Arthur Honegger first achieved fame as a member of "Les Six," the group of composers impulsively yoked together in 1917 by Jean Cocteau to create anti-Romantic, "quintessentially French" music. But Honegger's pensive, serious-minded outlook found little in common with the nose-thumbing frivolities of Poulenc and Milhaud, and he soon seceded from the group. In his film music, too, he always responded most intensely to subjects of a tragic or exalted stamp.

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) trained at the Paris Conservatoire between 1890 and 1897. He studied with Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré and André Gedalge, later orchestrating (in part) Fauré’s incidental music Pelleas et Melisande Op. 80. Music dictionaries indicate Koechlin was a late developer and, like Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), was an extremely prolific composer reaching 226 opus numbers, including eighty-nine miniatures within a single opus number...

Darius Milhaud was one of the most prolific composers of the century, with a final tally of well over 400 opus numbers taking in every major musical form. It is not surprising that, along with everything else, he composed a good deal of film music. Indeed it would have been more surprising if he had not, given his lifelong love of the cinema. His first major success, the 1919 Surrealist ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit, was originally subtitled a Cinéma-symphonie...

Jacques Ibert's reputation as a lightweight composer of witty frivolities—a kind of ex officio member of "Les Six"— does him a lot less than justice. The ebullient high spirits of his best-known works such as the parodistic Divertissement, though typical of one aspect of him, have come to eclipse the darker, more complex elements in his music. For Ibert was also the composer of the somber symphonic poem Ballade de la geôle de Reading, inspired by Oscar Wilde's poem...

Former lawyer, holding a degree from the Sorbonne. Trained in music at the Lycee Massena and Nice Conservatory. Began composing from the age of 28 at the instigation of filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti. As music director/composer for Pathe-Natan Studios (1930-1935), worked on many important French films of the period. He was killed as a result of enemy aircraft fire at the beginning of World War II.

Born René Albert Philippe Cloërec on 31 May 1911 in Paris, the young René studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Musique de Paris, from which he graduated with a first prize in piano in 1928. He began his career as a pianist and then as a music hall conductor. But very quickly, his passion for the cinema won out... At the beginning of the 1940s, the filmmaker Claude Autant-Lara asked him to compose the music for his film DOUCE. The two became an inseparable duo ...