Francis Poulenc
Classical
The next Francis Poulenc concert is scheduled for Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam, Netherlands. See all 6 upcoming concerts
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![Watch Les chemins de l'amour, FP. 106 (Transcr. for Cello and Piano) [Live] music video by Jaemin Han & Jonathan Ware](/mkimage/image/thumb/Video126/v4/31/ad/6e/31ad6ed9-992f-c7d8-1537-58fd55863157/23UMGIM56184.crop.jpg/575x575mv.webp "Watch Les chemins de l'amour, FP. 106 (Transcr. for Cello and Piano) [Live] music video by Jaemin Han & Jonathan Ware")
About Francis Poulenc
Hometown
Paris, France
Born
1899
Genre
Classical
There’s a duality to Francis Poulenc: on the one hand mischievously upbeat, with the salon chic of Paris in the 1920s and '30s; on the other, passionately spiritual, melancholic, and austere. But tears and laughter come together in a robust sensuality, with great (you might say shameless) tunes that sidestep criticism and go direct to the heart. Born in 1899 into Parisian privilege, he moved in the charmed circles of writers like Apollinaire and Cocteau, whose words he would set to music in the songs and other vocal works that underpin his creativity. Collections like the cycle Le bestiaire (1919) established his reputation, becoming a feature of the long performing partnership he shared as a pianist with baritone Pierre Bernac. And his vocal writing culminated in idiosyncratic takes on opera like the surrealist romp Les mamelles de Tirésias (1947) and a lacerating monodrama about unrequited love La voix humaine (1959). But in the mid-1930s, after the death of a friend, he had a spiritual experience that revived his Catholic faith and prompted a sequence of fervently religious works: some solemn, like the Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence (1939); some brazenly joyous, like the Gloria (1961). The high point of Poulenc’s devotional writing came with another unconventional opera, Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), which has one of the most extraordinary final scenes in lyric theater, as an entire community of French nuns go one by one to the guillotine. Poulenc himself died less spectacularly in 1963.
Francis Poulenc has also released music as a member of Le Groupe Des Six.
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