Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). French composer and musician
Francis Poulenc was a French composer and pianist whose works ranged from song to chamber works, orchestral repertoire, choral music, operas and ballets. He studied with Ricardo Viñes and Erik Satie, under whose influence he became a member of ‘Les Six’, a group of neo-classical composers whose music reacted against the German Romantics such as Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.
Poulenc began composing ballets collaboratively with ‘Les Six’, including Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921), choreographed by Jean Börlin for the Ballets Suédois to a story by Jean Cocteau, whom ‘Les Six’ admired greatly. The composers worked together to achieve Cocteau’s vision of vignettes of a French wedding ceremony held on the Eiffel Tower through tableaux. In 1924, Poulenc wrote Les Biches for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, his most famous work for ballet.
Following this, Poulenc composed L’Eventail de Jeanne (1927), a children’s ballet for the Paris Opéra by Alice Bourgat and Yvonne Franck that brought together ten different French composers including Maurice Ravel, Jacques Ibert and Darius Milhaud, among others. Poulenc’s final ballet was in 1942 with Les Animaux Modèles (1942) in choreography by Serge Lifar. Other works by Poulenc have also been set to choreography, most notably by Kenneth MacMillan for his 1980 ballet, Gloria.