Francis Poulenc

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Franz Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist.

His recordings include songs, solo piano works, chamber orchestras, choral pieces, ballets, and orchestral concert music.

The piano suite Les biches (1919) by Trois mouvements perpetuels (1923), the ballet Les Biches (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, chorus, and orchestra are among the best-known programs. Poulenc's sole son was supposed to follow his father into the company, but he was not allowed to enroll in a music academy.

He spent time studying music with pianist Ricardo Vies, who became his mentor after the composer's parents died.

Poulenc met Erik Satie, who under his tutelage, he became one of a group of young composers known collectively as Les Six.

Poulenc's early works were noted for his high spirits and unbridence.

A more serious facet of his personality emerged in the 1930s, particularly in his devotional music, which he performed with his more light-hearted works. Poulenc was a natural pianist in addition to writing.

He was especially well known for his performances with baritone Pierre Bernac (who also helped him in vocal writing) and the soprano Denise Duval, both touring in Europe and America with each, as well as making several albums.

He was one of the first composers to recognize the importance of the gramophone, and he recorded extensively from 1928 to 1996. Poulenc's later years, as a sociable, light composer, was well-known in his homeland country, and his devotion to his faith was often ignored.

During the 21st century, more attention has been paid to his serious works, including many new Dialogues des Carmélites and La voix humaine worldwide, as well as numerous live and recorded performances of his songs and choral music.

Life

Poulenc was born in Paris's 8th arrondissement, the younger child and sole son of Émile Poulenc and his wife, Jenny, née Royer. Émile Poulenc was a joint owner of Poulenc Frères, a successful pharmaceutical manufacturer (later Rhône-Poulenc). He was a member of a pious Roman Catholic family from Espalion's département of Aveyron. Jenny Poulenc was born in a Parisian family with a huge artistic passion. In Poulenc's viewpoint, the two aspects of his nature grew out of this context: a deep religious faith from his father's family and a more modern and artistic side from his mother's. Poulenc was later described as "half monk and half naughty child" by Claude Rostand.

Poulenc grew up in a musical family; his mother, who had a wide repertoire spanning classical to less accessible works that gave him a lifetime glimpse of what he described as "adorable bad music." He started piano lessons at five years old; as he was eight, he first heard Debussy's music and was captivated by the sound's originality. Schubert and Stravinsky were two composers whose influence on his development, while the former's Winterreise and the latter's The Rite of Spring left a lasting impression on him. Poulenc continued his education at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris rather than in a music conservatory, at his father's request.

Raymonde Linossier (1897-1930), a childhood friend of Raymonde Linossier (1897–1930), introduced Poulenc to Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres in 1916. Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon were among the avant-garde poets to visit here. Many of their poems were later set to music by David Copper. He was apprentice Ricardo Vies' piano in the same year. Henri Hellene writes that Vies' influence on his pupil was profound, both in terms of pianistic technique and Poulenc's keyboard works.

Poulenc later said of Viñes:

Poulenc's mother died when he was sixteen, and his father died two years later. Vies became more than a tutor: in the words of Myriam Chimènes in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the young man's "spiritual mentor" was "spiritual mentor." He urged his pupil to write, and he later gave the premieres of three early Poulenc works. Poulenc became acquainted with two composers who inspired his early development: Georges Auric and Erik Satie.

Auric, who was the same age as Poulenc, was a pioneer on musical terms; by the time the two met, Auric's music had already been performed at major Parisian concert venues. The two young composers shared a similar musical outlook and enthusiasm, and Auric was his most trusted friend and mentor during Poulenc's lifetime. "My true brother in spirit," Poulenc said. Satie, an eccentric figure who was alienated from the mainstream French musical establishment, was a mentor to a number of young composers, including Auric, Louis Duval and Arthur Honegger. Poulenc's initial dismissal as a bourgeois amateur, he relindicated and welcomed him into the circle of protégés, whom he described as "Les Nouveaux Jeunes." Satie's clout had "immediate and broad" in terms of both the spiritual and musical planes, according to Poulenc. According to Pianist Alfred Cortot, Poulenc's Trois mouvements were "reflections of Satie's sarcastic character who were adapted to the present intellectual circles."

