Chansons gaillardes comp

Chansons gaillardes (1925–6)

La maîtresse volage

Chanson à boire

Madrigal

Invocation aux Parques

Couplets bachiques

Sérénade

L'offrande

La belle jeunesse

Poulenc was firmly unapologetic about his eight Chansons gaiillardes. Although, as he said, he detested “smutty suggestiveness,“ he was “very fond” of this collection, where he “tried to show that outright obscenity can adapt itself to music.” On another occasion he wrote that it was ‘very uniquely “Poulenc” and that no one else could have succeeded with half-erotic half-elegiac songs of this kind… Anyway, I think it is an important collection.’

Important or not, these settings of what the composer called “fairly scabrous” 17th-century texts – which he chose to classify as chansons rather than dignify as mélodies – are brilliantly witty little compositions, characteristically années folles in style and yet regularly touching on the archaic. There are hints of stately sarabande in Chanson à boire, of ceremonial reverse-dottted rhythms in the introduction to Invocation aux Parques, of lilting siciliano in Sérénade. The piano writing, which Poulenc described as “very difficult but well written,” is a particularly entertaining feature, from the frank hyperactivity of La maîtresse volage to the moto perpetuo of Couplets bacchiques and the racy mixture of toccata and popular song in La belle jeunesse. Whatever the stylistic allusions, however, the music never leers while contriving to retain an appearance of innocent unawareness of the doubles-entendres – except, possibly, in the final “Ah!” of L’Offrande.