Francis Poulenc ‒ Mélancolie, FP 105

Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963), Mélancolie, FP 105 (1940)

Performed by Pascal Rogé

Written in 1940, Mélancolie is one of Poulenc's most nostalgic pieces.

Francis Poulenc first sprang to the attention of Parisian musical circles as a member of ‘Les Six’, so named by the critic Henri Collet. Les Six began to feature together (initially as ‘Les Nouveaux jeunes’) in the same concert programmes in 1917 and they found a ready spokesman in Jean Cocteau who produced his manifesto Le Coq et l’arlequin the following year. This aesthetic document rejected romanticism and demanded that music should be overtly nationalistic and should shun foreign influences, particularly the excesses of Wagner. Negro art, the frivolous music of Satie, the music of the circus and jazz band, the primitive, machines, brevity and straightforwardness were all considered art forms or values worthy of admiration and emulation. Everyday life was considered to be a powerful subject matter by Cocteau; but, despite despising the refinement, sophistication and decorative excesses of the nineteenth century, Les Six enjoyed a ‘gastronomic preference for under-done meat and extra-dry wines’.

By 1921 the group had begun to lose cohesion; of all the members of Les Six, Francis Poulenc remained true to the group’s general frivolity; the other members had drifted away. Honegger, for example, never had any sympathy with Erik Satie and therefore with Les Six. Despite the group’s anti-Debussyism which resulted from contact with Satie, Poulenc described how as a child he came close to kissing Debussy’s hat in a shop; in later years he said, ‘Debussy always remained my favourite composer after Mozart. I could not do without his music. It is my oxygen.’

Where would Poulenc have been without his melancholic streak? It’s that juxtaposition of emotions that makes this composer once dubbed ‘half man, half thug’ so endlessly fascinating. And we find both aspects of his character rubbing shoulders here. Mélancolie opens with a wistful melody, almost Chopinesque in tone, set against a rippling backdrop; the whole effect is unashamedly nostalgic and gives little hint of the emotional rollercoaster to come. And as so often with Poulenc it is the moments where he’s smiling, where the harmonies and key flirt with the major, that he tugs at your heartstrings most profoundly. The piece is dedicated to his driver and friend Raymond Destouches. It’s perhaps not surprising to learn that Mélancolie was completed in 1940, in war-torn France. Wilfrid Melers has compared the work to the perfumed utterances of Fauré, but more "unreal, and with dreams that are much more elusive". Others have found in it a luminous quality, akin to the paintings of Bonnard, Vuillard and Dufy. Music of deep yearning and nostalgia, whatever its inspiration, it unquestionably haunts us with its mystery and beauty.

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