C (1943)

Priez pour paix (1938)

Le retour du sergent (1942)

It is entirely characteristic of Poulenc that he can be found treating the same subject with all due seriousness at one time and undue irreverence at another. His war-time 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. 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. Le Retour du sergent, on the other hand - one of six Chansons Villageoises to words by Maurice Fombeure - is so grotesque that, given its subject, it could easily have caused offence when the songs were first performed in Paris in 1943. It is also characteristic of Poulenc that they didn’t.