Poulenc: Flute Sonata

A work perfectly made for the flute, Poulenc’s thoroughly melodious sonata is central to the repertory for flute players. In three short movements, it’s all over in around 13 minutes.

Introduction

Poulenc was one of the few composers (from Joseph Haydn onwards) who never wrote a string quartet. From his Sonata for two clarinets, which he composed at the age of 19 (1918), to the sonatas for clarinet and oboe, each with piano, that were his last works (both 1962), he preferred chamber music for woodwind instruments. He produced his Flute Sonata in 1956–57, soon after his opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1953–56).'

History

The work was commissioned by Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, where the deceased music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge had set up a foundation to encourage the composition and performance of chamber music. The negotiation between Washington, D.C., and Paris is documented in letters. Spivacke mailed a first approach on April 3, 1956, suggesting a piece for two pianos or a group of up to six instruments. Busy scoring Dialogues des Carmélites at that time, Poulenc declined. Spivacke was undeterred and wrote back a month later, this time proposing a flute sonata. Perhaps he remembered that Poulenc had begun such a piece four years earlier. In any event, Poulenc found this idea much more appealing, and the details of the commission were worked out over the next three months: the work was to be dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and Poulenc would be paid $750 (around $10,000 today), which he noted in his agreement was below his usual fee. However, he had travels coming up, and not until the beginning of December did he begin composition of the sonata, at the luxurious Hotel Majestic in Cannes. His work was interrupted by the premiere of Dialogues des Carmélites in Milan the following month, to be resumed when he was back at the Majestic in February‒March.

Poulenc: Sonata for Flute and Piano

As had been agreed upon with Spivacke, the sonata was allowed a first performance that the composer could easily take part in—at the music festival in Strasbourg, on June 18, 1957, with Jean-Pierre Rampal on flute. Poulenc did not travel to the Library of Congress for the US premiere, on February 14, 1958, but Rampal did, with the pianist Robert Veyron-Lacroix. Rampal recorded it with Poulenc the following year.

Form

The sonata is in three short movements with a conventional fast‒slow‒fast pattern. There is no strenuous development in any of them, but rather an easy flow of spirited ideas in variants with occasional diversions. Each movement has a contrasting middle section followed by a return to the opening.

Analysis

The flute is foremost almost throughout, playing in its own airspace above the piano. Its prominence is also assured by the light piano texture. This is how the sonata begins, the flute presenting a phrase and then an answer that comes with an upward rush. The marking is “Allegro malinconico,” but the melancholy does not go very deep. The statement-answer pair is repeated, with a little change in the answer which opens the door to further alteration, followed by curtailment of the initial idea. As if starting to get a little bored, the flute—or the composer—dashes off into a dance. Soon, though, the music returns to thematic business until it can move into its skipping middle section. This subtly brings back the five-note arpeggio motive that set the movement going, and thus prepares a return to the primary material. The upward rush, now eerie in its two shades of the minor scale, warns that this must all come to an end. (And it does.)

As Poulenc himself pointed out, the slow movement, headed “Cantilena,” recalls the music for Sister Constance, the young novice among the Carmelite nuns of his recent opera. A figure based on the five-note arpeggio sets the scene, and then the cantilena extends itself—its purity touched, in typical Poulenc fashion, with nostalgia and Parisian popular song. Once more, variants follow. The middle section, more assertive, is short. Then the cantilena returns.

Poulenc closed his sonata with a perky finale that has something of the character of a rondo, intercutting a fast main theme with other material. The piano, which we should remember was Poulenc’s own instrument, introduces a middle section with more echoes of popular song. After that, a call from the flute, suddenly alone, focuses attention on a brief reprise of the first movement’s middle section, which is followed by an acceleration back to the finale’s main theme.

Connections

Poulenc was certainly aware of the Flute Sonata of 1943 by his elder contemporary Sergei Prokofiev—a work he begged musicians (on at least one occasion) not to program immediately before his own because it was “so much stronger.” If we recognize there can be strength in lightness, however, we might want to disagree. French to his fingertips, Poulenc was also familiar with the French traditions of composing for the flute, and of flute playing. He said that he took Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp as a model, however distant, and that he had Rampal in mind while composing the piece. When Rampal was contractually unavailable for a second recording, he invited Michel Debost, but died before the recording could be made.

Legacy

It is touching to find Poulenc, at the time he was composing his Flute Sonata, writing to a friend about his warm approval of the young, radical Pierre Boulez’s Sonatine for flute and piano—an earlier and totally dissimilar work. Much closer to his aesthetic is the Sonata for flute and piano by the more musically conservative Jean Françaix (1996). Those who have benefited most from Poulenc’s Flute Sonata, though, are flute players, whether performing the original version or the orchestration that the English composer Lennox Berkeley undertook in 1976 for the flutist James Galway.

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Article by Paul Griffiths