Bachtrack top ten: Francis Poulenc

In 1950, the critic Claude Rostand defended the French composer Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), whose Piano Concerto had been dismissed as too trivial by the press at its European premiere at the Festival d’Aix. Rostand described Poulenc as “le moine et le voyou” – half monk, half rascal – a description that encapsulates opposing sides of his complex personality. “It’s true, alas,” Poulenc shrugged, but it’s exactly these very different sides to his personality that make his music so engaging and full of surprises. “Poulenc’s personality was much more complex than what met the eye,” said Nadia Boulanger. “He was entirely paradoxical. You could meet him as easily in fashionable Parisian circles... or at Mass.”

Poulenc studied with Ricardo Viñes and Charles Koechlin. In 1920 the critic Henri Collet wrote two articles in Comoedia in which he coined the term “Les Six” to describe a group of exciting young composers at the Conservatoire de Paris, who lived and worked in Montparnasse. Along with Poulenc, the other members were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre. They epitomised the post-war era of jazz and cabaret, while remaining quintessentially Gallic.

During the Roaring Twenties, Poulenc was something of a frivolous Parisian playboy. His musical style was often witty and urbane. He developed close friendships with the baritone Pierre Bernac, for whom he composed many songs, and later, the soprano Denise Duval, who performed leading roles in all three of Poulenc’s operas. During the Second World War, he participated in the French resistance movement, voiced through his cantata Figure humaine (1945), the score to which was printed secretly during the Nazi occupation.

Poulenc had a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church. The death of a friend, fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, decapitated in a road accident in 1936, had a profound effect on him. In a letter to Auric that summer, he asked, “What can we do when we don’t believe?” Poulenc had his Damascene conversion when he made a pilgrimage to Rocamadour to see the statue of the Black Virgin. His Litanies à la Vierge noire was composed soon after, described as a “miracle work” by Poulenc. “Rocamadour had the effect of restoring me to the faith of my childhood.” It led to other religious works, including the Stabat Mater, the Gloria and his masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites.

1Dialogues des Carmélites

Poulenc’s opera tells the story, based on true events, of an order of nuns who in 1794 faced the guillotine rather than renounce their religious vows. The opera focuses on the order’s newest member, Blanche de la Force, the only fictitious character in the cast, but is less an account of religious suppression during the French Revolution than an exploration of faith. As Robespierre’s Reign of Terror grips France, Blanche decides to join an order of Carmelite nuns. After they are expelled by the revolutionaries, taking a vow of martyrdom, Blanche runs away, only to return to join the others in facing their deaths. The condemned nuns sing a Salve Regina, going one by one to the guillotine, the blade slicing chillingly through the score’s closing pages. When only young novice Sœur Constance remains, Blanche appears through the crowd to complete their hymn before joining her sisters in martyrdom.

Carmélites caused Poulenc much anguish. During its composition, he suffered a nervous breakdown said (by Bernac) to be induced by the composer’s identification with the nuns’ suffering. “There can be no doubt,” said Poulenc, “that for those ladies, anguish was a necessary state. I think these fearsome nuns, before losing their heads, wanted from me the sacrifice of mine!”

2Organ Concerto in G minor

Commissioned in 1934 by the Princesse de Polignac (Winnaretta Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune) as a piece with an easy solo part that she could play herself, Poulenc’s Organ Concerto in G minor grew into something much more ambitious. From the grandiose opening quotation of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (which featured on the princess’ headed notepaper), the concerto veers between pulpit and fairground at dizzying speeds. There are thunderous, Gothic statements, sudden impish Allegro giocoso shifts and beatific slow sections, “Poulenc en route for the cloister” as the composer dubbed it.

3Clarinet Sonata in B flat major

Monk? Rascal? Both sides of Poulenc’s character can be heard within bars of each other in his Clarinet Sonata in B flat major. The opening movement – marked Allegro tristamente, hinting at a dichotomy – switches between the impetuous and the sly, the dreamy and the impish. A wistful Romanza is followed by an outrageously cheeky finale, but even here, Poulenc stops to paint great arcs of melody. One of his final works (1962), it was dedicated to fellow Les Six member, Arthur Honegger. It was premiered, after Poulenc’s death, by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein.

