“Play It Again, Yvonne: Lefébure and Radio Performance as an Embodied Technology of French Resistance, Hope, and Friendship During World War II”

Lefébure and Her Loved Ones: Turmoil and Trauma

Although the Holocaust has rightly been the focus of trauma studies scholars working on World War II—especially since trauma studies as a subfield emerged from and remains deeply connected to Holocaust studies⁵— numerous aspects of the conflict in France contributed to cultural and collective, as well as individual and psychological trauma. Henry Rousso has written about what he terms the “Vichy syndrome”: “a diverse set of symptoms whereby the trauma of the Occupation, and particularly that trauma resulting from internal divisions within France, reveals itself in political, social, and cultural life.”⁶ For Rousso, the collective trauma expressed in his idea of “the Vichy syndrome” has to do with collective historical memory of the events and circumstances of the occupation: “the civil war, and particularly the inception, influence, and acts of the Vichy regime, played an essential if not primary role in the difficulties that the people of France have faced in reconciling themselves to their history.”⁷

For many people living in France in the 1930s and 1940s, the internal divisions Rousso details were but a part of an especially traumatic era. In their testimonies and memoirs, French citizens who were not deployed but living in France report that the first days of the German Occupation of Paris were extremely distressing.⁸ Everyday wartime circumstances resulted in cultural, collective, and personal trauma as well. Food shortages were a fact of daily life for just about everyone (except farmers living in rural areas), which many people mention as one of their most prominent memories of the war years.⁹ Jews and members of the Resistance lived in near-constant states of fear for much of the war; being the target or witness of violence against Jews and résistant(e)s was a fact of life for many.¹⁰ Those who were sent to prisons and concentration camps in France like Drancy, Gurs, and Fresnes, or in Germany and Poland, such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück, if they survived, returned extremely traumatized.¹¹ Additionally, the loss of daily ways of life, of living spaces, and of belongings was another contributor to long-lasting trauma; here again, Jews and résistant(e)s were especially in danger of having their apartments usurped and their belongings—including many cherished family memories—stolen or destroyed by German Occupiers.¹² Moreover, the need to flee, to hide, and to remain in exile took psychological tolls on those who were forced to leave their homes during the war.¹³ The liberation of France did not put an end to traumatic experiences: between the épuration—the political movement to punish those who had collaborated with the Germans—and being forced to attempt to return to “normal life” after living in camps or being involved in the Résistance, many people struggled emotionally, psychologically, and physically.¹⁴

Like many living in France between 1939 and 1945, Yvonne Lefébure and Fred Goldbeck lived in near-constant states of uncertainty and anxiety. Their prolific correspondence reveals that, starting in 1939, they were frequently abreast of the news of Hitler’s invasions throughout Europe and became increasingly fearful for themselves, their friends, their families, and their homelands. In a letter postmarked October 5, 1939, Lefébure wrote to Goldbeck about the emotional and physical effects of her anxiety:

Not very well going, the old Puss [Goldbeck’s pet name for her]. Recalcitrant stomach, pains that emerge dully from the lower kidneys … head a bit tired. Not great. Nothing worrying, simply a bout of physical depression. We wait, we’re always waiting! Sometimes I surprise myself in hoping for a “miracle” that will stop everything … [that] we would “wake up”!¹⁵

Later in the same letter, Lefébure made clear the source of her anguish:

We don’t want to admit that we have embarked on months, maybe years, of this same history. We don’t want to be unhappy. Oh, human egotism that goes against the most obvious rationale. Enough! Let’s wait for Saturday. They tell us that Hitler will speak of the war beginning, without a doubt, afterwards. In waiting, he continues the war of nerves.¹⁶

In referring to “this same history” in her letter to Goldbeck, Lefébure acknowledged the role that the traumas of World War I played in many French citizens’ emotional responses to German invasion in 1940.¹⁷

Even prior to Hitler’s declaration of war on France, Lefébure and Goldbeck lived with the insecurity of not knowing where they would go if, in fact, the seemingly inevitable war began. Lefébure, who, in the year immediately before the war was splitting her time between Paris and the coastal town of Les Sables d’Olonne, just south of Nantes, wrote to Goldbeck about her concerns that her aging mother wanted to live in Paris, possibly even while bombs fell on the city.¹⁸ Once Paris fell to Nazi occupation on June 22, 1940, Lefébure made the move with her mother to the small town of Perpignan, between Marseille and the Spanish border less than 40 kilometers away.¹⁹

Throughout their stay in Perpignan, the Lefébures and Goldbeck spent much time wrestling with not only whether to leave France, but also whether it would be possible for them to move to the United States, where Yvonne Lefébure’s close friend and Paris Conservatoire colleague Marthe Morhange-Motchane had moved during the war’s first year. Goldbeck’s Jewish heritage necessitated that he leave France, especially after French Jews began being deported to concentration camps in spring and summer of 1942. Thankfully, the couple was able to arrange for his mother’s travel to the United States that spring. However, travel outside of France was not as easy for Lefébure, her family—including her mother and brother—and Goldbeck. Lefébure’s letters to Morhange-Motchane from 1942 detail the challenges that Lefébure and her loved ones faced during this time: the many long visa applications with often confounding requirements, confusions, and decisions; the shortage of places available on ships travelling to the US; and the family’s lack of funding to reserve seats when they were available. The family often had to borrow money from friends abroad for visa applications and the ship reservations, only to have the application or reservation fall through at the last minute, resulting in the need to request additional funds.

