Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is a French composer and pianist.
His mother taught him the piano at the age of five. From 1915, he perfected with Ricardo Viñes, who introduced him to Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
At the age of eighteen, he had his first success in a "avant-garde" music concert given at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. His Negro Rapsodie (1917) closed the door to the Paris Conservatory, but attracted the attention of composer Igor Stravinsky, whose support enabled him to have his first works published in the British editions Chester.
Critic Claude Rostand, to underscore Poulenc's coexistence of great gravity due to his Catholic faith with carelessness and fantasy, coined the famous formula "monk or thug". Thus, with regard to his Gloria, which caused a stir in his creation, the composer himself declared: "I thought, simply, while writing it, of these frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues, and also to those serious Benedictines that I once saw playing football ”.
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