Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon (1943)

Priez pour paix (1938)

Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon (1943)

C

Fêtes galantes

Bleuet (1939)

Although it was written before the beginning of the Second World War, Priez pour paix is rightly grouped with the war-time songs that follow. War was already in the air when Poulenc read what he described as this “very beautiful and very touching”extract from the 15th-century poet Charles d’Orléans in Le Figaro in September 1938. He set it immediately. Influenced by Litanies à la Vierge noire, his first religious work, it is, he said, “a prayer for a country church.”

When he wrote Priez pour paix Poulenc was staying in his country home at Noizay in Touraine, which is not very far from the Ponts-de-Cé where less than two years later hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Louis Aragon himself, would attempt to cross the Loire ahead of the advancing German army. Aragon’s memory of that experience resulted in C, a poem which, while playing on the name of the bridge in its title and in the repetition of the “cé” sound at the end of every line, is no less heartfelt for that. It inspired a song which is both discreetly resourceful in its reflection of Aragon’s rhyme scheme and unaffectedly emotional in expression. C is stylistically offset by a setting of the same poet’s cynical Fêtes galantes which, under its music-hall patter-song surface, is scarcely less distressing. “It is hard-up music for a hard-up time,” Poulenc wrote: “Paris during the Occupation.”

Apollinaire wrote his Bleuet, a poem addressed to a young soldier, towards end of the First World War. For Poulenc, who must have known it for years, it clearly had renewed relevance at the beginning of another war when many more recruits (or “bleus” or “bleuets”) would be going to meet their death in battle. He set it without grandiloquence and with a tenderness equivalent to that of the poem. “I had no heroic attitude of mind in writing this song,” Poulenc wrote: “I was quite simply moved to the depths of my being.”