Figure humaine

One of the most virtuosic works for unaccompanied choir in modern repertory, Poulenc’s Figure humaine was intended (he said) to be sung through teeth clenched with anger—the reason being that this 20-minute cantata reflects, in a sometimes agonised way, the pain of life in wartime France under Nazi occupation. Written in 1943 when Poulenc worried that his personal experience of occupation was more privileged than most of his fellow citizens could hope for, he thought of Figure humaine as clandestine Resistance work—setting words by Paul Éluard, whose poems were dropped across France by Allied planes to boost morale. The cantata culminates in one of those very poems, imagining a universe imprinted with the word "Liberty"—which is given triumphant emphasis at the end of the score, marked "ffff". And though the verse settings that preface it are shorter in duration, they’re set on almost equally heroic terms—for two six-part choirs that generate textures of organlike dimension, with sophisticated polyphony but without obscuring the words: a mark of Poulenc’s genius for choral writing, which reached its peak in this piece. Dedicated to his friend and fellow resident in wartime Paris, Picasso, Figure humaine had its first public performance in London, early 1945. But it’s interesting that it had no public performance in France until two years later—probably because there were so few French choirs at that time able to address the music’s challenges.