Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon

When the Nazis occupied France in World War II, Poulenc turned his anger and despair into works of quiet resistance like these stand-alone songs: his only settings of the surrealist-turned-Marxist poet Louis Aragon, written as a pair in 1943 and published privately. “C” is a dreamily archaic-sounding hymn to the Bridges of Ce which cross the Loire at a point historically associated with invasion. It connects defeats across time, past and present, with a tenderness that builds into the anguished cry “O my forsaken France”. By contrast, “Fêtes galantes” is bitter parody: a cabaret-style survey of how life continues under Occupation, with a fake normality that camouflages horrors. Poulenc’s music makes its point with the assumed banality of what he called “commonplace harmonies and rhythms of the bazaar”.