Francis Poulenc: Gloria
A 20th-century French composer’s return to Catholicism and his newfound musical mastery
Francis Poulenc was born in 1899 to two very different individuals. His father was a stout Roman Catholic while his mother was a wealthy Parisian with a fondness for the arts.
Poulenc was drawn toward his mother more than his father. She taught him piano and exposed him to the music of Debussy, Shubert, and Stravinsky.
Critic Claude Rostand once described the young Poulenc as “Half monk, half thug.”
By the 1920s, according to Wise Music Classical, Poulenc joined “the Paris-based group of composers Les Six who led the neo-classical movement, rejecting the overstated emotion of Romanticism,” which they also state had a “ironic nature.”
Poulenc made chamber music, similar to the other French composers of the time. This French music was the unmelodic, modernist music that spawned from the years after the Great War.
It wasn’t until WW2 loomed over Paris, that Poulenc started to incorporate deeper themes into his music. One event changed his life forever.
abc.net details the tragedy that led to his conversion:
“The young composer and critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud was one of Poulenc’s…
