Six of the greatest pieces by Francis Poulenc
A deep dive into one of my favorite French composers
As far as canonical composers go, Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is rather underrated. He’s frequently lumped together with «Les six» rather than discussed in his own right, despite the fact that his writing is head and shoulders above the rest of them (no offense). His compositional style is quite witty and tuneful—a major characteristic of his writing is his penchant for stringing melodies together.
Poulenc was largely self-taught; as a result, rather than traditional classical forms, his music displays much more influence from contemporary music like Ravel’s, Stravinsky’s, and Debussy’s, as well as jazz, ragtime, and cabaret. His works tend to be loosely organized, with sections differentiated by colors rather than tonal areas. Themes sometimes return, but they do not really develop; his style is far from Beethoven, Brahms, or Wagner.
In this article, I wanted to focus on the works that I feel are Poulenc’s greatest achievements, either because they are some of the best works for their instrumentation or because he just really hit it out of the park. So, here are Six of the Greatest Pieces by Francis Poulenc, in chronological order:
Concerto for two pianos, FP 61 (1932)
Sextet, FP 100 (1932, revised 1939)
Concerto for organ, strings, and timpani, FP 93 (1938)
Stabat Mater, FP 148 (1950)
Dialogues of the Carmelites, FP 159 (1957)
Gloria, FP 177 (1959)
Nos. 1 and 2: Concerto for two pianos and Sextet
The first two pieces on this list, the Concerto for Two Pianos (1932) and the Sextet (1932, revised 1939), were composed around the same time, and you can totally hear it. Like much of Poulenc’s music, they are both tuneful and lighthearted, with references both to each other and to contemporary styles. As Orrin Howard writes, this is music written “to help disperse the cloud of refinement upon which the music of the French Impressionists floated,” and he notes that the Sextet in particular is “about as determinedly lighthearted and satiric as anything he ever wrote.”
While the up-tempo parts are super fun, I particularly love the very beautiful slower sections in both pieces. The allegros provide the perfect contrast, highlighting meditative moments like the ending of the first movement of the Concerto (which was inspired by Balinese gamelan that Poulenc encountered at one of the Paris Colonial Exhibitions) and of the third movement of the Sextet.
But they have even more in common! One direct link between these pieces is the appearance of this material from the first movement of the Concerto:
in the first movement of the Sextet, brought down a half step:
Further, the Concerto and the Sextet also both make reference to Mozart. Regarding the former, Poulenc said in an interview:
In the ‘Larghetto’ of this concerto, I chose, for the opening theme, to go back to Mozart because I have a veneration for the melodic line and because I prefer Mozart to all other composers. If the movement begins alla Mozart, it soon switches with the reply from the second piano to a style that was recognisably mine at the period.
Similarly, the Sextet’s second movement begins with a reference to Mozart’s C Major sonata, K.545. Here, the opening oboe solo:
and the very beginning of K.545:
Poulenc brings it up a half step and omits the mediant, but otherwise, it’s a pretty direct quote.
The Concerto for Two Pianos and the Sextet are stand-out works because of their prominence in the repertoire. Besides Mozart’s youthful versions (his Piano Concertos Nos. 7 and 10, pleasant works that are mainly notable because they’re Mozart), Poulenc’s is the double piano concerto. As for the Sextet, in my opinion, it’s the greatest piece for wind quintet, with or without piano. It’s also just one of my favorite chamber works for winds and piano in general. His creativity when writing for winds is really on display here, particularly his wide use of colors—combining timbres and exploiting the natural changes in tone throughout the range of each wind instrument. And I just love the piano writing in both pieces.
As far as recordings go, for the Concerto for Two Pianos, I really like Bracha Eden and Alexander Tamir with Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Sergiu Comissiona. I used to like the Bernstein recording, but this one is much more accurate to the directions in the score and carries off Poulenc’s style a bit better. (I don’t think performers necessarily ought to be beholden to a composer’s wishes, but Poulenc is pretty clear about how he thinks his music should be played: “If pianists trusted my metronome markings, which have been calibrated very carefully, then many calamities would be avoided.”)
For the Sextet, there’s a lot of great performances out there; one of my favorites is Ensemble Wien-Berlin with James Levine. They have the right raucous energy yet are clean and together, and during the slower sections they play very elegantly.
