Un soir de neige (Night of Snow)

De grandes cuillers de neige…

La bonne neige…

Bois meutri…

La nuit le froid la solitude…

The Poulenc who wrote Un soir de neige in 1944 and the Stabat Mater in 1950 was not the same Poulenc as the one who had written Les Biches and the Concerto for two pianos. The naughty boy in him was still alive and far too vigorous to be suppressed, as the Gloria of 1959 so vividly illustrates, but events in the 1930s and 1940s had opened up a new dimension in his personality - the death of a young colleague in a road accident in 1936, the search for reassurance in religion through the Black Virgin at Rocamadour, the moral discomfort and material hardships associated with the occupation of France during the war…

Another important element in Poulenc’s development was his discovery of a key to setting the verse of Paul Eluard. He had long admired his work, which he felt was “vibrant with music,” but it was not until 1935 that he was able to write the first of what eventually amounted to a total of thirty-four songs and three choral works to Eluard texts. “He was veritably a spiritual brother,” said Poulenc, “and I believe it was he who allowed me to express the most secret side of myself.” Certainly, in the snow-laden poems he found in Eluard’s war-time collections Dignes de vivre and Poésie et Vérité Poulenc found sentiments that accurately reflected his own feelings during the cold Christmas of 1944.

Poulenc allows the unaccompanied voices of Un soir de neige no easy way out of their confrontation with Eluard’s bleak imagery. There is little comfort in the modal lines and the occasional chromatic harmonies of De grandes cuillers de neige. The C major ending of La bonne neige is as illusory as the snowy white background to the persecution and threat of death to the “last survivor.” The pain only partly concealed by the numbed harmonies and false relations of Bois meurtri is fully revealed in La nuit le froid la solitude, which begins bravely in E flat major and ends chillingly in the minor.

The first performance of Un soir de neige was given in the same concert in Paris, on 25 April 1945, as that of Messiaen’s Trois Petites Liturgies de la présence divine.