Francis Poulenc
1899-1963
“The musical setting of a poem
should be an act of love, never a marriage of convenience”.
Parisian born Francis Jean Marcel
Poulenc composed more than 146 songs, ranging from the sophisticated to the
elegantly simple, from playful to serious. He combined his love of poetry and
the human voice with his music, finding the natural tempo, breathing places and
inflections.
The Poulenc family originated
from Aveyron in the south and were wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturers;
founders of the now multi-national Rhône-Poulenc-Rorer. His father was a
regular concert and opera-goer, but Francis received his musical gifts from his
mother, Jenny Royer, an accomplished amateur pianist, who recognized his talent
and gave him lessons from the age of 5. Her brother was a ‘man about town’, an
amateur painter, theatre-goer and friend of celebrated actors and singers.
Uncle Papoum fascinated the young Francis with his outrageous stories.
The holidays were spent at his
Grandmother Royer’s house in Nogent-sur-Marne, in the suburbs of Paris. On
Sundays they would visit the pleasure gardens and accordion accompanied
bal-musettes organised for the Parisians to enjoy on the river banks. This experience
would be reflected in his early works, where he often used the forms and
rhythms of comic songs and popular dances, revealing his love of the circus and
fairground.
In winter of 1910, the family
went to Fontainebleau to escape floods in Paris and Francis discovered a copy
of Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ in a local music shop. This awoke his melodic gifts
and from age 14 he studied with the great Ricardo Viñes, perfecting his piano
skills. In 1914 he heard Stravinski’s ‘Firebird’ and ‘Rite of Spring’, and he
and his mother hoped he would go to Paris Conservatoire, but his father
insisted on a classical education. World War One started before his exams and
when it was over it was too late to enter Conservatoire.
It was Viñes in 1917, who
introduced him to Georges Auric and Erik Satie, whom Poulenc greatly admired.
They introduced him to Milhaud and Honegger and together they formed ‘Les Six’
with Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre. The group were first named by the
critic Henri Collet, because their works appeared at the same concerts,
organized by Jane Bathori at ‘Le Vieux Columbier’. Bathori sang their works and
accompanied herself on the piano and so the first works of Poulenc were
performed with immediate success. He dedicated his ‘Rapsodie Negre’ and ‘Les
Mouvements Perpetuels’ to her.
His military service abruptly
ended his training in 1918. He was sent to Vincennes and then to the front in
the Vosges. While training at the anti-aircraft school at Pont-sur-Seine, he
composed his first songs to poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. ‘Le Bestiare’ is extraordinarily competent
for a young man of 20. He captured the mood of these tiny poems in a simple,
economical and faintly impressionist way. It would be another 12 years before
he wrote songs that he felt were anywhere near this standard. Poulenc had
carefully studied the words and vowel sounds and the atmosphere. He had a
particular affinity to their nostalgia.
At Valentine Hugo’s house,
Poulenc had met Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), the
illegitimate son of a Polish noblewoman and prominent leader of the
Montparnasse bohemians. In his youth, he had been wrongly imprisoned for
stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. This would be the catalyst for his
contempt for authority and his wild lifestyle made him a legend. His friends
described him as “a clown, a scholar, a drunkard, a gourmet, a lover, a
criminal, a devout Catholic, a wandering Jew, a soldier and a good husband”. He
died in 1918 and Poulenc’s setting of six quatrains of ‘Le Bestiare’ was
considered a fitting tribute. Marie Laurencin, told him “You can not realize
how well you have been able to express the nostalgia and lyricism of these
admirable quatrains. And what touches me so deeply is that I could believe it
is Guillaume’s voice speaking these verses.”