No. 3: Concerto for organ, strings, and timpani
During the mid-thirties, Poulenc experienced a resurgence of his Catholic faith; as a result, his compositional style evolved to incorporate more religious subjects and themes. In August 1936, after learning of the tragic death of his friend and fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, Poulenc made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Notre-Dame de Rocamadour in southwestern France. In the chapel there stands a small statue of the Virgin Mary, carved out of black wood. In the words of Yvonne Gouverné, a friend who was there at the time:
Outwardly, nothing happened, yet from that moment everything in the spiritual life of Poulenc changed. He bought a little picture with the text of the Litanies to the Black Virgin, and as soon as we were back in Uzerche he began to write that very pure work for female choir and organ, Litanies à la Vierge Noire.
The Organ Concerto was also written during this period. It was commissioned in 1934 by one of Poulenc’s patrons, the Princesse de Polignac, who was an amateur organist (and had previously commissioned the Concerto for Two Pianos). While it is not as overtly religious as the later works on this list, it is very stylistically different from the Concerto for Two Pianos and the Sextet. Poulenc was well aware of this, and he wrote in 1936 that the concerto was “not the amusing Poulenc of the Concerto for two pianos but more like a Poulenc en route for the cloister.”
It was completed in 1938, premiered by Maurice Duruflé at the organ and Nadia Boulanger conducting the orchestra. Duruflé helped Poulenc with the registration, and there’s a great recording of him playing the piece with Georges Prêtre conducting:
Some other recordings I like include George Malcolm with Iona Brown and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (gorgeous strings, lovely ensemble) and Berj Zamkochian with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony (very exciting).
Like the Concerto for Two Pianos and the Sextet, the Organ Concerto is an important work because it is one of the preeminent examples of its form. Poulenc made sure to write for organ, not just transpose a piano part. The support that the organ receives from the strings is really well done, too; the orchestra really serves to heighten the effect that the organ creates, rather than being on an equal footing with the soloist. It’s all about the organ!
No. 4: Stabat Mater
The 1949 death of his friend Christian Bérard (who was a theatre and fashion designer and general popular figure in 1940s Paris) inspired Poulenc to write a piece in his memory—not with the traditional Requiem text, but with the more intimate medieval hymn, the Stabat Mater. Rather than the more abstract Requiem, the Stabat Mater is a depiction of the anguish of Mary at the Crucifixion. As Steve Schwartz notes, this choice “gave Poulenc an image of human contact with both death and the divine.”
The choir is in five parts—SATBarB—and the added baritone part adds a nice darkness and depth. Each movement is rather brief, as is Poulenc’s style, and there are a cappella stretches that resemble little motets. It’s truly a gorgeous piece. I like John Quinn’s description of it:
Much of the music is darkly dramatic. There are a couple of quicker, lighter sections and here it might be thought that the relative lightness of tone is somewhat at odds with the words. I don’t believe that’s the case: the two lighter movements provide very necessary contrast and some respite from the austere, even severe tone of much of the rest of the work.
It’s an incredibly gorgeous, personal piece; while Poulenc achieved a great deal with his choral/vocal works (like Figure humaine for double mixed choir and La voix humaine for soprano and orchestra), this one is a particular favorite of mine.
My favorite performance of this piece is Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony, with the beautiful Kathleen Battle as soloist. Ozawa is not normally a go-to conductor for me, and some might find this recording too bombastic. But I find it very enjoyable, and it is definitely a Certified Banger.
P.S. if you would like to read more about the individual movements and see the text of the Stabat Mater, check this out.
No. 5: Dialogues of the Carmelites
Dialogues of the Carmelites is rather unambiguously the summit of Poulenc’s achievement. It’s an extraordinarily gorgeous and affecting opera. The (justifiably famous) finale is incredible, but you have to watch the whole thing to really experience the emotional weight of this scene.
The opera is based on a short play by Georges Bernanos, in turn based on a novella by Gertrud von le Fort, in turn based on the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, who were 16 Carmelite nuns executed in 1794. Dialogues of the Carmelites centers on Blanche, a very nervous young aristocratic woman who becomes a Carmelite novice. Ultimately, the nuns take a vow of martyrdom and are guillotined, Blanche among them.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Poulenc stayed a pretty tonal composer throughout his life, and this opera is no exception. Despite his affinity for contemporary popular music, he is essentially conservative in this way. Dialogues of the Carmelites is particularly retrospective, from its Neo-Baroque elements to its debt to prior composers and their masterpieces. The score is dedicated to Debussy (“who made me want to write”), as well as Monteverdi, Verdi, and Mussorgsky (“who served as my models here”). Accordingly, Wilfrid Mellers writes:
Les Carmélites harks back to the Monteverdian concept of a play in music, scrupulously faithful to the nuances of the text, which are emotionally intensified, but not radically changed, by the score…Monteverdi, speaking of his Orfeo, said that it mated recitative, which is speaking while singing, with arioso, which is singing while speaking. This applies to Poulenc’s opera which, given his empathy with the human voice and his command of French prosody, relates character both to the inner life of the psyche and to action in the world.