Poulenc made his debut as a composer in 1917 with his Rapsodie nègre, a ten-minute, five-movement piece for baritone and chamber ensemble; it was dedicated to Satie and premiered at one of a series of concerts of new music performed by the singer Jane Bathori. At the time, there was a Paris fashion for African artists, and Poulenc was delighted to run into some unpublished lines that purportedly liberian but full of Paris boulevard slang. In two portions of the rhapsody, he used one of the poems. The baritone who appeared on the stage lost his nerves on the stage for the first time, and the composer, although no performer, jumped in. This jeu d'esprit was the first of many examples of Anglophone critics' term "leg-Poulenc." Ravel was amused by the article and speculated at Poulenc's ability to invent his own folklore. Stravinsky was captivated enough to win Poulenc a contract with a publisher, a gesture that Poulenc never forgot.

Poulenc got to know Ravel well enough in 1917 to have serious discussions about music with him. Ravel's decisions, which lauded composers who Poulenc admired little more than those he greatly admired, surprised him. He told Satie of his sad encounter; Ravel retaliated with a dismissive epithet, explaining "a load of garbage," he said. Poulenc was equivocal about Ravel's music for many years, but he maintained him as a man. Ravel's modesty regarding his own music particularly appealed to Poulenc, who attempted to imitate Ravel's example throughout his life.

Poulenc served in the French army from January 1918 to January 1921, during the First World War and the immediate post-war period. He served on the Franco-German front between July and October 1918, after which he was given a string of auxiliary posts, culminating as a typist at the Ministry of Aviation. His writings gave him time for composition; the Trois mouvements for piano and the Sonata for Piano Duet were both written at the piano of Saint-Martin-sur-le-Pré's local elementary school, where he completed his first song cycle, Le bestiaire, setting poems by Apollinaire. The sonata left a lasting impression on society, but the song cycle made the composer's name famous in France, and the Trois mouvements soared to international prominence. Poulenc learned a lot about writing for whatever instruments were available; later, some of his pieces were for rare combinations of players;

Poulenc was aware of his lack of academic training at this point in his career; the composer's good fortune was that the public opinion was shifting against late-romanticism in favour of the composer's "newness and insouciant charm" of his works, technically unassuming though they were. Four of Poulenc's early works were premiered at the Salle Huyghens in Montparnasse, where the cellist Félix Delgrange held concerts of music by young composers between 1917 and 1920. Auric, Duman, Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre were among them, who together with Poulenc became known as "Les Six" during Poulenc. Henri Collet, a writer from one of their concerts, published an essay titled "The Five Russians, the Six Frenchmen, and Satie."

According to Milhaud:

While Cocteau was younger than Les Six Six, it was still a father figure in the company. In Hell's words, his literary style, "paraphrasedoutput," was anti-romantic, concisive, and irreverent. It attracted huge audiences to Poulenc, who created his first setting of Cocteau's words in 1919 and his last in 1961. When members of Les Six collaborated with each other, they contributed their own individual sections to the joint effort. L'Album des Six's 1920 piano suite consists of six separate and unrelated pieces. Milhaud's 1921 ballet Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel includes three sections, two by Auric, Poulenc, and Tailleferre, one by Honegger and none by Dumont, who was still distancing himself from the company.

Poulenc's early 1920s was still worried about his lack of formal musical education. Satie was suspicious of music colleges, but Ravel advised Poulenc to take composition lessons; Milhaud recommended composer and teacher Charles Koechlin. Poulenc served with him from 1921 to 1925.

Poulenc's early 1920s, particularly in the United Kingdom, was well-received both as both a performer and a composer. "I keep an eye on Francis Poulenc, a young man who has only recently arrived in his twenties," Ernest Newman wrote in The Manchester Guardian in 1921. He should develop into a farceur of the first order." Newman said he had never seen anything so absurd as Poulenc's song cycle Cocardes, with its accompaniment performed by the unusual combination of cornet, trombone, violin, and percussion. Poulenc and Milhaud, 1922, travelled to Vienna to speak with Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Arnold Schönberg. Neither of the French composers was inspired by Austrian colleagues' revolutionary twelve-tone system, but they admired the three composers as the country's top proponents. Sergei Diaghilev gave Poulenc a grant for a full-length ballet score the following year. He has decided that the theme would be a modern interpretation of the traditional French fête galante. Les biches was a immediate success, first in Monte Carlo in January 1924 and then in May in Paris under André Messager's direction; it has since been one of Poulenc's best-known scores. Poulenc's latest celebrity after the success of the ballet was unexpected: Louis Laloy, a writer whom Satie regarded with implacable enmity, was one of his new acquaintances. Auric, who had just celebrated a similar success with a Diaghilev ballet, Les Fâcheux, was also chastised by Satie for being a Laloy friend.

