateningly on tiptoe.

This week Boston heard and cheered the world premiere of the new symphony. Its five movements built up to moments of authoritative power, which gave way to the skirling and whispering of flutes and violins. There were stretches of dissonance, but they were less strident than early Milhaud.

He had written it in a little house overlooking San Francisco Bay, a house which California's Mills College built for him after he went there in 1940, a gloomy Jewish refugee from Vichyfranee. He has taught composition to college girls in the mornings, composed in privacy during the afternoons. In none of his American scores (including an opera called Bolivar, the symphony, five concertos and some chamber music) is there much trace of U.S. influence ("My only influences are French and I remain true to them").* He is now hard at work on a Third Symphony, commissioned by the French National Radio, which he will conduct next October in Paris. What his music says most now is that France's exiled composer is homesick.

There was also a homesickness for Milhaud in Paris, where his music is being widely played. Said the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson, once of Paris' Left Bank, during a 1945 trip to Europe: "All musical France hopes [for] the return of its master. . . . There is a vacancy in the center of the stage." Milhaud, so crippled that he walks painfully with two canes, finds the California climate healthier than Paris, but says "I need to go back ... in Europe there are more possibilities."

* In Chicago last week, two other visiting European composers conducted their own music. Rumania's Georges Enesco, now 65 and also bent with arthritis, led the Chicago Women's Symphony through his First Symphony and Rumanian Rhapsody No. 1, then played the violin in Brahms's Concerto in D Major. Shy, slight Zoltan Kodaly (rhymes with no dye), 64, Hungary's top composer since the death of Bela Bartok, conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in his bustling, folk-tunish Peacock Variations. Enesco is now an honorary Rumanian deputy; Kodaly an honorary member of Hungary's Parliament.

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