“Le monstre est au point. (The monster is ready.)“
So wrote Poulenc at the end of his third or fourth attempt at a violin sonata, completed in 1943. It puzzles us that he did not share our enthusiasm over this ingenious work of art- in fact, he was fond of neither the piece nor the violin as a solo instrument and wrote it only at the behest of violinist Ginette Neveu, France’s young star whose career was interrupted by the war.
His complex musical personality is well illustrated in this piece. In less than 20 minutes he takes us through the city of Paris where its idiomatic street music once reverberated, now silenced by the Nazis. In a rebellious and protesting spirit with an ironic undertone (hear the hidden quote of “Tea for Two” in the last movement, music that was also forbidden), we are thrown back to the dismal time when human brutality reached another level.
But the narrative is not obvious. Just like the last movement of the first cello sonata by Saint-Saens, the war story is being told by a satirist or cabaret artist: one gets the urge to laugh, yet one is hesitant given the tragedy. What a unique and fascinating quality of how these French composers write of war, if we indeed choose to find explicit links to worldly episodes in this abstract music.
Between the two dynamic outer movements, we hear a nostalgic cantilena written in memory of Federica Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet and playwright who had been brutally murdered by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Here, Poulenc’s narrative pays homage not only to the late poet he profoundly admired and loved but to the oppressed Spanish people under the rising tides of fascism. He quotes from Lorca’s poem Las seis cuerdas (The six chords) at the head of the movement- “La guitar fait pleurer les songes” (“The guitar makes dreams weep”). The plucking sound of the guitar, the very symbol of the Spanish people, is heard in the repeated notes of the piano.
A composer who is not afraid of being charming, Poulenc is regarded as somewhat of a musical lightweight placed between the fin de siècle giants and post-war avant-gardists. His music is indeed often reminiscent of the popular music of his time, a genre often derided as pure entertainment. Poulenc, however, unreservedly confesses his love for it: “I’ve often been reproached about my ‘street music’ side. Its genuineness has been suspected, and yet there’s nothing more genuine to me.”
This may perhaps explain why his music has not yet been received with the seriousness it deserves. Plus, though to a lesser extent, the gift for writing great melodies, of which Poulenc is most certainly a true master, easily raises the suspicion of lacking profundity as has been the case in the likes of Schubert and Mendelssohn.
The music ends with a sharp, haunting cry cut brutally short, perhaps the very last spasm of Lorca or a cry of all the victims of unprecedented cruelty that his generation witnessed.
Mayumi Kanagawa, violin
Junho Yang, piano
original artwork by Grégory Coursaux
Recorded in Berlin 2022
Video: Lux Studio Berlin
Audio: Laura Schneider