La Courte Paille

Le Sommeil

Quelle aventure!

La Reine de coeur

Ba, be, bi, bo, bu

Les Anges musiciens

Le Carafon

Lune d’Avril

Poulenc’s last song cycle was written in 1960 for Denise Duval who, after the retirement of Pierre Bernac, was his favourite singer. Or rather, as the composer explained, “they were written for Denise Duval to sing to her little boy of six.” Unfortunately, although the cycle was dedicated to her – “the light of my heart and my music” – Duval didn’t much like La Courte Paille and never actually sang it. The reason is perhaps not too difficult to find. Of the seven little poems chosen from Maurice Carême’s La Cage aux grillons and Le Voleur d’étincelles, only three are the playful sort of thing you might expect in a children’s song and two are positively sinister.

One can well imagine a mother being reluctant to tempt fate with the first song in the cycle, Le Sommeil: set as not so gentle a lullaby with worrying chromatic intrusions on its C major harmonies, it is clearly addressed to a child who is sick. Even Quelle aventure!, which is one of the more fanciful poems and represents Poulenc in music-hall mode, has its alarming aspects for the child at least. La Reine de coeur, written for the most part in the manner of a popular song in easily flowing slow-waltz time, finds itself in an uneasy harmonic situation in the spooky third stanza. Ba, be, bi, bo, bu, beginning with a nursery mnemonic for vowels and including another one for nouns that take ‘x’ rather than ‘s’ in the plural, is a small-scale anarchist rebellion against lessons. Poulenc enjoyed quoting Mozart, as he discreetly does in the piano part at the beginning and end of Les Anges musiciens, and the angels clearly share his enthusiasm. But not many six-year-olds do. Le Carafon is a delightful blend of music-hall rhythms and popular-song melody entirely appropriate to its amusingly whimsical words – until, that is, the detached and curiously dry minor chord at the end. If the idealistic vision of Carême’s Lune d’Avril seems a little off-topic, Poulenc’s serenely melodious setting links it harmonically to Le Sommeil and completes the cycle in C major tranquillity, as the piano postlude confirms.