All right, it's an exaggeration to say that Francis Poulenc was the Sid Vicious of 1920s French art music. But Poulenc and his circle hit the classical music scene with almost the same biting, nihilistic force with which the punk movement slammed into popular music in the 1970s and early '80s.
Both movements were big on irony and mockery, including self-mockery. The goal was to shock the bourgeoisie, to burn off the sugar coating that music had been collecting in the previous decades. And both movements were absorbed into the mainstream in barely a decade.
Francis Poulenc joined a circle of young composers gathered around the eccentric Erik Satie, the famous scribbler of whimsically titled pieces (``Gymnopédies,'' ``Vexations'' and the like) with nonsensical comments running through the scores.
Satie's followers opposed the vagueness of Impressionism, the style typified by Claude Debussy's ``Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.'' They advocated simplicity and clarity. They also thought emotions should be more restrained than they had been in late 19th century Romantic music, although the Satie set eagerly made exceptions to the rule of restraint for the purposes of satire.
In 1920, a critic dubbed the half-dozen leading members of this circle - Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey - ``Les Six.''
It wasn't a very imaginative name; it referred to an earlier group of Russian nationalists called ``The Mighty Five.'' Poulenc and his pars weren't really nationalists, and The Five stood for much that Les Six opposed. But the name stuck.
They'd been hanging out together since the war years but did not really think of themselves as a school. They issued no joint artistic manifesto, although they did take interest in a tract by writer Jean Cocteau that espoused a particularly flippant form of anti-Romanticism, And it didn't take long for them to drift apart.
Honegger quickly became a serious composer of symphonies and biblical oratorios. Milhaud retained his snotty tone but ventured into polytonality and other advanced techniques. Durey, Auric and Taiileferre drifted to the edge of French cultural consciousness and never established international reputations.
Only Poulenc parlayed the style of Les Six into a full-blown career, and even he softened his style, admitting a certain religiosity and tenderness into his major works.
But that came later. The years just after World War I saw the emergence of Dadaism. This was a movement in art and literature powered by fantasy and incongruity; everything conventional was rejected, and satiric pointlessness was embraced.
``Dada'' is French baby talk, a word chosen by the Dada cult leaders because it evoked nothing but meaningless babble.
Artists outgrew Dada by the early 1920s, but Poulenc affectionately held onto some of the movement's anti-conventional, nose-thumbing techniques as if they were bronzed baby shoes on his mantel.
As a composer, Poulenc was largely self-taught, and one method of self-education is imitation. Many of Poulenc's early works, including a sonata for two clarinets and a brass trio, mimic the ironic Neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky.
Neoclassicism also made itself felt in Poulenc's keyboard concertos, but in a less parodistic manner.
The ``Concert champetre'' for harpsichord and small orchestra, the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, the ``Aubade'' for piano and 18 instruments and the Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani all contain busy, mock-18th century passages a la Stravinsky that evoke music for silent film comedies. But there's a more serious side to all these works, especially the dramatic, minor-key organ concerto.
At the same time he was dabbling in Neoclassicism, Poulenc was also following Satie into Dadaism through the deft use of monotony and melodies that would have been appropriate for dance halls and the Moulin Rouge.
According to the tenets of musical Dada, poetic delicacy and sentiment characterized the works of the old guard - Fauré and Debussy - and were to be avoided at all costs. For Poulenc at this time, vulgarity was preferable to sentiment, as long as it was charming vulgarity. As Cocteau wrote, ``Tact is the art of knowing how far to go too far.''
The young Poulenc was an outstanding pianist, so the keyboard dominated his early efforts at composing. But his friendships with the leading avant-garde French poets of the time also led him to write dozens of songs.
The music was straightforward, sometimes with melodies that might have been warbled by popular singers like Edith Piaf. But the texts were anything but pop-sentimental - they were the surreal poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau and Paul Eluard.
The appeal of Poulenc's music in smaller forms - the piano pieces, some of the songs, and assorted short orchestral bits - lies in their combination of satirical wit and natural, fluent melody. Generally, Poulenc accompanies a pretty tune with bland harmonies that flow along nicely for a few measures until they are suddenly disrupted by a spiky wrong-note chord.
As his career progressed, Poulenc did retain his taste for tart harmonies and unexpected turns of phrase. But he also developed a fondness for the traditional French qualities of grace, charm and light melodiousness. This is most evident in his Piano Concerto and the ballet suite ``Les Animaux modeles,'' and to a lesser extent in the still Neoclassical Sinfonietta for orchestra.
At the same time, he produced a series of sacred works expressing the deep faith he found within himself after returning to the Catholic Church in 1936. The unaccompanied choral works - notably the Mass in G and several motets - are poignant, if a bit austere.
Poulenc's two major works for soprano, chorus and orchestra - the 1950 Stabat Mater and the 1959 Gloria - are grand and fervent. Even so, the Stabat Mater and Gloria retain some of Poulenc's music-hall melody contours. This is the music of a man who attends Mass with great sincerity every Sunday morning, after Saturday nights of high life and stylish debauchery.
Poulenc's main musical interests can all be traced through his three operas.
First came the surreal 1947 comedy ``Les Mamelles de Tirésias,'' a satire on feminism in Poulenc's cupped-palm-in-the-armpit style. It's an updating of Jacques Offenbach's witty bouffe techniques - a 20th century counterpart to ``Orpheus in the Underworld.''
The 1959 one-acter ``La Voix humaine'' is a slightly more monotonous but also dramatically intense work, one side of a distraught woman's 45-minute telephone conversation with the lover who has jilted her.
And the 1957 ``Les Dialogues des Carmelites'' is Poulenc's single grand opera. A superficial young noblewoman enters a Carmelite convent during the French Revolution, eventually joining the sisters in martyrdom at the guillotine. The opera is not as grisly as it sounds; it contains some of Poulenc's most tenderly lyrical music and is the last opera to have entered the international repertory.
Throughout his life, Poulenc also devoted considerable attention to wind instruments. He produced an excellent series of works for woodwinds, including the Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano; the Sextet for Piano and Winds; and late sonatas for flute, clarinet and oboe.
By the end of his career, Poulenc's style had considerably softened. Even though Poulenc's middle and late music sometimes verges on the mawkish, at least the composer's sweetness is sincere. And there's always a sour chord nearby to keep the sweetness in perspective.
Poulenc listening suggestions
Most of Poulenc's music is available on imported EMI compact discs, reissues of recordings from the 1960s and '70s by musicians who had worked closely with the composer.
Nearly all the solo piano pieces are included in a two-disc set featuring Poulenc's friend Gabriel Tacchino. Every major chamber music work can be found in another two-disc set with Jacques Fevrier as pianist, several fine French wind players, and Yehudi Menuhin in the Violin Sonata. Still another double-disc box contains most of the orchestral music, aside from the concertos, conducted by Georges Pretre.
For the concertos and works for chorus and orchestra, EMI's single CDs are highly attractive. Stylish interpretations by Tacchino in the ``Aubade'' and concertos for one and two pianos make up for uneven playing from the French orchestras.
Still another EMI disc contains the Organ Concerto with Maurice DuruflC and the Gloria conducted by Pretre. The best source for Poulenc's a cappella choral music is a Telarc CD with the Robert Shaw Festival Singers in the Mass and motets.
For a good selection of the songs, albeit in very old recordings, Ades has issued two separate CDs with Poulenc at the piano accompanying his close associate, baritone Pierre Bernac.
For those who prefer to sample one disc at a time, Pascal Rogé has recorded Poulenc's most popular piano pieces on a London CD; another disc from the same company offers Rogé and friends in the woodwind chamber music.