Banalités (1940)

cinq mélodies sur des poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire

Chanson d’Orkenise

Hôtel

Fagnes de Wallonie

Voyage à Paris

Sanglots

Banal they are not. It is true that Apollinaire published the texts of two of these songs, Hôtel and Voyage à Paris, under the heading of Banalités, but Poulenc chose them not so much for their own sake as to offset Fagnes de Wallonie and Sanglots, which he approached in a very much more serious frame of mind. In the same way Chanson d’Orkenise was selected to provide an upbeat opening to a cycle which ends in tears. Set in the imaginary town of Orkenise – Poulenc identified the scene with a road leading to the Roman gate in Autun – the poem lends itself readily to the innocent folk-song treatment that Poulenc applies to it, with modal harmonies and a cheerful piano ritornello. Hôtel is a disarming study in indolence set in a smoky hotel room in Montparnasse. It presents a direct contrast to the outdoor activity of Fagnes de Wallonie where Poulenc’s music, unlike Apollinaire’s suffering walker on the desolate moorlands of the Ardennes (where the poet spent a holiday in 1899), never rests. It completes its course in one artfully sustained, breathtaking sweep.

Taken on its own, Voyage à Paris is undeniably, if irresistibly, banal: “deliciously stupid doggerel” is how Poulenc described it. In its context, however, in the middle of a set of songs written shortly after the occupation of Paris, the banality is clearly ironic. It is no doubt because of the depressing political situation in France at the time that, having long intended to make a setting of Sanglots, Poulenc was now in the mood to tackle it. Constructed as two poems spliced together, Sanglots represents Apollinaire not only at his unhappiest but also at his most obscure. It set the composer a considerable problem. He solved it not so much analytically, by means of an equivalent musical construction, as instinctively, beginning in apparently cool detachment but within a few lines rising to an emotional intensity and expanding to a melodic breadth unparalleled in any of the other thirty or so of his Apollinaire settings.