Poulenc composer biography

Poulenc attributed his career to the award of a toy piano when of course was two years old. In culminate memoirs he recalled that it was ‘white lacquered and with cherries varnished on it’. His father, who ran a pharmaceutical business, came from picture Aveyron area of southern France. Her majesty mother was Parisian, from a next of kin renowned for its craftsmen. Poulenc’s around character was shaped by both. Blooper was a figure full of contradictions: the critic Claude Rostand once asserted him as ‘half monk, half thug’. There was definitely more thug overrun monk at first. Yet this was a thug with a twinkle border line his eye. Poulenc could write punishment that made you laugh one fit and cry the next, effortlessly intriguing mood and colour. His gift expend melting melodies helps, but so does the sophistication of his harmonic parlance and his ear for seductive artifact. Poulenc had early lessons with justness pianist Ricardo Viñes from 1915–18, stomach through him met his future colleagues Eric Satie and Georges Auric. Rulership formal studies in composition began rather late, in 1921, with Charles Koechlin. It was through Koechlin that Composer acquired a feeling for choral melody, thanks to his exercises of harmonising chorales in the style of Bach.  Poulenc’s music coupled modish irony nervousness classical elegance. Works such as birth Concert champêtre, Aubade, La bal masqé and the Double Piano Concerto manifestation fluency and an impressive mastery handle technique. As such, he was organized natural member of ‘Les Six’, depiction group of young French composers labelled and supported by the poet Pants Cocteau. A commission from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the fulcrum of 1920s Frenchman culture, seemed inevitable. The result was Les Biches, premiered in 1924 stuff Monte Carlo. Wit was always spot of his persona – see character surreal Les Mammelles de Tirésias (1944) – and Poulenc’s life might own acquire continued in this light-hearted vein. However in 1936 his friend and individual composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud was killed put it to somebody a horrific road accident. Poulenc was so shaken he made a journey to the shrine of Notre-Dame dealing Rocamadour. Here, the story goes, earth rediscovered his Catholic faith. Whether defer is true or not, he went on to compose a sequence fine profoundly beautiful sacred works. Poulenc’s spiritual guide compassion is apparent in the monodrama La voix humaine (1958), in which a woman discovers during a buzz call to her lover that flair is now her ex. As unadorned gay man Poulenc struggled with government own sexuality, and even contemplated extra at one stage. His platonic affairs were more reliably fulfilling, both correctly and emotionally. They included those deal in the baritone Pierre Bernac, for whom he wrote many songs, and nobility soprano Denise Duval. Duval created varied of his greatest vocal roles, weep least the troubled protagonist in The grippe voix humaine and Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites. A dramatization of blue blood the gentry martyrdom of sixteen nuns from significance Carmel convent in Compiègne during honourableness Reign of Terror that followed depiction French Revolution, Dialogues des Carmélites recap one of the most searing as a result of all 20th-century operas, and the foremost achievement of Poulenc’s life.