Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence

A spiritual awakening in 1936 revealed a new side to Francis Poulenc and his music. For the first time, he began to compose sacred music, including (in 1938-39) the set of four Lent motets. The Quatre Motets pour un temps de pénitence show a composer testing the limits of a new language and context, taking texts charged with desperate spiritual intensity—shame, bitterness, anger, hope of redemption—and marrying them with music unafraid to reach into the darkest places. There’s a spareness to much of the writing for unaccompanied mixed choir, an angularity that nods to medieval music, softened by echoes of plainsong. “Timor et Tremor” opens in arresting fortissimo unison: fear and trembling that soon retreats into a muttered whisper. “Subito”—suddenly—is written everywhere on a score that darts between despair and hope, finally reaching the knottiest of chromatic phrases from which it wrenches resolution. “Vinea mea electa” is the slow movement of the set, musical balm spread thickly in six-part harmony. More impressionistic, “Tenebrae factae sunt” sees the musical sky cloud over, jagged with chromatic lightning—the darkness of mankind after the Crucifixion. The fractured “Tristis est anima mea” emerges out of this darkness: a lone soprano voice, whose keening cry summons the rest of the choir. Simultaneously the starkest (“vos fugam”) and richest (“immolari”) of the set, it’s a craggy conclusion to a work that wrestles with the biggest doubts and questions of Christianity.