Le Bal Masqué

Préambule et air de Bravoure

Intermède

Malvina

Bagatelle

La Dame aveugle

Caprice

“Anyone who doesn’t appreciate La Bal masqué,” said Poulenc, “doesn’t really like my music. It’s a hundred-per-cent Poulenc.” Certainly, no one else could have written it, not even Darius Milhaud, the most like-minded of his friends and colleagues in Paris at the time. They were both brilliant exponents of the popular instrumental style associated with the “Groupe des Six” in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties - Poulenc in Les Biches, for example, Milhaud in Le Boeuf sur let toit - but when it came to vocal music Poulenc was unequalled in his awareness of modern poetry and his sensitivity in setting it.

Bearing in mind the frank, even aggressive vulgarity of Le Bal masqué, sensitivity might not seem to be the most conspicuous quality in the score. It is sensitive, however, to both the surrealist near-nonsense of Max Jacob’s verse and the special occasion for which this “profane cantata” was written – an entertainment which, presented by the Count and Countess de Noailles at their theatre in Hyères in 1932, promised to represent the height of Parisian chic. Excited by the “unbelievably comic” element of the poems he found in Jacob’s Laboratoire central, Poulenc was confident of not being outshone by the other bright young contributors to the evening.

Another inspiring feature in Jacob’s verse was the occasional caricature that reminded the composer of people he knew. La Dame aveugle took him back to Nogent-sur-Marne, a suburban centre of popular entertainment where in his early youth he had come to love the music of the fair and the dancing booths. It was in order to re-create the Nogent sound in a trendy neo-classical context that he required not only a voice (baritone or mezzo) and piano but also one each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, violin, cello and percussion. But he didn’t stop at Nogent-sur-Marne. The perky little tune of the Préambule and its cheeky instrumentation seem to come straight out of the music hall, while the “bravura aria” that follows after a short transition echoes the comic word-setting of Emmanuel Chabrier.

The Intermède makes its entry by way of a brief gavotte-like introduction and mingles a spoof march with seductive phrases of sentimental melody. The soloist in Malvina would dearly like to break out in lyrical song but is continually thwarted by wry comments either in the vocal part itself or in the instrumental ensemble. Bagatelle is a kind of scherzo beginning with outrageous thumps on the piano, featuring a violin straight out of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale and woodwind with a renewed inclination to popular song. La Dame aveugle, too, though bitter in sound at first, cannot exclude melodic sweetness for long and ends somewhere near the fairground. As for the finale Caprice, it is a giddy merry-go-round effectively offset by an eerily bitonal tango in the middle.