ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the degree to which Darius Milhaud responded to Paul Claudel's ideas on the role of music in drama, assessing the part their collaboration played in the composer's artistic development. Claudel thought that music was inherent in everything from the spoken word to the full orchestra. In his writings and correspondence the attention Claudel gave to music was considerable; he never doubted its necessity, but its relative prominence within the drama varied from work to work, and even from one version of a work to another. In order to accentuate the savage nature of Claudel's French text, Milhaud divorced lyrical melody from rhythm. Strikingly, Milhaud treats the arch-shaped, flowing vocal lines as instrumental melodies, giving no indication of which sound should be used. In Christophe Colomb Milhaud demonstrated his musical maturity in responding to the greater complexity, with regard to plot, narrative and symbolism, of the drama.
