Darius Milhaud was the most irrepressible and eclectic member of a group of composers coined popularly in the press as ‘Les Six’ – the other members were Auric, Durey, Honegger, Poulenc, and Tailleferre. Although each had their own indelible musical personality, they shared a common view that the old Romantic order had outlived its usefulness and that contemporary music needed a good spring-clean. The classics of yesteryear were light-heartedly rethought in the context of a new playfulness, textural pungency, and madcap humour. It wasn’t long before jazz too was thrown into the Gallic melting pot as a refreshing antidote to Teutonic heaviness. Its nervous brilliance, enlivened by unconventional rhythmic accents and pared-down instrumentation, was in complete accord with the reaction against Romanticism that had set in before the end of World War I.
Milhaud embraced the idea of polytonality – music in more than one key at the same time – as early as 1916, and then began experimenting with speech and choral effects such as whistling, groaning, and shrieking. Trips to America enriched his musical language still further with jazz, the blues, and catchy dance rhythms, while his capricious word-settings based on catalogues of flowers and agricultural machinery kept disapproving critical pencils well-sharpened. The three-movement suite Scaramouche, based on existing music borrowed from two theatrical scores, was named after the Théâtre Scaramouche, which specialised in whimsically inventive dramas for children. It subsequently became Milhaud’s most popular work, yet he initially thought so little of it he considered forbidding its publication.
The archetypal 20th-century French composer, Poulenc combined grace and sparkling wit with a gentle nobility that encapsulated his desire for a ‘return to simplicity’. The key to his creative world lies hidden in a biographical note sent to his English publisher when he had just turned 19: ‘I studied composition almost solely through books because I was fearful of being influenced by a teacher…My four favourite composers, my only masters, are Bach, Mozart, Satie and Stravinsky. In general, I am very eclectic… I am a musician without a label.’
The Élégie is dedicated to the memory of celebrated patron of the arts, Princess Marie-Blanche de Polignac, and written ‘as if improvising with a cigar in your mouth and a glass of cognac on the table’ for ‘les boys’: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. So too the Capriccio, transcribed from the finale of Poulenc’s dazzlingly surreal cantata La bal masque, and the insatiable waltz L’embarquement pour Cythère, adapted from his music to the film Le voyage en Amérique and based on Watteau’s eponymous painting depicting several couples being enticed to Cythera, the Isle of Love.
‘I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy,’ wrote Poulenc in 1942, ‘but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t that the case with Mozart and Schubert?’ Of all the composers Poulenc might have chosen to make his point, they were especially apposite as the tantalising emotional thrust of his music, which at times appear to hover midway between elation and despair, brings those particular composers immediately to mind. Just three years before, Poulenc had revised his early Sonata for Four Hands, whose finger-crossing intricacies were reputedly designed to subtly enhance his contact with a student of whom he was particularly fond at the time.
Typical of Poulenc’s neoclassical tendency to use the composing greats as a springboard for his own creative imagination, the Sonata for Two Pianos was premiered at the Wigmore Hall on 2 November 1953. In a brief accompanying programme note, Poulenc explained ‘I began with the Andantino, knowing already the overall architecture of the work. Framed by a Prologue, an Allegro molto and an Epilogue, for me this Andantino is the very heart of the work… a lyrical, profound outburst…It is piano without pretence, real piano where each instrument converses with the other in perfect understanding and without interrupting.’
Debussy was music’s gentle revolutionary. If Stravinsky emancipated rhythm as a primeval force of nature, and Schoenberg embraced atonality (keylessness) and serialism, Debussy was content to gently loosen the bonds of orthodoxy. Listen to almost any of Debussy’s late piano pieces and you’ll be hard-pressed to say exactly what key it is in, let alone its time signature or detect anything so obvious as a singable melody. But whereas his colleagues announced their musical credentials with almost brute force, Debussy approached by stealth, cocooning his audiences in a sensual web of textures and sonorities that appeared to suspend time and place. ‘Everything with me is instinctive and unreasonable,’ he once declared. ‘I have no experience at all – only instinct.’
Debussy’s highly individual style of composing rang alarm bells as early as his training at the Paris Conservatoire. Emile Réty, the registrar, once asked him: ‘So you imagine that dissonant chords do not need to be resolved. What rule do you follow?’ – ‘Mon plaisir!’ came the disarming reply. Following a visit to the Bayreuth Festival, where he fell under the spell of Wagner’s music, and his contact with the music of the Far East through the Paris Exhibition of 1889, Debussy began considering the use of ‘ambiguous chords that belong to as many keys as one likes’ and ‘incomplete chords with floating intervals’. One can already sense the sea-change in the three orchestral Nocturnes he completed in 1899, inspired by a series of paintings by the American painter, James Whistler.
Debussy described the Nocturnes, performed here in Ravel’s 1901 transcription for two pianos, as ‘an exploration of the different combinations which particular colours can produce…Nuages portrays the unchanging aspect of the sky and the slow melancholic passing of clouds… Fêtes represents the movement, the dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light… Sirènes depicts the sea and its countless rhythms, and then amidst the waves, silvered in the moonlight, the mysterious song is heard of the sirens as they laugh and pass on.’

© Julian Haylock