Airs chantés (FP. 46):
I. Air romantique 00:00
II. Air champêtre 01:28
III. Air grave 02:45
IV. Air vif 05:23

Poulenc, Francis (1899-1963) -composer
Felicity Lott -soprano
Pascal Rogé -piano

Score: [ Ссылка ]

Playlist "The art of French song: Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Satie...": [ Ссылка ]

What could be more chic, more Parisian, more Cocteau-like, than to mock literary icons of the past, and trample on the reputation of a deceased poet, once famous, and now very much out of fashion? This was entirely Poulenc's aim with Airs chantés, a cycle, or perhaps anti-cycle of songs, during the composition of which he promised himself, as he put it, 'every possible sacrilege'. It was also partly a game to tease a friend, François Hepp, who genuinely admired the poet. Jean Moréas was the pseudonym of the Greek-born poet Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos (1856--1910). Having already published a collection of Greek poetry in Athens, Moréas came to Paris and made the acquaintance of Verlaine and Mallarmé. He was a man of formidable culture and technical gifts, but the neoclassical purity of his style (he belonged to the so-called 'École romane') laid him open to charges of being a latter-day Leconte de Lisle and an emotionless pasticheur. He also took himself very seriously indeed. Poulenc certainly felt that Moréas's verse was 'suitable for mutilation'; for the only time in his songs he writes that the work is 'after' ('d'après') the poems-as if to distance himself from the writer, and from the responsibility of deliberately misrepresenting him. The composer then proceeded to write a set of songs 'against' the texts that was an unexpected 'hit' with singers and the public. What the poet might have thought of it is another matter.
The poems are taken from different books of Moréas's Stances (1899--1901).

Air romantique is a strange and unlikely companion piece to Schubert's Die Krähe from Winterreise, but a good deal more jolly. The latter fact is entirely to do with Poulenc, writing against the meaning and the sentiment of the words. The song 'must be sung very fast with the wind in one's face', writes the composer. The melancholic flight of the crow is rendered as musically peremptory, and busy, as a humming-bird—a fine little display piece for soprano and pianist alike.
Air champêtre is entirely pleasant as a song, and in some ways its lovely melody and genial piano texture are not at all inimical to the seraphic mood of the text—like a 'modern dress' production of a classic perhaps. The delight of looking in the face of the goddess is happily, if not too respectfully, expressed. And then, with the phrase 'sous la mousse à moitié' Poulenc, very pleased with himself, plays what he believes to be his most deadly card: in his music, and against all rules of prosody, the line becomes 'sous la mou, sou la mousse à moitié' as if the cancan were suddenly being danced on Olympus. Offenbach had done it before, of course, but not quite as malignly as this. To the composer's astonishment no one was particularly shocked with this sacrilege, and certainly not singers who took it in their stride, delighting in the song nevertheless. On the closing phrase 'j'ai contemplé ton visage, ô déesse' Poulenc momentarily, and cheekily, taps into Richard Strauss's Zerbinetta style.
Air grave is certainly the least loved song in the set, and also the least effective as parody. Certainly Poulenc had aimed to write a setting that was clumsily 'over the top' in terms of its histrionics and with its melodramatic appeals to 'Insectes, animaux' and so on. A singer determined to make the song ridiculous might be able to do so with a lot of mummery, but in performance the neoclassical grandeur of the music is not nearly as funny, nor as impossible to take seriously, as Poulenc had intended. For the rest of his life he had to sit through any number of perfectly serious performances of this less-than-inspired song.
Air vif ends the set with an explosion of joy, a real success despite its initial intention to shock and irritate. The words do not read particularly well—'Mais toi, noble océan' and so on—but Poulenc actually does what he can to mirror the severity of these words and the only real challenge is for the wind-borne voice where the necessary, and tricky, coloratura is easier for some singers than others. The same applies to the piano-writing and pianists with its deliciously deft, quasi-coloratura coda.

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