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CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. 40 1 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. Airs chantés [SF] 21. v. Unis la fraîcheur et le feu ....................[1.25] 1. Air romantique .............................................[1.38] 22. vi. Homme au sourire tendre .................[2.08] 2. Air champêtre................................................[1.20] 23. vii. La grande rivière qui va.....................[0.53] 3. Air grave ..........................................................[2.38] Calligrammes [TO] 4. Air vif................................................................[1.08] 24. i. L’espionne ..................................................[1.48] 5. Colloque [TO] and [LA]........................[3.13] 25. ii. Mutation.....................................................[0.44] n his notorious little 1918 pamphlet Le Coq et l’Arlequin,Jean Cocteau pronounced 26. iii. Ver s le sud ..................................................[1.52] that ‘a composer always has too many notes on his keyboard.’This was a lesson the 6. Mazurka [TO] ............................................[3.45] 27. iv. Il pleut.........................................................[1.12] Iyoung Francis Poulenc took to heart and observed throughout his career; and nowhere 7. La grenouillère [AM].............................[2.10] 28. v. La grâce exilée..........................................[0.39] more tellingly than in the piano parts of his songs – far better written, he thought, than 29. vi. Aussi bien que les cigales....................[1.52] his works for piano solo. 8. ................................. Montparnasse [TO] [3.12] 30. vii. Voyage ........................................................[2.49] After the First World War, the ethos of French art across the board lay in the direction of 9. ........................................ Hyde Park [TO] [0.55] 31. La souris [LM] ...........................................[0.54] clarity and simplicity. Cocteau further cried for ‘an end to clouds, waves, aquariums, water Deux mélodies nymphs, an end to fogs’, and Erik Satie, the cultural godfather of the new French music, 32. Monsieur Sans Souci [JL] ...................[3.05] warned that fogs had been the death of as many composers as sailors.Another target was 10. i. Le pont [RM] ...........................................[1.39] (Il fait tout lui-même) the ‘music one listens to head in hands’ – Wagner most notably, but also Schumann. For 11. ii. Un poème [TO] .....................................[1.15] Poulenc then, in quest of song texts, the 19th century was largely to be avoided and only 33. Nous voulons une 12. Le portrait [JMA] .....................................[1.52] one of his texts,Théodore de Banville’s Pierrot,was published during it,while Jean Moréas’s petite sœur [LA]........................................[5.08] four poems forming the Airs chantés were printed in the first decade of the 20th. Otherwise Miroirs brûlants [SF] To t a l t i m i n g s : ................................................[61.59] Poulenc sought either distancing through pre-Romantic poetry or immediacy through 13. i. Tu vois le feu du soir ..............................[4.14] poetry of his own time. The present volume begins with the Airs chantés and continues with settings of poems entirely by Poulenc’s contemporaries. 14. ii. Je nommerai ton front...........................[1.15] Lorna Anderson [LA] John Mark Ainsley [JMA] 15. …Mais mourir [JMA]............................[1.38] It is not always wise to take composers at their word. Poulenc was not alone in occasionally Sarah Fox [SF] liking to tease his readers, so his claim, that he loathed the poetry of Jean Moréas (Yannis 16. Main dominée par le cœur [TO]....[1.12] Jonathan Lemalu [JL] Papadiamantopoulos, 1856-1910) and chose these poems as being suitable for mutilation, Lisa Milne [LM] should probably be taken with a slight pinch of salt, as should his condemnation of ‘Air La fraîcheur et le feu [JMA Ann Murray [AM] grave’ as ‘certainly my worst song’, though it may be true that he was more successful 17. i. Rayons des yeux .....................................[1.17] Robert Murray [RM] elsewhere in imitating ‘ancient’ textures. He professed to be annoyed by the success of the 18. ii. Le matin les branches attisent............[0.45] Thomas Oliemans [TO] second and last songs of the set, and the only one to escape censure was the opening ‘Air 19. iii. To u t d i s p a r u t ............................................[1.52] romantique’, where he concentrates the music around the tonic E minor, in parallel with 20. iv. Dans les ténèbres du jardin ................[0.29] Malcolm Martineau piano the unvarying tempo. 