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 <\/p>
09T<\/span><\/strong>o make sense of the collection of young French composers who in January 1920 were given the label Le Groupe des Six<\/i>, we have to go a little back in time.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n In the late 19th century, French composers were facing the Wagner<\/a><\/strong> problem. Letters of the time from composers such as Chabrier, Chausson<\/a><\/strong> and Debussy groan under complaints of how the German\u2019s musical vocabulary, what Debussy<\/a><\/strong> called \u2018the ghost of old Klingsor\u2019, dominated their efforts, try as they <\/span>might. But ignoring him, while not easy, could be done, as two younger composers, Maurice Ravel<\/a> <\/strong>and Erik Satie<\/a><\/strong>, showed with considerable success. <\/span><\/p>\n The compositional path Ravel marked out for himself led to masterpiece after masterpiece. But the pre-war group of Jeunes Rav\u00e9lites<\/i> never amounted to much, largely because, as Alexander Goehr has said, Ravel was \u2018a bit too clever to be of much influence, because you\u2019ve got to be too good at it to actually do it.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n Satie, though, was a different matter. It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n He also had a soft spot for the young, and towards the end of the First World War<\/a><\/strong> 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 \u2013 and himself, with Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc<\/a><\/strong> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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<\/i> to create a public for it. <\/span><\/p>\n Also grist to the mill was Cocteau\u2019s 74-page pamphlet Le Coq et l\u2019Arlequin<\/i>, published in spring 1918 and taking its cue from Satie\u2019s 1917 Parade<\/i> which had brought fresh air into the ballet scene. <\/span><\/p>\n A sample of quips from Le Coq<\/i> gives a good idea of where the Nouveaux Jeunes were now heading: \u2018knowing how far to go too far\u2019, \u2018a composer always has too many notes on his keyboard\u2019, \u2018build me music I can live in like a house\u2019, \u2018all music to be listened to head-in-hands is suspect\u2019. Audacity, economy, down-to-earthness and lightheartedness were the new watchwords.<\/span><\/p>\n The first use of the name Les Six<\/i> came in the collaborative composition of the Album des 6<\/i> for piano in the second half of 1919. There followed an article \u2018Young French Composers\u2019 by Roussel in an English magazine that October, before the crucial one in the mainstream music journal Comoedia<\/i> by Henri Collet, \u2018Les Cinq Russes, Les Six Fran\u00e7ais et Erik Satie\u2019 on 16 January 1920. A follow-up article by Collet a week later used the short title Les Six.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s cousin and later wife, felt that Roland-Manuel could easily have turned it into Les Sept<\/i>, as he subscribed in some degree to the same Coctelian aesthetic.<\/span><\/p>\n But then he started taking lessons from Ravel so, for this purpose, became persona non grata<\/i>. The second misconception is that among the group\u2019s members all was sweetness and light. <\/span><\/p>\n Poulenc later explained that \u2018we 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,<\/a><\/strong> whom he admired, was a b\u00eate noire<\/i> for Milhaud and me.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n Likewise Honegger\u2019s oratorio King David<\/i>, which in 1921 made a huge hit with the public, is written off by Milhaud as \u2018full of clich\u00e9s and fugal exercises from the classroom, thematic developments, chorales and reach-me-down formulae\u2019. 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<\/i> is making them both ill.<\/span><\/p>\n Before looking at the music of Les Six<\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Some of this questioning arose directly from the First World War<\/a><\/strong>. The heavy casualties (1.4 million killed) led in some quarters to a refusal to subscribe to the ancient notion of \u2018la gloire\u2019. 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. <\/span><\/p>\nWho were Les Six<\/em><\/h2>\n
When did they become known as Les Six?<\/i><\/span><\/h2>\n
How did Les Six<\/em> influence classical music?<\/h2>\n