Composers › Francis Poulenc › Programme note
Improvisation No.12 in E flat: Hommage à Schubert (1941)
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Three Novelettes
No.1 in C (1927)
No.2 in B flat minor (1928)
No.3 in E minor sur un thème de M. de Falla (1959)
Les Soirées de Nazelles No.7: Le Goût du malheur (1930-6)
Improvisation No.15 in C minor: Hommage à Piaf (1959)
Mélancolie (1940)
In 1945 Poulenc looked back over the piano pieces he had written durng the last twenty-seven years and declared them less than uniformly good. “It’s very simple,” he said, “I can put up with the Mouvements perpétuels, my old Suite in C and the Trois Pièces. I very much like my two collections of Improvisations, an Intermezzo in A flat and certain Nocturnes. I absolutely condemn Napoli and the Soirées de Nazelles. As for the rest, I don’t much care.” It’s easy to agree with him about the quality of the Improvisations, including the last of those he had written up to that time, the Hommage à Schubert, which is an intriguing combination of Schubert in Ländler mode and Poulenc in Lydian mode. He might not have cared much about the first two Novelettes - one lyrically evoking Schumann, the other vigorously cavorting with Chabrier - but the homage to his late colleague Manuel de Falla he took very seriously. His last piano piece, written more than thirty years after the other two Novelettes (for an anthology celebrating the centenary of Chester’s publishing house), it is a nocturnal meditation on a hypnotic theme from El Amor brujo.
Why Poulenc was so hard on the Soirées de Nazelles, written between 1930 and 1936 at the home of his “Tante Liénard” at Nazelles in Touraine, it is difficult to say. Certainly, he was enthusiastic enough at the time and, while one might find fault with the construction of this “enormous suite” of character studies, one can scarcely resist the expressive intimacy of a piece like Le Goût de malheur. A “taste for unhappiness” was also a characteristic of Edith Piaf, who inspired a last addition to the Improvisations. It is a homage so idiomatic that fans of the singer have wasted much time and energy going through their 78s for the song they feel Poulenc must have borrowed from her. As for the unhappiness of Mélancolie - at five or six minutes the longest of Poulenc’s piano pieces - the date of 1940 and the echoes of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel suggest that it was a French composer’s reaction to the events of the time.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Improvisations 12, 15”
Three Novelettes
No.1 in C (1927)
No.2 in B flat minor (1928)
No.3 in E minor sur un thème de M. de Falla (1959)
Les Soirées de Nazelles No.7: Le Goût du malheur (1930-6)
Improvisation No.15 in C minor: Hommage à Piaf (1959)
Mélancolie (1940)
In 1945 Poulenc looked back over the piano pieces he had written during the last twenty-seven years and declared them less than uniformly good. “It’s very simple,” he said, “I can put up with the Mouvements perpétuels, my old Suite in C and the Trois Pièces. I very much like my two collections of Improvisations, an Intermezzo in A flat and certain Nocturnes. I absolutely condemn Napoli and the Soirées de Nazelles. As for the rest, I don’t much care.” It’s easy to agree with him about the quality of the Improvisations, including the last of those he had written up to that time, the Hommage à Schubert, which is an intriguing combination of Schubert in Ländler mode and Poulenc in Lydian mode. He might not have cared much about the first two Novelettes - one lyrically evoking Schumann, the other vigorously cavorting with Chabrier - but the homage to his late colleague Manuel de Falla he took very seriously. His last piano piece, written more than thirty years after the other two Novelettes (for an anthology celebrating the centenary of Chester’s publishing house), it is a nocturnal meditation on a hypnotic theme from El Amor brujo.
Why Poulenc was so hard on the Soirées de Nazelles, written between 1930 and 1936 at the home of his “Tante Liénard” at Nazelles in Touraine, it is difficult to say. Certainly, he was enthusiastic enough at the time and, while one might find fault with the construction of this “enormous suite” of character studies, one can scarcely resist the expressive intimacy of a piece like Le Goût de malheur. A “taste for unhappiness” was also a characteristic of Edith Piaf, who inspired a last addition to the Improvisations. It is a homage so idiomatic that fans of the singer have wasted much time and energy going through their 78s for the song they feel Poulenc must have borrowed from her. As for the unhappiness of Mélancolie - at five or six minutes the longest of Poulenc’s piano pieces - the date of 1940 and the echoes of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel suggest that it was a consciously French composer’s reaction to the events of the time.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Novelettes 1-3”