4Les Biches

Les Biches was composed for the Ballets Russes, commissioned by Serge Diaghilev and choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The title is untranslatable, “biche” meaning a doe, but also a slang French term for a young, coquettish woman. The ballet depicts a group of young society things at a summer house party and has no real plot. The preface merely states that “it is a warm summer afternoon and three young men are enjoying the company of sixteen lovely women. Just as in 18th-century prints, their play is innocent in appearance only.” Poulenc’s music is frothy and carefree, drawing on styles ranging from 18th-century French melodies to ragtime. Nijinska regarded it as a 20th-century equivalent of Les Sylphides.

5Gloria

Poulenc claimed that he was inspired to write his Gloria when composing Carmélites. Another inspiration was Vivaldi’s 1715 Gloria, which was becoming better known in the 1950s. Like Vivaldi, Poulenc divides the text into separate sections, each with a different mood or tempo, swinging from a traditional “sacred” tone to vaudeville or jazz. The Latin text isn’t treated as sacrosanct; in the Laudamus te, for example, Poulenc splits up the syllables “lau-da” purely for the rhythmic effect. The Gloria was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation and was premiered by the Boston Symphony and Charles Munch in 1961. 

6Flute Sonata 

French composers have long had an affinity with the flute and Poulenc was no exception. A combination of elegance, Gallic spirit and droll wit pervades his Flute Sonata. While composing it, Poulenc wrote to Bernac, “I have the feeling of going back a long way, but with a more settled technique. It’s a sonata of Debussian dimensions. It’s the French sense of balance [la mesure française]. Finding the form for your language is the most difficult thing.”

The sonata was premiered in 1957 by flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and Poulenc himself at the piano. They played it frequently until the composer’s death six years later. Here is a recording of that premiere: 

7Sextet for Piano and Winds

Most of Poulenc’s chamber music favoured woodwind over stringed instruments – perhaps their gregarious, jesting hi-jinks were more suited to his personality. The Sextet for Piano and Winds was composed in 1932, but revised seven years later. “This is chamber music of the most straightforward kind,” wrote Poulenc, “an homage to the wind instruments which I have loved from the moment I began composing.”

The Allegro vivace opens with a great flourish, the winds exchanging puckish quips, but a bassoon cadenza introduces a sensuous interlude. The movement ends with a coda where Poulenc described the horn part as “syncopatedly inebriated.” After a lyrical Divertissement, the sextet ends with a sassy rondo.

8Stabat Mater

The Stabat Mater was Poulenc’s first major choral work with orchestra. Like the Litanies, it was created in memory of a friend, the painter Christian Bérard. Poulenc considered writing a Requiem, but after returning to the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, he rejected the idea as too pompous and opted for the Stabat Mater text instead, which contemplates Mary’s suffering at the foot of the Cross. It was composed in only two months in 1950, in what Poulenc attributed to heavenly inspiration. The woodwind writing, in particular, pre-echoes the orchestration of Carmélites a few years later.

9La Voix humaine 

Jean Cocteau was closely associated with Les Six and Poulenc remained a friend, setting the dramatist’s 1930 monodrama La Voix humaine as an opera, in which the single character – Elle – is on the telephone to her lover, who is about to end their relationship. Poulenc chose soprano Denise Duval for the role. He met her at the Folies-Bergère and was immediately “struck by her bright voice, her beauty” and he knew instantly that “she would be the perfect interpreter of [his] music” for his 40-minute tragédie lyrique.

10Les Chemins de l'amour & Montparnasse

These two songs represent the many that Poulenc composed across his career. Les Chemins de l’amour (The Paths of Love) is probably the one most performed in concert recitals today. It is a pastiche on a valse chantée, originally written for Jean Anouilh’s play Léocadia and dedicated to the actress and singer Yvonne Printemps, with whom Poulenc was rather starstruck at the time. 

Montparnasse, Poulenc’s masterly setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, is a bittersweet self-portrait that reflects his tentative early days in Paris, having emigrated from Rome. Poulenc captures both the sense of loneliness and being mesmerised by the city.