6. Choral music.

Several minor secular works such as the Chansons françaises (1945–6) continue the French tradition of Janequin and Sermisy, but Poulenc's early study of Bach chorales also left its mark. His masterpiece in the genre, Figure humaine (1943), is a highly complex setting of words by Eluard; although instrumental support would have reduced the performers' troubles, the composer wanted a pure choral tone in order to capture the mood of supplication.

After his return to Roman Catholicism in 1936, Poulenc produced a steady flow of religious choral works. Stretching over a quarter of a century they display a remarkable unity of tone as well as an increasing complexity in language and resources. The Litanies à la vierge noire (1936), written in the week after his visit to Rocamadour, are for a three-part female chorus in a conventionally modal style that avoids conventional cadences, the organ punctuating the discourse with fervently chromatic chords. The Mass in G (1937) is ‘more sober, more Romanesque’ than his next major work in the genre, the Stabat mater (1950–51) for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra, a powerful and profoundly moving work whose choral writing enlarges on the serious implications in that of Les mamelles. In the Gloria (1959–60) the choral writing is unsanctimonious to the point of wilfulness, as in the stressing of the phrase ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’, while the ostinatos, the soaring soprano and the matchless tunes proclaim Poulenc a believer who had, in Tippett's phrase, ‘contracted in to abundance’. Finally, the Sept répons des ténèbres (1961–2) pursue the same lush orchestral path but with a new concentration of thought, epitomized in the minute but spine-chilling codetta to ‘Caligaverunt oculi mei’ where Poulenc showed that his recognition of Webern was neither a matter of distant respect nor a piece of time-serving diplomacy.

Poulenc, Francis

7. Songs and other works for solo voice.

In the Rapsodie nègre (1917) Poulenc showed a marked affinity with words which were less than explicit, but his setting of six poems from Apollinaire's Le bestiaire (1918–19) is an extraordinarily individual and competent piece of work for a young man of 20, in which he captured the mood of the tiny, elusive poems, often by simple yet surprising means such as abnormal word-setting (as with ‘mélancolie’, the last word of all). The scoring is at once economical and faintly ‘impressionist’, but in Cocardes (1919) he imitated the sound of a street band, and Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale was also surely in his mind. There followed a period of 12 years before Poulenc again wrote songs by which he set any store, the Trois poèmes de Louise Lalanne (1931) – a fictitious poet born of Apollinaire's lively imagination; the second poem is by him, the others by his mistress Marie Laurencin. Apollinaire and Max Jacob provided the texts for the other vocal works of 1931–2. Poulenc's favourite was Le bal masqué, a nostalgic romp in which the ‘côté paysan’ of his nature is uncluttered by any kind of chic.

On 3 April 1935 Poulenc and Bernac gave their first public recital, including the first performance of the Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard. Poulenc had been attracted by Eluard's poetry since adolescence but there was ‘a stillness about it which I did not understand’. In the Cinq poèmes ‘for the first time, the key is grating in the lock’, and the door opened wide the following year in the cycle of love-songs Tel jour, telle nuit, a masterpiece worthy to stand beside Fauré's La bonne chanson. It lacks the common touch of some other Poulenc songs, the sentimentality of Hôtel or the earthiness of the Chansons villageoises, but otherwise it is highly characteristic. Where a single song contains more than one tempo, Poulenc followed Satie's lead in making them ‘successive’ rather than ‘progressive’; there is only one rallentando in the whole cycle; five of the nine songs move at a single, inexorable speed. However, Poulenc planned at least three of them (nos.3, 5 and 8) as transitions between their more important neighbours; in particular he intended the final climax of no.8, Figure de force, ‘to make more keenly perceptible the kind of silence that marks the beginning of “Nous avons fait la nuit”’. Often piano and voice work on independent dynamic levels, a dimension of songwriting not widely explored before his time. The texture of the accompaniment is never complex but there must always be ‘beaucoup de pédale’.

From this point there was little change in the technique of his songwriting, rather a continual refinement of means, an attempt to say more and more with less and less, a search for the pure line he admired so much in Matisse. This tendency reached its utmost point with La fraîcheur et le feu (1950), ‘the most carefully wrought’ of his songs, being a setting of a single Eluard poem in seven sections, in which two contrasted tempos (mostly crotchet = 120 and crotchet = 66–9) are treated as structural elements. Poulenc's last important setting of Eluard was of texts he commissioned from the poet to form Le travail du peintre (1956), a homage to seven contemporary painters. His last set of songs was La courte paille (1960), written for Denise Duval to sing to her young son and containing the hilarious patter song ‘Ba, be, bi, bo, bu’, but his last significant work for solo voice, La dame de Monte Carlo (1961), a monologue for soprano and orchestra to words by Cocteau, shows, like La voix humaine, that Poulenc understood all too well the terrors of depression.

In general, the sections that make up a Poulenc song are quite short and often built of two- or four-bar phrases. His technique has much in common with the surrealist poets whom he set, in the value he placed on the resonance of the individual elements. The opening of a song was rarely the first thing he composed. Usually a line or two would come at a time, and in the case of Montparnasse (a song of 20 lines) the process was spread over a period of four years. Furthermore, ideas always came to him in particular keys and he never transposed them; for example, D major seems to have been a key of relaxation and in it the fourth degree tends to be sharpened. Towards the end of the compositional process, therefore, he might be confronted with a collection of quite disparate tonal areas which he then had to combine to reach the listener as a single experience. Much though it annoyed him, the legend of Poulenc the rich playboy of music, from whom mélodies flowed with every exhalation of breath, is the perfect compliment to this most scrupulous of craftsmen.

Poulenc, Francis