Composers › Arthur Honegger › Programme note
Petit cours de morale (1941)
by Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)
Jeanne
Adèle
Cécile
Irène
Rosemonde
It cannot have been easy to re-create pre-War Parisian chic in the dark days of the Occupation. For his 50th birthday concert in the Salle Gaveau in 1942, however, Honegger set five little epigrams from Jean Giraudoux’s novel Suzanne et le Pacifique much as he would have done when the popular style of “Les Six” was the height of fashion – with a cabaret song in Cécile for example and a foxtrot in Irène.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Petit cours de morale.rtf”