Known by several names, including 'Comité de Front national des musiciens', the Front national des musiciens was an organisation of musicians in Nazi-occupied France that was part of the French Resistance set up at the instigation of the French Communist Party, in May 1941. Active until the autumn of 1944, the group's most prominent members were composers Elsa Barraine and Louis Durey, and conductor Roger Désormière.Article : Nigel Simeone, 'Making Music in Occupied Paris', The Musical Times, volume=147, number 1894, 2006-04-01, , doi 10.2307/25434357. Read online: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25434357, page 23
Origins Elsa Barraine, Roger Désormière and Louis Durey (all Communist militants) met in the autumn of 1940. The group, led by Elsa Barraine, published a manifesto in September 1941 in L'Université libre, the clandestine magazine created by Jacques Decour ("We refuse to betray", the musicians declared). From April 1942, the group published its own clandestine journal, Musiciens d'aujourd'hui (incorporated into Les Lettres françaises from March 1944) and then, from September 1943, a second journal, Le Musicien Patriote. Barraine, Auric, Désormière and others used this medium to counter German and Vichy propaganda (notably in Comœdia or on Radio-Paris), denounce collaborators, encourage musicians to join the Resistance, and praise the successes achieved here and there, such as (more or less confidential) concerts featuring works by banned composers. They also publicised the latest actions of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans.
Aims Their aims were defined in underground publications: Musiciens d'aujourd'hui and Musiciens français. Musiciens français, July 1, 1943, p.4, on Gallica. Musiciens d'aujourd'hui (1st issue in April 1942) and Le Musicien Patriote (1st issue in September 1943). Two articles were published in Les Lettres françaises in 1944 : one on July 1, 1944, in defense of French music , followed by a Le musicien d'aujourd'hui section in the August issue. The author suggested that, as soon as the provisional government was formed, resistants should form a Committee of Music to reorganize the French music world. In the September 16, 1944 issue Roland-Manuel informed the general public about the Front National des Musiciens. Auric became the regular music critic of Les Lettres françaises. Musicians should resist by refusing all collaboration with German media (particularly Radio Paris) and events"But above all, No collaboration with Radio-Paris, German concerts, German newspapers, no participation in treasonous events! In every orchestra, in every Conservatory, in every Administration, form a FRONT NATIONAL Committee! Everywhere, prepare for November 11th your active participation in the patriotic demonstration!" : Musiciens d'aujourd'hui Oct 1, 1942, on Gallica. and make things difficult for the Vichy government. They should refuse forced labour and help those in hiding, including FTP fighters.Another article in the same issue encouraged them to refuse deportation. In Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, June 1, musicians were encouraged to help those in hiding to avoid deportation, as well as (February 1944 issue) the Francs-tireurs et Partisans. : : Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Feb. 1944, p. 4, on Gallica They should form Front national committees in orchestras and institutions; contribute to underground newspapers; support the Resistance financially or join its ranks.Radio-Paris is a covert operation of the enemy. Collaborating with Radio-Paris amounts to working for the Germans, against France. Think again. There's still time. Join the ranks of the French Resistance. Fight with all your might, actively if you can, passively by refusing to collaborate if you can do no more." : Musiciens français, July 1, 1943, p.4, on Gallica They should use concerts to inspire patriotism."Yes, our composers have a duty to express the nation's aspirations through battle songs and works that exalt love of country and offreedom! Yes, our performers must champion French music and seize every opportunity to ignite a fervent patriotism in their listeners by demonstrating their commitment to the national cause through musical performances." (, October 1942 issue) and "Musicians will hear this call. The best of them will work together in each orchestra to seize every opportunity to act against the invader and create difficulties for Vichy; to demand, as manual workers have done in numerous strikes, improvements in their living conditions; to arouse patriotic enthusiasm among listeners by skilfully inserting into a programme a piece that recalls the traditions of freedom and the greatness of France; to take the defence of colleagues designated for deportation or hit by repression and finally to sponsor musicians in resistance. " : “'Le Musicien patriote”' n°1, September 1943, p.4, on Gallica. Finally, they should organize for mass demonstrations, like on November 11 and prepare for armed struggle by forming militia groups to join the national insurrection."There's something even better. There is active struggle. It means forming resistance committees. It means passing on insider snippets and articles in our combat newspapers. It means collaborating musically in the work of patriotic poets and giving clandestine auditions of patriotic works; it means playing the works of musicians who have celebrated freedom. It also means making regular contributions, as large as possible, to Resistance organisations, to help those who are resisting deportation. We need money to hide them, to feed and clothe them. We also need money to keep our press alive. Finally, we need to organise ourselves into militia groups to take part in the national insurrection." : Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Feb 1, 1944, on Gallica
Members and supporters The group had no more than thirty members, including : Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger (his attitude appearing ambiguous, he was disbarred in 1943"Arthur, who was part of the Resistance, got into mischief (trip to Vienna, collaboration on Comœdia), there was a Resistance tribunal session at Deso's [Roger Désormière] and he was expelled. He was very affected." Milhaud's second-hand account [the information came to him from Sauguet and Désormière] is essentially accurate. Honegger was a member of the Front National des Musiciens [...] for some time. But in 1943 he was (probably unfairly) excluded from the group because of "faults" such as his trip to Vienna [for the Mozart Festival in November 1941], his participation in a reception given by a high official of cultural propaganda at the German embassy in Paris, and his 'positive reviews of contemporary German music by Hans Pfitzner, Werner Egk and Richard Strauss', which cast doubt on his loyalty (Letter from Darius Milhaud to Alexandre Tansman, 1945, quoted, then commented on, by Erin K. Maher: Darius Milhaud In The United States, 1940-71: Transatlantic Constructions Of Musical Identity (Doctoral dissertation, Chapel Hill, 2016). Online: https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/pc289j467. For Honegger's article on Pfizner's Palestrina, see Comœdia (4 April 1942); for that on Egk's Peer Gynt, see the issue of 9 October 1943.), Irène Joachim, Roland-Manuel, Claude Delvincourt (flanked by organist ,According to K. Le Bail (p. 180), it was Marie-Louise Boëllmann, a member of Défense de la France, who provided the false papers that enabled the escape of several students of the Conservatoire Cadets Henri Dutilleux and Jacques Chailley, he created the Orchestre des Cadets du Conservatoire to rescue young musicians from the Service du travail obligatoire), Manuel Rosenthal, Charles Munch and Paul Paray.
