Page 40 - BBC Music (January 2020)

Les Six
‘‘ The future assumptions of what it was to be French. Some of
this questioning arose directly from the war. The
now belonged
heavy casualties (1.4 million killed) led in some
to the young, quarters to a refusal to subscribe to the ancient
notion of ‘la gloire’. Ideas about tradition and a
with all its stable hierarchy struggled against memories of
a war that had seen too many instances of gross
insouciance disobedience toward an officer class no longer
commanding automatic respect. The world of
and bravado 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. Instead, he filled
the piece with ‘forbidden’ consecutive fifths
Casualties of war: (left) the graves
of French soldiers killed in the Battle
of the Marne in September 1914;
(above) poet and writer Guillaume
Apollinaire was wounded by shrapnel
in 1916 and died two years later;
(below) composer Erik Satie
and a ‘primitive’ text (‘Kati moko, mosi bolou/
Ratakou sira, polama!) made up and published
by two pranksters. Looking for a teacher at the
age of 18, he brought his score to a 54-year-old
Conservatoire professor, Paul Vidal, who slung
him out on his ear. Satie was sympathetic: ‘Never
mix “schools”: it leads to an explosion – quite
understandably, in fact’. Poulenc followed
this with a Sonata for two clarinets in which
they gurgle delightfully, and a Sonata for piano
duet which starts with the primo player’s left
hand below the left hand of the secondo player,
enforcing a certain intimacy. A new spirit indeed.
Honegger meanwhile, in his 1918 orchestral
work Le Chant de Nigamon, used three authentic
American Indian tunes. The work rivals
Rapsodie nègre in deliberate brutality but far
surpasses it in contrapuntal interest. We find
similar complexity in most of his Le Dit des
Jeux du Monde, but also any number of lyrical
tunes. The second movement, for percussion
alone, takes its cue from Milhaud’s use of choir
plus unpitched percussion in his opera Les
Choéphores of 1915-16 – both passages speak
of the charm of exotic cultures that was to
mark Milhaud’s music over the next few years.
Between February 1917 and early ’19 he was in
Rio de Janeiro as secretary to the playwright and
diplomat Paul Claudel and was much struck by
the music, and the jungle, he found round him.
These influences fed into the ballets L’Homme et
son désir and Le Boeuf sur le Toit of 1918 and 1919
and the Saudades do Brazil for piano of 1920.
Le Boeuf is built round a simple, catchy tune
Milhaud picked up in Rio and he enjoys himself
presenting it in every one of the 12 major keys.