Further, while Dialogues of the Carmelites has a lot in common with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, both aesthetically and stylistically, Mellers points out that, unlike the latter, Poulenc’s opera is “more traditional in that it preserves affinities with classical French theatre music from Lully to Rameau.” This is very purposeful, and for the audience, it helps to situate the opera in ancien régime France.
Poulenc quotes his previous works quite a bit throughout the opera, but in particular, I’d like to highlight its relationship with his Stabat Mater. Poulenc considered the Stabat Mater to be a “study” for the opera, and, according to Mellers, the “grandly grim purgatorial motives” of both works were inspired by Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. Further, I’d like to point out a direct reference to the Stabat Mater at the beginning of Act III:
Compare that to the opening of X. Fac ut portem of the Stabat Mater:
Besides a few differences, it’s a pretty direct quote. This is significant, because calling up the Stabat Mater carries with it all the weight of that piece, particularly Movement X. Here is the Latin, with my English translation:
Fac ut portem Christi mortem, passionis fac consortem, et plagas recolere
Grant me to bear Christ’s death, share his Passion, and to contemplate his wounds
The Stabat Mater quote brings thematic depth to the opera by referencing the Passion—it suggests that the Carmelites, in their vow of martyrdom, will sacrifice themselves for the sins of the many. But what exactly are the nuns atoning for? On the surface, the opera’s antagonists appear to be the revolutionaries. As Mellers points out, however:
Dialogues des Carmélites is a psychological opera before it is either religious or political, its point being that the Revolution destroyed civilized tradition, human dignity, and spiritual grace without knowing what to put in their place.
The nuns’ sacrifice is not in the service of the ancien régime, it’s for the sake of humanity. The sin is not revolution in the abstract, it is the way in which the French Revolution was carried out—with a great deal of wanton, un-progressive destruction. That being said, the opera is pretty clearly sympathetic to the First and Second Estates (clergy and aristocracy), without much thought given to the revolutionaries’ rationale. (Tl;dr, although there’s nuance, the revolutionaries are still the antagonists.)
As far as full performances go, I quite like the two Met versions available, with Blanche sung by Maria Ewing (1987, cond. Manuel Rosenthal) and a recent production led by Isabel Leonard (2019, cond. Yannick Nézet-Séguin). Because Poulenc’s a relatively recent composer, we are fortunate enough to be able to listen to the OG French version, as well!
No. 6: Gloria
Written in 1960, the Gloria is one of Poulenc’s final pieces. It was commissioned by the Koussevitsky foundation in memory of the recently deceased Koussevitskys. According to Wilfrid Mellers, they asked for a symphony, but Poulenc “declined on the grounds that he was no symphonist;” they then asked for an organ concerto, and Poulenc told them he already had one. They then gave up and let him write whatever he wanted.
While in its setup it’s similar to the Stabat Mater, the Gloria’s vibes are pretty different. It sounds much more celebratory. Mellers quotes Poulenc as saying:
When I wrote this piece, I had in mind those frescoes by Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues. And also some serious Benedictine monks I had once seen revelling in a game of football.
Similarly, J. R. Fancher writes:
Poulenc’s many critics have often accused him of irreverence, which one must say has some truth, or of irreligiousness, which is a misinterpretation. Referring to the Romanesque architecture of his father’s southern France, he once said, “I like religious inspiration to express itself clearly in the sunshine with the same realism as we can see on those Romanesque capitals.”
I think these quotes provide some great insight into the logic behind Poulenc’s combining his lighthearted style with very serious religious texts. Not only is the Gloria very beautiful, I find this piece to be a very moving celebration of faith and life.
Anyway, much like the Stabat Mater, I think the Ozawa/Boston recording is a total banger. It’s my favorite to listen to, even if it is a bit…well, it’s Ozawa.
That’s all for today. I hope you check out these pieces and recordings—it will be soooo worth it!
Thanks for reading!
Casey