Berkeley and Poulenc’s Musical Friendship

Berkeley and Poulenc had met briefly during the early 1920s when Berkeley went to France for his holidays while still at Oxford but it was when he moved to Paris in 1926 to study with the formidable Nadia Boulanger that he and Poulenc became close friends. Theirs was never an intimate relationship but it was a warm, very real, deeply valued friendship.

We should like to begin by situating the two men in the period just before they met. Berkeley is in his early twenties. He is in his second year at Oxford. His contemporaries are Auden, C. Day Lewis, Evelyn Waugh. Louis MacNeice will arrive a few years later, as will Stephen Spender. Berkeley is reading French, Old French, and Philology. He is also reading Gide, Huysmans, and Julien Green. He is very keen on rowing but music is his obsession. He is playing the organ and he is composing. He decides to set a beautiful poem by the 16th century French poet Joachim du Bellay. It is called D’un vanneur de blé aux vents (From a thresher to the winds), and it depicts a thresher of wheat in the midday sun, grateful to the wind for the respite it offers from the heat. A performance of this song is given at the Oxford University Musical Club in 1925. Lennox Berkeley is accompanying and the singer is Cecil Day Lewis. In a revised version of 1927, this would become Lennox Berkeley’s first published work.

Four years older than Berkeley, Francis Poulenc turns twenty in 1919. The First World War has just ended; he is still stationed at Pont-sur-Seine in an anti-aircraft division, doing secretarial work; he is bored. He can’t wait for his next leave of absence to get back to his friends in Paris: Cocteau, Satie, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Henri Sauguet. More than once he finds himself spending time in military prison for overstaying his furlough. Then one day he receives in the post a little book of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire. It is a series of quatrains portraying a procession of animals following Orpheus, and the poems are illustrated with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy. Poulenc is enthralled. ‘Quite suddenly,’ he recalled later, ‘I felt the need to write my first real vocal work. I immediately learnt several of the quatrains by heart and then tried them out on an old rickety piano in the canteen … They made me feel the melancholy of Apollinaire before I came to know much more of his work. I can still hear the very special tone of his voice, half droll, half sad … These poems should never be sung with irony and knowing winks, but should always be sung seriously and from the heart.’ Le Bestiaire would become Poulenc’s first published song cycle.

Seven years later, Lennox Berkeley moved to Paris to begin his studies with Nadia Boulanger. Imbibing the atmosphere of the Paris music scene at that time, he composed a song cycle, Tombeaux, to poems by Cocteau. We have chosen two exquisite songs from this cycle, No. 1, a long slow, ravishing tribute to Sappho, and No. 3, a short, sharp tribute to a stream into which Aglaë, sister of Ophelia, throws herself in a fit of madness. They both show Berkeley’s familiarity with the style of the composers of Les Six, and particularly of Poulenc, who was rapidly becoming a valued friend – and a musical influence. But, as Peter Dickinson wrote in The Music of Lennox Berkeley, ‘All influences, both English and French, were submerged in Berkeley’s own finesse’.² I am bewitched by this sentence which, in its reserve and understatement, seems to me to capture the essence of the personality of Sir Lennox Berkeley himself.

A group of piano pieces follow, cameos both of the period and of the two composers. The first two are by Poulenc, Pastourelle and Humoresque, and contain, in Berkeley’s words, ‘much of what was best in the style of Les Six – an engaging simplicity, freshness and tunefulness.’ Next comes some piano music by Berkeley, ‘Etude’, ‘Berceuse’, and ‘Capriccio’ from Three Pieces.

There are a number of eminent musicologists and Berkeley scholars in the room tonight but I thought it might be interesting for you to hear some comments on Berkeley’s piano music by an equally eminent French musicologist, the composer Guy Sacre. In his magisterial two-volume encyclopaedia of piano music,³ Sacre devotes a highly appreciative chapter to Lennox Berkeley, observing that in the second of Berkeley’s Three Pieces, the ‘Berceuse’, there are glimpses of Poulenc, but in the ‘Capriccio’ Poulenc is clearly visible - ‘not so much in the harmonic style as in the witty spirit of the piece, the leaps, the bounds, the hints of songs, the fair-ground atmosphere, the brilliance and brio of it all’.

After these comes Berkeley’s beautiful Impromptu No. 1 in G minor, described by Guy Sacre as ‘a real pearl’ in Berkeley’s piano music – and a particular favourite of Billy’s as well. And to end the group, Billy will play Berkeley’s Scherzo from 1949, in which Guy Sacre finds hints of Scarlatti, because, he says, Scarlatti, like Berkeley, ‘knew better than anyone the precise weight of a note, the perfect length of a piece’.

