“Play It Again, Yvonne: Lefébure and Radio Performance as an Embodied Technology of French Resistance, Hope, and Friendship During World War II”

This article reveals how virtuoso French pianist Yvonne Lefébure employed radio as a socio-emotional and a political technology during and after World War II. I examine letters, contracts, and radio broadcast scripts in Lefébure’s vast but virtually untouched Parisian archive at the Bibliothèque Musicale LaGrange-Fleuret that show that Lefébure, her friends, and family members understood her radio performances as means to remain close to her despite the war’s disruptions. Analysis of period and secondary sources frame radio as not only a highly politicized media technology, but also a deeply imaginative, connective, and embodied one. In addition, study of Lefébure’s performance choices provides additional context for reading Lefébure’s acrobatic performance style—often described as “risky” by her contemporaries—as a manifestation of her French Resistance politics. My reading of Lefébure’s wartime and immediately postwar radio performances draws on trauma studies as well in suggesting that these performances offered Lefébure opportunities to “do something”—to complete a “survivor mission,” in the words of Judith Herman—during World War II’s years of upheaval and trauma. Ultimately, the attention paid to Lefébure in this article highlights the political and social significance of radio-broadcast piano performances during the war, while also locating a musical modality for performing resistance and survival that goes beyond the performance of “musical contraband” that has come to be how many musicologists have identified French Resistance musicians and their politics.