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Tu vois le feu du soir, cast in Éluard’s favourite litany
form, is another love song—a hymn of praise musically
translated into a gentle rhythm as immutable as the poet’s
devotion. This is music which shows Poulenc’s strongly
idealistic side: there is no room in the Éluard settings for lightweight
caprice. However, at the same time as Tel jour telle nuit
was being written, Poulenc discovered a writer whose words
allowed and encouraged musical settings of charm—with (in
his words) ‘a kind of sensitive audacity, of wantonness, of
avidity which extended into song that which I had expressed,
when very young, in Les Biches with Marie Laurencin’. Not
surprisingly for a composer who loved to write for the female
voice, this discovery was of a woman poet, Louise de Vilmorin
(1902–1969). The poetess’s family was celebrated for the
plants, seeds and flowers produced on their estate of
Verrières-le-Buisson. Poulenc wrote: ‘Few people move me as
much as Louise de Vilmorin: because she is beautiful, because
she is lame, because she writes innately immaculate French,
because her name evokes flowers and vegetables, because
she loves her brothers like a lover and her lovers like a sister.
Her beautiful face recalls the seventeenth century, as does the
sound of her name.’
The three short songs that make up Vilmorin’s
Métamorphoses are quintessential Poulenc, and indeed make
up a sampler and mini-compendium of his three basic song
styles: fast and capriciously lyrical (Reine des mouettes), slow
(never very slow) and touchingly lyrical (C’est ainsi que tu es)
and fast in the café-concert tradition, where moto perpetuo
virtuosity is the thing (Paganini). That these enchanting
feather-light songs stand chronologically close to Tel jour telle
nuit shows the discerning versatility of Poulenc’s song-writing
in the late 1930s.
Colloque, with a text by Paul Valéry (1871–1945), was
unpublished until after Poulenc’s death. True to its title it is a
colloquy in which the two voices never sing together. Valéry’s
original title for the poem (dedicated to Poulenc) was
‘Dialogues pour deux flûtes’. The composer admitted that
although he admired Valéry as much as Verlaine or Rimbaud,
he was not comfortable in setting his words. The vocal line and
harmonies are graceful enough, but there is no real fusion
between words and music. The Deux Poèmes de Louis
Aragon by contrast are perfect Poulenc. In C, Louis Aragon
(1897–1982) sees the fall of France into German hands in
1940 as the sorry outcome of centuries of false values and a
patriotism that had been based on class exploitation. On paper
the words can seem bitter and angry, but Poulenc finds
the heartbreak in them: Marxist poet and château-dwelling
composer (Poulenc owned a beautiful country house at Noizay
near Tours) are united in song by a common French birthright.
Fêtes galantes is an antidote to too much nationalistic selfpity.
The nation that produced the coolly elegant courtiers of
Watteau’s ‘Fêtes galantes’ in the reign of Louis XV, now finds
itself in complete disarray with the onslaught of the Nazi
invaders. There is not much elegance left in the French comedy
of manners, but even if manners are thrown out of the window,
comedy remains. Life under the occupation changed many
things, but the institution of the cabaret song, sung at full tilt,
vulgar and poetic at the same time, could never be anything
but defiantly, irrepressibly French.
Priez pour paix was written in the dark days of the Munich
crisis. The words are by Charles, duc d’Orléans (1394–1465).
Poulenc wrote: ‘I tried to give here a feeling of fervour and
above all of humility (for me the most beautiful quality of
prayer). It is a prayer for a country church.’ This is not only
religious music; in a subtle way it strives to achieve a medieval
hieratic atmosphere appropriate to the poet.
In 1935 Poulenc re-worked the music of the sixteenthcentury
composer Claude Gervais into his Suite française
(both a chamber work and a piano suite). À sa guitare, also
from this period, shows the hand of the tasteful pasticheur. All
this music was, in fact, written for Margot, a play by Édouard
Bourdet about Marguerite de Valois, although Poulenc chose
to set lines by Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585). It was first
sung by the famous singing actress Yvonne Printemps. The
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