Banalités: cinq mélodies sur des poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1940)

Chanson d’Orkenise

Hôtel

Fagnes de Wallonie

Voyage à Paris

Sanglots

Deux mélodies de Guillaume Apollinaire (1945)

Montparnasse

Hyde Park

Les chemins de l’amour (1940)

Although he scarcely knew Apollinaire – the poet died in 1918 of injuries sustained early in the First World War – Poulenc had little difficulty in setting his verse to music. A re-issue of Le Bestiaire stimulated him to write his first song cycle in 1918 and Apollinaire texts continued to be a source of inspiration for the next thirty-eight years, resulting in more than thirty mélodies (not to mention the comic opera based on his “drame surréal” Les mamelles de Tirésias). “It is with Apollinaire that I think I found my true song style,” the composer said.

Banal the five Banalités 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 on the road (Orkenise) 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, a disarming study in indolence set in a smoky hotel room in Montparnasse, is 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, never rests. It completes its course in one artfully sustained, breathtaking sweep.

Taken on its own, Voyage à Paris is undeniably, if irresistibly, banal. 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. Poulenc 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.

Montparnasse is another of the few Apollinaire settings that gave Poulenc prolonged trouble. The poem was written in 1912, at about the time that Montparnasse was discovered by Picasso, Braque and Modigliani and the artistic community began its migration across the river from Montmartre. Poulenc was sensitive to the freshness of its inspiration and did not hurry his setting of it. The music for different parts of the poem came to him at different times between 1941 and 1943 after which he left it, as he said, to “macerate.” He completed it in a few days in 1945, having solved the problem of modulating between ideas which had occurred to him in different keys and which he would not, as a matter of principle, transpose - hence the extraordinary harmonic freedom of the song, which floats away at the end like Apollinaire’s “deux grands ballons.”

Hyde Park, the other of the Deux Mélodies de Guillaume Apollinaire, is dedicated “to the memory of Audrey Norman Colville,” a British friend who died working for the Red Cross in 1940. Scarcely an elegy, it must have seemed right for her not because of its irreverent tone and sentiments but because of its London setting.

The one song in this group not based on words by Apollinaire is Les Chemins de l’amour, which was written as part of the music for Anouilh’s Leocadia, the first play staged at the Théâtre de la Michodière after its re-opening in 1940. Yvonne Printemps, who was starring in the production, wanted a popular waltz song and, having been presented with one of the best of its kind, she made a great success of it.