COCTEAU, SATIE AND 'LES SIX'
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Often referred to, yet rarely heard, the celebrated L'Album des Six of 1920 is today recognised as a minor landmark in 20th Century modern music. Similarly the artful relationship between the members of Les Six and their sometime mentors Erik Satie (1866-1925) and Jean Cocteau (1891-1963) also stands as an important cornerstone of the inter-war avant garde, and the celebrated annees folles (crazy years) of Twenties Paris, when the city became a magnet for writers, artists and composers from around the world.

In truth, Les Six were an artificial media creation, christened by the journalist Henri Collet in January 1920. The six disparate young composers who made up the group 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). Tailleferre was the only female member of the group. Yet if their work together and apart lacks the obvious novelty and vision of Luigi Russolo's Futurist intonarumori (noise generators), or George Antheil's Ballet mechanique, or Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, then…

The focus of this CD is the relationship between Les Six and their principal sponsors, Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. As a poet, dramatist and animateur, Jean Cocteau had long wished to fuse music with theatre, and was profoundly influenced by early exposure to Serge Diaghilev's exiled Ballets Russes, who had debuted in Paris in 1909. Having failed to convince Stravinsky to collaborate, Cocteau found an ideal partner in Erik Satie, the eccentric musical prophet whose minimalist gymnopedies, vexations and 'furniture music' have been blamed for everything from the virus of muzak to the rigours of John Cage. The result was Parade, a so-called 'realist ballet' in which the scenario was simplicity itself: a parade before a circus. First staged by Les Ballets Russes under Diaghilev's direction on 18 May 1917, with scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso, the spectacle offered a kind of rallying point for young Parisians, deprived of gaiety and innovation by three years of war. Satie's score was rendered provocative by parts for sirens, lottery wheels, pistol shots and a typewriter - scenic sound effects which clearly betray the influence of Futurism, albeit in rather dilettante fashion.

Just as early Futurist serata between 1909 and 1914 caused disturbances in theatres in Milan, Genoa and London, so too the gala premiere of Parade provoked predictable hostility and outrage. As the German author Thomas Mann records in his novel Doktor Faustus: "In Paris, where the world's pulse beats, the path to glory is through scandal. A proper premiere must take place in such a way that during the evening most of the audience stands up several times, shouting "Outrage! Impudence! Ignominious buffoonery!', while five or six of those in the know exclaim from their box. 'How right! What wit! Divine! Superb! Bravo bravo!' For all this, no such evening has been halted before the end. Not even the most indignant would want this, since it is their pleasure to grow even more indignant instead. As for the small number of those in the know, in the eyes of all they retain a strange and inestimable prestige."

Cocteau, Satie and Picasso were pilloried by the press as boches. One particularly vitriolic review wounded Satie so deeply that he set about mailing insulting postcards to the critic in question. As a result the composer was prosecuted, and condemned to eight days in prison for 'public insults and slander.'

Cocteau was also keen to forge creative alliances with younger composers, and had issued a general appeal to 'young musicians' as early as February 1915. Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Arthur Honegger first came together in June 1917 as 'Les Nouveaux Jeunes' (The New Youth), sharing concert programmes and a taste for Satie. Parade had stoked their enthusiasm further still, and through this alliance the venerable non-conformist and the new generation now joined hands. In 1918 Cocteau produced his mischievous pamphlet Le Coq et l'arlequin (Cockerel and Harlequin), which would come to be regarded as a quasi-manifesto for the new musical grouping, gradually swelled to six by the addition of Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud and Frances Poulenc.

Like Luigi Russolo's key Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises in 1913, Le Coq et l'arlequin was a collection of singular opinions about music by a non-musician. Crucially, however, Cocteau rejected the brave new world of rhythmic discord and the art of noises, and instead proposed 'everyday' music 'with a human beat', 'to which you walk' and which might be lived in 'live a house.' The pure voice of 'French French music' (the Cockerel) is contrasted - unfavourably - with that of the Harlequin, coloured by foreign influence and lost in a 'Germano-Slavonic labyrinth' all too crowded by 'clouds, waves, aquaria, water-sprites and perfumes of the night.'

