The Clarinet Sonata is one of Poulenc's last two substantial works, the other being the Oboe Sonata. Through a strange sort of symmetry, Debussy (1862-1918) and Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) also ended their careers with chamber music sonatas. Poulenc's Clarinet and Oboe Sonatas, in their absence of development of themes, rejected classical models: they were dedicated to the memories of the recently dead Arthur Honegger and Sergey Prokofiev respectively. He apparently felt a link between his wind sonatas and the dead (as in the homage to Dennis Brain in the Elégie for horn).
Poulenc's Sonata for clarinet and piano is like his Flute Sonata (1956) in combining virtuoso writing with lyric flow: it has a touch of German Romanticism that at times gives it a spooky air. The second theme of the first movement is reminiscent of Poulenc's setting of a text by Jean Cocteau titled La Voix humaine (1958), in which a woman conducts a telephone conversation with her lover and, in the course of it, realizes that their relationship is ended. The central Romanza is a stately sarabande which borrows from Poulenc's own setting of the Gloria (1959), while the rapid finale is dynamic, yet anxious, filled with high-stepping popular melodies. The Clarinet Sonata was given its première on 10 April 1963 at Carnegie Hall by Benny Goodman, accompanied by Leonard Bernstein.