Dans le jardin d’Anna

Deux poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1938)

Dans le jardin d’Anna

Allons plus vite

La Grenouillère is set in Paris, on the Île de Croissy on the Seine with its riverside bathing and boating and the floating restaurant much loved by Impressionist painters. Apollinaire must have been comparing a now deserted Grenouillère with the activity depicted decades earlier on a canvas like Renoir’s Déjeuner des canotiers. Poulenc’s tenderly sad setting, with its rhythm of boats gently knocking against each other and its straight-faced treatment of the “femmes à grosses poitrines/Et bêtes comme chou,” was dedicated to Marie-Blanche de Polignac with a modest apology to the effect that “a Renoir would obviously be more beautiful.”

Dans le jardin d’Anna would have been published seven years earlier with the Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire if Poulenc had not met with obstacles in setting the text. He found he could cope with the line about putting on a Spanish coat and the lyrical ending but the rest evaded him. What he didn’t know at the time is that, as he said, “in all poems with an accumulation of images one continuous and strict tempo is obligatory.” Adopting that principle and alternating passages of dry articulation with melodious legato lines doubled in the piano part, he was able to create a wonderfully vivid song out of a fantasy scene of 18th-century life prompted by the date inscribed on the stone seat in Anna’s garden. Although it is apparently set in Alsace, the composer actually envisaged somewhere “with a view of the river and forest of Fontainebleau.”

Allons plus vite, a Parisian inspiration this time, is another poem Poulenc had tried to set earlier. On returning to it three years later, he found his way into it by way of the music that goes with “Sur le boulevard de Grenelle,” where the poem comes down to earth from its lofty beginning. Down to earth is where it stays, though not without an urge to quicken the pace and avoid the embarrassment of loitering there.