Gloria
Composition and premiere: Poulenc wrote Gloria in 1959-60 on a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Charles Munch led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performances in January 1961 with soprano Adele Addison and the Chorus Pro Musica. They reprised the piece at New York’s Carnegie Hall in April and at Tanglewood on July 21, 1961.
French composers have rarely been bashful about writing music whose main purpose was to give pleasure. It was French composers who began openly twitting the profundities of late Romantic music in the cheeky jests of Satie and in many works by the group that claimed him as their inspiration, the “Group of Six,” which included Francis Poulenc. During the first half of his career, Poulenc’s work was so much in the lighter vein that he could be taken as a true follower of Satie’s humorous sallies. That changed in 1935 when, following the death of a close friend in an automobile accident, Poulenc reached a new maturity, recovering his lost Catholic faith and composing works of an unprecedented seriousness for him, though without ever losing sight of his lighter style. From that time on, he continued to compose both sacred and secular works, and often he could shift even within the context of a single phrase from melancholy or somber lyricism to nose- thumbing impertinence. But the more serious works include some of his largest, and the sheer size of them tends to change our view of the man’s music from about the time of World War II, when he composed the exquisite a cappella choral work La Figure humaine to a text of Paul Éluard as an underground protest to the German occupation. He became an opera composer, first in the surrealist joys of Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) in 1944 (first performed 1947), but later in the very different religious opera Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956), set during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, and the one-woman opera La Voix humaine (1958), in which a woman talking to her lover for the last time on the telephone tries vainly to hold on to him. Critic Claude Rostand once wrote of Poulenc that he was “part monk, part guttersnipe,” a neat characterization of the two strikingly different aspects of his musical personality, though the monk seemed more and more to predominate in his later years. Still, as the American composer Ned Rorem said in a memorial tribute, Poulenc was “a whole man always interlocking soul and flesh, sacred and profane.”
Possessing the least formal musical education of any noted 20th-century composer, Poulenc learned from the music that he liked. His own comment is the best summary:
The music of Roussel, more cerebral than Satie’s, seems to me to have opened a door on the future. I admire it profoundly; it is disciplined, orderly, and yet full of feeling. I love Chabrier: España is a marvelous thing and the Marche joyeuse is a chef-d’oeuvre…. I consider Manon and Werther [by Massenet] as part of French national folklore. And I enjoy the quadrilles of Offenbach. Finally my gods are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky. You may say, what a concoction! But that’s how I like music: taking my models everywhere, from what pleases me.
One of the composers omitted from this list is Debussy, from whom Poulenc may have learned what one analyst calls “cellular writing,” in which a musical idea one or two measures in length is immediately repeated, with or without variation. This kind of mosaic construction is the opposite of a long-range developmental treatment in which themes are broken down into their component parts and put together in new guises. The aim (and the effect) is to produce music that seems somehow instinctive, not labored or intellectual, but arising directly from the composer’s spontaneous feelings. It is a device employed by Mussorgsky and Debussy (who, like Poulenc, admired Mussorgsky), and it was taken up by both Satie and Stravinsky with the aim of writing music that might be anti-Romantic.
As a composer with special gifts in setting words to music, Poulenc had already composed a great deal of choral music, in French and Latin, before turning to the Gloria. Many of his earlier unaccompanied sacred choruses had an intensely mystical quality; this is as true of the motets “for a time of penitence” as it is of the motets for the presumably more joyous feast of Christmas. In 1950 he composed a Stabat mater, the first of three large-scale pieces for chorus and orchestra. This was followed by the Gloria in 1959 and Sept Répons des ténèbres (1962). The Stabat mater is a setting of a medieval Latin text recounting the reaction of the Virgin Mary to the crucifixion of Jesus; the Seven Responses for Tenebrae are likewise a part of the liturgy for the week before Easter, and deal with emotionally charged matter. Of the three late choral-orchestral works, then, the Gloria is the only one that is predominantly festive and exuberant.
The text of the Gloria is regarded as one of the great prose hymns of Christian literature. Normally sung in the Latin Mass immediately after the Kyrie on festive occasions, the Gloria has also been used separately as a hymn of praise. The text as it is now employed developed over an extended period until it reached its present form in the 9th century. Poulenc chooses to repeat a number of phrases in his setting in a way that is not liturgically appropriate; he evidently thought of his Gloria as a concert piece and not a work for the church service. As he himself said, “My Stabat is an a cappella chorus [though with orchestra!], my Gloria is a large choral symphony.” The choral writing is far less contrapuntal than in the unaccompanied motets and choral songs. The voices instead form a block of timbral color around which the orchestral instruments weave their colorful parts. The range of expression in the Gloria is broad—so broad, in fact, that some parts of the work attracted critical reactions when it was first performed. The second movement is among the most lighthearted movements in all of Poulenc’s work. As he recalled:
The second movement caused a scandal; I wonder why? I was simply thinking, in writing it, of the Gozzoli frescoes in which the angels stick out their tongues; I was thinking also of the serious Benedictines whom I saw playing soccer one day.
The second and fourth movements are both rhythmically alive and generally lively in character, while the third and fifth sections are filled with that special mystical quality that was so much a part of Poulenc’s personality. All in all, the Gloria, in its directness of approach, perfectly captures the faith of the man who said, “I want the religious spirit to be expressed clearly, out in the open, with the same realism that we see in Romanesque columns.” The Gloria may not be his most profound work, but it is assuredly among the most brilliant and life-affirming.
STEVEN LEDBETTER
Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.