By my reckoning, Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger were among the greats of 20th-century classical music. Fusing tradition with the new, they created works rich in humanity that leave a deep impression on the listener. Instead of throwing tonality out the window, they enriched it with fascinating new sounds, and they never forgot music’s human basis.
“Seeking to create beauty is an act of love.”
—Frank Martin (1890–1974)
Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger
The 20th century was an intense time in Western music, as composers sought paths forward out of what was felt to be the exhaustion of traditional tonality (the sense of key or harmonic center). But amid the iconoclasm and experimentation, there were some artists who sought a balance between tradition and novelty, who valued communication and emotion, and who aimed at beauty. Their work was sustained by a spirit of humanism that sought to put the best of the old wine into new bottles. Perhaps it is no accident that two of these composers had ties to Switzerland, a peaceful and civilized country in which two of the dominant traditions of European classical music, German and French, have existed in harmony.
Frank Martin (1890–1974) and Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) wrote orchestral, choral, dramatic, and chamber music that has stood the test of time as a powerful expression of the modern era in which they lived. Yet their names are rarely mentioned when the major composers of the century are discussed, and they remain little known among classical music listeners. Music history is too often seen in terms of determinism and “progress.” Conversation tends to center on the “movers and shakers” and “inspired innovators” who “moved music forward,” while artists who consolidated and carried on a tradition with integrity tend to be overlooked. But such a one-sided preoccupation with novelty is a serious mistake. Some of the most revered figures in the history of classical music (Bach and Brahms, for example) were more traditionalists than innovators. In the context of the 20th century, Martin and Honegger were comparable to those past masters for the magnificence of their work. While being rooted in the past, both composers succeeded in capturing the “20th-century sound,” which my old Harvard Dictionary of Music defines as “dissonance, classical craftsmanship, counterpoint, driving rhythm, and striking orchestral sonorities.” Their works were grounded in the aesthetic, moral, and religious traditions of European culture; far from “art for art’s sake,” they were reflections of very human concerns.
Frank Martin (the name is pronounced “fronk mar-TAN”) was the son of a Protestant pastor and grew up in Geneva in a highly musical and cultured family. Early on, J. S. Bach became his musical idol and inspiration, and the influence of the Baroque master can be clearly heard in his music. No prodigy, Martin developed slowly and meticulously, searching for an authentic personal voice and not achieving any real breakthrough until middle age. (Even before committing himself to music, Martin had studied physics and mathematics.) Once fully launched, he went from strength to strength, penning a number fine instrumental works (the Petite Symphonie Concertante, a violin concerto, a concerto for winds) as well as a beautiful Passion oratorio, Golgotha, other sacred choral works including In Terra Pax, and an opera on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Martin was intrigued early on by Arnold Schoenberg’s experiments in atonality, using the 12 notes of the chromatic scale on a more or less equal footing. However, true to his independent Swiss nature, Martin took Schoenberg’s method in his own terms. In Martin’s own words, “I can truly say that at the same time I both fell under the influence of Schoenberg and rebelled against him with my whole musical being.” He elaborated, “In Schoenberg I found an iron straitjacket from which I took only what suited me and allowed me to craft my own style of writing.”
In the end, Martin combined elements of the 12-tone system—mostly present in the form of wide-ranging, chromatic melodies—with harmonies straight out of French Impressionism and a strong, grounded rhythmic and contrapuntal foundation that recalls Bach. His music resists pigeonholing; it is neither atonal nor traditionally tonal, but always attractive to the ear. Martin pulls off a rare combination of mysticism and Gallic elegance. His instrumental works have a whimsical wit, and his choral works a luminous spirituality. His Mass for Double Choir sounds in places as if it were composed in the Renaissance instead of the 1920s. His oratorio Golgotha, written in answer to the Passions of Bach, is a mid-century masterpiece.
As a composer Martin was learned, his interests wide ranging. The subjects for his compositions include the four elements (Les quatre éléments), the life of Erasmus (Erasmi monumentum), medieval legend (Le vin herbé), and the Nativity (Le mystère de la nativité), among other themes.
Beyond the art of music, Martin’s Christian faith was the defining feature of his life. He once wrote: “As the son of a minister, and as the son of a minister who has not renounced his faith, religion has affected me twice as strongly.” His wife Maria commented, “His faith, which he wanted only to express through music, was built on an intense need to worship God, the power which transcends mankind and which is enshrined in the spirit; that is, as far as he was concerned, Love.”
I have not been able to discover whether Frank Martin and his countryman Arthur Honegger were friends, though I have a hard time believing that they were not given all they had in common. Honegger was born in Le Havre, France to Swiss parents from Zurich. Due to his parentage, the composer held dual French and Swiss citizenship and enjoyed access to both cultures, French and German. No less than Martin, Honegger was astutely engaged with the problems of his time. You sense in his work an initial fascination with the machine—as seen in Pacific 231, his famous musical depiction of a steam locomotive in action—tempered by a wariness of the machine’s destructive and anti-human potential.
Few works are as classically 20th century as Honegger’s cycle of five symphonies, powerful documents of their times that deserve to be as well known as the symphonies of Shostakovich or Mahler. The First Symphony from 1930 provides a kind of blueprint for the others. At times Honegger tosses us headlong into the heaving activity of a loud, frenetic city; in the turbulent First, we can almost picture Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp bewildered by the relentless motion of machines in a factory. Yet Honegger can resolve this chaos into moments of the most exquisite and redemptive hopefulness.
