Marcelle Meyer: L'art de toucher le piano

Marcelle Meyer: l’Art de toucher le Piano

By Edward Campbell-Rowntree

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, August 2021. https://pianotuner.org.uk

In the early 1940s, the French pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1958) gave a performance of Mozart’s Concerto in A Major K. 488 with the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, who were then visiting Paris. Her contemporaries regarded her appointment with a German symphony orchestra, during the height of the Occupation, as a betrayal. In response, more outspoken critics questioned her allegiance to the French musical tradition—some even questioned her very identity as a French woman. [1] By calling into question Meyer’s ‘Frenchness’, however, those critics brought attention to a complex relationship between music and nationalism; what prompted concern was not only who Meyer was playing with, but what she was playing and, perhaps, the way in which she played it.

The Francophile tendencies of a number of high-level German officials in Paris inspired a surprisingly liberal attitude towards the arts, and music-making in concert halls and opera houses remained astonishingly active throughout much of the Occupation. [2] On the evening of 16 January 1944, for example, there were no fewer than five symphony orchestra concerts taking place: as Nigel Simeone points out, “the agile concert-goer could have heard Cortot’s piano trio, Munch, and Mengelberg and Gendron all in the space of a few hours.” [3] Nevertheless, the cultural administration imposed by the Vichy government and occupying Nazi forces of Paris had engendered a climate of nationalist self-awareness in which allegiance and patriotism, clandestine or otherwise, were in high demand for cultural survival against a worldview of the Nazis that French culture was degenerate (Entartungen).

The Group of Six, oil on canvas by Jacques-Émile Blanche, 1922.

In order to preserve a sense of national identity throughout the cultural turmoil of Les années noires, French musicians placed a high premium on historicising their repertoire and performance practices against the German metaphysical canon. This was not the first time the French had codified their musical style in response to opposing cultural forces—the philosophes had debated the relative merits of French and Italian opera nearly two centuries earlier in the Querelle des Bouffons. The argument for French pianism, however, hardly needed substantiating: Sébastien Érard’s 1821 patent for double escapement action, the establishment of the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Déclamation in the nineteenth century, and the more than 180 piano firms in the city by 1847, meant Paris had long been considered “the birthplace of the modern piano”—it is undeniable that a distinctive style of pianism and musicianship was developed and nurtured there. [4]

Marcelle Meyer’s technique and musicality owed much to the French clavecinists, particularly François Couperin (1668-1733) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), whose extensive writings on harpsichord technique had codified the French style of playing across much of Europe. In L’Art de toucher le clavecin (The Art of Touching/Playing the Harpsichord) (1717), Couperin emphasised “The position of the body, that of the hands, the ornaments which contribute to the performance, [and] how to play with taste.” [5] In his Essay De la mechanise des doigts sure le clavecin, published alongside his first Pièces de clavecin, Rameau emphasised that “the wrist must always be supple. This suppleness, which spreads to the fingers, gives them freedom and all necessary lightness” [6]

As Charles Timbrell has remarked, “much of the technical advice of Couperin and Rameau is reflected in what pianists preached more than a century later.” [7] Further still, advice around the suppleness of the wrist and the economy of movement of the hand were reiterated almost verbatim in Alfred Cortot’s Rational Principles of Piano Technique of 1928. However, what Marcelle Meyer inherited from Couperin and Rameau (and also Scarlatti—she recorded nearly 60 of his sonatas throughout her career) was not only a firm grounding in the digital mechanisms of eighteenth-century keyboard music, but also deep understanding of those composer’s poetic language, which many other pianists simply could not translate into the idiom of their own instrument.

While the activities of other keyboardists, such as Wanda Landowska, embraced a culture of nostalgia and rediscovery, Meyer’s achievements stand alone in the history of French pianism in that her historical inquiry was always underpinned by the modernist tendencies of translation and re-contextualisation. As a result, her performances still sound fresh and vibrant—void of the early twentieth-century performance practices which make old recordings sound ‘old’ in the first place. She had no students, and so her legacy has been communicated through a collected discography of crystalline beauty and folklorish tales of her command of the piano.

Francis Poulenc wrote in Le Figaro in April 1945 in defence of Meyer’s “unfortunate” performance with the Berlin Orchestra, and defended her as “one of the most truly authentic French pianists of our time.” [8] Considering the other high-profile musicians were openly pro-Vichy and pro-Nazi, most notably Alfred Cortot (who was appointed as Pétain's High Commissioner of the Fine Arts), such impassioned criticisms of Meyer for her performance with a German symphony orchestra in the midst of the Occupation seem unfair and unwarranted. But the rhetoric of nationalism surrounding her pianism opens up an irresistible discussion of what it meant to be a French in the early twentieth century and, more pressingly, what it meant to be a pianist.

Meyer’s ‘Frenchness’, according to Poulenc, emerged from both her repertoire choices and the performance practices she inherited from her studies with Marguerite Long, Ricardo Viñes and Alfred Cortot. From Long and her strict diet of Hanon, Czerny and Kalkbrenner études, Meyer developed the style of Le jeu perlé “in which each note is bright and perfectly formed, like each pearl on a necklace.” [9] From the Catalan Viñes—the preffered pianist of Ravel—she fostered her love of contemporary composers like Debussy, Satie, Falla and Albéniz. And with Cortot she engaged with the most prominent French intellectual of the twentieth century, whose primary concerns were with touch, weight, and more incorporeal issues of sound, texture and poetry— “that shadows are as important as light”, as one of his students said. [10]

[1] Francis Poulenc, Letter in Defence of Marcelle Meyer, trans. https://musicalgeography.org/ 2863-2/

[2] Nigel Simeone, “Making Music in Occupied Paris”, The Musical Times , Spring, 2006, Vol. 147, No. 1894 (Spring, 2006), pp. 23-25.

[3] Ibid, 25.

[4] Charles Timbrell, French Pianism: a Historical Perspective, (Amadeus Press, Oregon, 1999), 27. [5] David Tunney, François Couperin and ‘The Perfection of Music’, (Ashgate, 2004), 144.

[6] Timbrell, 36.

[7] Ibid. 35.

[8] Poulenc, Letter in Defence of Marcelle Meyer

[9] Timbrell, 38.

[10] Ibid, 103.