Download Francis Poulenc Suite from the ballet “Les Biches” FRANCIS

Francis Poulenc
Suite from the ballet “Les Biches”
FRANCIS POULENC was born in Paris on January 7, 1899, and died there on January 30,
1963. He composed the ballet “Les Biches” (“The Lovies”) in 1923, and it was first performed on
January 6, 1924, by the Ballets Russes in the Théâtre de Monte Carlo, conducted by Édouard
Flament. The suite from the ballet was arranged by the composer in 1939-40. These are the first
performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of this music.
THE SUITE FROM “LES BICHES” calls for an orchestra of one piccolo, two flutes, two oboes and
English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, celesta, glockenspiel, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine,
triangle, harp, and strings.
Like Milhaud, Poulenc came to prominence in Paris immediately after the end of the First World
War. The public was eager for new entertainment; they were ready to laugh and dance and throw off
the shadow of four grim years, and a new generation of composers emerged with exactly the kind of
music they craved. It was no longer to be long and dreary, full of Wagnerian mythologizing or
Debussian impressionizing. It was blunt and stark, driven by bracing rhythms and sharp corners, and
loaded with humor.
Six composers were singled out by the press as leaders of the pack and named “Les Six,” and of these
six the two most in tune with the anti-romantic aesthetics of Cocteau and Satie, their twin gurus, were
Milhaud and Poulenc. (The other four were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, and
Germaine Tailleferre.) Milhaud was already launched on a career and recently back from a stay in
Brazil, while Poulenc was the youngest of the group with no pre-war reputation to build on. Poulenc
had to do postwar military service, but this did not keep him from making his mark in Parisian music
and consolidating the wild success of his Mouvements perpétuels for piano, published in 1918 before
he was twenty. He and Milhaud became friends, and their curiosity about modern music took them to
Vienna together in 1921 to meet Alma Mahler and Schönberg and his circle. The following year the
two friends went to Italy to meet Casella and some other Italian composers.
But they were both more drawn to ragtime and jazz than to serial music, and both were greatly
influenced by Stravinsky. For Poulenc it was many steps up the ladder of fame in 1921 when he was
introduced by Stravinsky to Sergei Diaghilev and offered the chance to compose a ballet. The Ballets
Russes, which had severed its Russian roots and performed now mainly in Paris and London,
continued to produce new Stravinsky works such as Renard and Les Noces, which to some extent
determined the new hard-edged fashionable style. Working with Bronislava Nijinska, Nijinsky’s
sister, as choreographer and Marie Laurencin as designer, Poulenc composed the score in Touraine in
the summer of 1923. Their idea was to be a ballet without a story, simply a series of dances which
take place in a large white room whose only furniture is a blue sofa. Sixteen young women are
courted by three young men and sometimes, suggestively, by each other. The young men are dressed
as oarsmen. The title “Les Biches” does not have the insulting meaning it suggests; literally, they
would be hinds or does, but its secondary sense is perhaps best conveyed in theater parlance as
“lovies.” The action was without sentiment: this was definitely a “ballet du plaisir” in which the
biches have lost all innocence.
Of the nine movements, four were supported by three voices—soprano, tenor, and bass—singing in
the orchestra pit, following the precedent of Stravinsky’s Renard. Poulenc went to the Bibliothèque
Nationale to find the words of some anonymous 18th-century poems and set them in a blatantly
tuneful style. In fact the whole ballet is a stream of singable tunes harmonized with that modern sauce
that Poulenc had perfected. Its success in January 1924 was guaranteed, all the more when it moved
from the small theater in Monte Carlo to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris later the same year.
Poulenc could have arranged an orchestral suite from his score by simply omitting the overture and
the three vocal numbers, but he decided instead in 1939 to reorchestrate the complete work and issue
the five orchestral movements as a concert suite. The original score was lost, and although there may
have been a copy somewhere, Poulenc’s manuscript was buried in 1930 with his friend Raymonde
Linossier, to whom he had given it, in her grave in Valence. It was published with choral voices to
sing the vocal numbers, not solo voices.
This is unmistakably happy music. The tunes, the scoring, the snappy pace—it can only lift the spirit.
Yet it is never cheap or crude. There is a high sophistication in the subtleties of the scoring, and a
sense that Poulenc is being thoroughly true to himself.
The Rondeau is not a rondo, although the spritely tune given to the trumpet is heard many times. The
movement has two contrasting sections, the first a smooth tune that cries out for words, and the
second some ravishingly rich chords for strings, followed by brass, a moment of rapture that is gone
too soon when the trumpet’s rattling scale comes back.
