Notes for: August 8, 2017
For irrepressible good cheer, it’s hard to top Francis Poulenc. His musical aesthetic was shaped by Erik Satie’s shocking, surrealistic 1917 ballet Parade. As Poulenc later described it, “For the first time, the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.” Poulenc was one of a group of young composers dubbed Les Six whose goal, he wrote, was to create music that was “clear, healthy, and robust – music as overtly French in spirit as Stravinsky’s Petrouchka is Russian.” He thrived in this new era of “the circus and the music hall,” as Satie called it. Poulenc set out to capture a French lightness of spirit in works that drew no line between serious music and entertainment.
Poulenc was the quintessential urbane Parisian. As his friend Claude Rostand wrote of him, “He always placed a great value on being regarded as light, charming, frivolous, and flip. He loved risqué jokes and a Rabelaisian way of life. … it was a point of honor for him never to appear serious.” But as Rostand also noted, there was a more troubled side: “Behind this spontaneity, this easy and ironic cutting up, was hidden much inner turmoil….” Perhaps that is what led him back to Catholicism in the 1930s, and to the religious music that he would write in his later years. Through it all, he remained true to the cabaret and the dance hall.
Poulenc wrote the Sextet for Piano and Winds as “an homage to the wind instruments I have loved from the moment I began composing.” It’s an ingeniously constructed work that is filled with jaunty tunes and bouncy intertwining rhythms. It’s not all surface ease and lightness, though. The rapid exchange of short melodic phrases rests on a complex structure, and there are constant abrupt shifts in mood, from humor to more weighty emotions.
The Sextet begins with a bang, with loud scales followed by a merry section in which all the instruments exchange catchy phrases. Abruptly the bassoon slows everything down to introduce a moody middle section, featuring a melancholy melody that will recur throughout the Sextet. After this digression, the movement ends with a return to the opening sprightliness. In the Divertissement the pattern is reversed, as sweet and expressive melodies in the outer sections frame a perky interlude. The flow of brash good humor continues in the finale, with its rapid shifts between syncopated jazzy riffs and long-lined lyricism. Suddenly, though, there’s a pause, the bassoon reintroduces the melancholy theme, and Poulenc brings the Sextet to an end with a final dissonant chord. It’s a surprising close to such a carefree work, and it reminds us that there are depths beneath Poulenc’s airiness.