La Fraîcheur et le feu (1950)

Rayons des yeux

Le matin les branches attisent

Tout disparut

Dans le ténèbres du jardin

Unis la fraîcheur et le feu

Homme au sourire tendre

La grand rivière qui va

‘If my tomb were to bear the words, “Here lies Francis Poulenc, composer of Apollinaire and Éluard,” it seems to me that it would be my greatest claim to glory.’

Poulenc first met Paul Éluard, along with André Breton and Louis Aragon, in Adrienne Monnier’s avant-garde bookshop in rue de l’Odéon in 1916. Although he liked him as a man - “He was the only surrealist who liked music” - and admired him as a poet - “His whole work vibrates with music” - it wasn’t until 1935 that he discovered the secret of setting his verse. He made up for the delay by writing as many as thirty-four songs and three choral works to Éluard texts in the next twenty years. Éluard was “a true spiritual brother,” Poulenc said. “I think it was probably he who allowed me to express my innermost self and above all my lyricism, my vocal lyricism.”

La Fraîcheur et le feu, which was written in 1950 and dedicated to Igor Stravinsky - “It pleased me to cook up for him one of the few dishes which have resisted him” - is an essentially romantic inspiration. That much is clear from the passionate, Chopinesque piano introduction, which not only sets the tone of the work but also, by recurring at the end, holds together its seven distinct sections. It was a necessary structural strategy: Poulenc’s approach to the poem is based on musical polarities equivalent to that of “cool” and “fire” in the title Éluard gave him when he asked the poet for an alternative to the unmusical title under which it had been published. So, while the original title Vue donne vie (Sight gives life) is the better clue to the understanding of the poem, La Fraîcheur et le feu explains the contrasts of fast and slow tempi and of major and minor keys fundamental to the setting.

If La Fraîcheur et le feu is not the most original of Poulenc’s songs - apart from Chopin, there is Stravinsky in Tout disparut and a curious mixture of Verdi and Schumann in Homme au sourire tendre - it is, as he said, “the most integrated” of them. Highly effective as a structure, with the emotional climax so beautifully realised and so perfectly placed in the penultimate section Homme au sourire tendre, it was one of the composer’s own favourites among his Éluard settings.