The Adagietto (which is by no means slow) is introduced by a lonely oboe leading to a melody of
great warmth. This is the solo dance in which Vera Nemtchinova caused a sensation. Jean Cocteau
wrote: “When this little lady edges out of the wings on points, with her long legs in white tights, her
blue top very short, and her right hand in a white glove held close to her cheek like a military salute,
my heart beats faster or stops altogether.”
Rag-Mazurka is neither rag nor mazurka. After an echo of the Rondeau’s marvelous chords, it sets
off at top speed like a brisk scherzo. Still loud and forceful, the pulse changes to four-time and
perhaps hints at a ragtime style, and the noisiness eventually gives way to some gentler solos for the
winds. The scherzo returns, but this hybrid movement is indecisive to the end, with a surprising two
bars marked “quieto” to close.
Andantino brings back grace and tunefulness, and themes from the Adagietto creep back in. Then the
Final is inevitably boisterous and breezy, with more echoes of earlier music. Youthful high spirits can
be shallow and selfish, but in Les Biches there is a tastefulness that informs every page, even when
the orchestra seems to have been let loose with high-kicking rhythms and cheeky orchestration. It is
impossible not to respond to this music with a smile spread from ear to ear.
Like Milhaud, Poulenc had a serious side. This was often exhibited in his songs, but it emerged most
strongly in the large-scale choral music he composed after an experience in 1936 that restored in him
the Catholic faith he had abandoned in childhood. There could be no stage work more different from
Les Biches than Poulenc’s opera Les Dialogues des Carmélites, first performed in 1957, about the
tragic fate of sixteen Carmelite nuns in the French Revolution. Yet the fundamentals of his style did
not change: it was rooted in tonality, in advanced chromatic harmony, in expressive melody, and in a
keen sense of the theater that all cosmopolitan Parisians seem to absorb with their mother’s milk.
One of the critics writing about Les Biches in 1924 was none other than Milhaud. His review ends
with a splendid encomium:
The general impression we get from hearing Les Biches is that of pure classicism. Nothing in it is
dated; it is the music of all time which will always retain its freshness and its youthful grace. Not
only is every musical requirement completely met, the work also possesses the intrinsic value of
any of the beautiful classic ballets. Furthermore, the specified limits of its conception are never
overstepped, since the music is always perfectly crafted for dancing. From the first note to the last,
this ballet is real enchantment!
Hugh Macdonald
To Read and Hear More...
Stephen Walsh, who wrote the Stravinsky article in the 2001 New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, is also author of the two-volume Stravinsky biography: Stravinsky–A Creative Spring:
Russia and France, 1882-1934 and Stravinsky–The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971
(Norton). The 1980 Grove entry was by Eric Walter White, author of the crucial reference volume
Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (University of California). Other useful books include
Stravinsky and his World, a collection of essays and documents edited by Tamara Levitz (Princeton
University Press); The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross, which
includes a variety of essays on the composer’s life and works (Cambridge University Press); and
Michael Oliver’s Igor Stravinsky in the wonderfully illustrated series “20th-Century Composers”
(Phaidon paperback). If you can find a used copy, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents by Vera
Stravinsky and Robert Craft offers a fascinating overview of the composer’s life (Simon and
Schuster). Craft, who worked closely with Stravinsky for many years, has also written and compiled
numerous other books on the composer. Charles M. Joseph’s Stravinsky Inside Out challenges some
of the popular myths surrounding the composer (Yale University Press). Noteworthy among the
many specialist publications are Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, edited by
Jann Pasler (California) and Richard Taruskin’s two-volume, 1700-page Stravinsky and the Russian
Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra,” which treats Stravinsky’s career through the
early 1920s (University of California).
Recordings of the Pulcinella Suite include Leonard Bernstein’s with the New York Philharmonic
(Sony), Pierre Boulez’s with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Sony), Sir Neville Marriner’s with the
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (Deutsche Grammophon), and the conductor-less Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra’s (Deutsche Grammophon). Recordings of the complete Pulcinella, including the
vocal numbers for soprano, tenor, and bass, include Stravinsky’s own, with the Cleveland Orchestra
(Sony, monaural, from 1953), Claudio Abbado’s with the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche
Grammophon), Pierre Boulez’s with the Chicago Symphony (CSO Resound), Robert Craft’s with the
Philharmonia Orchestra (Naxos), Marriner’s with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (EMI), and
Stefan Sanderling’s with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta (also Naxos).
The important modern study of Prokofiev is Harlow Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography.
