On Music

...accompanied at the piano by the incomparable Dalton Baldwin...

...His clothes came from Lanvin but were impressed...

...Except in a few highly uncharacteristic pieces, Poulenc has an unmistakable slow melody, and an equally unmistakable fast one...

...He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual...

...Alleluia" An infinitesimal addition to the canon, but one does not haggle with the notion of completeness...

...No need to grumble at how Mady Mesplé renders it here...

...It concerns the bridges of Cé, crossed in 1940 by the civilian multitudes fleeing from the Germans...

...Still, if you own this, you may forgo the latest issue, particularly if you don't care for a cappella works, however much Poulenc was the heir of the French Renaissance polyphonists...

...He finally kept only six of these whimsical quatrains (three more, subsequently found, are appended in M&Q...

...the delightful French tenor Michel Sénéchal, specialist in buffo and character operatic parts...

...his mother was a bourgeoise from a family that had much involvement with the arts...

...In 193 6, Poulenc's lover, the gifted composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, was killed in an auto accident...

...From the past, he set Racine and François de Malherbe, Pierre de Ronsard and Charles d'Orléans, and once Shakespeare ("Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred," in English), as well as anonymous drinking and wenching songs...

...But whatever versions were chosen for M&C naturally had to be EMI's, automatically eliminating many other fine performances...

...Both are suffused with a sense of transience: The fast one strives to combat it with a frolicsome lust for life...

...Especially recorded for this collection, as were several pieces, it is charmingly and fullthroatedly rendered by Nicolas Rivenq...

...His physiognomy showed a cross between weasel and trumpet, and featured a large nose through which he wittily spoke...

...the atmosphere of Paris is captured with passionate persuasiveness...

...John (who subsisted on it in the desert), and should similarly make the text (and its musicalization) "the feast of the best people...

...being surrealist or dadaist, and thus susceptible to numerous meanings ornone at all, they gave the composer a free hand in interpreting them...

...It begins, "Yesterday is this faded hat/ That I have trailed about so long/ Yesterday is a pitiful dress/ That's no longer in fashion...

...This becomes even more pronounced in "Hier" (Yesterday), to a text by Marie Laurencin from Three Poems by Louise Lalanne, a pastiche written jointly by Apollinaire and his painter mistress...

...the latter tends to be stanzaic, i.e., with one ortwo recurring tunes...

...The first is "The Dromedary": "With hisfour dromedaries/ Don Pedro d'Alfaroubeira/ Roamed the world admiring it/ He did what I would like to do/ If I had four dromedaries...

...The lion's share goes to poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Eluard, with each eliciting by chance 34 settings...

...A no less moving wartime piece is "Le pisparu" (The Vanished, 1946) to a text /by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who would himself vanish into a concentration camp...

...Very fey, that...

...In one case, in fact, M&C makes the wrong choice...

...the songs proceed not by thematic elaboration but by suggestive juxtaposition...

...There is a box for the piano and chamber music...

...The irony is obvious, but must not be sung as such...

...That lacks a few pieces discovered since and the a cappella works, but is superbly sung by the Dutch soprano Elly Ameling...

...But the men he went cruising for tended to match Rorem's description...

...and for the songs, Mélodies and Chansons (EMI 66849), my present concern...

...His villa at Noizay was austere and immaculate, but surrounded by densely careless arbors...

...At the same time, Poulenc was the neoclassical purist influenced by and borrowing from any number of other fine composers, but always transmuting these liftings into something intensely his own...

...His father was the head of a mighty pharmaceutical company...

...Not long before, he met and eventually became the partner and lover of the baritone Pierre Bemac, a consummate lieder singer...

...His social predilections were for duchesses and policemen...

...That, of course, is part of the Poulenc duality...

...But let's turn to Poulenc himself...

...Francis, a largely self-taught musician, never had financial problems...

...At the end, though, comes apuzzling piano chirrup that, frankly, baffles me...

...Included even is a 70th-birthday toast to Nadia Boulanger, the great music teacher, whose entire text runs, " Vive Nadia, la chère Nadia Boulanger, la très chère Nadia...

...How to describe his songs, or his music in general, in nontechnical language...

...The concluding quatrain is "The Carp": "In your fish pools and yourponds/Carp how long you live/Is it that death forgets you/ Fishes of melancholy...

...Poulenc's music is similarly dichotomous...

...This made Francis undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, bringing about a resurgence of his childhood Catholicism...

...the American baritone William Parker...

...He liked women, especially beautiful and aristocratic ones, and even sired a daughter...

