Post-war France saw the old order booted aside in an attempt to restore morale to a bruised nation. Roger Nichols reveals how, more than 100 years ago, a group of young composers ushered in a bright new dawn

By Roger Nichols

Published: Tuesday, 18 July 2023 at 12:00 am

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09To make sense of the collection of young French composers who in January 1920 were given the label Le Groupe des Six, we have to go a little back in time.

In the late 19th century, French composers were facing the Wagner problem. Letters of the time from composers such as Chabrier, Chausson and Debussy groan under complaints of how the German’s musical vocabulary, what Debussy called ‘the ghost of old Klingsor’, dominated their efforts, try as they might. But ignoring him, while not easy, could be done, as two younger composers, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie, showed with considerable success.

The compositional path Ravel marked out for himself led to masterpiece after masterpiece. But the pre-war group of Jeunes Ravélites never amounted to much, largely because, as Alexander Goehr has said, Ravel was ‘a bit too clever to be of much influence, because you’ve got to be too good at it to actually do it.’

Satie, though, was a different matter. It’s accepted these days that Satie was not a great musical technician, but his contribution to 20th-century music lies elsewhere, in cleansing the sonorous palate of his time from the rich morsels left over from the 19th-century banquet.

Who were Les Six

He also had a soft spot for the young, and towards the end of the First World War became a mentor to a group of budding composers whom, in March 1918, he christened the Nouveaux Jeunes: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey – and himself, with Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc joining later. Then, in November, Satie resigned from the group (no one knows for sure why), and his place was taken by the upwardly mobile Jean Cocteau.

Although not a trained musician, Cocteau was attracted by the idea of musical collaborations. Given the cold shoulder by Stravinsky, he saw this young group bereft of intellectual leadership, and between March and August 1919 used his column in the journal Paris-Midi to create a public for it.

Also grist to the mill was Cocteau’s 74-page pamphlet Le Coq et l’Arlequin, published in spring 1918 and taking its cue from Satie’s 1917 Parade which had brought fresh air into the ballet scene.

A sample of quips from Le Coq gives a good idea of where the Nouveaux Jeunes were now heading: ‘knowing how far to go too far’, ‘a composer always has too many notes on his keyboard’, ‘build me music I can live in like a house’, ‘all music to be listened to head-in-hands is suspect’. Audacity, economy, down-to-earthness and lightheartedness were the new watchwords.

When did they become known as Les Six?

The first use of the name Les Six came in the collaborative composition of the Album des 6 for piano in the second half of 1919. There followed an article ‘Young French Composers’ by Roussel in an English magazine that October, before the crucial one in the mainstream music journal Comoedia by Henri Collet, ‘Les Cinq Russes, Les Six Français et Erik Satie’ on 16 January 1920. A follow-up article by Collet a week later used the short title Les Six.

At this point, two misconceptions need to be laid to rest. Firstly, that the group was in some sense ordained by fate. Madeleine Milhaud, the composer’s cousin and later wife, felt that Roland-Manuel could easily have turned it into Les Sept, as he subscribed in some degree to the same Coctelian aesthetic.

But then he started taking lessons from Ravel so, for this purpose, became persona non grata. The second misconception is that among the group’s members all was sweetness and light.

Poulenc later explained that ‘we never had an aesthetic in common and our works were always different from each other. With us, likes and dislikes were always at odds. So, Honegger never liked the music of Satie, and [Florent] Schmitt, whom he admired, was a bête noire for Milhaud and me.’

Likewise Honegger’s oratorio King David, which in 1921 made a huge hit with the public, is written off by Milhaud as ‘full of clichés and fugal exercises from the classroom, thematic developments, chorales and reach-me-down formulae’. At the same time, he adds, Poulenc and Auric are taxed with thinking only of immediate success, to the point that the splash made by King David is making them both ill.

How did Les Six influence classical music?

Before looking at the music of Les Six in a little more detail, it may be useful to consider the social milieu they were working in. The France of the early 1920s saw a questioning, in a number of uncomfortable ways, of the old assumptions of what it was to be French.

Some of this questioning arose directly from the First World War. The heavy casualties (1.4 million killed) led in some quarters to a refusal to subscribe to the ancient notion of ‘la gloire’. Ideas about tradition and a stable hierarchy struggled against memories of a war that had seen too many instances of gross disobedience toward an officer class no longer commanding automatic respect.

The world of art could not expect to remain untouched by this cataclysm. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918 from Spanish flu and war wounds to his head, put it succinctly: ‘À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien’ – ‘when it comes to it, you’ve had enough of that ancient world’.

While ‘that ancient world’ could be identified as that of the Greeks and Romans, it could as easily refer to pre-1914, with its head-in-hands obeisance before ‘high art’ and its catalogue of composers who were expected to wait their turn and perhaps become rich and famous in their fifties or sixties, if they were lucky.

No longer – the future now belonged to the young, with all its insouciance and bravado. Indeed, Les Six were lucky to be waiting in the wings of this life-enhancing change of heart. France’s morale was low: what it needed was to be cheered up.

As explained above, the six didn’t wait for Collet’s 1920 articles to respond to what Apollinaire defined as ‘l’esprit nouveau’. One of the first was Poulenc, with his Rapsodie nègre, premiered in December 1917. Today, of course, this would be accused of ‘cultural appropriation’, even though Poulenc had not the faintest idea of what black music sounded like.