Sept Chansons

La blanche neige

Par une nuit nouvelle

Belle et ressemblante

A peine défigurée

Tous les droits

Marie

Luire

For Poulenc, the poet Paul Eluard was “a veritable spiritual brother.” It was Eluard, he firmly believed, “who allowed me to express the most secret side of myself.” Even so, although he always felt that Eluard’s verse was “vibrant with music,” it took the composer as long as twenty years to find the key to setting it. The Cinq Poèmes de Paul Eluard,the first of what would eventually amount to a total of thirty-four songs and three choral works to Eluard texts, were written in 1935. The Sept Chansons, based on five poems by Eluard and two by Guillaume Apollinaire, were completed a year later.

Poulenc’s choice of unaccompanied mixed chorus in this particular case was the result of several considerations. The initial inspiration was Eluard’s recently published collection of poems La Vie immédiate, one of which, Belle et ressemblante, “literally enchanted” him. In attempting to set it for voice and piano, however, he found that “a piano accompaniment would only weigh it down.” At the same time, as it happened, he was under pressure to write a piece for the Chanteurs de Lyon, one of the most accomplished French choirs of the day. After an evening at the salon of the Princesse de Polignac, listening to one of Nadia Boulanger’s pioneering performances of the then unknown madrigals of Monteverdi, he realised that a work for unaccompanied choir would be the answer to both his problems. The two Apollinaire poems were mixed in with those he selected from La Vie immédiate because, he said, “they are lighter and more rhythmic” and would vary the pace.

Bearing in mind Poulenc’s recent discovery of Monteverdi, one might expect to find a high proportion of polyphonic textures in the Sept Chansons. In fact, Poulenc was not a great contrapuntist and on those few occasions where he does extend his technique in that direction, in La blanche neige and Par une nuit nouvelle for example, it is more for passing colour effects than for anything else. In recompense he is adventurous in his harmonies and liberal in his use of just about every vocal device then considered legitimate - most entertainingly of all in the quasi-instrumental scoring of Marie and most dramatically in the parallel exclamations at the beginning and end of Luire. In A peine défigurée the bizarre concept of “un monstre sans corps” induces a muttered response as effective as it is apparently inadequate. Perhaps the most expressive and certainly the most resourceful, down to its dissonance on a thirteenth at the end, is Tous les droits. The most modest and the most moving, beginning as a church-like monody and approaching the manner of a chorale at the end, is the almost but crucially not quite sentimental setting of Belle et ressemblante, the initial inspiration of the work.

When the Sept Chansons were first performed by the Chanteurs de Lyon in Paris May 1937, although the music was much the same, the words of the first and sixth songs were quite different: the publisher Gaston Gallimard had refused the composer permission to use Apollinaire’s La blanche neige and Marie and, seeing no other way out of the emergency, Poulenc had had to ask Jean Legrand to write new texts to fit the existing music. When Gallimard heard the Sept Chansons, however, he changed his mind and the present, authentic version was published and first performed in 1943.

Gerald Larner©