This song, clearly not intended for the classical concert stage, is a pretty piece in an old-fashioned popular music style. It has the quality of a popular valse-musette, the kind of waltz-song that might be heard in a Paris restaurant played by a group with an accordion. Accordingly, it usually is missing from official lists of Poulenc's music. It is not included in either Poulenc's discussion of his songs, Journal de mes mélodies, or the book on interpreting them by his singing partner Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc: The Man and His Music. This might also be because the song is essentially a contrafactum, a word that Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians defines as the substitution of one text for another in a vocal work without substantial change to the music. The original version of the song is Thérèse's first aria in Poulenc's surrealist short opera Les mamelles de Tirésias (1944). According to Roger Grubb in notes to a collection of Poulenc's songs on the Arabesque Records label (Z 6713), Paul Bonneau, a composer and conductor of "light music" (or "semi-classical music") in Paris, asked Poulenc in 1962 to permit an adaptation of that aria to some words by Robert Tantry. Grubb (a published expert on interpretation of French art song) said Poulenc openly loved the kind of love song that was current in French pop music in the 1930s and 1940s, calling it "bad pretty music" ("la jolie mauvaise Musique"). Grubb suggested another translation of Poulenc's phrase, one that might convey his affection better, would be "appealingly trashy" music. In this instance, Poulenc achieved something American composer Charles Ives often did in his own songs: The adoption of a popular style, even one that was outdated and a bit hokey or trashy, with absolute sincerity and affection. Poulenc does not parody the style here—he simply adopts it without prejudice and shows he could be as good at it as anyone. The title of the song means Our memories are singing on. It one of those songs in which lovers remember their first kisses; their declaration of love; a rich, contented, and nostalgic song. The closest thing to this text in American popular song might be Hoagy Carmichael's considerably finer song "Stardust." Poulenc—or perhaps Bonneau actually did the adaptation under Poulenc's supervision—only goes over the top once in this song, when the singer vocalizes on the vowel "ah" one verse of the pretty waltz-tune. Otherwise, the song does seem an affectionate tribute to a past popular style Poulenc loved and might well have felt doomed by the onslaught of rock & roll from across the Atlantic.

© All Music Guide