Deux Poèmes

Éloge

Le Brick

Saint-Léger Léger, suspect though it might seem, is not a pseudonym: it is the real name of the poet who later called himself Saint-John Perse and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature under that much more familiar pseudonym in 1960. When Milhaud first met him, before the First World War, he was still Alexis Saint-Léger Léger and known mainly, if at all, for his blank-verse collection Éloges published in 1910. Attracted perhaps by the exoticism of these poems, and clearly not deterred by their obscurity, Milhaud applied himself to the virtuoso task of setting Éloge V for unaccompanied vocal quartet. Unlike Poulenc’s settings of Éluard and Apollinaire in the Sept Chansons, Milhaud’s Éloge is an essentially linear concept. Its contrapuntal texture, clarified by the composer’s still experimental use of polytonality, is effectively offset by the occasional passage in rhythmic unison.

Éloge was written in 1916, shortly before Milhaud left Paris for Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel on his posting to the French Embassy in Brazil. It had to wait for its companion piece until after the composer’s return to France at the end of the War in 1918. He chose René Chalupt’s Le Brick partly because he knew the poet: it was at Chalupt’s house that Milhaud first met Poulenc, who was still in the Army at the time, and heard him play his Mouvements perpétuels and sing his Bestiaire. Le Brick was appropriate for its Caribbean setting, which links it with Léger, and its comparatively jocular tone, which ensured a useful contrast between the two songs. There are harmonic as well as rhythmic unisons in the four-part setting of Le Brick, which is further enlivened by the witty repetitions of the first two lines as a kind of refrain.