Founding Figures

The music that developed and flourished during the 1920's in Montparnasse was largely modeled after the towering influence of two figures in particular: the composer Eric Satie and the writer and director Jean Cocteau.

While his peers revelled in Paris's nightlife, Satie was living in poverty in Arcueil. He didn't have enough money to follow the group - though he did meet with them on occasion - and in 1921 organised a lecture on Les Six. He also joined them when his music was being performed, programmed with compositions by Les Six. But perhaps most notably - he worked with them on the review Le Coq - wherein Georges Auric strongly opposed Wagner and Debussy.

Satie had already composed Les Gymnopédies, a set of satirical pieces with a strong infusion of minimalism. Too many notes killed the music, it was felt; the essence had to be stated with the stroke of a pencil. Cocteau expressed Satie's art as a "white" (or cool) freedom coming after the flamboyant freedom of Stravinsky. "Satie has invented a new simplicity. Its transparency reduces the lines, and pain isn't expressed by contortions."Fernand Léger was worth more than Pissarro and Monet; away with clouds and reflections in the water! Art was in the street and the factory, at the fair and at work (as demonstrated in the Sonatine bureaucratique)! The young musicians (not yet established as Les Six) invited Satie to play at their first concert, performing Parade for four hands with Juliette Meerovitch. In 1918, prior to a concert by the "Nouveaux Jeunes," Satie introduced each of the six musicians to the audience, describing their individual talents. Unlike his young confrères, Satie was an ideological extremist who lived according to his ideas, but was neither self-satisfied nor intransigent. Even so, he suffered from isolation and poverty. "This beggarly life revolts me," he wrote in a letter to Valentine Gross. He simply did not have Cocteau's ease in Paris society.

Cocteau wasn't however a member of the fashionable world, but rather the archetypal intellectual of the early twentieth century. He hated Parisian society but couldn't do without it. When not spending time on the Côte d'Azur fleeing the beau monde, Cocteau was flitting brilliantly from one salon to another.

He knew where to find a patron. Coco Chanel had complete confidence in him and never hesitated to pay his bills or create costumes for his avant-garde ballets such as Antigone (scored by Honegger) or Le train bleu (scored by Milhaud). Cocteau was also an habitué of Misia Sert's famous soirées, described in detail in pianist Arthur Rubinstein's memoirs. Anna de Noailles was his muse for many years, and he was also close to the Comtesse de Greffuhle and the Comtesse de Chevigné (whose combined image inspired Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes), as well as the Polignac and Étienne de Beaumont families. (To have Proust as a sponsor guaranteed you notoriety in Parisian society). Cocteau was, however, very eclectic in his butterfly progress, always on the lookout for the exceptional or the extraordinary among newcomers who might pique his interest. These included the poet Anna de Noailles, whom he raised to the heights before his interest cooled, Raymond Radiguet, whom he launched as a new literary fashion, and later actor Jean Marais and writer Jean Genet, to name a few. One may wonder whether Les Six were not sacrificed on the altar of Cocteau's overwhelming personality.

The group was officially named Les Six on January 16, 1920, although it had begun to come together in 1918. The group as such did not survive long. In 1921 Louis Durey left, despite pleas by Milhaud and Cocteau to stay. Durey was tired of Paris and its intrigues. He retreated to. St Tropez to seek inspiration in solitude. His departure left a gap in the preparation of the group's banner composition, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, but Germaine Tailleferre completed Durey's section in time for the piece to be performed on June 18, 1921. As time went on the five remaining musicians, no longer fresh from the conservatory, faced the hardships of a composer's life. Satie noted that instead of the group Les Six, there were now six individual musicians. Shortly afterward, in 1923, he remarked, "Les Six are Auric, Milhaud and Poulenc." In the same year the composer of Parade inspired another movement called the Arcueil School. Its members -Henri Sauguet, Maxime Jacob, Henri Cliquet-Pleyel and Roger Desormières - seemed set to carry on the work of Les Six, but for lack of a genuine leader this group was even more short-lived.

Erik Satie Homepage: One of the most useful sites on Satie on the internet. The site is a collaboration between a Satie scholar and the Satie archives in Paris.

Jean Cocteau: Website: This is another excellent website on Cocteau, and contains more images and links to related topics than the previous site.

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