Messiaen does not come off well

[bwv 1080]

but Cortot should have been hung as a collaborator

when Messiaen was released from the Görlitz camp, he was offered a job at the Paris Conservatory replacing André Bloch, a professor of harmony who was dismissed by French authorities in obedience to anti-Semitic laws. While other non-Jewish musicians, such as Nadia Boulanger, refused to profit from the sufferings of Jewish colleagues, Messiaen did not hesitate to do so. In all future accounts, Messiaen would falsely claim that he had been released from the prison camp only in 1942, as if hesitating in retrospect to admit his avid careerism at a time of tragedy.
Over 20 years ago, I spoke to the French Jewish composer Odette Gartenlaub, a onetime student of Messiaen who was thrown out of the Conservatory and forced into hiding by French officials in obedience to anti-Semitic laws. She explained that Messiaen never dared communicate with her during the war: "Messiaen had my address; he just didn't want to compromise himself. After the war when I returned, all the Conservatory people were very friendly and pleasant again, but these were the same people who ignored me after I'd been thrown out. I might have wound up in a crematory oven."
Sometimes solid documentary research can add extra certainty to preexisting impressions, such as the Nazi collaboration of the French pianist Alfred Cortot, who served as the Vichy regime's high commissioner of fine arts and on the National Council, a consultative body of appointees who vigorously enforced anti-Semitic legislation. I remember a chilling dinner that I attended in the early 1990s at the apartment of Cortot's son, the artist Jean Cortot, on the rue du Bac, decorated by museum-quality oil portraits of and framed manuscripts by composers such as Schumann and Schubert. One had to wonder if any of these works had been confiscated from homes of French Jewish deportees and presented by Nazi officials to Cortot, their favorite pianist.
Acclaim continues for Cortot's playing: In 2012, a 40-CD set, "Alfred Cortot: The Anniversary Edition" was released by Warner Classics, following the 2005 issuing by Sony Classical of a 3-CD set, "Alfred Cortot: The Master Classes". The latter was produced and edited by a perhaps surprising fan of Cortot's legacy, Murray Perahia, the American pianist of Sephardic Jewish origin.
In "Music in Paris during the Occupation," essayist François Anselmini states that Cortot proudly claimed to have collaborated not merely since France's defeat, but "for the past forty years." When Cortot conducted a performance of "Tristan und Isolde" at Vichy in 1941, it was the first time he had led a Wagner opera since 1903, when he conducted the French premiere of "Parsifal." Cortot was the first French musician to travel to the Reich after his country's defeat, and in 1942 published a text attacking the libretto of Claude Debussy's unfinished 19th century opera "Rodrigue et Chimène," possibly because it was written by a French Jewish poet, Catulle Mendès, as Anselmini underlines: "It should be observed that [Cortot] proclaimed that the writing of a Jewish author was incompatible with the genius" of Debussy. Published information continues to increase about Cortot's personal iniquity to Jewish colleagues, the mercilessness with which he dismissed even longtime colleagues such as Lazare Lévy.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/193898/were-they-heroes-or-were-they-collaborators/?p=all#ixzz2zXMmmIzH

[DaveF]

Not intending to comment on or express an attitude to the article as a whole, but merely to question two assertions made further on than in the quoted section:

[Messiaen] was imprisoned at Görlitz in Silesia along with other defeated French servicemen. There, he won the sympathy of a German sergeant, who gave Messiaen extra bread rations and time as well as materials to compose...

Apparently the sergeant in question, Carl-Albert Brüll, was Belgian.  Obviously therefore a German sympathiser/collaborator, but not actually German.

Messiaen wrote the "Quartet for the End of Time," which other prisoners were forced to stand and listen to during its world premiere performance

The usual version, as recounted by Messiaen himself, is that the prisoners and guards stood in rapt silence - which doesn't of course mean that they weren't forced to do so.

[petrarch]

Interestingly, this was discussed recently in another thread:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,23054.msg790848.html#msg790848

[Artem]

Is this issue with Messiaen a new development or has it followed the composer during his lifetime?