Henri Sauguet
Encyclopedia
Henri Sauguet was a French
composer
. Born in Bordeaux
as Henri-Pierre Poupard, he adopted his mother's maiden name as his pseudonym. His output includes operas, ballets, four symphonies (1945, 1949, 1955, 1971), concertos, chamber and choral music and numerous songs, as well as film music. Although he experimented with musique concrète
and expanded tonality, he remained opposed to particular systems and his music evolved little: he developed tonal or modal ideas in smooth curves, producing an art of clarity, simplicity and restraint.
at home when he was five years old. Later he was taught by the organist of the church of Sainte-Eulalie de Bordeaux. Because of the mobilization of his father in 1914, he was required to earn a living at a very young age. Eventually employed by the Prefecture of Montauban
in 1919-1920, he formed a friendship with Joseph Canteloube
, a former pupil of Vincent d'Indy
. Together they collected and harmonized traditional songs under the title Chants d'Auvergne (Songs of Auvergne). During this period too he continued his musical education with local organists and himself served as organist at the small church of St-Vincent de Floirac just outside the city (1916–22). Sacred music, and especially organ
arrangements, were to influence him for the rest of his life. One may instance the pieces he later wrote for organ and various combinations of instruments: Oraisons, with four saxophones (1976); Ne moriatur in aeternum, with trumpet (1979); Church Sonata, with string quintet (1985).
When Jean Cocteau
dubbed a group of Paris-based composers Les Six
, Sauguet started writing to one of its members, Darius Milhaud
. He also began to refer to himself and two Bordeaux friends, Louis Emié and Jean-Marcel Lizotte (another composer and a poet-musician), as 'Les Trois'. Their first concert took place on 12 December 1920. This included performances of work by 'Les Six' (Georges Auric
, Louis Durey
, Arthur Honegger
, Germaine Tailleferre
, Darius Milhaud
and Francis Poulenc
), together with "Erik Satie
et la jeune musique française". Among compositions by all three local exponents of 'the young French music' were Sauguet's four-handed Danse nègre and his Pastorale pour piano.
Sauguet's correspondence with Milhaud led to the composer asking to see some of his works. He wrote a piano suite called Trois Françaises (Three Frenchwomen) which so impressed Milhaud that he encouraged the young man to move to Paris
. Arriving in October 1921, he found work as a secretary at the Guimet Museum
. For some six years he studied composition with Charles Koechlin
, whom he credits with helping him understand music within its own context and find his own voice.
In 1923, together with three other admirers of Satie's music (Henri Clicquot-Pleyell, Roger Desormière
, Maxime Jacob
), Sauguet formed the 'School of Arcueil', named after the location of Satie's home. With his support, they had their first concert on 25 October 1923 at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
. In 1924, Erik Satie introduced Sauguet to Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant impresario of the Ballets russes
, and he wrote his first ballet, Les Roses (Roses) that year. In 1927 Diaghilev's company produced the ballet La Chatte (The Cat) with music by Sauguet, which premiered in Monte Carlo on April 30. The story is about a young man who falls in love with a cat, which assumes a human form through the intervention of Aphrodite. As they make love, the cat-woman sees a mouse and cannot resist chasing it, whereupon she changes back into a cat. The work was choreographed by the young George Balanchine
.
Sauguet's gained his greatest popularity with his ballets, of which he wrote over twenty. The best of these, and the work by which he is most known outside France, was Les Forains (1945) about a talented, slightly tattered, but ultimately hopeful travelling circus troupe. He also wrote numerous works for radio, television, stage, and film, and a large quantity of chamber and other instrumental works, including solos for harmonica and musical saw, but his particular talent was vocal music. He worked ten years on La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1936) - based on Stendhal
's novel - an opera that had a reputation in France as his most important work. Internationally, however, it was considered to be short on emotion and drama. Other operatic works include La Contrebasse (1930), La Gageure Imprévue (1942), Les Caprices de Marianne
(1954), and Boule de Suif (1978)
The war period brought a change to Sauguet's work, which had previously been marked by his high spirits. He used his reputation during this time to help his Jewish friends but lost the oldest-established among them, Max Jacob
, who died in the Drancy prison camp. At the war's end he completed his Symphony No. 1, known as Expiatoire (Expiatory), in tribute to the war's innocent victims. This was followed by his 2nd Symphony, known as The Allegorical or The Seasons, in 1949. His 3rd Symphony is known as I.N.R. and his 4th, a meditation on old age written as he approached the age of seventy, as Du Troisième Age (The Third Age).
Sauguet worked as a music critic throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He founded the Composers Union, also devoting his time to Una Voce, an organization that works to preserve Latin and traditional chant in the Roman Catholic liturgy. In 1956 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour and succeeded his friend Milhaud into the French Academy in 1976. He died in Paris in 1989 and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre. An autobiography, Musique, ma vie (Music, my life) was published in 1990.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
. Born in Bordeaux
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
as Henri-Pierre Poupard, he adopted his mother's maiden name as his pseudonym. His output includes operas, ballets, four symphonies (1945, 1949, 1955, 1971), concertos, chamber and choral music and numerous songs, as well as film music. Although he experimented with musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
and expanded tonality, he remained opposed to particular systems and his music evolved little: he developed tonal or modal ideas in smooth curves, producing an art of clarity, simplicity and restraint.
Career
Sauguet started learning the pianoPiano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
at home when he was five years old. Later he was taught by the organist of the church of Sainte-Eulalie de Bordeaux. Because of the mobilization of his father in 1914, he was required to earn a living at a very young age. Eventually employed by the Prefecture of Montauban
Montauban
Montauban is a commune in the Tarn-et-Garonne department in the Midi-Pyrénées region in southern France. It is the capital of the department and lies north of Toulouse....
in 1919-1920, he formed a friendship with Joseph Canteloube
Joseph Canteloube
Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret was a French composer, musicologist, and author best known for his collections of orchestrated folksongs from the Auvergne region.-Biography:...
, a former pupil of Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
. Together they collected and harmonized traditional songs under the title Chants d'Auvergne (Songs of Auvergne). During this period too he continued his musical education with local organists and himself served as organist at the small church of St-Vincent de Floirac just outside the city (1916–22). Sacred music, and especially organ
Organ (music)
The organ , is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard operated either with the hands or with the feet. The organ is a relatively old musical instrument in the Western musical tradition, dating from the time of Ctesibius of Alexandria who is credited with...
arrangements, were to influence him for the rest of his life. One may instance the pieces he later wrote for organ and various combinations of instruments: Oraisons, with four saxophones (1976); Ne moriatur in aeternum, with trumpet (1979); Church Sonata, with string quintet (1985).
When Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
dubbed a group of Paris-based composers Les Six
Les Six
Les six is a name, inspired by The Five, given in 1920 by critic Henri Collet in an article titled "" to a group of six composers working in Montparnasse whose music is often seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner and impressionist music.-Members:Formally, the Groupe des...
, Sauguet started writing to one of its members, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
. He also began to refer to himself and two Bordeaux friends, Louis Emié and Jean-Marcel Lizotte (another composer and a poet-musician), as 'Les Trois'. Their first concert took place on 12 December 1920. This included performances of work by 'Les Six' (Georges Auric
Georges Auric
Georges Auric was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault. He was a child prodigy and at age 15 he had his first compositions published. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Caussade, and under the composer Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum...
, Louis Durey
Louis Durey
-Life:Louis Durey was born in Paris, the son of a local businessman. It was not until he was nineteen years old that he chose to pursue a musical career after hearing a performance of a Claude Debussy work. As a composer he was primarily self-taught. From the beginning, choral music was of great...
, Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.-Biography:Born...
, Germaine Tailleferre
Germaine Tailleferre
Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the famous composers' group Les Six.-Biography:...
, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
and Francis Poulenc
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...
), together with "Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
et la jeune musique française". Among compositions by all three local exponents of 'the young French music' were Sauguet's four-handed Danse nègre and his Pastorale pour piano.
