Christmas music that's weird, Part 1

Poulenc's Gloria

I love Christmas music. Because I’m a recovering classical musician, mostly what the kind of music I’m talking about is what I call “English cathedral music”. There’s a lot of good English cathedral music for Christmastime. (Turns out the Church of England takes Christmas really serious or something.) I’m talking about works like the Coventry Carol and Howells’ A Spotless Rose. One of the more transcendent musical experiences I’ve had was one where Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols was sung in a candlelit church.

But I’m not here to sell you on English cathedral music, at least not today. Today I present to you not a piece of English cathedral music but a piece of French cathedral-ish music, one that I will also not necessarily try to sell you on because I think it is very weird. That piece is Francis Poulenc’s setting of the Gloria. The whole piece consists of six movements, but I only know the first movement intimately, so that’s what I’m going to write about.

Poulenc wrote his Gloria in 1959-1960, a time when classical music was doing all kinds of funky stuff. There’s much to be made of the harmonic and instrumental choices he made, and I’m sure people have, but my main interest is actually in Poulenc’s treatment of the text:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis.

That’s a text you probably know. It’s the first part of what’s sometimes called the Greater Doxology. Most people I know just call it “the Gloria”. It’s associated with Christmas because these words, which most people I know refer to as “Gloria In Excelsis”, are the Latin version of what the angels say when they come to see the shepherds in Luke’s gospel to let them know about Jesus. It means,

“Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to men of good will.”

I don’t know if Poulenc knew that, because frankly, his Gloria In Excelsis sounds terrifying. I can only assume that that’s to illustrate how scary it was when the angels came to the shepherds. That’s a fun concept. It’s in contrast to most of the Glorias I know (Vivaldi’s is the most famous), which mainly seem to be focusing of the fact of God’s glory, and not how frightening angelic visitation would be.

Allow me to walk you through what happens in the piece:

BOOM! BRASS. If you don’t know it’s about to happen, you might fall out of your chair. Brass, brass, big brass. Magnificent, stately, declamatory, G major. HERE ARE THE ANGELS! Then little whispering woodwinds. Are they the shepherds? I don’t know. Anyway, then comes the chorus. They are also declamatory. Brashly the men declaim in B minor, Gloria in excelsis Deo. “Glory to God in the highest”. Then the women follow with the same punchy dotted rhythym, Gloria in excelsis Deo. “Glory to God in the highest”. As the chorus does this, the strings and winds sway like branches in stormy wind. The horn has a little bit to say.

Then:

ET IN TERRA PAX HOMINIBUS! everyone in the chorus declaims. They yell it fast, they yell it twice, they yell it descending the scale. The strings quiver with an alarmed tremolo, the timpani roil. “And on earth peace to men”.

Wait, what? Where? This is one of the less peaceful musical moments in Christmas music canon. Poulenc’s ironic treatment of this line is in large part what has kept me returning to this piece every Christmas for the past eight years. It’s made stranger by what follows:

Bonæ voluntatis! Blink and you’ll miss it. Loud, brief, harmonically confusing, orchestrally chaotic. “Of good will”.

Then, gloria, gloria, gloria. Harmonically ascending, anticipatory, pleading, accompanied by frantic sixteenth notes. This is immediately followed by a quieter variation of the first Gloria in excelsis Deo, a louder et in terra pax hominibus. This time, though, we get two bonæ voluntatis. They descend chromatically. To me, these sound slouching, wilting, almost sarcastic. We then hear another slight variation of the first Gloria in excelsis Deo. Then:

ET IN TERRA PAX HOMINIBUS! This time instead of fearful, it’s soaring, ecstatic, like the chorus can hardly believe it. “And on earth peace to men!” Bonæ voluntatis, bonæ voluntatis. “Of good will, of good will.” The same melodic motif, this time more harmonically stable, and importantly, situated comfortably in a major key. Gloria, gloria, sung on a simple repeating tonic triad with a seventh tacked on just for fun or to be French. Or is it simple? The notes are stacked in such a way that you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be G major or B minor. The orchestra further obfuscates by flipping back and forth between the two at a sixteenth-note rate. When the chorus is done, the winds and strings twiddle away on 32nd and sixteenth notes. And it’s never resolved whether the piece was supposed to be in G major or B minor.

Just kidding! After a brief rest, the orchestra punches out an incontrovertible B minor chord.

And I just don’t know what to make of all this. Every year I have a new pet theory about what this puzzling-to-bizarre text setting is about, what Poulenc really meant. The truth is that I just don’t know. But here’s what I think this year. Poulenc is reminding us that the shepherds were “sore afraid” when the angels came to them: they were at their job when they were suddenly, shockingly brought face-to-face with the divine. Poulenc scares us like the angels scared the shepherds in the field. He shocks us with “peace on earth” because that’s one of the more shocking prospects people can conceive of. The shepherds in the outskirts of Bethlehem didn’t know peace, and neither do we. We wouldn’t know how to know it. When we sit with the idea a little bit, though, and let it sink in, we realize we are starved for peace, and we want to cry out, as Poulenc’s chorus does on his final et in terra pax. We settle into the idea, like the orchestra seems to settle into G major. Then we are rudely reawakened to the lack of peace we experience on earth; we are bludgeoned with B minor.

That’s the best I can come up with. I would welcome readers’ thoughts and impressions, especially if you’ve never heard of this piece or this guy before. Give it a listen. Don’t fall out of your chair.