Poulenc
The Life in the Songs
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- US$45.99
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- US$45.99
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One of the greatest modernist composers comes alive in this illuminating biography, a must-have for musicians and music-lovers alike.
Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most significant masters of vocal music —solo, choral, and operatic— quite apart from his achievements in instrumental spheres. But what it cost him, and the determined bravery it took for his unusual talent to thrive, has always been underestimated. In this seminal biography, which will serve as the definitive guide to the songs, acclaimed collaborative pianist Graham Johnson shows that it is in Poulenc’s extraordinary songs, and seeing how they fit into his life —which included crippling guilt on account of his sexuality— that we discover Poulenc heart and soul. With Jeremy Sams’s vibrant new song translations, the first in over forty years, and the insight that comes from a lifetime of performing this music, Johnson provides an essential volume for singers, pianists, listeners, and readers interested in the artistic milieu of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pianist Johnson (Franz Schubert) delivers a lively if unconventional biography of the French pianist and composer Francis Poulenc (1899 1963). Each of the six chapters focus on a decade of Poulenc's compositions and opens with a chronological time line of events in the composer's life (e.g., on June 21, 1943, a 44-year-old Poulenc first performed, with violinist Ginette Neveu, his "Sonata for violin and piano" in Paris's Salle Gaveau). Johnson then lays out a grid that includes the number and title of each piece written in the era, the date of composition, the literary source (if there is one), the key, the time signature, the tempo, the lyrics, and a description of each song. Along the way, he incorporates biographical sketches of poets and writers with whom Poulenc collaborated (Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul luard, Jean Cocteau) and explores Poulenc's closeted homosexuality and his ability to keep it secret by compartmentalizing his domestic life with his wife and daughter and his gay life. Poulenc emerges in this exhilarating and exhaustive study as a prolific composer attuned to the cultural and personal eddies of modern society. This astute biography will be a boon to Poulenc fans and classical music buffs alike.