When Poulenc arrived in Paris on
leave, he discovered that Louis Durey had also set all 12 quatrains of ‘Le
Bestiare’, and with his customary grace and good manners, Poulenc dedicated his
setting of ‘Le Bestiare’ to Durey. They were originally composed for voice and
chamber orchestra and their delicate irony and melodic freshness, would also
characterise his later works. They should not be sung with irony but with the
serious intent of the study of irony. Poulenc’s evocative and completely
individual music is very different to Ravel’s settings of Jules Renard’s subtly
humorous ‘Histoires Naturelles’, yet the symbolism is equally wonderful and
ingenious. Poulenc was an excellent pianist with an idiosyncratic way of
playing. This was reflected in his piano and voice setting of ‘Le Bestiare’,
which makes unusual and challenging demands on both the singer and the pianist.
There was an artistic euphoria in
Paris at the end of the War, as many people felt they had survived an atrocious
holocaust, which they hoped they would never see again. Poulenc began to study
piano with the imminent Charles Koechlin and went to the gatherings at the
famous’Aux Amies des Livres’ book shop in the Rue de l’Odéon. All the poets and
writers of importance came here to talk and read their works; including Paul
Valéry, André Gide, Paul Claudel, Léon-Paul Fargue, Louis Aragon and the
infamous American women: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Sylvia Beach. Here
Poulenc also met the artists Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and Marie Laurencin,
with whom he received a commission from Serge Diaghilev for a ballet. ‘Les
Biches’ was a colossal success yet Poulenc felt quite unprepared for the most
exciting period of artistic creation in his life.
In 1926 Poulenc asked the singer
Pierre Bernac to perform the premiere of his new songs ‘Chansons Gaillards’. It
was very successful collaboration, but they lost touch until spring of 1934
when they met again at the salon of a mutual friend. Bernac was singing some of
Debussy’s songs and Poulenc accompanied him. He also accompanied him at the
Salzburg Festival that summer and there they decided to work together on a more
permanent basis. Their famous collaboration lasted 25 years, when they retired
from the concert platform.
Following the death of his close
friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in car accident, in 1936, Poulenc went to
Notre-Dame de Rocamadour and renewed his Roman Catholic faith. This inspired
him to compose his famous ‘Litanies à la Vièrge Noire’. He remained in occupied
France during World War Two, participating in the Resistance via his music: he
dedicated his Violin Sonata to the memory of the Spanish poet Lorca and set
Louis Aragon’s powerful war poem “C” during the dark year of 1943.
After the war he lived in Paris
in his apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, or at his country house
‘Le Grand Coteau' overlooking the Loire, at Noizay in Touraine. However he
remained a true Parisian: “Paris takes me out of myself…I have only to take a
walk in the quartiers that I love and life seems suddenly lighter”. In Touraine
he composed, in Paris he socialized and walked, where he got much inspiration.
He toured the USA in 1948 and
1960, after recovering from nervous exhaustion following problems with his
‘Dialogue des Carmélites’. He died of a sudden heart attack aged 64, while
working on an opera based on Cocteau’s ‘La Machine Infernale’. His friends and
admirers lamented the loss of this “big, countrified fellow, bony and jovial,
looking like an overgrown schoolboy telling one of his racy tales, heavily
spiced with his native argot and sailing perilously near the wind.” © H Kean
Le Bestiare ou Cortège d’Orphée
With his four dromedaries
Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira
Roamed the world over and admired
it
He did what I would like to do
If I had four dromedaries.
2. La
Chèvre du Thibet
The coat of this goat
And even the one of gold
For which so much trouble was
taken
By Jason
Are worth nothing to the value of
The hair of my beloved.
3. La
Sauterelle
Here is the delicate grasshopper
The food of St John
May my verses be likewise
The feast of superior people.
4. Le
Dauphin
Dolphins you play in the sea
Yet the waves are always bitter
Sometimes my joy bursts forth
But life is still cruel.
5. L’Écrevisse
Uncertainty O! my delights
You and I, we progress
Like crayfish go
Backwards, backwards.
6. La
Carpe
In your fish ponds, in your
pools,
Carp, how long you live.
Is it that death has forgotten
you
Fish of melancholy?
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