Les Six: The French Composers and Their Mentors Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie

By Robert Shapiro

The absorbing, comprehensive story of an absolutely unique experiment in classical music, involving many key figures of the Dada and Surrealist movements Les Six were a group of talented composers who came together in a unique collaboration that has never been matched in classical music, and here their remarkable story is told for the first time. A musical experiment originally conceived by Erik Satie and then built upon by Jean Cocteau, Les Six were also born out of the shock of the German invasion of France in 1914—an avant-garde riposte to German romanticism and Wagnerism. Les Six were all—and still are—respected in music circles, but under the aegis of Cocteau, they found themselves moving among a whole new milieu: the likes of Picasso, René Clair, Blaise Cendrars, and Maurice Chevalier all appear in the story. But the story of Les Six goes on long after the heyday of Bohemian Paris—the group never officially disbanded and it was only in the last 20 years that the last member died; moreover, their spouses, descendents, and associates are still active, ensuring that the remarkable legacy of this unique group survives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780720617740

Book preview

LES SIX

Les Six were a group of young French composers consisting of Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre, brought together by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau at the end of the First World War, who achieved international fame in the 1920s. A unique collaboration that has never been matched in classical music, with Cocteau as their spokesman, Les Six were a phenomenon born out of the shock of the German invasion of France in 1914 – an avant-garde riposte to the impressionism of composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and the romanticism of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

The individual members were already respected in Parisian musical circles as Les Nouveaux Jeunes before they became Les Six, but they soon found themselves moving in an artistic milieu that included Sergei Diaghilev, René Clair, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and the writers Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Raymond Radiguet, Paul Claudel, Maurice Sachs and Paul Morand. Many fruitful collaborations arose out of these associations, and Satie would perform with them in concerts. Les Six continued to perform together intermittently during the 1920s and later, and most carried on to have long and distinguished musical careers, including the only woman of the group, Tailleferre.

Anchored by Robert Shapiro’s encyclopaedic knowledge, and enhanced by contributions from key commentators – Fréderic Robert, Jean Roy, Keith Waters and Ornella Volta – as well as the inclusion of rare photographs, memorabilia and valuable appendices, this is the first book in English to examine comprehensively the legacy of the group. It provides a unique portrait of artistic Paris in the 1920s and the subsequent careers of Les Six and those associated with them.

ROBERT SHAPIRO is a writer and researcher who specializes in the composers known as Les Six. He has published Germaine Tailleferre: A Bio-Bibliography and contributed articles on Milhaud and Satie for the anthology Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook. He has also produced recordings of Germaine Tailleferre’s chamber music and songs and is preparing a volume on the correspondence of Georges Auric.

For my wife Françoise Rebecca Herzog-Shapiro

FOREWORD

IT ALL HAPPENED so long ago. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since the magician Jean Cocteau waved his wand to put an ox on the roof and the newlyweds upon the Eiffel Tower. The leading figures in the movement, which was never really a movement, are all dead. But it was Cocteau who, with his flair for showmanship, seized on the chance remarks of a journalist and gave Les Six a place in French musical history.

Les Six consisted of Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre. The least known of the group, and perhaps the most atypical, was Louis Durey, who had reached the age of ninety-one when he died in 1979. For many years he lived in semi-retirement in Saint-Tropez where he settled during the 1920s. A bird-like creature, thin-featured and fragile, he remained brisk and alert to the end. The letters he wrote to me, even in his late eighties, were notable for their crisp expression and beautiful, clear handwriting. His published output was small. It includes such austere works as song cycles based on the hermetic poet Saint-John Perse and on Theocritus and Petronius. During the 1939–45 war, he scraped out a living transcribing music by Josquin des Prez and Marenzio. He was to become a dedicated Communist, a sort of left-wing Paul Hindemith, who specialized in writing songs that could be quickly learnt and performed by amateur choirs at trade-union rallies and mass demonstrations. Communism for him represented an ideal of justice and brotherhood. It was the inspiration for choral pieces to the greater glory of Chairman Mao, songs in honour of Korean warriors and odes on the French class struggle. We are here a long way from the aristocratic drawing rooms where Francis Poulenc charmed the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles.

No one could have been more different from Louis Durey than the sociable Parisian Georges Auric, although their friendship was to remain close for the rest of their lives. The precocious Auric began writing music at the age of ten. A group of songs, Trois Interludes, was first performed when he was eighteen: witty little vignettes of Second Empire life informed with a sophisticated irony quite remarkable for a young boy. In time he developed an instinctive feeling for the dance and showed a gift for the very difficult art of composing ballet music. One of his biggest successes was Les Matelots, which he wrote for Sergei Diaghilev. Another, exquisitely shaped, was Les Fâcheux, which he drew from Jean-Baptiste Molière’s comédie-ballet, a diverting piece that makes an elegant distinction between two types of bore: the one who is a bore at any and every time you meet and the bore who only becomes so if he catches you at a crucial moment when you are busy with some pressing affair that will not countenance interruption. Boring is something Auric most certainly was not. He had a natural, absent-minded charm and an engaging readiness to tackle any sort of commission that came his way. Like those adaptable eighteenth-century composers who were prepared to turn out whatever their patrons demanded, Auric was always happy to produce well-groomed music that is a pleasure to hear. He wrote many film scores, which called for the qual ities he had in good measure: delicate suggestiveness, fast-moving variation and fleet allusiveness. His fluent and versatile talent illumined well over a hundred films, among them René Clair’s A nous la liberté and nearly all of Cocteau’s cinema productions. With the theme song for director John Huston’s film Moulin Rouge he found himself at the top of the pop charts for quite a time. Les Six always numbered popular song among its inspirations, and it was a pleasant chance that Auric should himself write a genuine Tin Pan Alley hit.

A more mysterious figure was Germaine Tailleferre. At the time of Les Six she was quite a beautiful young woman. During the 1920s, she proved a discreet and amiable companion to the group’s artistic adventures. Later, economic circumstances obliged her to concentrate on writing incidental music for radio plays and films. Even so, she produced a comic opera, some ballets, music for Eugène Ionesco’s Le Maître and a setting of Paul Valéry’s Cantate du Narcisse, distinguished by purity and classic grace. Other works include the intriguing Concerto des vaines paroles for baritone and orchestra and a delightful Concertino pour harpe et orchestre. Tailleferre is, however, emerging from the shadows to which she has for too long been unjustly condemned, as Robert Shapiro’s work on her behalf has brought a much wider appreciation of her substantial musical achievement.

The other members of Les Six are too well known to call for much comment here. Arthur Honegger, whose music reminded Poulenc of edelweiss and pure mountain air, was an unlikely member of the group. Only after Les Six had, as it were, disbanded, did he find himself as a symphonic composer. The full measure of his achievement can be assessed in Harry Halbreich’s monumental study (Arthur Honegger, Portland: Amadeus, 1999), where the bare catalogue of his works occupies ten closely printed pages. Although he was an indefatigable worker and a keen explorer of new paths of expression, he became increasingly disillusioned. Perhaps his last illness was largely responsible. Before a massive heart attack carried him off at the early age of sixty-three, he had gloomily declared, à propos of the meagre rewards earned by musical talent, that anyone thinking of becoming a composer would be better advised to take up the grocery business.

From a temporal perspective, Les Six appears to have acted as a useful and necessary antidote to the kolossal tendencies of Richard Wagner and to the misty but insidious charms of Claude Debussy. For better or worse, Les Six took music out of the formal surroundings of the concert hall and related it to everyday life. Darius Milhaud, for example, set to music a list of farm machinery and a seed catalogue. Honegger was inspired by railway engines. Les Six demonstrated Cocteau’s epigram that if a work of art is in advance of its age, that is because the age is behind the times. Among the sources the composers drew upon was the music hall, not because of the music that was played there but because of the techniques used by the acrobats and tightrope walkers. Each gesture of these performers was dictated by the extent to which it was a necessary part of the whole and complete in itself. The economy of means and the objectiveness achieved in the music hall offered, by contrast with Impressionism, an ideal to be admired.

The reputation of Les Six is, of course, tainted by its link with café society, and the group is often accused of frivolity. It is, however, unjust to dismiss Les Six on the charge of light-heartedness alone. The composers were capable of many things besides. One thinks of Darius Milhaud’s innovative ballets, L’Homme et son désir and La Création du monde, of Arthur Honegger’s moving Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and of Francis Poulenc’s ballet Les Animaux modèles in its grim evocation of the horrors that lay behind the surface splendours of Louis XIV’s reign, which no mere parlour clown could have written. Honegger’s Le Roi David and La Danse des morts are ambitious frescos, a long way removed from the miniatures too often associated with Les Six.

Another paradox is that the names of Les Six were only once linked together in a joint production. This was the Album des Six, a little collection of piano pieces by each member presented alphabetically. Apart from this, the members generally went their own ways, even in their personal preferences. Arthur Honegger revered Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gabriel Fauré and Vincent d’Indy, composers whom Poulenc detested. Erik Satie, ‘godfather’ of Les Six, whom both Auric and Poulenc adored, was for Honegger entirely without interest or merit. If Honegger was pro-Wagner, Milhaud was violently against him. Darius Milhaud, a Jew from Provence, was unable to appreciate what he described as ‘the musico-philosophical gibberish, the mystico-harmonic tin-plating of an art that is essentially pompous’. Later, when his nephew and more than twenty of his cousins were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, he saw no reason to change his views.

Les Six was never a cohesive movement as such. The composers never set out to form a school or to win disciples. As Jean Cocteau himself was later to say: ‘The group known as Les Six was never much more than a group of six friends whose pleasure it was to meet and work together.’ But how many ‘groups of friends’ are there who could call on artists such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin to design their ballets for them? Or avail themselves of major poets like Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob to write libretti for their operatic and choral works?

James Harding

CONTENTS

Foreword by James Harding

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Robert Shapiro

Part 1: Les Six

Chapter 1. Les Six: Survey of an Avant-garde Movement

Robert Shapiro

Chapter 2. Memories of Les Six

Frédéric Robert

Chapter 3. Some Memories of Les Six

Jean Roy

Chapter 4. Georges Auric

Robert Shapiro

Chapter 5. Louis Durey

Frédéric Robert

Chapter 6. Arthur Honegger

Keith Waters

Chapter 7. Darius Milhaud

Robert Shapiro

Chapter 8. Francis Poulenc

Robert Shapiro

Chapter 9. Germaine Tailleferre

Robert Shapiro

Chapter 10. Erik Satie: Talisman of Les Six

Ornella Volta

Part 2: Sources of Information

Appendix 1: Chronology of Les Six to 1932

Appendix 2: Bibliographical Sources

Appendix 3: Compositions

Appendix 4: Discography

Appendix 5: Annotated Reviews of Selected Vintage Literature

Appendix 6: Concerts, 1916–2001

Notes

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Les Six with their mentor Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1929, photographed to commemorate Les Six’s tenth anniversary. Georges Auric, not present in the picture, is represented by a drawing by Cocteau.

A costume ball, the Bal des Quat’z Arts, attended by Tailleferre in medieval costume, c. 1914, held at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris

Milhaud and Tailleferre photographed on an outing to the Foire de Montmartre, Paris, c. 1920

Composer Charles Koechlin who was at one time invited to join Les Nouveaux Jeunes

Mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori (1888–1970), a fine pianist who frequently accompanied herself in recital. She served as an interim director of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1918.

Erik Satie (1866–1925), photographed by the artist Constantin Brancusi, c. 1924

A cartoon by Jean Oberlé; Cocteau is depicted as introducing Auric, Poulenc and Milhaud to Satie, whereas, in fact, the composers were acquainted with Satie before Cocteau became involved with the group. The drawing was published in the popular review La Crapouillot, 1 February 1921.

Jean Cocteau photographed in 1934 in his apartment

Le Coq, No. 1, May 1920, and Le Coq, No. 2, June 1920. These are the covers of the first and second issues of the publication founded by Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet.

Le Coq Parisien, No. 3, July, August, September 1920, and Le Coq Parisien, No. 4, November 1920. Le Coq was renamed Le Coq Parisien by its third issue, and publication was suspended after the November edition.

A page from the November 1920 issue of Le Coq Parisien announcing forthcoming Paris events, including various presentations of music by Les Six and a revival of Satie’s ballet Parade

A page from the June 1920 issue of Le Coq with a text by Cocteau dedicated to Honegger. The cover featured a cockerel designed by Jean-Victor Hugo and included an untitled musical piece by Durey dedicated to Poulenc, as well as statements by Auric and Poulenc.

The cover of Cocteau’s little-known book Carte Blanche: Articles parus dans Paris-Midi du 31 Mars au Août 1919 from the Tracts series, published in 1920 by the company that he co-founded, Éditions de la Sirène. Like Le Coq et l’Arlequin and Le Coq Parisien, this small volume consisted of Cocteau’s didactic writings which originally appeared in his Carte Blanche column in the journal Paris-Midi.

A postcard featuring Auric, c. 1921, printed by the publisher of his Sonatine, Rouart-Lerolle

Henri Sauguet and Milhaud at the latter’s home in rue Gaillard, Paris, c. 1922. As a member of the Group des Trois, the composer appeared at a concert celebrating Les Six. Later he belonged to the École d’Arcueil.

Poulenc at the piano in the Provençal home of his spiritual ‘Tante’, Virginie Liénard, a family friend. The composer intermittently resided at Liénard’s house, composing his 1923 ballet Les Biches there as well as the Chansons gaillardes three years later.

Tailleferre photographed in 1929 at the time of Les Six’s tenth anniversary

Honegger and pianist Andrée Vaurabourg in his Bugatti, c. 1929. After becoming acquainted at the Conservatoire they married and had a daughter. Vaurabourg played the piano suite, the Album des Six – the only work in which each of the group’s members participated – at the reunion concert held at the Salle Gaveau in December 1929.

Tailleferre with Charlie Chaplin at her piano, c. 1926, in the Manhattan apartment she shared with her first husband Ralph Barton, who was a friend of Chaplin’s.

Handbill announcing a pair of concerts for the tenth anniversary of Les Six on 11 and 18 December 1929, in which Cocteau participated. A concert of orchestral works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was followed by a recital of chamber music at the Salle Gaveau.

Tailleferre with her second husband Jean Lageat and their infant daughter Françoise, c. 1931–2. Françoise Tailleferre would later become a concert pianist.

Members of Les Six in 1951 at a reception in Paris honouring them at an exhibition at the Centre de Documentation Internationale de la Musique

Durey examining a document at the opening of the 1951 Paris exhibition

Views of the 1951 Paris exhibition

Les Six with Cocteau in 1951. This was the last group photograph to include Honegger, who died in 1955.

CONTRIBUTORS

James Harding specializes in the biography of the French musical and theatre world, having authored several books, among which is the first lengthy discussion of the period specifically covering Les Six: The Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in Paris in the Twenties. He has written studies of Erik Satie, Jacques Offenbach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Sacha Guitry, Jules Massenet and Gioacchino Rossini, among others. Dr Harding also undertook the English translation of Francis Poulenc: My Friends and Myself. He resides in London where he continues to monitor the French musical-cultural scene.

Frédéric Robert is a French musicologist who serves as the authorized biographer of Louis Durey. He has written numerous articles and books on a variety of musicological subjects and issues; these include the collaboration with composer/arranger/conductor Désiré Dondeyne for the formidable Le Traité de la harmonie, a compendium of French symphonic band music, music that Robert has championed. His biography of the least-known member of Les Six, entitled Louis Durey: L’Aîné des Six, was published in 1968. Frédéric Robert resides in Paris.

Jean Roy is a musicologist and journalist who has been critiquing the Parisian musical scene for more than half a century for a variety of musical periodicals. He is the author of numerous books, including studies of Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Georges Bizet. His narrative iconography Le Groupe des Six was published in 1990. Jean Roy resides in Paris where he produces programmes for Radio-France, while contributing recording reviews for Le Monde de la musique.

Robert Shapiro is a freelance writer and researcher specializing in the twentieth-century French school of Les Six. His first book, Germaine Tailleferre: A Bio-Bibliography (1994), was issued by Greenwood. Mr Shapiro has contributed articles on Milhaud and Satie for the anthology Music of the 20th-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Greenwood, 2002), edited by Larry Sitsky. With Cambria, Mr Shapiro produced a recording featuring Tailleferre’s chamber music (CD-1085, Musique de Chambre, 1994). Robert Shapiro is currently preparing a volume of Georges Auric’s correspondence.

Ornella Volta is the director of the Fondation Erik Satie in Paris. In addition to organizing exhibitions, she has written and edited a variety of works on Erik Satie and his musical, literary and philosophical contribution, including A Mammal’s Notebook, Satie Seen Through His Letters, Erik Satie et la danse, L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, among numerous others. In 1990, Volta served as curator for an exhibition commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the inception of Les Six, for which she prepared its informative catalogue.

Keith Waters is currently Assistant Professor at the College of Music at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He earned his PhD degree in music theory from the Eastman School of Music; his 1997 dissertation is entitled ‘Rhythmic and Contrapuntal Structures in the Music of Arthur Honegger’ and was published by Ashgate. Dr Waters has published studies on Arthur Honegger as well as on issues relating to jazz performance and analysis. As a jazz pianist he has performed throughout the United States, Europe and in Russia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY GRATITUDE is to those who made this compendium possible, especially Madame Elvire de Rudder, granddaughter of Germaine Tailleferre, for permission to work unfettered on the estate of the composer since 1989, for sharing innumerable ideas of her grandmother (for example, through formal recorded interviews) and for permission to publish photographs and diverse documentation gleaned from the composer’s extant documents – manuscripts and documents now in the collection of the Archives Les Six, Tucson, United States. I am also grateful to Françoise Tailleferre (Radziwill), the composer’s daughter, for ceding to my requests for extensive interviews conducted a year before her death, during the summer of 1991, with her husband, Prince Georges Radziwill of Poland, who generously contributed his impressions of his mother-in-law, and to Jacqueline Arents, Tailleferre’s niece, for consenting to an extensive interview in the Mieux countryside, in which she generously recalled time spent in the company of her illustrious aunt. Haude Vassent, Tailleferre’s great-great niece, contributed precious assistance; Jean-Luc de Rudder, first husband of Françoise Tailleferre-Radziwill and father of Elvire, kindly shared his intriguing insights about the composer and her milieu.

I also thank the gracious Désiré Dondeyne, from Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, for guiding me through the extant Tailleferre manuscripts and for sharing his impressions of his fellow composer and colleague through numerous interviews methodically conducted over a decade; Marie-Gabrielle Soret of the Librairie Gustav Mahler, Paris, for providing unsolicited documents regarding Tailleferre and Auric, in addition to documentation gleaned from the library’s clipping files; Frédéric Robert, Paris, Durey’s official biographer, for providing various unsolicited documents regarding the composer and for contributing a pair of essays to this volume; Michèle Auric-Battaïni, second wife and widow of Georges Auric, resident of Monte-Carlo and Paris, for permission to examine extant letters, scores, documents, drawings, paintings by Nora Vilter-Auric and assorted ephemera in the Auric collection; and Ornella Volta, director of the Fondation Erik Satie, Paris, for providing documents detailing the formative concert activity of Les Nouveaux Jeunes and Les Six, for contributing an article regarding Satie and Les Six and for granting permission to publish Constantin Brancusi’s photograph of the eccentric composer, from the foundation’s archive.

I should also like to thank Rosine Seringe, niece of Francis Poulenc and director of the Amis de Poulenc, for her graciousness; Marié-Thérèse Clostre-Collet, daughter of Henri Collet, for access to diverse extant documents within the Archives Henri Collet, Paris, and for granting a series of interviews; the gracious, late Nicole Viossat, of the Sorbonne, for allowing the cataloguing of autograph Tailleferre manuscripts then in her possession; and the late Madeleine Milhaud, widow of Darius, for granting numerous interviews between 1989 and 2002, for having responded to queries regarding the composer’s life and work (including those created with her collaboration), for providing a brief statement herein and for per - mission to publish photographs from the Archives Milhaud, Paris. In addition, I express my gratitude to Pascale Honegger, daughter of Arthur Honegger, for general documentation regarding her father; Dr Keith Waters, University of Colorado, Boulder, for the contribution of an essay discussing the life and work of Honegger, for assisting in the translation of several original texts by the composer and for supplying unsolicited information; Arlette Durey, daughter of Louis, for having provided unsolicited docu mentation; the late French poet Jean Tardieu (along with Mme Tardieu), for an extensive interview about his collaboration and longtime friendship with Tailleferre, as well as for allowing the researcher to inspect and catalogue the composer’s autograph manuscripts then in his possession; Jean Roy – critic, journalist and author – for supplying numerous unsolicited clipping files regarding Poulenc and Les Six and for contributing his invaluable reminiscences of the group; and to the gracious James Harding, London, for providing the Foreword to this book, having forged the path so splendidly a quarter-century ago, in having sent up his own ox on the roof.

The following archivists, institutions and writers have variously contributed to this volume, for which I am grateful: the Arizona State University Music Library, Tempe; the University of Arizona Library, Tucson; University of Arizona Music Library; Friends of the Library (University of Arizona), for their diplomatic intervention; the Music Division of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Phonothèque Nationale and its efficient, affable staff; Karl Miller of the University of Texas at Austin, who has assisted me in locating vital aural archival documents; John Shepard of the Rare Books and Manuscripts section of the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, for his assistance in locating elusive manuscripts; the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Musée Nogent-sur-Marne, France; Association Germaine-Tailleferre, Paris; Bruce Kellner, for supplying diverse documents regarding Ralph Barton and Tailleferre; Roger-Viollet, Paris, for granting permission to publish photographs from their archive, especially Catherine Cheval who judiciously guided me through their vast resources; the late French novelist Robert Pinget, for documentation regarding Tailleferre’s mélodies and for information regarding Germaine and Françoise Tailleferre – over lunch beneath the superlative Amboise château, not far from Poulenc’s Noizay; Eda M. Regan, Milhaud archivist at the F.W. Olin Library at Mills College in Oakland, California, for her assistance with regard to the composer and teacher, who took grateful refuge at this college during the Second World War, and to the efficient, amicable staff of the library’s rare book/documents division; Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, Paris, for general documentation regarding deportation during the Second World War, with specific reference to pianist François Lang, and Denis Herlin of Erato recordings for having contributed documentation regarding Lang’s work; Michel Dupuy, Paris, for enthusiastically allowing this writer access to his vast videotape archive of French/international film; Etienne Hauser, Paris, a student of Tailleferre at the Ecole Alsacienne long ago, for his assistance; Pascal Guillot, of Editions Salabert, for his efficient and friendly assistance; Mme Mansuy of Leduc/Heugel, Montrouge, France, for guiding this researcher through manuscripts and printed editions in the publisher’s archive, with reference to Tailleferre and Milhaud; the journal Cahiers d’histoire de l’institut de recherches marxistes for their gracious permission to publish an English translation of Frédéric Robert’s biographical essay of Durey; Christophe Dardenne, of Editions Billaudot, Paris; Mme Jobert of Editions Jobert, Paris, for access to internal Tailleferre documents; Pierre Vidal, for access to documents housed in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra de Paris, including those originally in the collection of Rolf de Maré; Director Erik Naslund and Thomas Skalm, of the Dansmuseet, Stockholm, Sweden, for unhindered access to a diverse array of documents, including unpublished autograph letters, regarding productions of the Ballets Suédois, and for their Swedish hospitality; and pianist Carlo Balzaretti (Italy), Stephen Vetter (Tucson, Arizona), Charles Merrill, Dr Timothy Ehlen (University of Oklahoma), Lucia Tagliaferro (Italy), Pascal Gautherot (France) and Bengt Häger (Stockholm), each of whom provided points of documentation.

For assistance with the production of this book I have been fortunate to have had the help of the following people: Sara Peacock who patiently edited the manuscript, Patsy Dale who proofread the text and appendices with a detective’s eye, Tim Mitchell who created the detailed index and the staff of Peter Owen Publishers, especially Antonia Owen who oversaw the editing and production process, Nick Pearson who worked diligently on the illustrations and layout, Michael O’Connell who took care of administrative matters, Simon Smith and Peter Owen himself, publisher and friend of Jean Cocteau, who saw the importance of making available in English a comprehensive book on the musical legacy of Les Six.

I am also indebted to Renate Herzog for having tracked down books and miscellaneous documents that had evaded me and to Philippe Herzog for his invaluable assistance; the late Yves Hemin for contributing a rare Poulenc document to my archive; to my late parents, William and Mollie Shapiro, who set me on the correct course so many years ago; to William Michael Cochran, Richard Bernard Meyer and Charles Reisig for keeping me on that course; to my brothers Edward and Joel Shapiro for their support; and, last but not least, to my wife, Françoise Rebecca Herzog-Shapiro, for her invaluable help in the preparation of the book as well as moral support during the years dedicated to the research and the writing of this volume, having never lost sight of the endgame.

INTRODUCTION

ROBERT SHAPIRO

Let us go off to the Hundred Years War.

We knights of the Middle Ages.

We Negroes of the High Era.

We modern poets, modern painters, modern musicians …

– Jean Cocteau, ‘Monologue’, Le Coq Parisien, No. 3 (1920)

IN P ARIS, F RANCE , amid the first of two devastating world wars during the dynamic twentieth century, the studio of an obscure Montparnasse artist, officially known as Salle Huyghens, masqueraded as a combined concert hall and art gallery to become the unlikely manger in which a musical revolution was born. While French troops were engaged in savage battle against the German invasion forces, a parallel and somewhat visceral attitude developed regarding Teutonic musical expression among Paris-based French composers, some of whom were militarily engaged. The informal hall, situated on the little rue Huyghens, was already functioning as a veritable nationalist camp when it began the programming of a new and unique musical expression, seamlessly French in character, in 1917, more than a year before the Armistice. This vanguard movement variously rejected Germanic or Teutonic music, especially that of Richard Wagner; the over-applied and dreaded but already waning musical Impressionism, although not necessarily the music of the revered Claude Debussy; and, with lesser vitriol, the sterility of French musical academicism, typified by the likes of César Franck and Vincent d’Indy. These movements were the consequence of efforts initiated by the iconoclastic, endearingly eccentric French composer and profane philosopher Erik Satie (1866–1925), who would be followed by the catalyst, Jean Cocteau (1889–1963).

This emerging musical nationalism was not rooted in an ethnocentric mire, nor was it the consequence of anti-Teutonic sentiments alone. Attempts at a distinctly French musical language grew organically out of a sincere affirmation: the quest, by an intimate nucleus of composers later to be known as Les Six Français, to integrate the respective languages of their selected mostly French musical ancestors with a modern musical world-view, expressed with their innately personal but diverse contemporary musical ideas. The practical justification for the philosophic refutation of musical Impressionism was based on arguments posited by the group’s supporter in tandem with Erik Satie, the brilliant Jean Cocteau, that musical Impressionism was rooted in Russian conception by way of composer Modeste Mussorgsky (1839–81) and therefore inconsistent with the requisite French basis. The signature ‘foggy’ or diffuse sensibilities of Impressionism, however, were not inherently conducive to the creation, or recreation, of the rarified atmospheres, idiosyncratic simplicity and aural clarity that were characteristic of the music of these courageous musicians with their optimistic expression; they were likewise at odds with Germanic and French academic expressions of the time.

The existence of this intriguing phalanx of six French-born composers – whether variously referred to as ‘Les Six Français’ (‘The French Six’), ‘Le Groupe des Six’ (‘The Group of Six’) or ‘Les Six’ (‘The Six’) – has been otherwise acknowledged by music historians, musicologists, critics and journalists alike. In our own time, the group is commonly referred to as Les Six in America and Britain, while in its native France, as on the rest of the Continent, it is generally referred to as Le Groupe des Six. Indeed, even early champions of the group’s music did not empirically agree on a formal name for the collective. Although individually disavowing some of the characteristics attributed to the group or its individual constituents by musical critics or journalists, the members of Les Six did discuss the phenomenon among themselves and with peripheral figures, which is evident from the extant body of the group’s correspondence, most of which, however, remains unpublished. The members of Les Six were Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983). But composers other than these appeared on recital programmes. In addition to the music of the eventual band of six musicians, compositions by Frenchmen Alexis Roland-Manuel, Jean Roger-Ducasse and Jean Huré were included on some formative programmes, along with the work of a smattering of others, including the stubbornly obscure Roger de Fontenay. Roland-Manuel and Roger-Ducasse, however, did not typically compose music consistent with the dominant emerging idiom. The group was progressively if haphazardly whittled down to the six we know today, with a committee of illustrious mentors who floated in the wings.

The movement’s chief mentors were composer Erik Satie, an idiomatic, paradoxical soul, who created a naïve, enchanting body of unique music, now universally beloved; artist, writer, entrepreneur Jean Cocteau, who would become a modern-day Renaissance Man and eventually, by way of his didactic writings, the chief spokesman for Les Six; and, lastly, the intriguing one-armed iconoclast, Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars (born Frédéric Louis Sauser; 1887–1961). It was the adventurous Cendrars, in conjunction with actor/singer Pierre Bertin (husband of pianist Marcelle Meyer) and musical director Félix Delgrange, who organized the first recitals of the new Montparno-based musical expression at Salle Huyghens.

The emerging body of musical composition – chiefly mélodies, piano pieces (solo/two pianos) or chamber compositions exhibiting an interesting diversity of instrumentation – was earnestly carried to an intrigued public by a loyal array of indispensable champions, including mezzo-sopranos Jane Bathori (also a fine pianist) and Claire Croiza (the mother of Honegger’s first child); with pianists Andrée Vaurabourg (Honegger’s wife), Marcelle Meyer (along with her sister, Germaine Meyer-Survage), Juliette Meerovitch; and Ricardo Viñes. Operating in parallel fashion was a luminous parade of literary-artistic collaborators, including artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Marie Laurencin and Fernand Léger; writers, including Paul Claudel, Francis Jammes, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raymond Radiguet, André Gide and Jean Cocteau himself; and, lastly, those in the domains of ballet and modern dance, including Boris Kochno, Caryathis (née Elise Toulemon, later Jouhandeau), Ida Rubinstein, Serge Lifar, George Balanchine, Jean Börlin, impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the luminous Ballets Russes and the obscure Rolf de Maré of the rival Ballets Suédois.

The ‘official’ emergence of Les Six began with the publication of a pair of incisive articles by Henri Collet, normally conceptualized as the group’s ‘baptism’, which appeared in the weekly Parisian ‘tribune’ Comoedia in January 1920. In these tracts, the musical journalist christened the grouping and – listing Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc and Tailleferre as its members – referred to the collective union as Les Six Français, an historical and a philosophical counterpart to the phenomenon of the late-nineteenth-century nationalistic school of the Russian Five: Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky.

Practically, the emergence of the French grouping may be traced to the initiation of performances of the music of each of the six composers on common 1919 concert programmes, particularly at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which had surmounted the Salle Huyghens as the group’s principal hall of exposure when Bathori became theatre director there. But the group may be technically or practically rooted from seeds sowed somewhat earlier: to the gathering of the first of these musical transients, in 1917 as we observed, with Satie’s crucial post-Parade instigation.

Some of these musicians met while students at the Paris Conservatoire between 1911 and 1913: specifically, Tailleferre, Milhaud, Auric and Honegger. Auric was the only one among the grouping who had met Satie by 1913 – a consequence of a published laudatory article on the elder composer. Both Durey and Poulenc were left to scrape for their own musical survival with their quest for a superior musical grounding; the result for both of them was an idiosyncratic approach to composition. Durey and Poulenc, however, did toil under formidable private pedagogues, in Poulenc’s case, with the champion of contemporary piano music, Spanish-born virtuoso Ricardo Viñes, who was also a ‘Sunday’ composer. It was only well after the First World War that Poulenc would be formally engaged in the study of harmony and counterpoint (with composer-theorist Charles Koechlin, already Tailleferre’s private teacher following her disengagement from the Conservatoire around 1916). Durey engaged Léon Saint-Réquier as his master for piano, sight-reading and counterpoint.

Cocteau provided the philosophical basis, or justification, for the formal or official existence of the group, with the appearance in early 1919 of the brief and ingenious volume of philosophical aphorisms Le Coq et l’Arlequin, dedicated to the prodigal Auric, referred to as ‘escaped from Germany’. That is, Auric, according to the gospel of Cocteau, successfully rejected the Teutonic musical palette in favour of an expression intrinsically French in character. The young Auric anonymously contributed to the tract by way of discussions with Cocteau that placed the musician, albeit paraphrased by the writer, as an intrinsic part of this historic manifesto that is capable of raising eyebrows even now. Cocteau further expounded on the assemblage in his Paris-Midi column during this transitional year of 1919, and the writer’s positive but offbeat sentiments were reinforced by the tracts of others, most notably by French journalist and composer Paul Landormy and Belgian musicologist and writer Paul Collaer, with a bulk of substantive articles actually appearing prior to Collet’s expositions.

Musicologists and journalists commonly submit that the lifespan of Les Six Français was brief, contending that the school had come to an abrupt, unequivocal demise with Louis Durey’s secession in 1921. Other observers, however, have cited musical and artistic-cultural commonalities among the composers and their creations that imply a sense of a continued camaraderie on their part, perhaps by then solely ‘spiritual’ in nature, however infrequent collective engagements had become. Nevertheless, a nostalgic pair of commemorative programmes, presented in Paris during the Christmas season of 1929, included the enthusiastic contribution of each of Les Six Français.

For the purposes of this study, I have opted to emphasize the artistic contribution of these composers from around 1917 when, as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, the gathering constituency was represented by music on common recital/concert programmes. We continue into the vivacious 1920s and through to 1932, when the musical thread that defined Les Six as Les Six began to dissipate on the part of the respective composers, in parallel with a general changing of the carefree attitude that had hitherto characterized Paris. As if reflective of the disintegration of the broader unions of the time, Jean-Victor Hugo (grandson of Victor Hugo) and artist–musician Valentine (née Gross), gifted collaborators with Les Six for Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, were divorced in 1932. The couple had united, in the presence of Cocteau, during the heady days of 1919, the year in which Hugo’s whimsical design for the sirène (a combined mermaid-seahorse) graced the ethereal, elongated, turquoise paperback cover of Cocteau’s Le Coq et l’Arlequin.

By 1932, the financial depression had landed upon the shores of France to spoil the fun. Owing to a predominant sense of a joie de vivre on the part of Les Six, it is therefore plausible to encapsulate this collective phenomenon within the confines of a period of carefree activity, frivolity, optimism and straightforwardness that the group so mirrored and indeed from which it had emerged; such a temporal delineation therefore encompasses at the very least a portrait of the group’s formative years. But one should not be tempted to presume that the period from the onset of the financial crisis to the advent of the Second World War excluded the usual forms of Parisian gaiety. It is apparent that the 1930s nevertheless represented a gradual dissipation of the unique spirit that originated during and as a direct result of the Great War and, having gathered steam following the Armistice, helped catapult the 1920s into the hedonistic and fertile realm that it famously became. This milieu, however, would disappear altogether with the onset of the subsequent war.

The composers comprising the Groupe des Six shared a somewhat common mission: to create for themselves, and thereby for their steadfast nation, a music to re-identify itself with its immutable aesthetic characteristics, which included their philosophical and practical rejection of Impressionism and Teutonicism. The nationalist cause, vis-à-vis the war effort, was somehow generalized into an overall and parallel examination of the country’s musical expression. A foundation, however, for the rejection of Wagner and French Impressionism was rooted in the fin de siècle, ironically, through the journalistic attacks of Claude Debussy himself, writing under the pseudonym ‘Monsieur Croche’, who extolled the eternal virtues of French ancestral composer and musical theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). Practically, this embracing of intrinsically French sources is itself a metaphor for the French trepidation that its national identity, if not its very future itself, was under the threat of cultural and physical obliteration.

This association of young French musical iconoclasts also sought to eradicate, as noted, the exalted or sterile in their own country’s music, typified by the academic Romanticism of Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931) and particularly by the musical expression of the Wagnerian César Franck (1822–90). At the same time, they expressed admiration for the creations of their French forefathers who wrote in an antithetically translucent style, in particular Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94) whose expression Poulenc especially adored. As for the influential Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), he typically escaped the vitriol of journalists who championed the emerging modernism, including Cocteau, by representing this liberal wing of French musical composition during the fin de siècle and for having aesthetically influenced both Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Those of Les Six who were associated, whether directly or in peripheral fashion, with the Schola Cantorum, a philosophically conservative institution co-founded by musical academician Vincent d’Indy (with Charles Bordes), were anxious to renounce the school’s presumed influence upon them. The clarity of Chabrier’s musical expression affirmed the line that these composers were generally attempting to draw in their music: a thread often traced to the French masters of the seventeenth century, such as Louis Couperin (1626–61) and the eighteenth-century Rameau. The Teutonic composers that these emerging French musicians nevertheless found exceptionally useful were Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), both masters of musical clarity.

The group offered accessible routes to and within their music, democratizing its mode of expression and approach such that it could be comprehended by nearly anyone and even appreciated by those who habitually dined on lofty fare. Loftiness itself was scowled at by its members and instead replaced by commonplace attributes. Hence the invention of the term ‘Furniture Music’, as coined and duly practised by Erik Satie. Satie’s ballet Parade, in collaboration with both Cocteau and Picasso in 1917, admirably led the charge for a reformation of Gallic music with its intrinsic reverence for, and practical reflection of, the ‘everyday’ or the mundane, later to be misapplied as ‘Elevator Music’. Parade’s heralded entrance was reminiscent of the tumultuous Parisian unveiling of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps four years before in May 1913. This was not exemplary of the new French expression itself but, rather, a music that emerged out of an incessantly driving primal inclination, retrospectively appropriate in its explosiveness with the outbreak of the war the following year. It was also Stravinsky’s liberating approach to musical expression itself that served as an unlikely influence upon these French composers, certainly the only Russian mentor, other than Diaghilev, to be implicitly tolerated by Cocteau. The group that Satie assembled at this time, Les Nouveaux Jeunes, would in name evolve into Les Six Français early in 1920, having avoided various bombardments launched from opposing musical or artistic encampments. These onslaughts left the besieged army of composers, in effect, unscathed, more renowned and somehow increasingly intriguing to its diverse audience, which included at one end of the cultural spectrum figures of royalty – some of whom doubled as patrons as in the days of old – and at the other end the usual array of struggling artists, writers and musicians.

‘Furnishing music’, as British writer James Harding astutely translates Satie’s ingenious tongue-in-cheek term musique d’ameublement, was utilitarian music intended to be as integral to the practical environment as chairs were for sitting: a background or ambient music to be appreciated while involved in some activity other than attentively listening to the composition in question. Satie suggested that the audience members were to stroll about in the presence of the music. Indeed, as Satie insisted, it was ‘music not to be listened to’ or at least not so in the usual manner – an approach later to be industrially misapplied with the commercial advent of Muzak. The group’s furniture, however, was perceived in a condescending manner and deemed uncomfortable by various critics during the group’s heyday, unlike the cushioned armchairs of German Romanticism and French Impressionism, which elicited a collective sense of security and consequent ease. But the loosely collective mission to set in place a new French musical aesthetic eventually won the day, leaving the order of French music dramatically altered. Once the group had accomplished what it had essentially set out to do, it naturally and necessarily ceased to exist, thereby allowing each of the members to follow their respective musical destinies. From our contemporary, historical perspective, an emergence of such expression appears as logical when employing a detached, telescopic vision, but the effect that such compositions would generally have upon the musical audiences of that era was indeed potent.

