Georges Auric stood out from the remaining composers in the French collective Les Six through his focus on incidental and dramatic music. An early meeting with ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev led to several dance commissions, including the mildly acerbic and mock-Romantic scores Les Fâcheux (1924) and Les Matelots (1925). The majority of his ballet output, produced for Diaghilev and additional clients, fell between 1924 and 1934 and again from 1949 to 1952. In the intervening years Auric became one of the first specialists in film music. His initial screen assignment was the score for Jean Cocteau’s provocative 1930 Surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète; the music he supplied for the 1932 picture À nous la liberté later circulated independently as a symphonic suite. Film enthusiasts also know his contributions to Cocteau’s Les parents terribles and Orphée, both dating from 1949–1950. The score for the popular 1952 film Moulin Rouge, centered on Toulouse-Lautrec, yielded the pop success “Where Is Your Heart?”
Born in 1899, Auric trained first at the Montpellier Conservatory, then at the Paris Conservatory and the Schola Cantorum under d’Indy and Roussel. By age 16 he had already composed Gaspard et Zoé for a magic-lantern presentation together with roughly 300 songs and piano pieces; at 18 he completed the ballet Les noces de Gamache. At 20 he turned to comic opera with La Reine de cœur, a score he later destroyed. Emerging from World War I with his generation’s sense of disillusionment, he aligned himself with the anti-Romantic circle forming around Satie and Cocteau. The prevailing aesthetic favored the novel, the experimental, the metropolitan, and an idealized notion of American culture, along with Satie’s belief that music ought to deliver “auditory pleasure without demanding disproportionate attention from the listener.” Auric frequented Satie’s circle alongside five other young composers—Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Durey, and Tailleferre—initially known as “Les nouveaux jeunes.” In 1920 critic Henri Collet named the group Les Six, though each member pursued an independent artistic course. Auric’s music typically juxtaposes popular melodies with advanced harmony, creating a pervasive sense of irony. Because it lacks the lighthearted tenderness of Poulenc, the austerity of Honegger, or the exuberant polyrhythm and polytonality of Milhaud, Auric, like Durey and Tailleferre, never attained the same degree of recognition as his three better-known colleagues. As critic Boris de Schloezer observed in 1926, Auric’s deliberate cultivation of a superficial tone may mask a deeper musical drive. Indeed, in the same year he wrote the score for Le Sang d’un poète, he produced the Sonata for piano in F, a lyrically serious work at odds with his public persona. Later he assumed several administrative posts: general administrator of the Opéra and Opéra Comique in Paris from 1962 to 1968, and president of the French Union of Composers and Authors from 1954 to 1977. He also contributed music criticism to Marianne, Paris-Soir, and Nouvelles Littéraires. Auric died in 1983.
