Cocteau, Stravinsky, Brecht, and the Birth of Epic Opera

COCTEAU, STRAVINSKY, BRECHT, AND THE BIRTH OF EPIC OPERA As ITS TITLE INDICATES, this paper is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of anti-Romantic and anti-Wagnerian tendencies in modern opera, but merely an attempt to evaluate certain affinities among Jean Cocteau's Le Coq et iArlequin, a collection of brilliant aper~ about music and the theater, Stravinsky-Ramuz' Histoire du Soldat, Brecht-Weill's Dreigroschenoper, and the series of Anmerkungen which Brecht appended to the latter work. An historical outline of the epic trends on the musical stage of our day would necessarily entail consideration of such other key works as Erik Satie's Parade, Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toif, Cocteau's Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, Milhaud's La Creation du Monde, Sitwell-Walton's Fagade, and Claudel-Milhaud's Christophe Colomb, whose authors, instead of wishing to place the audience at once in a "narcotic atmosphere ," "wanted to show how the soul gradually reaches music." 1 Taking the programmatic Le Coq et 7:Arlequin as our point of departure , we note that Cocteau finished this manifesto toward the end of World War I, dedicating it to Georges Auric on March 19, 1918, exactly six days before Debussy's death. Le Coq furnishes a convenient summary of the artistic aims pursued by the group of French composers known as Les Six and consisting of Honegger, Milhaud (who joined the group after his rehrrn from South America), Poulenc, Auric, Georges Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre. Les Six had grown out of a nucleus of musicians whom Erik Satie, their patron saint, had dubbed Les Nouveaux]eunes and who had made their first collective appearance in January, 1918. The name Les Six was attached to them by the music critic Henri Collet, whose article "Un livre de Rimsky et un livre de Cocteau-Ies cinq Russes et les six Franc,(ais" had appeared in the January 16 and 23, 1920, issues of the magazine Comoedia. Collet defined the aims of the French artists in analogy to those spelled out by the Russian composers Balakirev, Moussorgsky, Borodin, RimskyKorsakov , and Cesar Cui, popularly known as "The Five." Both schools were largely concerned with writing music conceived along national lines, freed, wherever possible, of foreign influence. Cocteau, who is not a professionally trained musician but is known to possess an uncanny talent for grasping the aesthetic significance of musical phenomena, was ideally suited to become the spokesman of 1. Paul Claudel, "Modem Drama and Music," YaZe Review, XX (1930), p. 94 ff. 142 1962 BmTH OF EPIC OPERA 143 Lea Six.2 For him, to pretend that "one cannot talk music if one does not know its algebra" was tantamount to declaring "that one cannot enjoy good food without knowing how to cook, that one cannot cook without knowing chemistry, etc." (Revue de Geneve, No. 21, March, 1922). As for the aesthetic of the group, it was a direct outgrowth of their anti-Romanticism, of their rebellion against Wagner (including his followers and the Impressionists), and of the Germanophobia which swept France at the outbreak of the global conflict. To Wagner and Debussy they opposed Erik Satie (much of whose.laconic writing has entered into Le Coq et rArlequin), to Romantic murkiness a classical sense of form, proportion, and clarity, and to German music an art of decidedly Gallic persuasion. Viewing the group's classicist bent, it seems odd that Jean Cocteau should have acted as their self-appointed Musagete, for the author-to-be of La Machine Infernale and future champion of Surrealism would seem to have been ill-disposed for such a role. Indeed, as early as 1919, in Carte Blanche, he completely reversed his opinion when asserting that "the creative nations"- France prominently among them-"have always been the scene of salutary disorders" and accusing the Germans of indulging in "order, propriety and a clinical discipline."3 But in 1918 it was the Frenchman Cocteau who came to the rescue of Classicism, as in his own way the GermanItalian composer Ferruccio Busoni had done ten years earlier in his Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst. Seen with a view toward the evolution of musical taste in...