4. Orchestral music.

The best of Poulenc's orchestral music dates from before World War II. The first of his major works was the Concert champêtre (1927–8), inspired by the playing and character of Wanda Landowska. The countryside evoked is nothing more savage than a Parisian suburb and the fanfares in the last movement emanate from nothing more exotic than the bugles in the barracks of Vincennes, but for all that it is an enchanting work. Finer still are the two concertos commissioned by the Princess Edmond de Polignac, for two pianos (1932) and for organ, strings and timpani (1938). The earlier of the two, first performed by the composer and his friend Jacques Février, has no aim beyond entertainment, in which it succeeds completely; its models range from Balinese gamelan at the end of the first movement to Mozart at the beginning of the second, but as in the case of the Sonata for horn, trumpet and trombone, Poulenc's 18th-century style affords a number of calculated inelegances before branching off in a quite different direction. The Organ Concerto is altogether deeper in emotional character while remaining stylistically ambivalent. Recognizably a product of ‘Janus-Poulenc’, it leads the solo instrument from Bach's G minor Fantasia to the fairground and back again. Poulenc placed it ‘on the outskirts’ of his religious music.

Poulenc, Francis

5. Music for the stage.

A number of Poulenc's dramatic works deal with the inconsequential, if not the downright absurd. His first effort was incidental music to Le gendarme incompris (1920–1), a nonsense play by Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet in which the policeman delivers himself of lines by Mallarmé; despite Milhaud's enthusiasm, Poulenc withdrew the material soon afterwards. A month later, in June 1921, came the première of the ballet Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel incorporating two movements by Poulenc. This joint production by all the members of Les Six except Durey achieved no more than a brief succès de scandale. By contrast, Les biches, first performed in 1924, is still one of his best-known works. The absence of deep, or even shallow, symbolism was only accentuated by a tiny passage of mock-Wagnerian brass, complete with emotive minor 9ths, in a score which is above all clear and tuneful, matching the white and pale blue of Marie Laurencin's décor. Apart from the ballet Les animaux modèles (1940–42), based on eight fables from La Fontaine, Poulenc was occupied for the next 20 years by film music and incidental music to plays, until in 1939 he happened to reread Apollinaire's Les mamelles de Tirésias which he then set as his first opera. Described as an opéra bouffe, it includes a variety of scenes both inconsequential and absurd, but Apollinaire's underlying message, the need for more French babies and a corresponding distaste for the incipient women's liberation movement, had been a national preoccupation since Napoleon's time. The musical tone can therefore be either noble or popular, often both, as inex.2. Poulenc himself pointed out that the vocal phrase (where Thérèse/Tirésias is reading in a newspaper of the death of two characters in a duel) would not disgrace a religious work; the three introductory bars confirm the continuity of Stravinsky's influence. Les mamelles is emphatically not an operetta – knowing winks, like smut, were anathema to Poulenc – but accommodates a host of musical techniques, lyrical solos, patter duets, chorales, falsetto lines for tenor and bass babies and, like Denise Duval whose Folies Bergères training was invaluable in the title role (fig.2), it succeeds in being both funny and beautiful.

Poulenc's last two operas treat serious subjects seriously. In Dialogues des Carmélites (1953–6) he charted the delicate vagaries of character and emotion among a group of nuns condemned to death in the French Revolution. The text, originally a film scenario, is built up from a number of short scenes whose brevity forced the composer to discriminate painstakingly between types of vocal line, of rhythm, even of vowel sound; the immediate success of this two-and-a-half-hour opera with an almost entirely female cast reveals Poulenc as a technician of the first order. He confronted similar problems in La voix humaine (1958) and enriched this 40-minute solo scena, one side of the telephone conversation between a young woman and the lover who is abandoning her, with non-referential ‘motifs conducteurs’, with a wide range of musical language mirroring both her manic condition and the perpetual interruptions of French telephonic life, with terrifying silences (as her lover is saying what the audience never hears), and with a long-term aim for A minor as the tragic goal of the harmony. The result is a powerful study of human despair.

Poulenc, Francis