There Trieste Concert Society this eccentric and brilliant protagonist of music was a guest twice. Already in 1940 Poulenc was invited to the 18th season in Trieste and on that occasion he accompanied the tenor Pierre Bernac on the piano in an almost entirely French repertoire, also playing music of his own composition for the occasion. An appointment that already makes us understand the far-sighted look and attention that the SdC of Trieste had (and will always have) for contemporary authors as it did for Poulenc but also Hindemith, Ghedini and many others.
The event that linked him even more to the city of Trieste was the performance, in 1957Of “The dialogues of the Carmelites” (The Dialogues of the Carmelite Nuns), certainly the most ambitious and complex if not the most original dramatic work of the Parisian musician. An appointment mediated by Maestro Raffaello de Banfield already on the board of directors of the Società dei Concerti, the intermediary between the Parisian musician, of whom he was a friend, and the Verdi Theater which hosted him.
Poulenc then returned to the Società dei Concerti in 1962 – welcomed among other things triumphantly by the crowd upon his arrival at the Trieste station – when he accompanied the soprano Denise Duval, his muse, on the piano in an exclusively French repertoire and with the first performance for Trieste (albeit in a concert version) of his “La voix humaine”, based on a text by Cocteau, which was performed subsequently, just in 1968, six years after the premiere for the Società dei Concerti, in Trieste at the Teatro Verdi in the stage form with orchestra.
Another presence of Poulenc in Trieste is linked to his participation, always in 1962a year before his death, to the international jury of a major international competition, the “City of Trieste” composition prize.
Poulenc, apparently relaxed and light-hearted, was a complex person, and although he tried to give a different image of himself, he was aware of his own contradictions, prey to long depressions that the official mask did not always shield. Sixty-one years after his sudden death (1963, due to heart failure), his art stands the test of time. His jagged musical path gave life to what Cocteau defined as “a music devoid of impressionist clouds and romantic turgidities, light and lively, biting but not too much, alien to academic forms, attentive to cubist and surrealist perspectives”.
Always the target of every avant-garde for not adhering to any spirit of research (except, and always with suspicion of the game, in his early youth), Poulenc cannot be totally attributable even to neoclassicism, in which his friendship with Cocteau and Stravinsky places him and the Group of Six of which he was a member.
