This work, Les biches, was an immediate success, first in Monte Carlo in January 1924 and then in Paris in May, under the direction of André Messager it has remained one of Poulenc's best-known scores. He decided that the theme would be a modern version of the classical French fête galante. The following year Poulenc received a commission from Sergei Diaghilev for a full-length ballet score. Neither of the French composers was influenced by their Austrian colleagues' revolutionary twelve-tone system, but they admired the three as its leading proponents. In 1922 Poulenc and Milhaud travelled to Vienna to meet Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg.

He ought to develop into a farceur of the first order.' Newman said that he had rarely heard anything so deliciously absurd as parts of Poulenc's song cycle Cocardes, with its accompaniment played by the unorthodox combination of cornet, trombone, violin and percussion. In 1921 Ernest Newman wrote in The Manchester Guardian, 'I keep my eye on Francis Poulenc, a young man who has only just arrived at his twenties. The pianist Alfred Cortot commented that Poulenc's Trois mouvements perpétuels were 'reflections of the ironical outlook of Satie adapted to the sensitive standards of the current intellectual circles'.įrom the early 1920s Poulenc was well received abroad, particularly in Britain, both as a performer and a composer. Poulenc described Satie's influence on him as 'immediate and wide, on both the spiritual and musical planes'. After initially dismissing Poulenc as a bourgeois amateur, he relented and admitted him to the circle of protégés, whom he called 'Les Nouveaux Jeunes'. Satie, an eccentric figure, isolated from the mainstream French musical establishment, was a mentor to several rising young composers, including Auric, Louis Durey and Arthur Honegger. Poulenc called him 'my true brother in spirit'. The two young composers shared a similar musical outlook and enthusiasms, and for the rest of Poulenc's life Auric was his most trusted friend and guide. Auric, who was the same age as Poulenc, was an early developer musically by the time the two met, Auric's music had already been performed at important Parisian concert venues.

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