Hôtel (Apollinaire) (1940)

Fêtes galantes (Aragon) (c1943)

C’est ainsi que tu es (Vilmorin) (c1940)

Voyage à Paris (Apollinaire) (1940)

Les chemins de l’amour (Anouilh) (1940)

Although he scarcely knew Guillaume Apollinaire - the poet died in 1918 of injuries sustained early in the First World War - Poulenc had little difficulty in setting him to music. A re-issue of Le Bestiaire stimulated him to write his first song cycle in 1918 and Apollinaire texts continued to be a source of inspiration for the next thirty-eight years, resulting in more than thirty mélodies (not to mention the comic opera based on his “drame surréal” Les mamelles de Tirésias). “It is with Apollinaire that I think I found my true song style,” the composer said.

Hôtel, one of five songs set to what he called the “delicious doggerel verse” of Apollinaire’s Banalités in 1940, is a characteristic example, not least because it allows Poulenc to indulge his love of the popular music he had got to know in his youth. Always sentimental about Paris - the hotel room in Apollinaire’s poem is in Montmartre - Poulenc was particularly susceptible during the Occupation. Fêtes Galantes is on the face of it a cheerful litle song in a popular café-concert kind of idiom. In its 1943 context in Deux Poèmes de Louis Aragon - where it stands alongside C, one of the saddest reflections of war-time France - it is, as Poulenc described it, “hard-up music for a hard-up time: Paris in the Occupation.” Voyage à Paris, a setting of more “deliciously stupid” verse from Apollinaire’s Banalités, is in the same vein, a Maurice Chevalier waltz all the more ironic for being so exravagantly silly.

C’est ainsi que tu es, the second of the three Vilmorin settings that make up the Métamorphoses completed in 1943, represents Poulenc once again as the unashamed and highly expert exponent of sentimental popular song. He could turn his hand to the post-Viennese waltz too, as he so irresistibly does in Les Chemins de l’amour, which was written for Yvonne Printemps as part of the incidental music for Anouilh’s Leocadia on the re-opening of the Théâtre de la Michodière in 1940.