Music, Poetry, Propaganda

Constructing Cultural Soundscapes at the French Service 137

and not for the “negroes of the continent” one can realise the uneasiness
in England’ (Radio-Paris, 1.3.42).82

It is not surprising to find that the majority of the French listeners to
English-language broadcasts were ‘journalists, schoolteachers, students’
and, more broadly, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘the bourgeoisie’.83 However, a sig-
nificant listenership was established ‘particularly by “Action Française”
people’, who, resentful of the anti-Pétain propaganda in the French Service
took to the Home Service instead.84 Indeed, the BBC’s report suggests
that rather than being ef fective in discrediting the Home Service, German
propaganda had enhanced its reputation exponentially but at the expense
of the French Service:

One highly qualified observer estimates that the discrediting of the French Service
by these means ‘is probably one of the most ef fective pieces of German propaganda
in France today’.85

The BBC French Service is nevertheless one of the most celebrated aspects
of the Corporation’s wartime activities. It was broadcasting which maxim-
ised its sparse resources, distilling ideas in text and music to the essential
allowing traces of meaning to combine with new layers designed to fix
ideas in the minds of listeners. If cultural production, and music in par-
ticular, was not the central focus of the French Service, it is not testament
to their redundance and unimportance, indeed works of poetry, music and
on occasion individual words themselves took on functions beyond their
own generic boundaries.

82 BBC WAC E2/188/2: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Studies of 
European Audiences/October 1942–April 1944, ‘BBC Special Studies of European
Audiences – Radio Eavesdropping (Second Study) (24 April 1944), 9–10.

83 BBC WAC E2/188/2: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Studies of 
European Audiences/October 1942–April 1944, ‘BBC Special Studies of European
Audiences – Radio Eavesdropping (Second Study) (24 April 1944), 11.

84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 12.



Chapter 5

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation

André Malraux’s account of the transfer of resistance leader, Jean Moulin’s
cendres présumées from Père-Lachaise to the Panthéon on 19 December
1964 at which Malraux as culture minister, gave the funeral oration, is inter-
twined with a recollection of his discovery of the now famous prehistoric
paintings in the caves at Lascaux in the Périgord.1 Moreover, the ambigu-
ity surrounding the identity of Moulin’s ashes reinforced the cenotaphic
nature of his monument as a potent relic of what he as a symbol of French
resistance was meant to mean. It is a complex passage that elides conf lict-
ing versions of cultural memory with first-hand testimony. In Malraux’s
version the caves had been appropriated as an arms-cache by the resistance.
‘Ce lieu avait sans doute été sacré, et il l’était encore, non seulement par
l’esprit des cavernes, mais aussi parce qu’un incompréhensible lien unissait
ces bisons, ces taureaux, ces chevaux … et ces caisses qui semblaient venues
d’elles-mêmes, et que gardaient ces mitrailleuses tournées vers nous.’2

By seeking to associate the trope of indigenous primitivism – French
cave paintings – with indigenous resistance through the evocation of
sacredness, Malraux plays into what Douglas Smith has determined to be
a specifically post-war rehabilitative cultural project.3 It is also extremely
unstable because the key elisions – resistance, the prehistoric and the sym-

1 André Malraux, Le Miroir de Limbes I: Antimémoires [1967] (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
481–7.

2 Ibid., 486.
3 Douglas Smith, ‘Beyond the Cave: Lascaux and the Prehistoric in Post-War French

Culture’, French Studies LVIII.2 (2004), 221–2. On this new primitivism in Dubuf fet
and Fautrier see also Caroline Perret, ‘Dubuf fet, Fautrier, and Paris under the
Occupation and in its Aftermath: A Study in the Visual and Textual Ideology of 
Matter’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2007.

140 Chapter 5
bolic ashes can only be read as mythical: Malraux’s account of Lascaux was
contested by experts both of the prehistoric period and fellow members
of the resistance.4 Malraux’s memoir outlines the first of one of a series
of cultural scene-settings that frame this chapter, this is to be contrasted
with the cultural projects of Vichy, particularly the claim to tradition and
folklore in order, lastly, to address cultural expressions of resistance and the
embattled cultural memory that found its way onto the BBC airwaves in
the form of Poulenc and Eluard’s Figure humaine in March 1945. Second,
the empirical inaccuracy of Malraux’s account forces us to consider once
more the relationship with what is experienced (événement vécu) and its
subsequent, often divergent, expression, and finally, the figure of ashes
which for Derrida mark the utter erosion of the trace and which here,
with the case of Moulin and later, in Figure humaine prove to be a remark-
able preoccupation. ‘La cendre, ce vieux mot gris, ce theme poussiérieux,
de l’humanité, l’image immémoriale de s’était d’elle-même décomposée,
métaphore ou métonymie de soit tel est le destin de toute cendre séparée,
consumée comme une cendre de cendre.’5

While the post-war cultural appropriation of Lascaux has been read
as a response to both Auschwitz and the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima
where the potential to annihilate originating traces had been a working
objective, during the war, as Smith outlines, Vichy almost totally ignored
the presence of the site.6 Preference was given, where any attention was
given at all, to the fake site at Glozel, where the ‘discovery’ of artefacts in
1924 appeared to indicate that the origins of writing had Western roots
and not Eastern ones fitting well with the appropriation of Nazi Aryan
policies.7 Such fakery in the rewriting of origins and tradition thoroughly
underwrote, as we shall see next, the Vichy cultural project.

4 See Guy Penaud, André Malraux et la Résistance (Périgueux: Fanlac, 1986), 69; he
cites Jacques Poirier and Gilles Delluc as ‘témoins incontestables’.

5 Derrida, Feu la cendre, 15.
6 Smith, ‘Beyond the Cave’, 221.
7 Ibid. Its close proximity to Vichy might also have been a favourable factor.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 141

Vichy and le paysan

Both in its cultural project as in its ethnographic one, Vichy under Pétain
sought a return to origins. Unlike the counter-Heideggerian project of
understanding the cultural response to Lascaux in light of the abyss of 
the Holocaust, Vichy’s paysannerie originated in the soil, through tradi-
tion and the tangible legacy of family heritage.8 It racialised the peasant
and the craftsman linking him to terroir and pays while women were left
au foyer, ‘vestale’ in their ‘natural’ role as mother and home builder.9 This
traditional Christian family unit maintained moral steadfastness and patri-
otism defined by productive independent artisan activity in contrast to the
cosmopolitan decadent ‘racaille’ of the capital.10

For all the talk of Révolution nationale, the mainstay of Vichy cultural
discourse was about a return to something lost and not the transforma-
tion into something new: ‘on parle de refaire, de rénouer, de rétablir, de
retrouver, de restaurer le passé’.11 Raymond Postal’s collection of essays
discussed the prospects of a ‘Révolution nationale constructive’ in terms
of renaissance and regeneration.12 The figure of Pétain depicted him as
both leader and father in whose safe and Christian hands family, youth

8 Smith, ‘Beyond the Cave’, 231.
9 Christian Faure, Le projet culturel de Vichy (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon,

1989), 117.
10 This comparison was particularly evident in the social philosophy of Gustave Thibon,

according to Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy et l’éternel féminin. 27 whose 1943 publi-
cation Retour au réel, nouveaux diagnostics (Lyon: 1943) opened with a consideration
of the ‘réalisme de la terre’. Muel-Dreyfus concludes that ‘femme et paysan forment
un couple stratégique dans la condamnation de la ville, de l’ ‘illusion’ démocratique,
ds vertiges de la Commune et du Front Populaire, et dans l’exaltation du rachat par
la natalité et le retour à la terre.’
11 Ibid., 121.
12 Raymond Postal, ed., France 1941: La Révolution nationale constructive: Un bilan et
un programme (Paris: Éditions Alsatia, 1941), 30. Other contributors to the volume
included André Bellessort, René Leriche, Charles-Brun, Rémy Goussaint, Louis
Salleron and Pierre Bertin.

142 Chapter 5
and education would f lourish. In the context of such a reactionary cul-
tural programme, it is clear that purity of race was as important as purity
of moral conscience. Its resulting exclusions were dramatic and all too
well known. From October 1940 onwards, racial laws banning Jews from
posts in the public sector were legislated: this included Jewish members of
state-supported orchestras and those who worked at the national opera.13
Laws permitting the establishment of concentration camps were passed in
November 1940, with full-scale implementation of the Nazi final solution
from the Parisian round-ups of 16–17 July 1942 onwards.