Friends of several FNM members, Lily Pastré and Marguerite Fournier offered hospitality to many musicians in distress.
Actions The musicians' resistance took many forms: Désormière helped musicians in times of adversity, for example by publishing under his own name scores by Jean Wiéner for films by Louis Daquin, Paul Grimault, Robert Vernay. He was careful to keep French composers in the programmes of his concerts and recordings. This was likely to be all the more important as "[n]ever have we seen greater crowds in Parisian concert halls than since the beginning of the events which, normally, should have half paralysed musical activity."Jean-Loup Peltier, 'L'activité musicale en France de 1939 à 1945', "Cahiers du Nord", 1 January 1946, pp. 98-135. J-L Peltier was a first prize winner in piano at the Conservatoire, who died in the same accident that killed Grace Moore, whose accompanist he was.
Another form of resistance consisted in giving concerts featuring banned works, as part of the launched by Gaston Gallimard from 1943, for example. It could also involve praising French musical heritage, by defending Debussy as a representative of the French school, while others would have liked to turn him into a Wagnerian.
While some composers stopped composing (Durey, and to a lesser extent Auric), others practised musical smuggling: playing fragments of patriotic airs inserted into other works in front of the Germans. Poulenc inserted a passage from a patriotic song, , in the score of Animaux modèles "premiered at the Paris Opéra on 8 August 1942 before an audience of German officers, with choreography by Serge Lifar" (Le Bail, p. 178); Auric quoted a few notes from la Marseillaise at the end of his setting of Aragon's poem ''. Similarly, an instrumentalist at the Opéra Garnier played a few notes of la Marseillaise during a performance of Carmen.
In the minds of FNM members, setting poems to music was a way of highlighting the richness of French literature, as well as publicising texts by banned authors, some of whom had been published clandestinely (Aragon, Éluard, Jean Bruller (better known in France as "Vercors"), Jean Cassou, Charles Vildrac, Supervielle) and to tackle provocative or subversive themes: Poulenc sang of peace in 1938, following the Munich crisis, in Priez pour paix (a poem by Charles, Duke of Orléans); Jean Françaix slipped a eulogy of peace into the second part of his Cantate pour le tricentenaire de Maximilien de Béthune Duc de Sully (1941); Paul Arma sang of freedom in his setting of Jean Bruller's 'Fuero' (1944, in one of the Chants du Silence), and Dutilleux did the same with Cassou's 'La Geôle', as did Poulenc with Éluard's 'Liberté' (Figure humaine, 1943).
Some works were veritable calls to resistance: in May 1944, Barraine composed , which Éluard had dedicated to the memory of a resistance fighter, Georges Dudach, shot at the Fort Mont-Valérien on May 23, 1942 by the Germans. In this poem, Eluard evokes the millions of comrades ready to rise up to avenge him. The work could not be played until the end of the war.
Arma's À la jeunesse (Les Chants du silence, premiered after the war) takes up a text by Romain Rolland encouraging young people to fight and succeed where their elders had failed. In "La Rose et le réséda", set to music by Auric in 1943, Aragon called on the French to transcend their divisions to resist the common enemy.
Auric (in Quatre chants de la France malheureuse) also set to music Le petit bois by Jules Supervielle (Poèmes de la France Malheureuse, 1939–41) in which the said wood refuses to disappear: "Mon Dieu comme il est difficile / D'être un petit bois disparu / Lorsqu'on avait tant de racines / Comment faire pour n'être plus.My God, how difficult it is / To be a little wood that has disappeared / When you had so many roots / How do you manage to be no more."
The same kind of stimulating allusion appears in Prière du Prophète Jérémie (Two prayers for unhappy times, music by Manuel Rosenthal, 1942): "Our inheritance has passed to strangers, our homes to outsiders." The text is indeed taken from the Book of Lamentations by the biblical prophet Jeremiah.Deux prières pour les temps malheureux : "Notre héritage a passé à des étrangers, nos maisons à des gens du dehors."