Darius Milhaud (4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers.

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The Oresteia of Aeschylus L’Agamemnon, Op. 14 (1913)
Librettist: Paul Claudel (1868-1955), after Aeschylus
Dedication: Jacques Benoist-Méchin (1901-1983)

Lori Phillips, soprano
University of Michigan Orpheus Singers & Michigan University Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Kiesler

Darius Milhaud was an important member of the musical avant-garde in early 20th-century Paris. Provençal and Jewish by birth, he maintained these and numerous other identities in his music and his life. A lifelong interest in classical mythology and drama, a wide knowledge of French music history, and his utilization of modern theoretical trends all played a role in the composition of his early trilogy, L’Orestie. These complex works draw from Milhaud’s numerous identities and interests in a dramatic, rhythmic expression of Aeschylus’s classic story.

Milhaud’s lifelong collaboration with the Catholic poet Paul Claudel played a critical role in the composer’s operatic style. The collaboration resulted in many of Milhaud’s best-known works, including the Orestie trilogy and Christophe Colomb (1930). The style developed by Milhaud and Claudel was influenced prominently by Claudel’s belief that every element of a dramatic work, including music, should exist to serve the poetry. The Orestie trilogy displays this attention to the text through the expressive, syncopated rhythm of the vocal parts.

Musically, Milhaud saw himself as part of a great French tradition which extended back from Satie and Debussy to Bizet and even to Couperin. Among his contemporaries, Milhaud associated most strongly with the fellow members of Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre), a group of composers loosely associated with Jean Cocteau in the 1920s in an effort to forge a new French modernist musical aesthetic during the interwar period.

Despite his integration into the French tradition, Milhaud prominently incorporated other national styles into his own. In a life-changing experience in 1917, Milhaud and Claudel travelled to Brazil on a diplomatic mission. After his diplomatic service, Milhaud began to incorporate Brazilian folk music into his compositions, most famously in the 1919 ballet Le boeuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof), but also seen here in Les Euménides. As a composer already drawn to rhythmic expression, Milhaud was particularly interested in the rhythmic complexity of Brazilian music.

In addition to innovative rhythmic elements, the Orestie trilogy exhibits complex harmonic techniques, particularly polytonality, in which Milhaud layered two or more harmonic areas simultaneously. Milhaud’s use of polytonality is particularly clear in the finale of Les Euménides, which is structured around repeated polytonal patterns. Although this polytonality may sound dissonant, Milhaud believed that it gave him more varied ways of expressing sweetness in addition to violence.

Because the three parts of the Orestie trilogy were written over a 10-year period, each work has a distinct style. In L’Agamemnon, written when Milhaud was only 21, the rhythm of the vocal parts is used to express the drama of the poetry, while in Les Choéphores and especially in Les Euménides, the drama is furthered by spoken sections and an increasingly complex harmonic language. The trilogy, taken as a whole, provides a glimpse into the interaction between modern and traditional, as well as between the French and the foreign, which characterized the music of early 20th-century Paris.

It should be emphasized that the trilogy is not a series of operas. In L’Agamemnon Cocteau requested music only for the scene following Agamemnon’s murder in a staged version of the play, and only certain parts of Les Choéphores were set to music for a similar use. Only Les Euménides was fully composed and staged later, as an opera directed by Milhaud’s wife Madeleine.

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