Melissa Errico

<h1>I still hear Michel Legrand’s voice in my head: “Melissa! Hurry! Come!”</h1>

It was morning at the Music Box Theater, an early rehearsal during the first previews of his 2002 Broadway musical “Amour.” It was 10:01 a.m., and we were all moving slowly, nursing coffee cups in the palms of our hands. We had performed the show the night before and were still easing into the day.

Michel, the three-time Oscar-winning film composer who died Saturday at 86, didn’t want to waste a minute. He pulled on my arm, speaking fast in heavily accented English, insisting that we must find a piano. As we scurried to the theater’s downstairs lobby, he told me he had written a new song for my character, Isabelle, and it would go into the show that evening. We flew down the gilded stairs, and I sat at his side at the piano.

What I remember most was the change in Michel’s body language as he shared his new music. Once at the piano, he slowed down and became absorbed. He would rush you as if to an American ice cream parlor on a crowded summer afternoon — and then offer you a slowly simmered French meal. I sat as he played, and marveled quietly when his hands turned the melody unexpectedly, a new minor key, a delicious twist that only he could have invented.

Of course the song, “Other People’s Stories,” with lyrics by Jeremy Sams, was beautiful, perhaps the best remembered in the show. And it was in “Amour” by 7 that night, typed hurriedly by a stage manager and taped into a magazine prop so I could literally read it as I sang in front of 1,000 people.

This mix of wild energy and plaintive emotion governed Michel’s extravagantly well-lived life. Music was urgent to him. Well, almost everything was urgent to him — try hailing a New York taxi with him, oh!, the impatience — and then at the piano, he was transformed, calm.

It’s almost impossible to believe what a day with Michel could be like. Once, while we were recording in Paris, he suddenly asked if my husband, Patrick, and I would like to fly with him to Spain for a quick vacation. We shrugged and agreed. Only after we got to the airport did we realize that he really meant “fly with him” — he was the pilot of his own tiny plane, and flew us out through a rainstorm over the Pyrenees.

Landing for a picnic lunch, we had hardly caught our breath when he happily explained that he was due that night in Andorra for a concert with pianist Chucho Valdés, and we had been drafted as his drivers. There we were in the front seat of a small French car, navigating our way across the terrifying corkscrew mountain roads, while Michel practiced piano in the back seat on a specially constructed wooden keyboard. (“Can you please go straighter!” he demanded of my poor husband.) The concert, when it happened, was a hurricane force of free music, with dueling pianists scatting on Michel’s classic “Watch What Happens,” stretching it to 15 ecstatic minutes.

Two years after “Amour,” he and I decided to make an album together, an ambitious symphonic recording eventually called “Legrand Affair.” He came to Manhattan, and we spent a few days rehearsing his songs. Once we settled on a sensibility for the album, Michel went wild. One day in my apartment, he called lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman on the telephone: “I need a new verse for Melissa! For ‘You Must Believe in Spring!’ Now, now! It’s too short! Too short!”

Mere hours later, a fax came through from the Bergmans, with a new verse, adapted to that post-9/11 moment. That was what Michel’s energy could produce in others.

Michel could listen, too, as well as ask. He loved that I saw his “The Windmills of Your Mind” as a poem about insomnia, and concentrated on orchestrating my interpretation. His career was full of positive and empowering relationships with women, from Agnès Varda to Barbra Streisand to me, and, most obviously, with Marilyn Bergman. Those relationships were never like that of an artist feeding a mannequin or “muse.”

“Music is feeling, then, not sound,” Wallace Stevens wrote. And Michel was a uniquely feeling musician. His sensibility worked superbly in film, especially in the enchanting “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” which offered an unending spool of emotion. But even in the television cartoon series “Futurama,” when his “I Will Wait for You” from that film appears, it brings a true sense of loss and longing to a silly story about dog cloning.

The last song Michel sent my way was “Hurry Home,” written for a small Jerry Lewis movie released in 2016, “Max Rose.” It was one more beautiful melancholy Legrand melody, and listening to it now, it feels like a tribute to him. Unlike our orchestral album, it was stripped down, recorded with just piano and guitar. We were thrilled by the many positive responses.

“Ah, Melissa, a happy avalanche!” was how he described it. A perfect phrase from Michel — but also for Michel, a happy human avalanche himself.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7c7e710d-2281-4d2d-994b-a1acbb30a25c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/theater/michel-legrand-composer-appraisal.html">The New York Times</a>.

Swept up in the whirlwind known as Michel Legrand

It was morning at the Music Box Theater, an early rehearsal during the first previews of his 2002 Broadway musical “Amour.”

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Melissa Errico

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Swept up in the whirlwind known as Michel Legrand