The only woman in the famed Les Six French group of composers, 1892 – 1983.
And actually she wasn’t born Germaine Tailleferre at all - her original surname was Taillefesse. But she changed it to spite her father, who told her that women musicians were as good as prostitutes and raised horrible barriers to her ever being a musician. So when she became famous it was not with his name !
How she ever got there is a story in itself. - thanks to her mother, who was her first piano teacher and encouraged her early composing. And it was her mother who defied the father and secretly enrolled her at the Paris Conservatoire when she was 12. The local nuns would arrive to escort her after Monsieur had left for work - and return the child before he got back. And they did this undetected for two years. Until, inevitably, one day they were late, the secret came out, and the father pulled her out in a fury. It was years before she was able to return.
But when she did, at 20 – she blossomed. This was 1920s Paris in its heyday: Ravel and Debussy were her teachers; Poulenc and Milhaud were her classmates, her future fellow members of Les Six; they hung out at the Café de la Rotonde and there she met Satie and Jean Cocteau and Picasso and Modigliani and Diaghilev, the list goes on. This is where all her most important works come from including the famous Harp Concertino, and there was more –
But there’s a very good reason it doesn’t survive. There were her marriages, both to men no better than her father. The first was an American who tried to shoot her to induce an abortion and later committed suicide – it was front page news. The second was a lawyer who abused her and her daughter and she escaped eventually – back to the States. Meanwhile, during World War II, the Nazis commandeered her house and in that terrible final winter off 44 to 5 all her manuscripts went up in flames.
So her best days were in her youth. As her great friend Poulenc recounts, and let’s forgive his condescension because he meant well:
“How ravishing our Germaine was in 1917, with her schoolgirl’s satchel full of all the Conservatoire’s first prizes! How kind and gentle she was! What a charming and precious contribution her music makes!”
She outlived them all.
Germaine Tailleferre (1892 - 1983)
MUSIC: Harp Concertino
Gillian Benet, harp
The Women's Philharmonic /JoAnn Falletta
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
