Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels, the ballet Les biches, the Organ Concerto, and the opera Dialogues des Carmélites.
About Francis Poulenc in brief
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels, the ballet Les biches, the Organ Concerto, and the opera Dialogues des Carmélites. In his later years he had a reputation as a humorous, lightweight composer, and his religious music was often overlooked. He was among the first composers to see the importance of the gramophone, and he recorded extensively from 1928 onwards. He toured in Europe and America with both the baritone Pierre Bernac and the soprano Denise Duval, and made a number of recordings as a pianist, including many live performances of his songs and choral music. In the year of his death he became the pupil of the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became his mentor after the composer’s parents died. He also made the acquaintance of Erik Satie, under whose tutelage he became one of a group of young composers known collectively as Les Six. He died in 1963 in Paris, where he had lived with his wife and three children since the age of 25. He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris with his family. His wife, Jenny, and their three children are also buried in Mont-Parnassus, in the Pays de la Loire, near Paris, and in the Chateau de Versailles, near Marseille, in France.
He left a wife and four children, including a son and two daughters, and a daughter-in-law, who died of cancer in 1998. He had no children of his own; he was the only son of a prosperous manufacturer of pharmaceuticals. His music was influenced by Debussy, Stravinsky, Schubert and the avant-garde poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Éluard and Louis Jacob. He wrote many of their poems, and later set many of them to music. His religious works emerged in the 1930s, particularly in the religious music he composed from 1936 onwards, which he alternated with his more light-hearted works. In 1916 a childhood friend, Raymonde Linossier, introduced Poul Enc to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres. In 1914, he was only in his early 20s, and at this time he was a madly madly, madly obsessed with Debussy and Debussy. He later said of Debussy: “I admired him because he played flat-brimmed sombrero in pure Spanish style, a hidalgo with enormous moustachios, in purest Spanish style. I didn’t change the pedalling enough to rap my shins when he used to rap shins”
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This page is based on the article Francis Poulenc published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
