Page 39 - BBC Music (January 2020)

New notes: Picasso’s 1917 set design for Satie’s ballet
Parade which inspired Cocteau’s Le Coq et l’Arlequin (left)

head-in-hands is suspect’. Audacity, economy,
down-to-earthness and lightheartedness were
the new watchwords.
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.
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

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 41