René Leibowitz, ’Marijuana,’ Variations non sérieuses Op. 54 (1960)

René Leibowitz (17 February 1913 – 29 August 1972) was a Polish, later naturalised French, composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher. He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second World War, and teaching a new generation of serialist composers. In Paris Leibowitz earned his living as a jazz pianist and composed constantly. In his early twenties he married an artist from an illustrious French family and settled down in Paris, eventually taking French nationality. During the early 1930s he was introduced to Schoenberg’s twelve-note technique by the German pianist and composer Erich Itor Kahn. Maguire writes that Leibowitz easily fitted into “the ebullient intellectual and artistic climate of Paris in the pre-war years“. His aesthetic interests were not confined to music, and he became friendly with leading figures from the world of modern art, notably André Masson and Pablo Picasso, and with literary figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. For Leibowitz composing was his most regular activity, and the one he thought most important, although he was known more for his commentaries, his critical and analytical writings, his conducting, and his teaching, all of which he considered secondary. Leibowitz remained firmly committed to the musical aesthetic of Arnold Schoenberg, and was to some extent sidelined among the French avant-garde in the 1950s, when, under the influence of Leibowitz’s former student, Pierre Boulez and others, the music of Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern was adopted as the orthodox model by younger composers. After 1945, René Leibowitz was one of the leading European advocates of the works of the Second Viennese School, in Paris above all but also at the Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt starting in 1946. What is less known, however, is Leibowitzs compositional œuvre, comprising over 90 works in practically all genres. Even though he always insisted on the necessity of an interplay between theory and practice, composed continuously for forty years, and was not indifferent to the success of his works, he was remarkably circumspect as a composer. His first works date from the 1930s; his firth opera, Todos caeran, based on an originally libretto, was completed in 1972, shortly before his death. Both his musical philosophy and his works are indebted to the œuvre of Arnold Schoenberg. Throughout his life, Leibowitz held Schoenberg up as his model and honored the unyieldingness with which Schoenberg spurred on musical developments from the spirit of tradition. In the center of Leibowitzs interest in Schoenberg was the twelve-tone technique which he clung to even though it meant isolation from his contemporaries. Leibowitz saw the uniqueness of this compositional method in the synthesis of constructive discipline and inventive freedom. It was the task of the followers of the Schoenberg school to plumb the depths of this methods possibilities, which were far from exhausted. Although Leibowitz was receptive to a wide range of musical styles, he could not bear the music of Sibelius, and published a pamphlet about him under the title of Sibelius: the Worst Composer in the World; he also severely criticised Bartók for writing music that was too accessible: Leibowitz felt that by failing to adopt dodecaphony in his later works Bartók was pandering to popular taste rather than helping to move music away from tonality in accordance with Leibowitz’s notions of historical inevitability and composers’ duty. For Leibowitz, to write a popular work like Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was a betrayal of modernism. After World War II, young composers like Pierre Boulez and Hans Werner Henze went directly to Leibowitz to learn about the twelve-tone technique. In the zero hour, young composers hoped that the then widely unknown method would lead to a new beginning. However, Leibowitzs reliance on a traditional access to music soon came in conflict with the zeitgeist. This had become obvious to all at the latest in 1951, when Pierre Boulez, the spokesman of the French avant-garde, gave his lecture Schoenberg is dead in Darmstadt. It was a symbolic farewell to this traditional-mindedness. Serial music came to dominate contemporary musical development, forcing Leibowitz to withdraw from the public eye. Leibowitz died suddenly in Paris on 28 August 1972, at the age of 59.