Music: Poulenc's Maturity

French Composer Francis Poulenc has a favorite religious scene: the painting by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) in one corner of which a small rabbit crouches unaware of the tragedy being unfolded on the Mount of Olives behind him. It is the kind of light but not irreverent touch that Roman Catholic Poulenc himself strives for in many of his religious works. Last week the Boston Symphony introduced U.S. audiences to the latest and perhaps most contrast-filled of Poulenc's compositions—his Gloria, in which he says he tried "to write a joyous hymn to the glory of God."

If the piece suggests Mantegna in mood, it is closer to a modern painter in manner. "The colors," says Poulenc, "are very clear, primary colors—rude and violent like the Provence chapel of Matisse." Scored for chorus, soprano, and a sort of celestial band of horns and strings, Poulenc's 25-minute Gloria proved to be a work of sharply profiled contrasts, at times deeply reverent (in the manner of his opera Dialogues of the Carmelites), at times mischievous and almost jazzy. Among its memorable moments: the opening of the second section, "Laudamus Te," with the dissonant cry of French horns followed by the syncopated chanting of the chorus; the movingly lyric third section with its bell-like soprano solo. "Domine Deus"; the quietly majestic ending in a mood of "pity and peace."

Poulenc wrote Gloria, as he writes all of his music, in his 16th century country home in Touraine, because "like wine, which can grow only in its own soil, I can compose only in France." Originally, he intended it for one of his favorite singers, Italian Soprano Rosanna Carteri ("She has a voice with lipstick and powder"), but at the work's premiere the principal part was sung by U.S. Negro Soprano Adele Addison, who so impressed Poulenc that he interrupted a rehearsal to shout: "Parfait! Parfait! La perfection!" Poulenc plans to write a new opera for La Scala, and he is now working on yet another religious work, for a male chorus and children's chorus, to be performed at the opening of Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Both will be "completely, completely, completely different" from what he has done before. "Every age of man has its music," says Composer Poulenc. "Now that I am 62, my music is very lyric and tragic—it is my maturity."