Francis Poulenc

french musician 1899-1963

Hervé Lacombe, Francis Poulenc, Fayard, 2013, 1104 p. [F]

The Poulenc bibliography lacked a wide-ranging biography encompassing the composer’s entire output as well as his personality and private life. This latest literary work addresses all those aspects: with recourse to many often unpublished sources, it gives the reader a better understanding of the contradictions which drove  the man and which played a fundamental role in his musical production and in the development of his very personal aesthetic principles. A marvellous, deeply-moving portrait, full of subtle nuances and particularly well documented.