Gloria

Laudamus te

Domine Deus

Domine fili unigenite

Domine Deus, Agnus Dei

Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris

Although Poulenc was brought up a Catholic - by a devout father and a rather less devout mother - and although he was drawn to writing for the voice from an early age, he composed no church music until he was in his mid-thirties. Before then he had completed only one choral work of any kind, the Chanson à boire of 1922. But the death of a composer colleague in a particularly horrific road accident in 1935 and a subsequent pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Rocamadour in the Dordogne inspired the Litanies à la Vierge Noire, which turned out to be the first in a whole series of religious works including the Mass in G, the Stabat Mater and the Gloria.

Commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky, written between May and December in 1959 and first performed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January 1961, the Gloria was an immediate success in the United States. If it took a little longer to establish itself in France it was partly because of some initial discomfort with the popular rather than churchy tone of the piece. The composer, who considered the Gloria the best thing he had ever done, was unrepentant and explained to his critics that he had been thinking of “those frescoes of Gozzololi where angels stick their tongues out and those grave Benedictine monks I have seen playing football.”

Certainly, it is a tuneful work in which, paradoxically true to himself, Poulenc draws on a variety of stylistic sources - not all of which, however, are foreign to the Church. There is just a hint of something Gregorian about the fanfares which open the work and, although there is also a tendency to play football with the natural stresses of the Latin text, the setting of the first movement is conventional enough to include some (for Poulenc) rare examples of choral counterpoint. Similarly in the Laudamus te, while there might be a brief echo of the music hall in the trombone introduction and more than a little of Rake’s Progress Stravinsky in the orchestral accompaniment, the short but very slow and very quiet middle section (“Gratias agimus tibi”) might almost have been written by Messiaen in celestial mode.

From the Domine Deus onwards - and particularly where the soprano soloist is involved - religious sentiment tends to prevail over cheerfulness. It is true that the cheeky composer of Les Biches is unmistakably present in Domine fili unigenite but, in spite of comprehensive allusions to Prokofiev, the Domine Deus, Agnus Dei is a prayer as personal as it is radiant. The last movement, which recalls the fanfares from the beginning of the work, seems to be proceeding briskly to a cyclic conclusion when the tempo slows down for another very slow and very quiet episode featuring the solo soprano. One last and very loud fanfare on “Amen” precedes a hushed ending on a prolonged, theoretically dissonant but actually conclusive major seventh.