A Miniaturist: Piano Music by Francis Poulenc

Would you be insulted if I asked you if you'd ever heard of Francis Poulenc? I am suddenly being made aware that knowledge I assumed shared by all musical­ly literate people has become esoteric. In the latest issue of The Gramophone, John Steane, in his column on vocal records, speaks of Pasquale Amato, Celestina Boninsegna, and Edmond Clement as "less well-remembered," meaning most people have no idea who they are. But then Poulenc has always been something of a special case.

His name recalls to me a slightly in­delicate event to which I was party 50 years ago. I worked in a Washington, DC music store at the time. In the basement was a sort of storage room littered with odd records, dumped there for whatever reason. Anyhow, curiosity saw to it that I combed through them on occasion, on the way to and from the comfort facility in the adjoining cubicle. Alan Bours, my coworker in the record department, had never heard of Poulenc (pronounced "Poo­LONK"). One day he took a phone call and, looking puzzled, he turned to me and said, "Do you know anything about Poulenc?" "Yeah," I replied, "there's one in the basement." Alan laughed so hard he couldn't finish the call.

Poulenc, as everyone used to know, was one of Les Six, an influential group of French modernists that didn't exist, save in some writer's head. In the period just after WWII, when I was working in New York, he was regarded by concert singers as the Great White Hope of the art song. In fact he probably qualifies as the most im­portant writer of the genre among Fren­chmen since Debussy and Faure. A few years ago EMI produced a big multi-record all-star album of his complete song output. He was essentially a miniaturist, but his organ concerto has had some currency, and both of his operas, Dialogues des carmtlites and Les mamelles de Tirlsias (Tiresias' breasts), have met with extraor­dinary success at the Met in recent times.

Poulenc played the piano, though I have read somewhere that he was no virtuoso, nor does he seem to have essayed virtuoso works on records. He is primarily remembered as an accompanist. He toured in that capacity with his lifelong compaWould you be insulted if I asked you if you'd ever heard of Francis Poulenc? I am suddenly being made aware that knowledge I assumed shared by all musical­ly literate people has become esoteric. In the latest issue of The Gramophone, John Steane, in his column on vocal records, speaks of Pasquale Amato, Celestina Boninsegna, and Edmond Clement as "less well-remembered," meaning most people have no idea who they are. But then Poulenc has always been something of a special case.

His name recalls to me a slightly in­delicate event to which I was party 50 years ago. I worked in a Washington, DC music store at the time. In the basement was a sort of storage room littered with odd records, dumped there for whatever reason. Anyhow, curiosity saw to it that I combed through them on occasion, on the way to and from the comfort facility in the adjoining cubicle. Alan Bours, my coworker in the record department, had never heard of Poulenc (pronounced "Poo­LONK"). One day he took a phone call and, looking puzzled, he turned to me and said, "Do you know anything about Poulenc?" "Yeah," I replied, "there's one in the base­

ment." Alan laughed so hard he couldn't finish the call.

Poulenc, as everyone used to know, was one of Les Six, an influential group of French modernists that didn't exist, save in some writer's head. In the period just after WWII, when I was working in New York, he was regarded by concert singers as the Great White Hope of the art song. In fact he probably qualifies as the most im­portant writer of the genre among Fren­chmen since Debussy and Faure. A few years ago EM! produced a big multi-record all-star album of his complete song output. He was essentially a miniaturist, but his organ concerto has had some currency, and both of his operas, Dialogues des carmtlites and Les mamelles de Tirlsias (Tiresias' breasts), have met with extraor­dinary success at the Met in recent times.

Poulenc played the piano, though I have read somewhere that he was no virtuoso, nor does he seem to have essayed virtuoso works on records. He is primarily remembered as an accompanist. He toured in that capacity with his lifelong companion, the baritone Pierre Bernac, with whom he frequently recorded. He also ac­companied other singers on disc, though almost entirely in his own songs-the English mezzo Claire Croiza, Suzanne Peignot, Lucienne Tragin, Genevieve Touraine (Gerard Souzay's sister), etc. He also left a few records of his own piano music, including the concerted ballet Aubade.

The piano was, however, very important to Poulenc: he did all his composing at the keyboard. He probably could have done so away from it, but he saw it (in Tchaikov­sky's words) as a "means of contact with musical reality." A fair percentage of his output, however, was for the instrument itself: Grove lists around 35 titles, in­dividual and collective. His composition teacher had been Charles Koechlin, who is only now being rediscovered; his piano teacher was Ricardo Vines, who had premiered many of the compositions of Ravel and Debussy.

Poulenc was a great admirer of Mozart and Chopin, but his own impulse came from Chabrier by way of Satie. Except perhaps in some of his religious music, he found profundity alien to his nature; there was a good deal of the stuff of French popular music in him. In fact it was only fairly late in his life that he began to be taken seriously.

As a piano composer, Poulenc was essen­tially a miniaturist. Les soirees de Nazelles (Evenings at Nazelles), a set of eight varia­tions with a "preamble" and a finale, is perhaps his most ambitious work in this medium. (The liner notes seem to imply that Nazelles was his country estate in the Touraine, but information gleaned elsewhere names it "Le Grand Coteau.") Anyhow, each variation is supposed to depict a regular visitor at the Poulenc menage, though just who remains obscure.

F.E. Kirby (A Short History of Keyboard Music), noting its "brilliant conclusion," cites the Italianate suite Napoli as another important work, which undoubtedly deriv­ed from Poulenc's Italian journey with Milhaud in 1922. His own favorite pieces are said to have been the 15 Improvisations written from 1932 to 1959.