On top of these logistical headaches, Lefébure confessed to Morhange-Motchane the emotional toll of vacillating between whether to go or not go, to go with Fred or to go alone, or to go with her mother or leave her mother alone in France. Lefébure details the arguing and the indecision that pervaded the household in spring 1942, writing to Morhange-Motchane in April after an altercation between Madame Lefébure and Fred about travel plans, that

I am completely stunned and upset by this return of the situation. Three days ago I thought I was going to see the big departure [of Freddy] on Tuesday and today I see myself, me, leaving. I don’t know how my nerves are keeping up still in the midst of all these emotions, these uncertainties, this suffering that I see alternately on the face of one and the other. I am not yet able to realize this departure (and in actuality it’s not a done deal yet) but I believe that I have acted as if I must do it. Despite my grief still at the idea of leaving Maman. I will still shed many tears. But it’s the fate of both of us to be torn apart.²⁰

And in May 1942, Lefébure wrote to Morhange-Motchane about how “all these complications, these alternatives—we leave, we don’t leave, put me in certain moments into a state of terrifying depression.”²¹

The angst of current separation—as well as the thought of possible separation—from loved ones only increased Lefébure’s anxiety, depression, and terror. For Lefébure, Goldbeck, and their friends and family, this separation was of various kinds: physical exile within France’s borders, the separation between loved ones in France and the United States, and separation due to the extraordinary sluggishness of the mail service, which sometimes delayed letters for weeks or months and, in other instances, prevented mail from arriving altogether. In addition to the Lefébures and Goldbeck missing their friends, family, and loved ones who had stayed in Paris or gone abroad, they also missed their surroundings in Paris, which Madame Lefébure seems to have felt acutely, according to Yvonne’s letters. Lefébure and Goldbeck became separated by the Franco-Spanish border during 1943 and 1944, when Goldbeck went into exile in Spain. In April [1943], he writes to his fiancée about his emotional state while in exile: “I cannot call this a nightmare, it’s rather a sort of moral catalepsy, with this kind of extreme nervousness that, like stage fright, slows me down rather than agitates me.”²² At around the same time that Goldbeck moved to Spain, Lefébure and her mother arrived at Les Brises—an estate in the small, largely Resistance town of Dieulefit—at the invitation of her close friend, Isabelle Brunschwig, who was exiled at the house with her family due to their Jewish heritage.²³ As Isabelle Brunschwig’s nephew, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, whose parents had been sent to concentration camps and killed after the gestapo arrested them in Marseille in 1943, remembered in 1988, “My aunt Isabelle Brunschwig had taken the initiative to move [Yvonne Lefébure] to Dieulefit with her mother. This choice saved the lives of them both.”²⁴ The slowness of the postal service was worrying for Lefébure to the point that she and her correspondents began numbering their letters to one another so that they would know which had arrived and in which order they should read them. Moreover, Lefébure frequently revealed in her letters the stress that the postal service caused her, writing, for example, to Morhange-Motchane in July 1942 that “these silences terrify me, this absence of communication.”²⁵

Analysis of Lefébure’s wartime correspondence with loved ones like Goldbeck and Morhange-Motchane reveals one reason for Lefébure’s concern regarding these absences of communication. Receiving news from loved ones offered Lefébure a powerful, intimate, embodied, and imaginative means of staying in touch with those closest to her. In letter after letter to Morhange-Motchane during and after the war, Lefébure writes to her about how much she needs detailed letters from her, as well as about how much letters conveying aspects of her everyday life help Lefébure to imagine her and her family in New Jersey, and to feel close to her. She wrote to Morhange-Motchane in April 1942, for instance, that

I sense you so much better and then in [your last letter] you recounted a bunch of interesting things on all subjects. One is a little with you, in your life. This brings [you] closer and lightly erases this horrible distance that separates us when I read you in this way. I hear our Marthon speak, it seems to me that you are here, very close. This is good.²⁶

She communicates similarly with Goldbeck, writing in February 1944, while she lived in Dieulefit and he lived in Madrid, that after five weeks of epistolary silence, “it was so lovely to hear your voice that appeared to me well-disposed and happy with projects, conferences, etc.”²⁷ In a letter to Goldbeck from the same year, she writes that “from time to time I re-read your letters,” adding that, in so doing, “I am struck by the optimism that comes through in them, above all for the last three or four months.” She notes the emotional importance of such a reading in sharing with him that “this gives me again a little bit of courage.”²⁸

Lefébure also reveals in her wartime correspondence that, while she often felt overwhelmed by her professional responsibilities, she was also not sure what she would have done without these during these years of crisis, uncertainty, absence, and loss. She writes to Goldbeck in 1944,

You know nearly as much [as me] the difference between our life in Perpignan in 1940 and that of today, and between that of 1928 and the war! I am trying to practice piano in this house—this is a blessing.²⁹

In the midst of detailing the difficulties of preparing to possibly travel to the US in May 1942, Lefébure writes to Morhange-Motchane that, “If I didn’t have my piano or the broadcasts that I haven’t ever let go of, I believe that I would not have survived.”³⁰

The “War of the Waves” and Radio’s Socio-Emotional Significance

Absences of communication and of information—whether about loved ones or the events of the war—were hallmarks of World War II, and the situation in France was no different. It is within this context that radio became not only a treasured and valued space, but also a highly politicized and fraught one. The situation regarding absences of information resulting from slow or missing correspondence was mirrored by the lack of information on French national radio broadcasts during the war. This made Lefébure’s radio performances, perhaps, all the more meaningful for her, as well as for loved ones who were able to listen to them.

