les six, satie and cocteau

1920-c1923
A short-lived group of French artists - Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre - who collectively championed the "anti-serious" avant-garde and surrealism in music and the arts. Originally inspired by Erik Satie, the group's most visible personality was the poet Jean Cocteau.

"Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself."
- Erik Satie

The official manifesto of Les Six, a group, as we shall see, of very disparate personalities, was in fact enunciated by Jean Cocteau, who had no time for German music, with the exception of Bach, but who also rejected the music of Debussy and the Russians. He contended that the new generation of French composers should derive its inspiration from the witty and worldy art of music hall and circus.

Jean Cocteau (at the piano) with, left to right, Milhaud, Honegger, Tailleferre, Poulenc and Auric

The members of Les Six were of widely diverse characters and talents: the curious, retiring Durey, the mocking but humble Auric, the mighty Provençal Milhaud and the Swiss Honegger, Poulenc, by turns lighthearted and serious, and the brilliant Germaine Tailleferre. Each was in fact soon to break away from the attributes which had been accorded him in Cocteau's Le Coq et L'Harlequin (The Cock and the Harlequin). But there were two points which all had in common: a hostility to French Wagnerism and Impressionism.

They wanted to align their work with painting and literature, and the writers Aragon, Eluard, Claudel, Gide and Apollinaire, as well as Cocteau, were often associated with them. But any actual collaboration between the Six was limited to a single ballet, conceived by Jean Cocteau for the Swedish Ballet, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower) (1921) - and even then, Durey declined to make a contribution. He was about to secede from the group and devote himself to the communist cause. Durey ended up setting to music the revolutionary tracts of Mao-Tse Tung and Ho-Chi Minh.

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), a German Swiss Protestant (born at Le Havre and brought up in France), nicknamed the 'modern Handel', was of strikingly different background from the Mediterranean-Jewish Darius Milhaud. This difference of background points to the lack of any common artistic outlook between the Six. The work that brought Honegger immediate fame was the oratorio Le Roi David (1921), but it was also the work that, from the very start, separated him from the group. He prized opera above everything, though it was his oratorios that made his reputation. In all Honegger's works, despite his harmonic and rhythmic language, we find a marked Romanticism. He was in fact not enough of an innovator for those who considered avant-garde music more important than anything else.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) was born in Aix-en-Provence. He studied the violin and was later a pupil at the Paris Conservatoire under Dukas. He spent the First World War in Brazil as attaché at the French embassy under Paul Claudel. The deep impression made on him by Latin America inspired the ballet Création du monde (1923) and the Saudades do Brasil for piano. Among his vast output, which includes twelve symphonies and eight quartets, it is essential to mention the stunning Scaramouche for two pianos.

More than any other of the Six (with the exception of Poulenc), Georges Auric (1899-1983), director of the Paris Opéra from 1962, followed the tenets of Cocteau's manifesto. Equally hostile to Wagnerism and Impressionism, he cultivated a witty sharp-edged style opposed to all Romanticism. His deliberate, easy grace was admirably suited to the innumerable theatrical and, especially, film scores that he wrote for Cocteau, René Clair and many others - including the British Ealing Studio. Auric drew on the idiom of the music hall and jazz, and works such as the ballets for Diaghilev, Les Fâcheux (1924) and Les Matelots (1925), brought him outstanding success.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) was born in Paris, and was a remarkable pianist at a very early age. For a long time he had a reputation as a social maverick which he deliberately cultivated and which earned him a fashionable success; for example, in his ballet Les Biches (1924), commissioned by Diaghilev with set and costume design by one of the artists associated with Les Six, Marie Laurencin, the erotic element refers explicitly to a known person.

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983), after brilliant studies at the Paris Conservatoire, met Milhaud and later Satie and became involved with the Six. It was her artistic connections, which by 1917 also included Picasso and Modigliani, however which lead to her initial success. Tailleferre completed a ballet, La Nouvelle Cythère, which was intended for the ill-fated 1929 season of Ballets Russes which was cancelled after Diaghilev's sudden death. She continued composing prolifically until shortly before her death in 1983 and her compositions include many works for piano and orchestra as well as solo piano pieces, chamber music, a cantata based on Paul Valéry's Narcisse and lyric pieces.

Louis Durey (1888-1979), little known save for his association with the Six, was one of the first French composers to be inspired by the theories of Schoenberg.

Illustration: Les Six, with a singer. From left: Tailleferre, Milhaud, Honegger, Durey, Poulenc, Cocteau, Auric.