The Swiss composer Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) wrote many distinguished film scores, for Abel Gance’s
Napoléon (1924) and Anthony Asquith’s
Pygmalion (1938) among others—he even made a brief appearance as a composer in a 1946 film called
Un Revenant. His
Souvenir de Chopin (in E flat major/minor) is one of three pieces extracted from the music he wrote for the 1946 film
Un ami viendra ce soir (‘A friend will come tonight’), one of the first French post-war films to deal with life during the conflict, a Resistance story set in an insane asylum. The last of Honegger’s works for the piano, like his earlier
Hommage à Ravel and
Hommage à Albert Roussel, it captures by means of charming pastiche something of Chopin’s compositional personality.
from notes by Jeremy Nicholas © 2010
