2. Piano music.

From Viñes, Poulenc learnt a clear but colourful style of piano playing, based on a subtle use of the sustaining pedal, and in his own piano music he was insistent on there being ‘beaucoup de pédale’. In his earlier pieces such a style gives body to the often arrogantly ‘popular’ tunes that abound, softening the ostinatos in the Sonata for piano duet (1918) and the quasi-Alberti bass in Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918). In Promenades (1921), written for Artur Rubinstein, a tougher harmonic language appears, based on 4ths and 7ths, and the texture is thicker than in any of his other works for the instrument.

The bulk of his piano music dates from the early 1930s, a time when he was reappraising the materials of his art. He later admitted that his reliance on past formulae (long pedal notes, arpeggios, repeated chords) was not always free of routine and that in this regard his familiarity with the piano could be a hindrance; his most inventive piano writing, he claimed, was to be found in his song accompaniments. Even so, a piece such as the Second Nocturne, Bal de jeunes filles, of 1933 is charming enough not to need supporting with claims of originality; it is in the manner of Chabrier but is still unmistakably Poulenc. His own favourite pieces were the 15 Improvisations, ranging in date from 1932 to 1959 and in dedicatee from Marguerite Long to Edith Piaf. This confirms that the piano was not always a vehicle for his deepest thoughts; he called the Thème variée (1951) an ‘oeuvre sérieuse’ and included a retrograde version of the theme in the coda to show that he was up with the latest serial ideas, but it is hardly the best of him. Inexplicably, he loathed what many would regard as his best piano work, Les soirées des Nazelles (1930–36), a suite of eight variations enclosed by a ‘Préambule’ and a ‘Final’ which might be described as the fusion of eclectic ideas in a glow of friendship and nostalgia. Ex.1 is typical of the suite and of Poulenc in the use of the dominant 13th, the pause after the end of the first phrase, the barely disguised sequence of 4ths in the bass and the circuitous route taken in bars 3–5 between the closely related keys of E minor and G major, a characteristically impertinent blend of the preceding and succeeding harmonic areas.

3. Chamber music.

Poulenc's output in this genre falls conveniently into three chronological groups. The four works of the first period (1918–26), each under ten minutes in length, are acidly witty, garnishing plain triadic and scalic themes with spicy dissonances. No doubt they share something of the spirit of the 18th-century divertissement, but the properties of harmonic and syntactical behaviour are not unfailingly observed. In the Sonata for clarinet and bassoon (1922) there are passages of jazz and bitonality, often leading to a mischievous cadence; in the Sonata for horn, trumpet and trombone (1922) the opening trumpet theme is one of Poulenc's ‘folksongs’, clearly a relation of many in Les biches, which needs the correction of only three ‘wrong’ notes in the first four bars for it to conform with 18th-century harmonic practice – as it were, Pergolesi with his wig awry. The central group comprises the Sextet for piano and wind (1932–9), one of his most popular works, and the sonatas for violin and piano (1942–3) and for cello and piano (1940–8). Poulenc admitted to being unhappy writing for solo strings and had written and destroyed two violin sonatas (1919 and 1924) before the surviving example, dedicated to the memory of Lorca and first performed by Ginette Neveu. Poulenc consigned a string quartet to the Paris sewers in 1947, rescuing three themes from it for his Sinfonietta. The final three sonatas for woodwind, like the last three chamber works of Debussy, form part of a set that Poulenc did not live to complete. They have already entered their appropriate repertories by virtue both of their technical expertise and of their profound beauty. In the Sonata for oboe and piano (1962), Poulenc's last work, dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev, his usual fast–slow–fast pattern of movements is altered to slow–fast–slow, in which the final ‘déploration’ fulfils both affective and instrumental requirements.

Poulenc, Francis