Radio Poupoule

In 1943, an aeroplane dropped thousands of copies of Liberté, a poem by Paul Éluard, over occupied France. Francis Poulenc clandestinely set the poem to music in Figure humaine, a cantata for unaccompanied double mixed chorus and a powerful ode to liberation. On 2 December 1946, the choir of the public broadcaster NIR, forerunner of the Flemish Radio Choir, gave the first performance in the original French, following an earlier English-language première in London. The eightieth anniversary of this event is the starting point for this musical portrait of the French composer Francis Poulenc – Poupoule to his friends.

The genesis of Figure humaine is shrouded in a veil of confusion deliberately created by Poulenc, who sought to present the work as the product of deeply personal inspiration, ‘une œuvre jaillie du cœur’ – ‘a work sprung from the heart’ – and as a symbol of artistic resistance during the German occupation. In reality, the work originated in a commission – or at the very least a suggestion – from Henri Screpel, sound engineer and director of the Compagnie des Discophiles, to set the poem Liberté to music and record it. Poulenc was initially daunted by the complexity of the task, but in a small bookshop in Lyon he came across a Swiss edition of the poems. Rediscovering the texts in this form inspired him to compose a more extensive cantata, with Liberté as its culmination. ‘C’est une œuvre de circonstance,’ Poulenc himself concludes in one of the eighteen conversations he had with musicologist and music critic Claude Rostand in 1953, ‘mais pas une commande’ – ‘It is a work born of circumstance, but not a commission.’

Rostand also asks Poulenc why he insisted on writing a work for unaccompanied mixed chorus, making it more difficult to perform and performances consequently rarer. Adding an orchestral part, Poulenc counters, would undoubtedly have made matters considerably easier, but it was not out of any desire for complexity that he decided against it. Figure humaine had to feel like an act of faith, with the unaccompanied human voice as its sole intermediary. The almost inhumanly high final note sends the listener towards an infinitely distant horizon, where the promise of freedom drifts down in fragments through Éluard’s words. Yet, just as in Figure humaine, Liberté is only the culmination of this concert: the open-ended conclusion to an exploration of a body of work with many faces.

The Belgian première was conducted by Paul Collaer, who was also director of the NIR’s Flemish Music Service. Acting as a bridge between the cultural worlds of Paris and Brussels, he introduced numerous composers of the French avant-garde to Belgian stages. Collaer opened many doors for the young Francis Poulenc as well. A friendship lasting many years developed between them, and the composer regularly stayed in Collaer’s home city of Mechelen. Inspired by the imposing bells of St Rumbold’s Cathedral, Poulenc composed his Nocturne No. 3: ‘Les Cloches de Malines’ in 1934.

Francis Poulenc was a man of striking contrasts, a Janus-like figure, and with the composer’s approval Claude Rostand attempted to sum him up in two words: ‘le moine et le voyou’ – ‘the monk and the rogue’. Throughout his life and work, the pendulum continually swung between a number of opposing poles: his rediscovered religious faith and his homosexuality; his desire to be recognised as a ‘serious’ contemporary musical voice and, at the same time, his profound love of popular French culture, melody that speaks for itself, and what we might now describe as a camp aesthetic. This richness and diversity, the constant pull between these opposing forces, brought together in an elegant Venn diagram, make the composer’s oeuvre ‘Le Poulenc Essentiel’.

With Tenebrae factae sunt, one of the four Motets pour un temps de pénitence for unaccompanied mixed chorus, we are offered a brief but intense taste – like a communion wafer on the tongue – of Poulenc’s undiluted sacred style. The motet is a prayer for Holy Saturday and gives musical expression to the Catholic faith of his youth, to which the composer increasingly returned following the fatal accident of a friend.