...A song like the striking "Allons plus vite" (Let's Go Faster, 1938) successfully combines both the sentimental and the skittering modes...

...They are to be sung, Poulenc said, "as gravely as a song by Schubert...

...There is much truth to this...

...The pulse of the music is extremely slow and sad, the vocal line almost immobile, so that a few bars can impart the burden of immortality...

...Indeed, how to describe any music in words, whether in layman's or musicologist's terms...

...and the funny songs elicit laughter by the music as much as by the words, whereas the tender ones are so beautiful that they, yes, hurt...

...In the style of an Edith Piaf nightclub number, this smiling-through-tears melody fingers the heartstrings as if they were a guitar...

...It may be true, as Rorem says, that Poulenc could never write "for the people," but I find one splendid exception, the waltz "Les Chemins de l'amour" (The Paths of Love, 1940) to a text by Jean Anouilh, composed for a play of his...

...To understand Poulenc the composer, it is useful to consider his life...

...For completeness, this edition supersedes a 1991 collection on four CDs (EMI 64087...

...There are 215 songs here, some short, some longer, individual pieces orparts of song cycles...

...In my opinion, most composers have basically only two or three tunes in them, on which they play infinite skillful variations...

...The first song cycle, Le Bestiaire (1918-19) comprises 12 settings from that Apollinaire collection, one quatrain per each animal in the bestiary—illustrated by Raoul Dufy, whose woodcuts also influenced the art-loving Poulenc...

...The fast sparkles, crackles, skips along...

...Besides Apollinaire and Eluard, Poulenc set Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, Louise de Vilmorin, Jean Moréas, Federico Garcia Lorca, and some lighter weights...

...it is sassy, mischievous, impudent...

...We find out a good deal about Poulenc's song writing from his posthumously published Journal de mes mélodies (1964...

...The composer Ned Rorem, who knew Poulenc quite well, described him in Settling the Score as "both dapper and ungainly...

...It is sung by Pierre Bemac, who, as Rorem says, "crawls" into a text, extracting the last hit of feeling...

...As a composer, he was never concerned with poetry's meaning beyond its musical possibilities," Rorem contends...

...It is sung with a dark, velvety quality by the excellent Gabriel Bacquier...

...Graham Johnson sees here "the sorry outcome of centuries of false values...

...though the songs are often simple, the melody is not predictable...

...the music is largely forthrightly diatonrc...

...Forward now to 1943 and the Two Poems by Louis Aragon...

...The first songs one might consider bittersweetly archetypal Poulenc are in Five Poems by Pierre de Ronsard...

...This is what gives them their particular flavor, and what cannot be fully conveyed verbally...

...Though other dualities, including geographical ones in his family origins and diverse residences, have been cited, the physical and sexual ones strike me as most relevant...

...But none of this delightful music is as yet quintessential Poulenc, nor is that of the next cycle, Cocardes (Cockades, 1919), to Cocteau's texts—three songs related, in the words of Jean Roy, the M&C annotator, "by their melancholy to Satie's Parader As Poulenc wrote in a letter, they are for those "who love as much as I do such things as pommes frites, player pianos, hand-tinted snapshots, shell-work boxes, and Paris...

...Such looks, for a sexually hyperactive homosexual, were a cross to bear...

...Although you can hear in the music the swaying of those ships of the desert, and perhaps even their snorts, this comic, Satiesque element is couched in a slow, stately, even mournful movement, but ends with a little piano trill—as Meilers puts it, "a fleeting vision of the wonders one might, given a sufficiency of dromedaries, momentarily enjoy.' The third poem, "The Grasshopper," conveys by various devices, including generous use of both pedals, the delicacy of a food fit for St...

...To me, he looked like a cross between a dray horse and a billy goat...

...A related factor is the nature of many of the texts...

...Most have piano accompaniments, some feature instrumental ensembles, and some are for a cappella chorus...

...Many of these performances were taken over by the Centenary Edition, though not all...

...the slow, generally about love and aware of its ephemeralness, has its radiance edged with black, like those European death notices sent to friends or posted on bulletin boards...

...They concertized, learned from each other and lived together until the composer's death...

...His complete works have now been brought out in four five-CD boxes by EMI as the Centenary Edition...

...There he wrote the greatest vocal music of our century, all of it technically impeccable, and truly vulgar...

...Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) was the uncontested master of both for the generation after Debussy andRavel, and beyond...

