Francis Poulenc

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Francis Poulenc and Wanda Landowska .

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc [ fʀɑ̃ˈsis puˈlɛ̃k ] (born January 7, 1899 in Paris , † January 30, 1963 ibid) was a French pianist and composer .

life and work

Poulenc was born in Paris. His mother taught him to play the piano , music was an integral part of family life. At the age of 15 he became a piano student of Ricardo Viñes ; “Je lui dois tout” (“I owe everything to him”), he said in a 1953 interview. In 1918, while he was still doing military service, he composed three miniatures . From 1921 he received musical training from Charles Koechlin .

Influenced by Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Chevalier as well as by French vaudeville , after the First World War Poulenc joined a group of young composers led by Erik Satie and the writer Jean Cocteau , known as Les Six , whose members rejected Impressionism in favor of greater simplicity and clarity.

Some of the Six's style found its way into Poulenc's own musical work. He adopted techniques from the Dadaists and was influenced by popular melodies. A charming vulgarity seemed more important to him than the supposedly deep feeling of romance . He was an eminent pianist, and piano music dominated Poulenc's early works. His friendship with some of the Montparnasse poets , including Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard , led to the composition of numerous songs for their texts. He also wrote many songs for the baritone of the same age, Pierre Bernac (1899–1979), whom he met in 1926 and accompanied as a pianist for 25 years (1934–1959).

In 1936, after the accidental death of his friend, the composer and critic Pierre Octave Ferroud , and the visit to the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, he turned to the Catholic faith. This was reflected in his compositions in a number of sacred works, which are often seen as his most important works, even if he himself saw his focus in the composition of operas .

In the summer of 1943 Poulenc composed the cantata for a cappella double choir Figure humaine (“Human Face”). In it, too, he set poems by his favorite poet Paul Éluard to music. During the time of the German occupation of France , Poulenc repeatedly received anonymously texts from the French resistance , including those that he identified as poems by Éluard. In these poems, more or less covert calls for resistance were made. In the famous poem Ode à la liberté , which concludes the composition, this happens very openly. Poulenc had to secretly set these texts to music. He had them secretly printed by the publisher Paul Rouart so that they could be performed immediately on the day of the longed-for liberation. Poulenc saw his work as an act of faith and confidence. For him, this was also the reason for limiting himself to the human voice, for not using instruments. The composition was smuggled to England before the end of the war , where it was premiered in an English translation in January 1945. The French premiere did not take place until 1947.

For his first opera, premiered in 1947 at the Comical Opera of Paris , Poulenc again used texts by Apollinaire as inspiration and worked on the basis of his Les mamelles de Tirésias .

The 1957 opera Dialogues des Carmélites , composed on behalf of Ricordi for La Scala in Milan , is probably Poulenc's best-known. The plot is based on the fate of the 16 Carmelites of Compiègne , who were guillotined during the French Revolution , and on the novel The Last on the Scaffold by Gertrude von le Fort . Poulenc's last opera was a tragedy in one act called La voix humaine ( The Human Voice ) and premiered on February 6, 1959 at the Comical Opera in Paris.

In addition to these operas, Poulenc wrote a concerto each for organ , harpsichord , piano and two pianos, as well as masses and numerous chamber music works. He used Mozart and Saint-Saëns as role models over and over again . Since 1995 his works have been collected with the Francis Poulenc Catalog raisonné (FP). Since 1958 he was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

The relationship between Poulenc and Bernac went far beyond concerting together. Some authors today regard Poulenc as one of the first composers to publicly acknowledge his homosexual tendencies. It is known that he had his first steady relationship with the painter and designer Richard Chanlaire (1896–1973): "You have changed my life, you are the sunshine of my thirty years, a reason for living and working." He confessed: "You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality." In 1928 he dedicated his Concerto champêtre to him . Although Poulenc had several relationships with women, he never publicly admitted fatherhood for his daughter Marie-Ange. His admission that he did not find his very good friend Raymonde Linossier desirable, even though he intended to marry her (her death in 1930 prevented this), puts his true interest in women more in question.

