3 Poèmes de Louise Lalanne (1931)

Le Présent (Marie Laurencin)

Chanson (Guillaume Apollinaire)

Hier (Marie Laurencin)

When Poulenc wrote his Trois Poèmes de Louise Lalanne he knew, of course, that there was no such poet. “Louise Lalanne” was a pseudonym used by Guillaume Apollinaire in the literary revue Les Marges, whose editor had urged him to invent a female poet to grace his pages. What Poulenc did not know is that two of the poems were written by the poet’s mistress at the time, the artist Marie Laurencin. Called upon to submit a selection of Lalanne poems to Les Marges in 1909, “Guillaume, who was laziness personified,” Laurencin told the composer 22 years later, “had nothing ready and, I remember, we looked through notebooks I had written as a young girl, full of idiocies of course, where we found these two embryos, Hier and Le Présent – which, I might add, I don’t consider special in any way.”

A particularly interesting aspect of this story is that when he came to the Trois Poèmes de Louise Lalanne in his Journal de mes mélodies, Poulenc wrote, “It is with Apollinaire that I think I found my true song style.” The one song of the three that marks an advance towards his mature style is however, the setting of Laurencin’s Hier. Le Présent and Chanson are both brilliantly original achievements but they are both demonstrations of composer virtuosity. In Le Présent, which is to be performed “as quickly as possible,” the piano surges through a stream of semiquavers in bare octaves (influenced, Poulenc confessed, by the last movement of Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor) while the voice is carried above it on the melodic crests of the waves of keyboard figuration. Chanson wittily sets an Apollinaire nonsense rhyme in the manner, Poulenc says, of a nursery counting song, “crazily quick” in execution but not so fast as to exclude melodic charm.

One reason why Hier is so very different from the others is that it is an early example of the inspiration Poulenc found in his empathy with sad and lonely women. The situation here – ”in an interior painted by Vuillard,” Poulenc said – is nothing like as serious as it is in two later works on the same theme, La voix humaine and La Dame de Monte-Carlo. But the Piaf-style setting is sentimental enough, with the piano joining the voice in octaves (or fifths at one point), to “release a few tears in sensitive hearts.”