2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 105Charles de Noailles, a noted patron of the arts, and Henri Monnet, the
brother of Georges Monnet, minister of agriculture in Blum’s govern-
ment, asked him to compose a cantata in order to mark the inauguration
of the museum. The result of this commission was Cantate pour l’inau-
guration du Musée de l’Homme, (later renamed Cantate de l’Homme),
the words for which were written by the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
Milhaud recorded in his autobiography that on the occasion of the inau-
guration of the Musée de l’Homme, this cantata was performed before
a crowded audience in the lecture-room of the museum. However, this
was not the premier performance of the work: the Cantate pour l’inau-
guration du Musée de l’Homme was first publicly perfomed on October
11, 1937, on the Esplanade du Trocadéro. Milhaud described the period
during which the Cantate de la paix and the Cantate pour l’inaugura-
tion du Musée de l’Homme premiered as a ‘brilliant season’ which saw
‘official ceremonies...[follow]...on another thick and fast as if to add to
the brilliance.’ Nonetheless, and like many others at the time, he had a
growing sense of foreboding. In his autobiography, Milhaud gave the
following account of the feelings engendered in him and in his wife,
namely, Madeleine Milhaud (who was the récitante on the occasion of
the first public performance of the Cantate pour l’inauguration du Musée
de l’Homme), by the spectacles on display in the Jardins du Trocadéro
and in the Champs de Mars:
In spite of the difficult period that followed the adoption of the Popular
Front Government’s social reforms...and the disturbances, strikes and fac-
tory occupations, preparations for the International Exhibition of 1937
went ahead and were eventually crowned with amazing success. Yet the
mutter of sinister threats and portents was already to be heard. There was
to be an Austrian pavilion, but the evil forces of the Anschluss were never
far away. Picasso’s Guernica adorned the walls of the Spanish pavilion, but
the Republic had been murdered. Opposite one another, the German and
Soviet pavilions seemed to challenge one another to mortal combat. One
evening as we watched the sun set behind the immense mass of flags of all
the nations that fluttered above the Pont d’Iéna, Madeleine clutched my
arm in anguish and whispered: ‘This is the end of Europe!’^72(^72) Milhaud, My Happy Life: An Autobiography, 188–89. See also Darius Milhaud Society,
The Darius Milhaud Society Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall, 1991), 1, 3; Jane E. Fulcher, The
Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914– 1990 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 231, n.206; Lucik Aprahamian, ‘Darius Milhaud’s “Cantate pour