| Summary: | Francis Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano exists as something of a hybrid work. Dedicated to the memory of Spanish resistant poet Federico García Lorca, the sonata’s slow movement, the “Intermezzo”, is prepended with the opening line of Lorca’s “Las Seis Cuerdas”. As a consequence, the movement is imbued with a programmatic quality that causes it to sit somewhere inbetween Poulenc’s instrumental and vocal works. In this essay, I take advantage of this hermeneutic quality to explore the composer’s relation to Lorca and surrealism more generally, and how this manifests in the”“Intermezzo”. Ultimately, I argue that the movement is more than simply a lament over Lorca’s tragic death, and is in fact a broader expression of Poulenc’s despair towards a political and social climate that seeks to marginalize on the basis of sexual identity.
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