From the Horn Sonata's opening phrase the listener is lifted into an aura of the legendary, heraldic, and mythic. Koechlin noted that "...the first two movements were set in the atmosphere of the Romantic forest of Weber or...Heine." It is the atmosphere of the 1870s, of d'Indy's symphonic legends, Le Forêt enchantée and Saugefleurie—with their prominent horn parts—though one has only to compare Koechlin's Horn Sonata (especially in its 1927 orchestration as the Poème pour cor) with d'Indy's Wagner-inspired "big machine" approach to gauge the sea-change that had taken place in French music over 40 years. Begun in 1918 and completed in 1925, the Horn Sonata is Romantic sensibility couched in a Modern idiom in which harmonies generated by open fourths and fifths create textures of luminescent gracious airiness through which an unusually attractive melodic fantasy wafts, the horn often supplying a timbrel complement to the piano's eloquence. Given d'Indy's fondness for polarizing polemics, it was inevitable that the productions of a new generation should elicit an invidious response from the venerable director of the Schola Cantorum. Through the war years, d'Indy was, after Franck and Debussy, the most performed of French composers, while Koechlin and younger composers struggled to be heard. The very things Koechlin and d'Indy held in common were destined to make their differences glaring. It is not remarkable that both were pianists—a condition sine qua non at the time: Koechlin played well enough to accompany his songs and less difficult sonatas, while d'Indy maintained a crackling technique into his seventies. Both played horn. Both demonstrated an encyclopedic grasp of ancient music. D'Indy was already an influential teacher, and Koechlin, as he began the Horn Sonata, was poised to become so. In 1918 d'Indy met the woman, half his age, whom he would marry to astoundingly rejuvenating effect. At the same age—mid-sixties—Koechlin's infatuation with film actress Lilian Harvey would prove similarly liberating. Yet, attempts to show a united French musical front by joining the d'Indyist Société Nationale de Musique with the Société Musicale Indépendante—formed in 1910 to give younger composers a hearing—came to a calamitous head over 1916-1917 with d'Indy, while regretting Ravel's shabby treatment, dismissing his younger rivals as "sad puppets, without a shadow of talent!" Nevertheless, Koechlin's Horn Sonata was launched on May 15, 1925, by Edmond Entraigue, with Edouard Garés at the piano, at a concert of the Société Moderne d'Instruments à Vent, to achieve some currency.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi