Arthur Honegger (
March 10, 1892-
November 27, 1955),
Swiss composer
Honegger was a Swiss composer who was a member of
Les Six and an important figure in modern
French music.
Honegger (aw-nay-GARE) was born to Swiss parents in the
French port city of
Le Harve. Though he remained a citizen of
Switzerland, he lived in
France most of his life. He studied at the
Zürich Conservatory and then at the
Paris Conservatory from
1912 onward. After
World War I, he was associated with the French movement Les Six, a group of six modern composers reacting against
romanticism and
impressionism. The group was not a close knit one, and perhaps it was really more of an arbitrary grouping than a true movement. Honegger was a bit distant from the group because his serious music was at odds with the playful, humorous approach taken by the others. Also, he disliked
Eric Satie, the group’s idol, and preferred the work of
Claude Debussy, which they thought was old hat.
His first success was a Biblical
oratorio,
Le Roi David (King
David,
1921). Other works include (in no particular order of importance) the
operas
Judith (
1926) and
Antigone (
1927), the latter with a
libretto by
Jean Cocteau. He based the oratorios
Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ("
Joan of Arc at the Stake",
1935) and
Les Danse des morts ("The Dance of Death") on texts by
Paul Claudel. The former work many consider to be his masterpiece. He wrote the score for the
1927 film
Napoleon, directed by
Abel Gance.
In his music, he drew on a wide variety of sources, chief among them the German Romantic composers of his Germanic heritage. Into the mix went
jazz,
twelve tone music,
Igor Stravinsky,
Sergey Prokofiev,
Gregorian chant,
Protestan hymns, and even
Native American music.
The work he’s most known for is a kick ass
tone poem called
Pacific 231 (
1924), which captures the cacophony of a
locomotive. (The "231" apparently refers to the wheel grouping on the engine of the train.) It is one of three pieces of
concrete music he called "Mouvement Symphonoique" ("symphonic movements"). The second was
Rugby (
1928) and the third
Pastorale d’été ("Summer
Pastoral").
During
World War II, he was trapped in Paris. Perhaps because of his Germanic heritage, he was favored by the
Nazis and invited to participate in their cultural propaganda mill. He essentially told the Nazis to
fuck off and worked for the
French Resistance as part of the "Front National des Musiciens".
After the war, he was gripped with an unshakable
depression. He developed
angina during a
1947 tour of the
United States, and he never recovered. He died in Paris eight years later.