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. Le bestiaire [TO] 25. Biała chor¹giewka (Le drapeau blanc)...[0.44] 1. Le dromadaire ...............................................[1.27] 26. Wisła (La vistule) .........................................[1.46] 2. Le chèvre du Thibet ...................................[0.42] 27. Jezioro (Le lac) ..............................................[2.15] 3. La sauterelle....................................................[0.29] Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard [JMA] 4. Le dauphin......................................................[0.28] 28. Peut-il se reposer celui qui dort ............[2.06] 5. L’écrevisse........................................................[0.47] 29. Il la prend dans ses bras .............................[0.54] 6. La carpe ...........................................................[1.41] 30. Plume d’eau claire .......................................[0.41] n his notorious little 1918 pamphlet Le Coq et l’Arlequin, Jean Cocteau pronounced 7. Le serpent [TO] ........................................[0.31] 31. Rôdeuse au front de verre.......................[1.53] that ‘a composer always has too many notes on his keyboard.’ This was a lesson the 32. Amoureuses ....................................................[1.15] young Francis Poulenc took to heart and observed throughout his career; and nowhere 8. La puce [TO]..............................................[0.56] I more tellingly than in the piano parts of his songs – far better written, he thought, than Chansons villageoises [TO] 9. La colombe [TO].....................................[0.52] his works for piano solo. 33. Chanson du clair tamis..............................[0.55] Poèmes de Ronsard [WD] 34. Les gars qui vont à la fête.........................[1.31] After the First World War, the ethos of French art across the board lay in the direction of 10. Attributs...........................................................[1.22] 35. C’est le joli printemps ...............................[2.43] clarity and simplicity. Cocteau further cried for ‘an end to clouds, waves, aquariums, water 11. Le tombeau ....................................................[2.47] 36. Le mendiant ...................................................[3.38] nymphs, an end to fogs’, and Erik Satie, the cultural godfather of the new French music, 12. Ballet .................................................................[2.12] 37. Chanson de la fille frivole ........................[0.51] warned that fogs had been the death of as many composers as sailors. Another target was 13. Je n’ai plus que les os … ..........................[3.26] 38. Le retour du sergent ...................................[1.54] the ‘music one listens to head in hands’ – Wagner most notably, but also Schumann. For 14. A son page ......................................................[1.36] Poulenc then, in quest of song texts, the 19th century was largely to be avoided and only 39. Une chanson de porcelaine [WD]...[1.31] one of his texts, Théodore de Banville’s Pierrot, was published during it, while Jean Moréas’s Cinq poèmes de Max Jacob [SF] 40. Fancy [AM] ..................................................[1.55] four poems forming the Airs chantés were printed in the first decade of the 20th. Otherwise 15. Chanson Bretonne ......................................[0.45] Poulenc sought either distancing through pre-Romantic poetry or immediacy through 16. Cimétière ........................................................[2.30] 41. La dame de Monte Carlo [SF] ........[7.23] poetry of his own time. The present disc contains settings of both kinds. 17. La petite servante.........................................[2.07] 18. Berceuse...........................................................[1.19] Total timings: ................................................[69.27] In 1949 Darius Milhaud looked back to his first meeting with Poulenc 30 years before: 19. Souric et Mouric .........................................[1.51] ‘He played us his Mouvements perpétuels and sang Le bestiaire which he’d just finished. I John Mark Ainsley [JMA] remembered, that day, something d’Indy had said to me about the evolution of music: Osiem piesn´i polskich [MM] William Dazeley [WD] “French music will become what the next composer of genius wishes it to be.” After all (Huit chansons polonaises) Sarah Fox [SF] the Impressionist fogs, would not this art - simple, clear, and going back to the tradition of 20. Wianek (La couronne) ..............................