Tristan Foison 6: Jacques Chailley

I am the preserver of the musical estate of Jacques Chailley (1910-1999). This composer was highly admired by Tristan Foison and he stole several of his compositions and presented them as his own. For example also the autograph manuscript of "Cantique du soleil", a work originally for alto and 4 ondes Martenot and composed in 1934. The premiere took place in 1935. Jacques Chailley later made different arrangements of the composition, one of them is scored for alto, ondes Martenot and piano. And as luck would have it I also own the autograph manuscript of the composition "Le cantique du soleil" by Tristan Foison - which is in fact just a copy of the Chailley work. Tristan Foison penned down the score and pretended to have written it in August 1994 in Atlanta (USA).

title pages of both the autograph manuscripts by Jacques Chailley (left) and Tristan Foison (right)

and the first music page with Jacques Chailley (top) and Tristan Foison (bottom):

The work was at least performed one time in this version under the name of Tristan Foison, that was at the wedding of the daughter of Carole Jacobsen, a singer from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported about this performance on 29 July 2001:

"On the day he [Tristan Foison] met Carole Jacobsen in the early 1990s, Foison asked permission to write something for her. What he produced for the mezzo-soprano with the ASO Chorus was a spare, ethereal song, scaled to the compass of her voice. A bond soon developed: He played his ondes martenot at Jacobsen's daughter's wedding, and Jacobsen's husband, Carl, was the narrator in Foison's "L'Enfant Musique" ("The Music Child") at a concert in 1994."

I contacted Carole Jacobsen for a comparision of the scores (she still has the manuscript in the hand of Tristan Foison, similar to the one pictured above) and she verified that "her piece" is identical to Jacques Chailley's "Le Cantique du Soleil".

The original composition "Le Cantique du Soleil" by Jacques Chailley was never published until I typeset the work from manuscript in 2023. Previous performances were executed from copies of the manuscript archived in the French National Library. These copies circulate in the small ondist circle. This situation makes it very likely that no performance of the piece was given in the USA before the above mentioned concert. If that is true the US premiere of "Le Cantique du Soleil" by Jacques Chailley was performed in summer 1995 at the wedding of Jason and Tracy Ahern by Carole Jacobsen (voice) and Tristan Foison (ondes Martenot).