"Pancarte pour une porte d'entrée" (in English "Handbill for an entrance", sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Onze Chants" or "Eleven Songs" in some sources) is a cycle of eleven songs composed by
Germaine Tailleferre
Germaine Tailleferre (; born Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse; 19 April 18927 November 1983) was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as ''Les Six''.
Biography
Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse was born at Sai ...
to the poems of the novelist and poet
Robert Pinget
Robert Pinget (Geneva, July 19, 1919 – August 25, 1997, Tours) was an avant-garde French writer, born in Switzerland, who wrote several novels and other prose pieces that drew comparison to Beckett and other major Modernist writers. He was al ...
written in 1959. The work was published in 2000 by the French publishers Musik Fabrik.
The work was commissioned by the American soprano and patron of the arts
Alice Swanson Esty
Alice Theresa Hildagard Swanson Esty (November 8, 1904 – July 21, 2000) was an American actress, soprano and arts patron who commissioned works by members of Les Six and other French composers, and American composers such as Ned Rorem, Virgil ...
who also commissioned Tailleferre's
L'Adieu du Cavalier for Esty's memorial concert for Francis Poulenc in 1964. The cycle was premièred in France on March 12, 1961 at Radio France by the French Baritone Aimé Doniat with the composer at the piano and premièred in the United States on March 13, 1961 at Alice Esty's recital in Carnegie Hall.
Tailleferre met Pinget through her daughter Françoise Lageat. She wrote this work on eleven successive evenings during the time she spent working on her opera "
Le Maître", setting one poem each evening. Years later, she herself said "I had great fun writing this work".
[Germaine Tailleferre in "Archives du 20ème Siècle-Germaine Tailleferre", a television programme made by the Radiodiffusion Télévision française, consultable at the INA in Paris] The short, witty texts allowed Tailleferre to use her natural sense of brevity to produce a compact and varied set of songs.
The Eleven songs are
*Les Chapeaux (Hats)
*Desinvoluture (relaxed attitude)
*L'Oiseau des Îles (Tropical bird)
*Cours (lessons)
*L'Émeraude (The Emerald)
*Sainte Nitouche (play on words: Saint (feminine) Don't Touch)
*Partage (Sharing)
*L'Insecte (The Insect)
*L'Hirondele (The Swallow)
*Le Serpent (The Snake)
*Pancarte pour une porte d'entrée (Handbill for an Entrance)
The eleven poems are extremely short and the complete cycle lasts less than ten minutes to perform.
References
Compositions by Germaine Tailleferre
Music based on poems
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