Alexandre Tansman
Alexander Tansman was a Polish composer, pianist and conductor who became a naturalized French citizen in 1938. One of the earliest representatives of neoclassicism, associated with École de Paris, Tansman was a globally recognized and celebrated composer.
Early life and heritage
Tansman was born and raised in Łódź, Congress Poland. His parents were of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. His father Moshe Tantzman died when Alexander was 10 and his mother Hannah reared him and his older sister Teresa alone.Tansman later wrote:
Tansman explained his later Francophile tendencies:
Career
Among his first music teachers were Wojciech Gawronski and Naum Podkaminer.Although he began his musical studies at the Lodz Conservatory, his study was in law at the University of Warsaw. On January 8, 1919, Tansman won the first composers' competition held in independent Poland, and gave a series of concerts at the Warsaw Philharmonic in the following months. In the fall of 1919, encouraged by his mentors Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Henryk Melcer-Szczawinski and Zdzisław Birnbaum, Tansman decided to continue his musical career in Paris. The first artists he was fortunate to meet shortly after his arrival were Moritz Moszkowski and Sarah Bernhardt. In Paris, his musical ideas were appreciated, influenced and favoured by composers Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Jacques Ibert, Igor Stravinsky, musicologists and critics Émile Vuillermoz, Boris de Schloezer, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Arthur Hoérée, conductors André Caplet, Gaston Poulet, Vladimir Golschmann. Though Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud tried to persuade him to join Les Six, he declined, stating a need for creative independence. Nevertheless, he was one of the earliest and leading representatives of neoclassicism, along with Stravinsky, Les Six, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, Alfredo Casella. He was also one of the most respected members of the international music group École de Paris, along with Bohuslav Martinů, Tibor Harsányi, Alexander Tcherepnin, Marcel Mihalovici, Conrad Beck.
File:Alexandre Tansman, Second Piano Concerto.jpg|thumb|Cover of the score of Tansman's Second Concerto dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, Éditions Max Eschig
From the 1920s Tansman's rise to fame was meteoric, with works conducted and championed by such world-famous baton masters as Arturo Toscanini, Tullio Serafin, Willem Mengelberg, Walter Damrosch, Sir Henry Wood, Serge Koussevitzky, Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Rhené-Baton, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Walther Straram, Hermann Abendroth, Leopold Stokowski, Erich Kleiber, Sir Adrian Boult, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Frederick Stock, Eugene Ormandy. Tansman follows Paderewski as the second Polish composer whose theatre piece – ballet Sextuor – was staged by the Metropolitan Opera.
As early as the first half of the 1920s, Belgian music critic and composer Georges Systermans wrote that Tansman's musical personality "combines poetic genius with Latin culture". Tansman's works started to be frequently performed in programs with pieces by Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Gian Francesco Malipiero on the one hand, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov on the other. Each time he visited Germany, he was invited to Arnold Schönberg's home, who at that time lectured in Berlin. In 1927 Nicolas Slonimsky called Tansman a "musical plenipotentiary of Poland in the Western World".
From the mid-1920s, and into the decades that followed, Tansman's works were performed in some of the best concert halls in the world, such as Salle Gaveau, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Carnegie Hall, Opéra National de Paris, New York Philharmonic, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Salle Pleyel, Boston Symphony Hall, Théâtre Mogador, Opéra National de Lyon, Château Royal de Laeken, Théâtre de la Ville, Palais-Royal, Berlin State Opera, Royal Albert Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Severance Hall, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, DAR Constitution Hall, Cologne Opera, Tokyo Hibiya Public Hall, Berlin Philharmonic, Oslo National Theatre, Wigmore Hall, La Fenice, Academy of Music, De Doelen, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Opéra de Nice, Orchestra Hall, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Hollywood Bowl, Powell Hall, Mann Auditorium, Johannesburg City Hall, Teatro Colón, Grand Auditorium, Royce Hall.
In 1931, a book authored by Irving Schwerke and titled Alexandre Tansman. Compositeur polonais was published in Paris. The book was devoted to the work of Tansman until 1930 and its reception, to his individual style and the aesthetics of his oeuvre. It also contained Tansman's short biography and the first catalogue of his works and their European and American premieres. Tansman's music – according to Schwerke – "is undoubtedly the most complete homage that any Polish composer of his generation has paid to his country. It occupies a prominent place among the most important artistic manifestations of the present day".
