Though Francis Poulenc's favored poet seems to have been Paul Eluard (the author of about three dozen of Poulenc's song texts), the composer also frequented the writings of Apollinaire; in fact, Edward Lockspeiser, writing in 1940, observed an important parallel between Apollinaire's poetic style and that of Poulenc and his French musical predecessors: "[Apollinaire] reveals a remarkably pure lyrical strain, derived from the music inherent in words.... Yet mated with this entrancing simplicity is a rasping sarcasm, a cynical despondency which French artists have again and again used as an antidote to any semblance of too obvious sentimentality. We find this combination in the music of Poulenc itself, as in the music of Chabrier, Satie, and Ravel." Scholar and biographer Keith Daniel ventures further in comparing the two: "On a deeper, more personal level, Poulenc found a kindred spirit in Apollinaire, a spirit of deep tenderness and biting humor, a modern spirit rooted in tradition; in a word, Poulenc and Apollinaire shared a temperament of contradictions." Though Poulenc had read Apollinaire before, it was a live recitation by the poet in 1919 that inspired the composer to set his texts to music; the resulting song cycle, Le Bestiaire, stands as the first of several convergences between Apollinaire's poetry and Poulenc's music.

Though the cycle is most often heard today in its version for voice and piano, Poulenc's original scoring called for the singer to be accompanied by a flute, clarinet, bassoon, and string quartet. This perhaps explains the rather unpianistic nature of the accompaniment in the piano/vocal version. Elsewhere, Poulenc's approach to song seems to treat the singer's voice like the white froth discernable at the tip of a contiguous wave of sound; here, the piano must parse itself up to cover the roles of the various instruments. The result is a sonority that is occasionally unidiomatic, but sometimes endearingly so. One example can be found in the rhythmically dwindling bass and martial melody to which Don Pedro's fine quartet of camels saunters in "Le Dromadaire," which, when given over to the piano, seem to make the awkward and unwieldy beasts just a little more cartoonish. Likewise, the murky depths through which "L'Écrevisse" ("The Crayfish") wanders are somewhat overly evoked by the constant "tidal" shifts in mode and the unmoving bass drone.

This is not to say that Poulenc means to caricaturize Apollinaire's images. The musical exaggerations in "Le Dromadaire," for example, serve only to enhance and comment upon the air of odd ambition exhibited by the mysterious Don Pedro. In recalling his hearing the poet read his own poetry, Poulenc commented that "Apollinaire's voice is like that of his works, melancholy and joyful at the same time. This is why my Apollinaire songs must be sung without emphasizing the ludicrousness of certain phrases. Le Bestiaire is a most serious work."

Other songs in the cycle bear this out. The second, "La Chèvre du Thibet," compares a goat's soft coat to the golden fleece sought by Jason; this comparison is then rendered moot upon considering the tresses of the speaker's beloved. As the poem finds ultimate beauty in the simplest or smallest of ideas, so does the music draw comparison between grandeur and plainness: the globe-trotting adventurer Jason is reflected in the music by lush, flowery harmonies and figuration; the greater beauty, as embodied by the lover, is answered in the score by a simple, diatonic line. In passages such as this, Apollinaire and Poulenc demonstrate the complementarity of their styles, characterized by a mode of expression at once concise, precise, and profound.



© All Music Guide