Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris on 7 January 1899 into a wealthy family. His father, Émile, a devout Catholic, ran with his brothers the pharmaceutical and chemical firm Poulenc Frères, later Rhône-Poulenc. His mother, Jenny Royer, from a family of Parisian craftsmen, was a good pianist who passed on to him a love of music, from Mozart to Chopin, and of popular song. Francis began piano with her at five. All his life he kept this double heritage: his father’s religious gravity and his mother’s Parisian whimsy.

His father wanted him to complete a classical education before thinking of music. But in 1914 Francis became a pupil of the pianist Ricardo Viñes, friend of Debussy and Ravel, who trained him at the piano and introduced him to Erik Satie, Georges Auric and avant-garde artistic circles. His mother died in 1915 and his father in 1917: orphaned at eighteen, he was taken in by his sister. In 1917 his Rapsodie nègre for baritone and ensemble, a humorous work on invented poems, was a first success and caught Stravinsky’s attention.

After military service he took composition lessons from 1921 to 1924 with Charles Koechlin, as he had never studied at the Conservatoire. In 1920 the critic Henri Collet grouped him with his friends Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre under the name “Les Six”. Around Jean Cocteau they championed simple, clear, joyful music inspired by music hall, circus and song. Poulenc then composed light, witty pieces such as the Mouvements perpétuels for piano.

In 1924 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned from him Les Biches for the Ballets Russes, a ballet evoking an elegant, slightly ambiguous party in a 1920s drawing room, with sets by Marie Laurencin: it was a great success. In 1928 he composed for the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska the Concert champêtre, reviving the harpsichord, and in 1932 the Concerto for Two Pianos, which he played himself with his childhood friend Jacques Février. He also formed a famous duo with the baritone Pierre Bernac, giving recitals with him for twenty-five years and writing for him many of his 150 or so songs.

In 1936 the sudden death of the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car accident shook him deeply. A few days later he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour and rediscovered the Catholic faith of his childhood. He at once composed the Litanies à la Vierge noire and then the Mass in G (1937). From then on his work alternated between two faces, summed up in a famous phrase: “half monk, half rascal”.

During the Occupation he composed the cantata Figure humaine (1943), on poems by Paul Éluard, a secret hymn to freedom ending with the poem “Liberté”. Between 1940 and 1945 he composed The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, for piano and narrator, after Jean de Brunhoff’s books, at the request of a little cousin who found the music he was playing too boring. In 1947 he premiered Les Mamelles de Tirésias, a surrealist comic opera on a text by Guillaume Apollinaire.

His masterpiece is the opera Dialogues des Carmélites, premiered in 1957 at La Scala in Milan, after Georges Bernanos: the story of nuns guillotined during the French Revolution who go to the scaffold singing the Salve Regina. He then composed La Voix humaine (1959), on a text by Cocteau, the luminous, joyful Gloria (1961) and sonatas for wind instruments such as the Clarinet Sonata and Oboe Sonata (1962). He died of a heart attack in Paris on 30 January 1963. He is one of the most performed French composers of the twentieth century.