Élégie pour cor et piano – Elegy for horn and piano – FP 168 is a short, one-movement work by the French composer Francis Poulenc, written in memory of the horn player Dennis Brain, who died in 1957. It was first performed in January 1958.
Poulenc had a profound admiration for the British horn player Dennis Brain. [1] When the latter died in a car crash in 1957, aged 36, Poulenc composed the Élégie as a tribute. [2] Unsure of the capabilities of the solo instrument, he sought the advice of the horn player Georges Barboteu before completing the piece. [3]
The Élégie was premiered by the BBC in a broadcast on 17 February 1958, played by Brain's former Philharmonia colleague Neill Sanders, with the composer at the piano. [2]
The work typically takes between nine and ten minutes in performance. [4] It is unique in Poulenc's oeuvre in opening with a 12-note tone row. Although Poulenc had met the leading proponent of 12-tone music, Arnold Schoenberg, and admired his music, in his own compositions he remained a tonal composer throughout his career, and this use of a serial theme is entirely untypical. [4]
The tone row is followed by a short and strongly accented
molto agitato passage in which both horn and piano play
triads of C major and C minor.
[5] The tone row returns and is again displaced by the molto agitato.
[5] After a bridge passage marked "tres calme", the main theme of the Élégie, in a basic G minor, is a slow 3
4 melody for horn accompanied by
quavers in the piano's middle register and a
cantabile line in the bass.
[5] The musicologist
Wilfrid Mellers finds both the horn melody and the piano accompaniment related to passages from Poulenc's
Stabat Mater (1950) and his opera
Dialogues des Carmelites (1956).
[5]
After a climax in fortissimo triads of E flat and C, both with flat sevenths, the Élégie moves gently towards its conclusion, ending pianissimo. [5] The horn's final theme is a new 12-tone sequence ending on the leading-note of the C major harmony on which it is supported. [4] Towards the end of the piece the piano has cadences reminiscent of the chimes of Big Ben, a reference to Brain's nationality. [6]
Recordings listed by WorldCat in August 2021 include one by the composer, with the horn player Lucien Thévet [7] and by these horn and piano partnerships: