-Composer: Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963)
-Performers: Felicity Lott (Voice), Pascal Rogé (Piano)

Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon for Voice and Piano, FP 122, written in 1943

00:00 - I. C
03:08 - II. Fêtes galantes

I. [...] The bridges of C, sometimes called Ce, are the four "Caesar Bridges" are near Angiers. In 51 B.C.E., the Gauls were defeated there by the Romans. In 1940, the Germans invaded at the same spot, and the French were again defeated.
Louis Aragon, the poet, speaks of the ancient defeat, and the tales of glory that followed. Then he speaks of the present time and the ill-concealed tears for his beloved, abandoned France.
Every line ends with a rhyme to the word "Ce". The vocal line moves syllabically, and the piano part is equally unextravagant. In total, this is one of those heartrending moments in music that achieves its goals through simple means.
II. [...] While Aragon consciously evoked a period of France's past in the "C," here he ironically applies a title Watteau used in painting and Verlaine in poetry. But whereas these two creative artists of earlier times were celebrating grace and beauty, Aragon points out the ugliness -- and the absurdity of the ugliness -- of the period of Occupation. Every line except the last is a miniature portrait of yet another horror, always presented in the same way: "You see [On voit] fops on bicycles, you see pimps in kilts...you see motor cars run on gasogene...you see guttersnipes you see perverts, you see drowned folk...." This entire litany, eerily comic in its piling-on of horrors, rattles out from a music-hall accompaniment as the baritone declaims the text with extreme rapidity. Poulenc applies the tempo marking Incroyablement vite (Unbelievably Fast), with a tempo marking not less than quarter note = 152. Like Shostakovich did so often, Poulenc here confronts the drab, valueless life under a dictatorship with the commonplace, with banality, with the sound of a low cabaret.
[allmusic.com]

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