À sa guitare (1935)

Paul et Virginie (1920–46)

Ce doux petit image (1939)

Hymne (1948)

Colloque (1940)

À sa guitare was written for the popular singer-actress Yvonne Printemps who was to play the title role in Édouard Bourdet’s play La Reine Margot about the life and loves of Marguerite de Valois. Although he drew on music by the 16th-century composer Claude Gervaise for inspiration for the instrumental items in his incidental music, Poulenc tried to “avoid,” as he put it, “the colour of the time” in the song. But, having chosen lines from Ronsard, presumably for their period flavour, he could scarcely fail to admit the cccasional archaism in the modestly coloured first stanza. One cannot imagine any guitar of the period, however, sounding like Poulenc’s dissonant strumming in the piano introduction, in his accompaniment to the second stanza and, indeed, the harmonies applied to the last bars of the vocal part. In her stage role, incidentally, Yvonne Printemps sang À sa guitare to the accompaniment of a harp.

Paul et Virginie is Poulenc’s one setting of a poem by Raymond Radiguet, who died at the age of 20 in 1923. “These few lines,” Poulenc said, “have always had a magic savour for me.” He first tried to set them in 1920 but couldn’t cope with a song with no opportunity for modulation until, on a rainy day 26 years later, he found a way of doing it “with little music, much tenderness and a silence” – a silence now followed by a modulation of which he was justly proud. The poem alludes, of course, to Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s novel of the same title.

Most of Poulenc’s settings of verse by Paul Éluard, who was an even more important inspiration than Guillaume Apollinaire, is contained in cycles, like Tel jour telle nuit and Le travail du peintre. There is, however, the occasional single song, like Ce doux petit image, which is based on a small part of a longer poem, Passionnément, from Éluard’s 1938 collection Cour naturel. The composer chose these few lines presumably because they reminded him of the friend of his youth and artistic mentor, Raymonde Linossier, who had died in 1930 at the age of 32 and to whose memory the song is dedicated. “How many times in the years since her death,” he wrote, “would I have liked to have her opinion of my works.” In a song he liked more than most, he “tried to translate musically all the tenderness of the poem.” That is particularly clear, from “À la sortie de l’hiver” onwards, in the arching vocal line, the equally melodious piano counterpoint and the impassioned harmonies.

Poulenc was not so fond of his Hymne, a setting of a translation by Racine from the Roman Breviary, each one of the five stanzas consisting of a line of eight feet and three alexandrines. “It is impossible,” he said, “to translate alexandrines into music when one doesn’t feel the rhythm in a living way. That’s my situation.” In fact, although he regrets a lack of suppleness in parts of the song, in order to accommodate the alexandrines there are no fewer than 17 changes of metre in 52 bars while the rhythms inflect freely according to the demands of the text. At the same time he wrote most effectively for the bass voice, beginning in the darkness of the lowest register, rising from there to the hightes note of the song on “O Christ” at the beginning of the third stanza, remaining in the upper register for much of what follows, and falling back into darkness as the centuries come to an end. Although such an expression of his religious convictions is rare in his songs, it is not unusual in the wider context of Poulenc’s music after his return to the Catholic faith in 1936.

Towards the end of his life Paul Valéry dedicated to Poulenc a poem with the intriguingly musical title Dialogue pour deux flûtes in the hope that he would make a song or duet of it. Poulenc duly set it to music, as Colloque, but reluctantly: “I admire Valéry as much as Verlaine, Rimbaud or Mallarmé,” he explained, “but I wouldn’t be able to write a note of music to go with their verse.” After the first performance of Colloque – by Janine Micheau and Pierre Bernac accompanied by the composer in Paris in 1941 – he withdrew it, convinced that it had “foundered on the greatest platitude.” It became clear, however, on the publication of the song 15 years after his death, that he had been far too hard on it. His own description of Valéry’s poem as “ravishing” could equally well apply to the melodiously flexible line and spontaneous harmonies of his sensitive dialogue setting.

Trois 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.

