Chanson bretonne

Cinq poèmes de Max Jacob (1931)

Chanson bretonne

Cimetière

La petite servante

Berceuse

Souric et Mouric

Ten years before he set these Cinq poèmes de Max Jacob, Poulenc had written Quatre poèmes de Max Jacob (for voice and wind ensemble) and regretted it. “I have burned them,” he told Ernest Ansermet in 1923, explaining that “it was the work of a composer gone astray in polytonality and other stupidities fashionable in 1920.” In fact, the four songs survived because Darius Milhaud, to whom the work was dedicated and who conducted the first performance, had been given a manuscript copy. While they are not as embarrassing as Poulenc clearly believed, they are perhaps too self-conscious for the fantasy verses of Max Jacob. Certainly the Cinq poèmes de Max Jacob are more successful settings, if only because in this case it was easier for the composer to find the right tone for the poems.

As a regular visitor to Kerbastic, the château of his friends Marie-Blanche and Jean de Polignac at Guidel in Brittany, Poulenc was well placed to appreciate the idiomatic quality of the Chants bretons which Jacob, who was born in Quimper, published under the fanciful pseudonym of Morven la Gaëlique in 1911. The first song, Chanson bretonne, sets both the Breton scene – Poulenc was thinking, he said, of “Guidel market place on a summer morning” ­– and the popular manner of the whole set. It also presents the first example, followed in all but one of the others, of a distinct change in tone in the last few lines: “The last page,” the composer wrote, “suddenly becomes poetic and unreal. Birds sing by the wayside.” The exception is the ternary Cimetière, the ending of which reflects its folk-song beginning. La petite servante – a Mussorgskyian inspiration, as Poulenc acknowledged – begins in agitation and ends in a quiet prayer. The irresponsible waltz-time rhythms of Berceuse – a deliberate stylistic incongruity, intended to match Jacob’s “father at mass” and the “mother at the cabaret” – are thoughtfully moderated in the last stanza. Beginning at a very quick tempo “in the style of a counting song,” according to the composer, Souric et Mouric ends as a nocturne “with a true impression of night.”