Francis Poulenc

French composer

• Born: January 7, 1899
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: January 30, 1963
• Place of death: Paris, France

Poulenc gradually came to be recognized by many as perhaps the greatest twentieth century exponent of the art song and, toward the latter part of his career, as the composer of deeply felt religious music.

Early Life

Francis Poulenc (pew-lahnk) was born to wealthy parents. From his father, Émile Poulenc, a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, he inherited a fortune, which allowed him to devote his life to music, and a profound Roman Catholicism, which manifested itself strongly in his music by his late thirties. His musical interests were awakened as a small child by his mother, the former Jenny Royer, an excellent pianist who gave him his first lessons. At eight, Poulenc studied with Mademoiselle Boutet de Monvel, César Franck’s niece. About this time, as he later noted, he was profoundly moved on hearing a composition by Claude Debussy.

In 1915, Poulenc’s pianistic education was turned over to the Spanish virtuoso Richard Viñes, who, realizing that Poulenc’s ambition was to compose rather than perform, provided him a sound training in the classics and encouraged his interest in modern music. Poulenc had already become acquainted with and been moved by the music of Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Debussy. An even older musical influence was Die Winterreise, Franz Schubert’s song cycle, which encouraged Poulenc’s lyrical gifts and romantic tendencies as well as his later passion for writing songs. In addition to his musical studies, Poulenc, at his father’s insistence, remained in school until he was graduated from the Lycée Condorcet.

Life’s Work

Poulenc’s first compositions were for the piano, written early in 1917, the year his father died, leaving him financially independent. He achieved success the same year with Rapsodie nègre , an unusual work for chamber ensemble that anticipated the Dada movement. The text of this composition consisted of a verse from Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou, supposedly the work of a Liberian black but in fact a hoax. The success of the rhapsody, with its verse of sheer gibberish, attracted the attention of the public and critics to Poulenc for the first time. He never completely abandoned the levity of this piece, continuing to produce from time to time compositions in which mockery and laughter were the keynotes.

In January of 1918, Poulenc was drafted into the French army. After spending six months at Vincennes and three in an antiaircraft battery in the Vosges, he was in Chalons-sur-Marne when World War I ended. Instead of being demobilized, he was sent to Paris to work as a typist in the ministry of aviation. He was discharged in October of 1921. While still in the army, he composed a number of tongue-in-cheek works. His three Mouvements perpétuels for piano, in which his indebtedness to Satie is obvious, were introduced by Viñes in 1919.

Poulenc’s first songs also came in 1919 the cycles Le Bestiaire (to poems by Guillaume Apollinaire) and Cocardes (to poems by Jean Cocteau), both characterized by a rich irony. It was soon afterward that the critic Henri Collet, in a review of a new music concert promoted by cellist Félix Delgrange, half-jokingly dubbed Poulenc, along with his associates Louis Durey, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre, “Les Six,” a label that stuck with them long after they had drifted apart. The group worked together long enough to create (minus Durey) a scandal with contributions to Les Mariés sur la tour Eiffel, Cocteau’s rather loony ballet of June, 1921. Of “Les Six,” Poulenc for a time was the one who remained most faithful to such principles as directness, simplicity, and economy as well as to the idea of everyday music for ordinary people. All of this was a reaction to German post-Romanticism and French Impressionism.

By 1921, Poulenc, who thus far had produced nothing of substance, had begun to feel a need for some formal instruction. Seeking a sympathetic teacher, he found one in Charles Koechlin, with whom he worked for four years. During this period, he produced his first major work, the music for the ballet Les Biches , commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1923. Poulenc’s score consisted of a suite of dances, each complete and self-sufficient. The ballet was a major success when it was presented in Paris on January 6, 1924. It was also about this time that Poulenc traveled with Milhaud to Rome and Vienna to meet the leading musical figures in those cities.

Poulenc followed Les Biches with other important works, also in a light and graceful vein. He wrote Concert champětre , for harpsichord and orchestra, for Wanda Landowska, who introduced it on May 3, 1929, with the Paris Philharmonic, under Pierre Monteux. About this time, he bought an estate at Noizay, on the Loire River near Amboise more for the sake of privacy than its rural location, he being a boulevardier at heart (he kept a Paris apartment on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens after 1935). In 1929, Poulenc was the piano soloist in his ballet score Aubade for piano and eighteen winds. First presented at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Venice on September 5, 1932, Poulenc’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra is characterized by its wit projected through a number of popular tunes and rhythms.

