Louis Durey

It was not until he was nineteen years old that he chose to pursue a musical career after hearing a performance of a Claude Debussy work.

Durey communicated with his colleague, Darius Milhaud, and asked him to contribute a piano piece that would bring together the six composers who, in 1920 were dubbed Les Six.

Despite the acclaim they received, Durey did not participate in the group's 1921 collaborative work Les mariés de la tour Eiffel,[3] a decision which was a source of great irritation to Jean Cocteau.

Never feeling the need to belong to the musical establishment, he voiced his growing left-wing ideals that put him in an artistic isolation that lasted for the rest of his life.

As others, he stopped composing under Nazi rule and instead arranged and collected older French music and folk songs.