3 Chansons gaillardes (1925-26)

La maîtresse volage

L’Offrande

La belle jeunesse

Poulenc was firmly unapologetic about his eight Chansons gaiillardes. Although, as he said, he detested “smutty suggestiveness,“ he was “very fond of this collection, where I tried to show that outright obscenity can adapt itself to music.” On another occasion he wrote that it was ‘very uniquely “Poulenc” and that no one else could have succeeded with half-erotic half-elegiac songs of this kind… Anyway, I think it is an important collection.’ However that may be, these settings of what the composer called “fairly scabrous” 17th-century texts – which he chose to describe as chansons rather than dignify as mélodies – are brilliantly witty little compositions, characteristically années folles in style and yet echoing here and there with a hint of the archaic. The piano writing, which Poulenc described as “very difficult but well written,” is a particularly entertaining feature. The frank hyperactivity of La maîtresse volage is followed in this selection by the not so innocent simplicity of L’Offrande and a racy mixture of toccata and popular song in La belle jeunesse.