Uploaded June 2011 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
.The best time to watch this video is when you are alone, or with a few of those who are dear to you. Watch it at night, when sounds from outside will not cover the languorous voices of Sirènes. Watch it late, when your thoughts begin to carry you away to other realities. That is when I would like you to travel on this Voyage chimérique. The journey started for the author, Charles Koechlin, who was 67 at the time, in the afternoon of 7 August 1934, in a Paris cinema, where he saw a film starring Lilian Harvey. Born in London in 1907, the actress started her career in Germany and went to Hollywood in the thirties. At the time she was as popular in France as Clara Bow and Greta Garbo. Koechlin was already very interested in the cinema, particularly since the advent of talkies, and he suddenly developed a passion for it, almost an obsession., which continued for two years. During this period, a financially difficult one for the Koechlin family, the composer sought refuge from the worries of daily life in these "unreal worlds." How could he find the right balance between the need to earn a living and the desire to escape into an imaginary world so that he would be free to create? This dilemma produced some of his finest music.
In the evening of the same day, 7 August 1934, Koechlin saw the film again, and that night, without pausing, he wrote the music of Tout va bien, "not without covering the paper with tears," as he later confessed. He added another song written a little earlier, Keep that school girl complexion, a pastiche or a Palmolive soap advertisement, and they formed the basis of a cycle that he called L'Album de Lilian.
I thought that I ought to describe to you the circumstances in which this music was born. When you know that each piece is inspired by a film or a scene from a film, you can imagine your own pictures, guided by the titles, which are so evocative: Keep that school girl complexion (soprano and piano); Les yeux clairs (flute and piano); Skating-smiling (flute, soprano and piano); Pleurs (small and large flute and piano); Tout va bien (soprano and piano); Sicilienne de rêve (Ondes Martenot and clavecin).
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin (27 November 1867 -- 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, Bach, travelling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. He once said: "The artist needs an ivory tower, not as an escape from the world, but as a place where he can view the world and be himself. This tower is for the artist like a lighthouse shining out across the world."
.The best time to watch this video is when you are alone, or with a few of those who are dear to you. Watch it at night, when sounds from outside will not cover the languorous voices of Sirènes. Watch it late, when your thoughts begin to carry you away to other realities. That is when I would like you to travel on this Voyage chimérique. The journey started for the author, Charles Koechlin, who was 67 at the time, in the afternoon of 7 August 1934, in a Paris cinema, where he saw a film starring Lilian Harvey. Born in London in 1907, the actress started her career in Germany and went to Hollywood in the thirties. At the time she was as popular in France as Clara Bow and Greta Garbo. Koechlin was already very interested in the cinema, particularly since the advent of talkies, and he suddenly developed a passion for it, almost an obsession., which continued for two years. During this period, a financially difficult one for the Koechlin family, the composer sought refuge from the worries of daily life in these "unreal worlds." How could he find the right balance between the need to earn a living and the desire to escape into an imaginary world so that he would be free to create? This dilemma produced some of his finest music.
In the evening of the same day, 7 August 1934, Koechlin saw the film again, and that night, without pausing, he wrote the music of Tout va bien, "not without covering the paper with tears," as he later confessed. He added another song written a little earlier, Keep that school girl complexion, a pastiche or a Palmolive soap advertisement, and they formed the basis of a cycle that he called L'Album de Lilian.
I thought that I ought to describe to you the circumstances in which this music was born. When you know that each piece is inspired by a film or a scene from a film, you can imagine your own pictures, guided by the titles, which are so evocative: Keep that school girl complexion (soprano and piano); Les yeux clairs (flute and piano); Skating-smiling (flute, soprano and piano); Pleurs (small and large flute and piano); Tout va bien (soprano and piano); Sicilienne de rêve (Ondes Martenot and clavecin).
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin (27 November 1867 -- 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, Bach, travelling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. He once said: "The artist needs an ivory tower, not as an escape from the world, but as a place where he can view the world and be himself. This tower is for the artist like a lighthouse shining out across the world."
