Francis Poulenc once described Gabriel Fauré’s music as physically unbearable. Florent Schmitt, who studied with Fauré, hated Poulenc’s Sextet for Piano and Winds. At its premiere, he described it as wandering and vulgar.
Turnabout is fair play, on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.”
Poulenc labored over his Sextet for the better part of a decade. He began work on the composition in 1931, when he was in his early 30s. Then he subjected it to a complete overhaul, so that he came to regard it as a completely different piece. In 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, Poulenc extensively revised it again. The sextet reached its definitive form, with France under Nazi occupation, in 1940.
The outer movements are frantic, but at the work’s core is the soul of the composer, jovial, wistful, and altogether irresistible. Some have regarded it as an affectionate parody of the 18th century divertimento. (It is described by the composer as a divertissement.) In particular, it seems to inhabit a world not all that far from Mozart’s slow movements.
We’ll hear Poulenc’s reviled Sextet, performed at the Marlboro Music Festival in 2015, by flutist Marina Piccinini, oboist Mark Lynch, clarinetist Narek Arutyunian, bassoonist Brad Balliett, hornist Lauren Hunt, and pianist Zoltan Fejérvári.
Then we’ll turn to music by Poulenc’s musical nemesis. Fauré completed his Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor in 1887, when he was 42, just about a year older than Poulenc was when his Sextet reached its definitive form.
The work may come as something as a surprise to anyone expecting the fairly chaste atmosphere of the Requiem, begun around the same time. In contrast to the Elysian serenity conjured in his great choral opus, the quartet is passionate and personal. The evocative slow movement, which the composer described as “a vague reverie,” was inspired by the memory of evening bells at the village of Cadirac, in the south of France, which he knew as a child.
The quartet was performed at Marlboro in 2001, by pianist Gilbert Kalish, violinist Catherine Cho, violist Melissa Reardon, and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan.
While it’s true that, as a young man, Poulenc had a violent reaction to Fauré’s music, it is one that became tempered with experience. “I hated Fauré until I was 30 and then I realized that he was a very great composer. So I made an effort with myself and began to admire him. It’s an attitude I’ve maintained and built on, but physically it is for me an unbearable kind of music, what can I do about it?”
Um, and things were going so well, until that last little bit…
It’s an uneasy truce, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
Poulenc: The more I listen to Fauré, the more I love my dog
