Sonic Boom Program Notes

This work was premiered privately on December 16, 1938, in the salon of Princess de Polignac in Paris with organist Maurice Durufle and conductor Nadia Boulanger. The first public performance was in June of 1939 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris with Durufle as soloist and Roger Désormière conducting. It is scored for organ solo, timpani, and strings.

Francis Poulenc’s upbringing was one of privilege. His father was the head of the multinational pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc and the resultant wealth allowed the family’s every want and need to be met without reservation. Francis adored childhood piano lessons and decided early on that his career would be in the musical field. However, his father insisted on a highly regimented classical education at an elite Parisian academy. Once these studies were completed, Francis would be permitted to enter the Conservatoire. However, the deaths of both his parents in the young man’s teenage years thwarted his plans. Instead of entering at the famed Conservatoire, Poulenc studied privately with the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes. In the discipline of composition, the young composer was largely self-taught.

Through Viñes, Poulenc met several prominent figures in the Parisian arts scene – the poets Apollinaire, Gide, and Claudel and, perhaps most notably, the iconoclastic composer Erik Satie, who influenced many French composers between the 1880s and his death in 1925. In the 1920s Paris was an artistic melting pot with the debauchery of the cabarets existing alongside the most respected poets, painters, and composers of the day. Poulenc absorbed every available influence as the sardonic wittiness of his music attests. Igor Stravinsky took notice of the teenage composer and convinced the publishing firm of J. W. Chester in London to issue several of his works.

Shortly thereafter, Poulenc was accepted into the group of composers known as Les Six (‘The Six’) – also including Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, and Arthur Honegger – who gathered as friends at a bar called La Gaya to drink and discuss music. This group composed the most significant French works of the period. Over the next four decades, Poulenc created music in nearly every genre, including three operas, a handful of ballets, several orchestra works, chamber music, and numerous pieces for piano and chorus. He is recognized as the most important composer of French art songs in the twentieth century.

Poulenc’s Organ Concerto dates from 1938 and was commissioned by and dedicated to one of the most colorful of characters in the multi-hued spectrum of Parisian eccentrics of the 1920s and ‘30s. The Princess de Polignac was born in Yonkers, New York, as Winnaretta Singer and was the heir to the sewing machine fortune. When the Civil War broke out in the U.S., the family relocated to France. In 1893 she married Prince Edmond de Polignac, thirty years her senior, in a marriage of convenience (both parties were homosexual) and remained with him until his death in 1901. Having inherited her father’s fortune in 1875 and now the Polignac riches, “Princess Winnie” occupied her time by supporting the most promising writers, dancers, actors, artists, musicians, and composers in Paris. Poulenc’s association with the Princess began in 1923 when he played one of the four piano parts in the private premiere of Stravinsky’s Les Noces in her home.

The Princess originally offered the commission for an organ concerto to composer Jean Françaix, who turned down the offer and passed it to Poulenc. She intended to play the piece, but Poulenc refused to simplify his ideas. About the same time he began the work, his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud, an up-and-coming composer and music critic, was decapitated in an auto accident in Hungary. In an attempt to find consolation, Poulenc made a pilgrimage to see the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, a wooden statue in southwestern France. The combination of the composer’s grief and religious reawakening informs the Organ Concerto with a unique aesthetic that is unlike any other composition.

Poulenc’s Organ Concerto is in seven distinct sections all organized into a single movement. One can easily hear a clear progression from feelings of anger and confusion to acceptance within the work, but Poulenc never divulged his intended meaning.

The work opens with a shocking and almost sinister passage for the soloist. Pizzicato low strings join the brooding melody, which gives way to a lyrical theme in the strings. In typical Poulenc style, the second section is filled with dissonant harmony and angular melodies that are propelled by a driving rhythmic pulse. An andante section interrupts with dotted rhythms and then proceeds through a series of two climaxes to become quite menacing at the end. Music from the second section returns, but soon grows into something quite different with dazzling organ writing and daring harmonies. A lovely slow section follows, but the tenderness is soon defeated by dissonant organ chords that lead to an allegro that seems inspired by Parisian cabaret music. The finale returns to the music of the opening with its sinister organ chords. However, the mood soon turns to one of resignation and peace as a poignant viola solo enters. Pizzicato strings enter and the movement feels as if it is winding down. A final organ gesture provides a very meaningful conclusion.