Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc stood at the forefront of Les Six, the French collective that steered music clear of Impressionist haze, rigid conventions, and excessive abstraction. His style relied on clear lines and memorable melodies, setting the playful or sardonic against the tender or somber. Diatonic and modal harmonies formed the core of his language, while chromaticism remained largely absent. Pandiatonic elements, first explored by Stravinsky around 1920, surface repeatedly in his scores, notably in the sacred choral piece Gloria. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant twentieth-century composers of religious music and, within the French art song, a defining presence of his era. He was likewise a pianist of real accomplishment.

Born in Paris on January 7, 1899, into a prosperous family of pharmaceutical industrialists, Poulenc grew up amid the wealth generated by his ancestors, whose enterprise eventually became the agrochemical corporation Rhône-Poulenc. His mother, an accomplished amateur pianist, began teaching him at age five. He later studied with a niece of César Franck and then with the distinguished Spanish virtuoso Ricardo Viñes, the dedicatee of several of his later works. At eighteen he completed Rapsodie Nègre for baritone and chamber ensemble, which brought him sudden prominence in France. Between 1918 and 1921 he fulfilled his military service while composing the widely admired Trois Mouvements Perpétuels.

By 1920 the members of Les Six—Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, the group’s sole woman, Louis Durey, and Francis Poulenc—had begun attracting international notice. In 1923 Poulenc finished the ballet Les Biches, which Diaghilev presented the next year to great acclaim; audiences embraced its blend of levity, high spirits, and passing sentimentality. He maintained a steady output through the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing numerous piano pieces, songs, and other works. In 1935 he renewed his friendship with baritone Pierre Bernac, initiating a long and fruitful partnership, and that same year returned to the Roman Catholic faith following the fatal automobile accident that claimed his close friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud. From this renewed commitment came such major religious scores as Litanies à la Vierge Noire for soloists, chorus, and organ and the Mass in G for unaccompanied mixed chorus, both completed in 1936.

Throughout World War II, Poulenc remained in occupied France and composed works of antiwar or openly anti-Nazi character, occasionally setting texts by prohibited writers such as Lorca. Among these pieces are the ballet Les Animaux Modèles (1940–1941), the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942–1943, revised 1949) dedicated to Lorca, and the powerful choral cantata Figure Humaine (1943), a hymn to liberty. After the war he produced the Sinfonietta (1947) and Piano Concerto (1949), neither of which achieved lasting success. Between 1953 and 1956 he completed his most ambitious undertaking, the opera Dialogue des Carmélites, frequently cited as the finest French opera of the twentieth century.

He finished his final opera, La Voix Humaine, in 1958; the single character converses on the telephone with her departing lover for the work’s entire forty-five-minute span. Also from this period is Gloria (1959), notable for its directness and fervent yet unpretentious spirituality. His last major composition, the Sonata for Oboe and Piano of 1962, was inscribed to the memory of Prokofiev, whom he had known since the 1920s. Poulenc died suddenly of a heart attack on January 30, 1963.