from Poèmes de Ronsard (1924–5)

Atrtributs

Le tombeau

À son page

Like Debussy, Poulenc set few poets from any period but his own. Apart from the five Poèmes de Ronsard and À sa guitare to words by the same poet, there are eight Chansons gaillardes on anonymous 17th-century texts and just one song each to poems by Malherbe, Racine and Charles d’Orléans. It is possible that he was drawn to Ronsard not because he recognised himself in his work, as he did with that of his favourite contemporaries, but because of the renewed interest in the poet on the fourth centenary of his birth in 1924. Certainly, although he liked his Ronsard settings at the time, he later came to regret them. What shook his confidence was a conversation he had with his friend and composer colleague Georges Auric when they were waiting for a train one day. Poulenc remembered the occasion vividly. “I must have a word with you,” Auric is reported to have said. “Your Ronsard songs, apart from the beginning of the first and the end of the last, are just not you. Believe me. You are not made for classic poets. Go on with Apollinaire and set Max Jacob, Éluard, Reverdy.”

While he took Auric’s advice at least as far as Apollinaire, Jacob and Éluard were concerned, Poulenc liked the Ronsard songs well enough to keep on performing them and even to make an orchestral version in 1934. He condemned them in his Journal de mes mélodies – the best thing about them, he said, was the cover designed by Picasso – but expressed his approval of the first of them, which he thought successful in spite of its debt (less noticeable in the piano than in the orchestral version) to the neo-classical idiom of Stravinsky’s Mavra. Indeed, Attributs is so fresh and so tuneful that it is impossible to dislike it. Overwritten though it is, Le tombeau anticipates in its vocal line the religious music that Poulenc was to start writing a dozen years later. As for À son page, a song of characteristic verve, Auric was right about the special quality of the ending.