3 23 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. ‘Colloque’, composed in 1940, was Poulenc’s only setting of words by Paul Valéry.After the 1945, and the whole put together in May and July 1946. He hoped, even so, that the song plain opening in octaves the piano, as often in Poulenc’s love songs, then proceeds largely flowed in one long wave, and insisted it should catch the burbling of the water and of the in pairs of pulsing chords, leading to one of his favourite descending sequences on the conversation going on above it. In ‘the postage stamp’ of Un poème,he admired Apollinaire’s words ‘Si ton désir…’ ‘Mazurka’, his last setting of words by Louise de Vilmorin, was ability to ‘suggest silence and emptiness in so few words’ and his music, balanced on the edge commissioned by the bass Doda Conrad in 1949 as one of a set of seven songs entitled of atonality, is the soul of emptiness, redeemed (or is it?) by a final, unforeseen major chord. Mouvements de coeur to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Chopin. Poulenc felt his song might have accompanied the ball in the novel Le grand Meaulnes,and was pleased to The novelist Colette was a friend of Poulenc’s from the early 1930s until her death in 1954 have negotiated the tricky ‘font, font, font’ passages to his own satisfaction. but, despite his frequent entreaties, she gave him only one poem – inscribed on a large gauze handkerchief and handed to him from her hospital bed in 1938. In Le portrait Colette paints He once said that he would be happy to have inscribed on his tombstone:‘Here lies Francis a version, perhaps, of herself – ‘beautiful,unkind, deceitful, unfair’, she was certainly the first Poulenc, the musician of Apollinaire and Eluard’.The order there is not just alphabetical but, and could, at times, be the rest – and Poulenc responds with a song of wilful eccentricity, in Poulenc’s life, chronological. Starting with the tiny poems of Le bestiaire (to follow in the beginning ‘very violent and impassioned’ and only at the end finding resolution, as the two final volumes of this series), he employed his own technique, essentially traditional but hankerchief reveals ‘the very portrait of your heart’. Its own qualities aside, the composer also flexible, to mirror the apparent simplicities of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry, beneath felt that this song, to his own surprise, constitutes the perfect lead-in to… which flow powerful currents of humour and nostalgia. He had had in mind to set La grenouillère for years before finally turning to it in 1938, reminding him as it did of happy … ‘Tu vois le feu du soir’, the first of the pair of Miroirs brûlants,composed in 1938-9 to childhood hours spent on the banks of the Marne and of the paintings by Monet and Renoir poems by Paul Eluard. Poulenc had first met the poet in Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop at depicting boatmen and lazy Sunday afternoons (he admitted that the piano’s floating, the end of the First World War, but did not set any of his poetry until 1935. Of the two undirected thirds on the line ‘Petits bateaux vous me faites bien de la peine’ were borrowed songs making up Miroirs brûlants,he was severe on the second,but reckoned that ‘Tu from Mussorgsky). With Apollinaire, he wrote, ‘irony is always veiled by tenderness and vois…’ might well be the one song of his that he would take to his desert island. It is not melancholy’, and this song must be delivered straight, without knowing winks. hard to see why. There are the usual pulsing chords, some on, some off the beat; a predominance of minor chords, with or without attendant 7ths and 9ths; a wonderful The more he read Apollinaire, the more he realised the poetic importance of Paris in his work lightening of the mood (major chords) at ‘Tu vois un bel enfant…’; and in the voice a line and in Montparnasse the composer looks back to the ‘discovery’ of the Left Bank 30 years that seems utterly natural and yet utterly individual. earlier by Picasso, Braque, Modigliani… and Apollinaire. Hyde Park,in contrast,is nostalgia- free – one of Poulenc’s scatty, fast numbers. Le pont,like Montparnasse and many other of his The two settings of the poet he made just after the war are barely less impressive. He songs, was written piecemeal: the line ‘qui va de loin qui va si loin’ in 1944, the next line in dedicated …mais mourir to the memory of Nusch, Eluard’s second wife, who died suddenly 4 5 45 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1946 at the age of just 40. Here the piano chords pulse in groups this time by Apollinaire. From early in their gestation Poulenc settled on an overall tonal of three rather than two, but the elegance and suppleness of the vocal line remain. Referring scheme: F minor – E flat major – E major – B major, then back through E major – E flat to the ‘mains lasses retournant leurs gants’, Poulenc remembered that ‘Nusch’s hands were so major – F minor.

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