Notes for: July 19, 2016
Francis Poulenc is now considered one of the 20th century’s leading French composers. During the first 50 years of his life, there was a tendency in professional musical circles to downgrade his music. In a period of atonality and other experimentation, he wrote in a simple musical style, which unsophisticated listeners could understand. Since World War II, musicians and critics have had second thoughts about Poulenc’s work. Mainly, this reassessment has occurred due to The Dialogues of the Carmelites, his opera about a group of doomed nuns in the French Revolution, which has become a staple of the opera repertory. But a number of his other works — the Concert Champêtre for harpsichord and orchestra, his piano pieces, his instrumental sonatas and chamber music, and his songs — also assure him a permanent place in 20th century music.
Poulenc first won recognition as a member of Les Sixes, a group of rebellious French composers that also included Darius Milhaud. The group’s primary bond was a common reaction against the emotionality of César Franck and his disciples, and the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. These French composers, in the group’s judgment, had abandoned the classic French principles of restraint and clarity. To restore these Gallic elements, each member of Les Sixes went his or her own way. Poulenc’s style can perhaps best be defined by his own analysis: “I’m a melancholy person who loves to laugh like all melancholy persons.” As suggested by this paradox, there are two contradictory strains in his music — one of wit, even sardonic humor and irony; the other of melancholy, even tragedy as in The Dialogues of the Carmelites. Beyond these conflicting strains, his music is marked by the use of spare harmony and dissonance, a search for new combinations of instrumental sound, a sense of elegance and a gift for melody.
When it came to chamber music, Poulenc much preferred the sound of wind instruments to the sound of strings. Of his thirteen chamber works, ten involved no string instruments at all other than the piano. Furthermore, he made a study of wind instruments, and his writing for them was skillful and idiomatic, exploring both their tonal resources and expressive possibilities. He also had a sure grasp of how to combine the winds effectively with one another and with a piano. Building on this lifelong interest, in the late 1950s Poulenc conceived the idea of writing four sonatas, one for each of the standard woodwind instruments – the flute, the clarinet, the oboe and the bassoon – with piano accompaniment. He finished the first three, but suffered a sudden fatal heart attack before he could write the fourth.
The flute sonata was written in the winter of 1956-57 on commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the U.S. Library of Congress. It was first performed at the Scarborough Festival in June 1957, by flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and Poulenc, and they played it frequently until Poulenc’s death six years later. In 1959, in fact, Poulenc selected the sonata for a 60th birthday concert of his favorite compositions.
The sonata reflects Poulenc’s contrasting moods of melancholy and joy; the first movement is appropriately titled Allegro malinconico and the mood is mournful. But the melancholy is intermittent and offset by a middle section in better humor. Note at the outset the little rhythmic pattern of four 32nd notes followed by a quarter note; this pattern is repeated again and again, giving the music a flowing character.
The slow movement is an extended song for the flute — slow in tempo but more introspective than depressed. The third movement is completely lively and spirited, with references to the main theme of the first movement and its rhythmic figure.
Notes for: July 25, 2023
The preface to the 1994 edition of Poulenc’s Sonata for Flute and Piano offers an inside look at the sometimes drawn-out birth of a piece of music, told through letters from the composer.
September. 1952, Poulenc to a friend:
“Momentarily I have abandoned the Sonata for Two Pianos for a Sonata for Flute which suddenly took shape at the Austerlitz station last Thursday.”
1953, To his publisher:
“I am just finishing my Sonata for Two Pianos. God knows if I will ever take up the Flute Sonata again because I am going to write a large opera for La Scala based on The Dialogues of the Carmelites.”
1955, To his publisher:
“After the summer I hope to take up again my idea for a Sonata for Flute.”
Early 1956, To his publisher:
“Perhaps this summer I will finish the Sonata for Flute.”
Spring 1956:
The chief of the music division of the Library of Congress offered Poulenc a commission for a new piece. Poulenc at first declined – he was finishing the orchestration of his opera, he said – but then accepted. In a phone call to his friend the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, Poulenc said: “Jean-Pierre, you know you’ve always wanted me to write a sonata for flute and piano? Well, I’m going to. And the best thing is that the Americans will pay for it! I’ve been commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation to write a chamber piece in memory of Elizabeth Coolidge. I never knew her, so I think of the piece as yours.”
June 1957:
Poulenc mailed the completed manuscript to the Library of Congress, just days before he and Rampal premiered it to great acclaim at the Strasbourg Festival.
The flutist James Galway has called Poulenc “a master of the mood swing” – an apt description of both his personality and his music. Poulenc was both an irreverent, happy-go-lucky hedonist who tried never to appear serious, and a deeply religious Catholic given to bouts of melancholy. The Flute Sonata, like so much else that he wrote, shows sides of his complex personality. The first movement, Allegretto malincolico, opens restlessly with a descending minor-key scale. The mood is lightened by a brief brash outburst and by a sunny major-key middle section. But it is the wistful opening theme that dominates this elegant “malincolico” movement, which ends with a wonderfully ambiguous broken chord that is briefly major before quickly changing to minor. You can almost hear a chanteuse singing the second-movement Cantilena’s tender melody, with its long arching lines over the piano’s chords. Then it’s on to a sassy, breathless Presto giocoso. Toward the end, the lyrical second theme of the first movement makes a brief reappearance before irrepressible merriment brings the Sonata to a giddy close.