In 1932–1933, Tansman made an unprecedented artistic tour around the world – starting with the United States, through Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Ceylon, India and Egypt, to Italy. He was honored by Mahatma Gandhi and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. In Tokyo, Tansman was granted honorary membership of the Imperial Academy of Music and awarded Golden Ji Ji Shimpo Medal in recognition of his notable contribution to the world of arts.
As Marcel Mihalovici noted, Tansman was one of the most prominent contemporary representatives of the centuries-old tradition of École de Paris: "This included musicians at Notre-Dame Cathedral during the Renaissance, and later Lully, Mozart, and Wagner. Not to mention Chopin, Falla, Enescu, Honegger, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Copland, and certainly our old colleague Alexander Tansman".
In June 1938, four years after Stravinsky and in the same year as Bruno Walter, Tansman was granted French citizenship by the last president of the Third Republic Albert Lebrun. Tansman fled Europe as his Jewish background put him in danger with Hitler's rise to power. He moved to Los Angeles, thanks to the efforts of his friend Charlie Chaplin in founding a committee visa. In 1941 he could join there the circle of famous emigrated artists and intellectuals that included Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel, Emil Ludwig, Aldous Huxley, Lion Feuchtwanger, Man Ray, Eugène Berman, Jean Renoir. During this time, he also met and befriended Golo Mann as well as Sholem Asch.
During his American years Tansman toured extensively as pianist and conductor and wrote a wealth of music, e.g. three symphonies, two quartets, works for piano. In 1944 he accepted Nathaniel Shilkret's invitation to co-create Genesis Suite, alongside Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. In the 1940s, he also wrote a few scores for Hollywood movies: i.e. Flesh and Fantasy, starring Barbara Stanwyck, a biopic of the Australian medical researcher Sister Elizabeth Kenny, starring Rosalind Russell, and Paris Underground, starring Constance Bennett. For the 1946 Academy Awards ceremony, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, for Paris Underground. In 1948, Tansman published a book on Igor Stravinsky, the result of a friendship between the two composers during the years of exile in the United States.
In 1946 Tansman returned to Paris and his musical career started again all over Europe. His works, with performances at times reaching over 500 a year, were performed by the best orchestras and conductors, such as Jascha Horenstein, Rafael Kubelik, André Cluytens, Carlos Chávez, Paul Kletzki, Charles Munch, Bruno Maderna, Paul van Kempen, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Ferenc Fricsay, Charles Bruck, Øivin Fjeldstad, Eugène Bigot, Franz André, Jean Fournet, Franz Waxman, Georges Tzipine, Pedro de Freitas Branco, Alfred Wallenstein, Eduard Flipse, Robert Whitney, Manuel Rosenthal, Roger Wagner, Jean Périsson, Vassil Kazandjiev.
Despite Tansman’s numerous performances far away from his home in France, he did not return to the United States after the 1946 end of his California residency. This eventually reduced the number of Americans who knew who he was.
As a ballet composer, for decades Tansman collaborated with the most eminent choreographers like Olga Preobrajenska, Rudolf von Laban, Jean Börlin, Adolph Bolm, Kurt Jooss, Ernst Uthoff, Françoise Adret.
In 1966, he was awarded the Hector Berlioz Prize. In 1977, in recognition of his contribution to European culture, Tansman was granted membership of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. In 1978, he was awarded the Music Prize of the Académie Française, and in 1986 – the highest Commander grade of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Notable students of Tansman include Cristóbal Halffter, Leonardo Balada, Carmelo Bernaola, Yüksel Koptagel.
During the last period of his life, he began to reestablish connections to Poland, though his career and family kept him in France, where he lived until his death in Paris in 1986. Since 1996, in his native city of Łódź, Alexander Tansman Association for the Promotion of Culture has been organizing the Alexander Tansman International Festival and Competition of Musical Personalities.
Twenty years after the composer's death, in 2006 Henryk Górecki wrote his long-awaited 4th Symphony, which he named Tansman Episodes by no accident. Górecki left a cryptogram that explains the way he created the theme for the symphony, using musical letters from the first and last names of "Aleksander Tansman".