Programme — J’peux pas monter, Les enfants qui s’aiment (1945), Est-ce bien ça? from Pas sur la bouche (1925) …

J’peux pas monter

Joseph Kosma (1905-1969)

Les enfants qui s’aiment (1945)

Maurice Yvain (1891-1965)

Est-ce bien ça? from Pas sur la bouche (1925)

Je chante la nuit

Yes! from Yes (1928)

The French popular repertoire between the wars was much enriched by composers from Eastern Europe, refugees from Nazism like Joseph Kosma - whose Les Feuilles mortes was much the biggest hit achieved by any of them - and musical imigrants like Joseph Szulc. The latter came to Paris first to study piano with Padereweski and composition with Massenet and then, after returning to Poland as a conductor, to establish himself as a composer of operetta, beginning with Flup (which was anything but a flop) in 1913. As the husband of the divette d’operette, Suzy Delsart, he was no doubt aware of the technical problems experienced by sopranos although, taking her reputation into account, it is scarcely like that she had to put with limitations as severe as those so vividly described in J’peux pas monter by the alleged singer Florise in one of his operettas.

When Kosma arrived in Paris in 1933, after a promising beginning to his career in Budapest, he had neither a sou nor a word of French. He had to earn his living by accompanying dancing classes while his wife gave piano lessons. What saved him as a composer - although he he was to suffer a serious setbacks during the Occupation - was his meeting with the writer Jacques Prévert and, through him, an introduction to the French cinema industry. He wrote the music for Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion and Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis and, among several others, Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit in which Les Feuilles mortes first came to public notice. Les enfants qui s’aiment, which was published in 1945 in a collection of 21 Chansons to words by Prévert, is characteristic of Prévert’s discreetly subversive poetry and Kosma’s expressive melodic style and frankly sentimental and yet tasteful harmonies.

One of the leading native French operetta composers of the period was Maurice Yvain, who did much to hold off the Americanisation of the genre between the wars. Where he couldn’t beat them he joined them, naturalising the fox-trot most enchantingly with the help of idiomatically naughty words in Est-ce bien ça? in the 1925 musical Pas sur la bouche, one of his many collaborations with the librettist A. Barde. He also collaborated with the film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, not only on film but also on an operetta called La Belle histoire and a few songs, not least Je chante la nuit, a charmingly melodious serenade with the occasional Spanish tinge to it. Yvain’s favourite librettist, however, seems to have been Albert Willemetz with whom he had some of his biggest successes, beginning with Ta bouche in 1922 and including Yes with its eponymous fox-trot - which, only three years after Est-ce bien ça?, is much more jazzy but no less naughty and still very French.