Camp in Francis Poulenc's Early Ballets

Abstract

Qui dira jamais le secret de certaines oeuvres?1 “As he's always been rather le cher maître in my eyes, I was chilled by his talk of sexual success.”2 With these surprising words, Ned Rorem reacted to a friendly conversation with Francis Poulenc in the spring of 1954, during which time the French composer was deeply immersed in work on his opera Dialogues des Carmélites. That Rorem, a homosexual whose writings habitually revel in the details of intimate self-exposure, registered a cold frisson upon hearing of Poulenc's gay sexual exploits seems almost hypocritically prudish. Yet for the American composer, Poulenc's purported promiscuity did not easily reconcile itself with the romanticized notion of the “dear master.” Clearly, the subject of sex, even at a casual gathering of friends at a Cannes hotel, was something about which Rorem would have preferred Poulenc to remain silent.3 He was not alone. Following Poulenc's death in 1963, most scholars adopted a “no-tell” attitude regarding the composer's sexuality. Hélène de Wendel's edition of a selection of Poulenc's letters, published in 1967, carefully expunged any mention of the composer's intimate relationships.4 References to Poulenc's unsuccessful marriage proposal to childhood friend Raymonde Linossier; his decisive and anxiety-ridden gay affair with Richard Chanlaire; the mysterious circumstances surrounding the birth of his daughter, Marie-Ange; and his passionate relationship with salesman Lucien Roubert, were all excised from Wendel's publication. Though Darius Milhaud, in his preface to the volume, commented on how these letters, “like pages detached from an intimate diary, reveal the very heart of Francis—his kindness, his concern and also his creative angst,” the epistolary portrait provided by Wendel, a friend of the composer, was heavily censored with the aim of removing any reference to the composer's sexual life.5