Michel Legrand A Life in Music and Film
Film lovers have often seen the name and heard the music of Michel Legrand (1932-2019) as the credits rolled. During a career that began in the late ‘40s and ended only a year before his death, Legrand contributed music to some 200 films, many of them French, but with a Hollywood tangent that included The Thomas Crown Affair and Yentl.
French film historian Stephane Lerouge sat with Legrand for many sessions and helped him compose a memoir, A Life in Music and Film. According to Lerouge, Legrand was a reluctant memoirist and laid down many conditions for this collaboration. He didn’t want a linear autobiography stuffed with the chaff of everyday life but a set of reflections on certain memories, certain times. “Michel spoke the book, I wrote it; the content is his, the form mine,” Lerouge writes.
Legrand received his musical education inside and outside the conservatory. He was given strict instruction by Nadia Boulanger, whose studio was the mecca for Aaron Copeland, Astor Piazolla, Philip Glass and many other composers. He balanced her lesson plans by absorbing the music around him. His father played in a ’30s dance band, and in 1937 the five-year old had an epiphany watching a film dramatizing a composer at work. Legrand was exposed to blues by a piano-playing Black GI during the liberation of France, and thrilled postwar to the Paris concerts by Dizzy Gillespie. Why not amalgamate his classical instruction with all that jazz?
“I have always loved exploring new lands, trying out new things,” Legrand told Lerouge. The cinema gave him the canvas where he applied Boulanger’s theories with the practicality of fitting music to a dynamic sequence of visuals. He became a musical polyglot, merging fugues with jazz, baroque with bebop.
Legrand was well established in French cinema before the Nouvelle Vague but had no problem embracing the new wave of Godard, Truffaut and company. He gained global attention with director Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). The Cannes winner and art house triumph was an unconventional musical that elevated Catherine Deneuve’s career and produced a pop standard, “I Will Wait for You,” sung by everyone from Tony Bennett to Louis Armstrong. Success lured him to Los Angeles, but while finding work in Hollywood, he didn’t care for LA. “That city will slowly kill you, suck the life force from your veins, shrink your personality,” he told Lerouge. Paris was home, yet he returned to Hollywood years later as a favor to Barbra Streisand for Yentl.
Along the way, Legrand also enjoyed an impressive musical career outside the movies, recording LPs and working with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Sting and others. But one of his most thrilling endeavors came late in life through his work on Orson Welles’ posthumously edited and released film, The Other Side of the Wind (2018). Working in tandem with Welles’ acolyte Peter Bogdanovich, Legrand created a musical mélange, “with several different styles overlapping,” in keeping with the perplexing collage Welles left behind.
The memoir will be eye-opening for film buffs who recognize Legrand’s name from numerous credits but were never able to piece together the full story of this remarkably talented composer.
Michel Legrand: A Life in Music and Film is published by Oxford University Press.
