At some point in the coming days, buffeted by the frenzy and bombast of a 21st-century Christmas, you may have the urge (and perhaps just a sliver of time) to re-enter the meaning and spirit of the season through a different, purer door.
But how to achieve this? Well, think of setting 10 or so minutes aside for Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). In his sleeve notes for a superb 2008 recording by the Choir of Westminster Abbey, Robert Quinney describes the motets as “exquisite miniatures” in which the French composer, alighting on four scenes from the Nativity story, “took time-honoured liturgical texts from the Catholic tradition and dressed them in bold new clothes”.
O Magnum Mysterium, which opens the sequence, is a setting of the text of the fifth response for matins on Christmas Day. The Latin reminds us “how great a mystery and how wonderful the sacrament, that the animals should behold the Lord newly born and lying in a stable”. Quinney thinks it the most profound of the four motets, slow and (by Poulenc’s standards) harmonically austere.
In Quem vidistis, the shepherds are asked who they have seen. To my ears, the music evokes quite brilliantly a feeling of creeping awe – tantalising, disturbing, inspiring – as others try to understand and assimilate what has taken place.
Videntes stellam, perhaps my favourite of the four, is rustic winter starlight given musical form. The motets conclude with Hodie Christus natus est, in which Quinney fancies he hears the sound of popping champagne corks.
Yet the Christmas motets, though popular with choirs and much recorded (especially O Magnum Mysterium), seem to play little part in Poulenc’s reputation. In books on the composer on the shelves of the estimable Westminster Music Library, references to them are few and far between. Perhaps their brevity tells against them.
Nor was Poulenc always an obvious candidate to produce music of this kind. According to Prof Wilfred Mellers, the conventional view of him once was that he was “froth in the wake of the First World War, a witty boy–hedonist who, in the giddy 1920s, tweaked the noses of moribund establishmentarians”.
Poulenc believed that he put “the best and most genuine part” of himself into his choral and religious works. He composed his first religious piece, Litanies à la Vierge Noire de Rocamadour, when he was “seeking to drop roots into the very depths of my being”.
An archetypal Parisian sophisticate in many respects, Poulenc nevertheless cautioned his friend Stéphane Audel not to forget that his father “came from Ayeron, that sturdy, mountainous area between Auvergne and the Mediterranean basin”. He described his father as “deeply religious but in a very liberal way, without the slightest meanness”. His own religious faith was “instinctive and hereditary”. Or, as he also liked to put it: “My faith is that of a country priest.” One critic called Poulenc “half monk and half naughty boy”.
For Audel, his friend’s faith “glowed within him with a gentle certainty”, like a “providential refuge which, for its beneficial effects, may be compared to the peaceful countryside of Touraine and its pearly light, or the gentle roll of its wooded hills where slate roofs twinkle in the sun”.
Poulenc counted Satie, Eluard, Prokofiev, Britten and Cocteau among his friends.
It was the death of another friend, the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, in a horrific car accident in 1936, that reawakened the faith which had lapsed during and after the First World War.
In the wake of his loss, Poulenc made a penitential pilgrimage to the shrine of the Vierge Noire at Rocamadour, where he had a mystical experience and took the inspiration for his Litanies, in which, in his own words, he “tried to get across that atmosphere of ‘peasant devotion’ that had struck me forcibly in that lofty chapel”.
The Christmas motets were composed in 1952. They are unlikely ever to attain the renown of his acknowledged masterpieces, such as the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (which tells the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, nuns who were guillotined during the closing days of the Terror for refusing to renounce their vocation). Prof Mellers finds the motets “slighter” than some of Poulenc’s work in a similar vein, but “magical” nevertheless.
Though no expert in such matters (as, to adapt a catchphrase of my father’s, who used it about “the scholars”, I only met the musicologists coming home), I would concur.
The magic of Christmas is a phrase that may seem hackneyed beyond repair, but Poulenc can help restore some of its true lustre in the days ahead: O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, iacentem in praesepio.
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