Flute Sonata (1957)

Allegro malinconico

Cantilena

Presto giocoso

Poulenc had never been happier than he was when working on his Flute Sonata in Cannes in the early months of 1957. His opera Les Dialogues des Carmélites had been a great success on its first performance in January at La Scala. Cannes, where the weather was “sublime” and where he had just met a new lover, seemed “more exquisite than ever.” And, since the Sonata had been commissioned by the Sprague Coolidge Foundation, he could look forward to a generous fee for a work he had been going to write anyway.

So - unless it is an allusion to the thematic reminders of the doomed Carmelite nuns that surface here and there - it is difficult to understand why the opening Allegro is qualified as malinconico. There is nothing “melancholy” about the elegantly poised flute melody with which the work begins and which, as the main theme of a ternary construction with a rather more rueful but comparatively undeveloped middle section, it dominates the first movement. It also has a part to play later in the work - not in the Cantilena, which has its own very shapely melodic interest, but in the last movement, where its characteristic little flourish is twice heard again. The surprise of the Presto giocooso, however, is the late recall of the rueful middle section of the Allegro malinconico, which most effectively offsets the boyish high spirits of the rest of the movement.