Wagner, Debussy and like purveyors of 'misty impressionism' were rejected in favour of a peculiarly French form of neo-classicism, in which simplicity, economy, clarity of outline ('the line is the melody') and the art available in everyday life was valued above all else. This aesthetic also embraced popular music - café chansons, fairground and circus music, parodies and comic songs, and also elements of American jazz, the latter of particular importance to Milhaud and Auric. However, behind Cocteau's rhetoric were six very different composers whose eclectic styles and personalities shared little in common, and whose collective alliance as Les Six would endure for little more than a year.

The group were first branded as 'Les Six' on 16 January 1920 by Henri Collet, a columnist for the arts journal Comoedia. In an article entitled Le Cinq Russes, les Six Francais et Satie, Collet declared that after the 19th Century musical group known as The Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov), France had gone one better by producing The Six. From the outset the snappy label was little more than a flag of convenience, by which each of the composers involved (some of them more talented than others) were able to launch successful careers. Indeed Honegger and Poulenc both adored the very kind of serious religious music that Cocteau simultaneously disparaged. As Milhaud would later protest, perhaps too forcefully:

"Collet chose six names absolutely arbitrarily simple because we knew each other and we were pals and appeared on the same musical programmes, no matter if our temperaments and personalities weren't at all the same! Auric and Poulenc followed some ideas of Cocteau, Honegger followed German Romanticism, and myself Mediterranean lyricism."

Early salon performances were small and staged in an artists' studio on Rue Huyghens in the 14th arrondissement, equipped with a malodorous heating system and hard wooden benches. A fashionable in-crowd - those 'in the know' - flocked to hear the trend-setting new sounds, and before too long these happenings also began to attract a snobby society set. By February 1921 the Shah of Persia was prepared to pay dearly for a seat from which he could see nothing, yet clearly be seen by all.

The group's one true collaboration, the collection of piano miniatures now known as the Album Des Six, was in fact the subject of Henri Collet's hyperbolic review, and therefore predates their baptism. It is hardly avant garde. Auric's Prelude (dedicated to General Clapier) is genial and animated, Honegger and Milhaud provide a quiet central core, while the contributions of Poulenc and Tailleferre are respectively extrovert and playful. In fact the underlying music made far less impact than the concept behind it, since the six short pieces were not recorded at the time, and thereafter their collective identity began to unravel.

Between May and June 1920 Les Six edited four issues of the periodical Le Coq, a direct continuation of Cocteau's earlier tract, but were never again fully reunited. In February 1920 Cocteau organised a concert spectacle at the Comedie des Champs Elysees, but called only upon Auric (Adieu New York), Poulenc (Cocardes, a breezy setting of three poems by Cocteau) and Milhaud (Le Boeuf sur le toit), as well as Satie (Trois petites pieces montees). In 1920 Cocteau and Auric were commissioned to write the score for a new performance piece by the Swedish Ballet, but facing a tight deadline Auric called on his friends from Les Six to bail him out. The result was Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, originally titled The Wedding Party Massacre), premiered at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on 18 June. Durey feigned illness and declined to take part, much of the music was written in haste, and too many of the absurdist texts by Cocteau were simply tedious. The result was a musical cum ballet cum revue which, shorn of its visual trappings, is little more than a compositional prank, and was bluntly dismissed as 'shit' by Poulenc. Indeed following the obligatory scandal surrounding its premiere Les Maries fell into oblivion, the scores remaining untouched and unpublished until the first recording of the work in 1966.

