Dialogues

Forty years separate the Saint-Saëns Sonata from this one, and yet the conversation between them is surprisingly close. Both composers believed in clarity, formal elegance, and the expressive possibilities of tonal harmony at a time when such beliefs were unfashionable. Both were writing at the end of their lives, with a sense of distillation rather than ambition. And both produced, in their final works for clarinet and piano, something that feels at once deeply personal and entirely characteristic. The Clarinet Sonata was composed in 1962, commissioned by the clarinettist Benny Goodman and dedicated to the memory of Arthur Honegger, one of the original Les Six. Poulenc died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1963 before it was published, and an editor was employed to supply missing dynamics and articulations. The premiere was given at Carnegie Hall by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein on 10 April 1963. The Sonata is in three movements. The opening Allegretto tristement establishes the bittersweet quality that runs throughout: lyrical but touched by melancholy, with a broadly singing clarinet line over a piano part that is both supportive and harmonically restless. The Romanza is the work's most intimate movement, tender and unhurried. The finale, Allegro con fuoco, brings the work to a brilliant and slightly impertinent close. The Sonata is unmistakably Poulenc: tonal but never quite settled, tuneful but never simple, and marked throughout by that characteristic mixture of warmth and irony that belongs to him alone. Heard after the Saint-Saëns, it feels less like a departure than a continuation: the same tradition, the same instrument, the same conviction that elegance and feeling are not opposites, expressed forty years further along the same road.