Poulenc: Clarinet Sonata
Like Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Nielsen before him, Poulenc’s music for clarinet was some of his last. Written just months before his death, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata shares with Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Bartók’s Contrasts and other landmark works a debt to Benny Goodman, who was responsible for many of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century. The King of Swing was slated to give the premiere of the Sonata at Carnegie Hall in April 1963 with the composer at the piano, but after a heart attack claimed Poulenc’s life in January that year, Leonard Bernstein joined Goodman for the memorializing performance instead. The piece itself represents a memorial of its own; Poulenc christened it with the dedication “to the memory of Arthur Honegger,” one of Poulenc’s colleagues in the Montparnasse composer group Les Six, the artistic disciples of enfants terribles Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Seeking to move on from the grand Wagnerian and Debussian responses on either side of the fin-de-siècle artistic crisis, Les Six aimed to inflect modern music away from “high art” and toward the quotidian styles of folk and popular song, jazz, music-hall, children’s songs and operetta airs. The odor of popular music does indeed permeate Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, with its percussive opening, its cool, wistful monotones, and its rambunctious wit. Finally, Poulenc declared, “the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Like Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Nielsen before him, Poulenc’s music for clarinet was some of his last. Written just months before his death, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata shares with Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Bartók’s Contrasts and other landmark works a debt to Benny Goodman, who was responsible for many of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century. The King of Swing was slated to give the premiere of the Sonata at Carnegie Hall in April 1963 with the composer at the piano, but after a heart attack claimed Poulenc’s life in January that year, Leonard Bernstein joined Goodman for the memorializing performance instead. The piece itself represents a memorial of its own; Poulenc christened it with the dedication “to the memory of Arthur Honegger,” one of Poulenc’s colleagues in the Montparnasse composer group Les Six, the artistic disciples of enfants terribles Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Seeking to move on from the grand Wagnerian and Debussian responses on either side of the fin-de-siècle artistic crisis, Les Six aimed to inflect modern music away from “high art” and toward the quotidian styles of folk and popular song, jazz, music-hall, children’s songs and operetta airs. The odor of popular music does indeed permeate Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, with its percussive opening, its cool, wistful monotones, and its rambunctious wit. Finally, Poulenc declared, “the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music