...To Henri Hell, Poulenc's biographer, the poem suggests an old romantic print, though Aragon clearly refers to a lai (lay), an old heroic poem, which fits in with the Loire chateau country— but the mad duke's castle, the unlaced bodice, the swans in the moat, and the roses on the roadway have been supplanted by overturned vehicles and unprimed arms in "my forsaken France...

...The next cycle Four Children's Songs (1934/ 35, here out of chronological order) to texts by Jean Nohain, contains "We Want a Little Sister," one of the funniest songs I know, whose sensational rendition by Michel Sénéchal makes me laugh every time I hear it...

...On it, Poulenc accompanies the sublime Denise Duval, makes some charming comments, and even croons a duet in his "composer's voice") Listening to five and a half hours of Poulenc's songs, you come away with a clear sense of his distinctive characteristics: He almost always chastely set one note to one syllable, avoiding melisma...

...In the same year of 1931, Poulenc set the Four Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire that contain "Avant le Cinéma," which has all the Poulenc deviltry firmly in place...

...for the operas and cantatas...

...If you want to hear the very voice of the master, track down on a 1986 CD [Clio 001] a 195 8 LP made at the Mai Musical de Bordeaux...

...Yvonne Printemps recorded it famously (EMI 69541...

...the frequent pushing of the singer into head voice yields fine comic or wistful effects...

...voice and piano blend perfectly into one entity...

...M&C assembles everything of Poulenc's in these mediums so far known, and more is highly unlikely to surface...

...The seize-the-day theme in a Housmanesque setting of country swains and maidens is given a melody that could have been created only by one "acutely alive in nerves and senses," as Meilers puts it...

...more recently, and very beautifully too, so did Felicity Lott (Hyperion 66147...

...I must not overlook "C'est le joli Printemps" (It's the Pretty Spring) from Chansons villageoises (1942), a splendid sixpart cycle to poems by Maurice Fombeure...

...A motif that runs through these jottings is that the songs, however frivolous-seeming, insouciant or even scabrous, are to be performed with straightforward seriousness...

...Later on, the young man took lessons in harmony from Charles Koechlin, but never studied orchestration or counterpoint...

...Wilfrid Meilers, in his Francis Poulenc, speaks of "a metaphysical chastity and physical sensuality that will recur throughout Poulenc's music-making life...

...Largely in a funereal monotone (we can even hearbells), the speaker misses a friend who no longer rambles with him through their beloved Parisian haunts...

...The slow is ineffably sentimental, insidiously lilting, and almost always with an undercurrent of wistfulness, even melancholy...

...Other texts are of great simplicity and even naïveté, appealing to his childlike side...

...And Bernac's beautifully enunciated words come as close as singing can come to speaking the poem...

...His piano training came first from his mother, then from Ricardo Vines, the remarkable Catalan virtuoso domiciled in Paris, who also introduced Poulenc to other young composers...

...His sunswept apartment on the Luxembourg Gardens was grandly toned in orange plush, but the floors squeaked annoyingly...

...The recently rediscovered musical adaptation by Poulenc of a playlet by Jean Cocteau and his young lover, Raymond Radiguet, entitled The Misunderstood Policeman, bears witness...

...He was musically closest to Erik Satie, and shared some characteristics with his close friend Georges Auric and the four other fellow members in the group known as Les Six...

...His hands were scrubbed but his fingernails bitten to bone...

...Much of it reflects strong love of the music hall, circus orchestras, street musicians, outdoor village bands, as well as folk melodies and pop hits whistled on metropolitan sidewalks...

...the first, "C," may be my favorite Poulenc song...

...The entire poem rhymes obsessively on cé (French for C), but the melody fluctuates between an aching sweetness and wrenching bitterness...

...There is no doubt that the large and somewhat gawky Poulenc was unprepossessing (I saw him once at a Paris Opéra premiere), but he was also, by all accounts, amusing and charming...

...the baritone Gérard Souzay, one of the great lieder singers and a student of Pierre Bernac (of whom more later...

...The former is throughcomposed, i.e., continually changing...

...the great Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda...

...It is sung here with the piercing simplicity the composer intended in the mellow baritone of Jean-Christophe Benoit, and followed by the magnificently fierce "Le Mendiant" (The Beggar...

...Two events influenced him profoundly...

...for the orchestral, concerto, and sacred music...

...Both the poem (the search for lost love) and the tune (infectiously nostalgic) remind me of the gorgeous "Autumn Leaves" by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma...

...The seven-song cycle La Fraîcheur et le feu is sung better in the four-CD collection by William Parker than on M&Cby Jessye Norman, whose operatic approach is as damaging as her poor French...