FrancisPoulenc

Ricardo Viñes used his feet as well as his hands when he taught the piano. When his pupil Francis Poulenc mishandled the pedal, a buttoned boot prodded his shin. Poulenc remembered the lessons with affection: “I owe him everything,” he told Claude Rostand in their radio conversations of 1953–⁠54. Viñes taught him to make a staccato note sing through the pedal and to distinguish sharply between kinds of touch. Poulenc later adopted his own remedy, in the language of the kitchen, for a meagre piano sound: “Put butter in the sauce!”

1899–⁠1919The piano at home

He was born in Paris on 7 January 1899. His father Émile ran a chemical business; his mother Jenny came from a family of Parisian artisans and began teaching him piano when he was five. She played Mozart and Schubert, Chopin and salon pieces. Poulenc’s tastes included what he later called “adorable bad music”. His uncle Marcel Royer, known as Papoum, took him to concerts and the theatre. Through the Ballets Russes he came to know Stravinsky, and Debussy’s scores were always in the house. “It is my oxygen,” he told Rostand of Debussy’s music.

His father insisted on general education before a musical career. Poulenc never entered the Conservatoire. From 1914 to 1917 he studied privately with Viñes, who introduced him to Satie and Georges Auric. Jenny died in 1915, Émile in 1917. That year the eighteen-year-old composer’s Rapsodie nègre was performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-⁠Colombier. The following year, during military service, he wrote the three Mouvements perpétuels, short piano pieces built on repeated figures.

Through his childhood friend Raymonde Linossier he came to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop at 7 rue de l’Odéon. There he heard Apollinaire read his own poems. In 1919 he set six of the animals in Le Bestiaire, beginning with a traveller and his four camels.

1920–⁠32Les Six and Les Biches

Wanda Landowska commissioned the Concert champêtre and first played it in 1929, with Monteux conducting. Her powerful modern harpsichord could be heard against a full orchestra. The Princesse de Polignac commissioned both the Organ Concerto and the Concerto for Two Pianos. Poulenc and Jacques Février gave the first performance of the latter in Venice in September 1932. Near the end of its first movement, repeated piano figures recall the Balinese gamelan Poulenc had heard at the Paris Colonial Exhibition the previous year. The slow movement opens with a phrase in the manner of Mozart, played by one pianist alone.

In 1927 he bought Le Grand Coteau at Noizay, among the vineyards of Touraine. It gave him a place to work away from Paris. He kept both addresses, finishing scores at the country house and returning to the city for its singers, friends and new poems.

1934–⁠43Bernac, Rocamadour and Figure humaine

In August 1936 the composer Pierre-⁠Octave Ferroud was killed in a road accident. Poulenc, who was working with Bernac and Yvonne Gouverné at Uzerche, went to the shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour. “Rocamadour completed my return to the faith of my childhood,” he told Rostand in 1953. That evening he began the Litanies à la Vierge noire for women’s voices and organ, and Nadia Boulanger conducted the first performance in London that November. The unaccompanied Mass in G followed in 1937.

He loved men and practised his Catholic faith. Both entered his music, and he used the same musical vocabulary for each; an ordinary major chord could set a lover’s words or the Mass. During the German occupation he composed Figure humaine, an unaccompanied cantata for two choirs on eight Éluard poems. The word Liberté does not appear until the end of the final movement, where a soprano sings a high E. The work was written in 1943 and first broadcast by the BBC in March 1945, sung in English.

1947–⁠59Denise Duval and the later operas

Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias has a woman whose breasts become balloons and a husband who sets out to bear children himself. Denise Duval sang Thérèse at the 1947 première, and she went on to sing in Poulenc’s later stage works. In 1957 she sang Blanche in the French première of Dialogues des Carmélites, and in 1959 she sang the single role, a woman on the telephone, in La Voix humaine.

Dialogues occupied him from 1953 to 1956. Bernanos’s text follows a frightened young aristocrat into a Carmelite convent during the French Revolution. The old prioress dies terrified, the convent is condemned, and the sisters sing the Salve Regina as they go to the guillotine; at each fall of the blade one voice drops out. Poulenc’s lover Lucien Roubert was dying while he worked on the opera; Roubert died in October 1955 as Poulenc completed the fair copy of the vocal score. The first performance was in Italian at La Scala in January 1957; Paris heard it in French that June.

1959–⁠63Gloria, wind sonatas and death

The Gloria was written in 1959–⁠60 and first performed in Boston in January 1961. In Laudamus te the chorus sings quick syllables, and Domine Deus is given to the soprano. Poulenc also wrote three sonatas for wind instruments in his last years. He played the Flute Sonata with Jean-⁠Pierre Rampal in 1957. The Clarinet Sonata, dedicated to Honegger, and the Oboe Sonata were both still unperformed when Poulenc died of a heart attack in Paris on 30 January 1963; the Clarinet Sonata was later played by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein. The music at his funeral was by Bach.