MORE Music About Animals, Day 3 – The Story of Babar by Francis Poulenc

This week’s theme is…MORE Music About Animals!  There’s just too much animal fun to contain within a single week…

MORE Music About Animals, Day 3 – The Story of Babar by Francis Poulenc

 

Around the year 1930, a Parisian lady named Cecile, trained as a concert pianist incidentally, began making up bedtime stories for her young boys named Laurent and Mathieu.  The boys were immediately captivated by her invented tales of an anthropomorphic elephant and the adventures which brought him from the jungle to the city (which feels very much like Paris) and back again.  Perhaps you recognize this story – the elephant’s name is Babar.  The storyteller was Cecile de Brunhoff (nee Sabouraud) and her husband, Laurent and Mathieu’s father, was Jean de Brunhoff, credited with the creation of the Babar stories.

Jean was trained as a painter, having studied at The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a scrappy little art school in the heart of Paris.  Something of an underdog, the pared-down business model and flexibility in curriculum distinguished it from schools like Ecole des Beaux-Arts which perpetuated a tradition of fine art centuries old.  The Académie de la Grande Chaumière was figurative in the rise of independent art, animated by a much different spirit than the continuity with antiquity that was prized in the philosophy of the Beaux-Arts crowd.  It is difficult to imagine a work like Babar coming from a Beaux-Arts trained artist.

The fact of the matter is that Cecile invented the stories and Jean illustrated them, at least in the beginning.  As family accounts go, Laurent and Mathieu, with stories of Babar, Celeste, and the Old Lady buzzing about in their imaginations, found their father in his study and excitedly recounted them as an amused Jean began to draw pictures inspired by what he heard.  The rest is history, still in the making, spanning almost a century of the Brunhoff dynasty at this point.  It was congruent with the family livelihood – Jean’s father, Maurice, was a successful publisher, so it was probably easy for him to see where this could go and how to get there.  As formative as she was to the genesis of the Babar stories, you will not see Cecile credited on the cover of title pages of any of the books – her great modesty, and perhaps gender mores, motivated her to stay behind the scenes.  Had you asked, she would have probably told you that after the invention, it was primarily Jean who harbored the vision of its possibilities and saw it through.  He also gave Babar his name – in Cecile’s telling the main character was simply “The Baby Elephant” – that was truly an inspired touch on Jean’s part, significantly adding to the distinctiveness of the character, the story, and the franchise.

Many elements of Babar’s creation parallel elements in the story of another entry into the Babar family of works, which also took place in Paris, almost a decade later.  Babar was invented by a pianist, and was later discovered by a pianist.  Babar was introduced to a painter by children, and was later introduced by a child to the pianist, also a composer.  The pianist and composer is Francis Poulenc.

In 1940, Poulenc was on the cusp of his mature middle age.  The heady early days of The Six and the Parisian avant-garde were fading into memory (see this post), he had enjoyed fame and success as a touring pianist, and the 1930s had seen his sensuous absurdity give way to a more serious and substantive approach.  The religious introspection that would characterize many works of his later years were still in the future.  One day, in the midst of this, Poulenc sat at a piano, improvising music of no great inspiration, when a young child of distant relation approached him.  First she chided him for his tepid improvisation: “Uncle Francis, that’s boring!”  Then, she showed him her copy of The Story of Babar, new to Poulenc, but having been in publication for almost ten years by that point, and beloved by children on both sides of the Atlantic, urging him to improvise to that.  He complied, energized by the challenge, and his musical telling of the The Story of Babar is the happy result.  Today it is possible to find versions for 4-hand piano…

 

…and a richly sensuous version for full orchestra:

 

It is hard to imagine a point during Poulenc’s career at which he would have been better-equipped to bring the story of Babar to life than the one at which the opportunity presented itself.  His palette had developed to encompass a wide range of moods, feelings and colors, from silly, to serious, but he was not yet realizing the sublime and transcendental, which simply would not have served the story well.  As it found him, his expressive mix was ideal to illustrate all the tender absurdity which fills the covers of Babar.  We hear Poulenc crafting sonic pictures of a vigorous, youthful Babar, the tragedy of his mother’s death, the cosmopolitan bluster of his relationship with the Old Lady and their gleeful exploration of Parisian commerce, the absurdly grave death of the elephant king, and the splendour of Babar’s coronation.  This is all cast in Poulenc’s affected, sensuous Gallic sensibility, and hardly a more appropriate language to illuminate the similar tone which runs through the Brunhoff’s stories is possible.  The result is a little like Peter and the Wolf (see this post), but in a sensuous French voice tinged with opulent, jazzy harmonies, and just a taste of the Parisian cabaret scene which had so deeply informed the development of Poulenc’s early style, as well as those of his frequent collaborators of a couple decades prior (see this post).
The Story of Babar is one of those artifacts of childhood that is permanently fused with my sense of the world.  All of us have such deeply-ingrained images of the stories, films, sounds, landscapes. locations, flavors and colors of our childhood packed into our memories that it is impossible for us to imagine a different world.  For me, Babar is part of that, especially the first book.  It seems a shame to me that Poulenc’s telling of the story is not more widely known.  I wish it was part of my collage of childhood memories, so that its tunes and timbres felt like second nature to me, as much so as the odd and wonderful plot turns and pictures of Jean de Brunhoff’s magical and enduring story.

