In the Open Air

Of Poulenc, 21st century composer Ned Rorem remarked, “He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.” While some may see this as duality, I see music as the conduit between what is sensual and what is spiritual.

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The Sonate pour violon et piano is a letter of love to a man Poulenc never met: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca, who was assassinated in the open air by Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, was a brilliant writer who expounded on themes of love and disfunction as reflected in nature and human nature. He also was a guitarist and his poems are deeply influenced by music and rural Spanish culture.

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At the top of the second movement, Poulenc inscribes “La guitare, fait pleurer les songes.”/"The guitar, makes dreams weep” a quote from Lorca’s Las Seis Cuerdas (The Six Strings). When plucking the chords of this movement, I can’t help but think of it as Lorca’s guitar, come back to speak to the man that so closely identified with him. Strikingly, in the dedication “à la mémoire de Federico Garcia Lorca 1899-1936” Poulenc incorrectly writes the poet’s birth year, instead choosing to align it with his own. Poulenc must have admired Lorca, not only for his artistic sensibilities but for his bravery in living openly as a gay man. Poulenc struggled in secret to accept his own sexuality and likely took comfort in Lorca’s writings. Poulenc had only recently acknowledged his sexuality even to himself by the time of Lorca’s death. 

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In this work I hear pain. I hear quotes from Eugene Onegin. I hear Lorca running away from the Nationalists and I hear his screams in the open field. I hear a requiem. I hear moments where Poulenc wants to scream, but can’t. Yet I also hear an indomitable and restless spirit that will stop at nothing to keep loving, writing and giving to us, even from beyond the grave. 

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Like Lorca, Sergei Prokofiev was someone intimately acquainted with political persecution. Having suffered for decades under Stalin’s thumb, Prokofiev died mere hours before Stalin. There was not a single flower in the entire Soviet Union to lay on Prokofiev’s grave at his funeral: they all went to Stalin. Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata offers a view into a happier time in Prokofiev’s life: written during WWII as he took shelter in Perm, near the Ural Mountains. The open, flowing melodies and nods to traditional Russian dances encapsulate the reprieve that permeated this brief period of the composer’s life. 

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Beethoven’s celebration of the open air is by the happiest one. His fifth sonata for Violin and Piano “Spring” is in F Major, a key that represent peace, calm and light nostalgia. As in the Poulenc, we hear the wind in this work, but it is a blissful wind.