Facade is in need of revaluation. If it achieves it, it will have taken nearly 60 years for the proper appraisal to come about; but then this work has throughout its growth demanded long perspectives: a full 30 years, for instance, before the definitive ordering of items was settled and a published score produced; 55 before many of the original items were made known to the public. During this time numerous chroniclers sought to describe and place the extraordinary creation, but nearly all of them found in it little more than charm and precocity, a remarkable upbeat to the composer's serious achievement yet sharply to be distinguished in worth from the Symphony, the Viola Concerto. Some writers went further to disparage Façade, one of them a former editor of this journal:

The desire for laughter in the concert hall is only a naughty whim which will soon pass, for music is not meant to make jokes consciously as in Façade, any more than unconsciously as in Rossini's William Tell Overture. Parody must always be as vulgar as what it parodies … When sanity is reestablished Façade will be recognised as no better Walton than the Musical Joke is good Mozart.

The catalogue concentrates on Markevitch's published works. A note on missing works and manuscripts, and on dating, is appended to it. Except for the early piano suite Noces (Salabert) and the 6 Songs of Moussorgsky (Edizioni Suvini Zerboni), all Markevitch's works are now published in London by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd, who were the original publishers of Icare (23) and The Musical Offering (26). Numbers 2 – 10c and 11 – 18a were first published by B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz, and numbers 20 – 22, 24 by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milan.

The subject has suddenly become volatile, and even the simplest facts have a heady aroma. Let us nevertheless begin with a few that may, without evaporating altogether, help place Markevitch in his context.

Should posterity number him among the historically essential composers of our century, his nearest contemporaries in that sense would be Britten and René Leibowitz, who were born a year later, in 1913; the next nearest, Messiaen and Carter, who are four years his senior.

Markevitch's achievement does not lie in having produced, at 18, a work stamped with the skill of a thoroughly experienced musician. We might well apply on his behalf the observation Radiguet made in declining a success due only to his precocity: ‘Age is nothing. All the great poets were writing when they were seventeen. The greatest are those who succeed in making us forget it.’ But it is wonderful to see the young Markevitch achieving such sure mastery in a field where there is no safeguard to keep him from error and no restriction to prevent him from exceeding his powers.

The facts. L'Envoi d'Icare (The Flight of Icarus) was written in the summer of 1932 for a projected ballet by Serge Lifar which was never staged. Its first concert performance, on 26 June 1933, caused a sensation—‘Cette musique, pure comme le diamant, represent une aspiration à la vie éternelle d'une puissance inouïe’ wrote Henri Prunières in La Revue musicale—and over the next few years many musicians and even some critics praised it highly. ‘Il y a dans la musique de Markevitch, cette force claire, (non pas froide), concentrée, que I'on trouve chez les mystiques, cette poésie qui vient de son caractére statique et de sa perfection’, observed Joseph Weterings in La Revue musicale after Scherchen had conducted the last two sections in Brussels in April 1935.

Markevitch's correspondence with the Dutch pianist Alex de Graeff began in 1932, at the time of her article on his Partita, and has continued to the present day. The following excerpts have been selected specifically for the present issue of TEMPO, and represent only very small fraction of the whole.

In Paris, between 15 October 1935 and 1 July 1936 there were:

246 symphony concerts with full orchestra,

30 with small orchestra (which is incredibly few),

57 with chorus,

115 chamber music concerts, not counting either sonata evenings or recitals by various instrumental soloists or groups, which make something like 700 performances to add to the above. Altogether, then, if I am to believe the Guide du Concert (from which I have taken these figures, adding a few concerts that were missed there), 1,144 occasions to exercise the reprehensible and avowedly useless profession of music criticism.

It was in 1942, at the age of thirty, that Igor Markevitch published in Milan the work which was to be his last: Variazioni e fuga su un tema di Haendel for piano. Modest in scale compared to the composer's more frequent deployment of choral and orchestral forces, this set of Variations is none the less one of his most robust works—and at the same time a profoundly lyrical one. Far from forecasting the end of a career, it marks on the contrary its high point, revealing a notable capacity for synthesis—synthesis both of his own style and of a pianistic tradition assimilated in an extremely personal manner.

The preceding article ended with a question. The title of this one contains an implicit reply—which is moreover a strictly foreseeable one. Indeed, an artist who has attained the fulness of his creative powers should be able to change his means of expression without altering its internal structure.

On leaving the stage, Markevitch the composer bequeathed all his experience to the conductor. Certainly, the conductor still had much to learn, and he was applying himself passionately to the task when, at the end of the war, the Allies in occupied Florence entrusted him with the conductorship of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. But the essentials he had known long since, because—as has been seen—his thought was essentially orchestral. This is why Markevitch, in deciding to become an interpreter, did not take up the familiar piano, but preferred orchestral conducting, of which he had scarcely more than an elementary idea and which he now had to manage in his own way, guided only by his pigheadedness, his tenacity, and … his experience as a composer.