 

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Musical Farewells, Day 2 – L’Adieu by Francis Poulenc

This week’s theme is…Musical Farewells! Parting is such sweet sorrow, but it’s always inevitable.  Musicians have explored the rich feelings of saying goodbye for as long as there has been music.  This week we examine examples of this from all across history.

Musical Farewells, Day 2 – L’Adieu by Francis Poulenc

Part of me would love to have experienced Europe between the world wars, and another part of me wants nothing to do with it.  It was a deeply troubled and conflicted place.  And why shouldn’t it be?  The ancient social order, ordained by God many surely thought, had toppled.  Monarchies as old as history had fallen to progressive social philosophies barely a century old.  Societies had to find their way, crippled by the losses of the war, depressed by economic stagnation.  Even among the victors of the Great War there seemed to be a collective sense of dread and foreboding, which expressed itself in odd and unexpected ways.  The visual arts were transformed into the bizarre images of cubism and surrealism.  Art music was subject to the barbaric dances of nationalism and the clamor of dodecaphony.  And in France, a gentler response, but twice as surreal.

Even before the Great War poets, artists, and musicians in France had begun to dissolve the sacred traditions they had inherited.  Mallarme and the symbolist poets banished wrote in a richly evocative manner, suggesting their subjects through effect and an obscure and highly personal code of meaning.  Debussy melted the clear edges of nineteenth century melody and counterpoint, creating his glowing masterpieces.  Earlier, the French painters had performed a similar feat on their canvases.  And all the surrealist and cubist painters, Picasso, Dali, Magritte, while not French themselves (although Magritte, a Belgian, comes closest) were drawn to Paris.  And Diaghilev had chosen Paris for his headquarters in inaugurating his Ballets Russes, presenting challenging new scores to the French public, creating scandals that the Parisian public most certainly delighted in, even if the pleasure was kept secret.   Maybe it was the fact that France had its revolution, and nothing was ever the same.  Even though mobs in other empires tried (for a composer who became involved in one of these, see this post), it wasn’t until the World Wars that the monarchies fell elsewhere, and maybe because of this early revolutionary success, France was able to cultivate their surreal thoughts more floridly than other nations.

And then there was Dada, the absurd, a bizarre and unsettling everyday surrealism which, while not specifically French, found fertile ground in Paris shortly after the first World War.  It seemed to be a reaction to the horror, destruction, and societal upheaval that were a result of the Great War, and artists coped by making art of the least artistic objects imaginable.  Dada found a musical equivalent in the wacky conceptual engine that was the imagination of Erik Satie.  Often seeming to be more a philosopher than a composer, Satie bathed his delicate music in unconventional and provocative ideas that were almost like Dada before it was cool.  

A surreal composer in a very real sense, his role was also that of a thought leader, challenging and encouraging other French musical talents when they needed a change of direction or just a little push.  You can read more about this fascinating figure here.  

Satie talked Debussy out of imitating Wagner when he began to sense it could become a stale habit.  That’s just not French, and the French deserved their own music, written on their own terms.  And when Debussy began to take himself too seriously (maybe a valid criticism, but I think he was justified given what he created – see this post).

After he gave up on guiding Debussy, Satie found new mentees in a group of French composers that came to be known as The Six.  Converging from diverse backgrounds and working in diverse styles, The Six formed a loose confederation of creative minds for a few decades, encouraging each other, setting the tone for musical Paris between the wars, and, on occasion, collaborating on significant works.  An interesting initial collaboration is a fantastically absurd ballet called The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tour.  The action takes place on a commercial platform of the Eiffel Tour.  After a photographer instructs the wedding party to “watch the birdie”, an assortment of exotic animals begins to escape from his camera.  A lion eats one of the guests.  Eventually a freakishly large baby, a “child of the future”, enters and massacres the rest of the part with ping pong balls.  And then everything is reset to what it was.  Is it a dream?  A hallucination?  Does it matter?  It’s pure Dada, and I wonder if it even comments on anything, or is just on outpouring of tension in response to the overwhelming social forces that raged at the time.  You can listen to the entire ballet, not all that long at 20 minutes, here:

 

The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tour features musical movements written by five of The Six, including Francis Poulenc, the best known of The Six.  You can tell he was not one to take himself too seriously, in great contrast to Debussy, and so was a man after Satie’s heart.  Satie developed a reputation as a musical buffoon, creating amusing, comical, shallow music.  This reputation is largely justified, and much of his music, as well-crafted as it is, fits that bill.  But Satie was capable of profound, sentimental, and refined statements as well.  He was also the greatest composer of French songs for voice and piano, possibly in the history of French music, and is often compared to Schubert in this respect.  Here is a diptych of poems by Louis Aragon, set to music by Poulenc, which illustrates this duality brilliantly, first the introspective side, and then the zany, and both applied with great precision to the texts:

 

 

Another stunning of example of Poulenc’s more serious shading can be found in the fifth of a set of Eight Polish Songs, composed in the early 1930s, a concise phrase that is incredibly brief and direct, but overflows with heartbreak and melancholy most effectively over the course of its entire duration.

Poulenc may be closely associated with French musical Dadaism, even if his artistry is often more child-like than surreal, but he possessed a much wider range of expression than many listeners sense at first listen.  Had he grown up in a different time, perhaps perfect sincerity would have been his modus operandi, but growing up as he did among the surreal world of cubism and Dada, his innate absurdity could not help but to ring out through music that is still arresting for its zaniness.

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