Arthur Honegger (1) (1892–1955)

Arthur Honegger was born to Swiss Protestant parents living in Le Havre, France. He played the violin as a child. After studying for two years at the Zurich Conservatoire (later merged into the Zurich University of the Arts), he attended the Paris Conservatoire from 1911 to 1918. He befriended Darius Milhaud and met various artists and writers, including Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Pablo Picasso, and Erik Satie. In 1918, he was commissioned to write the score for the avant-garde ballet Le dit des jeux du monde (The Story of the World at Play), which provoked an uproar at its first performance similar to that caused by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring a few years earlier. He rose to fame on the basis of this and his 1921 hit composition Le Roi David (King David). After World War I, he was a member of a group of young modern composers who worked in Montparnasse, collectively known as Les Six, along with Milhaud, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, François Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. In 1926, he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow Conservatoire student, on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They had one daughter. He also had a son with singer Claire Croiza. Honegger became a prolific composer, writing nine ballets and three vocal stage works, including Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake, 1935), with libretto by Paul Claudel, which he called a "dramatic oratorio." It's now considered one of his finest works. His chamber music pieces included three string quartets and sonatas for violin, viola, and cello. He composed the music for Abel Gance's epic 1927 silent film, Napoléon, and others. In addition to his pieces written alone, he collaborated with Jacques Ibert on the opera L'Aiglon (1937), and on an operetta. Honegger always maintained his Swiss citizenship, but during the Nazi invasion of France in World War II, he could not bring himself to leave Paris, his city. He secretly joined the French Resistance and was allowed by the Germans to continue his work unimpeded. He taught composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He wrote his last four symphonies during this period of his life. He published an autobiography, Je suis compositeur (I Am a Composer), in 1951. In 1953 he wrote his final musical composition, A Christmas Cantata. After suffering a series of heart attacks beginning in 1947, his health steadily declined and he died in 1955. Milhaud and Poulenc dedicated works to his memory.