Les chemins de l'amour

Poulenc’s best-known song, “Les chemins de l’amour” (“The Paths of Love”), rises above distinctions between the high art of “mélodie” and more populist “chanson” in its pastiche of a Parisian cabaret waltz—complete with upward vocal swoops and shimmering descents. Dating from 1940, the year the Nazis invaded France, it’s the sole surviving fragment of some 20 minutes of incidental music he composed for Jean Anouilh’s wartime play Léocadia: a light, escapist comedy about a working girl hired in to cure an aristocrat’s romantic obsession with a dead woman. Starring the then hugely famous Yvonne Printemps as the girl, “Les chemins de l’amour” was her hit number. And as seemed appropriate to the times, it’s a wistful remembrance of the past that takes care not to be unduly sad—recalling Poulenc’s dictum that French composers had learned to maintain a “sense of proportion” in which “somberness and good humor are not mutually exclusive.”