68 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
The composer makes the prospect of apocalypse seem like a moment of grace.
MUSICAL EVENTS
DRUNKEN ANGELS
In Poulenc’s masterly songs, the solemn and the sensual collide.BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
A
t the end of 1940, after Paris had
fallen under German occupation,
the spectacularly refined French com-
poser Francis Poulenc made a musical
setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem
“Sanglots,” or “Sobs.” Poulenc was in
no way a political artist: although he
steered clear of collaboration with the
Nazis, he also held back from an ac-
tive role in the Resistance. Still, it is
difficult not to hear the song in the
context of the time, particularly when
it arrives at its wrenching conclusion:
And nothing will be free until the
end of time
Let us leave all to the dead
And hide our sobs“Sanglots” is the last of five songs
in a cycle deceptively titled “Banal-
ités.” In a demonstration of the stealthy
power of Poulenc’s art, the grouping
swerves from merry, irreverent vi-
gnettes to a near-fathomless sorrow.
In “Sanglots,” the words “Et rien”
(“And nothing”) are set to a plung-
ing F-sharp octave, with “Et” empha-
sized to the point that it becomes a
cry from the heart. With the next
words, “ne sera libre,” the vocal line
leaps back up the octave and then de-
scends the slightly narrower interval
of the major seventh, landing on
G-natural, which clashes against the
F-sharp-minor tonality. The harmonythen softens from minor to major,
with a D-sharp adding an almost sen-
timental sweetness. Poulenc makes
the prospect of apocalypse seem like
a respite, a moment of grace. The sobs
of the title hardly register, vanishing
into a melancholy haze.
“Sanglots” emerged during a season
of doom-laden music: in a prisoner-
of-war camp in Germany, Olivier Mes-
siaen was writing the “Quartet for
the End of Time,” which finds its way
to a state of ethereal bliss. But Pou-
lenc may not have been thinking solely
about the war: he had, after all, been
waiting to set “Sanglots” for some time.
Rather, the song evokes a consuming
descent into an inner world of mem-
ory and regret. Earlier in the poem,
Apollinaire writes, “This is the song
of the dreamers / Who tore out their
heart / And held it in their right hand.”
Then: “Here are our hands that life
has enslaved.” Seldom have such com-
plex, cloistered feelings been captured
in music of such gasping beauty. With
Poulenc, these wonders of compres-
sion are almost routine.I
’ve been holed up in Poulenc’s world
on account of two absorbing new
books: Roger Nichols’s “Poulenc: A
Biography” (Yale) and Graham John-
son’s “Poulenc: The Life in the Songs”
(Liveright). Both do justice to a com-
poser who has often been overshad-
owed by the giants with whom he
shared the early and mid-twentieth
century. He was no originator, like
Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor did he
possess Britten’s or Shostakovich’s
command of manifold genres. He was,
however, a composer of rare gifts, par-
ticularly in the setting of sacred and
secular texts. As the decades pass, he
grows in stature, and his aloofness from
musical party politics matters less.
Nichols, a British scholar who has
written about Debussy, Ravel, and
Messiaen, gives an assured overview
of Poulenc’s life and work, applying
a light touch that is appropriate to
the subject’s man-about-town façade.
Poulenc was born in 1899, into upper-
middle-class comfort; his father was
the co-owner of a family chemical
company that eventually morphed
into the giant firm of Rhône-Poulenc.
When the composer was in his teens,