The Music of Maurice Ohana

Caroline Rae

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351744607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

This title was first published in 2000. Pianist and scholar Rae presents a detailed study of composer Maurice Ohana's life and music, and identifies the procedures that characterize his mature style. In the initial chapters, she provides a biographical overview and sets his work in its musical and cultural context.

PART ONE

From the Garden of the Hesperides

CHAPTER ONE
Pianist to Composer: Cultural Roots, Life and Influences

Maurice Ohana was born in Casablanca on 12 June 1913.¹ By his own declaration he was profoundly superstitious and especially so in any matters involving the number thirteen. Modifying his birthdate to 1914, he suppressed knowledge of the true year of his birth. Writers respected this unusual eccentricity until after his death.² An ironic turn of fate proved Ohana’s fears well-founded as he died on 13 November 1992. Any biographical discussion of Ohana must, however, begin by considering his cultural origins and nationality which have sometimes been a source of confusion. Recognising the significance of Ohana’s cultural roots is the gateway to understanding the composer’s creative stimuli. As shall be shown, the Spanish and African influences of his youth and early adulthood provided the raw material which was tempered by his French training, education and environment. Together, these three cultures provided the rich and fertile loam which nourished his compositional growth.

Maurice Ohana was once described by André Gide as a French Joseph Conrad.³ The intriguing comparison highlighted the issue of nationality as distinct from cultural origin which, in the case of both Conrad and Ohana, did not correspond. Like the Ukrainian-born Pole Józef Korzeniowski, Maurice Ohana’s cultural lineage was not defined by his bureaucratic nationality; both, albeit for different reasons, were British citizens. Ohana spent most of his life in Paris, yet was not a Frenchman. He was born and grew-up in Casablanca, yet was not a Moroccan. He was a British subject but could not be described as an Englishman. His parents were of Spanish origin yet Ohana was not simply a Spaniard. The southern culture from which he stemmed reaches beyond the political boundaries of any one country and in his later years he held nationality of more than one state.⁴ Maurice Ohana’s cultural background is full of contradictions which conspire to make him difficult to place for those who desire the convenience of tidy labelling by nationality. For this reason, Ohana tended to speak more of cultural roots and geographical influence than of nationality. The complexities of nationhood and origin have contributed to the neglect of Ohana’s music in the United Kingdom; those who are not readily categorised tend to be excluded. While such complexities are easily understood by those belonging to the same Southern culture, or whose origins were internationalised as a result of the Diaspora, they have represented a source of confusion when viewed from a northern, Anglo-Saxon perspective. In France, where fascination for the exotic and acceptance of the eclectic is almost tradition itself, the issue has rarely been problematic, his country of adoption having always claimed his music as its own.

When describing his cultural origins himself, Ohana liked to identify his birthplace as the ‘balcony of Europe’, drawing attention to the proximity of southern Spain and north Africa as a meeting point of cultures. The Morocco of his youth, Casablanca in particular, represented a melting-pot of races and creeds with the cosmopolitan mix of Berbers and Arabs together with French and Spanish, both Christian and Jewish. Ohana ignored the political divisions of the modern world, preferring to evoke more ancient civilisations, associating his birthplace with the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, reputed by many scholars to have been sited in north Africa.⁵ While Hesperia was for the Greeks the western land of Italy, the Romans called Spain by this name. In earliest legends the nymphs who guarded Hera’s famous golden apples, assisted by the dragon Ladon whom Hercules later slew, were the daughters of Atlas’s son Hesperus. They lived on the river Oceanus in the extreme west which has been placed by many in the Atlas mountains.⁶ As a mature composer he found that such evocations of ancient myth had greater resonance in the context of his music, much of which draws on mythological sources.

If one asked me to say where I was born, civil states apart, I would refer to this vast area which later I could locate as a place that fascinates me; the Garden of the Hesperides. A certain place with grazing herds of bulls that Hercules had acquired after killing Geryon [mythical three-headed King of Spain]; a place where a great disaster joined the Mediterranean with the ocean. I turn back to this place, I prowl about it in the quest of some memory I know not of, perhaps that of an earlier life, seeking without doubting the forces which feed my music through a metamorphosis whose powers I would not wish to analyse. It is enough for me to perceive that these are the forces that assure, by their diversity, the continuity of a single idea in all that I write.⁷

The youngest in a large family of eleven children, Ohana stemmed from mixed Jewish-Christian lineage, much of his complex cosmopolitanism resulting from his immediate family background and circumstances. The Ohana family was of Spanish origin but resided for a time in London as well as, more permanently, in French colonial Morocco. The composer’s father, Simon David Ohana, was of Sephardic, Andalusian-Gibraltarian origin and was born in Casablanca in 1865, the son of Moses and Jamu Ohana who are recorded on the birth certificate as ‘subjects of the Moroccan Empire’. Maurice Ohana’s mother, Fortuna Mercedes Ohana (née Bengio) was Castillian Spanish and a Roman Catholic, although her family also had Andalusian roots.⁸ The family surname, far from being Irish as is often wrongly assumed by some English speakers, is Andalusian, being derived from the village of Ohanes approximately 20 miles north west of Almería on the southern Spanish coast. Although there are historical ties linking Spain and Ireland, there is no known connection in the Ohana family, the name being correctly spelled without an apostrophe.⁹

