Banalités

The title of this group of songs suggests a random collection of ordinary things. But they were composed by Poulenc in the extraordinary time of 1940, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany. And although there’s no connecting narrative, they’re perhaps linked by the notion that a true heart—of the kind carried by common folk in the first song, or brandished by exiles in the last—could find shared meaning in them. They set poems written years earlier by the surrealist poet Apollinaire, starting with “Chanson d’Orkenise”, a folk-fantasy about life in a medieval, fortified town that Poulenc depicts with period embellishment. “Hôtel” is a hymn to indolence, as the singer lounges in a hotel room, deciding not to work but simply smoke a cigarette. And “Fagnes de Wallonie” (“Walloon Moorlands”) imagines a country journey which is also a journey from despair to acceptance—musically propelled by something like a gust of wind that sweeps the song along from start to finish. “Voyage à Paris” is a snapshot of the city Poulenc and Apollinaire both adored, conceived with the charm and cheek of a music-hall number. And by complete contrast, “Sanglots” (“Sobs”) is one of Poulenc’s longest, most complex songs, responding to an elusive text in which two dreamlike voices examine the belief that “nothing will be free until the end of time”.