The jobs he had arranged fell through, and, after playing piano with a traveling pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a friend. “There was no future for me there.”

He set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer was a bad time for it because many of them were out of town., although Frenchman Paul Dukas went out of his way to be helpful and introduced him to the influential Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz.

Getting to know the famous Claude Debussy would not go so smoothly.

Falla finally met him in October, played the piano score of his opera his La vida breve for him, and found the Frenchman’s sarcasm a little intimidating.

A little later, Falla’s shyness made for an even more awkward encounter.

Falla came to visit Debussy, was told that he was out, and was ushered by a servant into a dim alcove off the dining room, a storage space filled with grotesque Chinese masks. After awhile Falla heard Debussy, his wife Emma, and composer Eric Satie come into the dining room and begin lunch. Falla was too timid to enter the dining room unannounced and sat there in the dark alcove, faint from hunger, staring at the weird and ghoulish faces of the masks.

When the chatting and clatter of lunch seemed loud enough to cover his retreat, he slipped into a dim hallway and hastened toward the egress, only to bump headfirst into Debussy’s wife, who screamed.

Even though everybody encouraged Falla to join them for lunch, he was so rattled by the encounter that he made his apologies and departed.

From the start, Poulenc was at odds with military life. He was wealthy, pampered, and flippant, and within a few months, overstaying a leave in Paris, he pulled a ten-day term in a military prison. [He wrote to influential friends, hoping for help, but maintained some sense of humor, asking one friend to spread the word about his incarceration because it was so funny.]

While he was still in prison, Poulenc received from the flamboyant avant-garde choreographer Jean Cocteau a proposal for a project to be called Jongleurs, and with great enthusiasm he set about writing what he called “a thing of mad melancholy and sensitivity so far unknown in my work.”

Jongleurs–that is to say, Jugglers–began with a prelude so wild that Poulenc dismissed it as noise. By contrast, he intended the other part of Jongleurs to sound “as clear as Mozart,” and a well-known dancer of the day moved to it with what was called “melancholy grace.”

Poulenc was so concerned with the originality of Jongleurs that he passed up the chance to ask his friend Pablo Picasso to design costumes and sets for it because Eric Satie had recently relied upon Picasso’s designs for his ballet Parade.

His originality would cost him more. The composer came to think of Jongleurs as music that was not quite ballet and yet not quite viable outside the theater. And later in life, when Francis Poulenc decided that the more exotic rhythms of his early days were not representative of his true style, he destroyed several works that employed them, including the wild, youthful Jongleurs.

Mozart was eager to write his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, but there was a catch. On October 6th, 1781, he wrote from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg:

I’m getting impatient with not being able to continue writing my opera. Sure, I’m composing other things in the meantime, but my heart is set on writing that opera, and what would usually take me 14 days to write I could do in four. In one day I composed Adamberger’s aria in A, Cavalieri’s in B-flat, and the trio, and copied them out in a day and a half. At the same time, though, there’s no advantage to finishing the opera because it would have to sit there until Gluck’s two operas were ready to perform [and there’s still plenty in them that the performers have to work on.]

On top of that, Umlauf has to wait with his opera, which is ready and which took him a whole year to write. Entre nous, don’t believe that it’s any good just because it took him a year to write it. Fourteen or 15 days would be more like it, especially since he’s probably learned so many operas by heart that all he has to do is sit down–and that’s just how he composed it. You can tell as soon as you hear it!

By the way, he invited me to his house oh so politely so that I could hear his opera, adding, “Just don’t think it’s worth your time to hear it. I’m not as advanced as you are, but I do my best.”

I heard afterward that he said, “Mozart must have a devil in his head, his limbs, and his fingers. He played some of my opera, which I scrawled out so badly that I can hardly read it, as if he had written it himself.

Mozart’s opera would have to wait nearly a year for its debut.