By Leslie Sprout [NY Times, 26 August 2010]
Arthur Honegger’s “Chant de LibÈration” was not a piece I intended to consult during a research trip to Paris in June 2009. Like others who knew of it, I thought the score was lost. Honegger had composed this song for baritone, chorus and orchestra in secret during the German occupation of France. Its only known trace was a tantalizing description of its October 1944 premiere in liberated Paris: a “triumph” by a “musician of the Resistance,” the music critic Maurice Brillant wrote.