While Martin’s music has an elegant surface, Honegger’s is boldly and grittily rhythmic, with frequent dissonant clashes resulting from polytonality (the use of two or more keys at the same time). Yet Honegger uses dissonance not gratuitously but with expressive purpose, creating powerfully heightened tension that always serves the story his music is telling.
Honegger said he tried to portray in his music “the revolt of the individual against the masses that crush him,” and there is more than a bit of “angry young man” in his earlier work. He builds his movements on striking themes, developed in a rugged and dynamic style with a clear descent from Beethoven. Given his music’s strong sense of action, it comes as no surprise that Honegger wrote a quite a few scores for the movies as well as an orchestral piece depicting a football match (Rugby).
The greatest of the symphonies is the Third, subtitled “Liturgique” and composed toward the end of World War II. Honegger gives each of the three movements headings from the Requiem Mass and delves into the emotional content of the Latin phrases “Dies irae,” “De profundis clamavi,” and “Dona nobis pacem” as they apply to a war-weary world yearning for peace and wholeness. The first movement plunges us into the chaos of war; since Beethoven music has become very good at depicting battle, but this is emphatically war in its modern form, with sirens and airplanes dropping bombs. In the course of the symphony, Honegger takes us from this hell on earth to at least a glimpse of heaven.
The music critic Steven Kruger puts it best: “In Honegger’s harmonic world the tragedy is never permanent. Sooner or later something bucolic and sweet pops up like a flower in a bomb site.” We hear this in the mystic ending of the Third where, after a long, sinister march into the abyss, a “bird of peace” heard in the flute hovers over a scene of uneasy calm. In Honegger’s world, harmony ultimately triumphs over discord and beauty over ugliness. He composes some of the best “rainbow music,” truly biblical in its sense of promise, that I have ever heard.
Early on, Honegger set himself apart from his Parisian bon vivant colleagues by his serious-mindedness and affinity for weighty historical and religious subjects. Whether limning the stories of King David, Judith, and Joan of Arc in oratorios (the latter to a text by his friend Paul Claudel), or the medieval Danse des morts, Honegger went for the big statement. Yet his music is not all doom and gloom. His gentler moods can warm the heart, with lighter moments reminiscent of hot chocolate by the fireside in a ski lodge—a very Swiss sense of comfort. The composer gives us the musical equivalent of a Swiss vacation in his Fourth Symphony, subtitled Deliciae Basilienses or the Delights of Basel and offering an idyllic prospect on postwar life.
Such an idyllic future was, sadly, not for the composer, whose later years were clouded by a darkening pessimism. Honegger found himself no longer able to believe, even though his respect for Christian culture endured (a Swiss Protestant like Martin, Honegger once described himself as “steeped in the Bible”). The problem, as Honegger saw it, was that the modern world was succumbing to the forces of evil he had depicted in his Third Symphony: “the morass of barbarism, stupidity, suffering, machine-mindedness, and bureaucracy.” The composer even went so far as to predict that, because of the general decline of civilization, the art of music would either disappear within a few years or regress to a state of primitivism. Weakened by ill health, Honegger died in 1955 at the age of 63. We can feel this pessimism acutely at the end of his fifth and last symphony, where the violently energetic music simply peters out—a vision of the world ending, not with a bang but with a whimper.
What a contrast with Martin, who concluded his life in hopefulness with a cantata entitled Et la vie l’emporta (And Life Carried the Day) and Polyptique, a concerto for violin and string orchestra describing the life of Christ.
One of the things that tie Martin and Honegger together, besides their rich musical imagination and their shared heritage, is their humility and integrity as artists, something that goes against the egocentric grain of much modern art. Jean Cocteau once likened Honegger to a humble stonemason of the Middle Ages. Frank Martin often sought anonymity, refusing to show his Mass to anyone for decades lest it draw too much attention to himself. This level of self-forgetfulness is rare in the art world, especially in recent times; but it is in line with a more artisanal concept of art with links to (for example) Jacques Maritain’s aesthetic theories in his book Art and Scholasticism. Both composers were in fact expert craftsmen in sound, who created great music without fanfare or desire for personal glory. Quite simply, their work belongs within the noble tradition of 20th-century Christian humanism.
By my reckoning, Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger were among the greats of 20th-century classical music. Fusing tradition with the new, they created works rich in humanity that leave a deep impression on the listener. Instead of throwing tonality out the window, they enriched it with fascinating new sounds, and they never forgot music’s human basis.
And I believe their work is as vital as ever, at a time when the classical repertoire has ossified into a small range of works endlessly repeated. Much “old gold” from the early-to-mid 20th century is getting lost, and we are apt to forget (if we ever knew in the first place) that the Western art music tradition extends and embraces the modern era and its spiritual dramas. Conversations about the legacy of Schoenberg and atonality, far from being productive, are now dated and a distraction from rediscovering the riches of the recent past. We owe it to those “modern classicists” to listen to their work with fresh ears, and these two Swiss masters are a great place to start.
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The featured image is combines photographs of Frank Martin and Arthur Honegger. Bot files are in the public domain and appear courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.