Lefébure was of the generation of French musicians for whom radio was a central medium for building their careers and disseminating their performances to broad audiences. As Rebecca Scales and Derek Vaillant have detailed, radio came to the fore as a popular media form in France during the interwar period. The radio technology of the time allowed listeners access to a broad range of stations, not only in their home country, but throughout the world.³¹ Although Lefébure began her career performing recitals and concerts that were not broadcast on the radio, by the mid-1930s and 1940s, her career was rather dominated by radio performances and recordings. In her letters with friends, family members, and students from the 1940s and 1950s, Lefébure frequently refers to radio performances. Some of these live radio broadcasts took place in France, strictly on Radiodiffusion Nationale (hereafter RDN)—the national radio station that was, at least initially, in the Free Zone, even if somewhat under the control of the Nazi-occupied French state. In the years after the war, Lefébure was also a frequent performer on the BBC since she was then able to travel outside of France.

As scholars of French radio like Christian Brochand, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, and Hélène Eck have detailed, the “guerre des ondes,” or “war of the waves,” was a central feature of World War II’s political landscape, in which both Radio-Paris and RDN were instruments of Nazi and collaborationist propaganda, beginning in 1940.³² In 1940 and 1941, as Crémieux-Brilhac and Eck explain,

Vichy-controlled radio functions according to a fundamental contradiction: there is a war that it pretends to not know about. It shows its “neutrality” in neglecting the battlefields, which no longer concern the French army, but the French are deprived of news. It puts itself in the service of Vichyist nationalism, without really taking account of patriotic calls coming from the De Gaulle [i.e. resistance] camp.³³

At the same time, RDN attempted to “maintain its audience”—which was, at the time, dwindling and suspicious—“through a politics of attractive programming.”³⁴

It is within this context that the BBC’s broadcasts offered sources of hope for French residents who resisted the Nazi occupation as well as any collaboration between the French and German governments. Because state-sponsored radio was suspect for many French citizens, and private French radio stations were far more difficult to access due to weaker radio signals, many people in France who resisted the Nazi occupation turned to radio BBC, which had specific programming created for, directed at, and produced by French citizens. According to Eck and Crémieux-Brilhac, “The BBC didn’t always tell the truth, but it wasn’t afraid of bad news… . In addition, the BBC offered to make revelations about France itself, it breaks the wall of silence imposed as much by the Vichy government as by the Germans.”³⁵

But Lefébure couldn’t travel to England during the war to perform on the BBC, leaving her with few options for continuing her career in ways that would assist her in receiving the money so necessary for getting her fiancé, her mother, and herself out of France. Her correspondence brings to light, for instance, that she attempted in 1942 to organize a tour in Spain and North Africa, receiving a negative response from the Association Artistique, which offered various forms of support to French musicians during the war years.³⁶ This was likely especially disappointing since this tour would have offered her the opportunity to travel to Spain either with Goldbeck in tow, or to visit him after he’d already moved to Spain. Performing on the radio in France—though never on Radio-Paris, and only on RDN—seemed to offer her the possibility of maintaining some sort of income during the war years, especially since she all but ceased performing publicly in concert halls between the summer of 1940 and December 1944.

However, there was perhaps more to her radio performances than offering her a source of income. Radio, especially at its beginnings, had been understood as an embodied sonic media that brought announcers, actors, and musicians into the space of the home. Jason Loviglio refers to the “new cultural space created by radio broadcasting in the 1930s that was marked by tensions between national and local, inclusion and exclusion, publicity and privacy” as an “intimate public.”³⁷ Although Loviglio’s focus is on radio broadcasting in the United States, there are clear resonances between his theorization of early radio in the US and how people in France understood this new media. As French radio historian Eck has written,

[Radio] put an end to isolation and solitude. It intruded in the home, which could shock or worry people, but it brought [into the home] a completely original space/time, which integrated the individual to the world around them, all the while preserving their intimacy.³⁸

Early French radio critics, theorists, and producers like René Sudre, Paul Deharme, and Louis Lavelle addressed the effects that radio had on listeners, often using language that suggested both the intimacy and the public- and masses-shaping powers of radio. Sudre, for instance, said of radio announcers in 1929 that, “You already possess much more of him [the announcer] than you would of a writer, whose handwriting you don’t even know. He partly opens to you a small door of his unconscious; he gives you part of his personality; you become intimate.”³⁹ Another French radio critic, as Judith Coffin has noted, described radio as “like a ‘slightly indiscreet friend’ who comes into your home” that “needed to find a tone appropriate to this kind of ‘intimacy.’”⁴⁰ As late as 1951 Louis Lavelle wrote about how, without concrete visual images as in film, radio created a “‘bridge’ or a chain’ between ‘speaker and listener’ and made it possible to ‘communicate between consciousnesses.’”⁴¹ Of course, these hopeful and positive readings of radio’s abilities to intimately connect announcers to listeners took on a darker meaning during World War II, in which radio was used as a means of state propaganda.