Poulenc reached a new maturity around 1935, precipitated by his reacquaintance with the baritone singer Pierre Bernac and the death in a car accident of his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud. In August of 1935, Poulenc appeared as a piano accompanist of Bernac in song recitals at Salzburg, Austria. It marked the first of many similar recitals in the major music centers of Europe and the United States. These recitals played a major role in Poulenc’s growth as a composer of art songs. He maintained that he learned the art of writing songs through his accompaniment of Bernac in the great literature of the French and German schools. From his association with Bernac, Poulenc went on to write songs that won him acclaim as one of the greatest twentieth century composers of such music. His 1935 musical setting of five poems by Paul Éluard was followed in 1937 with a setting for Éluard’s cycle Tel jour, telle nuit. From the late 1930’s to 1956, Poulenc wrote about a hundred songs, most of them to poems by Éluard and Apollinaire. The best of these are noted for the sensitivity and poetic beauty of their melodies and for the rich invention of the piano accompaniment, as well as for Poulenc’s gift for projecting subtle nuances, feelings, and atmospheres.

The death of Ferroud in 1935 and a consequent visit to Notre Dame de Rocamadour restored Poulenc to his paternal Roman Catholic faith. The first fruits of this restoration were Litanies à la vierge noire (1936), for children’s (or women’s) voices and organ, and the Mass in G Major (1937) for four-part a cappella mixed chorus. These works give expression to deep religious convictions; they combine serenity with spiritual ardor and humility with sweetness, traits characteristic of Poulenc’s greatest religious compositions. In 1938, Poulenc wrote the Concerto in G Minor, for organ and orchestra, for the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, at whose salon it was premiered the same year. Though wit is given free rein, there are solemn, perhaps ominous, passages that portend a new and more serious direction for the composer.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 called the forty-year-old composer back to the antiaircraft guns. He was in Bordeaux when the French military collapsed the following summer; instead of heading for the border, he returned to Paris. Poulenc remained in occupied France for the war’s duration, demonstrating his “resistance” by musical means. The war years invested his music with increasing expressiveness and intensity. In 1943, Poulenc wrote a poignant Sonata for Violin and Piano, inspired by and dedicated to Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet who had been murdered by the Falangists (fascists). Its first performance was given on June 21, 1943, in Paris, with the composer at the piano. During the same year, Poulenc finished Figure humaine , one of his greatest works for chorus, to a poem by Éluard. Deeply moving and tragic, this music, which concludes with a mighty hymn to human liberty, expressed the suffering of every Frenchman as well as his will to resist. In 1944, Poulenc completed his first opera, Les Mamelles de Tirésias , a one-act Surrealist fantasy based on a play by Apollinaire. It received its first performance in 1947 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, where it became a center of violent criticism. Satirizing a French campaign to increase the population, it caused shock and dismay by some of the items discussed in the text, such as the way by which one of the characters changes his sex. This latter work, which had its American premiere on June 13, 1953, at the second annual Festival of the Creative Arts in Waltham, Massachusetts, demonstrates that, despite the increasing seriousness and sobriety of purpose in many of his works after 1935, Poulenc had not altogether deserted an iconoclastic attitude and the light touch.

It was from a Bernac-Poulenc recital in Paris just after the war that the general recognition of Poulenc’s songs as the finest since Gabriel Fauré’s arose. In 1948, Poulenc and Bernac received an enthusiastic welcome on the first of several visits to the United States. The world premiere of Poulenc’s piano concerto was given in Boston by the composer and the Boston Symphony on January 6, 1950.

Poulenc spent the years 1953-1956 at work on his first full-length opera, Dialogues des carmélites , which deals with the self-sacrifice of a group of Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution. It is possibly Poulenc’s greatest single work in any medium. First produced with outstanding success at La Scala in Milan on January 26, 1957, it is characterized by exalted spirituality, expressive lyricism, and shattering tragedy. An American premiere of the opera followed in September of the same year in San Francisco. In 1958, it was telecast by an American television network and received the New York Music Critics Circle Award. Poulenc had no librettist for either Les Mamelles de Tirésias or Dialogues des carmélites. Preferring to deal directly with the original texts, he skillfully condensed the originals by excising unessential details and repetitions. He retained the beauty and force of the original language and the logic of the original dramatic structure.

