1892–1955 · Switzerland, France
Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) was a Swiss-French composer and music critic, born in Le Havre, who spent much of his life in Paris. He belonged to Les Six but kept apart. Le Roi David and Pacific 231 brought him fame; he wrote five symphonies. The site offers his Trois Pièces for piano and the Third Symphony for two pianos.
Arthur Honegger was born on 10 March 1892 in the port city of Le Havre. His father was a Swiss coffee merchant who had settled in France long before. Honegger himself remained a Swiss citizen for the rest of his life and never took French citizenship. As a boy he became interested in music early and at first worked on his own. In Le Havre he learned the violin, and his harmony teacher was Robert-Charles Martin, to whom the composer later dedicated his first published work. In 1905 Honegger began to study harmony and violin privately.
Honegger spent most of his life in France and was educated there, yet he always felt a deeply rooted Swiss element within himself. His friend Darius Milhaud liked to tease him about this trait.
In 1909 Honegger enrolled at the Zurich Conservatory and studied there until 1911; there his teachers were Lothar Kempter and Friedrich Hegar. Then, in 1911, he moved to the Paris Conservatoire and remained there until 1918. He studied the violin, took music theory with André Gédalge, conducting with Vincent d’Indy and composition with Charles-Marie Widor; Lucien Capet is also named among his Paris teachers.
It was Gédalge who urged him to write music, and on 28 April 1915 Honegger told his parents in a letter that he had decided to become a composer. His studies were interrupted by service in the Swiss border troops; afterwards he went back to his classes and finished in 1918. Among his first serious works are the symphonic poem Le Chant de Nigamon and a String Quartet.
In December 1918 Le Dit des Jeux du monde, built from thirteen short pieces, was first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. It caused a scandal and drew public attention to the young composer.
While still a student Honegger became friends with Jacques Ibert and Darius Milhaud, met Germaine Tailleferre, and later got to know Georges Auric and the pianist Andrée Vaurabourg. He joined the Nouveaux Jeunes, a group organised by Erik Satie as a counterweight to Maurice Ravel’s Jeunes, and took part in a series of its joint concerts.
In the early 1920s he and Milhaud formally joined Les Six, which had been formed out of the Nouveaux Jeunes, but after this loose association quickly fell apart he chose an independent path. For Honegger the group never had a single programme: in an article of 1924 he wrote that it was a union of friends rather than people of like mind, with no shared aesthetic. In both his manner of composing and his character he stood apart from his companions.
Milhaud, Auric and Poulenc were ardent followers of Erik Satie, but the calm and level-headed Honegger never regarded him as a teacher. Even so, on 5 April 1919 at the Salle Huyghens it was Honegger who, during the interval, presented to the audience Satie’s short pieces for what was called furniture music, adding a few introductory words on the author’s behalf. Paris critics singled Honegger out from the Six and received his premieres much more kindly.
One of the group’s joint projects was the Funeral March for the Death of a General, which Honegger wrote for a farce about the newlyweds of the Eiffel Tower, with a parody libretto by Jean Cocteau. Some members of Les Six, led by Cocteau and Satie, sided with the young opponents of Ravel, but Honegger kept out of it and refused to sign Satie’s pamphlet.
Fame came to Honegger with his music for the play Le Roi David by the Swiss dramatist René Morax. The commission came in 1921, the score took only two months, and the premiere on 11 June was a triumph. Three years later the music was reworked as an oratorio, which has stayed in the choral repertoire ever since.
Honegger composed his best-known orchestral piece, Pacific 231, in 1923; its subtitle is Mouvement symphonique No. 1, and it is dedicated to a steam locomotive of that name. The piece was intended for the Koussevitzky concerts at the Paris Opéra in May 1924. In depicting the motion of a large locomotive, the composer developed Satie’s idea of the “industrialisation of music”, in a pictorial and even slightly impressionistic vein. Two further “symphonic movements” later joined it: Rugby and No. 3.
From 1922 Honegger wrote music for the cinema: he ranked among the earliest major composers to write specially for films, coming after Camille Saint-Saëns. Of his score for Abel Gance’s silent film La Roue (1923) only the overture survives. He worked with Gance again later, on Napoleon in 1927.
In 1922 Honegger lost his parents: his mother died in February and his father in September. In 1926 he married the pianist Andrée Vaurabourg, a fellow student from the conservatoire, on one unusual condition: separate homes, since composing required him to be alone. Andrée stayed with her mother, and he joined them for lunch daily. For nearly all the marriage the two kept separate households; the exceptions were 1935–1936, after Vaurabourg was injured in a car crash, and the final year of his life, when illness made it impossible for him to live alone. Their daughter Pascale was born in 1932.
In 1922 Honegger had provided very short music for Jean Cocteau’s Antigone after Sophocles, and between 1924 and 1927 he expanded it into the opera Antigone. Pablo Picasso designed the sets and Coco Chanel the costumes; the score is dedicated to Andrée Vaurabourg.