Poulenc created a number of pieces over the decade, from songs to chamber music, and Aubade's ballet. According to Hell, Koechlin's influence occasionally hindered Poulenc's natural simple style, and Auric gave him tips on how to make him look in his natural colors. Poulenc's songs were performed for the first time by baritone Pierre Bernac in 1926, from whom, in Hell's words, "the name of Poulenc was shortly to be inseparable." Wanda Landowska, another performer with whom the composer was closely associated, was another performer. In Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro (1923), an early example of the use of a harpsichord in a modern art, she was taken right away by the sound. He composed a concerto à la demande of Landowski, the Concert champêtre, which she premiered in 1929 with the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris directed by Pierre Monteux.

Richard D. E. Burton, a biographer, notes that Poulenc must have been in a enviable position in the late 1920s, both financially wealthy and independently wealthy, having inherited a considerable fortune from his father. At Noizay, Indre-et-Loire, 140 miles (230 km) south-west of Paris, where he retreated to compose in quiet surroundings, he bought Le Grand Coteau, a large country house. Nevertheless, he was terribly ill, struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, which was largely heterosexual. Richard Chanlaire, a painter whose son gave him a copy of the Concert champêtre score inscribed, was his first serious c

Nonetheless, although the investigation was ongoing, Poulenc proposed marriage to Raymonde Linossier, his friend. She was not only aware of her homosexuality but she was also intimately attached elsewhere, and their relationship became strained. He suffered with depression for the first time, which affected his ability to write, and was devastated when Linossier died suddenly in January 1930 at the age of 32. "All my youth leaves with her," he wrote about her, "all my youth passes away with her, all my youth was her entire life, not just mine." I sob... I am now twenty years old. In 1931, Chanlaire's affair ended, but the two were lifelong friends.

After a two-year absence from writing, Poulenc returned to writing songs at the start of the decade. Graham Johnson's "Epitaphe," a Malherbe poem, was written in honor of Linossier's memory, and he is described as "a profound song in every sense." Poulenc produced three sets of songs, some of which were serious in tone and others that were more reminiscent of his earlier light-hearted style, as well as others of his early 1930s works. In 1932, his music became one of the first television broadcasters in which Reginald Kell and Gilbert Vinter played his Sonata for clarinet and bassoon. Poulenc began a relationship with Raymond Destouches, a chauffeur; as with Chanlaire, what started as a passionate affair blossomed into a deep and lasting friendship. Destouches, who married in the 1950s, remained close to Poulenc until the composer's death.

A revival of religious belief and a new degree of seriousness in Poulenc's music were ignited by two unrelated events in 1936. Pierre-Octave Ferroud was killed in a car accident so violent that he was decapitated, and nearly immediately after, while on vacation, Poulenc visited Rocamadour's Sanctuary.

He later explained:

Other works that followed the composer's nascent interest, including several adaptations of Éluard's surrealist and humanist poems. He created the Mass in G major for soprano and mixed choir a cappella, his first major liturgical work, in 1937, which has since been the most popular of all his sacred works. Poulenc's latest compositions were not all in this serious vein; his incidental music to the play La Reine Margot starring Yvonne Printemps was pastiche 16th-century dance music and became popular under the tag Suite française. Poulenc's light-hearted performances continued to be characterized by music critics, but it wasn't until the 1950s that his serious side was widely understood.

Poulenc began giving frequent recitals with Bernac in 1936. The premiere of Poulenc's Cinq poèmes de Paul Éluard was held at the École Normale in Paris. They continued to perform together for more than twenty years, both nationally and internationally, until Bernac's retirement in 1959. Poulenc, a composer who produced 90 songs for his collaborator, named him one of his "three great meetings" of his career, the other two being Éluard and Landowska. "Befor twenty-five years Bernac was Poulenc's counsellor and conscience," the composer said, and he depended on him for advice not only on song-writing but also on operas and choral music, as well as his choral music.

