L'espionne

Calligrammes (1948)

L'espionne

Mutation

Vers le sud

Il pleut

La grâce exilée

Aussi bien que les cigales

Voyage

Although they were not the last of Poulenc’s Apollinaire settings – two more songs were to follow, Rosemonde in 1954 and La Souris in 1956 – Calligrammes represent, as the composer said, “the culmination of a whole range of exploration concerning the setting to music of Apollinaire.” Written for a recital tour of America with Pierre Bernac, they amount to a true cycle linked by a coherent tonal scheme and ending with a, by Poulenc’s standards, extended piano postlude. They are, in fact, the Apollinaire equivalent of the Éluard cycle Tel jour tel nuit.

The first song begins, as Poulenc has pointed out, “with a rhythmic figure that I often employed in the Éluard mélodies, but suddenly the tone is different, more sensuous than lyric.” Like several of these “Poems of Peace and War,” as Apollinaire subtitled his Calligrammes when he published the collection in 1918, it takes refuge from war service in memories of a woman he loved. Mutation, based on a direct evocation of life at the front, is well placed between L’espionne and Vers le sud, which latter is an exquisitely lyrical memory of days passed in the south of France.

As printed in the Apollinaire collection, Il pleut (like Aussi bien que les cigales and Voyage) is laid out as a calligram with pictorial typography, or “visual lyricism`” as the poet called it, arranged to illustrate the poem. Poulenc says he was “attempting to achieve a kind of musical calligram” in his setting of Il pleut, but it really doesn’t work in music, impressive though the piano writing is here. La grâce exilée, Apollinaire’s tribute to Marie Laurencin exiled at the time in Spain, is set as an elegant approximation to a waltz. If Poulenc could not match every aspect of the typographical layout of Aussi bien que les cigales, he could certainly, in his grandiose ending to a generally ribald song, find an equivalent to the capital letters of the seven words at the end. The last of the Calligrammes Poulenc regarded as “one of the two or three songs I value most.” As he says, “by the interjection of unexpected and sensitive modulations Voyage goes from emotion to silence, passing through melancholy and love.” The piano postlude sustains the emotion without disproportionately prolonging it.