[Following a short interval] Billy Eidi and Jean-François Rouchon will continue the programme with a rarity – the complete set of Berkeley’s Five Songs on Poems by Walter de la Mare, which seem never to have been recorded in their entirety. Berkeley wrote these settings in 1946 and dedicated them to Poulenc and the baritone Pierre Bernac, who gave the first performance in Cambridge in 1947. Only two years earlier Poulenc had given Berkeley a copy of the score of his ballet Les Animaux modèles, with the affectionate inscription, ‘A mon cher Lennox, avec vingt ans d’amitié’ (To my dear Lennox, with twenty years of friendship). There is something very touching in the warmth and simplicity of that dedication, to which Berkeley’s dedication of the de la Mare songs seems to have been an equally touching compliment in return.

Next come two songs by Poulenc. The first is La Grenouillère (The Froggery), the name of a small island in the Seine on the outskirts of Paris, with a restaurant where on Sundays in the 19th century, writers and painters came lunching and boating. When hearing this song, I am always reminded of the wonderfully evocative paintings by both Monet and Renoir of boats and bathers at La Grenouillère. The poem that Poulenc set is by Apollinaire. In his Diary of my Songs, Poulenc points out that the piano part particularly evokes the gentle bumping together of the boats. He also tells us that the whole song recalls happy days of a past that is lost. Here again come the recurring themes of bitter-sweetness, nostalgia and yearning. Berkeley, writing about this song in his own diary thirty years later, says that in La Grenouillère, ‘the nostalgic charm of the poem is more than reproduced – it’s enormously heightened. The harmony is conventional, if analysed chord by chord, but not one phrase could be by any other composer.’

La Grenouillère will be followed without a break by ‘C’est le joli printemps’, the central song from Poulenc’s Chansons villageoises. Berkeley loved this song, and chose to play a recording of it at the inaugural meeting, in 1980, of The Friends of Pierre Bernac of which he was President. I was present at that meeting and it was incredibly moving to hear Sir Lennox, aged 77, talking about Francis Poulenc. He explained that the Chansons villageoises were written in the spirit of folk song or popular song, and that in his view ‘C’est le joli printemps’ was one of the most beautiful songs that Poulenc ever wrote. He went on to say that what he loved most was its ‘atmosphere of nostalgia combined with a great tenderness’.

There is a little aside which I’d like to make at this point. In the 2013 Journal of the Berkeley Society there is an article by Michael Berkeley which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is about his father, and it is entitled ‘Berkeley and the Music of Loss in the Poetry of A. E. Housman’. In it Michael suggests that humans need to yearn. ‘We need to seek the unattainable,’ he writes, ‘we live and love to yearn.’ I urge everyone to read this beautiful article.

The two piano pieces that follow those Poulenc songs are interesting because they are both in the same vein: compositions by Poulenc and Berkeley on a theme from Manuel de Falla’s opera El amor brujo, commissioned from various composers by the music publishers Chester to mark their centenary in 1960. Poulenc’s offering took the form of a Novelette, and Berkeley provided an Improvisation. Guy Sacre describes Berkeley’s contribution as quite simply ‘one of his most poetic pieces’.

At the end of January 1963 Francis Poulenc died suddenly, at the age of 64. He had recently returned from a concert tour of Holland with the soprano Denise Duval, and was due to have lunch with her on the 30th, but he called in the morning to say he was feeling unwell, was quite hoarse, and felt that he should not go out to lunch. He died later that day of a heart attack, leaving no unfinished compositions. Lennox Berkeley wrote an obituary for The Musical Times in which he stated, ‘By the death of Francis Poulenc we lose a composer of a type that is rare today, for his talent was above all natural and spontaneous. He never sought to bring anything new to music other than the novelty of his own personality, and wrote unashamedly as he felt, paying little heed to musical fashion.’

In New York a memorial concert was planned as a tribute to Poulenc by the American soprano and patron of the arts, Alice Esty. She commissioned songs from twelve composers who had known Poulenc well, and she performed the new works in the Carnegie Recital Hall in January 1964, a year after Poulenc’s death. Berkeley was among the composers who contributed to this Hommage à Francis Poulenc. He set a beautiful poem by Apollinaire, Automne, which ends with the lines, ‘Oh! Autumn, autumn, has killed the summer / Through the fog go two grey silhouettes’.

After Automne, Billy will end the recital with Poulenc’s Nocturne No 4 in C minor – the piece that Berkeley played over and over again in his declining years. Written in 1934, the nocturne has a sub-title, ‘Le bal fantôme’, and illustrates a passage in a novel by Julien Green, Le Visionnaire, in which a bed-ridden invalid listens to the sound of dance-music floating up from an imaginary party below and dreams of the happy days of his youth, now long gone.

At the end of the concert the audience at 22 Mansfield Street seemed reluctant to let the artists leave without an encore. Billy Eidi and Jean-François returned with an extra offering, which Jean-François introduced: ‘Finally, we’re going to perform what we believe is Lady Berkeley’s favourite song. It is a setting by Lennox Berkeley of a poem by the 17th century English poet, Robert Herrick: ‘How Love Came In’. After the encore, Billy Eidi and Jean-François Rouchon invited Sidney Buckland to accept her share of the applause, and the audience rose to express its appreciation of them all.