Among those taken in these round-ups was the philosopher, Sarah
Kofman’s father, a Rabbi, taken on 16 July 1942, first to Drancy and then
deported to Auschwitz where he died.14 In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat,
Kofman gives an autobiographical account of  her childhood and her
encounters with not just the humiliation and devastation of the racial
laws, but as an enfant caché, her experience of the Vichy cultural project
also.15 Kofman’s autobiographical project centres on her conf licting love
for both her Mother and the woman, ‘Mémé’ who takes them into hiding
and adopts Sarah as her own – the title refers to their two associated
addresses. Mémé transforms Sarah into Suzanne, first through baptism
and then through a process of acculturation enacted through clothes, hair
and non-kosher meals, which cause Kofman to vomit. It is a transforma-
tion that reaches its apotheosis on the Jour de la fête des Mères.16 Having
chosen her two cards, one for Mémé and one for her mother, both typi-
cal of Vichy’s iconography of young, radiant and smiling mothers, she
blushes upon deciding to give the one she finds most beautiful to Mémé
and not to her mother.17 As part of the Vichy regime’s indoctrination of 

13 Legislation was passed on 3 October 1941.
14 Kofman’s account of her father’s deportation is considered along with a reading of 

Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine and a meditation on Maurice Blanchot’s writ-
ings on the concentrationary in Paroles suf foquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987).
15 Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Paris: Galilée, 1994).
16 The Fête des Mères was inscribed on the Vichy calendar from 1941 as the last Sunday
in May.
17 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 55.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 143

the ‘eternal feminine’ virtues of motherhood, a school competition had
been organised by Pétain that rewarded the best letters written by chil-
dren to their mothers. Kofman won with a letter written to Mémé and
her prize was an illustrated copy of  La Fontaine’s fable La Cigale et la
Fourmi. She was made to read out her letter to each class in the school ‘et
exhiber le prix que m’avait of fert celui qui remettait à l’honneur le travail,
la famille et la patrie’.18

Francine Muel-Dreyfus described her research on the eternal femi-
nine and Vichy, which examines the place of women, the symbolism and
roles attributed to them by the French State at this time, as working on
‘la violence de la banalité’.19 How this anodyne, folkloric return to roots
played out in the musical and literary domain is particularly evident in the
state-led educational projects shown in Kofman’s example above – and she
illustrates its dangers, and the pedagogic objectives of such cultural activity
belies its own ideological programme. Christian Faure notes how folk music
became ideologically appropriated by the Vichy regime as its ‘of ficial’ music
and seeking to renew such music through youth movements.20 Classical
music that could be aligned to a tradition or a region such as Gounod’s
Mireille or Bizet’s L’Arlésienne also fitted the cultural regime of La France
paysanne – of the healthy worker wedded to the soil marching of f to work
singing. La Fontaine’s Fables with their bucolic moralising were a means
for the Vichy regime to simultaneously plunder and align themselves with
a canon of classical literature.

On 8 August 1942, Poulenc’s ballet Les Animaux modèles, to his own
scenario based on fables by La Fontaine, was staged at the Opéra Garnier
with Serge Lifar in the lead. Its performance fell the midst of a season that
included the opera Palestrina (1915) by Hans Pfitzner, mounted at the insist-
ence of the occupying forces, directed by Wetzelberger and Werner Egk’s
ballet, Joan de Zarissa directed by the composer. Is it possible to rehabilitate

18 Ibid., 56.
19 Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy et l’éternel féminin, contribution à une sociologie poli-

tique de l’ordre des corps (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 17.
20 Christian Faure, Le projet culturel de Vichy (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon,

1989), 155.

144 Chapter 5
Les Animaux modèles from the charge that it is a Pétainist work as stated
by Benjamin Ivry?21 Certainly, in the immediate contemporary perception,
the ballet was suf ficiently problematic for the name François [sic] Poulenc
to ‘the main list of those whose works should be included only after special
application to Assistant Director of Music (General) at the BBC’.22

Les Animaux modèles

As a project, the idea of composing a ballet on the fables had been mooted
as early as 1937 and Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, had long sought
a ballet from Poulenc.23 So the idea predates the imposition of the Vichy
cultural programme and might be seen to fit with a creative trajectory
that had produced L’Histoire de Babar le petit éléphant for récitant and
piano in 1940 shortly after his demobilisation. It was already an unusual
step for Poulenc to choose to work with texts that were not contemporary,
although he had originally sought to borrow the title at least from Eluard’s
early collection Les animaux et leurs hommes, les hommes et leurs animaux
(1920).24 An af fectionate letter from the poet in the course of the summer
of 1941 of fered up other suggestions for titles:

21 Benjamin Ivry, Francis Poulenc (London: Phaidon, 1996), 126.
22 BBC WAC R27/2/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4 (1943–44) K.A.

Wright, ‘Copyright Music by Enemy Composers (New Edition) (4 June 1943). Issues
were raised about Poulenc at meetings of the OMD in Marylebourne HS from 24
August 1942 continuing until a meeting was held with the Gramphone Department
who had instigated their own prohibition policy in early March 1943.
23 Letter from Poulenc to Paul Collaer, 12 October 1937 in Francis Poulenc: correspond-
ance, 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 456.
24 Myriam Chimènes observes that of nearly 140 mélodies only around twenty were not
inspired by contemporary poets. See M. Chimènes, ‘Francis Poulenc et les poètes’,
Vingtième siècle 49 ( Jan.–Mar. 1996), 146.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 145

Vendredi [été 1941]
Mon cher Francis,
   Avant de partir pour la campagne, je veux vous communiquee les premiers titres
trouvés. Rassurez-vous, il y en aura d’autres.
     A la lueur de l’homme
     Les Animaux modèles
     Mouvements animaux
     A la mode animale
     Mille pattes
   Marie-Laure et Valentine et Cécile ma fille sont enthousiastes des Animaux
modèles, le voient sur l’af fiche, plein de sens et bien retenu par le public. Moi, avec
mon habituel mauvais goût, j’aime A la mode animale
   Ecrivez-moi ici. Ne craignez pas de m’exprimer votre dégoût.
   Je reviens le 10 septembre.
   Je vous aime bien.

Paul E.25

Poulenc created his scenario based on six fables (L’Ours et les compagnons,
Le Cigale et la fourmi, Le Lion amoureux, L’Homme entre deux ages et ses
deux maîtresses, La Mort et le Bûcheron, Les deux Coqs), in a time sequence
that begins with Le Petit jour and closes with Le Repas du midi. A small
cahier of ‘Notes pour Les Animaux et leurs hommes’ is conserved in the
Frederick Koch Collection at Yale University.26 It is fascinating document
dating from April 1942 that includes sketches of set design, explanatory
notes on the scenario and the outline of a ‘schéma musical’.

The scene is set in an ‘atmosphère bourguignone fin Louis XIII’, the
dawn sequence re-uses a wistful and nostalgic opening theme in D minor,

25 Letter from Paul Eluard to Poulenc (Summer 1941), in Francis Poulenc: correspond-
ance, 1910–1963, 514.

26 Francis Poulenc ‘Notes for “Les Animaux et leurs hommes”’, Frederick R. Koch
Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 16 f f. (and
subsequent references). I am grateful to the staf f at the Beinecke for providing me
with a fascimile of the manuscript.

146 Chapter 5
which ‘complètement oublié pendant 18 ans [s]’est revenu tout à coup’ to
the composer. It had originally served as the introduction of the first act
of Cocteau and Radiguet’s Paul et Virginie (f. 2v). The fables are designed
to roll f luidly from one to the next and characters from one take on new
roles. Poulenc ef fectively defabulates the animals of the fables appealing
to their symbolism, so the Lion, then, of  Le Lion amoureux danced by
Lifar, was to be ‘un superbe costaud avec pistolets et poignards à sa cein-
ture: le gangster de la fronde’. Elmire, is ‘ravissante, un peu le sex appeal
d’une star’. She is ‘coquette et sensuelle’, and dragueuse: ‘c’est elle qui court
après le Lion’. Indeed, the overriding theme is cinematic: ‘si Arletty dan-
sait je ne voudrais pas d’autre [Elmire]’.27 In the fable of Les deux Coqs,
the arrival of a poule upsets the relationship of  the two cockerels, who
had lived for many months side by side without issue. In the fight that
ensues, the winning Coq struts around in proudly, until an eagle swoops
and takes the winning bird away. The ballet closes with the repas du midi
and as the farmers say their benedicité, Elmire sits at her window, crying,
eyes fixed at the woods.

The Fables, not just in Poulenc’s rendition, are marked by particular
sense of textual f lexibility. La Fontaine’s texts were themselves already
reworkings of previous layers of fabulist writing, deriving from Aesop or
elsewhere, and it was an authorial intervention that worked at exploiting
variations or narrative sequences to reinforce or diminish particular aspects.
In what is essentially a theoretical study into the realms of ‘textes possibles’,
Marc Escola in the course of outlining a model of récriture returns to sev-
enteenth-century definitions of the rather attractive noun, ‘af fabulation’.28
While it describes a type of pre-compositional arrangement of material,
planning where the key moments will occur, the meaning upon which
Escola pounces, found in the Littré, is the definition as the ‘partie d’une
fable qui en explique le sens moral; c’est ce qu’on nomme le plus souvent

27 Poulenc writes ‘Lucinde’, which was clearly his original name for the character.
28 See Marc Escola, Lupus in Fabula, six façons d’af fabuler La Fontaine (Saint-Denis:

Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003), 7–8.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 147

la moralité’, which is to say, ‘la leçon d’une fable tient d’abord à la façon
dont ses sequences narratives sont af fabulées’.29 So the closing moral of the
last fable set in Les Animaux modèles is very resonant, all the more since
it remains unstated and only those who knew the fable would know the
moralité:

La Fortune se plaît à faire de ces coups.
Tout vainqueur insolent à sa perte travaille.
Défions-nous du sort, et prenons garde à nous,
Après le gain d’une bataille.30

This form of intellectual contraband had its musical aspects too. In an
interview with Claude Rostand, Poulenc, in reference to Les deux Coqs
reminisced that he had allowed himself the indulgence of introducing into
the fight scene the line ‘Non, non vous n’aurez pas notre Alsace-Lorraine.’31
This is the point in the Beinecke cahier mentioned above where he suggests
using ‘chansons obscènes de régiment’ and there is a fragment of melody
in the trumpet and trombones that is clearly a citation. Nigel Simeone’s
investigation into this apparently elusive snippet found a possible candidate
in the 1871 song ‘Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine’ by Ben Tayoux.32
The text of the chorus certainly fits appropriately:

Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine,
Et, malgré vous, nous resterons français.
Vous avez pu germaniser la plaine,
Mais notre cœur vous ne l’aurez jamais.

However, the quotation is not the one in Les deux Coqs, but paraphrased
as the sweeping melody, described by Poulenc as ‘assez bassement érotique’

29 Ibid., 8.
30 ‘Les Deux coqs’, Livre 7, Fable xii, ed. J. Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 216.
31 See Entretiens avec Claude Rostand (Paris: Julliard, 1954), 58.
32 See Nigel Simeone, ‘Making Music in Occupied Paris’, Musical Times (Spring 2006),

35.

