The other five members of Les Six are much more defined by their membership of the group, and as a result a generic Parisian perkiness clings to much of their music. Poulenc soars beyond them, because he is more complex, and because he was such a painstaking craftsman (the two things are connected). A myth grew up that his deliciously sensuous music came easily to him. “The myth is excusable,” he said, “since I do everything to conceal my efforts.” Poulenc was far more inspired by poetry and art than music and once said it was looking at Matisse’s illustrations for Mallarmé’s poems that taught him the value of refining an idea. “Matisse went in three or four stages from the complex and thick to the most ideally simple and pure pen strokes,” he wrote. “I often tried, particularly in the accompaniments of my songs, to follow this lesson.” This method of endless refining is a sensuous thing, a matter of weighing this sonority at the piano against that one. It’s incompatible with the fierce urge to systematise and rationalise, which lies behind so much modern music.