After attending the 1924 Paris premiere of Le Train bleu, a Ballets Russes production with music by Darius Milhaud, the critic Charles Tenroc took aim at a problem he had detected in several of the most recent Ballets Russes offerings. “I’m afraid,” he sniffed, “that our talented youngsters are wasting the most fecund years of their lives.” Comparing Milhaud and his peers to hens, he continued, “They lay [pondent] with disconcerting fertility, but only tiny eggs, without substance.” Not content to conclude with the clever wordplay that substituted eggs (oeufs) for works (oeuvres), Tenroc closed with what he must have thought a stinging rebuke: “Their music sounds like commissioned music. They produce on command.” Putting aside the fallacy that commissioned music has a certain “sound,” Tenroc's jab divulges a sincerely held fear about the risks he thought commissions posed to young composers’ development. In Tenroc's defense, the young composers he lectured had benefited from a remarkably fertile spree of commissions: Le Train bleu and its sister works – Georges Auric's Les Matelots, Francis Poulenc's Les Biches – were all indeed produced “on command” for the Ballets Russes's 1924 season. Right or wrong, Tenroc's insinuations that these works were inferior, that their commissioned status should be counted against them, would echo through the decades.

Sergei Prokofiev reacted even more negatively to the tight links between young French composers and their sources of funding. During a conversation with Nicolas Nabokov, Prokofiev lashed out at the wealth and prestige concentrated within the audience of the chamber music series Le Triton. One night, as Prokofiev and Nabokov strolled near the Hôtel des Invalides (a military memorial) after a concert, Prokofiev remarked,