The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Poulenc, Francis

(b Paris, 7 Jan 1899; d Paris, 30 Jan 1963). French composer and pianist. During the first half of his career the simplicity and directness of his writing led many critics away from thinking of him as a serious composer. Gradually, since World War II, it has become clear that the absence from his music of linguistic complexity in no way argues a corresponding absence of feeling or technique; and that while, in the field of French religious music, he disputes supremacy with Messiaen, in that of the mélodie he is the most distinguished composer since the death of Fauré.

1. Life.

2. Piano music.

3. Chamber music.

4. Orchestral music.

5. Music for the stage.

6. Choral music.

7. Songs and other works for solo voice.

8. Summary.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MYRIAM CHIMÈNES (life, work-list), ROGER NICHOLS (Works)

Poulenc, Francis

1. Life.

Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, Poulenc was Aveyronais by descent through his father, Emile Poulenc, director of a family pharmaceutical business which eventually became the giant Rhône-Poulenc, and of Parisian stock through his mother Jenny, née Royer, from a family of artist-craftsmen. Poulenc regarded this dual heredity as the key to his musical personality: he associated his deep Catholic faith with his Aveyronais roots and attributed his artistic heritage to his mother's family. It is certainly the case that two strands, profane and religious, co-exist in his work: he was the composer of the Chansons gaillardes as well as a Mass, of Les mamelles de Tirésias as well as a Stabat mater. The two sources of inspiration were summed up by Claude Rostand in the celebrated remark: ‘In Poulenc there is something of the monk and something of the rascal’.

His mother introduced him to the piano at the age of five, and before long entrusted him to a teacher who was a coach for Cécile Boutet de Monvel, Franck's niece. In spite of his obvious talent and taste for music, Poulenc bowed to his father's wishes and completed a conventional classical education at the Lycée Condorcet, the condition on which he would then be allowed to enter the Conservatoire. But the war and his parents' early deaths (his mother died when he was 16, his father when he was 18) upset all his plans. From 1914 to 1917 Poulenc was the pupil of Ricardo Viñes, who, far more than a teacher, was a spiritual mentor and the dedicatee or first performer of his earliest works. He affirmed that the influence of Viñes had determined his career as pianist and composer, and thanks to him he made the acquaintance of other musicians, notably Auric, Satie and Falla. He also met poets and writers, and it was around this time that he was taken to Adrienne Monnier's bookshop in the rue de l'Odéon by his childhood friend Raymonde Linossier, the future lawyer and orientalist, where he had the privilege of meeting Apollinaire, Eluard, Breton, Aragon, Gide, Fargue, Valéry and Claudel, and to become familiar with their work.

Poulenc destroyed his first attempts at composition, dating from 1914. He made his public début in Paris in 1917 with his first work, Rapsodie nègre, dedicated to Satie and performed at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier at one of the avant-garde concerts organized by Jane Bathori. Stravinsky, whose influence he had felt, took note of him and helped him to get his first works published by Chester in London. A conscript from January 1918 to January 1921, Poulenc did not let military service interfere with composition, and produced, notably, Trois mouvements perpétuels which enjoyed immediate success, and Le bestiaire, his first cycle of mélodies on poems by Apollinaire. His works were often performed in the concerts given at the studio of the painter Emile Lejeune, in the rue Huyghens in Montparnasse, where programmes also included the work of Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Tailleferre and Durey. This led to the birth of the ‘Groupe des Six’ in 1920, baptized by Henri Collet in a review of a concert featuring all of them. Rather than a shared aesthetic, these composers were united by strong friendship.

Instead of following a conventional course, Poulenc's years of study overlapped with the start of his career. He already had a certain reputation when he approached Charles Koechlin in 1921, asking him for lessons because until then he had ‘obeyed the dictates of instinct rather than intelligence’. He was still Koechlin's pupil when he received a commission from Diaghilev for the Ballets russes: Les biches, first performed in Monte Carlo in 1924, was a great popular and critical success. As well as intellectual and artistic circles, Poulenc frequented Parisian society, in an age when private patronage still played an important role in musical life. Princesse Edmond de Polignac (at whose home he met Wanda Landowska, dedicatee and first performer of Concert champêtre) commissioned his Concerto for Two Pianos and his Organ Concerto, while Aubade and Le bal masqué were composed specially for events organized by Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles. Poulenc was quick to see that the gramophone would play a major role in the diffusion of music, and the earliest recordings of his own work date from 1928. He suffered his first serious bout of depression in the late 1920s, at about the time he became fully aware of his homosexuality. He was permanently scarred by the death of Raymonde Linossier in 1930. His letters reveal that she was the only woman he ever wanted to marry. Throughout his life, his letters testify to the complexity of his emotional life, which was closely bound up with his creativity; they also reveal the existence of a daughter, born in 1946. Subject to a manic-depressive cycle, Poulenc always rebounded from depression into phases of enthusiasm, and was possessed successively by doubt and contentment.

The landmarks of Poulenc's life in the 1930s were the formation of a duo with the baritone Pierre Bernac and the composition of his first religious works. In 1934 he decided to start a career on the concert platform with Bernac, for whom he eventually composed some 90 mélodies, specifically for their recitals together. Their association lasted until 1959. The rhythm of Poulenc's life was determined henceforth by periods of concert-giving alternating with periods of composition. He divided his life between Paris, to which he retained a visceral attachment, and his house at Noizay in Touraine, where he retreated to work. He was deeply affected by the death of the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, but a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Rocamadour in 1936 revived his Catholic faith, the immediate first fruits of which were Litanies à la vierge noire.

Poulenc passed the greater part of World War II at Noizay, which was in the German zone of occupation. There he composed, notably, Les animaux modèles, first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1942, and Figure humaine, settings of clandestinely published poems by Eluard. His first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, received its première at the Opéra-Comique in 1947 and inaugurated his collaboration with the soprano Denise Duval, who became his favourite female interpreter. 1948 saw the extension of Poulenc's international career, as he made his first concert tour in the United States. He returned there regularly until 1960, to give concerts with Bernac or Duval, or to attend first performances of some of his works, notably the Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Boston SO. Between 1947 and 1949, recognizing the important influence that radio had acquired, he devised and presented a series of broadcasts on French national radio.

During the 1950s he was a dedicated composer: fiercely independent, deliberately distancing himself from the musical mainstream of the time, while remaining attentive to what happened there. He had gone to Vienna to meet Schoenberg in 1922, and from their inception he subscribed to the concerts of Domaine musical. Of his compositions of this decade, Dialogues des Carmélites, commissioned by La Scala, Milan, rapidly gained international success, and La voix humaine sealed nearly 50 years of friendship with Jean Cocteau. In 1963 Poulenc died suddenly of a heart attack in his Paris apartment.

Poulenc, Francis