Several accounts of Poulenc’s life have been published in recent years, though all in French, as appreciation for the composer has not dwindled in his home country. However, two books in English have recently appeared. That Poulenc’s work has been comparatively undervalued and underperformed by English speakers in relation to other titans of composition is likely the impetus behind Graham Johnson’s Poulenc: The Life in the Songs and Roger Nichols’s Poulenc: A Biography. Although Johnson and Nichols provide no previously unknown, important information that might justify adding to the dozens of already well-researched biographies on Poulenc, both of their characterizations of the man and his art provide the reader with a brilliantly elaborate understanding of the composer.

Johnson and Nichols provide nearly identical portrayals of Poulenc as a man of contradiction, personal and musical. Referred to amongst his acquaintances as both “monk and ragamuffin,” the composer is portrayed as having had difficulty reconciling his relationship with Christianity. He made a yearly pilgrimage to the black Madonna statue at Rocamadour for much of his adult life, although filled with religious doubts all the while. He struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality, further complicating his faith, in a time of sexual freedom enjoyed by his friends in Paris. He was obsessed with his own legacy and reputation as a serious composer but refused to allow his vanity to influence the populist aesthetics of his work, lest he not “sound like [himself].” The most interesting contradiction is that between Poulenc’s deep love for his country and his being entirely apolitical—a contradiction whose implications are neglected by Johnson and Nichols.

Despite the similarities between Johnson’s and Nichols’s portrayals of Poulenc, the biographies are written for entirely different audiences, suggesting the biographers might have been aware of each other’s projects. Johnson, one of the great art song collaborators of his generation and created Chevalier by the French government in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, writes exclusively for the singer, pianist and, perhaps, the instrumentalist who engage Poulenc’s art in performance. He argues that the songs of Poulenc alone can give us an idea of who the composer was as an artist and a man. (Johnson should be more transparent here with his reader and admit that, after all, this is the only music of Poulenc’s on which he is really qualified to write, being a collaborative pianist). Thus, his biography focuses exclusively on each of the composer’s mélodies, providing their texts, translations, tempi, dedicatees, publishers, places of composition, keys, and time signatures. Johnson shares advice and anecdotes on performance practices, interpretation, and style, all of which should be taken as gospel, given Johnson’s own success as performer. Just as The Interpretation of French Song by Pierre Bernac, Poulenc’s favorite collaborator, has become indispensable source material for singers and pianists alike in their understanding of French mélodies, Poulenc: The Life in the Songs should be required reading for musicians who wish to perform the music of Poulenc with authenticity and sophistication. However, Johnson’s assertion that study of Poulenc’s mélodies alone are capable of providing a comprehensive profile of the composer is unfounded.

Johnson would have done well to make an exception to his assertion in examining some of Poulenc’s great works beyond his mélodies, such as Dialogues des Carmélites and La voix humaine, as the two operas reveal sides of the composer, musical and dramatic, that are not found elsewhere. To be fair, Poulenc said that “my best pianistic discoveries have come to me in writing accompaniments for my songs.” He did not say, however, that his best musical discoveries have come to him in writing accompaniments for his songs.

Johnson’s account has little to offer the non-musician beyond its heavily honeyed tangents of gossip regarding Poulenc’s famous friends, love life, and a plethora of French poetry translated wonderfully by Jeremy Sams. The most interesting, intelligent passages of Johnson’s biography are those where he embraces the fact that he is unrivaled concerning his qualifications to write from a performer’s perspective. Thus, Johnson’s work makes clear to the reader that in order to write interestingly on music, one must often be a musician: “No matter what the subject matter of the poem, the tempo of most French mélodies is ruled by the physicality of the dance rather than the immobility of philosophical reflection” (for the latter see Schubert). He writes on the importance of rubato of diction in performing French mélodies—a level of musicianship over the heads of most singers and pianists. He touches on the power and significance of things left unsaid in French music. In Johnson’s mind, the “Piano chases the voice,” “flourishes crash between hands,” and the “fugitive nature [of a song can] evoke a musical dew that evaporates on a blade of grass.” Abstract description of art rarely serves any practical purpose, but most of Johnson’s is insightful, avoids coming off as fluff, and is very clearly the product of an impressive musical mind in its own right.

