Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel et le Groupe des Six: Rencontres poetico-musicales autour des melodies et des chansons (review)

Cocteau, Apollinaire, Claudel et le Groupe des Six is a revision of Catherine Miller's doctoral thesis at l'Université catholique de Louvain. Despite the potentially misleading word order of its title, it is in fact a straightforward historical survey of the contributions of Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre to the genre of the French art song: la mélodie or le chanson. The book is richly illustrated with numerous photos of the composers and poets in various groupings and a few musical autographs, and there are enough typeset musical examples to keep the narrative from collapsing under the weight of documentary detail—of which there is an impressive amount synthesized from a wide range of sources.

The book falls into three parts. Part 1, Le Groupe des Six et la littérature, systematically attends to each composer in turn, narrating their "Rencontres littéraire," providing an annotated list of their "Mélodies et chansons," including those where the accompaniments are for instrumental ensemble rather than piano, and mapping out an appropriate "Parcours mélodique." Detours are provided in the first three chapters to assess, respectively, Milhaud's approach to l'expression poétique, Poulenc's own views of how his songs should be interpreted, and Honegger's personal methodof text setting.

Part 2, Collaboration des poètes et des musiciens, devotes chapters to Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Cocteau (in that order). These discuss each poet's general attitude towards music and his specific relationships and collaborations with the composers. There is much of interest in the chapter on Claudel, whose own views on music were a challenge to Milhaud, with whom he worked on many occasions; in the composer's words, "Claudel et la musique? Problème complexe" (p. 117). In the case of Apollinaire, who died in 1918 and hence whose role was somewhat different from those of Claudel and Cocteau, Poulenc clearly saw him as one of his major muses, setting thirty-five of Apollinaire's poems. Catherine Miller singles out, quite rightly, three events around which the histories both of the individual composers and of Le Groupe des Six turned: "Parade et l'esprit nouveau," where, with responses to the collaboration between Erik Satie and Apollinaire, the public origins of Les Six can be located; "Le Coq et l'Arlequin," which acted as a public front for their activities, albeit unreliably and controversially; and "Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel," which, even though it took place in 1921, three years before the official demise of the group, nevertheless marked the beginning of the end and revealed much about internal tensions within Les Six, Durey refusing to take part in it because of Cocteau's (predictably) derogatory remarks about Maurice Ravel and la Légion d'honneur.

Part 3, Mélodies et Chansons du Groupe des Six, contains two chapters. The first chapter, "Mélodie ou chanson?," is mercifully short, dealing as it does with the apparently vexing question of genre: what was meant by the various titles used by Les Six: poème, mélodie, chant, cantate, cantatille, and so on; and what did they imply about formal, stylistic, and generic constraints? Its second half, though, does begin the important task of assessing the national significance of the genre across, from, and alongside the heavy history of German lied composition. The other chapter in part three, "Facteurs en jeu dans les mélodies et les chansons," is more interesting, and starts to assess the vast output of Les Six. Its two final sections, on the accompaniments and on the vocal writing and prosody, contain some interesting observations. From a musical and critical point of view, this chapter is the...