Voyage à Paris (1940)

Montparnasse (1945)

La Grenouillère (1938)

Avant le cinéma (1931)

Although he scarcely knew Apollinaire - the poet died in 1918 of injuries sustained early in the First World War - Poulenc had little difficulty in setting him to music. A re-issue of Le Bestiaire stimulated him to write his first song cycle in 1918 and Apollinaire texts continued to be a source of inspiration for the next thirty-eight years, resulting in more than thirty mélodies (not to mention the comic opera based on his “drame surréal” Les mamelles de Tirésias). “It is with Apollinaire that I think I found my true song style,” the composer said.

“Any one who knows me will find it quite natural that I opened my opened my carp’s mouth to snap up the deliciously silly lines of Voyage à Paris.” Dedicated to Paul Éluard, Poulenc’s setting (one of a set of five Banalités written in 1940) is an appropriately delicious and, as it goes on, increasingly silly waltz in the Maurice Chevalier manner to which he so refreshingly reverts from time to time.

Montparnasse - a rather more serious tribute to Paris - is one of the few Apollinaire settings that gave Poulenc 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 river 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.” Montparnasse was published with Hyde Park as the first of the Deux Mélodies de Guillaume Apollinaire.

La Grenouillère is also set in Paris, on the Île de Croissy on the Seine with the riverside bathing and boating and the floating restaurant much loved by Impressionist painters. Apollinaire must have been comparing a now deserted Grenouillère with the activity depicted decades earlier on a canvas like Renoir’s Déjeuner des canotiers. Poulenc’s tenderly sad setting, with its rhythm of boats gently knocking against each other and its straight-faced treatment of the “femmes à grosses poitrines/Et bêtes comme chou,” was written in 1938 and dedicated to Marie-Blanche with a modest apology to the effect that “a Renoir would obviously be more beautiful.”

The earliest of the Apollinaire songs in this group, Avant le Cinéma (from Quatre Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire) was written in 1931 and dedicated to Olga Picasso, who no doubt appreciated this characteristically “cap over one ear” satire on artistic pretentiousness.

Gerald Larner©