Listening #8

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music.


"C" is one of Poulenc's most beautiful songs, one of his few direct responses to the German conquest of France in World War II.

Poet Louis Aragon joined the Resistance after the German occupation. He must have been high on the Gestapo hit list, for he was a founder of the surrealist movement -- one of the artistic currents labeled "entartete" (degenerate) by the Nazis. Even worse, he had been a dedicated Communist and supporter of Stalin since 1927. His role in the Resistance was to encourage and organize the intellectual Resistance movement.

Poulenc set two of Aragon's Resistance poems in September and October of 1942 and arranged for them to be clandestinely and anonymously published. The two poems do not constitute a song cycle, even though they are united in the anti-Occupation sentiment that is underneath the surface of their texts. Rather, they are two songs conceived as separate and complete statements, published together for convenience.

Aragon evokes the age of chivalry in ancient France, both in his imagery and in his choice of verse form, selecting a Medieval and Renaissance convention of using the same rhyme in each of its 18 lines. (They all rhyme with "Cé," an abbreviation for a place where bridges cross the Loire, and the ending of the first and last lines.) 

The opening verses of the poem depict the poet recalling those ancient chivalric days while crossing one of the bridges: Images of a wounded knight, the castle of a "mad duke," and a meadow where an "eternal betrothed" dances.

The poet jerks back to reality. Now he sees "the overturned cars and the unprimed weapons and the ill-dried tears."

"O my France, O my forsaken France," concludes the song, "I have crossed the bridges of C."

Poulenc himself described the texture of the song in the valuable record of his song-writing career, Journal de mes melodies (Diary of my Songs) by pointing out its difficult pedaling and its use of quarter-note chords. These, he says, "should be veiled."

His great interpreter, Pierre Bernac, considered it essential that the pianist no less than the singer achieve a perfect legato (smooth flow from note to note). Bernac, writing in his book Francis Poulenc, The Man and his Songs, assessed it as "one of his most deeply moving and successful works." Fellow composerCharles Koechlin agreed, stating that it "breathes the soul of our wounded homeland" (quoted by Benjamin Ivry in his biography of Poulenc).