Trouble over the rights of Dialogues des carmélites in 1954 put Poulenc under severe nervous strain, but he made a complete recovery. In 1958, he composed another unorthodox opera, La Voix humaine. A tour de force, but this time on a note of tragedy, it is a one-character opera with a libretto by Cocteau. First heard at the Paris Opéra-Comique on February 9, 1959, it concerns the reactions of a woman who is being spurned by her lover. The heartbreak of the deserted woman is effectively captured by the declamatory style of most of the music. In 1960, Poulenc made another successful tour of North America with Denise Duval.

It is the serious and religious side of Poulenc that is encountered in his last important compositions. The six-part Gloria , for chorus and orchestra, was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Music Foundation and introduced on January 21, 1961, by the Boston Symphony. His last major completed work was the vocal-orchestral Sept Répons des ténèbres (1961), which was posthumously premiered on April 11, 1963, by the New York Philharmonic to help celebrate its opening season at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Poulenc was working on a fourth opera based on Cocteau’s La Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine, 1936) when he died.

Poulenc’s death from heart failure on January 30, 1963, was unexpected. He had never married. It is said that he loved only one woman in his life. She was Raymonde Linaissier, with whom he had grown up. He was deeply attached to her, but she died prematurely in 1930. Every song Poulenc wrote in which the word “face” appeared in the title was dedicated to her memory. Bernac survived Poulenc by sixteen years and published a useful guide to the songs, most of which he recorded with the composer.

Significance

Poulenc did not care for abstract ideas or philosophy. He was essentially a sensualist and was sentimental as well. A musical natural, Poulenc probably composed more from aural experience and instinct than any other major composer of the twentieth century. During the first half of Poulenc’s career, critics frequently failed to consider him as a serious composer because of the directness and simplicity of his writing. Gradually, it became clear that the lack of linguistic complexity in his music in no way indicated the absence of technique or feeling.

In addition to exhibiting a kind of classical simplicity, Poulenc’s music often emphasizes the unexpected. Even though these traits can be found in music by Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, and Satie all of whom influenced Poulenc’s style he probably came to them more directly through the work of such writers as Apollinaire, Éluard, and Cocteau. They provided an aesthetic with which he could identify and furnished the texts for many of his best vocal pieces.

In Poulenc’s music, melody is always the dominant element. His songs often begin immediately with the voice. His religious music, for which he became known as a distinguished master, is imbued with an almost medieval quality of naïveté and candor because of this same lyricism. A five-record collection of all Poulenc’s songs (released in France in 1980) performed by Elly Ameling, Nicolai Gedda, Gérard Sougay, and others strengthened Poulenc’s reputation as perhaps the foremost twentieth century composer of the art song.

Bibliography

Bernac, Pierre. Francis Poulenc: The Man and His Songs. Translated by Winifred Radford. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. The unrivaled interpreter of Poulenc’s songs provides a detailed and lucid analysis of all Poulenc’s piano-accompanied songs. Having had the unique advantage of concertizing repeatedly with Poulenc, Bernac provides interesting insights in two chapters on Poulenc “the man” and “the composer.”

Burton, Richard D. E. Francis Poulenc. Bath, England: Absolute Press, 2002. Biography placing Poulenc within the context of the artistic and gay milieu of Paris in the early to mid-twentieth century. Describes his sexuality, music, religious beliefs, and circle of friends and acquaintances.

Daniel, Keith W. Francis Poulenc: His Artistic Development and Musical Style. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982. Five biographical chapters are followed by material on Poulenc’s style and compositions.

Hell, Henri. Francis Poulenc. Translated by Edward Lockspeiser. New York: Grove Press, 1959. First published in France in 1958 as Francis Poulenc, musicien français, this is a good study of Poulenc and his work.

Myers, Rollo. Modern French Music, from Fauré to Boulez. New York: Praeger, 1971. A good account of French music in the twentieth century. Helps place Poulenc and his music in its historical context.

Poulenc, Francis. My Friends and Myself: Conversations with Francis Poulenc. Translated by James Harding. London: Dobson, 1978. Conversations originally broadcast by Suisse-Romande Radio between 1953 and 1962. Poulenc discusses his youth, early studies, “Les Six,” his secular and religious works, and friends ranging from Satie and Éluard to Honegger and Stravinsky.