About this Piece

Francis Poulenc was one of Les Six, a band of 20th-century Parisian composers who were greatly inspired by the ironic music of Erik Satie and the work of surrealist Jean Cocteau. Their pieces drew on everything from the popular songs that could be heard in music halls to modernist trends in rhythm and harmony to modal church music. In the 1930s, Poulenc became a devout Catholic after experiencing the sudden death of a good friend. Though his compositions continued to include a sense of fun and silliness, they also started to exhibit a serious, spiritual edge. During the Nazi occupation of France, he remained in Paris. Many of the pieces he wrote at the time looked like escapist fare on the surface—for example, Les animaux modèles, a ballet about animals—but contained subtle messages of resistance that could be detected by his French audience. By the end of the war, many saw his music as a patriotic lifeline, as one of his publishers expressed in 1944: “You play in the darkness that surrounds us, as someone sings in order not to be afraid.” 

Poulenc admitted that he felt less emotionally connected to the sound of the violin and cello than he did to winds, piano, and voice. It took him several attempts and a literary inspiration (in the form of a few lines by Federico García Lorca) to get him to complete a Violin Sonata in 1943, and though it contains some brilliant ideas, it betrays his professed lack of confidence. There is far less trepidation in his Cello Sonata. He started sketching it in 1940 while staying with his cousins in Brive in southern France, worked on it during the war years, and finally completed it in 1948 with a bit of help from cellist Pierre Fournier. He dedicated the piece to Fournier, and the two played it together many times on tour in the late 1940s and ’50s. 

Fournier’s formidable technique allowed Poulenc to dabble in some windy cello writing. The first, third, and final movements are full of breathy trills and leap-filled melodies we could imagine being played by a clarinet. In the Ballabile (a lively ballet number, the name of which literally means “danceable”), Poulenc throws in running ribbons of plucked notes. These elements make the sonata one of the most difficult in the standard repertoire; yet despite its challenges, it has the potential to sound quite natural and carefree. The sublime Cavatine shows what Poulenc does in his best pieces for any instrument. It’s a moment of perfect, somber stillness, far away from the humor and the circus-like antics of his faster movements and sections. Such departures sound as though a dilettantish dandy, during an evening of good food and too much wine, has paused to recall the sad things that have happened in his life and to mutter a short prayer. —N.S.