Mellers, Wilfrid.  Francis Poulenc.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1993.  186 pp.  ISBN 0-19-816338-X

Part of the series "Oxford Studies of Composers," this is indeed a study,
so consider yourself warned.  If you don't know what "mixolydian in G"
means or if you don't read music, you should probably give this slim volume
a miss.  On the other hand, you will find fewer books that offer so much in
a small space.  Mellers, with elegant prose and a gift for the illuminating
phrase, lets us take a peek under the hood of music that sounds as natural
as breath.  He reveals the craft of a composer who took great trouble to
hide his craft.

Almost all of Poulenc's music sounds as if he got it from the air around
him.  We almost always miss a sense of the composer struggling with his
materials - practically a feature of Beethoven's music, for example.  This
simply shows Poulenc's success, for he took incredible pains - starting
three violin sonatas and destroying two, working on a four-minute song for
over ten years (trying to find the music for the first two lines of the
text), throwing a string quartet of many years' labor down a Paris sewer.

To me, Poulenc counts as one of the greatest figures in any art, but I
admit I'm practically alone in my view.  Certainly Mellers doesn't share
it.  He seems to consider the composer a "petit maitre" who occasionally
rises to the heights of Stravinsky and Messiaen.  On the other hand, I
consider Poulenc - in his own way, of course - as good as the other two.
Poulenc represents the "human" composer - very rare, incidentally.  We
tend to look for greatness among the titans, perhaps an inheritance from
Romanticism.  Greatness for us largely means storms, impossible loves,
yearning for what we'll never have.  We secretly - and often openly - look
down upon those apparently satisfied, sincerely happy, or in love with the
nearby, mainly because it seems too easy.  If we think about it, however,
real happiness eludes most of us, and stupid people - to judge by talk
radio - can be just as miserably dissatisfied as smart ones.  There is a
reason why Dante had to travel entire worlds of suffering and happiness
before he saw Beatrice smiling in heaven.  Poulenc shares the fate of other
composers in this group - Haydn, Schubert, and Mendelssohn - all treated as
"happy" or (my personal favorite) "childlike," and thus patronized.  In the
last fifty years, we've seen Schubert's stock come up, but only because
someone made the argument that he really is a titan after all.  It doesn't
seem to occur to anyone that a titan suffers serious limitations.  At the
end of a particularly tough week, I don't necessarily want to listen to
Wagner.  I haven't the energy or the will for all that heroism.  I want
someone to talk to me in normal, soothing tones, maybe even tell me a joke
or share a pizza.  Most important, I want to know that the act and effort
of so-called normal life is not only worthwhile, but occasionally even fun.

To be fair, I admit Mellers gets some of this, but I still believe he
ultimately undervalues it.  I quote from the final chapter:

   When he [Charles Koechlin, "the instructor of Poulenc's youth"] adds
   that 'the intense and noble emotion of "Ce" breathes the very soul
   of our wounded fatherland' he touches on the transcendent qualities
   that - in Quatre Motets pour un temps de penitence, Figure humaine,
   Dialogues des Carmelites, Gloria, Sept Repons des tenebres, and
   possibly in La Voix humaine and even the little oboe sonata - make
   Poulenc momentarily a great composer.  For the rest, he makes music
   that enhances our lives.  He deserves our gratitude which, loving
   him, we are unlikely to withhold.

I object to a few things in that paragraph, not least is the omission
of the Stabat mater in the list of "momentarily" great works.  Be that
as it may, I wholeheartedly endorse the last two sentences.  Yet why
doesn't this make Poulenc a great composer without qualification?
Obviously, I don't know what Mellers means by "great." Beyond that, I
object to Mellers's strategy.  He tries to turn Poulenc into a titan in
order to make him heroic and artistically worthy.  Poulenc's heroism was
genuine (among other things, he risked arrest by the Nazis in composing his
Occupation masterpiece Figure humaine) but never put to a physical test.
His heroism confined itself to his own life, mainly overcoming breakdowns
after the deaths of friends and lovers.  It's an everyday heroism and,
although shared by many not particularly titanic, it doesn't make him any
less heroic.

Poulenc's music attaches itself to bourgeois, even mundane images - the
images and scenes largely from the composer's quite comfortable material
life: circuses, music hall, cabarets, fashionable salons, elegant houses,
Riviera resorts, good food, friendship, and play, and with all this, a
deep, absolutely sincere, possibly naive religious faith.  Most take a
standard view of him is as a "double man" (in Mellers's phrase) - in
Poulenc's own terms, "part monk, part guttersnipe." People wonder that the
same composer could write both Les Mamelles de Tiresias and the Dialogues
des Carmelites because they see him in this sharply-bifurcated way.

Before I read the book, I decided to "follow along," by listening to
the works discussed as I studied Mellers's text, and I made a particular
point of listening for the musical excerpts.  I discovered the following.
Poulenc composes his music largely in 2- and 4-bar phrases.  I should also
say that he "assembles" his music, as a painter puts together a collage.
Many of these phrases recur from work to work.  Thus, a seemingly innocent
phrase in the modest "Pastourelle" from the collaborative L'Eventail de
Jeanne shows up in such large, even tragic works as the Stabat mater and
the Dialogues des Carmelites.  Of course, the emotional meaning of the
patch changes.  The process also reverses.  Phrases from the religious
music turn up in the worldly; the Mass in G also pops up in Les Animaux
modeles.  Again, the emotional content of the little scrap changes.  This
shows the interpenetration, the integration - rather than the separation -
of sacred and profane in Poulenc - not only in the music, but in the man -
one that may puzzle non-Catholics and non-Mediterranean Catholics alike.
Mellers quotes the following from Poulenc himself, on the composition of
his Gloria:

   When I wrote this piece ... I had in mind those frescoes by Gozzoli
   where the angels stick out their tongues. And also some serious
   Benedictine monks I had once seen revelling in a game of football.

Again, Mellers gets some of this.  Perhaps it's the space he has that
prevents him from following these leads to the level of actual musical
notes.  I also wish he could have included more extended discussion of the
Mass and of several song cycles: Chansons gaillardes, La Fraicheur et le
feu, and Le Travail du peintre.  These cycles get no mention at all, and
they're among his most important.  Nevertheless, I have not seen a trade
book on Poulenc this musically focussed, and the discussion of the music
is superb.  Especially fine are his analyses of works he likes, such as
the long sections on the Dialogues and the Sept Repons.  He also tellingly
shows how Poulenc moved musically from Satiean miniaturist to a composer
capable of undertaking the "long haul." Mellers points out the works of
Stravinsky that helped Poulenc become more fully himself.  However, if
Poulenc's personal and artistic modesty ultimately confuses Mellers,
Mellers at least doesn't stand alone.

Steve Schwartz