Poulenc maintained a fruitful relationship with the BBC in London, which broadcasts several of his works throughout the decade. Bernac made his first tour of the United Kingdom in 1938 with Bernac. His music was also popular in America, being regarded by some as "the quintessence of French wit, grace, and high spirits." Poulenc's compositions in the last years of the 1930s continued to vary between serious and lighthearted works. Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence (Four Penitential Motets, 1938–39) and the song "Bleuet" (1939), an elegiac reflection on death, contrast with Les biches's "Breille de rire" (Light-Hearted Betrothal), which recreates the essence of Les biches in the opinion of Hell, compares to the song cycle Fiançailles pour pé

Poulenc was briefly a soldier during the Second World War and served in an anti-aircraft unit at Bordeaux on June 2nd. Poulenc was demobilized from the army on July 18 after France surrendered to Germany. He and his family and friends in Brive-la-Gaillarde, south-central France, spent the summer of that year together. He had composed little new music in the early months of the war, rather re-orchestrating Les biches and reworking his 1932 Sextet for piano and winds. He began three new creations at Brive-la-Gaillarde, and once more at his Noizay home in October. These were L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant for piano and narrator, the Cello Sonata, Les Animaux modèles, and Banalités' music cycle.

Poulenc was in Paris for the bulk of the war, giving recitals with Bernac, focusing on French songs. He was in a difficult situation under Nazi rule as a known homosexual (Destouches barely escaped arrest and deportation), but in his music, he made several expressions of opposition to the Germans. Aragon and Éluard, among other poets active in the French Resistance, lent music to music verses. He included the tune "Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine" in Les Animaux models, which debuted at the Opéra in 1942. He was a founder-member of the Front National (pour musique) in which the Nazi authorities had mistook it for its relationship with banned performers, such as Milhaud and Paul Hindemith. He wrote a cantata for an unaccompanied double choir destined for Belgium, Figure humaine, and eight of Éluard's poems in 1943. The work, which came to an end with "Liberté," could not be performed in France until the Germans were in charge; it was the first performance to be broadcast from a BBC studio in London in March 1945, but not in Paris until 1947. The work, according to the music critic of The Times, is "one of the finest choral works of our time," and it separates Poulenc from the category of petit maître, where ignorance has largely been content to relegate him."

Poulenc and Bernac, the French government's first French government recruited them in January 1945, flocked from Paris to London, where they were welcomed with a warm welcome. In a performance of Poulenc's Double Piano Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed; he and Benjamin Britten were the soloists; with Bernac, he gave recitals of French mélodies and piano works; and for the BBC; he and Mozart were the composer's successors. Bernac was wowed by the public's response; "the audience grew and I began to weep" as he and Poulenc stepped out on the Wigmore Hall stage; rather than singing, I started to weep. The two passengers returned home on the first boat-train to leave London for Paris in May 1940, after their fortnight's stay.

Poulenc completed his opera scores for L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant, and his first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, a short opéra bouffe of about an hour's duration in Paris. Apollinaire's performance of the same name, which was staged in 1917, is the setting. Sams describes the opera as "high-spirited topsy-turveydom" concealing "a deeper and sadder theme – the desire to repopulate and rediscover a France devastated by war. It was launched in June 1947 at the Opéra-Comique in Marseille, and it was a critical success, but not so popular with the public. Denise Duval, the composer's favorite soprano, frequent recital partner, and dedicatee to some of his songs, was the leading female role. He branded her the nightingale who made him cry ("Mon rossignol à larmes").

Poulenc had a brief affair with a woman named Fréderique ("Freddy") Lebedeff, with whom he had a daughter, Marie-Ange, in 1946, just shy of the war. The child was brought up unaware of who her father was (Poulenc was ostensibly her "godfather") but he made generous plans for her and she was the primary beneficiary of his inheritance.

Poulenc's battle swords with composers of the younger generation who resisted Stravinsky's latest work insisted that only the precepts of the Second Viennese School were valid. Poulenc defended Stravinsky and expressed incredulity that "in 1945, we are talking as if the aesthetic of twelve tones is the only possible hope for contemporary music." Berg's belief that serialism had gone as far as it could have been, as well as Schoenberg's music, earned him the enmity of composers such as Pierre Boulez. Many who disagreed with Poulenc's views portrayed him as a relic of the pre-war period, frivolious and unpromoetic. He began to concentrate on his more recent art and tried to persuade the French people to pay attention. His sacred music was popular in the United States and Britain, with their strong choral roots, but performances in France were much more limited, meaning the audience and the critics were often unaware of his serious compositions.