148 Chapter 5
that opens Le Lion amoureux.33 It is an extraordinary piece, which for
all the cowboys and f lirting was a very serious and consummate piece of 
large-scale orchestral writing. Les Animaux modèles is also testament to the
complexity of texts in performance, where location and audience become
added factors to the value or judgement of a work. In the same way, and it
is to whom, I wish to turn next, Louis Aragon engaged with literary his-
tory and the knowledge obtained through shared memory to become an
exponent of what was in ef fect the cultural project of the resistance.

À chacun sa musique et sa merencolie

Louis Aragon, for better or worse, had acquired by the end of the Second
World War, the epithet of ‘national poet’. An object of derision for the
die-hard Belgian surrealist Mesens, who publishing in London wrote a
poem entitled ‘Le revers de ses médailles ou Deux mots au “Camarade”
Aragon’ dated 14 July 1943.34 Mesens objected to a perceived chauvinism
in Aragon’s work and what he felt was a retrenchment into classical struc-
tures, particularly rhyme which had formed the subject of Aragon’s war
poetry manifesto, La Rime en 1940.35 However, in Angela Kimyongür’s
analysis of commemoration and memory in the poet’s work, Aragon’s desire
to resonate with ‘un sens national’ is motivated by the necessity to obtain

33 Ibid., 36. Simeone continues to find an autocitation from the Litanies à la vièrge noire
(1936) in the scènes du petit jour and le repas du midi. In the Lion’s java, Simeone
hears a six-bar reference to Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, no. 1, 37.

34 E.L.T. Mesens, Troisième front, poèmes de guerre, suivi de Pièces détachées (London:
London Gallery Editions, 1944), 20.

35 La Rime en 1940 was added to Le Crève-Cœur (1946) having originally been published
on 20 April 1940 in Poètes Casqués 40. On Aragon’s reception in London, see John
Bennett, Aragon, Londres et la France Libre: Réception de l’œuvre en Grande-Bretagne,
1940–1946, trans. Emile-Jean Dumay (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998).

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 149

the unifying impact of collective cultural memory.36 It was also a means
of overcoming the literal isolation of hiding by appealing to a common
shared cultural inheritance.

Aragon’s rehabilitation of rhyme was also a call to song: ‘Alors la rime
cesse d’être dérision, parce qu’elle est le chaînon qui lie les choses à la chan-
son, et qui fait que les choses chantent.’37 Olivier Barabant’s assessment of
memory in Aragon sees a unification in objective between song, poetry
and history, for Aragon, all were embodied in the figure of Chrétien de
Troyes.38 Intimate song permitted several levels of reading the reception of
which during the war ‘se montrait évidemment plus sensible au travail de
la contrabande et de la contention politique’.39 In a context where ‘jamais
peut-être faire chanter les choses n’a été plus urgente et noble mission à
l’homme, qu’à cette heure où il est plus profondément humilié, plus entière-
ment dégradé que jamais’, it is timely to address the repertoire of resistance
poetry in its musical setting.40

Table 2: Resistance Poetry Set to Music41

Composition Poet and Collection Further information
Claude Arrieu, Paul Eluard [ Jean du Haut], First performed, RTF 1946.
Cantate des sept Les sept poèmes d’amour en F-Pn [Ms 23273 and dossier
poèmes d’amour guerre (1943) d’œuvre, [Vm. dos 8 (21).
en guerre (1944),
Soprano, Baritone
and Orchestra.

36 Angela Kimyongür, Memory and Politics: Representations of War in the Work of Louis
Aragon (Cardif f: University of Wales Press, 2007), 87.

37 Louis Aragon, ‘La rime en 1940’, in Le Crève-Cœur (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 67.
38 Olivier Barbarant, Aragon: La Mémoire et l’excès (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1997), 113.
39 Ibid.
40 Aragon, ‘La rime en 1940’, 67.
41 See also Paul Arma’s Les Chants du silence for voice and piano which sets eleven

dif ferent texts (not all dating from the Occupation) and is illustrated by artists such
as Picasso, Chagall, Matisse (1942–5).

150 Chapter 5

Georges Auric, 1. Louis Aragon, ‘Richard
Quatre chants de la II Quarante’, Le Crève-cœur
France malheureuse (Sept. 1940).
(1943). 2. Jules Supervielle, ‘Le petit
bois’
Elsa Barraine, Avis 3. Paul Eluard, ‘Nous ne
(1944) for voice and vous chantons pas’, no. 6 of 
piano or chorus and Les Sept poèmes d’amour en
orchestra guerre (1943).
Robert Caby,
Cantate sur Poésie et Paul Eluard, ‘Avis’, Au rendez- Dedicated to the memory of 
Vérité 1942 vous allemand (1944) Georges Dudach.
Henri Dutilleux,
La Geôle (1946) for Paul Eluard, Poésie et vérité Unpublished F-Pn [Vmg
baritone or mezzo- 1942 (1942) 29005 (21–22).
soprano and piano.
Francis Poulenc, Jean Cassou, 33 sonnets
Deux poèmes de composées au secret
Louis Aragon for (presented by L. Aragon,
voice and piano 1944).
(Sept.–Oct. 1943).
Francis Poulenc, Louis Aragon, ‘C’ and ‘Fêtes ‘C’ is dedicated to ‘Papoum’
Figure humaine, galantes’ from Les Yeux and ‘Fêtes galantes’ to Jean
cantate, for double d’Elsa (1942). de Polignac. First performed
unaccompanied 9 December 1943 by Poulenc
chorus (1943). and Pierre Bernac.

Selection of poems from Paul First public performance
Eluard, Poésie et vérité 1942 on BBC Home Service
and Sur les pentes inférieures in English translation by
(1941). Roland Penrose and Rollo
Myers, 25 March 1945.

Poulenc’s setting of ‘C’ and ‘Fêtes galantes’ from Les Yeux d’Elsa made
an unbilled premier at a recital at the Salle Gaveau with the composer
accompanying Pierre Bernac on 8 December 1943. In contrast to the large-
scale symphonic sweeps of Les Animaux modèles, Poulenc’s intimate settings

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 151

of Aragon’s texts combine clarity of melodic expression with a harmonic
poignancy, particularly in the first of the settings, ‘C’.

Aragon’s text is in the form of a lai, octosyllabic lines that all use the
same rhyme, Cé with a refrain at the opening and end. The poem speaks
once more of ‘une chanson des temps passés’ as much as it simultaneously
reworks the medieval genre and this self-ref lexivity of genre marks an
important temporal caesura where following:

Et j’ai bu comme un lait glacé.
Le long lai des glories faussées,

The mental timescape of the past is thrust rudely into the present:

La Loire emporte mes pensées
Avec les voitures versées
Et les armes désamorcées
Et le larmes mal ef facées.

Melancholic poignancy is reinforced by the emphasis on the second beat of 
the triple time bar, ef fectively rendering the opening quaver intervals into
a sort of displaced anacrusis in a familiar signature move by the composer.
The second song, ‘Fêtes galantes’, Poulenc writes a parody of a ‘chansons-
scies de café-concert’, and the nostalgia of ancient chivalry is replaced
with a series of unbelieving witnessing statements all beginning with ‘On
voit …’. Aragon’s mixture of composite rhyming ‘voit ailleurs’, ‘dévoyés’ all
play with the notion of the homophonies of seeing and voice as the act of
seeing is put to the voice in song.

Although surrealist quarrels had separated Aragon and Eluard from
each other, a renewal of cooperation and friendship occurred via the pages
of Poésie 40 when Aragon of fered his unsigned review of Eluard’s Le livre
ouvert to Pierre Seghers. Eluard recognised the author of the review and
asked for a meeting.42 A stranger meeting still was organised by René
Tavernier between Aragon and Claudel in Lyon in 1944; a confrontation of 

42 Pierre Seghers ‘Témoignage’ in Rencontres avec Paul Eluard, Actes du Colloque de
Nice (19–21 Mai 1972), Europe ( Jan. 1973), 77.

152 Chapter 5
‘la bouleversante mélodie d’Aragon et au grandiose monument de Claudel’
markedly dif ferent in physique as in ideas: ‘L’un mince, élégant bien sûr,
le communiste aristocratique. L’autre l’ambassadeur, carré, rectangulaire,
massif comme la foi qui l’anime.’43 When France fell in 1940, Claudel ini-
tially placed his faith in Pétain in a manner described, by Tavernier as ‘une
sorte de pensée de vieux Français, traditonnellement patriotique. Pas un
seul instant il n’y a un engagement idéologique, ni dans la collaboration
ni dans un idéal national socialiste.’44 Claudel, who wrote poems both to
Pétain (Paroles au Maréchal, 1941) and de Gaulle (La France parle, 1943),
was designated ‘opportunist’ by Philippe Soupault in an interview directed
by René Tavernier’s son Bertrand in 1984.45 In addition to his considerable
collaboration with Milhaud, which produced a four-movement Cantate
de Guerre, composed in February 1940 following the Cantate de la Paix of 
May 1938, the most significant wartime collaboration was with Honegger.
A prologue was written for the dramatic oratorio, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher
(1938) in 1944 reframing the text with a dark, tenebrous opening incanting
‘La France était inane et vide’ with a soprano solo voice seeking salvation
for her soul in a virtuosic passage. The texts of Poulenc’s cantata derive
from Eluard’s collection, Poésie et Vérité 1942 and Sur les pentes inférieures
(1941). If Aragon’s project was to provoke a shared sense of historical lit-
erary identity, Eluard seemed more inclined to find the beauty of truth
expressed in poetry through an ethical encounter, for him:

