Poulenc by Roger Nichols, review: Why it's time to start taking this composer seriously

Why does Francis Poulenc come, for many, so far down the roll of honour of 20th-century French composers, below Debussy, below Ravel, below Messiaen, perhaps even below Fauré and Boulez? He was a fabulous melodist, as no less a judge than Ravel insisted, and his harmonies are often delicious. Much of his output has a secure place in the repertoire, above all his more than 100 songs, which many insist are the greatest achievement in art-song of the 20th century.

There’s also an impressive body of chamber music, incidental music for plays, a hit ballet for Diaghilev, concertos and religious music. This last seems to touch real depths of feeling, of a startlingly anguished kind.

And yet, the same man was capable of writing an absurdist, mock-mythical opera named The Breasts of Tiresias, which ends with an admonition to French couples to have more babies. This aspect of Poulenc holds many music-lovers back from according him real importance. He’s too saucy, too sentimental, too willing to spoil what might have been a tender love-song or austere religious motet with a naughty closing chord.

But Poulenc has his champions too, and long-time French music scholar Roger Nichols, author of well-known studies of Ravel and Parisian musical life in the Twenties, is certainly one of them. For him, the depth of Poulenc’s music is real, not pretended, and far from being contradicted by the moments of skittish humour and sentimental excess, it is actually bound up with them, in complex and subtle ways.

This fond and sharp-eyed biography reveals an anguished but artistically fruitful tangle of contradictions in the man, bubbling away inside the endlessly loquacious boulevardier who was always exquisitely tailored and smelled of cologne. He was caught, says Nichols, between “faith and doubt, between hetero- and homosexuality, between popularity and profundity, between tonality and modernity, between the axioms of the haute bourgeoisie and a nostalgie de la boue [literally ‘a nostalgia for mud’, meaning a longing for degradation and low-life], this latter expressed in his affection for ‘rough trade’ or something similar”.

That phrase “something similar” isn’t the only instance of Nichols’s gentle tact towards his subject, which will disappoint those who want the grisly details and dates of those encounters with the rough trade. And tact is a quality Nichols shares with his subject, who showed it to the nth degree. There are many examples in the book, but my favourite is the one where Poulenc found himself among the two million people fleeing Paris in 1940 in the face of imminent German occupation. He didn’t need to join the bedraggled hordes pulling carts along the highway, as his sister and her husband offered him a lift in a limousine, driven by the chauffeur who just happened to be one of Poulenc’s ex-lovers. But this presented a ticklish problem: how to handle the embarrassment of lunch? It just wasn’t done to invite the chauffeur to the lunch-table, but they could hardly abandon him. Poulenc found the solution; a picnic on the edge of a wood. “The open air and fresh grass did the trick.”

Life never seemed to weigh heavy on Poulenc, thanks in large part to the money earned by the family chemical business (his family was the Poulenc in Rhône-Poulenc, the French chemicals giant which is now part of Aventis). It allowed him to buy a grand house in the country when he was only 28, which became his refuge at times of turmoil. True, his shares in the family business plunged during the depression, and at times he complains of being hard-up (here Nichols’s tact seems excessive; some real facts and figures about Poulenc’s financial affairs would have been welcome). But that’s partly because he couldn’t resist pouring money into the new house, and besides it never got really serious. A good fairy would always turn up with a commission; in 1931 it was the Princess de Polignac, whose timely offer gave us that charming potpourri of French gaiety and Javanese-style orientalism, the Concerto for Two Pianos.

Poulenc was one of the famous group of composers known as “Les Six” formed around 1920 by Paris’s arch cultural fixer, Jean Cocteau. An interfusion of traditional French virtues of clarity and elegance with new popular forms was what he advocated, and Poulenc was happy to oblige. Nichols reveals that he contributed music to a “seance-music-hall”, including acrobats, wrestlers, jugglers and boxers, at the Théâtre de Vieux Colombier – a favourite hang-out for assorted Dadaists, bohemians and aristocrats.

Poulenc was in the midst of it all, but retained his sharp-eyed (and sharp-tongued) critical independence, tartly remarking, of his friend Milhaud’s fondness for writing in several keys at once, that: “Polytonality is an impasse whose uselessness will be acknowledged five years from now.”

Then in 1936 came Poulenc’s visit to the Shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour. It brought on an ecstatic return to the faith of his childhood, and an outpouring of religious music which continued right up to his death in 1963. As Nichols shows us, there were endless backslidings after the revelation, and tormenting doubts. But in his great opera of 1957 Dialogues des Carmélites, which portrays the trials, both legal and spiritual, of a group of Carmelite nuns accused of sedition by French Revolutionaries, Poulenc transmuted his doubt into the most burning expression of faith. Nichols devotes many searching pages to this opera, in which Poulenc leaves his habitual sentimentality and wit behind. As a critic of the London premiere wrote, “It is Poulenc’s very restraint and scrupulousness that carry the day.”

Does this side of Poulenc represent the “real” composer, more than the naughty piano pieces and sentimental songs? Of course not. As Nichols makes clear, each is the necessary complement to the other. Together they make a beautifully crafted, essentially modest expression of l’homme moyen sensuel, which is what Poulenc knew himself to be. That is why his music deserves a place on Mount Parnassus – but perhaps only on its slopes, rather than at its peak.

Poulenc is published by Yale at £25.