Poulenc completed this work in 1938. It was premiered at the home of the Princesse de Polignac in Paris in December of that year, and the first public performance, also in Paris, took place in June 1939. This is our first performance of the concerto.

Poulenc, born into wealth, had the rather enviable position, for a composer, of not having to worry about making a living. Likable, humorous, and friendly, he circulated easily in the social world of the French upper class. This didn't mean he was not serious about his work, however. Poulenc was a member of the influential group of French composers known as Les Six, together with Honegger, Milhaud, Auric, Durey, and Tailleferre: an informal association founded when most of them were Paris Conservatory students in the late 1910s. The members of Les Six sought a more naturalistic style of modern French music, rejecting the Romantic excess of Wagner, the harsh atonality of Schoenberg, and what they saw as vagueness of form in Debussy. Poulenc's music, often dry and witty, fits these goals perfectly.

There is also a deeply spiritual and serious side to much of Poulenc's music. He rediscovered his Catholic faith while in his late 30s, and many of his choral works, from the Mass in G Major of 1937 to the well-known Gloria of 1960, were settings of Latin religious texts. Poulenc's religious vision reflected his own joie de vivre, and his religious music is never pompous or conventional.

His organ concerto, though not intended as church music, clearly draws on the organ fantasias of Bach and other Baroque composers and on the great 20th-century French organ tradition. It was originally commissioned in 1934 by the Princesse de Polignac, a wealthy patroness who had also commissioned his concerto for two pianos. The Princesse-American-born Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune--was a talented musician who had a large organ installed in her salon in Paris.

The Concerto's composition was uncharacteristically drawn-out and difficult for Poulenc. A large part of the problem seems to have been the fact that he was not, in fact, an organist, and was unsure about technical details of writing for the instrument. He also seems to have had in mind a piece of greater emotional depth than many of his earlier works, writing at one point to the Princesse that: "It is not the amusing Poulenc of the Concerto for Two Pianos, but more like a Poulenc on the way to the cloisters." After four years of off-and-on frustration, he wrote to her in the May 1938: "Yes, you will finally have your Concerto. The word finally sums up the joy I feel on being at peace with my conscience and even more specifically, with my artistic conscience, as the work is now truly ready. Never, since I first began composing, have I had so much trouble finding my means of expression, but I nevertheless hope that it now flows freely without giving the impression of too much effort."

Though the original commission was apparently for a relatively easy organ piece that the Princesse herself could play, the solo part of Poulenc's concerto ended up as music calling for considerable virtuosity. (For the premiere, Poulenc enlisted Maurice Duruflé, organist at the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont, and organ professor at the Conservatory.) The piece is laid out in several linked sections, which do indeed "flow freely" from one to another. There is a severe and distinctly "Bach-like" introduction, which eventually leads to, stormy music carried by the strings with short bursts from the organ. There is a full stop, and then a short recitative by the organ leads to long section marked "very calm." A long period of increasing tension culminates in an outburst from the organ, a short quiet interlude, and another furious scherzo. In the end, there is a brightening of the harmony, and a quiet passage of almost religious mystery, before a final Baroque explosion from the organ and a closing chord.