Poulenc's Perpetual Motion

In a 1923 article about the group of young French composers known as Les Six, the American critic Paul Rosenfeld indicated that one member had appropriated the subject of this study: “This music is at once charming and ill-mannered, gay and bitter, simple and scurrilous. There is much wit in it; many clever musical quotations—[Gustave Charpentier's] ‘Louise,’ Schubert's ‘Marche Militaire’; and not a little sarcasm.” Who, specifically, Rosenfeld had in mind is unclear, although in his article he judged Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, and Darius Milhaud to be the most important members of a group who by that time had already gone their separate creative ways. For a member of Les Six to allude to Schubert's Marche militaire before 1923 might well have demanded “not a little sarcasm.” Parisian modernists’ musical borrowings were often glib and irreverent, especially if those appropriations came from works that were by that time already construed to be canonic, including those from the Austro-German romantic tradition.

Judging by Rosenfeld's essays on the composers of Les Six, he was acquainted with many of their most recent works. Rosenfeld had already observed in a 1921 article that Poulenc “writes sophisticatedly childish tunes for the piano, rhythms repeated over and over as the improvisations of children sometimes are, ‘perpetual movements,’ but subtly varied, subtly prevented from becoming monotonous.” If one were to guess at the work that Rosenfeld believed alluded to Schubert's Marche militaire, it could very well be Poulenc's Trois mouvements perpétuels, composed at the end of 1918 and announced for publication by Chester of London in October of the following year. One writer has aptly said of these pieces: “If there is one ‘Six’ music for piano, if there is one and only one ‘Six’ work, if ever the ‘Six’ aesthetic became incarnate, it is in the Mouvements perpétuels.”