3 Poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin (1937)

Le garçon de Liège

Au-delà

Aux Officiers de la Garde Blanche

Not everyone liked Louise de Vilmorin. Evelyn Waugh described her as a “Hungarian countess who pretends to be a French poet. An egocentric maniac with the eyes of a witch. She is the Spirit of France. How I hate the French.” In fact, although she had married a Hungarian, she was an authentically French poet and Poulenc adored her. “Few people move me as much as Louise de Vilmorin,” he wrote, “because she is beautiful, because she limps, because she writes French of innate purity…” But for his encouragement she might never have become a poet. It was on the strength of her first novel, Sainte Unefois, and just one poem, Aux Officiers de la Garde Blanche, that he asked her for more verse to set to music. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea but, on the insistence of a mutual friend, she produced the two poems, Le garçon de Liège and Au-delà, that with Aux Officier de la Garde Blanche make up the texts of the Trois Poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin. She went on to write many more, nine of which became Poulenc songs - six of them in Fiançailles pour rire in 1939 and three in Métamorphoses in 1943.

One thing Poulenc liked about her writing was its “sensitive impertinence,” a description that could well apply, at least until the poignant ending, to his setting of La garçon de Liège, which whirls by as quickly as the little affair it describes. Another thing was her “libertinage,” which is clearly the inspiration of the tingling eroticism of Au-delà. The repeated semiquavers that reverberate through the first three stanzas of Aux Officiers de la Garde Blanche “evoke,” according to the composer, “the guitar that Louise took with her when dining with friends.” The harmonic economy that goes with them finds its reward in the comparatively voluptuous music of the last two stanzas and, in another way, in the

severe little postlude.