Messe en sol majeur, Sept chansons, Motets

Description

The Sept Chansons, written in 1936, borrow their surrealist lyrics from Apollinaire and Éluard. Each of them refers to a part of the human body, namely, respectively: the arms, the face, the breasts, the eyes, the face again, the hair and the hands, and finally the shoulder. Poulenc composed his Messe in 1937, completing it in August 1937 and dedicating it to the memory of his father, who had died more than twenty years earlier. It is a missa brevis (the Credo is omitted), and it is renowned for its striking introduction, which strikingly recalls the opening bars of Luire in the Sept Chansons. More than a decade separates the Quatre motets pour le temps de Pénitence (1938-39) from the Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël (1952), but these two collections share several common features, as does the Messe en sol-, especially in terms of their homophonic textures and unexpected dissonances.