[2.03] Magdalena Molendowska [MM] Scarlatti and Mozart – mark the next phase of our music?’ The simplicity and clarity of 21. Odjazd (Le départ)......................................[1.03] Ann Murray [AM] Poulenc’s score matched those of Apollinaire’s poetry which the composer had first read 22. Polska młodziez˙ (Les gars polonais) ....[0.57] Thomas Oliemans [TO] in 1912 at the age of thirteen. From then on ‘I was fascinated by everything I read of his. 23. Ostatni mazur (Le dernier mazour) .....[1.59] Most important: I heard the sound of his voice. Apollinaire’s timbre, like his whole output, 24. Poz˙egnanie (L’adieu) .................................[1.37] Malcolm Martineau piano was at the same time both melancholy and full of joy. Sometimes his speech was marked 3 2 3 291.0mm 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. by a touch of irony, but never by deadpan humour. That’s why my Apollinaire songs must as the voice of his conscience, encouraging him to avoid the classical poets and stick to be sung without emphasising the comical sounds of certain words.’ Apollinaire, Eluard and Max Jacob. Certainly his harmonic palette is now much richer, and perhaps not so well under control. The first and fourth songs seem to have been the ones Le bestiaire, containing Poulenc’s earliest known songs,was originally written in the first he favoured, since he recorded them in 1934 with Suzanne Peignot who had premiered half of 1919 for singer and an instrumental group of string quartet, flute, clarinet and them in 1925, and who ‘sang them as I would if Heaven had made me a soprano’. bassoon, the piano version arriving shortly afterwards. It also contained twelve settings from the 30 poems that make up the poet’s collection, and Poulenc indeed mentioned all Poulenc had set four poems by Max Jacob (1876-1944) in 1921. Ten years later he returned twelve as figuring in a performance on 8 June 1919. But when it came to the editions to the writer, following Auric’s advice, and at the end of his life he mused rather sadly ‘I published the following year, Poulenc took his friend Auric’s advice and reduced the don’t understand why my Cinq poèmes de Max Jacob are so rarely done. It is without doubt twelve to six. Three of the rejected settings survived and are included here. The simplicity one of my most characteristic [‘authentiques’] cycles.’ In these poems Jacob paints pictures Milhaud refers to operates on at least two levels: in the close intervals of the melodic line, of country life in his native Brittany, and Poulenc captures marvellously the combination and in the use of repetitions in the accompaniment. How economically Poulenc renders of fantasy and earthiness. Here is the ‘composer of his own folksongs’ identified by Ravel, the swinging gait of the dromedaries and the sportive swoops of the dolphins! The the harmonies now more firmly directed than in the Ronsard cycle, the textures clearer. backwards movement of the crabs, reversing the opening phrase, is marked ‘ironique’ (but But the listener can never entirely relax: in ‘Cimétière’, for instance, the phrases ‘rose no winks to the audience…), while the stillness of the carps does momentarily look back blanche’, ‘rose rouge’ and ‘blanc muguet’ are set differently at each repetition. For once, in to Impressionism, crowned by the sudden rising octave on the key word ‘mélancolie’. Of ‘La petite servante’, Poulenc is guilty of saying the obvious. Over the ecstatic bars of the the three rejected songs, ‘Le serpent’ surprisingly recalls the music hall, and ‘La puce’ seems servant girl’s final prayer, for a husband who doesn’t beat her every evening, he writes ‘avec to look forward over 40 years to the mesmeric textures of the opera Dialogues des Carmélites. charme’. How else? After the popular Cocardes (see volume 1), Poulenc turned in December 1924 to the In the early months of 1934 Poulenc set eight Polish folksongs, chosen by the soprano poetry of Pierre Ronsard (1524-85). Earlier that year La revue musicale had commissioned Maria Modrakowska, presumably with a view to their joint recitals in Morocco in March and published a number of settings of his poems (most famously, Ravel’s Ronsard à son âme), 1935, although we know of no reason for the lapse of time. On the edition of the songs but not from Poulenc; his five Poèmes de Ronsard might possibly have been composed to Modrakowska indicates that the poems and tunes mostly date from the Polish uprisings of show the magazine what it had missed. Initially Poulenc was happy with the cycle, 1830 and 1831. Each of the songs is dedicated to one of the composer’s Polish friends, commenting on a critic’s use of