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‘Anything that concerns Paris I approach with tears in my eyes and my head full of music’ FRANCIS POULENC (1899–1963) N O COMPOSER was ever so in love with a metropolis as Francis Poulenc was with Paris. This ultra-sophisticate, easily bored and depressed, detested the inevitable exile from his beloved home town during concert tours in the French regions. At the end of these provincial recitals, Voyage à Paris was performed as a rather malicious encore: it is an unashamed paean of joy (and relief) at the prospect of reentering the urban melting-pot. Poulenc wrote in his Journal de mes mélodies: ‘To any who know me it will seem quite natural that I should open my mouth like a carp to snap up the deliciously stupid lines of Voyage à Paris.’ As a teenager Poulenc had only slightly known the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), but even on hearing Apollinaire read his poems aloud, the young composer recognized a kindred spirit. Apollinaire was Polish–Italian by birth (Kostrowitsky was his real name) but his love for Paris had all the intensity of the convert. Montparnasse is a beguiling and nostalgic evocation of south Paris and its magic as felt by the wide-eyed and inexperienced apprentice poet. It took Poulenc some four years to piece together his setting of these words, but the seamless unfolding of the music as it follows the affectionate meanderings of the poem is a triumph: he finds tune and harmony to suggest not only the longing for vanished times of the poet’s youth in Montparnasse, but also Apollinaire’s rueful smile at his gauche, younger self—un peu bête et trop blond. Hyde Park transfers the scene to London. It makes these twinned pieces a type of ‘Tale of Two Cities’ in song, although, as far as Hyde Park is concerned, Poulenc knew he had done far, far better things. ‘It is nothing more than a trampoline song’, he wrote, meaning that he intended it to be a quick, effective springboard into a more substantial mélodie. The vignette marked follement vite et furtif depicts the crazy preachers of Hyde Park Corner, reproving nannies airing their charges, and the pea souper fog preventing policemen from seeing enough to press theirs. Red cyclops’ eyes in the mist are nothing more mythological then the glowing of tobacco pipes. Racy humour in both Poulenc and Apollinaire is always capable of suddenly yielding to the deepest emotion. The word ‘bleu’ is slang for a young soldier, and the title of the song Bleuet (which literally means ‘cornflower’) is a tender diminutive. The boy soldier is about to die; five o’clock is the time to leave the trenches and face the enemy fire. But there is no exaggerated heroism or patriotism in this song. Poulenc wrote: ‘Humility, whether it concerns prayer or the sacrifice of a life is what touches me most … the soul flies away after a long, last look at “la douceur d’autrefois”.’ It is Poulenc’s only mélodie for tenor, and the voice needs to be that of a Cuenod rather than a Gigli; in describing the young man of twenty, the sad waste of his life, and that long last look, the narrator’s voice should have a special and ethereal timbre. Apollinaire wrote the poem in 1917, a year or so before he himself died as a long-term result of his war wounds. Voyage is also a moving valediction, and its words too are set in a wartime context. Who but Poulenc could have deciphered this Calligramme (Apollinaire’s name for his experiments in pictorial typography—and this one is especially puzzling in lay-out) and produced a song of such flowing lucidity? There is an atmosphere here of resigned acceptance—partings in war are often permanent farewells; the journey of Dante through the infernal realms knows no return. As in Montparnasse we are aware of an almost chemical reaction which takes place when Poulenc’s music meets the so-called surrealist poetry of Apollinaire and of Paul Éluard (1895–1952). Poulenc wrote: ‘If on my tomb were inscribed: here lies Francis Poulenc, the musician of Apollinaire and Éluard, I would consider this to be my finest 2
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. 3
Page 1: FRANCIS POULENC Voyage à Paris THE
Page 5 and 6: orchestration of the song, as heard
Page 7 and 8: Regardez venir les cyclopes Look at
Page 9 and 10: Chanson 8 Les myrtilles sont pour l
Page 11 and 12: Je ne veux pas les lâcher I do not
Page 13 and 14: u Tu vois le feu du soir qui sort d
Page 15 and 16: Violon femme morganatique Violin mo
Page 17 and 18: Fêtes galantes cq On voit des marq
Page 19 and 20: C’est demin (jour de Saint Éscur
Page 21 and 22: Mais les dix-huit enfants en chœur
Page 23 and 24: « Lorsqu’il s’agit de Paris j
Page 25 and 26: universelle et révèle une profond
Page 27 and 28: Recorded in February 1984 Recording
Page 29: HELIOS CDH55366 POULENC VOYAGE À P

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