Few composers have been so thoroughly filed under the wrong heading. Joseph Kosma’s name conjures, for most people, the bittersweet accordion-tinged world of postwar Parisian chanson — “Les feuilles mortes,” above all, that song so perfect it barely seems composed at all. And yes, he wrote that. But a musician who spent years collaborating with Jean Renoir, who fled Budapest when the political climate curdled, who survived the Occupation by hiding in the Béarn countryside while the Nazis were arresting his colleagues — that man had more on his mind than autumn leaves.
This Hortus disc makes the case, quietly and persuasively, that Kosma was something considerably more complicated.
The choral works come first, and they’re the revelation. Kosma handles multiple voices with the same instinctive naturalness he brought to a solo melody line — which is rarer than it sounds. Two settings of texts by Madeleine Riffaud, the Resistance poet, catch the ear immediately. Riffaud was barely twenty when the Nazis arrested her; her verses carry that specific weight, the weight of someone who has looked directly at something terrible. Kosma doesn’t underline the anguish. He frames it — and that restraint, that refusal to sentimentalize, is what makes these pieces sting.
Lou Bouy é is something else again. The old Albigensian melody it draws on goes back centuries, to the Cathar country of the Languedoc, and Radio Toulouse repurposed it during the Occupation as a coded signal to the Resistance. Kosma’s setting respects that double life. It sounds ancient and urgent simultaneously — not an easy trick.
The cantata movement commemorating the Courrières mine disaster of 1906 — a catastrophe that killed over a thousand workers in the Pas-de-Calais, the deadliest industrial accident in French history — arrives with a gravity appropriate to its subject. Kosma’s left politics were lifelong and unsentimental. So is this music. And then, almost unbearably, the setting of Ethel Rosenberg’s last letter to her children. Whatever one thinks about the Rosenberg case — and in 1953 the arguments were considerably less settled than they appear now — the letter itself is devastating, and Kosma honors it without exploitation. The choral writing here is lean, almost austere, which is exactly right.
The Esquisses béarnaises are a different kind of document entirely. Navarrenx is a tiny walled town in the foothills above the Pyrenees, and its people sheltered the Kosmas during the Occupation with a generosity that might have gotten them killed. These small piano pieces — most barely a minute long — were his thank-you. They don’t try to be more than they are. Serious, gentle, modest in scale, they have the quality of private speech — something said quietly across a kitchen table rather than declaimed from a stage. The harmonic language is simple, almost Satie-simple, but without Satie’s irony. There is no irony here. Only gratitude.
Then something shifts. The Cinq chansons populaires du Languedoc — a violin and piano arrangement of the earlier Suite Languedocienne — introduce a different Kosma altogether. Hungarian inflections surface suddenly, the kind of modal turns and rhythmic asymmetries that remind you this man grew up in Budapest, that Bartók and Kodály were in the air he first breathed as a artist. The adopted Frenchman and the émigré Hungarian coexist in these pages without apparent tension, which is itself a kind of statement about identity — about how a person can belong to more than one place at once.
The Missing Voices Project — this is its fifth release — has been doing necessary work. The composers it champions were, by definition, composers the Nazi machinery tried to silence. That some of them remain obscure is partly a consequence of that silencing, and partly a consequence of the way music history tends to sort people into tidy categories. Kosma the chanson composer. Kosma the film composer. Not Kosma the choral composer, the miniaturist, the witness.
This disc doesn’t overclaim. It doesn’t pretend Kosma belongs in a pantheon he never aimed for. What it proves, with considerable care and evident conviction, is that the man’s musical intelligence was wider and deeper than his popular reputation suggests — and that some of this music, particularly the choral works, deserves a permanent place in the repertoire of any ensemble serious about the twentieth century’s buried history.
Worth having. Unambiguously.