[La poésie] ne peut trop longtemps jouer sans risque sur les mots. Elle sut tout perdre
pour ne plus jouer et se fondre dans son éternel ref let: la vérité très nue et très pauvre
et très ardente et toujours belle. Et si je dis ‘toujours belle’, c’est qu’elle prend la place
chérie de toute la beauté dans le cœur des hommes, c’est qu’elle devient la seule vertu,
le seul bien. Et ce bien n’est pas mesurable.46

43 René Tavernier, ‘Quand Claudel rencontrait Aragon (Lyon 1944)’, Bulletin de la
Société Paul Claudel 119 (1990), 6.

44 Ibid.
45 ‘Philippe Soupault parle de Paul Claudel’, interview with Philippe Soupault by Jean

Aurenche, dir. Bertrand Tavernier, France 3 (16 Dec. 1984).
46 Paul Eluard, ‘Raisons d’écrire, entre autres’, in Au Rendez-Vous Allemand (Paris:

Minuit, 1945), 66.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 153

In his title, Poésie et vérité, Eluard made ironic reference to Goethe’s auto-
biography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, published in French translation (reis-
sued in 1941) under the title Souvenirs de ma vie: Poésie et Vérité.47 Charles
Maurras, who cut a dif ferent sort of literary figure, also used the same
title in an anthology of canonical French literature published in 1944.48
Deliberations about truth in relation to memory, specifically witnessing
and the usefulness of knowledge all form part of Charlotte Delbo’s project
in which the musicality of memory becomes an overwhelming emotional
energy. In a haunting passage at the end of the first volume, ‘Aucun de nous
ne reviendra’ a fragment entitled ‘Le Printemps’ revisits the Parisian spring-
time, in contrast to the ‘poussière de boue séchée’ and the liquid odour
‘plus épais et visqueux qui enveloppait et isolait cette partie de terre’. In the
sheer squalor of the meagre existence she and her companions endure at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was overtaken by the powerful memory a spring-
time that ‘sang’ in her memory: ‘dans ma mémoire le printemps chantait’.49
Extending the musical metaphor further the vividness of this bright spring-
time intoxicates:

Les pousses des saules scintillent argentées dans le soleil – un peuplier plie sous le vent
– l’herbe est si verte que les f leurs du printemps brillent de couleurs surprenantes. Le
printemps baigne tout d’un air léger, léger, enivrant. Le printemps monte à la tête. Le
printemps est cette symphonie qui éclate de toutes parts, qui éclate, qui éclate.50

It is a transitory, disturbing and intoxicating memory that evokes grief in
the vast distance between the archived memory-image and the recounted
present in a bitter inversion of the association of springtime with hope and

47 Goethe, Poésie et vérité (Paris: 1941).
48 ‘Poésie et Vérite, non; ce titre n’est pas de moi, mais il n’est pas non plus de Goethe,

il appartient aux premiers traducteurs français de ses Mémoires. Ceux qui, plus tard,
ont essayé d’une version plus littérale ont cru devoir inscrire en tête de l’ouvrage:
Fiction et Réalité, ce qui ne veut rien dire pour moi. Mais Poésie et Vérité me va
comme un gant, et je le prends comme il me vient.’ C. Maurras, ‘Avant-Propos’ (Paris:
H. Lardanchet, 1944), 7.
49 Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra, 178.
50 Ibid.

154 Chapter 5
with song. In a Freudian operation of memory, this reminiscence or nostalgia
is both unexpected and performative. This theme, which evokes through
spring both the beauty and innocence violated, is operating at the opening
of the first movement of Figure humaine. In setting the poem ‘Bientôt’, with
an incipit that reads, ‘De tous les printemps du monde, Celui-ci est le plus
laid’ in just the basses, Poulenc recalls the recitation of the chant in a mass
and firmly defines the musical text as a secular recitation of a holy rite. It
recalls also the solo piano line that opened the setting of ‘C’ preceding the
line ‘J’ai traversé le pont de C’ by Louis Aragon discussed above with which
it shares the same register. In writing a cantata on secular texts, Poulenc
invokes the incantatory magic of the resistance. If we consider Malraux’s
misremembered encounter with the sacred at Lascaux, the setting of Eluard’s
texts in this way is a self-ref lexive move, referring to the Litanies à la vièrge
noire inspired by a visit to (coincidentally nearby) Rocamadour in 1936.

In Table 3 below are the first of all the titles of the poems set in the
cantata contrasting their position in the choral work with their order in
Eluard’s collection, the titles are not retained in the cantata. The table then
outlines the movement structure of the cantata, the performance direction
at the opening and the forces required. Just two, and they are the most lyri-
cal, movements use solo choirs, ‘Toi ma patiente’ and ‘Le jour m’étonne et
la nuit me fait peur …’.

Table 3: Eluard’s poems from Poésie et Vérité 1942 used in Figure humaine (1943)

Title Incipit Position in the Position in the
collection cantata (mvt)

Liberté Sur mes cahiers 18
d’écolier

Sur les pentes inférieures Aussi bas que le silence 2 3

Première marche la voix Riant du ciel et des 3 5
d’un autre planètes

Le rôle des femmes En chantant les 4 2
servantes s’élancent

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 155
4
Patience Toi ma patiente 5 7
Un feu sans tache La menace sous le ciel 6
rouge 1
Bientôt De tous les printemps 7
du monde 6
Le Loup Le jour m’étonne et la 14
nuit me fait peur

Table 4: Cantata structure, performance direction and forces

I: De tous les printemps du monde … Très large Both choirs

II: En chantant les servants s’élancent Très animé et rythmé Both choirs

III: Aussi bas que le silence Très calme et sombre Both choirs

IV: Toi ma patiente … Très calme et doux 1st choir solo

V: Riant du ciel et des planètes … Très vite et très violent Both choirs

VI: Le jour m’étonne et la nuit me Très doux et très calme 2nd choir solo
fait peur …

VII: La menace sous le ciel rouge Très emporté et rude Both choirs

VIII: Liberté Commencer très calmement Both choirs
mais allant quand même

Poulenc himself explained the movement order of  the cantata in
a recording he made for the BBC Home Service programme Music
Magazine to accompany the first performance.51 Focusing on the triumph
of hope, feminine courage, the martyrs of the firing squad, hope returns
in the fourth movement, then the quite patience is broken by an angry,

51 BBC Scripts Music Magazine (23) Home Service, Sunday, 25 March 1945, 11.0–11.45,
a fortnightly review edited by Anna Instone and Julian Herbage, introduced by Alec
Robertson. Talk by Francis Poulenc.

156 Chapter 5
mocking anti-military manifesto as ‘les sages’ are proclaimed as ‘ridicules’.
In the sixth movement, the purity of snow is destroyed by the wolfprints
of  the invader. The penultimate text marks the transit from fractured,
discontinous horror and moves to concordant tonal harmony having been
‘pierced with a sudden light’.52 Then the final movement is a setting of 
the famous text ‘Liberté’; in ever increasing modal changes the tension
and rapidity of declamation increases until the final chord sounds includ-
ing two soprano solos singing a high E. This last poem had circulated
widely, not least through RAF tracts, indeed the entire Poésie et vérité
collection obtained a quite extraordinary circulation for a work that was
of ficially censored in the Occupied Zone. In May 1942, les Editions de
la Main à la Plume under the direction of Noël Arnaud published a first
collection and individual poems were published in Fontaine in Algeria,
in Switzerland and in South America, in Britain, too. The poem Liberté
was airdropped over France in an edition of ‘Courrier de l’air’, apporté
par vos amis la RAF’, adding to its symbolism as allied-authorised ‘intel-
lectual contraband’.

In order to best demonstrate the convergence of the symbolic memo-
ries I have been investigating throughout this chapter, I want to concen-
trate on the seventh and penultimate movement which sets the poem,
‘Un feu sans tache’. Although the title is not retained in the cantata, the
words resonate clearly with Derrida’s preoccupation with cinders – this is
a fire without stain, without mark, a fire that leaves no ash and an absence
of trace.

I have included the text accompanied by Roland Penrose’s translation
below in order to demonstrate how the verses correspond to four sections
of the musical setting. The first with the first stanza, the second sets the
second and third stanzas, the third, the fourth verse and the final section
uses the last two voices and coda.

52 Ibid.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 157

Example: Un feu sans tache and translation

I Came the dark threat beneath the red sky
La menace sous le ciel rouge From underneath gaping jaws
Venait d’en bas des mâchoires And scales and links
Des écailles des anneaux Of a chain slippery and heavy
D’une chaîne glissante et lourde
II Life was distributed
La vie était distribuée Widely and far just so that death took
Largement pour que la mort Seriously the tribute
Prît au sérieux le tribut Paid to it without stint
Qu’on lui payait sans compter But death was the god of love
La mort était le Dieu d’amour And in a kiss the conquerors
Et les vainqueurs dans un baiser Swooned heavily upon their victims
S’évanoussaient sur leurs victimes And putrefaction grew bold
La pourriture avait du cœur
III Yet beneath the reddened sky
Et pourtant sous le ciel rouge Beneath the appetites for blood
Sous les appétits de sang Under the baleful famine
Sous la famine lugubre The cavern closed its mouth
La caverne se ferma
IV The useful earth covered up
La terre utile ef faça The graves dug up in preparation
Les tombes creusées d’avance And children lost their fear
Les enfants n’eurent plus peur Their fear of mysteries maternal
Des profondeurs maternelles And madness and stupidity
Et la bêtise et la démence Gave place, baseness too,
Et la bassesse firent place To men, to brothers of men
A des hommes frères des hommes No longer striving against living
Ne luttant plus contre la vie Men who will forever be eternal.
A des hommes indestructibles.