Satie died an alcoholic in July 1925, having fallen out with each of his six proteges, and by 1930 Cocteau too spoke of Les Groupe de Six in disparaging terms. The influence of 'French French music' is also little apparent in either one of the two lively poems Cocteau recorded with the Dan Parrish Jazz Orchestra in March 1929, included here. By 1953, however, his faith had been sufficiently restored to record the warm tribute which opens this CD. Furthermore, Cocteau continued to collaborate with several erstwhile members of Les Six. Auric, always his favourite, scored five films directed by the polymath poet, notably Le Sang d'un poete (Blood of a Poet, 1930), La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), L'Aigle a Deux Tetes (1947), Orphee (Orpheus, 1949) and Le Testament D'Orphee (1959), as well as such diverse productions as A nous la liberte (1931), The Wages of Fear (1952) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). He also scored ballets for Diaghilev, although his best known single work remains the waltz from the 1952 Hollywood version of Moulin Rouge.

In January 1917 Milhaud travelled to Brazil as secretary to the poet-diplomat Paul Claudel, and returned to France with a suitcase full of samba rhythms and a passion for jazz. Composed in 1919, Le Boeuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof) was described by its creator as a "cinema symphony" for which he assembled "a few popular melodies, tangos, maxixes, sambas and even a Portugese fado, and transcribed them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each successive pair." The title was borrowed from a popular Brazilian song. Once completed, Cocteau proposed that it form part of the 'spectacle-concert' first staged at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees on 21 February 1921, where the piece was presented as a farce performed by acrobats and clowns, the latter sporting large cardboard heads painted by Raoul Dufy. The piece also lent its name to the celebrated cabaret bar on Rue Boissy d'Anglas, an indelible emblem of the Roaring Twenties.

Of the other members of Les Six, Durey's left-wing ideals distanced him from many of the contacts and commissions necessary to sustain a commercial career, and even today much of his music remains unrecorded and unpublished. Tailleferre too failed to establish herself as a major figure, lacking the panache of Poulenc or the mischief of Milhaud, but nevertheless produced some pleasing music over the course of a long life.

Of Swiss descent, Honegger was always the most overtly serious of Les Six, and greatly influenced by Stravinsky. As a child he was fascinated by trains, and always made a point of inspecting the engine before boarding. In 1923 he was inspired to compose Mouvement symphonique no. 1 'Pacific', being the large engine used by heavy express trains in Europe. 231 referred to the wheel ratio. The thunderous piece now commonly referred to as Pacific 231 was premiered in Paris in May 1924 and is sometimes said to be Futurist in character, and certainly inspired the later 'machine music' of Socialist Realism in the USSR. However, Honegger seems to have arrived at the same destination by a very different route, for Pacific 231 was essentially architectural in character, and also modelled on the chorales of Bach. As he later wrote:

"What I have tried to depict in Pacific is not the imitation of the noise of a locomotive but the reproduction of a visual impression and a physical sensation through musical design. This reproduction stems from concrete observations: the quiet breathing of the machine standing still; the straining at the start; the gradual gathering of speed to lyrical steadiness culmination in the powerful exuberance of a 300 ton engine rushing at 120 kilometres per hour through the night… I wanted to give the feeling of a mathematical acceleration of rhythm, while the actual motion of the piece slowed down."

Claims that Les Six were linked to Paris Dada and Surrealism are no less specious. While Les Six were to some extent pranksters, the sole links were their presence in the city at approximately the same time, and the fact that Auric briefly sat on a 'congress' organised by Andre Breton in 1922. Indeed the Surrealists were generally disinterested in music as a creative form, and shunned Cocteau. Yet if the pure art credentials of Les Six are somewhat lacking, the fleeting collaboration between these eight protagonists retains something more than mere historical interest, while the co-dependency of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events in 1966 provides a valid modern comparison.

James Hayward
January 2005

Recording Notes:
Track (1) recorded by Jean Cocteau in 1953.
Tracks (2) to (7) performed by Andrew West (piano) in 2000. Released under licence from Hyperion Records Ltd, London.
Tracks (14) and (15) performed by Jean Cocteau with the Dan Parrish Jazz Orchestra in March 1929. The music track on The Goldren Fleece is Holidays (Dan Parrish) and on The Child Snatchers is Pourquoi J'ai Regrette (V Lowry).
Tracks (16) to (20) are dubbed from original prints of the films, and we apologise for flaws in the sound quality.
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