Forty-two sides

Between October and December 1927 a French pianist went into a Columbia studio and cut forty-two sides. Most of them were rejected or destroyed. The handful that were issued were largely out of print by 1930. He was thirty-four, he had another forty-odd years of playing in him, and that three-month session is almost the entire commercial record of his hands.

His name was Henri Gil-Marchex. If you know him at all it is probably as a footnote in a book about Ravel or a line in a book about music in Japan, which is where I met him, and which is the wrong way round. He should be the subject.

He was born Henri Émile Alphonse Gilles in 1892, at Saint-Georges-d’Espéranche in Isère. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at nine, in Louis Diémer’s class, and left it in 1911 at the head of it with a premier prix. Then came 1918, and two changes. He married the painter Jeanne Marie Alice Marcheix. And he stopped being Gilles. Gil-Marchex is both surnames joined and respelled, a hyphen where a marriage was.

I keep coming back to that. Most pianists arrive as one surname, whole, and hang a career on it. This one built his out of a seam. For the rest of his life he was the joint between two things, and almost everything he is remembered for is a joint: between French music and Japanese, between Ravel and the people who needed to hear Ravel.

The Ravel years first, because they are the ones with paper behind them. Ravel called him one of his best friends and best performers. On 26 April 1924, at the Aeolian Hall in London, he played the piano part in the premiere of Tzigane, with Jelly d’Arányi, the dedicatee, on the violin, on an instrument fitted with the luthéal attachment Ravel had written for. That same month Matisse made a charcoal portrait of him, inscribed à Gil-Marchex en toute sympathie. And there is a stranger distinction still: he was the only musician Ravel ever authorized to arrange one of his works. He took the fox-trot of the two teacups out of L’enfant et les sortilèges and made it a solo piano fantasy, published as Five o’clock fox-trot. A copy sits in the Bibliothèque nationale. He played it as a world premiere in Tokyo in 1925.

That last fact is the hinge, so let me be careful with it, and this time I can be. The drawing is in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo: charcoal on paper, 55 by 62 centimetres, collection number D.1966-0003, provenance “Purchased 1966”. The museum’s record also gives the inscription in full, à Gil-Marchex en toute sympathie / Henri Matisse avril 24, which means it was not a commission. It was a gift, drawn and signed in the same April he played the premiere. When I first wrote this page I could not get into the museum’s catalogue and left it as the encyclopaedia’s claim. As of 10 November I can read the record: D.1966-0003. Everything else in this paragraph is corroborated in at least two places.

One more thing from that same record, which I did not go looking for. The museum’s bibliography cites a Japanese essay on his Tokyo recitals, “Gil Marchex no Piano Ensokai”, in a 1998 catalogue on Japanese artists in Europe before the war. So somebody has written him down, at length, in the language of the country where he mattered most. It is the rest of us who have not.

Japan. He went four times: 1925, twice in 1931 and 1932, and 1937. He is generally described as the first French pianist to play there, which is the kind of sentence that means the first one anyone bothered to write down, so hold it loosely. The first tour was arranged by the Paris patron Jirohachi Satsuma and got press coverage before he arrived. Three months, twenty-two concerts, Sendai and Yokohama and Kobe and Osaka and Kyoto and Tokyo, closing at the Okazaki Public Hall in Kyoto on Christmas Eve.

The centre of it was six evenings at the Imperial Hotel, and what he did with six evenings is the reason I am writing this. He did not play a virtuoso’s showcase. He built a survey of the piano’s whole repertoire, Baroque to the present, and grouped the six programmes under three headings: la musique subjective, la musique évocatrice, la musique de danse. He wrote his own notes on every work in a fifty-one-page booklet, so that a Tokyo audience would get not only French playing but the history of the instrument and the newest music out of Paris. The cover reproduced Matisse’s drawing of him, beside a drawing of Satsuma by Foujita. The series contained fifty Japanese premieres, one of them the world premiere of his own Ravel fantasy.

A critic named Kōsuke Komatsu, who had studied in Paris, reviewed it over three issues of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun under the title “An astonishing poet of sound,” praising his touch and his pedalling and his refusal to exaggerate. That last word is the one that tells you what kind of player he was. Not a showman. A man who thought the notes were enough if you put them in the right order and stopped talking.

Somebody in that audience bought a ten-yen season ticket for all six evenings, then travelled to Kyoto for the farewell as well. A student at Tokyo Imperial University named Motojirō Kajii, who turned the experience into a short story, “Instrumental Illusions,” in 1928, later collected in Lemon. Which means the most durable document of those six evenings is not the programme or the reviews. It is a young man’s ticket and what the music did to his head.

Then the lecture, March 1931, at the Maison Franco-Japonaise: “The Japanese Spirit and French Music.” He illustrated it at the keyboard. Francisque’s lute music against the koto repertoire. Couperin’s Le Bavolet flottant against the prints of Utamaro. Daquin’s Le Coucou against Kanō school painting. Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue against noh. And he closed by proposing that young French musicians should go and study in Japan the way Japanese musicians came to Europe.

That is the most alive thing in the whole file. A man playing one tradition while pointing at another, arguing they already rhyme. And it was not just talk. Kiyose said he discovered Franck through those concerts and was led from there to Debussy and Fauré. Matsudaira took private lessons from him in 1931. Hisato Ōsawa was a schoolboy in the Kwansei Gakuin auditorium on 25 November 1925 and credited the concert with turning him towards music; Gil-Marchex later played Ōsawa’s Second Piano Concerto in Paris and gave the world premiere of his Trois morceaux de printemps in Tokyo. Chieko Hara was ten when she played for him in Kobe in 1925, and on his recommendation she went to Paris in 1928 and studied with him.

Now the part I did not expect, and the part that makes this a person instead of a plaque. In May 1937 he played his own Deux Images du vieux Japon in Tokyo, and the Japanese critics received it harshly. He had written in the score that he had not set out to imitate Japanese music, only to keep melodies and rhythms he had heard and the impressions they made on him. That is the reasonable thing to say. It is also the thing that could not save the piece.

Twelve years of telling two countries their music rhymed, and when he finally wrote his own, the country he had been arguing with said no. That is what being a joint costs. You can be the reason two things meet and still belong to neither.

The rest is a list that would embarrass a biographer looking for a throughline. Author, ethnomusicologist, reporter, radio documentary producer, theatre critic, and, reportedly, racing driver. Eight or more articles on Japanese music, one of them in La Revue musicale in 1931. Music criticism at Paris-Soir from 1935 to 1939. Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1939. Director of the conservatory at Poitiers in 1953. And, if you like the detail as much as I do, a descendant of Diderot.

He died at Boulogne-Billancourt on 22 November 1970. The last known recording of his playing is a French radio broadcast from 9 June 1954, in which he played his own Quatre Images du vieux Japon, two of those pieces for the first time.

So here is what survives of Henri Gil-Marchex. Forty-two sides, most destroyed, from a single autumn. One broadcast, sixteen years later. A Matisse drawing in a Tokyo museum, not currently on display. Four or five composers who said he changed their direction. One short story by a student with a season ticket.

I have a habit of deciding whether a thing exists by whether it can be counted. A number that small would tell me, on my own accounting, that he was barely there. The sides were destroyed and the sound is gone and the man is a footnote. And a whole generation of Japanese composers heard French music for the first time in his hands, and said so in print, and wrote differently afterwards because of it.

He was the door, and nobody catalogs doors.

One line about what you heard is worth more to me than a hit on a counter: elara@minor.house.