158 Chapter 5
As in the opening of the first movement, the movement opens with solo
voices, the altos of the first choir, incanting the opening statement of what
becomes a fugal subject. The chromatic and disjunct melody can is reduc-
ible to two overlapping chromatic descents, spelling out in ef fect a com-
plete octave descent from A through to A. Use of fugue is most unusual by
Poulenc and it can be read here as symbolic of a web of dif ferent meanings.
The words opening the poem speak of the ‘arrival of the dark threat’ sug-
gesting that the fugal form is a representation of the psychological state of 
fugue – of f light, of the need to f lee. But there is another more structural
connection at work also. The entire fugal exposition, from bars 1–16 sets
just the first three lines of the opening stanza:

La menace sous le ciel rouge
Venait d’en bas des mâchoires
Des écailles des anneaux

As each part overlaps and the introduction of each new voice gradually
increases vocal participation the sonic rendering of the chain is developed
– and it has already been figured in the superimposed chromatic descents
of the fugal subject itself. However, the utterance of the chain, does not
occur until after its figuration is complete at the end of the exposition. The
discordant intervals between the parts are found between the mezzos and
altos, who sing a chain of seven tritones and the mezzo line is paralleled
at the minor seventh by the Tenors. In the following section the parallel
chromaticism is continued though now at the minor ninth between the
basses and mezzos in a series of antiphonal exchanges between the two
choirs. On the words ‘du cœur’ the entire emotional field of the movement
shifts. The mezzos reprise a variation on the fugal subject at but the tempo
is ‘subito le double plus lento du Tempo cédé’ and the extended rallentando
closes on the words ‘La caverne se ferma’.

From the disturbing chromaticism and discontinuity, the music moves
into centeredness, almost stasis as the migratory harmony up to this point
opens out in an expansive tutti on a pianissimo chord of C sharp major,
accompanied by gentle alternation in the altos and basses. This is the light
Poulenc referred to in his broadcast talk in a key as far sharpwards as it is

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 159

possible to go in diatonic terms. This section is also a sarabande in a cantata
that makes several allusions to dance styles. If the final section in C sharp
major reads Eluard own faith in the ability of humanity to overcome its
manifest evils, evoking the spirit (and spectre) of communist ideology.
My final comparison is to make a connection with the testimonial poetry
by Paul Celan, a poet, who like Delbo was a survivor of the death camps.
His poem, Aschenglorie is central to Derrida’s consideration of the poetics
of witnessing, but there is another important aspect to Celan’s aesthetic,
which involves the attempt to apply musical form to his poetry, particu-
larly fugue. Celan uses fugal structures in Death Fugue [Todesfugue] and
Strette [Engführung], both poems discussed by Szondi and Derrida, to
break down verbal structures into sounds that transfer or translate – even
embody – meaning. This movement, already in the context of a work that
is seeking to express a sacred humanism lined to values of freedom, is the
most transfigurative. Liberty, the final movement gives very beautiful voice
to a text that goes before it. In ‘La menace’ through the musical language,
the expression of fear, f light, calm and hope is articulated. Eluard’s final
line ‘a des hommes indestructibles’ powerfully communes with Robert
Antelme’s L’espèce humaine: ‘[le bourreau] peut tuer un homme, mais il
ne peut pas le changer en autre chose.’53

In the final part of this chapter, I want to return to the BBC’s presen-
tation of the work and how the resonant web of meaning was translated
through transmission on 25 March 1945. Through examination of the BBC’s
presentation of the first public performance of Figure humaine and consid-
eration of the work’s textual construction, both as poem and as cantata, as
text, more broadly, this chapter explores the varied (and variable) web of
meanings evoked, suppressed or exploited at dif ferent generic thresholds
in conception and performance.

In many ways, the presentation of Poulenc’s cantata was designed to
set the seal on the Corporation’s own relationship with the spirit of French
Resistance establishing a co-presence of liberation, French resistance and

53 R. Antelme, L’espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [1947]), cited in M. Blanchot,
L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 192.

160 Chapter 5
British broadcasting in the ears of domestic and overseas listeners.54 The
performance required a large commitment both in forces and finance for
the Corporation and even the delivery of the scores to the BBC intersected
with international diplomacy and government arriving via the diplomatic
bag from the British Embassy in Paris at the Ministry of Information at
Senate House.55 It was ultimately in matters of diplomacy that the per-
formance of the work was deemed to be most significant as an event at
the BBC as the following memo, concerned with the reception of guests
post-performance, attests:

To explain the significance of the occasion may I say that it is Poulenc’s newest and
most impressive work, but that this alone would not justify our request. The point
is that he has set in the form of a cantata, verses by the leading French poet, Paul
Eluard, symbolising the strife for freedom, and that the last poem, entitled Liberty,
has become associated with the Resistance movement in much the same way as
the Marseillaise was associated with the Revolution. In view of the significant part
played by the BBC in stimulating the Resistance movement during the four years
of the occupation, Poulenc was himself particularly anxious that this work should
receive its first performance by the BBC, and an English translation was written for
the occasion. Therefore the whole thing is symbolic of something much greater than
the music in itself, quite beautiful though that music is.56

Poulenc’s cantata had already generated a symbolism beyond itself as far
as the Corporation was concerned, a construction of cultural memory was
in operation that now needed to be translated and transferred to listeners.
It was not only the poems and their clandestine dissemination that was
significant; the participative role of the BBC in stimulating the resistance

54 It was also intended to broadcast the performance live into France using SHAEF
but there was technical failure in the event and it was a recording that was broadcast
into France in the following days. It was still this translated performance that marks
the public premier of the work to French audiences.

55 BBC WAC RCont1/Composer/Poulenc, Letter from Joan Grif fin (MOI) to V. Hely-
Hutchinson (DM) (16 Dec. 1944).

56 BBC WAC RCont1/Composer/Francis Poulenc, DDM (Kenneth Wright) to AC(P)
(R. Howgill) Figure Humaine – Poulenc: Broadcasting House Concert Hall Sunday
25 March 1945 8.30–9.0 ([15] March 1945).

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 161

activity to which these texts bear witness was also an active objective. Figure
humaine as event was a point at which diverse political, practical and mean-
ingful elements coalesced. The first performance and first public hearing
were moments of collective knowledge creation surrounded by activity not
simply revealed in explanatory programmes designed to enhance the work’s
presentation, but also in political and diplomatic purpose. Since this was
a message designed to get across to as many of the Home Service listen-
ers as possible the decision was made to perform the work in translation.
Poulenc himself attended the meeting at which it was decided to perform
the cantata in English, a meeting that took place on 9 January 1945.57 Eluard
insisted that the translation should be the one by Roland Penrose, which
had completed in 1944 and revised, at Poulenc’s request for the purposes
of the musical setting, by Rollo Myers.58

Vera Lindsey, a news producer, was dispatched to discuss the perform-
ance of the cantata with the composer and was responsible for delivering the
first copy of the score to the BBC.59 From early November 1944, Director
of Music, Victor Hely-Hutchinson was keen to record and broadcast the
work, and in January 1945 Poulenc met with Edward Lockspeiser and
Leslie Woodgate, the BBC choirmaster, to discuss rehearsals.60 Poulenc
emphasised the exigencies of the work, himself remarking that it was ‘hor-
riblement dif ficile’.61 Poulenc insisted on a minimum of seven singers to each

57 BBC WAC RCont 1 Poulenc Composer file 1, Memo from E. Lockspeiser to DM
[?] 9 Jan. 1945.

58 Penrose’s translation was published in 1944 under the title Poetry and Truth 1942, with
a portrait of the author by Man Ray (London: London Gallery Editions, 1944).

59 Vera Lindsay is listed as a Radio News Reel producer in the BBC staf f list of April
1945. Her report of the trip where she picked up the scores of 18 November 1944
details meetings notably with Picasso and Valéry, though mentions nothing specific
about the score. The inf luence and importance of Eluard comes over however in
relation to Picasso and Les Éditions de Minuit. BBC WAC R28/128/7: News/Misc.
Correspondence/1944–54.

60 RCont1 Artists file Poulenc, Interview with Lockspeiser and Woodgate (9 Jan.
1945).

61 ‘Prière de téléphoner à Monsieur Hutchinson [Victor Hely-Hutchinson] à la BBC
lui dire que je lui ai écrit ces jours et pour lui expliquer 1° – qu’il faut au moins 96

162 Chapter 5
of the twelve parts – something that was eventually agreed by Woodgate
and the Corporation.62 This represented a not inconsiderable financial
commitment as outlined below, and use of the entire corporation’s profes-
sional choral forces. Woodgate decided that he required choral forces of 
forty-two singers for each of the two choruses, to be divided into fourteen
sopranos, eight contraltos, eight tenors and twelve basses.

For a Home Service production that arguably had a strong European
interest, the scale of the work and its dif ficulty drew hard on financial
resources. Woodgate’s decision to use the maximum number of Bedford-
based singers, including the Theatre Chorus, entailed creating another
chorus of forty-two from choral forces in London. Not only then, was
the work of considerable importance to its British listeners, it provided
rebroadcast material of noteworthy capital for the BBC’s overseas opera-
tions. This was particularly the case for the European Service, for whom
interest in the performance was generated from two sides. First, to some
extent, the genesis of  the cantata owed something to the work of  the
BBC, especially the French Service. This was certainly the line taken in
the of ficial presentation by the Corporation in the ancillary programmes
and material used to furnish its premiere. Second, the work shared – or
could be made to share – the values that the European Service of the BBC
had sought to display during the Second World War: integrity, honesty,
truth and hope.

Poulenc’s own attendance at later rehearsals and his presence at meet-
ings where decisions were taken to perform the work in translation helps to
rebuke claims that there was personal disappointment in some way about
the performance circumstances because there was evidence of a marginali-
sation of the work in post-liberated France. The cantata received its first

choristes pour la Cantate, 2° – que celle-ci est horribilement dif ficile et qu’il faut au
moins 2 mois de travail étant courte a capelle et très compliquée comme prononcia-
tion.’ BBC WAC RCont1/Poulenc/Composer/file 1 (1941–62), handwritten note
from Poulenc [n.d.].
62 Letter to Hely-Hutchinson [1 December 1944], Correspondance, 575–6 and BBC
WAC RCont1 Artists file, Francis Poulenc, Internal Memo from Leslie Woodgate
to DM (9 Jan. 1945).