Nichols, a British recipient of the Légion d’honneur for his writings on French music, pens an account of the composer’s life that caters to academics who are likely not musically inclined. His descriptions of the distinct musical features of compositions tend to bore and are reminiscent of analysis one might encounter in an undergraduate music theory course—shallow, albeit informative. One assumes that Nichols’s omission of creative musical analysis is not a reflection of his knowledge, but merely of his intended reader. He still manages to convey a wonderfully constructed, no-nonsense narrative of Poulenc’s life that avoids too much speculation and makes clear the composer’s legacy, though he ultimately decides against qualifying the composer as a genius. According to Nichols, Poulenc’s style, and the French aesthetic that he inherited from Satie, Fauré, and Debussy, are defined by their elegance, lightness of touch, and humor, but with the ability to move one deeply—a spot-on description.

Nichols details each composition, both finished and abandoned, with relatively equal attention. Examining compositions beyond Poulenc’s mélodies provides the reader with a far more complete perspective of the composer’s progression as an artist; for there are two important facets of Poulenc’s musical personality that rarely express themselves in his mélodies. First, his penchant for pastiche, often quoting other composers’ melodies within his own. Second, his fondness for episodic, unpredictable melodies which, more often than not, blend to become some of the most moving instrumental music ever written (see his Cello Sonata, FP 143). Nichols’s studies of Poulenc’s instrumental music make these vital dimensions of Poulenc’s artistry perfectly clear for the reader.

Although the objectivity and emphasis on historical fact with which Nichols writes are admirable and illuminating, his revealing of the magic within Poulenc’s music is lacking. After reading Nichols’s uninspired plot summaries of Dialogues des Carmélites and La voix humaine, operas that are composed entirely of remarkable moments both musically and dramatically, the reader would have no idea that they were two of the greatest operas written during the twentieth century. Nichols and Johnson fail to discuss these operas as representing a fascinating synthesis of Poulenc’s musical identities—that of the fragmented, capricious melodic attitude evident in his instrumental music and the lush, elegant, lyrical temperament found in his mélodies. Though neither biographer goes in for meaningful analysis of Poulenc’s operas, they each provide enthralling narrative on Poulenc’s compositional process.

Poulenc was a great lover of art and literature. Of Matisse and Eluard, Poulenc said “they are the ones who gave me most ideas about art. Musicians can’t teach me anything new.” Matisse provided Poulenc lifelong inspiration as a model for achieving maximum results by minimal means (specifically, the notion of a painting being made up of a single line or brush stroke that in its totality is elegant, provocative, yet simple). Poulenc’s technique for setting text to music entailed rereading a poem to himself, sometimes for hours on end, until the rhythm of an individual line, often neither the first nor the last, determined for him the rhythm and feeling of the piece as a whole. He said that “to write a good song, one must love the poem.” His technique for writing the music itself was, according to Poulenc, inspired entirely by visual memory. Known amongst friends for his astounding ability to recall visual details from years past, Poulenc claimed that he would often call upon a moment in time from his boyhood or adolescence and write what he saw and felt in that past moment. Hence, when we hear Poulenc’s music, we find ourselves transported to the Paris and Nogent-sur-Marne of Poulenc’s youth.

Johnson’s and Nichols’s biographies function well as supplements to one another in apprising the reader why Francis Poulenc’s art ought to be considered amongst the greatest of the twentieth century; Johnson provides the wit, gossip, and musical expertise while Nichols imparts a scholarly seriousness to his subject. These fresh accounts lay bare the charms and talents of the composer and do well to remind us that, ultimately, as an artist should be judged based on their art, Poulenc was an artist of the highest caliber.