Sauguet's correspondence with Milhaud led to the composer asking to see some of his works. He wrote a piano suite called Trois Françaises (Three Frenchwomen) which so impressed Milhaud that he encouraged the young man to move to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Arriving in October 1921, he found work as a secretary at the Guimet Museum
Guimet Museum
The Guimet Museum is a museum of Asian art located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France...
. For some six years he studied composition with Charles Koechlin
Charles Koechlin
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars , travelling, stereoscopic...
, whom he credits with helping him understand music within its own context and find his own voice.
In 1923, together with three other admirers of Satie's music (Henri Clicquot-Pleyell, Roger Desormière
Roger Désormière
Roger Désormière was a French conductor.Désormière was born in Vichy in 1898. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where his professors included Philippe Gaubert , Xavier Leroux and Charles Koechlin , and Vincent d'Indy...
, Maxime Jacob
Maxime Jacob
Maxime Jacob, or Dom Clement Jacob, was a French composer and organist....
), Sauguet formed the 'School of Arcueil', named after the location of Satie's home. With his support, they had their first concert on 25 October 1923 at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is a theatre at 15 avenue Montaigne. Despite its name, the theatre is not on the Champs-Élysées but nearby in another part of the 8th arrondissement of Paris....
. In 1924, Erik Satie introduced Sauguet to Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant impresario of the Ballets russes
Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company from Russia which performed between 1909 and 1929 in many countries. Directed by Sergei Diaghilev, it is regarded as the greatest ballet company of the 20th century. Many of its dancers originated from the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg...
, and he wrote his first ballet, Les Roses (Roses) that year. In 1927 Diaghilev's company produced the ballet La Chatte (The Cat) with music by Sauguet, which premiered in Monte Carlo on April 30. The story is about a young man who falls in love with a cat, which assumes a human form through the intervention of Aphrodite. As they make love, the cat-woman sees a mouse and cannot resist chasing it, whereupon she changes back into a cat. The work was choreographed by the young George Balanchine
George Balanchine
George Balanchine , born Giorgi Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a Georgian father and a Russian mother, was one of the 20th century's most famous choreographers, a developer of ballet in the United States, co-founder and balletmaster of New York City Ballet...
.
Sauguet's gained his greatest popularity with his ballets, of which he wrote over twenty. The best of these, and the work by which he is most known outside France, was Les Forains (1945) about a talented, slightly tattered, but ultimately hopeful travelling circus troupe. He also wrote numerous works for radio, television, stage, and film, and a large quantity of chamber and other instrumental works, including solos for harmonica and musical saw, but his particular talent was vocal music. He worked ten years on La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1936) - based on Stendhal
Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...
's novel - an opera that had a reputation in France as his most important work. Internationally, however, it was considered to be short on emotion and drama. Other operatic works include La Contrebasse (1930), La Gageure Imprévue (1942), Les Caprices de Marianne
Les caprices de Marianne
Les caprices de Marianne is a two-act opéra comique by Henri Sauguet with a French libretto by Jean-Pierre Grédy after Alfred de Musset. It was first performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1954, with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire conducted by Louis de Froment with...
(1954), and Boule de Suif (1978)
The war period brought a change to Sauguet's work, which had previously been marked by his high spirits. He used his reputation during this time to help his Jewish friends but lost the oldest-established among them, Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
, who died in the Drancy prison camp. At the war's end he completed his Symphony No. 1, known as Expiatoire (Expiatory), in tribute to the war's innocent victims. This was followed by his 2nd Symphony, known as The Allegorical or The Seasons, in 1949. His 3rd Symphony is known as I.N.R. and his 4th, a meditation on old age written as he approached the age of seventy, as Du Troisième Age (The Third Age).
Sauguet worked as a music critic throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He founded the Composers Union, also devoting his time to Una Voce, an organization that works to preserve Latin and traditional chant in the Roman Catholic liturgy. In 1956 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour and succeeded his friend Milhaud into the French Academy in 1976. He died in Paris in 1989 and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre. An autobiography, Musique, ma vie (Music, my life) was published in 1990.
Private life
Sauguet was homosexual, and formed a partnership with the set designer and decorator of French theatre Jacques Dupont which endured until the latter's death in 1978.External links
- Sauguet's biography, accessed 12/10/2008