In 1929–1930 Honegger wrote his First Symphony; it was first heard in Boston and then in Paris, in 1931. In December 1930 the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens staged the operetta Les Aventures du roi Pausole, which showed the composer on his humorous side; it ran for no fewer than 800 performances. Ida Rubinstein, who had danced with the Ballets Russes and became a patron, financed several works by Honegger; among them was the ballet Sémiramis (1934). He also kept working for the cinema, for example on Raymond Bernard’s film Les Misérables (1934).
In 1938 Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, a dramatic oratorio with a libretto written by Paul Claudel and commissioned by Rubinstein, was first performed in Basel under Paul Sacher. It combines spoken word, music and chorus, and remains one of Honegger’s most frequently performed works. Igor Stravinsky’s influence on him was growing; he made a close study of his music and in 1939 wrote a substantial essay about it.
Tension was rising across Europe. With Hitler’s rise to power, the performance of Honegger’s music was forbidden in Germany, and afterwards in the territories it absorbed.
When Nazi Germany occupied France, Honegger, although Swiss, refused to leave Paris. He first fled south, but by the end of October 1940 he was back in the capital and went on composing. He worked as a music critic and taught composition. He was largely left to work, and on several occasions he went abroad, usually to conduct his own music.
The emblematic work of this period was the Second Symphony for string orchestra with trumpet: its three movements stand for death, grief and liberation.
Koussevitzky invited Honegger to give summer courses at Tanglewood, but two weeks after he arrived the composer suffered a heart attack, and a month later a severe one. He recovered and returned to Paris on 15 November, but did not go back to work until the spring of 1948. In 1948 the University of Zurich awarded him an honorary doctorate. He became president of the International Federation and Association of Authors of Theatre Music, and also founder and president of the Music Council at UNESCO.
In his last years, despite failing health, Honegger kept composing. The Fifth Symphony, Di tre re, was first performed in 1951, and around the same period the orchestral Monopartita appeared. In the spring of 1952 festivals marking his sixtieth birthday were held in many European cities. Late in 1952, though his health was poor, he began to rework material from an aborted project; this became the Christmas Cantata, first performed in Basel in December under his friend Sacher. For several years the composer taught at Alfred Cortot’s École Normale de Musique in Paris; his pupils included Yves Ramette.
Arthur Honegger died on 27 November 1955 in his studio on the boulevard de Clichy in Paris. The farewell ceremony, held at the Oratoire du Louvre on 2 December 1955, was followed by burial of the urn with his ashes in Montmartre, at Saint-Vincent Cemetery. On 18 December 1955 the Opéra in Paris honoured his memory by performing the Third Symphony and Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher.
The foundations of Honegger’s style are Bach-like polyphony, driving rhythm, broad melody, colourful harmony and a concern for form. He named Bach as his chief model. While his colleagues in Les Six rebelled against German romanticism, he did not, and its influence shows in his mature works; his manner is graver and more solemn than theirs. He wrote that serious chamber and symphonic music mattered more to him than the music hall or the fairground.
He wrote for the theatre, radio, cinema and concert hall: ballets, songs, concertos, chamber music, film scores, operas, oratorios and symphonies. The religious feeling of this Protestant composer is evident in Le Roi David, in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and in the Third Symphony. He was also a writer: three books of essays on public matters, critical articles, essays on composers and the autobiographical book I Am a Composer are his.
Honegger left five symphonies. The First was written in 1929–1930; the Second is for string orchestra with trumpet. The Third, the Liturgical, is tragic; the titles of its three movements come from church texts: Dies irae, De profundis clamavi and Dona nobis pacem. The Fourth bears the subtitle Deliciae basilienses and is dedicated to the composer’s friend Paul Sacher; it was first performed in Basel in January 1947. The Fifth is called Di tre re, a title that refers to the D on which each of its three movements ends. The Third and Fifth reflect the composer’s gloomy moods, while the Fourth is bright.
Among the larger vocal and stage works are the oratorios Le Roi David, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and Les Cris du monde, and the opera Antigone. His orchestral works include Pacific 231, Rugby and Mouvement symphonique No. 3.
Among the smaller works, Danse de la chèvre for solo flute (1921) has become a staple of the flute repertoire, and there is also the Sonata for cello and piano (1920). His piano pieces include the Trois pièces pour piano of 1915, which contain Hommage à Ravel, and the very short Scenic Railway (1937), with its original English title, written for a collaborative collection in honour of Marguerite Long.
The site has two Honegger publications. Trois Pieces, H23 is for solo piano, at the upper-intermediate level. Symphony No. 3 (Liturgicheskaya) (2 pianos) is the Third, Liturgical Symphony arranged for two pianos, also at the upper-intermediate level.