Quatre Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire

L’Anguille

Carte-Postale

Avant le cinéma

1904

“It is with Apollinaire,” Poulenc once said, “that I think I found my true song style.” He was introduced to Apollinaire and much impressed by him when the poet returned to Paris, wounded from War service, in 1917. His first mélodies were inspired by Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire in 1918 and, although there was a long gap before he next turned to Apollinaire in 1931, by the time he wrote his last Apollinaire song in 1956 he had completed more than thirty of them - not to mention the comic opera based on his “drame surréal” Les mamelles de Tirésias.

The Quatre Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire were written at the composer’s recently acquired country house at Noizay in Touraine - which was more ruinously expensive to decorate, he complained, than entertaining Josephine Baker - in February and March 1931. He was very pleased with them and, indeed, he considered them, along with Le Bestiaire, the Cocardes and the Chansons Gaillardes, as the best of his songs at that time. This is not to say that they aspire in any way to the poetic grand manner. Far from it: L’Anguille, for example, is not only written in the frankly popular style of the valse musette but also deliberately coarsened by crude harmonies and such direct contradictions of the natural rhythms of the words that the weakest syllables frequently fall on the strongest musical accents. This Sunday is very different from that of Debussy’s De soir.

Although Poulenc did not have time to get to know Apollinaire very well before the poet died in 1919 he did remember the sound of his voice, “half ironic and half melancholic.” That would be an apt description too of Carte-Postale, an intimately expressive “air dolent” with a characteristically sentimental turn of melody (in octaves on the piano) at the very end of the sad last line. A similar phrase occurs in the vocal line at the end of Avant le cinéma, which up to that point exercises its satire through brilliantly resourceful manipulations of a basically gig-like rhythm. While other composers might have been put off by Apollinaire’s essentially verbal humour, Poulenc clearly revelled in it, not only in his amused comments on current terminology in Avant le cinéma but also in what Poulenc described as “the kaleidoscope of words” in 1904. The amorous last line of 1904, with its exaggerated vocal swoop down the interval of a ninth, most effectively puts a stop to the flood of nonsense that preceded it.