Héloïse Luzzati is a cellist. She could have continued her life as a performer like any other talented instrumentalist, gradually finding her place in an admittedly very masculine musical universe. But a question appears to her one day, which she formulates today and which will change everything: “How could I have gone so many years without having played the work of a woman?
Today, barely 4% of the musical works programmed in concert are written by women. For Héloïse Luzzati, the awareness is brutal, and only increases as she gives herself, with the association “Elles Women Composers”, the means to remedy it. Taking advantage of the break imposed by the pandemic on live performance, the intense activity of the team around it quickly bears fruit: research and publication of scores, production of YouTube videos presenting the composers, recent release of the first disc-box from the label “La Boîte à Pépites”, dedicated to the composer Charlotte Sohy.
Acme of this substantive work, a festival, “A time for them”, starts on June 10 for one month: sixteen concerts across the Val d’Oise where works exclusively by female composers will be defended by about forty musicians, including Renaud Capuçon, Bertrand Chamayou, Déborah and Sarah Nemtanu, Sandrine Piau, Victor Julien-Laferrière or Raphaëlle Moreau… We met Héloïse Luzzati, a musician with infectious enthusiasm and iron determination, who explained her approach at length.
Franceinfo Culture: How did this trigger come about that prompted you to look for female composers?
Heloise Luzzati: In reality it’s not a trigger, it came in a diffuse way at various times in my artistic life. A first example: at the Paris Opera where I was extra for a long time, I had to play The Huguenots by Meyerbeer. And I said to myself, during the five hours that the work lasts, why have we still spent so much money to reissue this score to which I absolutely do not subscribe, nor to its staging for that matter , nor to anything in this insanely expensive project of a super long opera, without anyone in the room? (laughs) And therefore to say to myself: why am I here playing this, when there are a billion things that I don’t know and that I’m curious about? Why bring out these works and never works by women when there are so many operas that have been composed by women?
Another example: at the end of my studies, I had the experience of going to sort the boxes of the library of the National Conservatory of Music of Paris to just recount the number of scores of female composers in chamber music and cello and piano. And I was desperate to see so few of them! Fortunately, there are women composers in contemporary music, but on heritage, almost nothing! So. It went from there.
Beyond this observation – certainly essential – of an under-representation of female composers in the heritage, why was it so important for you as a performer to play a score composed by a woman?
This is an important and very “personal” question. I am convinced that the fact of not performing works by women undermines the confidence of female performers. There are many women who have been damaged by the enormous sexism in the world of music and education, which is not necessarily voluntary on the part of teachers. Overall there are many male pedagogues. At the CNSM in Paris, for example, there has never been a woman professor of the cello, my instrument. And again recently, I heard a cellist, professor at the CNSM, say that women technically do not play the cello very well. These are things that are ingrained.
So it’s about restoring trust…
It’s very personal. In my case, the fact of playing all these works by women, but also unpublished work, of course, is something that carries me enormously. It restores this confidence that had been damaged in me, I am no longer afraid to go back on stage. But I’m not the only one, many of us are extremely stimulated by this. But it’s not just about women, I think men obviously have to play songwriters as well.
Why do you think the music of female composers has been ignored for so long?
Because when you don’t know something, you are convinced that there is a reason. Inevitably, we say to ourselves, it is because it is not good enough. This is also true for men! I think there are masterpieces in men that we don’t know. Before even bringing them out, you have to convince them that the music is interesting. And then when you’ve never heard the music, it takes time to get into a language, that’s what I tell some journalists: listen to the same track several times…
How do you distinguish the nugget?
There is something obvious for me, it is that we are musicians and we read music. We are not in an intellectual reflection, but it is right away: we take the instruments, sometimes we tear our eyes out, but we read. And the feeling is obvious: there has to be the desire to play it immediately, to record it, to make people discover it, otherwise we forget. That is to say, when it’s not good, you forget you’ve read it, that’s it. In general we are synchronous, the trigger is shared.
What upset you in this heritage that you discovered?
This upheaval is quite daily, and it is very shared with the other musicians. Sometimes we have failures, sometimes big slaps, like Charlotte Sohy whom I discovered through the orchestra, it was quite luxurious. Rita Strohl’s music is also a big upset, but in reality there is a lot of it.
Charlotte Sohy is the subject of a record on the label “La Boîte à Pépites”. What did you like most about her?
It’s wildly dramatic. It is imbued with an extremely rare intensity. From the beginning, the first opuses, when you listen to the first chords of fantasy, it’s incredibly dramatic, I love it.
With this “box of nuggets”, video channel and record label, you unearth the works but you also present the life of the composers.
Yes, because if it is true that there is no “feminine” specificity in the music of a composer, I like the idea of linking her artistic work to her life journey. In the case of a woman, the latter is also a journey of a mother: in the case of Charlotte Sohy, seven pregnancies in a not so long life (she died at 68), it’s huge! So when I talk about her life, I also say: she was pregnant with the fifth child when she composed her opera, then she gave birth, then there was the premiere of such and such another work… wouldn’t speak for a man. But at that time, most men were not very involved in family life. And besides, if Charlotte Sohy hadn’t been wealthy, if she hadn’t had nannies, she wouldn’t have had the artistic life she had.
How did you convince the many artists, some of whom are famous, to participate in the festival “A time for them” and all your accomplishments?
Because I’m a musician, I’m not just an artistic director who doesn’t know what it’s like to create repertoire. The real challenge is there, it takes time to put on works that you don’t know. When I send them a score, these musicians know that they won’t waste any time and then everyone is happy to discover music! Bertrand Chamayou, Renaud Capuçon come to the festival with great enthusiasm! And then we are all convinced that we have to move forward, we all need to have more repertoire of female composers in stores. So I do some of the work that they don’t have time to do, I guess that’s how it is.
“A time for them”, from June 10 to July 10: sixteen concerts across the Val d’Oise