At the least George Auric was a fine musician, having been a child
prodigy, but he was much more in the musical world. He studied under
Vincent D'Indy (a devotee of Cesar Franck and the German school of
symphonic composition) and attended the Paris Conservatory (1920). By
the time he was 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for
ballets and the stage. With some interest in the avant garde, he became
a friend of Erik Satie and playwright Jean Cocteau and joined their friends,
the musical group "Les Six", whose members were impressive: Darius
Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre (the
only woman member), and Louis Durey. Auric moved into music criticism
for a short time and then began composing for poetic and other textual
formats from his Les Six associations. But his stylistic development
would prove to be very classical in sympathy.
He especially continued his association with Cocteau who finally turned
to films, and Auric turned to writing film scores. Their first
collaboration was Cocteau's Blood of the Poet (1930). But Auric did the
scores of many small format movies with other French directors through
the 1930s and the war years. He was also interested in what the British
were doing in film work. His first UK score was for Dead of Night
(1945), a stylish horror film. The same year he also scored the Bernard
Shaw comedic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The
next year he scored perhaps his most famous musical partnership with
Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (1946). Auric's haunting, subdued music
for the movie would be typical of his inventive style of transparent
orchestration in which he might use only a few instruments at a time in
a particular passage but eventually employ all the usual orchestral
instrumentation in this progression to convey the whole of his score.
Auric's music (here Stravinsky-like) provided the perfect atmospheric
score for the eerie British horror classic Pique Dame (1949).
Auric's first American score very much displayed his depth in conveying
the nuances of mood change in a story musically. This was the
wonderful, bittersweet comedy Roman Holiday (1953), directed by William Wyler
and introducing a vivacious Audrey Hepburn to the silver screen. On through
the 1950s and into the 1960s Auric was very busy with scores
predominately of French films but some notable British and American
efforts as well. Among several for the English language were the
charming American war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with
Deborah Kerr and - with Kerr again - the spooky 'Henry James' novel ("Turn of the
Screw") UK adaptation Schloss des Schreckens (1961). For the remainder of the 1960s and
sporadically in the mid 1970s, Auric did some additional scoring,
mostly French TV, but he was busy elsewhere as of 1962 being director
of Paris Opera. Providing a unique finesse to film music, George Auric
contributed nearly 130 scores, placing him along side some of the most
prolific of the contemporary Hollywood film composers.
