Throughout his life as a composer, Arthur Honegger combined within himself the characteristics of the French- and German-speaking cultural circles, which made him one of the most appealing musicians of his time. Manysidedness and openness with respect to the most varied styles, the desire and the skill to build on the tradition, as well as the courage to take up new themes and forms distinguish his oeuvre, which he created primarily in Paris, his permanent place of residence since 1913. He was among the six composers who in a curious way became members of a supposedly programmatic group, for the establishment of the “Groupe des Six” came about more or less coincidentally. In fact, Honegger abstained from the Groupe des Six’s joint theoretic statements, yet participated in mutual projects such as the collective ballet Les Mariès de la Tour Eiffel (1929/30). From youth onward, he was influenced most strongly by Richard Wagner, Max Reger, and Richard Strauss, thus by German late-Romantic music. He attended, together with Darius Milhaud, the class of André Gédalge, to again later esteem the harmonic complexity and the polyphonic richness of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music and to pick up on them in his own works. The focus of his attention was the detailed and serious involvement with each individual instrument, as was best to be achieved in chamber music. At the same time, however, he had a sense for the provocative and unconventional, as he demonstrated in his programmatic orchestral works Pacific 231 (1923) and Rugby (1928), or in his film scores. With the titles relating to the modern world, they quickly became famous. Honegger cultivated within himself a mixture of enfant terrible and solid craftsmanship, which made him to an outstanding composer in the circle of the Six.