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Derek Connon, Honegger, Cocteau and a Man-Eating Lion on the Eiffel Tower: Concealment and Contradiction, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 2, April 2018, Pages 121–135, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx074
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Abstract
In the cosmopolitan world of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, the author Cocteau and the musicians known as Les Six sought to establish a new French voice in music, whilst Cocteau used ballet as a form to support this innovation. Focusing on Cocteau’s delight at the critical response to Honegger’s contribution to the collaborative work Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, which demonstrated that the point had generally been missed, this article looks at the way Honegger’s piece differs from the contributions of other members of the group. It also shows that the piece has characteristics that chime with Cocteau’s own aesthetic, particularly in relation to the need to be able to look below the surface of the work of art, and the adoption of a deliberate dislocation between the rhythms of music and action in ballet.