1928 FRANCIS POULENC PIANO Plays LES BICHES Ballet 78

$

33

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FRANCIS POULENC in two selections of his 1923 Ballet les Biches written for Diaghilevs Ballets Russes

Dyaghilev first singled out the young Poulenc as early as 1918, probably on the wise advice of Stravinsky. A letter from Poulenc to the impresario dated 15 November 1921 mentions that he would supply the piano score of Les Biches (The Coquettes) by October 1922, before the orchestral version. In fact, he seems not to have begun work on the composition until July 1922, once he, Dyaghilev and designer Marie Laurencin had agreed on the setting for the ballet, and the orchestration was only done a year later, between July and September 1923. The music for the ballet comprises nine numbers, three of which also feature a chorus. The suite performed here comprises the six piano pieces from the vocal score. Four of them (here Nos. I, II, III and V) seem to have been published separately as early as 1924, under the generic title Morceaux détachés. In 1928, Poulenc recorded two of them (II and III) for Columbia. The length of the Rag-Mazurka and perhaps also the rich complexity of its piano writing may explain why it was not selected for publication, despite its obvious musical attractions.

les Biches  No 2 Rondeau/  No 3 Adagietto

12" 78 rpm record COLUMBIA PRESSING

Condition: EXCELLENT close to pristine, plays very veryquiet

Poulenc was born in Paris on 7 January 1899 into a well-known family of industrialists. A Parisian musician, but one with close links to the regions of Burgundy and the Touraine, he followed in the French tradition of Chabrier, his writing brimming with subtlety, humour and genuine emotion, piquant harmonies and a rhythmic lightness. He first encountered Stravinsky’s music in 1910, and between 1914 and 1917 studied piano with Ricardo Viñes. In 1915 he met Milhaud and then, through Viñes, got to know Auric and Satie as well. By 1917 he was a regular at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop near the Odéon theatre, and there came into contact with the poets Apollinaire, Fargue, Éluard and Aragon. In the same year he also met Radiguet, Honegger, Durey, Germaine Tailleferre and Cocteau, who was to become the promoter of the group known as ‘Les Six’. Between 1921 and 1924 Poulenc studied composition with Koechlin. Unlike Milhaud, with whom he travelled to Rome in 1921 and Central Europe the following year, he was no globe-trotter, although between 1935 and 1959, as pianist with his duo partner baritone Pierre Bernac, he did undertake a number of foreign tours, notably to the United States from 1948 onwards. He never held any official academic or administrative position.

Poulenc’s most accomplished works, despite all his operatic, concerto and chamber successes, are his songs and his sacred and secular choral music, both with and without orchestra. He happily admitted in 1942 to André Schaeffner: “I know very well that I am not an innovative musician like Stravinsky, Debussy or Ravel, but I think there’s a place for new music that is happy to use the chords created by others.”

Poulenc wrote three ballets to commission. On the subject of dance, he said, “For me, dance of course means nothing but classical dance, because I’m a sworn enemy of any kind of rhythmic dance or rhythmic pseudo-dance; I owe my love of classical dance to the years I spent working closely with Dyaghilev.” He himself wrote the scenario for each of his own ballets, explaining his personal approach to choreographic creation as follows: “I write my own libretto, and I cannot imagine creating a ballet in any other way; for the tale of the ballet is born at the same time as the movement of the music.”

It is unusual to hear these ballet scores performed on the piano. It was the nature of the beast that the original form a dance composition took was the “piano score”—the music had to be made available as quickly as possible to enable the choreography to be developed and rehearsals to begin. The contract for the Aubade commission, for example, which came from the Viscount and Viscountess of Noailles, clearly stipulated that the solo piano score had to be delivered by March 1929—two months before the orchestral version.

Poulenc was also well aware that, for him, the piano played an indispensable rôle in the compositional process, and he certainly never concealed the fact that these piano versions came first. They reflect the original creative impulses behind the ballets, and it is therefore debatable whether they should be thought of as “reductions”.

Dyaghilev first singled out the young Poulenc as early as 1918, probably on the wise advice of Stravinsky. A letter from Poulenc to the impresario dated 15 November 1921 mentions that he would supply the piano score of Les Biches (The Coquettes) by October 1922, before the orchestral version. In fact, he seems not to have begun work on the composition until July 1922, once he, Dyaghilev and designer Marie Laurencin had agreed on the setting for the ballet, and the orchestration was only done a year later, between July and September 1923. The music for the ballet comprises nine numbers, three of which also feature a chorus. The suite performed here comprises the six piano pieces from the vocal score. Four of them (here Nos. I, II, III and V) seem to have been published separately as early as 1924, under the generic title Morceaux détachés. In 1928, Poulenc recorded two of them (II and III) for Columbia. The length of the Rag-Mazurka and perhaps also the rich complexity of its piano writing may explain why it was not selected for publication, despite its obvious musical attractions.

Poulenc noted, “There is no plot, as such, for Les Biches. Dyaghilev’s idea was to stage a kind of modernized Sylphides, in other words, a ballet of atmosphere.” The ballet is an updated version of the fêtes galantes, in which “twenty or so beautiful and coquettish women frolic with three athletic fellows in rowing costumes”.

Stylistically, the work draws on French eighteenth-century song (Rondeau), makes exotic reference to ragtime (Rag-Mazurka) and reveals influences both classical (Mozart and Schubert) and modern (Stravinsky and Prokofiev), while the composer told Claude Rostand that the Adagietto was inspired by a variation from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.

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