Francis Poulenc died of heart failure in Paris on January 30, 1963. His grave is in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Works

Stage works

Film music

  • La Belle au bois dormant FP76
  • La Duchesse de Langeais FP116
  • Le Voyageur sans bagage FP123
  • La Nuit de la Saint-Jean FP124
  • Le Voyage en Amérique FP149

Spiritual works

  • Processional pour la crémation d'un mandarin FP1
  • Litanies à la Vierge Noire (1936)
  • Mass in G major FP89 (1937)
  • Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence FP97 (1938–1939), the following four motets are summarized below :
    • Timor et tremor
    • Vinea mea electa
    • Tenebrae factae sunt
    • Tristis est anima mea
  • Exultate Deodorant FP109 (1941)
  • Quatre petites prières de Saint François d'Assise FP142 (1948)
  • Stabat mater FP148 (1950)
  • Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël FP152 (1952), includes the motets
    • O magnum mysterium
    • Quem vidistis pastores dicite
    • Videntes stellam
    • Hodie Christ natus est
  • Gloria FP177 (1959), world premiere in Boston (1961)
  • Salve Regina , SATB, May 1941

Further choral works

  • Sept chansons pour chœur mixedte (1936)
  • Un soir de neige (1944)
  • Figure humaine - cantata for double choir a cappella FP120 (Human Face, 1943), first performance in January 1945 in London
  • Chanson à boire

Chamber music

  • Sonata for 2 clarinets op.7 FP7 (1918/1945)
  • Sonata for piano four hands FP8 (1918)
  • Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano op.12 FP12 (1918)
  • Quatuor à cordes I FP28 (1921), destroyed?
  • Sonata for clarinet and bassoon op.32 FP32 (1922/1945)
  • Sonata for horn, trumpet and trombone op.33 FP33 (1922/1945)
  • Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano op.39 FP39 (1924)
  • Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano op.43 FP43 (1926)
  • Sonata No. 3 for violin and piano op.54 FP54 (1929)
  • Villanelle for recorder and piano op.74 FP74 (1934)
  • Suite française for 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, percussion and harpsichord op.80 FP80 (1935)
  • Sextet for piano and wind quintet op.100 FP100 (1932–39)
  • Sonata No. 4 for violin and piano op.119 FP119 (1942–43 / 1949)
  • Quatuor à cordes II FP133 (1945–47), destroyed
  • Sonata for violoncello and piano op.143 FP143 (1940–48)
  • Trois mouvements perpétuels for 9 instruments op.14 FP14 (1946)
  • Sonata for flute and piano op.164 FP164 (1956–57)
  • Elégie for horn and piano op.168 FP168 (1957)
  • Sarabande for guitar op.179 FP179 (1960)
  • Sonata for clarinet and piano op.184 FP184 (1962)
  • Sonata for oboe and piano op.185 FP185 (1962)

Piano works

  • Impromptus [6] FP21 (1920–21, rev. 1924 and 1939)
  • Trois Études de Pianola FP26
  • Nocturnes [1–8] FP56 (1930–38)
  • Feuillets d'album FP68 (1933)
  • Improvisations 13-14 FP170 (1958)
  • Improvisation 15 FP176 (homage to Edith Piaf, 1959)

Songs

  • Banalities (1940)
  • Tel jour tel nuit (1937)
  • Sept chansons d'Apollinaire et d'Eluard (1936)
  • Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon (1943)
  • Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard (1934)
  • Epitaphe (1930)
  • Le Bestiaires (1919)
  • Allons plus vite (1937)
  • Dans le jardin d'Anna (1937)
  • Miroir brulantes (1937)
  • La Grenouillère (1937)
  • Chansons gaillardes FP42 (1925-26)
  • Airs chantés FP46 (1927)
  • Métamorphoses FP121 (1943)
  • La Travail de peintre FP161 (1956)

Marches

Orchestral works

literature

  • Francis Poulenc: J'écris ce qui me chante , textes et entretiens, réunis, présentés et annotés par Nicolas Southon, Fayard, Paris, 2011, ISBN 978-2-213-63670-2
  • Wilfrid Mellers: Francis Poulenc , Oxford [u. a.]: Oxford University Press, 1993, repr. 2003, ISBN 0-19-816338-X
  • George Russell Keck: Francis Poulenc. A bio-bibliography , Greenwood Press, New York 1990, ISBN 0-313-25562-8

Web links

Commons : Francis Poulenc  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Honorary Members: Francis Poulenc. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 19, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Champagne, Mario (2002): Francis Poulenc ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Retrieved January 5, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.glbtq.com
  3. ^ Benjamin Ivry (1996). Francis Poulenc , 20th-Century Composers series. Phaidon Press Limited. ISBN 0-7148-3503-X .
  4. ↑ Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) (2001). Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day . New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-22974-X .
personal data
SURNAME Poulenc, Francis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Poulenc, Francis Jean Marcel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French pianist and composer
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1963
Place of death Paris