Les Six encore

An update to my post on Les Six.

Here's an extract from an article that appeared in La Scena Musicale, Vol. 6, No. 1, September 2000:

Les Six and Le Coq grew out of Parisian artistic revelry. Cocteau frequently dined on Saturday evening, with six young composers, all recent Conservatory graduates: Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre. They were often joined by pianists Marcelle Meyer and Juliette Meerovitch, the Russian singer Koubitsky, and painters Marie Laurencin, Irène Lagut and Valentine Gross (not yet married to Jean Hugo), as well as writers Lucien Daudet and Raymond Radiguet. After dinner the Saturday night revellers went to the Foire du Trône or the Médrano Circus to enjoy the mime shows of the Fratellini brothers. The evening would end at Darius Milhaud's or the Gaya Bar, where they listened to Jean Wiéner play "negro music." Cocteau would read his latest poems while Milhaud and Auric, joined by Arthur Rubinstein, played a six-handed version of Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le toit. This work, composed in 1920 and performed on stage with the famous Fratellini, was to become the Saturday night party piece. It was such a hit that the owner of the renowned Gaya Bar called his new restaurant on the Rue Boissy d'Anglas "Le Boeuf sur le toit." With the help of Jean Wiéner and Clément Doucet, the restaurant became a fashionable meeting-place. The other signature pieces of Les Six were Georges Auric's Adieu New York and Francis Poulenc's Cocarde.

Links:
la Foire du Trône
Fratellini brothers
Médrano circus
bar Gaya
Jean Wiéner
Le Boeuf sur le Toit (the music)
Théâtre des Champs-Élysés
Le Boeuf sur le Toit (the restaurant)
Clément Doucet
Le Coq et L'Arlequin

Article source: XXth Century -- ''Les Six'', Satie, and Cocteau, by Stéphane Villemin, 1 Septembre 2000


Images: At the Médrano circus and Fratellini Brothers. Sources: left and right (click to enlarge)