One of the most important aspects of radio at this time involved the medium’s ability to stir the imagination of listeners—to engage them in a multi-sensorial embodied listening practice. Eck makes this clear in her understanding of interwar radio as needing to

guide the listening of ‘blind’ listeners and give rise to images, thanks to sound. Radio reconstructed the sonorous reality of the world through technical and aesthetic artifice, which was in the interest of verisimilitude and soliciting the imagination.⁴²

Paul Deharme—a notable surrealist who produced radio programs and collected his theories about radio into the volume Pour un art radiophonique in 1930—understood radio as a fundamentally sensate medium that, unlike film or theater, could allow listeners to create their own images. He writes that “the mind functions in different ways” when one listens to radio than when they encounter a theater piece or film. He clarifies that

to play on the word “image,” taken at the same time in its usual sense and in the sense where the terminology of psychologists oppose it to “sensation,” we can say that [on the radio], the auditor furnishes the images themselves; in the theater or at the cinema, the spectacle prepares [the images] for them. This isn’t what occurs on the stage or screen, but rather on the subjective image—nearly similar to the scenic “sensational” image—which works the mind of the spectator.⁴³

Further, he contends that “music, sounds are above all and first producers of sensations.”⁴⁴ Deharme is focused here on radio announcers’ and performers’ voices. However, his understanding of radio as a medium centered on its abilities to allow listeners to produce images and experience other bodily sensations offers an important and evocative framework for understanding how listeners may have engaged in embodied fashions with Yvonne Lefébure’s radio performances during and after World War II.

Lefébure’s correspondence indicates that many of her friends and family members understood her radio performances during the war as consoling. Of course, to a certain extent, radio musical performances were intended to be “distracting” by the state radio’s administrators; but this does not diminish the importance that the radio medium had for French citizens. Armand Izran—a close family friend who Lefébure, her mother, and Goldbeck lived with in Perpignan during the first years of the Occupation—wrote often to Lefébure about the elation and consolation that he experienced through her radio performances. On November 11, 1944, he writes to Lefébure about “the joy that I had hearing you on the Radio,” ending this letter by telling her that “in this tormented time in which we live, music remains for us the grand consoler.”⁴⁵ Even after the war, Izran continued to tell Lefébure how important hearing her play on the radio was for him.⁴⁶ We also learn from Izran that RDN is the “only channel here [in Perpignan] that allows us to hear perfect performances”—an indication of the extent to which different radio stations had different qualities of broadcasts.⁴⁷ The mere idea or hope that Lefébure might be heard on the radio was comforting to some of her friends. A friend of Yvonne’s named Edith wrote to her on March 24, 1943 that amidst her worries about Yvonne—even dreaming of her three times in a week—the only means she has to know that she’s okay is “given to me by the radio programs that I often consult in the sole hope to see your name there.”⁴⁸ In November 1944, Izran’s wife Loulonne writes about how she, her husband, and their children “will all be listening tomorrow night and Sunday,” noting how “we have more than ever need of all that your art brings us of stability and depth, which relieves me for a few moments from an anxiety that is more poignant every day.”⁴⁹

Lefébure’s students, friends, and family felt that her radio performances—as embodied media—allowed them to feel connected to her. A Mme Beziers writes, “I had the joy of hearing you last Friday and this was well retransmitted or had nearly the illusion that you were there very close.”⁵⁰ One of her students, Jacqueline Robinson, writes to Lefébure in 1945, in response to a BBC performance: “It gave me such a joy to hear you; this also gave me the nostalgia of the days when I had much more easily the occasion to [hear you perform].”⁵¹ Robinson’s nostalgia leads her to remember “this delicious soirée at Waterford, last summer, when I had the double pleasure to hear true music and to see you again after these long years of exile.”⁵² In January 1943, Armand Izran’s wife Loulonne writes to Yvonne about hearing her perform Ravel on the radio, noting that “we know better each time that we hear you why we need you so much.”⁵³ Loulonne’s correspondence with Lefébure reveals that she often heard her perform live in their home during the war; on May 12, 1944, she writes to say that “I haven’t ceased to desire those who enjoyed these intimate concerts born from exceptional circumstances that are, I know it, what music can express best in its most refined form.”⁵⁴ And in a telling letter from November 1944, Loulonne indicates the extent to which Lefébure’s radio performances offered a testimony of the pianist’s politics, perhaps especially notable given her decision to perform French music—Fauré’s Nocturne and Dukas’s Variations: “Thank you for remaining so essentially ‘yourself’ and for giving us such a dazzling testimony of revenge and resurrection before even the horizon has had the time to be completely illuminated.”⁵⁵

