What I like about Poulenc - aside from the beautiful melodies, effective
harmonies, and, in his songs, an incredible sensitivity to poetry (even
when he admits he doesn't know what the poem means) - is his expressive
range.  He can be witty, joyous, grand, austere, and so on.  But what
I like most is his lack of pretention.  I never feel that, even at his
grandest, he's "trying on" profundity or fashion (although he was one
of the trendiest of composers), that he's expressing something genuinely
within him, a quality I occasionally miss in, say, Wagner.  For Poulenc,
music is indeed his life, and all facets of his life go into it.  His
great quality as a religious composer is that his religion isn't separate
from him.  Obviously, the sensuality, the athleticism, the elegance,
the appetite of the man informs his religious feeling, which is why, I
believe, his religious music never cloys or strikes one as false.  There
may be a hint of the grotesque, like a gargoyle on a cathedral, but that
innocent "lapse in taste" to me merely shows the genuineness of the
individual feeling.

A lot has been made of the "two Poulencs" -- in the composer's own words,
"part monk, part guttersnipe." A few years ago, I binged on all my Poulenc
recordings and noticed that many of the characteristic phrases of his
religious music find their way into the secular music and vice versa.
The man's artistic personality seems to me really all of a piece.

More personally, Poulenc's music, like Schubert's, tells me what it's
like to be human, rather than a Titan or a god, and that being human's
not only hard enough, but enough.

Steve Schwartz