Poulenc: Concerto for Organ
The lot of the music critic can be an unhappy one. The critic is called upon, usually on an absurdly short deadline, to pass judgement on composers and pieces with which he sometimes has had little opportunity to become intimately familiar, and on performances which, by their nature, are fleeting and transitory. While composers and conductors take good reviews for granted, the dangerously unstable nature of these artists frequently causes them to react to poor notices with irrational hostility, and the critic lives in fear of the vicious threats he all too often receives. And history is no kinder: generations after his death, a critic may be held up to ridicule for any article of his that fails to coincide with present opinion, as those critics unfortunate enough to have dismissed Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies after their premieres could readily testify. Too frequently all this responsibility weighs heavily on the shoulders of the critic, and his life becomes a tortured Gehenna of drink, debauchery, and debasement.
The story of the Parisian critic Henri Collet is a happier one, though, for Collet brought people together. Specifically, Collet brought together six French composers who have remained linked in textbooks ever since as Les Six. In a 1920 article depicted six young composers who at that time had relatively little in common as being a closely-linked, like-minded group of friends bent on reforming French music. The six composers in question (Poulenc, Milhaud, Tailleferre, Auric, Honegger, and Durey), while understandably surprised, grew curious about one another, and before long became close friends. They spent nearly every Saturday evening for over two years together, eating, drinking, and haunting Paris’ fairs and music halls.
Those Saturday evenings had a great impact on the music of Francis Poulenc, for Poulenc developed an affection for jazz and popular music that remained throughout his life. Claude Rostand wrote that “there is in Poulenc a bit of monk and a bit of hooligan,” and it was the hooligan side of his musical personality he developed on those evenings. The monk side came a little bit later, when – shocked by the tragically early death in 1936 of his friend, the brilliant young composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud – he made a pilgrimage to the Catholic shrine of Rocmandur and recommitted himself to that faith.
Monk and hooligan take turns on the stage in the seven alternating sections of Poulenc’s single-movement Organ Concerto. Written for the influential patron of the arts and leader on the Parisian social scene the Princesse Edmond de Polignac (or, as she had been known before she moved to France and married a nobleman, Winnaretta Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), the piece was first performed at the Princesse’s salon in 1938. It begins and ends on a slow, somber, note, but its inner five sections are in turn playful and tender.
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Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.