Lefébure & Musical French Resistance Politics

Indeed, as Loulonne Izran so poignantly suggested, Lefébure’s activities during and just after World War II reveal her Resistance politics, even if not in the most obvious or common ways. Amongst the most outspoken Resistance musicians were Elsa Barraine, Roger Désormière, and Roland-Manuel, who founded the Comité de Front national de la musique in September 1941, and created the French Resistance music journal Musiciens d’aujourd’hui in early 1942. These musicians published numerous manifestos that spoke directly to French musicians, outlining what they considered a politics of resistance vs. a politics of collaboration with the occupiers. In the fall of 1941, for example, they published “Nous refusons de trahir” (“We refuse to be traitors”) in the clandestinely-published journal L’Université libre. In this article they advocated the performance of pieces composed by French musicians, specifically naming musicians whose works had been banned by the occupiers—Mendelssohn, Dukas, Bry, Martinu, and Milhaud—alongside French composers of the past, like Albéric Magnard, Rameau, Berlioz, Bizet, and Debussy, noting that, while the latter composers may have been influenced by Austro-Germanic music, they at least “never received orders from abroad.”⁵⁶ In April 1942, an article appeared in Musiciens d’aujourd’hui advocating the expression of resistance sentiments through the performance of “musical contraband,” which included “the act of playing, as a supplement to a program, a piece in which the content glorifies France, liberty, fraternity of people, or even the work of a non-Aryan composer.”⁵⁷

Historians of World War II-era France have argued over the last several decades that the historiography of this period has been oversimplified, especially in terms of what constituted Resistance and who was involved in Resistance efforts. Gender ideologies of the mid-century, the fact that men were involved far more often than women in the armed Resistance movement, and the celebration of mostly men as part of the Resistance after Liberation all contributed to a narrative that members of Resistance organizations and the Resistance movement were almost exclusively men.⁵⁸ As Robert Gildea, H.R. Kedward, and Dominique Veillon—amongst others—have pointed out, historical narratives of the French Resistance have also frequently sidelined the significant roles that Jews, people born beyond France’s borders, and people in rural areas of France played in the Resistance movement.⁵⁹ In addition to understanding histories of the Resistance as shaped by the political contexts surrounding the writing of these histories and mythological narratives of the Resistance that have played out in private and public from World War II to present, Pierre Laborie has convincingly argued that the great variety of ways that one could be involved in the Resistance makes any complete historical understanding of it nearly, if not entirely, impossible:

Nothing is to be gained by deceiving ourselves about the possibility of totally mastering the concept of Resistance and successfully rendering its reality in a convincing synthesis. The phenomenon, both protean and unique, is of such complexity and such plasticity that it does not adapt well to a mode of conceptualization that resembles a poorly fitting corset.⁶⁰

These critiques of traditional definitions of Resistance activities can similarly be leveled towards musicologists, given the extent to which musical contraband has been one of the main ways that contemporaneous musicians and today’s music historians have defined Resistance music-making during the Occupation. Jane Fulcher, Colin Roust, Nigel Simeone, Yannick Simon, and Leslie Sprout have, in their exceedingly important work on French music during World War II, compellingly analyzed the compositions and activities of composers like Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Arthur Honegger to reveal their Resistance politics.⁶¹ French-language studies of French music-making under German Occupation have importantly gone beyond a focus on composers in investigating musicians’ roles as collaborators, résistant(e)s, or other more in-between political affiliations.⁶² Although the tendency amongst musicologists has been to center research on musicians more clearly involved in the Resistance or assumed to be pro-Vichy, and to focus on music-making in Paris, Lefébure’s activities during and after the war, as well as in the south of France, underline the necessity of moving the focus beyond these figures and the centrality of Paris in researching musical acts of Resistance.

Although Lefébure certainly performed pieces considered “musical contraband,” she engaged with French Resistance politics in numerous other ways. First, she expressed hatred for the occupiers and their politics, sometimes in ways that reduced her performance opportunities. For example, in March 1937, Lefébure received a letter from Ernest Denis in Prague, who told her that he was in the process of organizing a series of concerts for her in Prague and that he had spoken with the director of the Agence Bel Canto, Charles Kiesgen, about “my intention of orienting you towards Germans here [i.e., in Prague], due to your critiques of the Reich; but he strongly advised me against doing this given the rivalry of the two nationalities.”⁶³ In addition, Anne Vallaeys, in her book detailing life in the southwestern French town of Dieulefit—well-known for its Resistance politics and practices—relays that Lefébure gave piano lessons and occasionally performed for a closed and intimate public during the years she lived there since she “had forbidden public performances as long as France was under the boot.”⁶⁴ Although this is not entirely true given a handful of performances that newspapers report occurred in Avignon and Perpignan during the war, her live concert hall performances were indeed few and far between during this time.⁶⁵ And in March 1945, Lefébure wrote to Morhange-Motchane about her and Freddy’s efforts to work only with Resistance musicians, for instance in relation to Fred Goldbeck’s new music journal, Contrepoints:

I will participate in the comité de direction as well as [Marc] Pincherle (who has said of you many things, he has been perfect during the entirety of the occupation) and several others, good people. We will try to work only with [these kinds of people].⁶⁶

Indeed, Contrepoints was understood as deeply connected to the Resistance: it was published through the Resistance press Éditions du minuit and the journal’s editorial board and most frequent contributors all identified as or came to be known as Resistance musicians.⁶⁷

Even if Lefébure was perhaps less outspoken about her political views during the war, after the war she came to be more well-known for her resistance to the Nazi regime and their occupation of France. In a March 1945 article in Les Lettres françaises, well-known Resistance musician Georges Auric wrote of Lefébure’s “exemplary firmness of attitude through the difficulties and uncertainties of so many of our former comrades.”⁶⁸ Auric was responding in part to a speech that Lefébure had given on BBC radio in February 1945.⁶⁹ She began this speech by noting how moving it was for her to “speak before a microphone of the BBC … the BBC that has been, during the hard years of the occupation of France, the only source of our comfort, to which we had attached all of our hope”⁷⁰ Throughout the speech, Lefébure centers on the cellist Pablo Casals—with whom she became close friends during their mutual exile in Perpignan in the south of France. She sees Casals as a musician whose behavior in relation to the war—centered on refusal as resistance—was, for her, politically ideal. In her BBC speech, she pronounced that:

Throughout the war he has never wavered. He believed in France, in the real France. He would have no dealings with Nazi Germany and refused to play in Paris or wherever the Germans were in control. And so Casals maintained a silence so eloquent that it became the living soul of the resistance. He would only give concerts in what was then unoccupied France. When the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942 Pablo Casals disappeared completely from the public eye. Only in the houses of friends a few privileged people were able to hear him.

She closed her speech by saying, “To those French musicians who in spite of defeat refused to give up their claim to be free people, Pablo Casals will remain a noble example—such an example as England gave to the world during the years of darkness.” This speech demonstrates that, like many musicians during the war, Lefébure understood the radio as a politicized technology and space, and that refusal—to perform in particular places, with certain repertoire, or even to perform at all—offered one means of Resistance political expression for French musicians. Lefébure’s focus on Casals’s refusal in her BBC speech may have also been a subtle nod to her disappointment that her former collaborator and friend Alfred Cortot had made decidedly different decisions during the war years, such as continuing to perform in Germany and working with the Vichy government as the president of the Comité professionnel de l’art musical et de l’enseignement libre de la musique—decisions that had already led to a breach in the friendship between Cortot and Casals.⁷¹

Lefébure’s radio performances during and just after World War II further reveal her Resistance politics through various kinds of refusal. According to Les Ondes—a guide detailing radio programming in France published between 1940 and 1944—during the war Lefébure refused to perform on Radio-Paris, the most obviously Nazi-controlled state radio station (see Table 1). However, she performed on RDN at various times throughout the war. From July 1941 through June 1942, she appeared in a variety of radio concerts—chamber music, recitals, concerto performances with orchestra—a total of nineteen times, at least once per month for every month in this time frame except December 1941 and January 1942. It is notable, however, that Lefébure stopped performing on RDN between July 1942 and November 1942, at a time when the station had become virulently and overtly anti-Semitic. After performing three concerts for RDN in December 1942, Lefébure did not appear in a performance on the channel again until May 1943, for just one performance, and then not again until August 1943. Les Ondes’s published programming suggests that she did not perform on RDN again in 1943; perhaps tellingly, the Resistance music journal Le Musicien patriote emerges in September 1943 with a manifesto that urges French musicians to interfere with any Vichy projects and so at this point, Lefébure may have decided to stop performing on French radio altogether. As soon as Lefébure was able to travel to England and perform on the BBC—then a station associated with the French Resistance movement—she did: first in February 1945, when she played Ravel’s Concerto in G Major and gave the speech cited above, and then with some regularity for the next fifteen years; the BBC Radio Archives reveal 28 unique live broadcasts of Lefébure’s performances between 1945 and 1966 (see Table 2).

Notably, the people with whom Lefébure chose to perform on RDN were largely aligned with the French Resistance movement. Her frequent fellow performers in this period included Maurice Maréchal, Roland Charmy, and Yvon Marc’Hadour. She considered touring with Maréchal and Charmy in the 1940s, as she writes to Morhange-Motchane in April 1942 after discussing logistical and financial difficulties:

In principle, I must go on tour in South America with Maréchal and perhaps Charmy. It has been decided that I will try to join you [in the US] afterwards. This is yet what will have to happen, perhaps, if I don’t have time to catch Freddy’s boat.⁷²

Nothing ever came of this, however, due to a shortage of funding on the part of the Service des œuvres françaises à l’étranger—the organization that had attempted to facilitate this tour.⁷³ Although little is known about Marc’Hadour, more can be said about Charmy’s and Maréchal’s support of the French Resistance movement. During the war, like many French Resistance musicians, Charmy lived in the south of France, rarely performing during these years and, when he did, performing programs containing much music written by French composers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷⁴ He performed in a 1944 concert funded by the Resistance group Front nationale,⁷⁵ and in 1946, performed Berg’s Chamber Concerto—which had been, like all of his compositions, banned during the German Occupation—for Pierre Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai.⁷⁶ Maréchal, who sent his wife and children to the United States in the summer of 1940 and whose son would enlist in the French army in 1943, remained in France, even, according to Jean-Claude Pasteur, “hiding in his house one of his students, an active member of the Resistance, whose mother had been sent to Ravensbrück, saving him in this way from deportation.”⁷⁷ Moreover, during the war, Lefébure seems to have only performed under conductors who were not involved in collaborating with the occupiers—like Jean Clergue and Henri Tomasi, who would in 1945 become a member of the Communist party⁷⁸—or at least not aligned with the Nazi occupation.