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 163

performance in France on 22 May 1947 and was not included in the first
concert in a newly liberated Paris. If the work was not given the fanfare
in France that its apparent spirit might have warranted, then it may be
because, as Leslie Sprout has argued, that post-war programming and state-
sponsorship looked to symphonic genres as the means of suitable expression
of victory.63 A more practical consideration, and one voiced by Poulenc in
his Entretiens with Claude Rostand, is its extreme technical dif ficulty.64
But it does no harm to reconsider the f luidity of the national borders in
such matters and that perhaps there might have been some honour in the
broadcast by a foreign network that was perceived to have played a very
important role in the liberation of France.

Two weeks before the performance, Poulenc was invited to lunch with
the Director General and the social engagements surrounding the perform-
ance attest to those who the BBC felt were important in Franco-British
cultural and political relations, as can be seen in a brief reception was held
after the first performance. People from the French Embassy, the former
headquarters of the Forces Françaises Libres and the British government
both the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Of fice were all in attend-
ance as well as, those who had been responsible for putting the cantata
on the air within the BBC, the publishers – Rouart and Chester and the
composer; artists from France and Britain, including the conductor Roger
Désormière and soprano, Ginette Neveu and Benjamin Britten.

During the proceedings, the Director of  Music, Victor Hely-
Hutchinson made the following speech:

Five months ago it was my privilege to extend to M. Charles Münch and Mlle. Nicole
Henriot in this room the thanks and appreciation of the BBC for the broadcast in
which they had taken part two nights earlier with our Orchestra at Bedford – the
first broadcast to be given by visitors from France for nearly five years. Since then
we have welcomed from France M. Paul Paray and Mlle Yvonne Lefebure, M. Roger
Désormière and Mlle Ginette Neveu, as well as M. Poulenc himself with M. Pierre
Bernac, and we are very glad to see M. Bernac and M. Désormière here tonight also;
but because of the subject matter of the work we have here performed tonight this

63 Sprout, ‘Music for a New Era’, 351.
64 Entretiens, 103.

164 Chapter 5
present broadcast has much in common with that first visit of guests from liberated
France. I said then, and I say again now, that this is an occasion which we shall not
forget; for besides our admiration for the music itself, which I need not emphasise, we
should be less than human if the significance of the words, coupled with the knowl-
edge of the circumstances under which Figure humaine was written and composed,
did not also make on us a profound and lasting impression.65

Conclusion

As an event, the broadcast premier of Figure humaine was a confirmation of 
the BBC’s role in the construction of French cultural memory. Symbolism
surrounding the performance was resonant on both sides of the Channel,
since although as we saw in Chapter 4, Radio-Paris had an extensive musi-
cal programme that in tandem with the urgency of the political situation
prevented the BBC from showcasing its own extensive music provision. It
was also a moment to transfer that cultural memory to British listeners by
presenting the work in translation. It also marked an important moment
in the rehabilitation of Poulenc at the BBC and as seen on the advertising
cover of an accordeon score of national anthems, Poulenc’s cantata was
proudly listed alongside Honegger’s Chant de Libération under the rubric
of Répertoire des grands concerts firmly canonised with Les Chansons de la
Libération et la Victoire. In its translation, the cantata represented a highly
refined, virtuosic utterance of Eluard’s texts made accessible, because the
meaning was important, to the BBC’s listeners.

This chapter has explored how dif ferent cultural projects were at work
during the occupation and liberation of France, the post-war search for ori-
gins that linked the myth of resistance with an ancient indigenous culture,
the collaborationist cultural project of paysannerie of strict gender roles,

65 BBC WAC RCont 1 Poulenc Artists File, Memo from DM to C(P) ‘Broadcast of 
“Figure humaine” (Poulenc) – Sunday 25 March, 8.30pm (Home Service) (26 March
1945)’.

The Cultural Soundscapes of Liberation 165

purity of race and folksong and finally the projects behind resistance poetry,
which for Aragon became a desire to express authenticity in reworking a
literary heritage and for Eluard an ethical search for truth expressed in
terms of desire. The necessity of singing (in the sense of a devoir de faire-
chanter) and the potential for music to transfigure written text underwrites
Poulenc’s composition, a work defined as much by its technical dif ficulty
as its beauty when performed.



Conclusion

Before drawing this study to a more general conclusion, I want to draw
together some of the features and aspects that have been covered in the
immediately preceding case studies. An outline of Anglo-French cultural
activity in London was combined with investigating how new genres of
presentation unique to radio represented a new epistemological field in
their interpretation of actuality. Assessing the function of slogans and
musical refrains demonstrated how even on the margins of a busy sound-
scape they were highly performative. There was also consideration of how
the soundscape of a city like urban poetry could operate as music in the
representations of Paris. Finally, the performance of an important work of
cultural imagination – a collaborative af fair between poet and composer –
by the BBC simultaneously commemorated and created memory within
the discursive field that was discussed at the opening, a timescape, where
temporality and place sound together.

By understanding cultural memory through analytical approaches
derived from archive theory, or more properly, approaches associated with
theorising the archive, we have repositioned the broadcasting organisation
at issue. While elements of research have of course derived from the BBC’s
own memory storehouse, the figure of the archive as a body of memory, the
encounter with which engenders an intermediary space, is critical. There
is, to use another musical figuration, a polyphony of voices, attitudes, and
epistemologically challenging utterances that do not always sound in per-
fect concord. The signification of events, documenting and naming and
the extreme determination that such exercise requires in order to recover
is read more urgently in the aftermath of the deadly projects of genocide.
Using the archive to construct only an institutional narrative is not ten-
able, and not especially useful either, in trying to locate, assess or address
cultural memory. Instead to return to Sylvie Lindeperg’s analysis of film, it

168 Conclusion
is a body of palimpsestic traces that reveal processes of programme making
and indicate how projects took shape.1

It is the dif ferent modalities of memory and their mediation that has
formed our focus in this investigation of a timescape marked by trauma,
uncertainty and fear. Where cultural identity was suppressed, denied or at
the very least compromised, new constructions based on shared frameworks
of knowledge, recursively or newly configured helped to enact the roles of
memory at its best – to gather, to redeem, to preserve and where possible,
to reintegrate.2 If figurative use of musical concepts signal most clearly
the operating processes of memory – encoding ‘tonalities of the past’ or
its ‘contrapuntal genius’ that configures a sense of home out of disparate,
independent and discontinuous elements, then our task here has been to
establish how music itself provokes culturally significant reminiscence.3 We
saw how Aragon’s ‘Zone-Libre’ from Crève-Cœur was interrupted by ‘une
vieille chanson de France’, which in its reminding – memories are defined
by an awakening from forgetfulness – unsettled. The encounter with music
can be disturbing. Music, in the function that has concerned us most, has
not assuaged or calmed; it has not acted as an analgesic like Bach did for
poor Madame Delahaye’s headaches in Jean-Louis Curtis’s Les Forêts de la
nuit. Instead the constructions of cultural memory through music that we
have addressed here all sought to confront, initiate, motivate, and if there
was consolation it was in terms of transfigured readings of texts. These are
musical memories that have been shown to require mediation, attention
and translation; they are the product of intercultural encounter, requiring
spatial thinking to rescue them from their temporal inactivity.

Political disruption and exile led necessarily to the construction of
memorial discourses that were located somewhere but not necessarily
geographically. The extent to which identity is forged out of location was
explored in the way French broadcasters organised their programmes around

1 Sylvie Lindeperg, Les écrans de l’ombre (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1997), 11.
2 See M. Sheringham, ‘The Otherness of Memory’, in French Autobiography: Devices

and Desires from Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 288.
3 Ibid.

Conclusion 169

cities, taking listeners on aural tours of the soundscape. Such broadcasts
tested the thresholds of what constitutes musicality in programmes where
sounding the city was a communicative act that engendered hope of the
promise of return, or evoked a sense of home, or simply negated the home-
sickness of displacement. Forging a sense of the familiar out of otherness
was a feature of broadcasts that attempted to mediate Frenchness to British
listeners; stratified programming assessed the extent to which listeners
would have sympathy or knowledge of France. Framed by a basic presenta-
tion that set a Frenchman and Englishman in dialogue, the impartial voice
of the BBC mediated the construction of a representation of Frenchness
that was designed to converge, unite and neutralise some dif ferences while
maintaining others in order to reinforce its own identity. To an important
extent then, the BBC also communicated a hybrid Anglo-French memory
that neutralised the hostile and promoted that which in Frenchness pro-
voked desire.

If this research has provided one focus of cultural memory investiga-
tion, then there are several new directions for further research to take. My
concentration on France is indicative of my own particular interests and
linguistic ability and so a similar approach to cultural memory could be
undertaken in relation to other areas, among which, wartime broadcast-
ing to Latin-America might be very profitable and many of the French
Service programmes were translated for their broadcasts, similarly regional
programmes in Welsh were retransmitted to Patagonia. A broad study of
colonial and post-colonial broadcasting in relation to the Empire Service
concentrating on music and literature is overdue and this could be usefully
narrowed to a cross-analysis of wartime broadcasting to British- and French-
mandated territories where there were unusual and challenging cultural
dynamics at work. From a dif ferent perspective there is scope for analysis
of the figure of the radio in resistance discourses, particularly in Aragon’s
Le Crève-Cœur and finally a comparative study that uses archive theory to
liberate voices by assessing the surveillance traces used to track and follow
members of resistance read along side the figure of the archive in the life
writing that results from testimonial accounts of capture, imprisonment
and retour could convincingly be made in the case of papers relating to
Georges Dudach and Charlotte Delbo at the Police archives in Paris.

