‘Francis Poulenc is music itself. I know no music more direct, more simply expressed or going so unerringly to it its target.’ This praise from his fellow composer, Darius Milhaud, is equaled only by that from Arthur Honegger, who admired Poulenc as a born composer, one who ‘amid fashions, systems, slogans, has stayed true to himself with that rare courage which demands respect’.

Poulenc grew up in the heart of Paris, between the Madeleine (‘my home town), the Marais (‘my village’) and Nogent-sur-Marne (‘my countryside... my paradise with its open-air cafés, chip-sellers and dances to the accordion’). A precocious pianist, his creativity was nourished by Debussy, who had ‘awakened music’ for him, by Stravinsky, who ‘served as a guide’ and Ravel and, above all, by Satie, who influenced him greatly, ‘even more aesthetically than musically’. For many years Poulenc had to put up with being labelled a ‘superficial’ and ‘light’ composer, but nothing is farther from the truth. His correspondence collected by Myriam Chimenes and Renaud Machart’s biography both testify to this, noting the bold modernity of his music.

From the first work he dared make public, the Rapsodie Negre, at the advanced age of nineteen, to the very last, the Clarinet and the Oboe Sonatas, completed shortly before his untimely death, Francis Poulenc regularly devoted himself to chamber music, sometimes following an urge to write, sometimes responding to the wishes of his virtuosi friends. He liked saying: “To write what seems right to me, when I want to, that is my motto as a composer”. These chamber works, thumbing their nose at early twentieth century post-romantic pretensions, are mischievous, youthful portraits from the inter-war period, melancholy, tender images of the post-war spirit.  The final pages are as spare as a Matisse drawing, giving off a bittersweet perfume nostalgia and perhaps assumed gaiety.

After a period during which he turned away from the genre with his only contributions to it being the superb Le Bal Masqué and the popular Sextet, Poulenc set out to write for strings and piano. The Cello Sonata was first sketched in 1940 and reworked eight years later, while his Sonata for Violin and Piano was first heard in 1943. From this same period dates Poulenc’s collaboration with the dramatist Jean Anouilh, providing incidental music for Léocadia and L’invitation au Château.

Incidental music to L’invitation au Château was written and first performed in 1947 and the score was published in 1948. Although Poulenc had relatively little affection for the cinema, he felt great affinity for the stage, as demonstrated by his theatre works. At the request of dramatist friends such as Jean Cocteau, he wrote music for their plays. 

L’invitation au Château, adapted for the English theatre by Christopher Fry as Ring Round the Moon, was the last collaboration between the two artists. In July 1947, Anouilh wrote: 

‘That is what is happening. I do not think I want to make it into a play with incidental music, I should not like to have needed music to get atmosphere. I imagine that to express happiness or its illusion in music you would only need to write a very curious waltz, returning all the time to suggest the dance, just one theme occasionally in a minor key when things are going badly, that is all’. 

The plot of this ‘pièce brillante’ is as follows. A grand ball is held at the château. The old châtelaine, Madame Desmermortes, has two identical twin nephews, Horace and Frédéric (played by the same actor). Frédéric is engaged to Diane, the daughter of a very rich businessman, but she actually loves Horace. Unable to tolerate the influence she has over his brother, Horace takes advantage of the ball and secretly invites another beautiful girl, Isabelle, a dancer, who is supposed to make Diane jealous. Surrounded by mystery and charm, Isabelle cannot get away from her possessive and inquisitive mother, who turns out to be an old friend of Madame Desmermortes’ companion. Of course, the secret cannot be kept. Fortunately Isabelle and Frédéric get on nicely. Thanks to the kind action of the old aunt, everything is finally sorted out in a sea of plotting, misunderstandings, substitutions and about-turns.