Book

During a festival dedicated to female composers, conductor Debora Waldman meets François-Henri Labey, former director of conservatory. He tells her about his grandmother, Charlotte Sohy, an unknown composer of the first half of the 20th century, and offers to show her some scores. Debora immediately falls in love with the story of this woman, who managed to reconcile her creative energy, her role as a mother of seven children and her love life – her work being closely linked to her husband’s, the composer Marcel Labey. Debora decides to create Charlotte’s unpublished symphony, written during the First World War. Little by little, an unexplored continent of music is revealed to her: women composers who were nevertheless, for some, major figures in the artistic world.

A formidable adventure in a symphony out of oblivion, this story traces the crossed destinies of two musicians carried by the same passion a century apart: two powerful women, whose history leads us from the cultural life of the Belle Époque to a kibbutz in Israel where Debora, as a child, discovered her vocation.

Born in Brazil, trained in Israel and Argentina, and former assistant to Maestro Kurt Masur, Debora Waldman is now the Music Director of the Orchestre national Avignon‑Provence.
Deputy editor‑in‑chief at Point de vue, contributor to Classica and to “La tribune des critiques de disques“ on France Musique radio, Pauline Sommelet is a passionate specialist in classical music.