Maurice Emmanuel: Six Piano Sonatines Rediscovered

Few composers have been so thoroughly buried by their own modesty. Maurice Emmanuel spent decades as a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, wrote a landmark study of ancient Greek music, taught Messiaen and Koechlin, and composed six piano sonatines of genuine distinction — then watched the century move on without him. He was born the same year as Debussy, 1862, and died in 1938, which means he lived long enough to see his quiet revolution absorbed into the larger noise of modernism and forgotten there.

The sonatines deserve better.

They span roughly four decades of Emmanuel’s creative life, and what strikes you immediately — what strikes you on first hearing and keeps striking you — is how unlike anyone else they sound. The opening Sonatine No. 1 of 1893 draws on the chansons bourguignonnes, the folk songs of the Burgundy region where Emmanuel grew up, and he threads through them passages of carillon writing that evoke specific church bells, among them those of Notre-Dame de Beaune. This is not picturesque tourism. The carillon textures are structurally functional, and the modal inflections they carry give the whole piece a kind of archaic brightness, like winter sunlight on old stone.

Emmanuel is always dancing. Even when the idiom grows more astringent — as it does in the Third Sonatine of 1920, where the harmonies sharpen into something closer to Bartók than to Burgundy — the pulse underneath remains fundamentally choreographic. Dance was the skeleton around which he arranged everything else.

Laurent Wagschal has been building a serious Emmanuel discography, and this recording of all six sonatines finds him at something close to his best. He is a romantic in the old sense — not sentimental, but committed to a fullness of tone and a depth of pedaling that opens up harmonic resonances lighter-fingered players miss. Listeners who know Peter Jacobs’s earlier traversal on Continuum will hear the difference immediately. Jacobs is lean, precise, a little Apollonian; Wagschal is warmer, more physically present in his chording, more willing to let a bass note bloom and color the texture above it. Neither approach is simply right. But Wagschal’s suits this music.

Consider the Fourth Sonatine, dedicated to Busoni and saturated in Hindu modes — it follows in the wake of Roussel’s Évocations and Holst’s engagement with Sanskrit sources, though Emmanuel’s treatment is more pianistic than either. The scalar material is genuinely exotic, not merely decorated with orientalist filigree, and Wagschal navigates the modal ambiguities with complete conviction, never letting the unfamiliar pitch collections feel merely strange. He makes them feel inevitable.

The Fifth Sonatine, “Alla Francese,” is the longest and in some ways the most immediately appealing — a dance suite in the French Baroque tradition, opening with an overture and closing with a gigue, the whole thing functioning as a kind of Burgundian Rameau filtered through early 20th-century harmonic awareness. It was dedicated to Robert Casadesus, which tells you something about the level of pianism Emmanuel had in mind. Wagschal brings genuine elegance to the overture and real rhythmic snap to the closing gigue; his ornaments are stylish without being fussy.

The Second Sonatine deserves a word. Written in 1897 and soaked in birdsong, it invites the inevitable Messiaen comparison — Emmanuel was among his most important teachers — but Emmanuel’s birds are Beethovenian creatures, part of a natural world, not transcriptions of divinity. The Pastoral Symphony‘s cuckoo is closer kin here than the Quartet for the End of Time.

And then the Sixth Sonatine, dedicated to Yvonne Lefébure, technically demanding and genuinely radiant, brings the cycle to a close with a kind of earned luminosity. Wagschal plays it as a summation, which it is.

Emmanuel will never be fashionable. The sonatines are too small in scale, too rooted in regional soil, too undramatic in their ambitions. But they are beautifully made things, and Wagschal plays them with the authority they require. This is now the disc to have.