170 Conclusion
One crucial aspect of memory studies is the extent to which it has been

about rescuing suppressed memories from grand narratives. This counter-
memorial discourse is embodied in the unopened files of the archive and
in the determination for survivors of atrocity to bear witness. Unmediated
testimony, as counter-memory, is historically problematic since it refuses
to be contained by a narrative ordering, it challenges and disrupts what is
established and what is secure. The recent BBC People’s War project instead
seeks to archive memories, to provide a bank of testimony that corrects
or fills in the lacunæ left by undisclosed material in the of ficial archives.
‘To set the record straight’ by gathering material that demonstrates ‘how
a generation remembered the war, 60 years after the event’, bespeaks a
project that is determinedly ‘not a historical record of events, a collection
of government or BBC information, recordings or documents relating to
the war’.4 This project exploited the advances in technology that make the
archive ‘interactive’ such that memories could be collected and commented
upon by archive users.

French cultural memories constructed at the BBC during the Second
World War are about vicarious recollection, of representations and not of
direct experience. This process of mediation engages with political and
ideological drivers that are oriented around nationhood, solidarity and
indeed nostalgia as Aurélie Luneau concludes her study of Radio Londres
by describing French attitudes to the BBC as that ‘joyeuse photo-souve-
nir sur laquelle on se représente en famille ou entre amis, l’oreille tendue
vers le poste de radio’ une mémoire couleur sepia sur fond de tendresse
reconnaissante’.5 This book has demonstrated the extent to which the con-
struction of Anglo-French cultural memory at the BBC was contingent
and multidirectional in its origin.

4 The BBC People’s War project was designed by Chris Warren and from June 2003
to January 2006 collected up to 47,000 stories organised into sixty-four dif ferent
categories. See www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar (accessed 5 January 2012).

5 Aurélie Luneau, Radio Londres, 1940–1944, Les Voix de la liberté (Paris: Perrin, 2005),
300.

Bibliography of Primary Sources

Archives Diplomatiques, Quai d’Orsay, Paris

Guerre 1939–1945 Londres-Alger.
29 (Dec. 1940–July 1942): Presse française en Grande-Bretagne.
30 ( June 1940–March 1943): Émissions françaises de radio.
31 (1940–1942): Propagande.
32 (8 July 1940–3 Feb. 1944): Dossier general (Statut des Français en Grande-Bretagne

etc.).
196 (5 Nov. 1941–6 July 1943): BBC; Informations.
423 (Aug. 1940–Sept. 1943): Dossier général (Organisation du service des oeuvres;

oeuvres françaises dans divers pays).
424 ( June 1940–July 1943): Dossiers et associations française de Grande-Bretagne.
425 ( July 1940–April 1943): Amis des volontaires français (correspondance).
426 (Oct. 1940–April 1943): Amis des volontaires français (réunions).
Guerre 1938–1945 Vichy.
40 Relations commerciales.

Archives Nationales, Paris

AJ15: Opéra National-RNTL.
1696: Jacques Rouché.
AJ40: Documents allemands concernant l’Occupation française.
1015/1–3: Gruppe Rundfunk.
1016: Divers tracts allemands destines aux troupes anglaises et américaines.

172 Bibliography of Primary Sources
F1a: Ministère de l’Intérieur/administration générale/Commissariat de l’Intérieur

de Londres et Délégation à Londres du commissariat à l’Intérieur d’Alger/
Documentation provenant de la Section NM (non militaire du BCRA (Bureau
central de renseignements et d’action) et du SCDD(Service courrier, documen-
tation, dif fusion) du commissariat à l’Intérieur.
3723: Documentation et propagande/BBC, Reforme BBC, Emissions arabes, direc-
tives de propagande, PID, Comité exécutive de propagande, documentation et
radio, procès-verbal concerant ‘Honneur et Patrie’, Bir Hakeim, of fice français
d’Editions, Darlan, Pétain, Camille Chautemps, Laval.
3798: Ecoutes radiophonique dont la BBC, Radio-Paris, Radio-Vichy, L’Amérique
vous parle et divers postes (1942–43).
F21: Comité nationale d’épuration (sous dérogation).
8114: Comité national d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs.
F43: Radiodif fusion.
59–94: Radio Paris.
F60: France Libre et France combattante.
1736: Courrier de France.
3 AG 2
395: BBC (BCRA) Emissions Schumann, Apprécitations sur la radio anglaise, Radio
Patrie, Parti Honneur et Patrie.
72AJ:
45: Dossier ‘Comité nationale des écrivains’.
78: Dossier ‘Résistance des intellectuels’.
226: BBC – Émissions françaises (1940–1944)/Weekly programme summaries.
227–9: BBC – Émissions françaises (1940–1944)/Documentation Crémieux-
Brilhac.

Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris

G: Fonds issus des Renseignements généraux et dossiers d’internement.

Bibliography of Primary Sources 173

SOUS-SÉRIE: GB – Renseignements généraux et Internement pendant l’Occupation.
Unités de police de la Direction des Renseignements généraux pendant
l’Occupation.

GB 93 à 139: BS 2 (Période Occupation): Procédures. Répression ‘anti-terroriste ’
(gaulliste et communiste).

     BS 2/carton no. 6:
              Georges Dudach (Pican)
              Charlotte Dudach (Pican)
     BS 2/carton no. 37:
              Georges Dudach (Cadras Pican)
              Charlotte Dudach (Cadras Pican)

BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham, Reading

External Services

Interviews with civilian escapees (France) (1943–1944).
E1: Countries
E1/702/1–3: Countries: France/French Service (1939–1952).
E1/703: Countries: France/French Service Directives (1941).
E1/704: Countries: France/French Service/Listener Correspondence (1940–1945).
E1/709: Countries: France/Music/A-Z (1936–1954).
E2: Foreign General
E2/6: Foreign General/Alliance européene de radiodif fusion (1943–1945).
E2/9: Foreign General/Allied Government Broadcasts/France (1940–1943).
E2/22/1–4: Foreign General/Anglo-French Co-operation (1939–1945).
E2/23: Foreign General/Anglo-French Co-operation/Chanson de la BBC (1945).
E2/24: Foreign General/Anglo-French Co-operation/Collaborators (1943–1945).
E2/25: Foreign General/Anglo-French Co-operation/Contributors (1945–1949).
E2/26: Foreign General/French Overseas Transmissions (1944–1945).
E2/30: Foreign General/Anglo-French Talks (1939–1946).
E2/88: Foreign General/Clandestine Press (1943–1946).

174 Bibliography of Primary Sources
E2/89: Foreign General/Clandestine Press/PWE/MOI and PID Guidance

(1943–1944).
E2/90: Foreign General/Code Messages (1941–1945).
E2/175: Foreign General/Enemy Broadcasting/Fernsender Paris (1964).
E2/185: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Intelligence Reports (1941–

1943).
E2/186/1–4: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Intelligence Reports:

Europe (Feb. 1940–Jan. 1941).
E2/187: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Self-Portraits of European

Listeners (1942).
E2/189: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Surveys of Broadcasting

Organisations (1942–1943).
E2/193/1–6: Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Surveys of European

Audiences/France (Dec. 1940–June 1945).
E2/206/1–7: Foreign General/European Service (1940–1945).
E2/212/1: Foreign General/European Services Meetings/Correspondence

(1941–1943).
E2/213: Foreign General/European Services Meetings/Minutes (1941).
E2/483: Foreign General/PID Intelligence Unit/Minutes of  Schedule Meeting

(1941–1945).
E2/484: Foreign General/PID Miscellaneous Papers (1941–1945).
E2/485: Foreign General/PID/Notes on Psychological Warfare (1943–1945).
E2/518: Foreign General/Reorganisation of Intelligence Section (Browett Committee)

(1941–1942).
E2/543: Foreign General/Studies in Broadcast Propaganda (April 1940–August

1941).
E11: Press Publicity
E11/13/1–4: Press Publicity/French Service-General (March 1939–March 1940).
E12: Publicity Overseas Service
E12/171/1: Publicity O.S./France (1940–1946).
E15: Staf f Visits Abroad
E15/48: Staf f visits abroad/Delavenay (1944).
E20: Tangye-Lean’s Of fice
E20/32/1–6: Foreign General/Tangye-Lean’s Of fice/French Radio (1941–1947).

Bibliography of Primary Sources 175

R6: Advisory Committees
R6/44/1: Advisory Committees/Music (1943–1946).

R9: Audience Research
R9/1/1–4: Audience Research Bulletins 1–225 (1940–1944).
R9/9/5–7: Audience Research Special Reports (1941–1943).

R12: Radio Copyright
R12/50/1–2: Copyright/Bureau internationale de l’édition mécanique (BIEM) agree-

ment (1939–1945).
R12/66: Copyright/Dubbing/French Slogans (1944–1946).
R12/78/3–7: Copyright/Foreign Language Memos ( Jan. 1940–1945).
R12/132: Copyright/National Anthems (1940–1943).

R13: Departmental
R13/24/1–2: Departmental/Empire Service/Weekly Meeting Minutes (1941–1943).
R13/147/1–2: Departmental/External Services/French Section (1938–1949).
R13/247: Departmental/Music Department/Overseas Music Department

(1939–1945).
R13/293: Departmental/Programme Divisions/Features and Drama (1933–1941).

R19: Entertainment
R19/395: Entertainment/The Fourteenth of July (1941–1945).
R19/399/1: Entertainment/France (1939–May 1940).
R19/405: Entertainment/French Army (1939–1941).
R19/709: Entertainment/The Marseillaise (1936–1942).
R19/791/1: Entertainment/Music Features (1941–1943).
R19/886: Entertainment/Paris Goes to War (1940).
R19/887/3: Entertainment/Parlez-vous français? 3rd Series (1940–1941).
R19/1200: Entertainment/Spirit of France (1935–1936).
R19/1385: Entertainment/V for Victory Campaign (1941).

