Les Six: the revolutionary French composers who rejected Romanticism and found brand new soundworlds

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Published: Sunday, 06 October 2024 at 15:52 PM

To 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 Emmanuel Chabrier, Ernest Chausson and Claude Debussy groan under complaints of how the German’s musical vocabulary dominated their efforts, try as they might. This, indeed, was what Debussy called ‘the ghost of old Klingsor (a reference to a protagonist from Wagner’s final masterpiece, the transcendent Parsifal.

But ignoring Wagner, while not easy, could be done, as two younger composers, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie, managed to demonstrate 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?

Erik Satie 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 poet, playwright and much-else-besides 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.

Audacity, economy, and lightheartedness were the new watchwords

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 fellow French composer Albert Roussel in an English magazine that October, before the crucial one in the mainstream music journal Comoedia by Henri Collet, ‘Les Cinq Russes [a reference to The Mighty Handful], 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.’