On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music THE PULL OF POULENC By John Simon How relative things are! The composer Ned Rorem, who knew Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) well, told me not long ago that when he now...
...he turns out to be a yellow journalist trying to blackmail his father...
...he is sent packing...
...It begins, "Honoloulou, poti lama...
...The entire dialogue here is wordplay as they argue about whether they are in Zanzibar or Paris, and who has fleeced whom in a card game called Zanzibar...
...So, at the opera's Paris premiere in 1947, the baritone sang the Director with a bandaged head...
...These Young Turks of the '20s were inspired musically by Satie, verbally by Jean Cocteau...
...In English (and with punctuation): "Hear, ? Frenchmen, the lesson of the war,/And make children, you who weren't making any"—with the splendid homonyms guerre (war) and guère (not any) setting the irreverent tone...
...And, to conclude, "Dear audience, go make children...
...Poulenc's music dazzlingly defies categorizing...
...Elaborations of these two modes play tag with each other throughout, undergoing numerous variations...
...to describe his burlesque play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, he coined the term drame surréaliste, thus christening the next important artistic movement...
...We begin as Thérèse emerges from a building and announces that, as a feminist, she rejects the male's authority...
...They end up fighting apistol duel, singing "tous les coups sont dans la nature"—all tricks [or shots, coups means both] are in nature—and proceed to kill each other, though they will soon revive...
...Poulenc transposed it to the South of France that, in a way, is also Paris...
...Boston's Seiji Ozawa conducts Tokyo's Saito Kinen Orchestra, Thérèse is Barbara Bonney from New Jersey, the Gendarme is the Austrian Wolfgang Holzmair, Lacouf is the English Graham Clark, and so on...
...Maybe he was...
...Only the Director, Jean-Phillippe Lafont, and the Husband, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, are French...
...This turns out to be Thérèse, and the eventually reunited couple joins the chorus in singing ribaldry, "Love the white or love the black, it's much more fun when it switches...
...The citizens' chorus of eight men and eight women sings a deliciously tragicomic chorale on the lines, "Comme il perdait au Zanzibar, Monsieur Presto a perdu son pari...
...Now, even though the editors of the definitive Pléiade edition of Apollinaire accept the 1903 date, they believe the play to have been reworked in 1916/17, when the poet was asked by a magazine to contribute a play that would supplant the "odious realism" he had complained about in an interview...
...Back in Paris, he wrote —or rewrote—his play, himself delivering the Director's Prologue with his head bandaged...
...His book, Les Peintres cubistes, helped establish the cubists...
...the Second, just over for Poulenc...
...A stickler might observe that, on the old EMI recording, Denise Duval as Thérèse, and Robert Jeantet as the Director, were marginally finer...
...he was clearly major...
...Because we are in Paris, Mr...
...He is generally known as the most dashing member of Les Six, a loose group that also included Auric, Louis Durey, Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre...
...The work is frequently performed on record or in concert...
...The poet claimed to have written it in 1903 or 1904, and to have merely added the prologue and final scene in 1916/17...
...Apollinaire placed the action in a fictitious Zanzibar that is really Paris...
...The French, incidentally—Erik Satie, Jacques Offenbach, Emmanuel Chabrier, André Messager, and Jean Wiener, among others—were always good at straddling "serious" and "light" music...
...Some time earlier, the piano virtuoso Charles Rosen told me that he was once conned into playing the piano part in a recording of Poulenc's Sextet...
...Charles Koechlin and Henri Sauguet teetered on the verge of popular music, and could have done wonders for it...
...The Husband's voice is heard from within clamoring for bacon, but she opens her blouse and detaches her breasts: A red and a blue balloon promptly take flight...
...For me, Poulenc's unique charm lies in his easeful encompassing of the frothy and sentimental, playful and devout, melancholy and exhilarating...
...Depopulation was thought to be one of the reasons France might lose World War I. "The truth is," Apollinaire wrote in the Preface, "they are not making more children in France because they're not making love enough " More lovemaking, then, to increase the population, and avoidance of "certain garments recommended by neo-Malthusians" that, as he claimed, fell on your head whenever you took a walk in Berlin...
...In his late 30s Poulenc was equally capable of a grim and ominous work such as Sècheresses ("Droughts") or of melodious yet sedate church music with glorious choral writing...
...From the corner café, enter Presto and Lacouf, one roly-poly, the other beanpoly, drunkenly dancing to a bouncy polka...
...The date of the play is problematic as well...
...The new recording (Philips 456 504) is a total success artistically, as well as a tribute to universalism...
...The Husband now makes a journalist out of ink, paste and scissors stirred together in a pot...
...Not wishing to be an epigone, Apollinaire predated it...
...At the front in 1917, Apollinaire incurred a serious head wound, was trepanned, and discharged...
...instead, she will become everything from politician to psychiatrist, from lawyer to mathematician—even an old roué keeping a young dancer as his mistress...
...The composer Ned Rorem, who knew Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) well, told me not long ago that when he now performs Poulenc's works, he no longer calls the Frenchman a minor composer...
...It is largely in consequence of that wound that he died the following year...
