The Poulenc Puzzle

Nothing was so amusing to French Composer Francis Poulenc as hearing his friends marvel at 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, and he also wrote some of the century's greatest songs. Since his death in Paris last January, the Poulenc puzzle has become his epitaph--as though his critics and colleagues would rather cherish their confusion than resolve it. Last week in New York, two concerts that amounted to a Poulenc memorial-cum-festival only restated the mystery: two world premieres of pieces Poulenc composed in his last year eloquently argued the case for him and against him.

No Conversation. The first premiere, a Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, played by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein, had the misfortune of being the marquee come-on for an all-Poulenc concert that included some vintage works--the beautiful Fianc,ailles pour Rire song cycle, the lovely a cappella Motets. The sonata's first movement is nervously melodic, the second drowsily romantic, the third merely gymnastic; nowhere does the music lead the two instruments into the tense conversation the form requires. The piano simply accompanies the clarinet, as in a coloratura song, and the clarinet does little more than produce the kind of music an inspired Greek might dream up to charm a belly dancer. It is vapid, threadbare stuff--good fun for Benny Goodman, but hardly sport for Bernstein.

The second premiere, performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Thomas Schippers, was another matter. It was a cantata called Sept Repons des Tenebres, and it impressively proved that Poulenc's last year, like his other 45 as a composer, was blessed with exalted days. In Sept Repons, Poulenc resolved the devotional strain that runs through much of his music; the composition is a hymn for Holy Week that, as a French critic said after Poulenc's death, "springs from a soul taken by an ideal."

Written for chorus and full orchestra, the cantata parallels the psalms sung for the ancient Tenebrae service, in which the mystery of Christ's sacrifice is sung to diminishing candlelight, until at last only one candle remains--the Light of the World. The colors of the music suggest the gathering shadows, and Poulenc gives it a timeless serenity by weaving into it ancient liturgical forms along with angular modern music.

Subtle Passage. Boy Soprano Jeffrey Meyer, the Walter Baker Chorus, and the choirs of the Little Church Around the Corner, St. Paul's Church in Flatbush, joined the Philharmonic, but the orchestra made them welcome by drowning out their frail voices through most of the work. Young Meyer has a pure, clear soprano, but he sang very shyly, as if his voice were about to change at any minute.

Schippers enriched his private memorial by playing the Poulenc Concerto for Organ in G Minor just before the perform ance of the Sept Repons. Having transferred keyboard notes to the foot pedals, he freed an arm for conducting, and with only one slip (a missed orchestral entry), he played with brilliant drive. The massive, 5,000-pipe organ overwhelmed the string orchestra, but Schippers coaxed out of the instrument all the music's high glories.

Sept Repons was one more reminder that Poulenc's genius lay more with choral music and songs than with instrumental music. His lyrical sensitivity to poetry led his songs into fragile moods that passed subtly from laughter into grief. "J'aime la voix humaine," he would say. and no composer of the century knew better how to write for it; Frenchmen now call him their Schubert, their Puccini. From the Mouvements Perpetuels he wrote at 19, through his days with the anti-impressionist Groupe des Six, on through all the rest of his career, he never abandoned his own highly idiomatic voice: Ravel envied him for knowing how to speak "his own folklore." And if the Sept Repons was born of his faith in God, as his friends believe, then his Sonata may well be nothing more than a strange man's tribute to the likes of Benny Goodman.

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