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Poulenc: Stabat Mater / Gloria / Litanies

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Poulenc: Stabat Mater / Gloria / Litanies

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RUDE ANGELS "Monk and knave" - there is undoubtedly some truth in Claude Rostand's famous remark about his friend Francis Poulenc, but it has distorted the...

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RUDE ANGELS

"Monk and knave" - there is undoubtedly some truth in Claude Rostand's famous remark about his friend Francis Poulenc, but it has distorted the composer's image in a way Rostand can surely never have intended. Undeniably, Poulenc was paradoxical and self-contradictory - indeed, he did his best to advertise this polarity in himself, which was a permanent clash rather than an alternation of opposite moods. In itself, the clash is perfectly understandable in a composer who was, and still is, subject to a great deal of prejudice and misunderstanding. He wrote Aubade (1929), his "fantaisie chorégraphique" for piano and eighteen instruments, which had been commissioned by Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles for one of their fancy-dress balls, in w hat he termed a phase of "melancholy and anguish". He wrote his cantata Figure Humaine (1943) and Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1944) in a further phase of anguish engendered by the war years. Yet his contemporaries and some of his later critics leaped at the truculent insouciance of Les Mamelles and ignored the rest. The new generation of musical scribblers discovered a second Mendelssohn in Poulenc: after the "elegant and facile notaire" they hailed their "petit maître of eroticism". The comparison with Mendelssohn - wealthy circumstances, musical "facility" and so on - would be worth pursuing. But the truth of the matter is apparent from what Poulenc himself said about these works: "I regard Les Mamelles as my most authentic work, together with Figure Humaine and my Stabat Mater." In a later radio interview, he added that the choruses in Les Mamelles and those in the Stabat Mater (1950) belonged to the same vein.

The composition of Francis Poulenc's first work for the church dates from 1936. While on "holiday" in Uzerche, he rehearsed his concerts for the 1936-37 season with the baritone Pierre Bernac and the choir conductor Yvonne Gouverné. The news of the death in an accident on 17 August of the composer-critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud reached Poulenc as he was planning a visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Rocamadour, a few miles away. When he got back from this decisive visit, he wrote his Litanies à la Vierge Noire in a week - the score is dated 22-29 August 1936. This work for three-part female chorus and organ is essential, but its status as a turning-point in the shift from Poulenc's "knave" phase between 1920 and 1935, when he himself said he was "not greatly concerned by religious matters", to his "monk" phase in the 1950s, when he was in great psychological distress, is not as obvious as has sometimes been claimed. If Mouvements perpétuels (1918), Les Biches (1923) and Concert Champêtre (1927-28) are the only works taken into account, his early period does indeed seem "light". However, if attention is paid to the austere melancholy of the slow movement of the Sonata for two clarinets (1918, also found in one of the interludes in Dialogues des Carmélites), the poem " Hier" from Trois Poèmes de Louise Lalanne (1931), Nocturne No.4 (1934) and even the special kind of anguish found .in certain passages of Bal Masqué (1932), "early" Poulenc was already "en route for the monastery" as he himself put it concerning one of his graver works, the Concerto for organ (1936-39). Whether the Litanies mark a religious revelation or just confirm the composer's innate religious feelings (which his southern father encouraged and his Parisian mother repressed), they mark the beginning of a series of church pieces which constitute one of Poulenc's most interesting and original aspects. The superb Mass (1937), the Motets pour un Temps de Pénitence (1938) and the Motets pour un Temps de Noël (1951) are the key works in his output of a capella church music, which was influenced by the Renaissance polyphonists - his revered Tomàs Luis de Victoria in particular. The scoring of the Stabat Mater (1950) and the Gloria is more like that of the French grand motet. Both works require a petit Chœur (the soprano soloist), a grand Chœur (in Lullyan five-part format in the Stabat Mater) and a large orchestra. However, the grand motet is inevitably associated with ceremony and rhetoric of the Bossuet variety - grave and dignified - which is exactly the tone of the Stabat Mater. Written to commemorate the painter and designer Christian Bérard and to "entrust his soul to Our Lady of Rocamadour", the Stabat Mater, in which the chorus often appears a capella and the orchestra is used with restraint, is grave indeed, even austere on many occasions, despite the alternation of its twelve slow and fast movements. These are arranged almost symmetrically around the pivotal No.6 Vidit suum, the first appearance of the solo soprano, where Poulenc's harmonic and modulatory skill is especially apparent and particularly inventive.

Unexpectedly, the same restraint is found in a section of the Gloria - the Domine Deus set for solo soprano - where the orchestral introduction is reduced to Poulenc's beloved four-part harmony and the instrumental register is the same as in Faure's Requiem. (This is probably a coincidence, as Poulenc loathed Fauré's work as a whole.) The same register returns at the close, when the composer's " Extrêmement calme" is reminiscent of the spiritual elevation of the Dialogues des Carmélite (1953-56) which he composed between the Stabat and the Gloria, when going through a phase of deep depression during which he also composed that other lyric masterpiece La Voix Humaine (1958). Equally magnificent is the Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, where the instrumental introduction looks forward harmonically and melodically to the spirit of the slow movement in the Sonata for clarinet and piano (1962), Poulenc's last work. Nonetheless, the Gloria, in keeping with the words, suggests an immediately jubilatory reading of the religious text. In this connexion, Poulenc said: "My Stabat is an a capella chorus, while my Gloria is a large choral symphony." The Domine Fili unigenite is a throwback to the insolent insouciance of Poulenc at twenty-five, when he wrote Les Biches, while the Laudamus te, which irritated part of the first-performance audience, comes close to sounding like a French cancan. (Not surprising, considering Poulenc's taste in women - "only nuns and whores.") More seriously, he remembered late in life, with his wonderful gift for sincere paradox, having seen "grave Benedictine monks playing football" and pictures by Gozzoli (1420-97) in which "rude angels stick out their tongues."

