On Poulenc's Figure Humaine and Part's Passio

Downtown Voices and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street present works by Francis Poulenc and Arvo Pärt—two of the most idiosyncratic voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Figure Humaine and Passio are the most significant exemplars of their musical styles. These challenging masterpieces enact dramatic journeys that reveal two divergent but equally effective approaches to composition.

In 1936, as the increasingly dark looming shadow of Nazism began to shadow the bright Parisian panache of his youth, Poulenc learned of the death of a friend. At the time, the composer was traveling in southern France; shaken, he sought solace at Rocamadour, a medieval town that for centuries was the endpoint of pilgrimages to the shrine of the Black Virgin (Vierge Noire)—a small wooden effigy. Beholding the tiny statue while he was in the depths of grief rekindled the Catholic faith of Poulenc’s youth. He began writing Litanies à la Vierge Noire that same evening and soon resumed working on his Concerto for Organ (begun in 1934), ushering in a new musical style. These works combine medieval and modern elements, juxtaposing undulating ribbons of sound redolent of medieval organum with immense splashes of neon-bright dissonance, deemed by Ned Rorem “deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.” Similar juxtapositions pervade the Motets pour un temps de penitence of 1938. Poulenc recalled, “the exact image of my Motets suddenly came to me, as vivid and as tragic as a painting by Mantegna.” Their sound, marked by colorful harmonic language and dramatic shifts in mood, power, and attack, evokes neither sweeping landscape panoramas nor hazy impressionist mirages but the starkly hued, intimately emotive faces one might see in a work by Mantegna or Goya.

The apotheosis of this stylistic development was Figure Humaine, written in 1943 following a return pilgrimage to Rocamadour that birthed “the idea of composing a clandestine work which could be prepared in secret and then performed on the long-awaited day of liberation.” The cantata sets eight Surrealist poems from Paul Éluard’s Poésie et Verité 42 that capture the smoldering anger and gruesome, terrified suffering of an occupied people who still maintain an abiding devotion to liberty. It culminates in “Liberté,” wherein the speaker incants an increasingly fervent and mad litany of objects upon which he writes the name of the cherished ideal: Liberty. (Poulenc was especially eager to set this poem, which, printed on pamphlets, was dropped over France by British airmen to bolster morale.)

In scope and difficulty Figure Humaine far surpasses Poulenc’s earlier works. Its performers, spread across twelve parts in two choirs, must summon the full palette of vocal colors within a variety of tempos and registers, and expertly voice pungent sonorities, as they bend quickly round sharp tritone corners, all while building—for twenty minutes—to the work’s most intense, final moment. Extremes of vocal register are met with extremes of expression: “Très” seems to qualify every other expressive marking in the score, from très doux et très calme (very soft and very calm) to très emporté et rude (very vigorous and rough) and even très violent (very violent); the four-octave spread of the final, nearly cataclysmic “Liberté!” outcry bears the exceedingly rare dynamic fortissississimo (ffff). Poulenc’s music clarifies the contours of Éluard’s verse and lends it inexorable immediacy. Éluard wrote to Poulenc, “Francis, I never heard myself; I needed you to understand me.”

Arvo Pärt was born the year Figure Humaine premiered, 1943, in Soviet-controlled Estonia. When Soviet authorities proscribed the young composer’s explorations of serialism and avant garde styles, he retreated into a study of medieval and renaissance compositional processes. He emerged with a new technique he named “tintinnabuli,” for the ringing of bells. Tintinnabulation guides all of Pärt’s musical parameters, setting a mostly stepwise melodic line against a set of triadic pitches within prescribed durations and meters. When the composer emigrated to Vienna, in the late 1970s, he was at work on his largest-scale piece in that style, the Passio Domino Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Sancti Joannem. It premiered in Munich in 1982.

Passio clarifies the Passion narrative by assigning different characters to different cohorts stationed in different key areas with different instrumentation: Jesus, a baritone, and Pilate, a tenor, with solo organ; the Evangelist, an SATB quartet, with various obbligato instruments (violin, cello, oboe, bassoon); and the crowd, an SATB chorus. Rather than append poetry to the biblical prose and suspend its narrative flow with contemplative arias and chorales, as Bach does in his Passions, Pärt sets the Latin translation of the Gospel of John (and adds a brief exordium and a conclusio at beginning and end). Pärt admits: “[the text is] more important than the music” because “it is stronger and it has given food for hundreds and thousands of composers, and it will continue so." He sets the text entirely syllabically and uses harmony statically, not developmentally. The tintinnabuli technique fashions syntax through its mindful control of minimal musical material, lulling the listener into its almost respiratory rise and fall— of a melodic line curling away from and back towards its unbending harmonic frame, of the resultant icy dissonance sublimating into consonance, of sound and silence yielding seamlessly to one another. The words of the drama float, mantra-like, atop the soundscape. Passio invites our surrender to its spellbindingly calm dramaturgy, conjuring for frazzled lives a temporal grace akin to the salvific grace at the heart of its story.

Pärt’s simple-sounding music disguises the difficulty it imposes on performers. Pärt said, “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played;” to beautifully play or sing hundreds of notes, oscillating pristine intervals repeatedly for more than an hour, requires utmost discipline and focus. Poulenc’s handling of Éluard’s verse necessitates nearly super- human skill and stamina, commensurate with the suffering and ardor it means to convey. The challenges offered by these pieces prevent most singers and audiences from attempting to reap their rich rewards. We are most fortunate not only to have the opportunity to hear them, but to hear them together. Experiencing these singers and players as they summon the necessary strength, discipline, and commitment reminds me that cherished ideals like liberty and grace are precious gifts, granted and rekindled through precisely the kind of powerful, mystical communal exchanges between performer and listener that these two great composers have given us.