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"At last, the world will now know that I am a serious composer!" (Mussulman 1979> 97)·1 Thus reacted Francis Poulenc in 1949 upon hearing a newly released recording of his 1936 Messe under the baton of American conductor Robert Shaw.2 Certainly Poulenc was thrilled by the fact that Shaw had so lovingly rendered a work in his catalogue, which, like all of his religious music of the late 1930s, had suffered considerable neglect in the intervening years. But Poulenc's belief that this recording would help prove to the world that he was a "serious composer" should perhaps be viewed as more than simply an expression of personal contentment. Intersecting with broader issues relating both to his professional reputation and musical aesthetics, Poulenc's desire to be considered "serious" invites us to ponder a nexus of questions that constitute the focus of this article: What did Poulenc mean by serious? Why did he aspire to be viewed as a serious composer at this point in his career? And finally, how did he seek to convince critics and the general public that he was, indeed, a serious composer?
These questions would seem irrelevant, strange even, if it were not for the fact that up until the 1950s Poulenc's musical style was almost consistently defined by the very opposite of seriousness-what critic René Kerdyk, writing in 1938, described as "the personality of a jokester." As Kerdyk explained in his journalistic portrait of the composer, during the social and aesthetic "confusion" of the 1920s and 1930s, the music of Poulenc had succeeded in "enticing the public into a kind of good humour for which he holds the secret." According to the critic, Poulenc's considerable success resulted primarily from the triviality of his music and the composer's desire-viewed as increasingly suspect-to write works with the primary goal of pleasing his public. Poulenc was, Kerdyk argued, a musician "attached to homages, to gossip, and the superficial elegance of the society that surrounds him," and the critic depicted him as a materialistic entertainer "who only agrees to perform in concert if he is very well paid, like a diva" (Kerdyk 1938).3 The composer's involvement with the sometimes impertinent early 1920s pronouncements of the group Les Six, as well as the light-hearted, audience-friendly...