Originally published in 1987, this was reprinted in 2002 with a new foreword and afterword by the
author (Northeastern University paperback). Robinson’s book avoids the biased attitudes of earlier
writers whose viewpoints were colored by the “Russian”-vs.-“Western” perspectives typical of their
time, as reflected in such older volumes as Israel Nestyev’s Prokofiev (Stanford University Press,
translated from the Russian by Florence Jonas) and Victor Seroff’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet
Tragedy (Taplinger). More recently Robinson produced Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev, newly
translating and editing a volume of previously unpublished Prokofiev correspondence (Northeastern
University). Sergey Prokofiev by Daniel Jaffé is in the well-illustrated series “20th-Century
Composers” (Phaidon paperback). Essays by Michael Steinberg on both of Prokofiev’s violin
concertos are in his The Concerto–A Listener’s Guide (Oxford paperback). Robert Layton discusses
Prokofiev’s concertos in his chapter “Russia after 1917” in A Guide to the Concerto, for which
Layton was also editor (Oxford paperback). Other useful books include Boris Schwarz’s Music and
Musical Life in Soviet Russia, Enlarged Edition, 1917-1981 (Indiana University Press) and Prokofiev
by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir, an autobiographical account covering the first seventeen years
of Prokofiev’s life, through his days at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Doubleday).
James Ehnes has recorded Prokofiev’s complete works for violin, including both violin concertos
with Gianandrea Noseda conducting the BBC Philharmonic (Chandos). The Boston Symphony
Orchestra and the young Itzhak Perlman recorded both of Prokofiev’s violin concertos with Erich
Leinsdorf conducting, No. 1 in 1964, No. 2 in 1966 (RCA). Other noteworthy violinist-conductor
pairings for the two concertos include Joshua Bell with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony
(Decca), Cho-Liang Lin with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony), Itzhak
Perlman with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony (EMI), Gil Shaham with André
Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon), and Maxim Vengerov with
Mstislav Rostropovich and the London Symphony (Warner Classics).
I am indebted to Hugh Macdonald, author of this week’s program note on Milhaud’s La Création du
monde, for the following recommendations as to books on the composer. The place to start is
Milhaud’s autobiography, published in English as My Happy Life (Boyars). Roger Nichols’s
Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud offers reminiscences from the composer’s widow (Faber &
Faber). Paul Collaer’s Darius Milhaud is a good general biography (San Francisco Press). La
Création du monde is discussed at length in Glenn Watkins’s Pyramids at the Louvre: Music,
Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Belknap Press). Recent books on the
Ballets Russes include S.L. Grigorev’s The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909-1929 (Dance Books) and Sjeng
Scheijen’s Diaghilev: A Life (Profile).
Charles Munch recorded La Création du monde with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1961, a
recording available at least for a while on compact disc (RCA). Milhaud himself recorded La
Création du monde in Paris in 1931 (CD reissues on Pearl and EMI). Other recordings include
Maurice Abravanel’s with the Utah Symphony Orchestra (Vanguard), Leonard Bernstein’s with the
French National Radio Orchestra (EMI), Simon Rattle’s with the London Sinfonietta (EMI), Michael
Tilson Thomas’s with the New World Symphony (RCA), and Yan Pascal Tortelier’s with the Ulster
Orchestra (Chandos, on a disc also including the suite from Poulenc’s Les Biches).
Hugh Macdonald, author of this week’s program note on Poulenc, recommends the following books
about the composer. Poulenc’s own writings about his life and music have been translated into
English: Moi et mes amis (Dobson) and Diary of My Songs (Gollancz). General biographies include
Henri Hell’s Francis Poulenc, translated from the French and introduced by Edward Lockspeiser
(Grove); Benjamin Ivry’s Francis Poulenc (Phaidon paperback, in the copiously illustrated series
“20th-Century Composers”), and Carl B. Schmidt’s Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography of
Francis Poulenc (Pendragon). Keith W. Daniel’s Francis Poulenc: His Artistic Development and
Musical Style is an important analytical study (UMI Research Press). To read about Paris in the
1920s, there is Roger Nichols’s The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris, 1917-1929 (University of
California).
Stéphane Denève has recorded Poulenc’s complete Les Biches with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony
Orchestra, North German Radio Chorus, and Stuttgart Southwest German Radio Vocal Ensemble
(Hänssler Classic). Recordings of the suite include Charles Dutoit’s with the French National
Orchestra (Decca), Yan Pascal Tortelier’s with the Ulster Orchestra (Chandos, on a disc also
including Milhaud’s La Création du monde), and Semyon Bychkov’s with the Orchestre de Paris
(Philips).
Marc Mandel