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he fell into the eccentric orbit of Erik
Satie, who had a great influence on
his early style. Poulenc was a core
member of the enfant-terrible collec-
tive promoted by Jean Cocteau as Les
Six. His first triumph was the explo-
sively tuneful ballet “Les Biches,”
which the Ballets Russes premièred
in 1924.
Poulenc’s life story is customarily
organized around a central epiphanic
event: his visit, in 1936, to the shrine
of the Black Virgin, in Rocamadour,
in the South of France. The composer
seems to have experienced that pil-
grimage as the beginning of a spiritual
awakening, one that led to an extraor-
dinary series of religious and religiously
themed works: the “Litanies of the
Black Virgin,” the Stabat Mater, the
Gloria, two sets of motets, and his only
large-scale opera, “Dialogues of the
Carmelites.” These scores rank with
the most formidable religious music
of the twentieth century, on a par with
that of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ustvol-
skaya, and Pärt, although their inti-
mate, confiding mode of address oc-
cupies a category of its own.
While Nichols, in his retelling of
the Rocamadour episode, does not
deny its significance, he qualifies it a
bit. Poulenc had been raised a Cath-
olic, and religiosity had been smolder-
ing in his work all along. Therefore,
Nichols writes, the experience marked
“the reappearance of something long
hidden beneath worldly cares.” Com-
plicating the picture is Poulenc’s dis-
orderly love life, which consisted of
many fleeting gay encounters, a few
longer-lasting attachments with men,
and a mysterious assignation with a
woman that yielded a daughter. This
activity may only have intensified after
the religious turn, leading to psycho-
logical conflicts. Johnson, in his study
of the songs, speculates that the com-
poser suffered from sexual addiction,
and that an inability to see his part-
ners as social equals consigned him
to loneliness.
Both accounts undermine the pop-
ular image of Poulenc—carefully cul-
tivated by the man himself—as the
epitome of Parisian suavity and ebul-
lience. He was, in fact, a turbulent,
even tortured character: sometimes
arrogant, sometimes self-castigating,
sometimes lovable, sometimes impos-
sible. That complexity only adds to
the interest of the music. The critic
Claude Rostand famously commented
that Poulenc was a combination of
“moine et voyou”—monk and rogue.
Many of the composer’s works fall
cleanly into one category or the other,
but some of the strongest fuse the two
personalities in one. The Organ Con-
certo (1938) interlaces brimstone dis-
sonances with rollicking fairground
strains. The Gloria (1959-60) exudes
an almost scandalous joy, as if a crowd
of drunken angels were dancing down
the boulevards.G
raham Johnson is a veteran Brit-
ish pianist and accompanist who
has made himself indispensable to
the art of the song. His most signifi-
cant achievement is a forty-disk re-
corded survey, with more than sixty
singers, of Schubert’s complete Lieder,
for the Hyperion label. He has also
published a Schubert-song compan-
ion, which runs to three thousand
pages. Johnson’s devotion to Poulenc
is scarcely less intense. In the nineteen-
seventies, he worked closely with the
French baritone Pierre Bernac, Pou-
lenc’s favorite collaborator, and ac-
quired an encyclopedic knowledge
not only of the songs but also of the
milieu from which they sprang. In
2013, Hyperion released Johnson’s
complete survey of the Poulenc songs.
His new Poulenc book is a greatly ex-
panded version of the already lavish
and lively program notes that accom-
panied the recordings.
Johnson is convinced that Poulenc
was not only the premier French song-
writer of his time—a claim that few
would dispute—but also a crucial figure
in the international vocal canon. I lis-
tened to the songs in the company of
Johnson’s book, and came away fully
persuaded by his argument. He makes
clear that Poulenc had a deep grasp
of the often challenging twentieth-cen-
tury poets he set to music—Apolli-
naire, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Lou-
ise de Vilmorin, Louis Aragon—and
that he illuminated their work as star-
tlingly as Schubert and Schumann
lit up Heinrich Heine. In a discus-
sion of “Sanglots,” Johnson points out
that Poulenc finds musical analogiesfor Apollinaire’s singular structure, in
which two distinct poems seem to be
interwoven.
The songs encompass a huge range
of moods: silly, solemn, naughty, aus-
tere, agitated, serene, joyous, desolate.
When Poulenc puts his mind to it,
he can knock out an indelible tune
fit for Edith Piaf or Maurice Cheva-
lier. The gloriously hummable waltz
in the 1940 song “Les Chemins de
l’Amour” (“The Paths of Love”) is one
that you will swear you’ve heard be-
fore—and, in fact, you have, in “Der
Rosenkavalier.” But, Johnson notes,
Poulenc changes the melody enough
to make it his own: “So like, and yet
suddenly so unlike: this is musical leg-
erdemain of an extraordinarily auda-
cious order.” The composer’s inclina-
tion toward seedier environments is
evident in his knowing treatment of
Apollinaire’s “Allons Plus Vite” (“Get
a Move On”), which evokes prosti-
tutes, pimps, and johns circulating
on the Boulevard de Grenelle. The
song begins in a wistful evening mood
and ends with a dark, driving pattern
in the bass—an image of frustrated
sexual compulsion, Johnson plausi-
bly suggests.
The songs I treasure most are those
in which a finespun theme runs through
a cool, airy harmonic field, like a sliver
of cloud hanging against red twilight.
“Sanglots” is a supreme example; my
favorite recording, which can be found
in Erato’s survey of Poulenc’s com-
plete works, is by the heartbreakingly
expressive American baritone Wil-
liam Parker, who died, of aids, in 1993.
Parker also gives a potent rendition
of the setting of Éluard’s “Tu Vois le
Feu du Soir” (“You See the Fire of Eve-
ning”), which is itself couched in a sun-
set world, with warmth and chill inter-
mingled. The final chord of C-sharp
minor glides into a misty, fragrant at-
mosphere, like Death in evening wear.
Throughout his career, Poulenc was
a master of endings: in place of the
musical clichés of wrapping up and
taking leave, he often deploys quiet
shocks, which send the mind spinning
through the silence that follows. Such
moments confirm Poulenc’s affable
boast: “In the field of song I fear no
one, and being the best is always very
pleasant.”