...We read in the Preface: "When man wished to imitate walking, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg...
...but the ensemble performance and the conducting are infectious, and the sound is, of course, incomparably superior...
...having declared children the riches of the family, starts bearing 44,049 of them a day, as the newborn—the pit orchestra players—trill away...
...Cocteau's "surreal" ballet Parade had been mounted by Diaghilev amonth before Mamelles, after many delays, finally reached the stage...
...it was done most recently (January 24, 1999) by the wonderful Anne Sofie von Otter in Alice Tully Hall, where its political incorrectness was cheerfully ignored...
...The other two are superb one-acters: a deeply affecting setting of Cocteau's monodrama, La Voix humaine ("The Human Voice"), and the piece I shall discuss here, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947), to a text by Guillaume Apollinaire...
...The Prologue's other main point is the Flaubertian outcry of the authorproclaiming, "His universe is hisplay/Inside which he is God the Creator...
...Here the music becomes more solemn, as it does also in the references to World War: the First, still raging for Apollinaire...
...The music then turns into a seductively lilting waltz: "We must love or I succumb [here meaning both 'give in' and 'perish'], before the final curtain come...
...No more cookery...
...puisque nous sommes à Paris, Monsieur Lacouf n'a rien gagné, puisque la scène se passe à Zanzibar, autant que la Seine passe à Paris...
...Presto lost his bet [or his Paris—in French, the two are homonyms...
...A venal Paris journalist arrives to interview the prolific Husband—and touch him for some money...
...Pascal Pia, however, argues persuasively for a wartime date...
...Lacouf has won nothing, as the scene takes place in Zanzibar, just as the Seine [scène and Seine are likewise homonyms] passes through Paris [again, se passe, 'takes place,' and passe, 'passes through,' are near-identical...
...Since both Rorem and Rosen are excellent writers and theorists, I wish it were possible to organize a spoken or written debate between them on Poulenc's merits...
...So the theater, which "is no more the life it interprets than the wheel is the leg," must find "a new and striking esthetic" liberating it from "a trompe l'oeil doubtless suited to the movies [but] the most antithetical thing to dramatic art...
...That reached its peak in his Stabat Mater and Gloria, and in the most magnificent of his three operas, The Dialogues of the Carmelites...
...Premiered in 1917, its title is usually Englished as The Breasts of Tiresias, though the colloquial and alliterative The Tits of Tiresias seems better to me...
...The mythic seer Tiresias was androgynous, and had breasts...
...The aria perfectly encapsulates the whimsical and sprightly side of the music, even as the Director's Prologue epitomizes its more emotionally charged aspect...
...Apollinaire (1880-1918), who has been called "the Moses of modern poetry," and with whom André Gide ended his celebrated anthology of French verse, was a supreme lyricist as well as a master of rhymed humor, and no mean hand at various kinds of prose...
...And what was to be the style of the play...
...Hence The Tits of Tiresias, a play full of puns, well-rhymed nonsense and grandiose tomfoolery, wherein there is indeed no trompe l'oeil naturalism, and whose spirit is pure rowdy, irrational fun, very much like Poulenc's often nose-thumbing music...
...The population of Zanzibar (i.e., the chorus) rebels at having to feed so many mouths, and the Husband suggests to the Gendarme that he give them cards—so, of course, a card reader appears and advocates making more children...
...There is a comic confrontation between husband and wife thatushersinathirdmode: crackling dotted rhythms aptly translating stichomythia into music...
...and the Husband puts on her cast-off clothes...
...Arthur Honegger and Georges Auric wrote terrific film scores...
...But Poulenc possessed the spirit of combined levity and gravity innately, without needing group support...
...he is the ideal composer for winning new converts to classical music...
...Take his opus 1, Rapsodie nègre, written at age 18 to his own nonsense text, and attributed by him to one Makoko Kangourou...
...As he was losing at Zanzibar, Mr...
...It should have been billed, he thought, as "Charles Rosen Plays Shit...
...Kicked out, he goes off to invent tomorrow's news...
...Honoloulou, Honoloulour and ends (with obvious references to bananas and couscous) "Bananalou ito kouskou,/ poti luma, Honoloulou...
...The delectable companion piece on the CD is Le Bal masqué, a mischievous earlier Poulenc work setting poems by the Cubist poet Max Jacob...
...Fly away birds of my frailty" she sings to them, as she pops them with her cigarette lighter (to an enchanting café-concert waltz tune) and, donning a false beard, declares that her beard is growing...
...The Prologue, set to some of the composer's most ravishing melody, hinges on the distich: "Ecoutez ô Français la leçon de la guerre/Et faites des enfants vous qui n'en faisiez guère...
...Thus, unwittingly, he made surrealism...
...And he made some apt cuts in the text...
...I can't go into further detail, but will say that the investigating Gendarme instantly falls for the Husband in drag, who...
...No mere makeweight, it is nonetheless no match for Mamelles, whose "boisterous roistering quality" (Roger Little's phrase from his Guillaume Apollinaire) has translated as perfectly into music as if the dead poet had been looking over Poulenc's shoulder...
...Thérèse proclaims herself henceforth Tiresias...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 4
