Apart from Part I of Le buisson ardent, which it resembles in tone if not in method, Le Docteur Fabricius was Koechlin's last major orchestral work, a vast, meditatively unfolding epic of crisis and affirmation composed between 1941 and 1944, and scored in 1946 for an enormous orchestra augmented by quadruple woodwinds, two saxophones, four saxhorns, organ, and ondes martenot, playing over 50 minutes. Koechlin called Le Docteur Fabricius his "testament," and nearly all of the oddments of his style are here and writ large, so to speak—monodies, monodic chorales in canon, a modal fugue, dissonant outbursts consoled by a harmonic language uniquely astringent but caressing and otherworldly, polytonal/polyrhythmic tumult turned expressively to both sorrow and joy and unlike any other's (e.g., Vermeulen's), and the ondes martenot looming as the voice of Nature. Based on a novella of the same title by his uncle, philosopher and man of letters Charles Dollfus (1827-1913), this enormous panoply is employed in recounting a nightmare—an imagined visit to the mysterious and sinister Doctor Fabricius, who reveals to his unnamed guest that "Life is a trick: Nature is eternally indifferent. She avails herself of us to maintain life as we know it and does nothing to diminish our misfortunes." After retiring to his room, the tormented narrator gives way to despair and revolt (signaled by the angry statement of the chorale "Aus tiefer Noth...") before throwing open a window to behold the starry sky and hear the enigmatic voice of Being...and awakening to joy crowned by a final benediction. The attenuated glitter of the "star" music in Fabricius is a refined return to that of Vers la Voûte etoilée, from a decade before. Le Docteur Fabricius is stunning in parts, seemingly interminable in others (unless your conscious threshold has dropped to the hypnotic), and cumulatively, powerfully moving. Koechlin is a supple melodist but he's no tunesmith—there's hardly a memorable phrase, a phrase that you might whistle or hum, in the whole shebang. His melodies, like those of Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum, are hardly melodies at all but "melodic archetypes." Part of the drama of Le Docteur Fabricius is hearing its peculiar and curiously engaging evocations unfold imperturbably without reliance on the overly familiar formulas that make, say, Korngold's music such delightful top corn. That is, you must listen to Koechlin—don't expect him to sweep you away. Franz André led the premiere, with the Radio INR Orchestra (Brussels), on January 14, 1949.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide