By Eugenio Monjeau @2023
Eugenio Monjeau is a writer, translator, editor, and professor of music history and appreciation. He has written notes for Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. He is a two-time winner of Princeton University Concerts Creative Reactions Contest.
The group of composers known as “Les Six” was born as an avant-garde proposal by French playwright Jean Cocteau, who anointed them as the representatives of what French music should be—without the composers themselves perhaps being so conscious about it. The group was not precisely defined—there could have been more (or less) than six, and some names could have been others—until January 1920, when journalist Henri Collet christened them Les Six and chose its participants. According to composer Darius Milhaud, a member of Les Six, Collet selected the names “arbitrarily,” “simply because we knew each other and we were pals and appeared on the same musical programs.”
Although Cocteau himself said, “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,” he expected something concrete from these young composers: the development of a music that “had to be French, from France.” This was not only a declaration of war against Wagner or Beethoven, but even against French impressionism, which Cocteau considered a French masque for Russian nationalist music. “Enough of hammocks, garlands and gondolas; I want someone to build me music I can live in, like a house.” In the words of Collet, “Les Six is a response to a desire for lucidity, of formal measure and perfection, expressing a latent classicism always secretly present among French musicians … For the French, this return to classicism is really a searching of the soul.”
The group had six members: 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). As writer Robert Shapiro points out, “each of the six composers wrote examples of what can reasonably be considered music in a Les Six idiom: one that stresses clarity, with a grounding in melody and sparse harmony, all the while … embracing a certain joie de vivre.”
Darius Milhaud, Suite for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano, Op. 157b (1936)
The Ouverture from Milhaud’s suite brings together the neoclassical spirit with the atmosphere of a Western movie. The second movement embodies what Cocteau envisioned for his project: beautiful melodies and unobtrusive harmonies. The Jeu continues in the playful, cinematic spirit of the first movement. The last movement is the most somber but manages to regain a certain levity thanks to its Brazilian flavor, which Milhaud might have discovered while serving as secretary to Paul Claudel, the French ambassador to Brazil in 1916.
Arthur Honegger, Three Poems of Paul Fort, H. 9 (1916)
Honegger’s Three Poems of Paul Fort were written in 1916, just as the group was beginning to form, and do not stray too far from the tradition of Debussy songs. However, the accompaniment of all three songs has similarities with a march, not in a military but mechanical sense, as if something had been set and could not be stopped. In particular, the piano part in “Le chasseur perdu en forêt” makes us think that the hunter lost in the forest is lamenting because he will miss his train. In 1923, Honegger composed Pacific 231, where the orchestra embodies a steam locomotive. “I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses,” Honegger famously said.
Georges Auric, Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon (1938)
Auric may not be the best-known of Les Six, but his music is one of the most representative of the group’s spirit. The Trio for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon was premiered on November 28, 1938. Remarkably, the original recording of the work by the Trio d’Anches de Paris is available on disc and streaming platforms. It is not possible to describe this work in a more synthetic manner than one of the original reviewers of the concert, Paul Bertrand, perfectly aligned with Cocteau’s philosophy: “A first lively movement, sparkling with malice and mischief; a romance, seductive by its nonchalant grace; and a tense finale, with a brilliant rhythmic and thematic freshness.”
Germaine Tailleferre, Adagio for Violin and Piano (1924); Rondo for Oboe and Piano (1972); Arabesque for Clarinet and Piano (1973)
American socialite Winnaretta Singer, aka the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, was an American-born heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She used this to fund a wide range of causes, notably a musical salon where her protégés included Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. She commissioned Germaine Tailleferre to write a piano concerto, completed in 1923. Tailleferre wrote the following about the concert: “The classic form I have used in this work may be regarded, in a way, as a reaction against Impressionism and Orientalism and as an indication of an attempt to discover a purely musical mode of expression, exempt from literary implications.” Its Adagio was transcribed for piano and violin and published as a separate piece, included in this afternoon’s concert. It is more neo-Baroque than neoclassical, and the emotion it exudes makes us think of those Baroque works (Bach arias or Scarlatti sonatas) that seem to prefigure Romanticism of the 19th century.
Although Tailleferre composed her Rondo and her Arabesque in the 1970s, that should not lead us to believe that these works do not stand as a testament to Les Six for two reasons. First, Tailleferre saw her career as a quarry, with materials that could always be re-mined. Arabesque is based on an opera, La petite sirène (The Little Mermaid), which Tailleferre composed in 1957. Second, even if this were not the case and these were entirely new materials, the disarming simplicity of their melodies represents the best tradition of Les Six.
Louis Durey, Le bestiaire for Voice and Piano, Op. 17a (1919)
Louis Durey left Les Six in 1921, but before doing so he completed one of the most monumental works ever to emerge from the group. It is, however, a peculiar monument, a sculptural group composed of many miniatures. Durey decided to set all twenty-six poems in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Bestiaire to music. “In these brief but satisfying works, each species is evoked, along with the sentimental association we have with them; and not one is like any other. Such variety within the confines of a single idea is remarkable,” says Collet in the second of his articles on Les Six. We can take as an example one of the songs included in this afternoon’s concert:
| La sauterelle
Voici la fine sauterelle,
La nourriture de Saint Jean.
Puissent mes vers être comme elle,
Le régal des meilleures gens. |
The grasshopper
Here is the fragile grasshopper,
the nourishment of Saint John.
May my verses be like it:
a treat for the very best people. |
Apollinaire focuses on the tenderness of the grasshopper instead of highlighting the more monstrous aspects present in any insect. Durey’s music is fully aligned with Apollinaire’s poetry and with what Cocteau would have expected: it does not disturb and only serves to reflect all that tenderness and become “a treat for the very best people.”
Francis Poulenc, Sextet (1932–9)
Finally, Francis Poulenc’s Sextet is one of the best-known works of the composer, who was also the best known of Les Six. Circus music was an essential influence on Les Six. In 1921, Georges Auric wrote that this music, like that of the music hall and American orchestras, had been “an awakening” for them. The first part of the first movement is circus music. It is not purely playful but filled with suspense (will the tightrope walker fall off the rope?), so much so that it sometimes reminds us of the music of film composer Bernard Hermann. The central part of the movement features a melody first on the bassoon that is bursting with melancholy. This movement seems at times to pay homage to the trio for horn, violin, and piano written by Johannes Brahms. The second movement, meanwhile, is also an homage, or perhaps a parody, of a slow movement that could have been written by Mozart—as neoclassical as it gets, with a twist of irony. Like a negative of the first movement, here is the central part that seems circus-like. The final movement does not abandon the circus, but its coda is filled with a languor worthy of the best Ravel.
Further reading about Les Six
Benjamin Ivry, Francis Poulenc (1996)
Colin Roust, Georges Auric (2020)
Robert Shapiro, Les Six: The French Composers and their Mentors Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie (2011)
Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996)
Translation of “La sauterelle” by Christopher Goldsack
About the Artists
Richardson Chamber Players Founded during the Princeton University Concerts 1994–1995 centennial season, the Richardson Chamber Players is our resident ensemble comprised of performance faculty, distinguished guest artists, and supremely talented students. The performance faculty share the artistic direction and seek to present repertoire of works for singular combinations of instruments and voices, which would otherwise remain unheard. Today’s program was conceived and organized by mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick.
