ABSTRACT
’He plays the piano well,’ wrote the society hostess Mme de Saint-Marceaux in her diary on 18 March 1927. ’His compositions are not devoid of talent but he’s not a genius, and I’m afraid he thinks he is.’ Intelligent though the lady was, she got this one spectacularly wrong. Poulenc has in fact outpaced his colleagues in Les Six by many a mile, as singers and instrumentalists all over the world will attest, and while he would never have accepted the title of ’genius’, preferring ’artisan’, a genius is increasingly what he appears to have been. Part of the answer lay in always being his own man, and this independence of spirit shows through in his writings and interviews just as brightly as in his music, whether it’s boasting that he’d be happy never to hear The Mastersingers ever again, pointing out that what critics condemn as the ’formlessness’ of French music is one of its delights, voicing his outrage at attempts to ’finish’ the Unfinished Symphony, writing ’in praise of banality’ - or remembering the affair of Debussy’s hat. And in every case, his intelligence, humour and generosity of spirit help explain why he was so widely and deeply loved. This volume comprises selected articles from Francis Poulenc: J’écris ce qui me chante (Fayard, 2011) edited by Nicholas Southon. Many of these articles and interviews have not been available in English before and Roger Nichols's translation, capturing the very essence of Poulenc’s lively writing style, makes more widely accessible this significant contribution to Poulenc scholarship.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|47 pages
Articles
chapter 9|6 pages
Article IX ‘Pages from America (Diary extracts)', La Table Ronde, no. 30, June 1950, pp. 66–75
chapter 11|6 pages
Article XI ‘How I Composed Les Dialogues des Carmélites', L’Opéra de Paris, no. 14, Second Quarter, 1957, pp. 15–17
part II|17 pages
Critical Articles and Reviews
chapter 13|4 pages
Article XIII ‘On Richard Strauss's Elektra’, Le Figaro, no. 244, 1 September 1934, p. 4
part III|7 pages
Contributions to Works by Others
part IV|3 pages
Response to a Survey
part V|19 pages
Lectures
part VI|63 pages
Interviews
chapter 23|4 pages
Article XXIII Interview with André Laphin
chapter 24|4 pages
Article XXIV Interview with Lucien Chevaillier
chapter 25|6 pages
Article XXV Interview with José Bruyr
chapter 26|4 pages
Article XXVI Interview with Nino Franck
chapter 27|4 pages
Article XXVII Interview with A.P.
chapter 28|4 pages
Article XXVIII Interview with Jeannie Chauveau
chapter 29|4 pages
Article XXIX Interview with Claude Chamfray
chapter 30|4 pages
Article XXX Interview with Fernando Lopes-Graça
chapter 31|6 pages
Article XXXI Interview with Paul Guth
chapter 32|2 pages
Article XXXII ‘Poulenc
chapter 33|6 pages
Article XXXIII Interview with Henri Hell
chapter 34|8 pages
Article XXXIV Interview with Martine Cadieu
chapter 36|4 pages
Article XXXVI Interview with Denise Bourdet
part VII|114 pages
Interviews with Claude Rostand