Chapter 12: Endings (1960–67), pp. 502-04

“Complete reform” was hardly to overstate the case. Though André Malraux, as Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, was not especially interested in art music and had more urgent priorities for his infant administration, he gradually yielded to mounting nationwide pressure from professional musicians to address a governmental neglect of 50 years’ standing: “It’s time to be done with that,” he told the National Assembly. In December 1962 he appointed a blue-ribbon commission, chaired by Robert Siohan and including among its several luminaries Gallois-Montbrun, “to study the problems of music in France and elaborate a course of action.” It now seems clear, from documentation that began to accumulate in the 1990s, that the notion of forming a prestigious, handsomely subventioned new orchestra in Paris was the first proposal to gain consensus within the commission, apparently as early as spring 1963.
     If subsequent forward motion toward this end proved painfully slow, that was largely a function of the way budgets were established in those years, complicated by profound disagreement in intellectual circles as to what might come afterward. By 1965, when tempers were flaring and patience with what had become a national debate had reached its breaking point, Malraux told the National Assembly, in his typical arch-Gaullist manner: “After all, you weren’t waiting for me to do nothing.”
     Concurrently the composer Marcel Landowski (1915–99) was emerging, quietly at first, as the chief architect of the new policies and, without a doubt, as the single most influential figure in the mutation of the Société des Concerts into today’s Orchestre de Paris. The report of the Siohan Commission, well-meaning but tame, was drafted in early November 1964 and formally submitted in December; already on 5 December Landowski was named to succeed Siohan as Inspecteur Général de l’Enseignement Musical in Malraux’s cabinet. Finding himself “walled in” at the ministry, largely owing to the unwillingness of the two senior figures, Gaëtan Picon (as Director General of Arts and Letters) and especially Émile Biasini (as Director of Theatre, Music, and Cultural Programming) to let music find its own way, Landowski developed a circle of intimates that soon realized they were theorizing nothing less that a new politique musicale. One turning point was reached in March 1965, when a Comité National de la Musique chaired by Jacques Chailley, professor of musicology at the Sorbonne, submitted Malraux a memorandum demanding that the elements of a new politique be left in care of a professional musician. From there Landowski gained his dominance in policy making, first as chief of a separate Music Service (1966), then as the nation’s first Director of Music, Opera, and Dance (1970–75)—formally “Directeur de la Musique, de l’Art Lyrique et de la Danse au Ministère de la Culture.”
     He famously carried the “Landowski Plan,” or “Plan de 10 ans pour l’organisation des structure musicales françaises,” in his mind for many months before it was first put to paper in July 1969: a pyramid with the Orchestre de Paris and Paris Opéra at its point and, at its base, a conservatory, orchestra, opera house, and local program for each region in France. As perpetual secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, 1986–93, and chancellor of the Institute from 1994 until his death in 1999, Landowski lived to see much of his vision come true, even such impressive projects of brick and mortar as the Opéra Bastille (1989) and the new Cité de la Musique at La Villette (1995).
     Nothing in France is so noisy as a new politique. Landowski’s endeavor was buffeted on all fronts, and not only by assaults from the other arts. Among musicians there were objections both from organized syndicates, who feared government intervention in general and the loss of some obviously wasteful privileges in particular, and from radicals like Boulez, who held that little short of a national turn away from the centrality of opera and symphony orchestras would do. “To want to make such an ensemble these days is folly,” Boulez wrote of the orchestra that topped Landowski’s pyramid. He held that recordings and radio/television had put fine art music at everyone’s disposal, and that the foreign orchestras did well enough at bringing front-line classical music to Paris. The acidic groans of the tam-tam boulézien, wrote Landowski in his absorbing memoirs, Batailles pour la musique (1979), “gave [my] score its spice.”
     The tam-tam was an apt metaphor for the Boulezian pronouncements. Boulez, during these critical years for French classical music, was racing about the international stage as a self-exiled expatriate and just reaching his maximum stride as an aging enfant terrible. His own sweeping plans for a French resurgence in music, voiced to anyone who would listen, were thought by ordinary working musicians arrogant and laughable. Intellectuals wondered whether he was a national treasure or something of an embarrassment. And everything about the new official politique galled him: “a total absence of ideas,” he thought: the policy was “as sad as the Maginot Line and about as effective,” the work of “amateurs incapable of taking the long view: mediocre squanderers.” He appeared jealous that others were doing the work. He found their strategy a “bric-à-brac,” Landowski’s long-term plan “an abortion . . . destined to sterilize music in France for twenty or thirty years.” It is generally believed that Malraux’s decision to put Landowski in charge of the nation’s music is what caused Boulez to leave Paris, “saying,” reported the New York Times, “he could never again live in a city where music was in the hands of incompetent functionaries.”
     The aftermath of these celebrated confrontations is still, in 2002, taking place. The debate was at its most electrifying after the Orchestre de Paris was already a fait accompli. What is important at this point in our chronicle is that consensus for action had been reached by 1964. Landowski’s alliance with Gallois-Montbrun and, increasingly, the capital’s best orchestral players succeeded. Soon they had established the foundation for widespread agreement on the look and feel of a new national orchestra.