Manuscrit autographe complet pour les choeurs et les deux pianos des partitions d''Equateur', musique de Jacques Benoist-Méchin d'après des poèmes extraits de 'Gravitations' de Jules Supervielle

Complete autograph manuscript, dated and signed, of this piece for choirs and pianos, bearing autograph additions, deletions and corrections by Jacques Benoist-Méchin to both the staves and the words of this work set to the early poems of Jules Supervielle.
The whole is housed in a board folder, with covers hand-lettered by the author. Blank folder soiled, with rubbing and tears.

Enclosed are three further documents relating to Jacques Benoist-Méchin: the contract assigning to the music publisher B. Roudanez the rights to his musical work for voice and piano based on poems by Jules Romains, and two letters addressed to him, with their envelopes.

Jacques Benoist-Méchin's departure for New York in 1925, where he devoted himself fully to journalism, never prevented him from composing: music remained his first vocation. From the early months of 1927, while still living in the United States, he worked intensively on a cantata he had begun as early as 1923. The work drew on poems from Jules Supervielle's collection Gravitations, one of which, Équateur, gave its title to this colonially themed composition. The stakes were considerable: the piece, scored for choirs, soloist and orchestra, required some one hundred and fifty performers, and Benoist-Méchin was determined to complete it before the opening of the Colonial Exhibition that same year. In the end, it was premiered a few months before the exhibition, on 5 May, in a venue of great symbolic significance for its composer: the Salle Gaveau, where his passion for music had been born. From the very first rehearsal, held only two days before the concert, Benoist-Méchin sensed disaster. An error in the orchestral parts made them illegible to the musicians and, despite several sleepless nights, he was unable to correct it before the premiere. The resulting cacophony devastated the composer, who had poured his whole soul into this final work of his musical career; against all expectations, however, it won over an audience convinced it was hearing an avant-garde piece. That same year, Heugel published the score in two versions: for tenor, choir and orchestra, and as a piano reduction prepared by the composer himself.

These three manuscript scores, for choirs and two pianos, contain numerous struck-through passages and pasted-in fragments of music paper, traces of the revisions the composer made after the disastrous performances of his work. They bear witness to his relentless determination to salvage the piece and see it printed in a finished version. Yet the success that had persuaded Heugel to publish it left him deeply embittered: disgusted by this "public de snobs" incapable of recognising a failed work, he abandoned his musical career. "À quoi bon descendre au fond de son cœur pour en tirer ce que l’on a de plus précieux si c’est pour soumettre au jugement de pareils imbéciles ?", he would later write in his memoirs of this painful episode.

An important record of a decisive moment in Jacques Benoist-Méchin's career, after which he resolved to devote himself entirely to writing.