The repertoire that Lefébure chose to perform on the radio principally resonated with French Resistance politics as outlined in the Resistance musicians’ manifesto discussed above. Although many of her performances from 1941 involved the standard piano repertoire that she had built her career upon thus far—Bach, Mozart, Schumann, and Chopin—she performed works by twentieth-century French composers Albert Roussel and Fauré in the second half of the year. And in 1942 and 1943, she performed pieces on the radio by Ravel, Fauré, and Debussy that would have certainly been considered aligned with the Resistance goals of showcasing French composers. She made even clearer political statements by performing compositions by two French composers specifically mentioned in the L’Université libre article, “Nous refusons de trahir”: the Sonata for Cello and Piano of Albéric Magnard, who famously was killed by German soldiers outside his home in the first weeks of World War I, and Variations, interlude et final by the French-Jewish musician Paul Dukas, whose compositions had been banned in French concert halls during World War II.⁷⁹ When she performed in a live concert in Dieulefit, she played the works of exiled Alsatian composer Fred Barlow, who was also living in Dieulefit at the time. Although it is difficult to determine the degree of agency that Lefébure and others had in their radio programming choices, Lefébure’s repertoire selections for her performances on RDN during the war, as well as her choices to perform largely French, twentieth-century repertoire after the war on BBC radio, would seem to suggest her Resistance politics.

Performing Resistance through Embodied Risk and Survival

One way of understanding these performances in this timeframe is that Lefébure needed money to attempt to move herself, her mother, and her partner out of France. And yet, I would argue that we can understand Lefébure’s radio broadcasts as representations of resistance, risk, hope, and survival for those who knew her best. Lefébure was famous for her stage fright, which she referenced in her written and spoken texts and about which her friends and collaborators had intimate knowledge. Even after decades of performing publicly, Lefébure, one of the most famous virtuoso pianists of her time, experienced “le trac,” which she defined as “but a vague word for designating the complex ensemble of apprehensions that take hold of us in the moment when we are going to, even for the hundredth time, bring alive again a work in the here and now.”⁸⁰ Her friend and student Henry-Louis De La Grange reported in an interview that “Yvonne Lefébure suffered her whole life from stage fright. This is to say that, I remember that before a concert, she was always quite beside herself. You couldn’t talk to her. She was in a really bad way.”⁸¹ One of her students, Rémy Stricker, corroborates De La Grange’s recollection, saying, “All I can say is that I remember having terrible stage fright on her behalf, which was totally unjustified. But she was so modest about it all that you couldn’t help feeling nervous, thinking, ‘She’s spent so much time telling us she’s not up to this, I wonder if she is.’”⁸²

In addition to her friends, family, and colleagues understanding her performances as representative of survival through the risk of stage fright, radio performances may have also allowed listeners who knew Lefébure to imagine in a highly embodied fashion, her “risky” approach to keyboard performance, especially given Deharme’s understanding of radio as a space that facilitated extra-auditory sensory experiences. Lefébure was well-known for her precarious performance style, of which many of her friends and colleagues were aware, especially if they had watched her perform publicly or while she was practicing at home. In watching a performance of Lefébure at the piano from the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, her perilous performativity is evident: she often raises her arms and hands inches if not a foot off the keyboard rather than keeping them close to the keyboard.⁸³ As one former student described,

She wasn’t a “comfortable” musician. You didn’t sit listening blissfully in your armchair, letting the music wash over you like warm water. You took part in it with her in the adventure that each concert represented. It was a risky undertaking. I remember that I used to say that a concert by Yvonne was both marvelous and frightening, because it all had to be fought for at sword-point, all the time taking risks. At times she’d use very idiosyncratic fingering, coming up with rather acrobatic arrangements, and her little hands helped a lot with that. She got the maximum possible speed and dexterity out of them, but she did take considerable risks.⁸⁴

Given Deharme’s and other early radio theorists’ understanding of radio listening as a multi-sensorial and imaginative medium, Lefébure’s embodiment of risk in her approach to keyboard performance would have likely been intensely evocative for those who had witnessed her performances previously.

