AURIC, GEORGES  

Georges Auric studied at the Conservatories of Montpellier and Paris and finally at the Schola Cantorum with Vincent d’Indy. In his early twenties he was member of the famous Groupe des six. Auric’s talents are to be found predominantly in his music for the theatre and the screen. In addition to his ballets Les Matelots, Pastorale, Les Enchantements de La Fée Alcine, La Concurrence, Les Imaginaires, Le Peintre et son Modèle, Phédre (on a libretto by Cocteau), Chermin de Lumière, La Chambre and Euridice written for the ballet companies of Sergey Dyagilev, Ida Rubinstein and David Lichine, his incidental scores and his opera Sous le masque, Auric’s credits as a composer can be found on some forty French, forty American and fifteen British films. As a writer of both complete scores and of songs, Auric collaborated during almost half a century with such directors as Marc Allégret, Jean Delannoy, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Max Ophüls, William Wyler, John Houston and Otto Preminger. Among his best known scores for British and American films are Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Moulin Rouge (1953), Bonjour Tristesse (1957), The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1957) and The Innocents (1961). Above all, however, Auric is to be remembered for his unique collaboration with Jean Cocteau, including six films that were directed by Cocteau himself (Le Sang d’un Poéte, La Belle et la Bête, Les Parents Terribles, L’Aigle à deux Têtes, Orphée and Le Testament d’Orphée) and three directed by others, but with Cocteau as a script-writer (L’Eternel Retour, Ruy Blas and Thomas l’Imposteur).