Francis Poulenc's Drunken Angels

Illustration by Eleni Kalorkoti

In the composer's masterly songs, the solemn and the sensual collide.

By Alex Ross

The New Yorker — August 10, 2020

At the end of 1940, after Paris had fallen under German occupation, the spectacularly refined French composer Francis Poulenc made a musical setting of Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Sanglots", or "Sobs". Poulenc was in no way a political artist: although he steered clear of collaboration with the Nazis, he also held back from an active role in the Resistance. Still, it is difficult not to hear the song in the context of the time, particularly when it arrives at its wrenching conclusion:

And nothing will be free until the end of time
Let us leave all to the dead
And hide our sobs

"Sanglots" is the last of five songs in a cycle deceptively titled "Banalités". In a demonstration of the stealthy power of Poulenc's art, the grouping swerves from merry, irreverent vignettes to a near-fathomless sorrow. In "Sanglots", the words "Et rien" ("And nothing") are set to a plunging F sharp octave, with "Et" emphasized to the point that it becomes a cry from the heart. With the next words, "ne sera libre", the vocal line leaps back up the octave and then descends the slightly narrower interval of the major seventh, landing on G natural, which clashes against the F sharp minor tonality. The harmony then softens from minor to major, with a D sharp adding an almost sentimental sweetness. Poulenc makes the prospect of apocalypse seem like a respite, a moment of grace. The sobs of the title hardly register, vanishing into a melancholy haze.

"Sanglots" emerged during a season of doom-laden music: in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, Olivier Messiaen was writing the "Quartet for the End of Time", which finds its way to a state of ethereal bliss. But Poulenc may not have been thinking solely about the war: he had, after all, been waiting to set "Sanglots" for some time. Rather, the song evokes a consuming descent into an inner world of memory and regret. Earlier in the poem, Apollinaire writes, "This is the song of the dreamers / Who tore out their heart / And held it in their right hand". Then: "Here are our hands that life has enslaved". Seldom have such complex, cloistered feelings been captured in music of such gasping beauty. With Poulenc, these wonders of compression are almost routine.

I've been holed up in Poulenc's world on account of two absorbing new books: Roger Nichols's "Poulenc: A Biography" (Yale) and Graham Johnson's "Poulenc: The Life in the Songs" (Liveright). Both do justice to a composer who has often been overshadowed by the giants with whom he shared the early and mid-twentieth century. He was no originator, like Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor did he possess Britten's or Shostakovich's command of manifold genres. He was, however, a composer of rare gifts, particularly in the setting of sacred and secular texts. As the decades pass, he grows in stature, and his aloofness from musical party politics matters less.

Nichols, a British scholar who has written about Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen, gives an assured overview of Poulenc's life and work, applying a light touch that is appropriate to the subject's man-about-town façade. Poulenc was born in 1899, into upper-middle-class comfort; his father was the co-owner of a family chemical company that eventually morphed into the giant firm of Rhône-Poulenc. When the composer was in his teens, he fell into the eccentric orbit of Erik Satie, who had a great influence on his early style. Poulenc was a core member of the enfant-terrible collective promoted by Jean Cocteau as Les Six. His first triumph was the explosively tuneful ballet "Les Biches", which the Ballets Russes premièred in 1924.

Poulenc's life story is customarily organized around a central epiphanic event: his visit, in 1936, to the shrine of the Black Virgin, in Rocamadour, in the South of France. The composer seems to have experienced that pilgrimage as the beginning of a spiritual awakening, one that led to an extraordinary series of religious and religiously themed works: the "Litanies of the Black Virgin", the Stabat Mater, the Gloria, two sets of motets, and his only large-scale opera, "Dialogues of the Carmelites". These scores rank with the most formidable religious music of the twentieth century, on a par with that of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ustvolskaya, and Pärt, although their intimate, confiding mode of address occupies a category of its own.

While Nichols, in his retelling of the Rocamadour episode, does not deny its significance, he qualifies it a bit. Poulenc had been raised a Catholic, and religiosity had been smoldering in his work all along. Therefore, Nichols writes, the experience marked “the reappearance of something long hidden beneath worldly cares". Complicating the picture is Poulenc's disorderly love life, which consisted of many fleeting gay encounters, a few longer-lasting attachments with men, and a mysterious assignation with a woman that yielded a daughter. This activity may only have intensified after the religious turn, leading to psychological conflicts. Johnson, in his study of the songs, speculates that the composer suffered from sexual addiction, and that an inability to see his partners as social equals consigned him to loneliness.