Many of the group’s compositions were unfailingly avant-garde for the age, which the audiences and critics instinctively recognized and variously appreciated. Indeed, some of the group’s expression from those formative years appears curiously in step with our own time, thereby partially accounting for its current revival. Contemporary interest in Les Six is not primarily rooted in historical curiosity but, rather, by way of the compelling nature of the music itself. Historical curiosity is of secondary, albeit illuminating intellectual significance: a product of the desire on the part of contemporary scholars and aficionados to augment their own understanding of the compositions, and the respective creators, by calling up a sense of the fleeting milieu that was integral to the birth of this rarefied and loosely unified body of musical expression.

The membership of Les Six could never be characterized as philosophically cohesive, but the group’s dominant sense of camaraderie managed to transcend or to resist attacks from the outside and, for that matter, psychological dissension within its own ranks, such as Durey’s unexpected secession. As if to take the wind out of the critics’ sails, by perhaps consciously inducing a Dadaist sense of confusion, the members variously contended that their union, above all, was one of friendship: that no mission had ever been mutually agreed upon and that no movement, ‘école’ (school) or unified approach was forged upon a common or shared musical philosophy.

The members did, for the most part, underscore their approval of Cocteau’s diatribes, identifying their respective attraction to his ideology and to the group as essentially emotional and not inherently ideological in nature. Although this coterie is commonly and loosely referred to as a movement, Cocteau preferred use of the term ‘school’, a more intimate nomenclature, to characterize the group. Each of the members of Les Six, practically without exception, magically reappeared for widely touted anniversary-reunion celebrations, as in 1929 and the early 1950s, including Durey, otherwise the only constituent to have formally departed the informal movement. Honegger, who was too ill to attend the later commemoration, was the one member whose aesthetic preferences were allied to German musical tradition, true to his Swiss heritage, while the other members aggressively sought a new yet distinctly French idiom: a music that evoked their nation’s rich although obscured musical legacy. Honegger would, however, sporadically conceive music in relative aesthetic alignment with the dominant idiom of the group, while philosophically refuting Impressionism, conceiving of an expression characteristically weightier than the new French palette. But there was actually a wide diversity of musical expression among the other five musicians as well.

Collectively, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc were the ‘heart of the artichoke’, as Paul Rosenfeld contended in the anthology Musical Chronicle (1923). This trio forged ahead with their musical manifestations of the aesthetic sensibilities of the movement. Tailleferre did not outwardly reject Impressionism (an informal student of Maurice Ravel, she sporadically embraced the characteristic diffuseness, as in her 1922 Ballade for Piano and Orchestra) but otherwise created accessible music falling within the domain of ‘furnishing music’. Well before his departure from Les Six, and while an active participant in the then Nouveaux Jeunes, Durey exhibited Impressionistic traits in some of his carefully drawn creations, as with his setting of Cocteau’s lengthy poem Le Printemps au fond de la mer or the 1921 flute sonatina. It remains evident, none the less, that each of the six composers wrote examples of what may reasonably be considered music in a Les Six idiom: one underscoring clarity, with a basis in melody and sparse harmony, all the while evoking a characteristic atmosphere that enthusiastically proclaimed an unadulterated embracing of a certain joie de vivre.

The differences between the respective musical expression of the members may be considered as less of an issue when considering that each member of Les Six, regardless of predilection, attempted sincerely to create a ‘new music’ authentically reflecting who they were (in essence, the children of an emerging age, albeit confusingly serving as the heirs of a crumbling order). The nineteenth century vanished incrementally, gasping for its final measures of oxygen only with the conclusion of the First World War. But the music that emanated from the diverse future members of Les Six, as Les Nouveaux Jeunes and even earlier, detected the death rattles of the existent musical order well before the parting military volleys of November 1918. Already in 1913, and well before the deafening shouts of war machinery, Milhaud composed music that chipped incessantly away at formal convention. By around 1916, the new tendencies were increasingly apparent, as with Tailleferre’s Jeux de plein air and Poulenc’s naughty, nonsensical and Dadaesque Rapsodie nègre.

About the book

This compendium has been conceived for use as a general guide and reference source in approaching Les Six Français, for the casual listener as well as the serious aficionado and scholars of the group, the only such comprehensive undertaking about Les Six to appear in English. A mere handful of books have been published about this intriguing musical-cultural phenomenon, commencing with the literary narrative Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in the Twenties (1972) by James Harding, who has graciously contributed the Foreword to this compendium. A diverse pair of French paperback editions have appeared: Le Groupe des Six, ou le matin d’un jour de fête (The Group of Six, or the Morning of a Holiday) (1987) by Eveline Hurard-Viltard, initially an academic dissertation; and, for more general consumption, Les Six (1994) by Jean Roy, with its nevertheless informative narrative augmented with a variety of archival images of intriguing interest and significance. Roy contributes a memoir to this study regarding his interactions with various constituents of Les Six. A slim but detailed Les Six iconography and source book of archival documents, Le Groupe des Six et ses amis (1990), by Ornella Volta, served to accompany an exhibition mounted in Neuilly-sur-Seine, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the group’s inception; Volta contributes an essay about Satie’s relationship with Les Nouveaux Jeunes to the present study.

A notable, lengthy study of the group’s chamber music (the mode predominantly, and necessarily, employed by the group during its formative period), Ästhetik und Kompositions-Weise der Gruppe der Six: Studien zu ihrer Kammermusik aus den Jahren 1917–1921 (1998), by Ursula Anders-Malvetti, reflects an unlikely German-language interest in the group’s expression. Further evidence of this intense interest is to be found in the proliferation of German-based recordings of the music of Les Six since 1992. It might be suggested, however, that the German exposure to the relatively accessible Gebrauchemusik (music of countryman Paul Hindemith – in effect, the Teutonic counterpart of musique d’ameublement) established a foundation for a serious appreciation of the music of Les Six, particularly those compositions bearing the group’s formative dominant idiom: Poulenc’s ‘Sixish’ formative woodwind compositions along with his rebellious but uncomplicated and catchy 1919 Mouvements perpétuels; Milhaud’s clean, linear formations for winds; or Tailleferre’s sprightly and percussive Jeux de plein air of 1918.

A mere handful of theses and doctoral dissertations, predominantly emanating from a diverse array of academic institutions in North America and in Europe, have variously concerned themselves with discussions of the music of Les Six, in a collective fashion (although less commonly with the group per se), but more common are research efforts dedicated to the work of the individual composers, characteristically replete with theoretical analyses, although to a lesser degree with comprehensive or definitive biographical approaches. Literature regarding the phenomenon of the group is not vast, and the significant contributions to the field of inquiry have been duly cited throughout this book. Also included is a translation of Paul Collaer’s rare Christmas Day tract, which appeared in the Brussels journal La Flamme less than a month prior to the publication of the first of two watershed articles by Henri Collet, which appeared in Comoedia during January 1920 (see p. 400–4). Collet’s pair of articles themselves, as well as some diverse, brief excerpts from the 1920 broadsheet Le Coq [Parisien], appear in the Documents section beginning on p. 414 in English translation. Excerpts from the seminal, although relatively obscure, writings by Cocteau regarding the group, first serialized in Paris-Midi throughout 1919, also appear in this section.

