About this Piece

The son of a successful French pharmacist and an artistically inclined mother, Francis Poulenc inherited gifts from both sides of his family. By the time he was 5, his mother Jenny had started teaching him piano works by Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin. However, his father Émile insisted that his son receive a more practical general education before pursuing musical studies at the Paris Conservatory.  

The onset of World War I in 1914 and the deaths of Jenny (1915) and Émile (1917) scuttled Poulenc’s aspirations to enroll in conservatory. He instead found a mentor in Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, who had premiered works by Debussy, Ravel, Falla, and Satie and introduced his young student to many of these figures. At the same time, Igor Stravinsky, who set Paris aflame with his ballet scores The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, influenced the burgeoning composer.   

The Sonata for Four Hands belongs to Poulenc’s first group of works to be published—Stravinsky had reached out to the London-based publisher Chester on Poulenc’s behalf, and the compilation was released in 1919. The driving rhythms and spiky dissonances of the opening “Prélude” and closing “Final” nod to the modernism of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Prokofiev, while the central “Rustique” with its meditative open chords channels a Satie-like purity. —Amanda Angel