Honegger’s work is marked by a dramatic sensibility and a keen lyrical impulse. He was a highly skilled craftsman, especially in orchestral works and his widely varied output, including dozens of film scores and other incidental works, is one of the strongest and most expressive of the second-generation modernists.
Early Life and Studies
Honegger was born in Le Havre, Switzerland on November 27, 1892. As a child he studied the violin and later composition and theory at the Zurich Conservatory. His early musical interests ran to the new German composers, especially Strauss and Reger, and he was to retain, despite all the nationalistic pressures of his future life as a composer in France, a certain rigorousness and intensity in his music, which set him apart from many of his French contemporaries.
When he was nineteen he enrolled at the Paris Conservatory, where he remained for seven years, and though not a brilliant student academically, he soon attracted attention as a unique and powerful new voice in composition. Among his fellow students at the time were composers Tailleferre, Auric and Milhaud, with whom he was destined to be closely associated, at least in the mind of posterity, for the remainder of his career.
After the war in France, there was a great deal of reactionary impulse, which sought to separate the new from the decadent old and the “purely” French or Latin from the tainted Germanic music which had dominated musical life prior to the war. These feelings were perhaps most arrestingly articulated by Jean Cocteau who had, in an essay called “The Cock and the Harlequin,” called for a new, simpler, purely Latin art and had offered up Erik Satie and his music as an ideal. Honegger had already met Satie by this time and was one of the young composers who looked on Satie as something of a mentor. This propagandistic effort on Cocteau’s part led to the coining of the name “Les Sixes” to refer to a group of these young modern French artists –one of whom, of course, was Honegger.
There is much that is misleading in the associating of six such diverse artists together as a school or movement. Honegger especially had a much more serious and passionate nature than many of the others in the group, and his works only rarely exhibit that light, cool and ironic tone which is supposed to exemplify these composers.
Honegger had his first great success with Le roi David (1921), a staged version of incidental music that he wrote for a drama by Rene Morax that received a great deal of public and critical acclaim. This work established him as being at the forefront of the new generation of composers in Europe. He followed this piece with the even more successful Pacific 231 (1923), an evocation of railways, for which Honegger had a passion and which resonated perfectly with the new machine-age aesthetic of the roaring 20s.
Other works of the 20s include Rugby (1928), inspired by Honegger’s favorite sport, the opera Antigone (1927), on which he collaborated with Cocteau, and the wildly successful operetta Les aventures du roi Pausole (1929).
Later Works and the Second World War
Honegger responded to the darkening political world of the 1930s with a series of dramatic works on serious subjects. These works included Cris du monde (1931), Jeanne d’Arc au bucher (1935), La danse des morts (1938) and Nicholas de Flu (1939). During this time he also wrote a great deal of music and cultural criticism of an increasing pessimistic and despairing character.
With the onset of the war, Honegger turned largely to writing symphonies and completed four (numbers two through five) between the years 1941 and 1950. These orchestral works are all serious and highly ambitious works, often inspired by liturgical texts and focusing on humanity’s struggles for purpose and hope – themes which, in occupied and post-war France, were of direct and immanent concern. The fact that Honegger continued to work and to have his work performed during the Nazi occupation was later held against him by some people, though he was never accused of overt political collaboration.
Honegger’s health declined after a heart attack in 1947 and consequently his output was curtailed. His last major work was “Une cantata de Noel” in 1953. He also published the autographical book I am a Composer in 1951. Honegger died in Paris in 1955.
Honegger’s work is marked by a dramatic sensibility and a keen lyrical impulse. He was a highly skilled craftsman, especially in orchestral works and his widely varied output, including dozens of film scores and other incidental works, is one of the strongest and most expressive of the second-generation modernists.
References:
Spratt, Geoffrey K: ‘Honegger, Arthur’, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 19 November 2006), <http://www.grovemusic.com>