Tel jour telle nuit (1936–37)

Bonne journée

Une ruine coquille vide

Le front comme un drapeau perdu

Une roulotte couverte en tuiles

A toutes brides

Une herbe pauvre

Je n’ai envie que de t’aimer

Figure de force brûlante et farouche

Nous avons fait la nuit

Poulenc knw Éluard far better than he knew Apollinaire: they were good friends almost from their first meeting in Adrienne Monnier’s avant-garde bookshop in rue de l’Odéon in 1916 until the poet’s death 36 years later. Even so, he had set dozens of poems by Apollinaire and two other friends, Cocteau and Jacob, before he found the inspiration to realise the music which, he said, “vibrates in all Éluard’s work.” He had heard him read his verse “with that warm voice, gentle and violent in turns, velvet and metallic” but he found the key to his prosody only when he came across a slim volume printed on pink paper À toute épreuve and wrote his Cinq poèmes de Paul Éluard in 1935.

In November of the following year the composer was “feeling completely happy,” he recalled, “strolling by the Bastille. I began to recite the poem from Les yeux fertiles, ‘Bonne journée.’ That evening the music came of itself.” Although the song wasn’t definitively written down until January 1937, that walk by the Bastille was the moment of conception of the composition of Poulenc’s Éluard masterpiece Tel jour tel nuit – a title supplied by Éluard in deference to a composer who fell that the visual title of the collection in which eight of the nine poems were published was inappropriate for a song cycle. Actually, it would have been more helpful if he had adopted Les yeux fertiles, since Éluard’s eyes, fertilised by his surrealist’s imagination, saw what we might see only in our dreams or in our fevered imagination – a fact which it is as well to remember when attempting to understand these frankly obscure texts.

Éluard dedicated ‘Bonne journée’ to Pablo Picasso after he had been to see the artitst’s first retrospective exhibition in Barcelona in 1936. Whether or not his vision was influenced by what he saw there, the serene mood of the poem is clear enough. It is beautifully captured in Poulenc’s melodious C-major setting with the voice poised over a rocking accompaniment of quavers that persists almost throughout, though not without the occasional doubling of the vocal line or counterpoint to it in the piano part. The B flat blue note added to the C octaves at the end of ‘Bonne journée’ leads naturally into the G minor (also with flattened 7th) of ‘Une ruine coquille vide.’ The clue to Éluard’s vision in this case is perhaps in the last line, which suggests a sleepless kind of delirium. Poulenc’s setting, marked “Très calme et irréel,” is scarcely delirious but it does achieve a kind of unreal weightlessness as it floats on the syncopated rhythmic figures in the pianist’s right hand and the regularly chiming crotchets in the left.

Poulenc’s treatment of ‘Le front comme un drapeau perdu’ calls to mind his description of the poet’s voice “gentle and violent” in turns, its initial A-minor violence suddenly appeased into B-flat-minor lyricism and transformed to a caressing A major by the end. There is no consolation in the sinister setting of ‘Une roulotte couverte en tuiles’ which, though anchored to a pedal D at the beginning and the end, makes little tonal sense, and even that is snatched away at the end. ‘À toutes brides’ and ‘Un herbe pauvre’ were clearly intended as pair. The demonic violin open-string sounds and stormy tumult of the first have “no other pretension,” according to the composer, “than to highlight the following song” – an appropriately pure, rhythmically plain, daringly simple progression from E minor to E major and back again.

“It was Éluard who showed me how to express love in musical terms,” Poulenc once confessed. His setting of ‘Je n’ai envie que de t’aimer’ – “this charming poem of happy love,” as the composer described it – is the first of two supreme examples in Tel jour, telle nuit, animated throughout by triplet rhythms in a piano part which also has time to define the melodic impulse of the supple vocal line. The other love song is approached by way of Figure de force brûlante et farouche, the initial violence of which is not dissipated by a long silence or an expressionless middle section but preserved to break out again, if in different terms, at the end. “This terrific climax is there,” said Poulenc, “to make one hear the kind of silence that is the opening of ‘Nous avons fait la nuit’.” Addressed to his wife Nuch, Éluard’s ‘Nous avons fait la nuit’ moved Poulenc deeply and, happily, inspired him to set it in similar terms – melodic, harmonic and textural – to those of ‘Bonne journée.’ Having completed the cycle in this way, he adds a piano postlude as poetic and as effective in its way as Schumann’s in Dichterliebe.