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title to fame.’ With his innate understanding of their work, the
composer illuminates the sometimes inscrutable poetry which
in turn, through its force and dignity, ensures that his lyricism
never topples into sentimentality. It is as if a wonderful bargain
has been struck between head and heart, between modern use
of language and the old-fashioned power of melody.
Hôtel takes us back to Apollinaire’s Montparnasse, and
Poulenc’s. Just after the First World War the area was the home
of Picasso and Derain, of Gris and Modigliani. The composer, a
connoisseur and lover of painting all his life, was excited by the
avant-garde buzz of the Montparnasse of his youth. But Hôtel
is not about creativity. Quite the reverse. It is about laziness.
And here too, according to his friends, Poulenc was quite an
authority! The opening chord suggests the first deliciously long
exhalation of a Gitane’s dangerous delights. The music yawns
and stretches and the smoke spirals to the ceiling in the
rhythm of a very slow waltz.
The Apollinaire section of this recital ends with the earliest
Poulenc mélodies on this disc, the Trois Poèmes de Louise
Lalanne. Apollinaire chose this name in order to masquerade
as a female poet in the pages of the literary review Marges.
Montparnasse laziness got the better of him however, and he
rifled through the literary jottings of his mistress in order to find
something suitably feminine to meet his publishing deadline.
Apollinaire’s loving collaborator was none other than the
painter Marie Laurencin (1885–1956; a painting by her is
on the cover of this booklet) who designed the costumes and
sets for Poulenc’s first great success, the ballet Les Biches,
presented by Diaghilev in 1924. Laurencin had been enthusiastically
‘discovered’ by Apollinaire in his role as influential art
critic. In this song-set only the whirlwind nonsense of Chanson
is by him. Le présent (where Poulenc is influenced by the
implacable last movement of Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata)
and Hier are Laurencin’s words. Hier is the first of Poulenc’s
mélodies to employ the lyrical vein in which so many of his
best songs were to be written. By 1931 when it was composed,
Poulenc’s roaring twenties were behind him. The clown and
ragamuffin shows in this song that he is capable of melancholy
things, and he chooses the style of a smoke-filled room of a
Paris boîte (the ghost of Piaf’s predecessor, Marie Dubas,
hovers) to make his tender revelation.
If the Apollinaire songs are of earth and water (the feel of
the Paris pavement, the sound of the Seine), the Paul Éluard
songs are made of fire and air. Indeed it must be admitted that
the greatest Apollinaire settings were written only after Poulenc
had passed through the refining fire of contact with Éluard’s
poetry. 1936 was a pivotal year: one of Poulenc’s friends, the
composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, was killed in a macabre
accident; Poulenc was reconverted to catholicism as a result
of a mystical experience at the shrine of the Black Virgin of
Rocamadour; his song duo with the baritone Pierre Bernac was
firmly established; and Éluard became a cherished collaborator
in his vocal music. Out of these experiences a more
serious and dedicated creator emerged, and in Bernac he had
found a serious and dedicated interpreter to give voice to this
new idealistic lyricism.
From this time, the cycle Tel jour telle nuit is one of
Poulenc’s greatest achievements. Undeterred by superficial
difficulties, the composer goes to the heart of Éluard’s texts.
The poet’s own experiences (journeys, encounters, friendships,
dreams, and above all his love for his wife Nusch) have gone
into the making of the poems. Poulenc’s musical interpretation
helps to unlock a door: behind it Éluard, the seemingly formidable
intellectual, is revealed for what he really was—a poet of
the people who sang unstintingly of love, the beauties of nature
and the brotherhood of man. The last mélodie in this cycle, Nous
avons fait la nuit, is one of the greatest love songs in French
music; the poem is but one man’s explication of a relationship,
yet, illuminated by Poulenc’s music, it takes on a universal
significance and shows a deep understanding of the nature of
love itself, and the means of its constant renewal. It is no
surprise that the song’s postlude, which is the summing up of
the cycle, has a power that recalls the end of a less optimistic
but similarly heartfelt cycle, Schumann’s Dichterliebe.
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