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He Was More Than 'Almost Great'

When Francis Poulencdied 50 years ago this month, the world of classical music sorrowfully noted the passing of a delightful artist of the second rank. Even his friends seem to have thought him a bit of a lightweight. The British composer Lennox Berkeley, who knew and loved Poulenc, wrote an obituary that praised the "touching tenderness and simplicity of heart" of his ever-so-French music—but went on to say in the very next breath that he "lacked the power of large-scale construction."

'TOUCHING TENDERNESS' | The composer and pianist Francis Poulenc in France, 1929. ENLARGE
'TOUCHING TENDERNESS' | The composer and pianist Francis Poulenc in France, 1929. Getty Images

That was in 1963, at a time when the classical-music establishment was still in thrall to the postwar professoriate of Austro-German composers and their foreign epigones who believed that the future of music lay not with traditional harmony but with Schoenberg-style serialism. They thought it to be historically inevitable, and had no use for those who disagreed. Least of all did they care for composers who, like Poulenc, happily embraced tunefulness and wit and sought to give pleasure to their audiences. Such dour folk took it for granted that pleasure was bad for you.

Today the avant-garde monopoly is a thing of the blessedly distant past, but Poulenc, though his music continues to be played around the world, is still widely seen as a lightweight. Yet it is perversely wrongheaded to write him off as a mere charmer. He also wrote profound song cycles, gorgeous chamber music and a powerful opera, "Dialogues of the Carmelites" (1957), whose subject is religious martyrdom and which the Metropolitan Opera will be reviving this spring for the first time since 2003.

What is it about Poulenc's music that makes it hard for some listeners to understand exactly how good it is? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that he really did start out as a lightweight, an impish comedian with a dilettantish streak. His first great success, "Le Bestiaire" (1919, words by Guillaume Apollinaire), was a song cycle about animal life that is scarcely four minutes long. Even after his music grew more ambitious, he was still inclined to slip his audiences the occasional wink. The "Gloria" that he wrote for the Boston Symphony in 1960, for instance, is not a ponderous oration but a festive piece that he once likened to a 15th-century fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli in which angels can be seen sticking their tongues out at one another.

For all his humor, though, Poulenc was at bottom a deeply serious artist who never quite managed to reconcile the two sides of his no less deeply divided personality. He was both a believing Catholic and a gay man who neither shook off the simple faith of his youth nor came fully to terms with his mature sexual urges. But while such personal complexity may not be a recipe for happiness, it can make for interesting art, and the music that Poulenc wrote in the second half of his life—which includes such large-scale works as "Dialogues of the Carmelites," the soaring song cycle "Tel jour, telle nuit" (Such a day, such a night, 1937), the darkly magnificent Two-Piano Sonata (1953) and the piercingly elegiac Oboe Sonata (1962)—is as beautiful as anything composed in the 20th century.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the critics of Poulenc's day were thrown off the scent by his apparent inconsistency of tone. Time's obituary spoke of "the quilt of contradictions that masked his music and his life. 'I am half-monk, half-bounder,' he would say, and his friends would add that he was also a cultured vulgarian, a moody wit, a seedy dandy—a puzzle. He wrote flippant music and sacred music, funny, jazzy profane music…the Poulenc puzzle has become his epitaph—as though his critics and colleagues would rather cherish their confusion than resolve it."

Was he a great composer? If you equate "greatness" with sheer originality, Poulenc is bound to come up short—and he knew it. More than most artists, he had a clear-eyed sense of his own limitations. "I am well aware that I am not the kind of musician who makes harmonic innovations, like Igor [ Stravinsky], Ravel, or Debussy, but I do think there is a place for new music that is content with using other people's chords," he told a friend in 1942. "Was this not the case with Mozart and with Schubert? And in any case, with time, the personality of my harmonic style will become evident."

That is an impressively honest self-appraisal—and it's right on the money, save for being overly modest. Poulenc himself aspired to being nothing more than (as he put it) "an almost great composer." What he ended up being was France's last indisputably major classical composer, a full-fledged master who was capable of effortlessly expressing the full range of human emotion without lapsing into empty grandiloquence. If that doesn't make him great, then the word means nothing.

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