Nonetheless, the robust "country-priest" religiosity and the earthy jubilation of the Gloria, whose opening fanfare is an undisguised tribute to Stravinsky's Serenade in A, is resolved by a phrase in the solo soprano part borrowed from the Agnus Dei in the Mass (1937) and by an Amen which fades into silence forever, in the absence of one of those dry and undemonstrative final cadences with which Poulenc liked to belie the emotion expressed earlier in the work.

True, Poulenc in 1959 was not the same as in 1923 or even 1936. After the Gloria he w rote a monodrama, La Dame de Monte-Carlo (1961), which has all the cold elegance of despair, two moving sonatas (clarinet / piano and oboe / piano, 1962) and his final, posthumous Sept Répons de Ténèbres (1960-62) which preceded the cold January morning in 1963 when a man who loved the pleasures and pains of life on this earth slipped away with no warning to join God.

Renaud Machart
March, 1993
Translated by Roger Greaves

Danielle Borst
Of French and Czech origin, the Swiss soprano Danielle Borst was born in Geneva, where she won a First Prize for Virtuosity before making her début in Lausanne. Her first important rôle in opera, Oscar in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, was at Geneva, with Luciano Pavarotti, followed by further performances at the Paris Opéra and in Vienna. She has appeared with conductors of the greatest distinction and has recorded, among other things, the title-rôle of Monteverdi's L 'incoronazione di Poppea, Ravel's Shéhérazade and the part of Marie in Berlioz's L 'enfance du Christ.

Chœur Régional Vittoria d'lle-de-France
Established in 1987 under the direction of Michel Piquemal, the Chœur Régional d'lle-de-France, with its ninety singers, has appeared with a number of very well known French orchestras. Recordings by the choir include the Requiem and Déluge of Saint-Saëns and Kamilló Lendvay's Stabat Mater, of which it gave the first performance in 1991. The 1992-1993 season brought performances of Brahms's German Requiem in Paris and Lilie with the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux and at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence with the English Chamber Orchestra.

Orchestre de la Cité
The Orchestre de la Cité is associated with the work of the Ensemble Vocal Michel Piquemal and of the Chœur Régional Vittoria d'lle-de-France. The players are principally drawn from gifted young professionals trained at the national Conservatoires of Paris and Lyon.

Eric Lebrun
The organist Eric Lebrun won the Interpretation Prize of the Chartres Organ Competition in 1990 and in 1991 the First Organ Prize in the Paris Conservatoire class of Michel Chapuis. He took part in the first performance of Marcel Landowski's Leçons des Ténèbres and in the first performance and recording of Kamilló Lendvay's Stabat Mater. He is organist of the Paris Church of Saint-Antoine des Quinze-Vingts, with its Cavaillé-Coll instrument.

Michel Piquemal
Born in Ariège, Michel Piquemal was a pupil of Pierre Bernac and, at the Salzburg Mozarteum, of Suzanne Anders and Paul von Schilawsky. From 1968 to 1973 he was an assistant to Jacques Jouineau with the choir of Radio France and established the Chœur Vittoria d'Argenteuil, which won a reputation under his direction for its performances of oratorio. In 1978 he set up the Ensemble Vocal Michel Piquemal. In 1985 he was appointed teacher of choral singing at the Paris Conservatoire and in 1987 accepted the position of conductor of the Chœur Régional Vittoria d'lle-de-France and of the Chœur Régional Provence Alpes Côtes-d' Azur. Michel Piquemal has conducted oratorios with a number of well known orchestras and his recordings include a wide repertoire both as a singer and as a conductor.

Disc 1

Stabat mater, FP 148

(more info)

Performed by: Munich Radio Orchestra BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Orchestre de la Cite
Composed by: Francis Poulenc
Conducted by: Marcello Viotti Yan Pascal Tortelier
Michel Piquemal, baritone
Janice Watson, soprano
Danielle Borst, soprano
Recording date: October 1992

Stabat Mater dolorosa - 4:08
Cujus animam gementem - 1:07
O quam tristis - 3:07
Quae moerebat - 1:37
Quis est homo - 1:27
Vidit suum - 3:32
Eja Mater - 1:19
Fac ut ardeat - 2:41
Sancta Mater - 3:05
Fac ut portem - 3:33
Inflammatus et accensus - 2:33
Quando corpus - 4:32

Gloria, FP 177

(more info)

Performed by: Chicago Symphony Orchestra BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Orchestre de la Cite
Composed by: Francis Poulenc
Conducted by: Yan Pascal Tortelier Bernard Haitink
Michel Piquemal, baritone
Janice Watson, soprano
Jessica Rivera, soprano
Danielle Borst, soprano
Recording date: October 1992

Gloria in excelcis Deo - 2:31
Laudamus te - 3:04
Domine Deus - 4:08
Domine Fili unigenite - 1:24
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei - 5:34
Quie sedes ad dexteram Patris - 5:47

Litanies a la vierge noire, FP 82

(more info)

Composed by: Anonymous Francis Poulenc
Conducted by: Peter Dijkstra
Max Hanft, organ
Eric Lebrun, organ
Recording date: October 1992

Litanies a la vierge noire - 8:56

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Composer(s):
Anonymous; Poulenc, Francis

Orchestra(s):
Orchestre de la Cite

Artist(s):
Borst, Danielle; Lebrun, Eric; Piquemal, Michel

Label: Naxos Classics
UPC: 730099417624
Item Number: 8553176
Release Date: Nov 23, 1994