Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) was the most charming of the 20th-century French composers and the most deceptive. His music sounds easy — witty, melodic, light, full of café-music rhythms and Parisian sophistication — and then something shifts and you realize you’re in the middle of something painful and deeply felt. He was a member of Les Six, the loose grouping of French composers who reacted against the lushness of late Romanticism and the mysticism of Debussy in favor of wit, clarity, and the sounds of popular music. He was their best representative.

He had two major creative registers. The first is irreverent comedy: the ballet Les Biches (1923), the Mouvements perpétuels for piano, the witty songs and chamber music. The second is sacred anguish, which emerged after the death of a close friend in 1936 sent him back to the Catholic faith he had lost. The Litanies à la Vierge noire (1936) marked the turn. The Mass in G major (1937), the Stabat Mater (1950), and the Gloria (1959) are works of genuine religious gravity, surprising from someone who spent so much of his career being funny.

His opera Les dialogues des Carmélites (1957) is his masterpiece — the story of French Carmelite nuns who were guillotined during the Terror for refusing to abandon their vows. The opera ends in silence broken by the sound of the guillotine falling, one by one, as each nun is executed while the survivors sing their final prayer. It is among the most devastating endings in opera.

StyleFrench clarity and wit above an undertow of Catholic melancholy. Melody that sounds simple but moves in unexpected directions. Brilliance and grief, sometimes in the same bar.

Listen: Dialogues des Carmélites (complete opera — don’t skip the ending). Then the Piano Concerto in C minor. Then the song cycle Fiançailles pour rire — a different, lighter Poulenc.