Plate (folio 16) from Les Biches, vol. I

Francis Poulenc was a French composer known for his lyrical approach to twentieth-century music, blending neoclassical form with accessible melody and harmonic freshness. Active from the 1920s onward, he composed across opera, ballet, chamber music, and vocal works, many featuring texts by poets including Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard. His operatic works, particularly Dialogues of the Carmelites, established him as a major figure in mid-century French music. Poulenc's aesthetic resisted both dodecaphonic austerity and modernist complexity, maintaining instead a distinctly French lyricism rooted in popular song and religious sensibility.