Chansons villageoises (1942)

Chanson du clair tamis

Les gars qui vont à la fête

C'est le joli printemps

Le mendiant

Chanson de la fille frivole

Le retour du sergent

Although the Second World War and the Occupation affected Poulenc deeply, as several of his vocal works confirm, he was not above indulging in the occasional escapist frivolity. The Chansons villagoises have their serious side and, indeed, their wartime relevance, but they are for the most part – and particularly in the original orchestral version – a brilliant display of wit. “Imagine a Morvan version of Pribaoutki,” Poulenc said. While the Chansons villageoises are not based on actual folk texts, as Stravinsky’s Pribaoutki are, Maurice Fombeure’s verse, “which evokes for me the Morvan where I have passed such wonderful summers,” was the next best, or even the better, thing.

Fombeure’s Chanson du clair tamis is sheer nonsense but littered with musical allysions which Poulenc picks up with unerring dexterity as he races through it. So is Les gars qui vont à la fête which requires another high-speed performance (“madly animated and gay”) but one with a flexibility which allows the composer to evoke his favourite Maurice Chevalier here and there. In timely contrast the “very calm” C'est le joli printemps has a virginal freshness about it which is actually easier to protect from association with Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne in the piano version than in the highly coloured orchestral original. The first of the more serious songs, Le Mendiant, is a Mussorgskyian inspiration, beginning in the manner of a pilgriam chorale but increasingly violent and vividly expressive down to the final snarl. After the flighty virtuosity of C'est le joli printemps, which is to be performed “as quickly as possible,” the homeward march of the Sargeant – a Second World War descendant of the soldier in Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat – seems all the more painful.

Quatre Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1931)

L’Anguille

Carte-Postale

Avant le cinéma

1904

“It is with Apollinaire,” Poulenc once said, “that I think I found my true song style.” He was introduced to Apollinaire and much impressed by him when the poet returned to Paris, wounded from War service, in 1917. His first mélodies were inspired by Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire in 1918 and, although there was a long gap before he next turned to Apollinaire in 1931, by the time he wrote his last Apollinaire song in 1956 he had completed more than thirty of them – not to mention the comic opera based on his “drame surréal” Les mamelles de Tirésias.

The Quatre Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire were written at the composer’s recently acquired country house at Noizay in Touraine – which was more ruinously expensive to decorate, he complained, than entertaining Josephine Baker – in February and March 1931. He was very pleased with them and, indeed, he considered them, along with Le Bestiaire, the Cocardes and the Chansons Gaillardes, as the best of his songs at that time. This is not to say that they aspire in any way to the poetic grand manner. Far from it: L’Anguille, for example, is not only written in the frankly popular style of the valse musette but also deliberately coarsened by crude harmonies and such direct contradictions of the natural rhythms of the words that the weakest syllables frequently fall on the strongest musical accents.

Although Poulenc did not have time to get to know Apollinaire very well before the poet died in 1919 he did remember the sound of his voice, “half ironic and half melancholic.” That would be an apt description too of Carte-Postale, an intimately expressive “air dolent” with a characteristically sentimental turn of melody (in octaves on the piano) at the very end of the sad last line. A similar phrase occurs in the vocal line at the end of Avant le cinéma, which up to that point exercises its satire through brilliantly resourceful manipulations of a basically jig-like rhythm. While other composers might have been put off by Apollinaire’s essentially verbal humour, Poulenc clearly revelled in it, not only in his amused comments on current terminology in Avant le cinéma but also in what Poulenc described as “the kaleidoscope of words” in 1904. The amorous last line of 1904, with its exaggerated vocal swoop down the interval of a ninth, most effectively puts a stop to the flood of nonsense that preceded it.

Quatre chansons pour enfants (1934)

La tragique histoire du petit René

Nous voulons une petite soeur

Le petit garçon trop bien portant

Monsieur Sans Souci

For all the 1930s modernity of the words attributed to “Jaboune” – the nom de plume of Jean Nohain, son of the Franc Nohain who wrote the play on which Ravel based his L’Heure espagnole – Poulenc’s Chansons pour enfants go back in most musical respects to the epoch of Offenbach and Lecocq. From the comic patter and tuneful refrains down to the farcical emphases on the wrong syllables and the nonsensical repetitions, these settings are essentially opéra-bouffe in technique, even if Poulenc’s melodic style derives from the popular song of his own childhood. Certainly, neither Lecocq nor even Offenbach could have done it better.