As with many Jewish families of southern Spain, the Ohanas had close ties with Gibraltar, although the family had been resident in Morocco for many years. Simon David Ohana chose to formalise the family ties with Britain and in 1894, aged 29 and married with four children, he was granted British citizenship by naturalisation.¹⁰ The Home Office certificate, issued in London, is dated 17 July 1894, the Oath of Allegiance 19 July and the registration 20 July. In accordance with the Naturalisation Acts of 1870, Simon David Ohana and his family were required to have lived in the United Kingdom for at least five years within an eight year period prior to the application. The certificate records their address as 236 Queen’s Road, Dalston, London.¹¹ The four children listed at the time of their father’s naturalisation were Semtob, Rachel, Albert, and Isaac, aged seven, five, three years and six months, respectively. It is interesting to note that even during this period the Ohana family returned regularly to Morocco; Semtob and Albert were born in Casablanca.¹² Clearly the Ohanas maintained close ties with north Africa, for business as well as for family reasons and despite the regulations of naturalisation requiring an intention to remain in the United Kingdom, they eventually returned to Morocco permanently.¹³ When Maurice Ohana was born nineteen years after his father’s naturalisation, he was able to claim British citizenship. Surprisingly, his birth was not registered with the British Consul in Casablanca until 27 November 1939, the date recorded on his birth certificate.¹⁴ Two of Maurice Ohana’s sisters, born after the family resettled in Casablanca, inherited the estate in the 1940s and remained there until the property was dissolved in 1965 (the family house was sadly later demolished). Semtob remained in Casablanca until his death in 1979 at the age of ninety-two. Members of the family today live in Spain and France as well as in England and the United States of America.

The Ohanas enjoyed a well-to-do, intellectual and cultured family milieu. In Casablanca, they lived in a large villa at 182 Boulevard d’Anfa, the house where Maurice was born. His mother had been a schoolmistress in Gibraltar prior to marriage and his father, described as a commission agent on his naturalisation papers, ran a business in shipping and exports with a British partner. Very much younger than his brothers and sisters, whom Ohana remembered far more as uncles and aunts than as sibling playmates, his childhood in Casablanca was paradoxically a solitary one. While still a young child his older brothers were leaving home to take up careers in business and the professions, settling in different parts of Europe and the United States. He had slightly closer contact with his sisters whom he recalled as being good pianists. Noemi, his closest sibling, was contemplating a career as a concert pianist and gave Maurice his first informal piano lessons when he was five. Her performance of works by Chopin, Albéniz and Debussy, were among Ohana’s earliest memories.¹⁵ At the same time he was nurtured into his Spanish culture. His beloved nanny Titi, an Andalusian gypsy woman for whom he maintained a life-long affection, sang him flamenco songs, many in the ‘Cante Jondo’ style.¹⁶ His mother taught him many old Spanish legends and encouraged his enthusiasm for the re-telling of these tales in family performances of the traditional, comic puppet-theatre, long popular in Spain and also beloved by Falla and Garcia Lorca. In later life these proved important influences on his own approach to theatre music, on the subjects chosen as well as on the means in which they were executed. Ohana’s mother also introduced him to many of the dances of Spain and sang Andalusian lullabies (from the flamenco)¹⁷, as well as songs from the Zarzuela:

My mother, like all Andalusian women of her time sang and loved music. She had a natural voice. Her repertoire went from the medieval ‘chansons de geste’ to Spanish songs and the Zarzuela.¹⁸

Ohana never underestimated the significance of the richness and diversity of his Andalusian heritage, itself a mixture of cultures, races and creeds. In later years he formalised his extensive knowledge of Spanish folk music and began a collection of traditional folk songs from the different regions.¹⁹ While he published a number of articles and sleeve-notes during the 1950s and 1960s and gave several talks, most of his ethnomusicological research remains unpublished, his interest being more for compositional than musicological reasons.²⁰

Andalusia was a focus of tremendous civilisation during 10 or 15 centuries. First came what they call the people from the sea, whom I presume came from Crete, the Middle East and Greece. Cadiz was founded over 3000 years ago by the Greeks, and some Roman poets still mention the dancers of Cadiz as being of Greek descent. Then came the Romans wfco had an influence as well. Then came the Arabs, the Jews and then the Gypsies to crown the whole thing. And the interesting point about Andalusia is that it achieved such a type of civilisation as not to destroy the sediments that were left by the preceding civilisations but just melted with it. That’s how we got finally to what is called Andalusian folk art which is the combination of all those influences.²¹

English, as well as Spanish was spoken in the Ohana household, while the family location in Morocco necessitated the speaking of French, although Ohana recalled that this was spoken more among himself and his siblings than by his parents.²² Exposed to so many languages at an early age, Ohana alarmed his mother by hardly speaking at all until the age of four.²³ Fluent in three languages by the age of seven, speaking each without accent, Ohana undertook his general education in the French schools of Casablanca and took a baccalauréat in Philosophy in 1932 at the Lycée Lyautey, named after the French resident General of Morocco. (That Ohana remained trilingual throughout his life is witnessed by his publications, written in English, French and Spanish.) Although educated in a Roman Catholic environment, Ohana often emphasised that he was brought up without adherence to any specific religious practice. The differing religious backgrounds of his parents may have fostered a flexible approach to formal worship during his formative years. As an adult he was drawn to the Christian liturgy, perhaps as a result of his prolonged studies of plainchant and he completed a Mass for liturgical, as well as concert perf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part 1 From the Garden of the Hesperides
• Part 2 The Mature Music: Technique, Style and Structure
• List of works
• Bibliography
• Index