Poulenc

The best known of Les Six, who wrote salon miniatures and satirical songs as a young man and was described as half monk, half delinquent. He returned to Catholicism after a friend was killed in a car crash in 1936, and the religious works that followed — the Stabat Mater, the Mass in G — could have been written by another person.

He never gave up melody or tonality, which took real stubbornness in the avant-garde climate of the 1950s. His harmony has a sweetness with acid in it that is hard to describe, turning suddenly and never affectedly. The opera Dialogues des Carmélites ends with a group of nuns going to the guillotine, the chorus thinning out voice by voice — one of the most disturbing endings in twentieth-century opera.