| Georges Auric (15 February 1899 – 23 July 1983) [SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Auric] The French composer Georges Auric was a child prodigy. 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. Before he turned 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for several ballets and stage productions. As a young student at the Paris Conservatory in 1920, Auric became part of Satie and Cocteau's famous group Les Six. His participation led to writing settings of poetry and other texts as songs and musicals. When Jean Cocteau started making motion pictures, at the beginning of the 1930s, Auric - who by the time had already written his exhilarating Overture for Orchestra ♫ (1932) - began writing film scores. He wrote soundtracks for a number of French and British films, and his success led to writing the music for Hollywood movies, too. Especially notable among his film music are the lavishly impressionistic scores that he wrote for Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949). Whereas Cocteau was thrilled with the music, most Hollywood studios would have rejected it as too complex and demanding of the listener. It's all to our benefit that the composer had a free hand and based his work on his very best judgment of what was acceptable and needed -- he didn't compromise and the result is a bold body of serious music. You can listen to The Beauty and the Beast here ♫ (part 1) and here ♫ (part 2), and to Orpheus here ♫. In 1962 Auric gave up writing for motion pictures when he became director of the Opéra national de Paris, but he continued to write classical chamber music, especially for winds, right up to his death. |