Le Bal Masquè
Francis POULENC (1899-1963)
Poulenc’s
“profane cantata” for baritone and chamber orchestra was written between
February and April 1932, starting it at his country house at Noizay in the
Touraine and finishing it at Cannes. It was one of his favourite compositions in
his Journal de mes melodies. He remembers being in a bad mood one day,
and his friend Jacques Fevrier encouraging him to play Le Bal Masque to himself,
adding ‘You’ll see, I know you, you’ll feel better afterwards.’ It was
not only a work which the ever self-critical Poulenc never said a disparaging
word about, but one which he regarded as a key to his personality: this and the Quatre
motets pour un temps de penitence would explain to any being from another
planet the essence of Poulenc, categorized by one of his friends as being half
monk, half thug. The four poems are all taken from Max Jacob’s collection of
poems Le Laboratoire central (1921). Poulenc was a great admirer of
Jacob’s work, feeling that he had been unfairly outdone in popular esteem by
Apollinaire, and he particularly treasure Jacob’s ironical twists and his
refusal to take himself absolutely seriously.
Poulenc later wrote of his cantata: ‘I tried to create a vocal style which would be both hallucinatory - something like photographs of crimes or vulgar, popular magazines – and full of jarring ideas, mixing vulgar harmonies with refined ones, deforming words and sounds… I’m very fond of these songs which will, no doubt, shock the paladins of so-called modern music.’
The
work was commissioned by the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles
for a ‘spectacle-concert’ in April 1932. The presence of the surrealist film
director Bunuel among the other contributors to the evening is fitting, since
the cantata pays more than lip service to Surrealism. Poulenc admitted that he
and Jacob ‘wanted the listener to laugh from surprise, perhaps even from
shock’: and the composer’s febrile shifts of mood and texture, with lyricism
repeatedly punctured by impertinent wrong notes, mean that listener has to live
for the moment. Poulenc plays along the edge between pleasure and pain, between
contentment and hysteria, with an assurance which continues to astonish, and his
concern that the curious portraits drawn from suburban Paris would not be
understood outside France has proved quite groundless. Surrealism, after all is
based on a profound and universal reality, even if it is a reality we are not
always comfortable to have exposed.
This cantata was composed on the eve of Hitler’s ‘Machtubername’ in Germany. The poet Max Jacob was a Jew, originally from Brittany, who had become a Catholic convert. Neither he nor Poulenc could have suspected that in 1932 that conversion would not save him: Jacob died in the French concentration camp at Drancy in 1944.