Performing on the radio involved additional risks regarding audience expectations. Lefébure divulged that, for her, radio performances brought about a change in what audiences were expecting from performers. She reported that

around 1920, the instrumental art goes without ceasing towards more technical perfection and, in parallel, towards more impersonality. The radio recordings are in part responsible for this evolution. The microphone—this magnifying and discoloring lens—encourages and demands the impeccability of the execution, while the interpretation, in what it has of the imponderable, often doesn’t happen.⁸⁵

She was well-aware of the wide variety of listeners who she needed to reach in any given performance, and this would have been especially true for radio performances. Just before defining “le trac” in her essay on interpretation from 1950, Lefébure wrote:

Even the most “faithful public” is always a new assembly—or rather an assemblage of people in which it rightly falls on the musician to make an assembly out of… . The concert performer feels themselves penetrated by hundreds of looks—friendly looks from enthusiastic music lovers, understanding but sometimes a little less friendly looks from a few colleagues, reserved and until further notice distracted looks from those for whom the concert is as much, or first of all, a social event as a musical event, curious looks from everyone, while alone, concentrating on themselves re-assembling their physical and nervous forces, they greet [the audience] and situate themselves. These are moments intensely lived, these few seconds that precede, in the silence, the first note.⁸⁶

The idea of a large, expectant audience of listeners with various levels of experience with different kinds of music was something on which the music critic André Coeuroy focused in a 1938 essay entitled “Premiers essais de musique radiogénique.” He closed this essay with the observation that

the radiophonic public is a new public for art, it is truly, and for the first time, the masses, the anonymous and uncultivated masses, in which 25 out of 100 listeners do not have, to the letter, any idea of what art can be. The radio poses in this way the most worrying problem: to create art for the masses.⁸⁷

Although Coeuroy is mainly concerned in this essay with modernist attempts to create radio-specific compositions, his point that radio reached an incredibly large and diverse audience resonates with Lefébure’s concerns about how to reach and respond to her audiences—whether in the concert hall or on the radio.

Conclusion: Radio Performance as Resistance Survivor Mission

By playing on the radio during World War II, Lefébure took substantial risks—in terms of her playing style, her ability to reach a (very politically) diverse and often divided audience, and her stage fright. Lefébure undertook these risks for her family, for her friends, for her students, and, I would argue, for herself as well. In listening to radio in their homes, Lefébure’s audiences who knew her—and especially those who knew her politics—may have been able to read into her radio performances a message of resistance and, ultimately, hope. If one takes risks, one might also succeed—as Lefébure so often did—making those risks worthwhile, especially at a time when taking risks was an important part of Resistance efforts, musical and otherwise. And of course, for Lefébure, radio performances offered her opportunities to obtain the financial resources necessary for moving herself, her partner, and her mother out of a fascist and decidedly not-free France.

As I noted in this article’s introduction, Lefébure’s very public radio performances may have presented her with occasions to process the war- and exile-related trauma that she experienced between 1939 and 1945. In psychiatrist Judith Herman’s watershed book, Trauma and Recovery, she asserts that processing trauma can involve connection with loved ones, telling one’s story, mourning one’s losses, and embarking on “survivor missions.” Herman contends that survivor missions occur when “survivors recognize a political or religious dimension in their misfortune and discover that they can transform the meaning of their personal tragedy by making it the basis for social action.”⁸⁸ She explains that “although giving to others is the essence of the survivor mission, those who practice it recognize that they do so for their own healing. In taking care of others, survivors feel recognized, loved, and cared for themselves.”⁸⁹

In fact, the desire of women to “do something” in the wake of Nazi occupation has been a major theme of women’s accounts of their participation in the French Resistance, in addition to being part of Resistance discourse from the very beginning of the occupation. In the first issue of the clandestine journal Résistance of December 1940, produced by the Musée de l’Homme Résistance, one of the first organized Resistance organizations, the following statement appeared:

Resist! This is the cry coming from all your hearts amid the distress caused by your country’s disaster. This is the cry coming from all of you who will not submit, who want to do what duty requires. Yet you feel isolated, torn by confusing ideas, opinions, and organizations. To resist is to keep your heart and head. But above all, it means acting—doing something that will bring about positive results; rational and useful acts.⁹⁰

French Resistance member Sonia Vagliano-Eloy encapsulates how the trauma of German occupation informed her desire to join the Resistance in her recounting of a meeting with an American officer in France during the war:

When he asked me why I joined the army, I told him that I was in France when the armistice was signed and the Germans marched in. I was revolted and heartsick to see German soldiers walking the streets of Paris as conquerors, as if Paris belonged to them: seeing their black-and-yellow posters everywhere, hearing them singing as they marched—in short, all that. I couldn’t really explain it; it would take too much time. It was a reflex. They were there, chez nous, and that was unbearable. I wanted to do something, to serve. That was all.⁹¹

Accounts by French women involved in the Resistance like Vagliano-Eloy remind us not only that the trauma of German invasion and occupation inspired and informed the actions taken by Resistance members, but also of the fact that women were highly involved in the Resistance and in a variety of ways.

Lefébure’s wartime radio performances, then, can be understood as part of a “survivor mission” in that they helped her to connect with loved ones and to tell her story—albeit surreptitiously—of trials, tribulations, risk-taking, survival, and resistance through musical performance. In a wartime culture in which speaking openly about one’s politics was extremely dangerous—and in Lefébure’s case, not just for herself but also for her loved ones—radio performances offered a sonic, embodied, and meaningful way to bring joy and connection to loved ones who longed to be near her, while also allowing for the pianistic articulation of resistance and hope in ways that at least some listeners would understand. Yvonne Lefébure thus played a role in the Resistance as well, although, like many French women, in ways that have not yet been fully recognized.