Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899 into a wealthy family of pharmaceutical manufacturers (the firm later became Rhône-Poulenc). Largely self-taught as a composer (his formal training was as a pianist, with the great Catalan virtuoso Ricardo Viñes), he shot to fame in his early twenties as a member of Les Six, the loose group of young French composers around Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau who rejected both German Romanticism and Debussyan vagueness in favour of wit, clarity, and the music of the streets. The critic Claude Rostand famously described him as ‘half monk, half rascal’, and the phrase has stuck because it is true: Poulenc’s music swings between cabaret-bright irreverence and a depth of religious feeling almost unmatched in twentieth-century music. The turning point came in 1936, when the death of a fellow composer in a car accident prompted a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour and a return to the Catholic faith of his childhood. From then on the two Poulencs coexisted: the boulevardier of the ballets and songs, and the believer of the Stabat Mater, the Gloria, and the opera Dialogues des Carmélites.