Sinfonietta
Performances: Feb 16/17, 2008

I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy, but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords.  Wasn’t that the case with Mozart, Schubert? –Poulenc, in a 1942 letter.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) has been called both a monk and a street urchin, because his music swung between extremes of impudent irony and devout religion.  He won special favor for his entertaining suites, miniatures and attractive concertante works.  His temperament preferred elegance to profundity.  For years, he was pigeonholed as the playboy of French music.

Poulenc was born into money and had a privileged social position.  He began his piano studies with his mother—an accomplished performer—at the age of five.  Through his piano teacher Ricardo Viñes he gained access to the fashionable Parisian artistic scene, and became a member of a group of iconoclastic young composers called Le Six, (Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Tailleferre), who, spearheaded by the writer Jean Cocteau, rejected not only the inflated romanticism of Wagner but also what they regarded as the imprecision of Debussy and Ravel.

It was this life of renegade and privilege that inspired the majority of Poulenc’s works.  But there was also a dark side to Poulenc’s personality, and in the 1930s a series of disastrous love affairs (mostly with younger men) and the death of a friend, the composer-critic Pierre Octave-Ferroud, precipitated a return to the Catholic Church and a spate of powerful religious works.

The nearest Poulenc came to the architectural expanses of symphonic form was his Sinfonietta (1947), which in duration equals a full-fledged symphony.  Even the Sinfonietta, however, is a light and entertaining piece in the spirit of Haydn.  The composer himself was somewhat shocked by the easy-going and humorous result and thought that he might have “dressed too young for his years.”  Poulenc was then 48 years old and had received a commission for a multi-movement orchestral work to be included in the celebration of the BBC Third Programme’s tenth anniversary.  Suffering from a creative block, he remembered a string quartet that he had written many years before, which, because he didn’t like the piece, he had chucked into the Paris sewer system in a fit of anger.  With the entire string quartet still in his head, he sat down to reinvent the work for small orchestra, and the Sinfonietta was born.