Georges Auric: A Life in Music and Politics by Colin Roust (review)

As a young piano student, I cherished every opportunity to play a vintage 1930s Steinway piano residing in my grandparent's formal living room. Beyond serving as a repository for family heirlooms, the instrument included a bench for storing musical scores, the majority of which were selections from well-known musicals and films. During one summer visit I selected a score containing the drawing of a woman in French belle époque costume with music by an unknown composer: Georges Auric. Opening the score, I played through 'The Song from Moulin Rouge' and was immediately taken by this elegant music. The memory of that experience resurfaced as I began reading Colin Roust's new book, the long-awaited first English-language biography of the composer. As anyone who has encountered Roust's many contributions to Auric scholarship will attest his primary intention is to position this underappreciated composer at the centre, rather than the margins, of modern French music, a position he has often occupied while more familiar comrades (especially Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and, to a lesser extent, Arthur Honegger) command the concert stage and the scholarly conversation. Roust's monograph goes a long way toward rectifying this situation.

Organised into nine compact chapters, Georges Auric proceeds in roughly chronological order, considering the composer's early years, status as a child prodigy, encounters with Cocteau and the Les Six orbit, substantial work as a film and stage composer, and later administrative duties, which became a second career. Drawing on a plethora of primary and secondary sources, including material from more than thirty research archives, Roust freely acknowledges Auric's 'complicated life' (p. xv) and that his career did not follow a perfectly linear trajectory. Starting with a childhood in Lodève, Montpellier, and eventually Paris, the young musician was recognised for his talent before he was a teenager and was soon taking courses at the Conservatoire while at the same time beginning work as an occasional music critic. He befriended Erik Satie and author Henri-Pierre Roché, who fired a lifelong interest in setting texts for their literary, and not purely lyrical, qualities. Soon, he was part of a group gathered around Satie known as 'The New Youth' where he composed his first important work, the Huit poèmes de Jean Cocteau (1919). It seemed that everyone knew Auric and he knew everyone, a pattern that would remain in place the rest of his life.

After a brief period of undistinguished service in World War I, Auric devoted himself to collaboration, spending most of his time with what Roust calls Cocteau's 'gang' (p. 43). The composer soon developed from prodigy into a mature artist, while at the same time Henri Collet's famous 1920 article for Comoedia christened the short-lived group forever known as Les Six. Referencing Collet's effusive praise of the young composer, Roust reminds us of his connections to French Dada and contributions to both the journal Le coq and the ballet Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921). Placing the latter event in its proper context, Roust writes that 'although the group maintained their friendships throughout the rest of their lives and even gave periodic reunion concerts, Les mariés was the last unified act of the group' (p. 61).

The decade of the 1920s found Auric dividing his time between work as a music critic—especially for Les nouvelles littéraires for which he contributed seventy-five columns—and collaborating with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, culminating in Les fâcheux (1924) and Les matelots (1925). Of the former work especially, I wished for deeper engagement with this sparkling score, whose critical success transformed the composer 'from an enfant terrible to a serious modernist composer with something to say' (p. 82).

After breaking with Diaghilev, Auric was admitted to the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs, et Editeurs de la Musique (SACEM), an organisation he would...