THE LISTENING SERVICE
In 1962, Francis Poulenc had composed his last sacred work, his Sept répons des ténèbres, a piece he wouldn’t live to hear when it premiered in New York the next year. ‘I have finished Les Ténèbres,’ he said. ‘I think it is beautiful. With the Gloria and the Stabat Mater, I think I have three good religious works. May they spare me a few days in purgatory, if I narrowly avoid going to hell.’
Ah Francis! It wasn’t you who needed saving from a hellish afterlife thanks to the strictures of the Catholic church. In fact, it’s just the other way round: Poulenc’s sacred music – composed by a gay man who had also fathered a child out of wedlock, making him a persona non grata according to the church’s diktats – amounts to a redemption of the intolerances of the church. Poulenc fearlessly accepts the whole of human life in the sensual and spiritual sounds that his sacred music makes.
His very first sacred work, the Litanies à la Vierge Noire for female voices and organ – first performed on the BBC in 1936 – was a shock to the international music scene. Poulenc, according to the critic Ernest Newman, was a ‘farceur of the first order’. But the rawness and ferocity of the Litanies, written in the immediate aftermath of the tragic death of his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud, completely contradicts that image. ‘It’s not that I’m consumed by the idea of being a great musician,’ Poulenc wrote, ‘but all the same it has exasperated me to be, for so many people, simply an erotic petit maître.’
The glory of Poulenc’s later sacred music – including the Gloria, written for Boston in 1961 – is that it dares to admit the earthy and, yes, e
