Bleuet

Much though he admired Britten’s “prodigious” realisations of the Purcell figured bass, Poulenc had no such antiquarian interest himself. He was a composer of the here and now, not least during the approach of the Second World War and the Occupation. One of the saddest of his war-time songs, his setting of Louis Aragon’s poem C – named after the Ponts-de-Cé near Angers where hundreds of thousands of refugees attempted to cross the Loire ahead of the advancing German army – is both discreetly resourceful in its reflection of Aragon’s rhyme scheme (every line ending with the same “cé” sound) and touchingly simple in expression. The other of the Deux Poèmes de Louis Aragon, Fêtes Galantes, is on the face of it a cheerful little song in a popular café-concert kind of idiom. In its 1943 context it is, as Poulenc described it, “hard-up music for a hard-up time: Paris in the Occupation.” Bleuet, Poulenc’s tribute to a young soldier who has “seen death face to face,” was written not, he insists, in a heroic posture but in the “most profound emotion.” His pre-war setting of Charles d’Orléans’s Priez pour paix – written at the composer’s home at Noizay not so very far from the Ponts-de-Cé in September 1938 – is positively and consciously religious in its demeanour.