Miel de Narbonne (1919, revised 1939)

Cocardes (1919)

Miel de Narbonne

Bonne d’enfant

Enfant de troupe

The one song Poulenc wrote before Le Bestiare was Toréador to words by Jean Cocteau, who was to remain an inspiration in various ways – not least as author of the texts for the two monodramas La Voix humaine and La Dame de Monte Carlo – for most of the rest of the composer’s life. Although in the years immediately following the First World War, his influence was more as aesthetician, publicist and impresario to the “groupe des Six” than as a poet, he did elicit from Poulenc a remarkable setting of his dadaist Cocardes for a “séance-Music Hall” in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1920. As studies in word association with no logic to them apart from the fact that one or two syllables from the end of one line are repeated at the beginning of the next, they make little sense. To Poulenc, who seems to have had an instinctive understanding of even the most obscure texts, Cocteau’s words, “which fly like a bird from one branch to another,” meant among other things “Paris before 1914.” That is no doubt why he set these allusions to a Parisian’s favourite things in his “Nogent” style – in the manner, that is, of the popular music he learned to love in the guingettes on the banks of the Marne in his boyhood.]

Attributs (1924)

Montparnasse (1945)

Carte postale (1931)

Avant le cinéma (1931)

1904 (1931)

When Poulenc’s three Cocardes – Miel de Narbonne, Bonne d’enfant and Enfant de troupe – were first performed, in the Théâtre des Champs- Elysées in 1920, the singer was accompanied by violin, cornet, trombone, bass drum and triangle. While the piano version, which was written at the same time, is no less effective – the composer himself described it as “stunning” – it does not so directly reflect the bal musette aesthetic urged by Jean Cocteau on Poulenc and his young composer colleagues in the so-called Groupe des Six. Whatever the accompaniment, one cannot but admire the Satie-like straight face assumed by the composer in setting Cocteau’s absurd word-association games and his skill in finding the appropriate melodic profile for ideas so elusive that, as he said, they “fly like birds from one branch to another.”

Five years later, having so far found inspiration for his songs exclusively in verse by his contemporaries, Poulenc turned to Pierre de Ronsard, his interest aroused by the celebration in various publications (including the Revue musicale) of the fourth centenary of the poet’s birth. Although he seems to have been persuaded by Auric that his “true nature was not in these songs,” he liked them well enough to make an orchestral version ten years after their composition. He was particularly pleased by Attributs, in spite, as he acknowledged, of its debt to the neo-classical idiom of Stravinsky’s Mavra.

Poulenc maintained that he found his “true song style” with Guillaume Apollinaire. Although he scarcely knew him – the poet died in 1918, six months after their first meeting – he always remembered the sound of his voice and had little difficulty in setting his verse to music. Montparnasse is one of the few Apollinaire texts that gave him prolonged trouble. The poem was written in 1912, at about the time that Montparnasse was discovered by Picasso, Braque and Modigliani and the artistic community began its migration across the Seine from Montmartre. Poulenc was sensitive to the freshness of its inspiration and did not hurry his setting of it. The music for different parts of the poem came to him at different times between 1941 and 1943 after which he left it, as he said, to “macerate.” He completed it in a few days in 1945, having solved the problem of modulating between ideas which had occurred to him in different keys and which he would not, as a matter of principle, transpose – hence the extraordinary harmonic freedom of the song, which floats away at the end like Apollinaire’s “deux grands ballons.”

The other three Apollinaire setting in this group come from Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire, all of them (like L’Anguille, which is omitted on this occasion) written in 1931 in the popular idiom of the day. An acrostic addressed by Apollinaire to “Linda,” as the first letter of each line indicates, Carte postale is set as a sentimental love song but with a graceful poise appropriate to the image of “Misia Sert at the piano, painted by Bonnard” which, according to the composer, the song should bring to mind. Avant le Cinéma is dedicated to another adornment of the artistic world, Olga Picasso, who no doubt appreciated this characteristically “cap over one ear” satire on good-taste pretentiousness. Poulenc particularly liked the “kaleidoscope of words” in 1904, a chaotic memory of carnival time in Strasbourg which he set in cheerful music-hall manner before being taken aback by the suddenly poignant last line.