Honegger’s Wife is named after the wife of the Swiss French composer Arthur Honegger, who is known to us in various music literature as both Honegger’s wife and Pierre Boulez’s counterpoint teacher. Andrée Vaurabourg (1894 – 1980) was a formidable pianist, composer and teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. She also supported her husband’s career, premiering several of his pieces and completing arrangements of some of his music. Honegger and Vaurabourg lived apart, in order that he have the solitude he required to compose. Pierre Boulez studied counterpoint in frequent private lessons with Mme. Vaurabourg, during two of his formative musical years. As far as we know, all that remains of her music is a counterpoint exercise in Vaurabourg’s hand, in the manuscript of Charles Koechlin’s Précis des Règles du Contrepoint (1923, Heugel & Cie, Paris). A composition of Vaurabourg’s was performed in a Verley Prize concert in 1921 in Paris. Unfortunately, Pascale Honegger (Vaurabourg-Honegger’s daughter) was unable to find this work. Vaurabourg did not win the prize (Honegger did) and then decided to stop composing. No music of hers is included in the Honegger archives held by the Paul Sacher Foundation. We are left to imagine what might have happened musically under different circumstances. Vaurabourg’s counterpoint is embedded as a musical object in a new work inspired by this history. Honegger’s Wife channels a slow-burning kind of feminist rage, in response to both the glacial rate of social change women have experienced and the (predominantly female) juggle of a modern life, balancing career, family and household obligations, coupled with the cognitive load of doing so.
