Élégie Pour Cor Et Piano
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''Élégie pour cor et piano'' – Elegy for horn and piano – FP 168 is a short, one-movement work by the French composer Francis Poulenc, written in memory of the
horn Horn most often refers to: *Horn (acoustic), a conical or bell shaped aperture used to guide sound ** Horn (instrument), collective name for tube-shaped wind musical instruments *Horn (anatomy), a pointed, bony projection on the head of various ...
player
Dennis Brain Dennis Brain (17 May 19211 September 1957) was a British horn player. From a musical family – his father and grandfather were horn players – he attended the Royal Academy of Music in London. During the Second World War he served in the Roya ...
, who died in 1957. It was first performed in January 1958.


Background and premiere

Poulenc had a profound admiration for the British horn player
Dennis Brain Dennis Brain (17 May 19211 September 1957) was a British horn player. From a musical family – his father and grandfather were horn players – he attended the Royal Academy of Music in London. During the Second World War he served in the Roya ...
. When the latter died in a car crash in 1957, aged 36, Poulenc composed the Élégie as a tribute. Unsure of the capabilities of the solo instrument, he sought the advice of the horn player Georges Barboteu before completing the piece. The Élégie was premiered by the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
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in a broadcast on 17 February 1958, played by Brain's former
Philharmonia The Philharmonia Orchestra is a British orchestra based in London. It was founded in 1945 by Walter Legge, a classical music record producer for EMI. Among the conductors who worked with the orchestra in its early years were Richard Strauss, ...
colleague Neill Sanders, with the composer at the piano."Poulenc's Elegy for Dennis Brain", ''The Times'', 8 February 1958, p. 3


Structure

The work typically takes between nine and ten minutes in performance. It is unique in Poulenc's oeuvre in opening with a 12-note
tone row In music, a tone row or note row (german: Reihe or '), also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets ...
. Although Poulenc had met the leading proponent of 12-tone music, Arnold Schoenberg, and admired his music, in his own compositions he remained a tonal composer throughout his career, and this use of a serial theme is entirely untypical. The tone row is followed by a short and strongly accented molto agitato passage in which both horn and piano play triads of C major and C minor. The tone row returns and is again displaced by the molto agitato. After a bridge passage marked "tres calme", the main theme of the Élégie, in a basic G minor, is a slow melody for horn accompanied by
quavers Quavers are a deep-fried potato-based British snack food. Launched in the UK in 1968, they were originally made by Smith's. Since 1997 they have been produced by Walkers. The name comes from the musical note, quaver. History Quavers were lau ...
in the piano's middle register and a
cantabile In music, ''cantabile'' , an Italian word, means literally "singable" or "songlike". In instrumental music, it is a particular style of playing designed to imitate the human voice. For 18th-century composers, ''cantabile'' is often synonymous wit ...
line in the bass. The musicologist
Wilfrid Mellers Wilfrid Howard Mellers (26 April 1914 – 17 May 2008) was an English music critic, musicologist and composer. Early life Born in Leamington, Warwickshire, Mellers was educated at the local Leamington College and later won a scholarship to Dow ...
finds both the horn melody and the piano accompaniment related to passages from Poulenc's Stabat Mater (1950) and his opera '' Dialogues des Carmelites'' (1956). After a climax in fortissimo triads of E flat and C, both with flat sevenths, the Élégie moves gently towards its conclusion, ending pianissimo.Mellers, pp. 161–162 The horn's final theme is a new 12-tone sequence ending on the leading-note of the C major harmony on which it is supported.Aprahamian, p. 7 Towards the end of the piece the piano has cadences reminiscent of the chimes of Big Ben, a reference to Brain's nationality.


Recordings

Recordings listed by
WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...
in August 2021 include one by the composer, with the horn player Lucien Thévet and by these horn and piano partnerships: * Hervé Joulain;
Alexandre Tharaud Alexandre Tharaud (born 9 December 1968) is a French pianist. He is active on the concert stage and has released a large and diverse discography. Life and career Born in Paris, Tharaud discovered the music scene through his mother who was a danc ...
*Nicholas Korth and Julian Mitchell *Ab Koster; Éric Le Sage *Neil Page; Martin Qvist Hansen * Richard Watkins; Ian Brown *Richard Watkins;
Julius Drake The gens Julia (''gēns Iūlia'', ) was one of the most prominent patrician families in ancient Rome. Members of the gens attained the highest dignities of the state in the earliest times of the Republic. The first of the family to obtain the ...


References and sources


References


Sources

* * * * {{Francis Poulenc Compositions by Francis Poulenc 1957 compositions Funerary and memorial compositions