Writings about the individual composers are more commonly published than studies of the group itself, but the familiarity of the respective composers with the musical public varies widely. Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc have received the bulk of attention, although studies of a definitive nature – such as Harry Halbreich’s monumental Honegger tomes, a catalogue of compositions and a definitive biography – have appeared only in our own time. The definitive biography of Poulenc, Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography by Carl B. Schmidt, augments and indeed supersedes all other Poulenc biographies, from the standpoint of the raw amount of prodigious documentation alone, with its elegant neutrality in unselfishly allowing primary documents to speak for themselves. A definitive biography of the prolific Milhaud is a significant omission, since we are left with his sketchy, albeit interesting and forthright but necessarily biased and ‘selective’ autobiography, Ma Vie heureuse (My Happy Life); and the otherwise compelling self-titled biography by Paul Collaer, although an important contribution, is not definitive in its literary-biographical scope. (The same can be said for Honegger’s otherwise philosophically enlightening Je Suis un compositeur (I Am a Composer), which is in the formidable shadow of Halbreich’s definitive Honegger biography.) Of musicological interest is the volume by Deborah Mawer, which focuses upon his work from les années folles: Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (Scolar Press, London, 1997). Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud: 1912–1939 (Ashgate, 2003) by Barbara L. Kelly is perhaps an indication itself that the decades upon the heels of the prolific 1990s will also prove to be intellectually and musically fruitful, with the publication of compelling, and in some cases purely archival, ventures within the domain of Les Six and about those characters who found themselves within the group’s orbit, as with the rediscoveries of such composers as Alexis Roland-Manuel, Lord Gerald Berners, Roger-Ducasse and Charles Koechlin (which is not to the exclusion of those languishing on outer orbits, such as Paul Ladmirault, Tristan Klingsor, Roger de Fontenay and the unfortunate Pierre Menu). Auric and Tailleferre, who both authored memoirs, are the subjects of a resurgence of interest in their respective musical legacies, including biographies. Greenwood issued this writer’s Germaine Tailleferre: A Bio-Bibliography (1994), and Georges Hacquard, the director of the school at which Tailleferre was employed late in her long career, has conceived a gossipy French biography, La Dame des Six (1999). A brief Auric biog raphy written by his colleague Antoine Goléa was published a quarter-century before its subject’s death and is therefore necessarily incomplete. Auric’s Quand j’étais là (When I was there) (1979) – like Tailleferre’s autobiography and Honegger’s aforementioned volume – is somewhat sketchy, which is unfortunate in light of what might have otherwise been imparted in heightened detail, given their respective relationships with an impressive array of other artists and musicians amongst the higher tiers. Indeed, Carl B. Schmidt’s ‘documented’ study of Poulenc has, by itself, raised the biographical standard. Such an approach, however, can only be utilized given the prerequisite preponderance of the appropriate, precious documentation, specifically, the composer’s autograph letters or a near equivalent, such as daily logs or diaries. Also important, and intriguing, is the perception of the subject’s contemporaries, musical and otherwise, so it is vital – with the addition and integration of correspondence addressed to the composer in question – that a dialogue be reconstructed, not synthesized.

All of which is to imply that the critical literature about this trio of musicians had indeed been sparse, that is, until the appearance during the 1990s of a relative wealth of books and scholarly articles, biographical or musicological in nature, including two formidable volumes of Poulenc correspondence: ‘Echo and Source’: Selected Correspondence 1915–1963 (1991), edited by Sidney Buckland (in which Poulenc’s selected letters appear collectively in the English language for the first time), and the voluminous French tome, edited by Myriam Chimènes, Correspondance 1910–1963 (1997). Some thirty years separated this from the publication of the first volume of Poulenc’s letters (with a preface by Darius Milhaud), Correspondance: 1915–1963, which appeared in 1967. The earlier collection was edited, or censored rather, by the heirs of Poulenc to the presumed frustration of the volume’s editor, Hélène de Wendel; the two later volumes were both given free rein.

Correspondence of the other members of Les Six remains, for the most part, unpublished and unknown, except for a few scattered and slim offerings: two volumes of Cocteau letters exchanged with Milhaud and Auric, respectively, have been published by the Université Paul Valéry, under editor Pierre Caizergues and Josiane Mas, who are responsible for a notable series of paperback titles revolving around Cocteau, spurred by and in symbolic homage to the artist’s 1989 centenary. Also worthy of mention is a previously out-of-print collection of letters exchanged between writer and ambassador Paul Claudel and his unlikely attaché Milhaud, reprinted in commemoration of the composer’s centenary. Claudel had collaborated with Milhaud on a variety of compelling works, including some monumental achievements, supplying him with scenarios or texts for compositions ranging from opera to ballet to art song. The Music of Francis Poulenc: A Catalogue (1991), compiled by Poulenc biographer Carl B. Schmidt, which details the composer’s complete oeuvre, with some of its documentation drawn from hitherto unpublished sources, also appeared during the 1990s. A volume of some of Poulenc’s obscure writings are included in an anthology, edited by Lucie Kayas, A Bâton rompus: écrits radiophoniques (1999), which includes a journal that Poulenc kept between 1911 and 1912 when he was about twelve years old: Journal de vacances (Vacation Diary) and the mature 1949 Feuilles américaines (American Pages). Numerous other volumes are otherwise at least cited elsewhere in this book, in which are explicated musical and biographical issues, with diverse volumes regarding Honegger, Milhaud and Poulenc, respectively, the bulk of which has appeared in French.

Documentation about Honegger’s perceptions of the music of others, as well as of his own, and its interpretation, forms part of yet another monumental tome: a diverse collection of Honegger’s writings simply entitled Ecrits (Writings) (1992), edited by Huguette Calmel. This publication includes Incantation aux fossiles, along with other lengthier prose works, in addition to a wealth of rare, often intriguing critiques that originally appeared in the tribunes of the day: the day-to-day documentation that otherwise typically falls into certain obscurity with the march of time. Musicological studies of the respective composers experienced a parallel fate during the 1990s. Indeed, it is the decade in which the centenaries of five of the six composers in question were observed, shortly following the intimate homages to Durey in 1988 and the numerous, enthusiastic retrospectives to mentor Cocteau the following year, shared with the Eiffel Tower and the centenary of the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Indeed, these celebrations functioned as a catalyst in helping to spur a current common revival of interest in Le Groupe des Six, while performances and recordings of the group’s music proliferated at an impressive rate at the waning of the century.

Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre have received far less attention than the aforementioned trio. The gifted Durey undoubtedly remains, and was always, the group’s most obscure constituent, although a definitive study was authored in 1968 by Frédéric Robert. For the present