On today's date in 1961, the French composer Francis Poulenc was in the United States for the Boston premiere of his major new choral work, scored for soprano solo, large orchestra, and chorus. It was a setting a Latin text from the Roman Catholic Mass—"Gloria in excelsis Deo" or "Glory to God in the Highest."

These days Poulenc's "Gloria" is regarded as one of his finest works, but back in 1961, a few critics shook their heads and tut-tutted about the seemingly irreverence of sections of the new work which seemed too light-hearted and rather out of place in a presumably "serious" religious work. Poulenc's setting of the Latin text "Laudamus te, Benedicimus te, Adoramus te, Glorificamus te" (We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you), seemed downright giddy to those critics.

In his defense, Poulenc said: "I was thinking when I composed it of these frescoes by Gozzoli with angels sticking out their tongues, and of those grave Benedictines I saw once playing soccer."

In retrospect, it seems odd that anyone should have been surprised by the coexistence of the serious and the silly in the music of Poulenc, since both moods had been evident in his music for decades. In 1950, the critic Claude Rostand described the composer as "A lover of life, mischievous and good-hearted, tender and impertinent, melancholy and serenely mystical, half monk—and half delinquent."