Honegger provided music for two animated pictures, L'Idée (1934) and Callisto ou la petite nymphe de Diane (1943). The first of these is an unusual and important work, both from the point of view of the film and of the music. It also initiated a series of scores in which the Ondes Martenot were used, an instrument included in relatively few of Honegger's "classical" works and never as prominently as in his film scores. At that time, while the Theremin, a comparable instrument in sound, was used sometimes excessively in Hollywood, Honegger made admirable use of the Ondes, as did his French colleagues Jacques Ibert, Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud.

As we are told by the painter Jiri Mucha in his memoirs Au seuil de la nuit, Bertold Bartosch, the creator of L'Idée, was a pioneer of the animated cinema. He was very poor and crippled and had also worked as a special effects man with Jean Renoir and other directors, using self-made, almost amateur devices. With L'Idée Bartosch animated a series of woodcuts by the Belgian expressionist painter and illustrator Frans Masereel (1889-1972), a life-long militant pacifist, opposed to all forms of oppression. War, man's loneliness in the modern world and social criticism are constant themes in his works. Like some of his famous anti-capitalist and anti-war works, L'Idée is a cartoon-like textless sequence of 83 illustrations. Bartosch, by bringing to life the more harmless sections of Masereel's original story, excluding some crude details, was able to transmit through the most primitive frame-by-frame and superimposing techniques the artist's humanitarian message, assisted by the highly effective, spontaneous yet poignant score by Honegger. More than any other film score by the composer, this contains typical devices of the film and theatre music of the 1920s and 1930s, making it sound at times like Hindemith or Kurt Weill. The "Idea" itself, its lyrical leitmotif stated and developed at the beginning by a solo of 39 bars for Ondes Martenot, is represented by the silhouette of an immortal, naked girl, inspiring mankind and leading revolt against all kinds of oppression.

In 1935 the choreographer Elsa Darciel staged a ballet based on L'Idée in Brussels, using music by Honegger and by Eric Satie, but it is not known whether the music by Honegger was that of the Bartosch film. It is also of interest to know that in 1961 the same subject inspired the Polish composer Jadwiga Szajna-Lewendowska to music for a pantomime.

The instrumental ensemble of L'Idée is confined to some fourteen players, Ondes Martenot, piano, flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion and string quartet. In the present recording the string quartet has been augmented to 6-6-4-4 in order to improve the ensemble balance, thus avoiding the use of extra microphone gimmickry.

Writer: Adriano
Translataed by: Keith Anderson