la création du monde

The two works “La Création du monde” by Darius Milhaud and “Ballet mécanique” by George Antheil from the 1920s, which were composed in interplay between various arts and players, are in the truest sense of the word ready for a museum. The French artist Fernand Léger, a versatile talent to whom the Museum Ludwig will dedicate a major exhibition in 2016, was involved in both works.

He dressed the dancers of the Ballets suédois and the entire scenery in cubist forms for the ballet “La Création du monde” with his pioneering décor. For this “act of creation”, Milhaud drafted a composition that refers in style and instrumentation to New York jazz revues of the 1920s. Léger’s “Ballet mécanique”, which he created together with Dudley Murphy and Man Ray, is an avant-garde film that is considered – with its Dadaistic surreal elements – a unique film document. Antheil wrote a composition of the same name for the film; its score mirrors the euphoria and misery of the machine age with hypnotic repetitions, cascades of notes and overlapping sounds. The two short works can be experienced in a performance in the Museum Ludwig. The music will be supplemented by a discussion between Katia Baudin (curator of the exhibition) and François-Xavier Roth, in which the lively exchange between musicians and visual artists in Paris of the 1920s, including as exemplified by Léger and Milhaud, is examined more closely. It is often the crossing of frontiers, the confrontations between the arts, which strike the hottest sparks. That’s why this “visit” by the Gürzenich Orchestra to the museum can be considered the kick-off to regular encounters with other arts.