Composers › Francis Poulenc › Programme note
La Dame d’André
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Il vole
Mon Cadavre est doux comme un gant
Violon
Fleurs
C’est ainsi que tu es
Fêtes galantes
Louise de Vilmorin might never have become a poet without Poulenc’s interest in her writing. When she first met him she had published only one novel and one poem but something in them - “the innate purity of the language” is one quality he mentions - appealed to him so much that he asked her for two more poems to make up the group he set to music as Trois Poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin in 1937. He was moved to turn to her collection Fiançailles pour rire, which she wrote shortly after her marriage to the Hungarian Count Palffy, by her misfortune in being indefinitely detained in Hungary on the outbreak of war in 1939.
Poulenc chose six poems from Fiançailles pour rire (Dans l’herbe is omitted on this occasion), covering a wide variety of mood: “I take the title of Fiançailles pour rire in all its implications of tenseness, sensuality, cynicism and melancholy,” Poulenc told Nadia Boulanger. La Dame d’André is a surreal kind of scene viewed as though from a distance and reflected in music innocent in its even rhythms and its modal vocal line and at the same time sceptical in its wayward piano harmonies, not least in the very last bar. Il vole Poulenc has described as “one of the most difficult” of his songs. The piano part is to be played “in the style of a study” while the voice is so hard pressed as to introduce, as the more serious implications of text require, a suggestion of breathless panic from time to time.
Whatever the underlying meaning of Mon Cadavre est doux comme un gant, Poulenc takes it for the most part at funereal face value, with a slow tread in the piano part and a passionately inflected vocal line, but finally suggesting there might be a more sensual side to it in the voluptuous major harmonies in the closing bars. Violon is a parody waltz, replete with fiddle effects, of the kind played by the Budapest gypsy band Count Palffy brought to his favourite Hungarian restaurant on the Champs Elysées. The finale song in the cycle, Fleurs, matches the first in its calmly inflected vocal line and its steady rhythm in the piano part, although in this case, for all its melodic beauty, the outcome is distinctly melancholy.
C’est ainsi que tu es, the second of the three Vilmorin settings that make up the Métamorphoses Poulenc completed in 1943, represents Poulenc the unashamed and highly expert protagonist of sentimental popular song. Written at much the same time, Fêtes Galantes is on the face of it a contrastingly cheerful litle song from a similar café-concert kind of source. In its 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.”
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Métamorphoses/C'est ainsi”
Il vole
Mon Cadavre est doux comme un gant
Violon
Fleurs
C’est ainsi que tu es
Fêtes galantes
Louise de Vilmorin might never have become a poet had not Poulenc taken an interest in her writing. When she first met him she had published only one novel and one poem but something in them - “the innate purity of the language” is one quality he mentions - appealed to him so much that he asked her for two more poems to make up the group he set to music as Trois Poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin in 1937. He was moved to turn to her collection Fiançailles pour rire, which she wrote shortly after her marriage to the Hungarian Count Palffy, by her misfortune in being indefinitely detained in Hungary on the outbreak of war in 1939.
Poulenc chose six poems from Fiançailles pour rire (Dans l’herbe is omitted here), covering a wide variety of mood: “I take the title of Fiançailles pour rire in all its implications of tenseness, sensuality, cynicism and melancholy,” Poulenc told Nadia Boulanger. La Dame d’André is a surreal kind of scene viewed as though from a distance and reflected in music innocent in its even rhythms and its modal vocal line and at the same time sceptical in its wayward piano harmonies, not least in the very last bar. Il vole Poulenc has described as “one of the most difficult” of his songs. The piano part is to be played “in the style of a study” while the voice is so hard pressed as to introduce, as the more serious implications of text require, a suggestion of breathless panic from time to time.
Whatever the underlying meaning of Mon Cadavre est doux comme un gant, Poulenc takes it for the most part at funereal voice value, with a slow tread in the piano part and a passionately inflected vocal line, but finally suggesting there might be a more sensual side to it in the voluptuous major harmonies in the closing bars. Violon is a parody waltz, replete with fiddle effects, of the kind played by the Budapest gypsy band Count Palffy brought to his favourite Hungarian restaurant on the Champs Elysées. The finale song in the cycle, Fleurs, matches the first in its calmly inflected vocal line and its steady rhythm in the piano part, although in this case, for all its melodic beauty, the outcome is distinctly melancholy.
C’est ainsi que tu es, the second of the three Vilmorin settings that make up the Métamorphoses completed in 1943, represents Poulenc the unashamed and highly expert exponent of sentimental popular song. Written at much the same time, Fêtes Galantes is on the face of it a contrastingly cheerful litle song from a similar café-concert kind of source. In its 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.” It has nothing to do with Verlaine.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Fiançailles pour rire/most”