Both accounts undermine the popular image of Poulenc – carefully cultivated by the man himself – as the epitome of Parisian suavity and ebullience. He was, in fact, a turbulent, even tortured character: sometimes arrogant, sometimes self-castigating, sometimes lovable, sometimes impossible. That complexity only adds to the interest of the music. The critic Claude Rostand famously commented that Poulenc was a combination of "moine et voyou" – monk and rogue. Many of the composer's works fall cleanly into one category or the other, but some of the strongest fuse the two personalities in one. The Organ Concerto (1938) interlaces brimstone dissonances with rollicking fairground strains. The Gloria (1959-1960) exudes an almost scandalous joy, as if a crowd of drunken angels were dancing down the boulevards.

Illustration by Neale Osborne

Graham Johnson is a veteran British pianist and accompanist who has made himself indispensable to the art of the song. His most significant achievement is a forty-disk recorded survey, with more than sixty singers, of Schubert's complete Lieder, for the Hyperion label. He has also published a Schubert-song companion, which runs to three thousand pages. Johnson's devotion to Poulenc is scarcely less intense. In the nineteen-seventies, he worked closely with the French baritone Pierre Bernac, Poulenc's favorite collaborator, and acquired an encyclopedic knowledge not only of the songs but also of the milieu from which they sprang. In 2013, Hyperion released Johnson's complete survey of the Poulenc songs. His new Poulenc book is a greatly expanded version of the already lavish and lively program notes that accompanied the recordings.

Johnson is convinced that Poulenc was not only the premier French songwriter of his time – a claim that few would dispute – but also a crucial figure in the international vocal canon. I listened to the songs in the company of Johnson's book, and came away fully persuaded by his argument. He makes clear that Poulenc had a deep grasp of the often challenging twentieth-century poets he set to music – Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Louise de Vilmorin, Louis Aragon – and that he illuminated their work as startlingly as Schubert and Schumann lit up Heinrich Heine. In a discussion of "Sanglots", Johnson points out that Poulenc finds musical analogies for Apollinaire's singular structure, in which two distinct poems seem to be interwoven.

The songs encompass a huge range of moods: silly, solemn, naughty, austere, agitated, serene, joyous, desolate. When Poulenc puts his mind to it, he can knock out an indelible tune fit for Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier. The gloriously hummable waltz in the 1940 song "Les Chemins de l'Amour" ("The Paths of Love") is one that you will swear you’ve heard before – and, in fact, you have, in "Der Rosenkavalier". But, Johnson notes, Poulenc changes the melody enough to make it his own: "So like, and yet suddenly so unlike: this is musical legerdemain of an extraordinarily audacious order". The composer's inclination toward seedier environments is evident in his knowing treatment of Apollinaire's "Allons Plus Vite" ("Get a Move On"), which evokes prostitutes, pimps, and johns circulating on the Boulevard de Grenelle. The song begins in a wistful evening mood and ends with a dark, driving pattern in the bass – an image of frustrated sexual compulsion, Johnson plausibly suggests.

The songs I treasure most are those in which a finespun theme runs through a cool, airy harmonic field, like a sliver of cloud hanging against red twilight. "Sanglots" is a supreme example; my favorite recording, which can be found in Erato's survey of Poulenc's complete works, is by the heartbreakingly expressive American baritone William Parker, who died, of aids, in 1993. Parker also gives a potent rendition of the setting of Éluard's "Tu Vois le Feu du Soir" ("You See the Fire of Evening"), which is itself couched in a sunset world, with warmth and chill intermingled. The final chord of C sharp minor glides into a misty, fragrant atmosphere, like Death in evening wear. Throughout his career, Poulenc was a master of endings: in place of the musical clichés of wrapping up and taking leave, he often deploys quiet shocks, which send the mind spinning through the silence that follows. Such moments confirm Poulenc's affable boast: "In the field of song I fear no one, and being the best is always very pleasant".

Source: newyorker.com

Illustration by Colbert Cassan

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See also

Francis Poulenc: Sonate pour violoncelle et piano – Bruno Philippe, Tanguy de Williencourt (HD 1080p)

Francis Poulenc: Pièces pour piano – Alexandre Tharaud (Audio video)