Poulenc's first trip to the United States in 1948 during his two-month concert tour with Bernac. He appeared in recitals with Bernac or Duval, as soloist in the world premiere of his Piano Concerto (1949), which was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Poulenc began the 1950s with Lucien Roubert, a traveling salesman, as his first partner in his personal life. Poulenc was a success on a seven-song cycle setting poems by Éluard, La Fraîcheur le feu (1950), and the Stabat Mater in honor of painter Christian Bérard's birth in 1950 and premiered the following year.

Poulenc received a commission from La Scala and the Milanese publisher Casa Ricordi for a ballet in 1953. He considered the life of St Margaret of Cortona but discovered that a dance version of her life was impractical. Ricordi suggested Dialogues des Carmélites, an unfilmed screenplay by Georges Bernanos, rather than writing an opera on a religious theme; Ricordi suggested Dialogues des Carmélites. The text, based on a short story by Gertrud von Le Fort's, depicts the Martyrs of Compiègne, nuns who were imprisoned during the French Revolution for their religious convictions. Poulenc adored it as "such a moving and noble work" — ideal for his libretto — and he started composing in August 1953.

Poulenc sustained two blows during the opera's creation. He learned of a fight between Bernanos' estate and writer Emmet Lavery, who owned Le Fort's theatrical adaptations, and Poulenc's book Emmet Lavery; this caused Poulenc to suspend work on his opera. Roubert became seriously ill around the same time, and Poulenc was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and he was in a clinic in L'Haes, just south of Paris, in November 1954. He revived his work on Dialogues des Carmélites during lengthy touring with Bernac in England as he recovered, and the literary rights and royal compensation issues with Lavery were resolved. He wanted the substantial money earned from his recitals as his personal fortune had decreased since the 1920s.

Poulenc created little else while on stage; two mélodies were missing, and a brief orchestral movement called "Bucolique" in a collective effort, Variations sur le nom de Marguerite Long (1954), to which his old friends from Les Six Auric and Milhaud also contributed. Roubert died at the age of forty-seven when Poulenc was writing the last pages of his opera in October 1955. "Lucien was delivered from his martyrdom ten days earlier," the composer told a friend, "the final copy of Les Carmélites was completed" at the time my dearest friend breathed his last.

In January 1957 at La Scala in Italian translation, the opera was performed for the first time. Between then and the French premiere Poulenc, he performed the Flute Sonata, one of his most popular late works, which he and Jean-Pierre Rampal performed at the Strasbourg Music Festival in June. Dialogues des Carmélites de Montréal premiered at the Opéra three days later, on June 21. It was a huge success, due to the composer's immense relief. Poulenc's last intimate relationship, with Louis Gautier, a former soldier, began right around this time; they remained friends until the end of Poulenc's life.

In 1958, Poulenc began an operatic version of La Voix humaine's 1930 monodrama La Voix humaine, alongside his old friend Cocteau. Duval, the tragic deserted woman speaking to her former lover by telephone, was produced at the Opéra-Comique in February 1959, under Cocteau's direction. Poulenc's 60th birthday was celebrated by a few months before the latter's withdrawal from public service was announced.

In 1960 and 1961, Poulenc visited the United States. Among his travels were the American premiere of La Voix humaine with Duval and the world premiere of his Gloria, a large-scale work for soprano, four-part mixed chorus, and orchestra conducted in Boston by Charles Munch. "He writes with passion and admiration of a composer whose views on topics such as melody's primacy and the essential seriousness of humour," Poulenc wrote in the 1980s. The Clarinet Sonata and the Oboe Sonata were among Poulenc's last 12 months' work, including Sept répons des ténèbres for voices and orchestra, the Clarinet Sonata, and the Oboe Sonata.

Poulenc died after a fatal heart attack on January 30th, 1963, at his apartment across the Jardin du Luxembourg. His funeral took place in the nearby church of Saint-Sulpice. None of his recordings was performed; Marcel Dupré appeared on the grand organ of the cathedral in accordance with his wishes; none of his songs was performed; Poulenc and his family were buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

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