R20: Finance
R20/65/1: Finance/European Service (1940–1946).

R21: Gramophone Correspondence
R21/55/1: Gramophone Correspondence/European Service (1941–1948).
R21/123: Gramophone Correspondence/Radiodif fusion nationale (1944–1954).
R21/141/1: Gramophone Correspondence/Survey of Foreign Records (1939–1942).

176 Bibliography of Primary Sources
R26: Music Chorus
R26/1/1: Music Chorus/BBC Choral Society (1928–1946).
R27: Music General
R27/1–5: Music General/Alien Composers (1939–1945).
R27/32/1–3: Music General/British Council (1939–1946).
R27/58: Music General/Commissioned Works/Patriotic Songs (1940–1944).
R27/59: Music General/Committee for the Promotion of New Music (1943–1954).
R27/94/1: Music General/European Service (1941–1946).
R27/107: Music General/French Music (1945–1954).
R27/123: Music General/Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1941–1947).
R27/178: Music General/Lili Marlene (1942–1947).
R27/198/1: Music General/Meetings/Overseas Minutes (1941–1943).
R27/213/1–2: Music General/Ministry of Information (1939–1945).
R27/214: Music General/Music Department Monthly Meetings (1941–1945).
R27/219: Music General/Music and Music Department (1931–1943).
R27/245/1–2: Music General/Music Policy (1930–1947).
R27/247: Music General/Music Policy/Surveys and Reports (1922; 1939–1949).
R27/375/2–3: Music General/Opera Policy (1939–1946).
R27/409: Music General/Orchestral, Choral and Chamber Music (1943).
R27/415: Music General/Our Music Lives (1942).
R27/416/1–3: Music General/Overseas Service (1936–1944).
R27/425: Music General/Marc Pincherle (1947–1952).
R27/427: Music General/Elizabeth Poston (1940–1953).
R27/430: Music General/Programme Suggestions (1942–1943).
R27/434/1: Music General/Radiodif fusion nationale française (1944–1945).
R27/504: Music General/Trafalgar Day (1942).
R27/526/1: Music General/Dr Thomas Wood (1940–1946).
R27/546–643: Music General/Reports/AA-ZZ (See individual entries as

appropriate).
R29: Orchestral General
R29/138: Orchestral General/BBC Variety Orchestra/O.E.s A-Z (1940–1943).
R29/194/1–7: Orchestral General/Orchestral Policy File (1933–1945).
R34: Policy
R34/316: Policy/Controller (Administrations) Policy (1938–1941; 1944).
R34/352: Policy/Empire Talks (May 1939–Dec. 1942).
R34/357/1: Policy/European Service/Post-War (1943–1945).

Bibliography of Primary Sources 177

R34/396: Policy/Foreign Languages (1937–1947).
R34/639/3: Policy/French Wireless Propaganda ( Jan.–Mar. 1940).
R34/639/6: Policy/Propaganda/Counter-Propaganda (1941).
R34/654/1–3: Policy/PWE directive for BBC French Service (1941–March 1944).
R34/942: Policy/Wartime Programme Administration (1939–1942).

R46: Recording General
R46/180/1: Recording General/European Service (1939–1940).
R46/226: Recording General/Walter Goehr (1941–1942).
R46/346/1–4: Recording General/Music for Overseas (1940–Dec. 1941).
R46/390/1–3: Recording General/Overseas Music Department/Recording Scheme

(1940–).
R46/428/1–7: Recording General/Recording for Overseas (General Memos) ( Jan.

1940–1944).

R61: Censorship and American Liaison
R61/13: Censorship and American Liaison/Censorship/D.Eur.B (D. Ritchie)

(1941–1945).
R61/14: Censorship and American Liaison/Censorship/European Service

(1941–1944).

R79: Concert Organiser’s Of fice
R79/130/1–3: Concert Organiser’s Of fice/Concert Programmes (1940s–1960s).
R79/2/1: Concert Organiser’s Of fice/Contemporary concerts (1941–1947).

RCont1: Radio Contributor Files
RCont1: Felix Aprahamian/Talks (1935–1959).
RCont1: Josephine Baker/Artists (1933–1962).
RCont1: Lennox Berkeley/Composer.
RCont1: Pierre Bernac/Artists (1945–1957).
RCont1: Nadia Boulanger.
RCont1: Benjamin Britten.
RCont1: J.B. Brunius (1940–1947).
RCont1: Dmitiri Calvocoressi/Copyright (1932–1962).
RCont1: Francis Chagrin/Music Copyist/1A (1943–1962).
RCont1: Francis Chagrin/Music Copyist.1B (1941–1942).
RCont1: Francis Chagrin/Artist/1–2 (1939–1955).
RCont1: Francis Chagrin/Composer (1940–1962).
RCont1: Myra Hess/Artist/1–3 (1939–1953).

178 Bibliography of Primary Sources
RCont1: Arthur Honegger/Composer (1942–1962).
RCont1: Ibbs and Tillett (1930–1962).
RCont1: Maurice Jaubert/Composer (1943–1962).
RCont1: André Labarthe/Talks (1938–1962).
RCont1: André Labarthe/Copyright (1941–1962)
RCont1: Edward Lockspeiser/Copyright ( June 1940–1962).
RCont1: Edward Lockspeiser/Talks (1936–1962).
RCont1: Messiaen (1945–1962).
RCont1: Rollo Myers/Talks (1942–1962).
RCont1: Francis Poulenc/Artist (1937–1962).
RCont1: Francis Poulenc/Composer (1937–1962).
RCont1: Gaston Richer/Artists (1941–1947).
RCont1: André Savignon/Scriptwriter (1941–1962).
RCont1: André Savignon/Copyright (1941–1962).
RCont1: Maurice Thiéry/Copyright (1943–1963).
RCont1: Maurice Thiéry/Talks (1939–1962).
RCont1: Workers’ Musical Association ( June 1940).
RCont1: Sophie Wyss/Artist (1947–1948).
RCont3: Emile Delavenay (1941–1959).
BBC Staf f Lists
BBC Staf f List December 1942
BBC Staf f List April 1944
BBC Staf f List April 1945

Programmes as Broadcast

Home Service
Overseas Service
Empire Service

Bibliography of Primary Sources 179

Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Dépt de Musique), Paris

Rés Vm.dos. 98: Francis Poulenc, recueil divers (35 pièces).
Rés Vm. dos. 70 (1–22) Concerts de la Pléiade.
4º pièce 949: Delvincourt, C. ‘Rapport sur une réorganisation adminstrative de la

musique et de l’enseignement musical en France’ [1944].
Rés Vma.ms. 1074: Réponse aux arguments invoqués par le Département des finances

(1943).
Rés vm.dos. 10. Henri Büsser – Dossier Büsser.
Archives de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.
D. 17263 (xix) Programmes soumis à la censure (1940–1944).

British Library, Euston Road, London

Mus. mss. 59–62 Chagrin Collection BBC Radio Music.
Ms. Add. 56419: Sir Henry Wood Correspondence.
Ms. Add. 52256–7: Edward Clark Correspondence.
Ms. Add. 71144: Elisabeth Lutyens Correspondence.
Ms. Add. 61885–6: Ernest Chapman Correspondence.
Ms. Add. 81145: Michel Saint-Denis Archive Vol LV (1941–1952).

Britten-Pears Library, The Red House, Aldeburgh

Concert Programmes

– 7 March 1939: Celebrity Concert in aid of Spanish Women, Children and Refugees
in Spain and France, Central Hall, LIVERPOOL.

– 12 April 1940: BBC Special Concerts, Colston Hall, BRISTOL.

180 Bibliography of Primary Sources
– 14 Sept. 1942: The Comforts Fund for the Women and Children of Soviet Russia

‘The French-English Concert’, Arts Theatre Club, LONDON WC2.
– 10 Dec. 1944: Under the auspices of the French Provisional Government ‘Concert de

musique française’, Wigmore Hall, LONDON (in assoc. with Musical Culture
Ltd.)
– 6 Jan. 1945: Musical Culture ‘Saturday Book’ concert, LPO with Britten, Poulenc
and Basil Cameron (cond.). Royal Albert Hall, London.
– 8 Mar. 1945: Radiodif fusion française ‘Oeuvres de Benjamin Britten – Jeune musique
anglaise’ Ce programme est vendu au profit du livret-pécule des prisonniers de
guerre de la Radiodif fusion française, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, PARIS.
– 10–11 Mar. 1945: Sté des Concerts conducted by Münch and Britten, Th. CE,
Paris.
– 13 Mar. 1945: Association Française d’Action Artistique. Concert en l’honneur de MM.
Benjamin Britten et Peter Pears, Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire, PARIS.

Concert Season Prospectuses (in reverse chronology)

Three Concerts of French Music, under the auspices of the French National Committee:
Debussy-Chabrier; Fauré-Ravel; ‘Les Six’, September 1942.

Festival of Music for the People, London 1939, 1, 3 and 5 April. Organised by Edward
Clark in association with the Workers’ Musical Association and Alan Bush as
chairman.

Sir Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts –
47th Season Prospectus (12 July–23 August 1941)
48th Season Prospectus (27 June–22 August 1942)
49th Season Prospectus (19 June–21 August 1943)
50th Season Prospectus (10 June–12 August 1944)

Correspondence

Lennox Berkeley [149 LB]
British Council
BBC
Francis Poulenc
Sophie Wyss

Bibliography of Primary Sources 181

Press Cuttings – Elizabeth Mayer and Jessie Pears Collections

Anon. ‘French Music: Milhaud and Poulenc’ Untitled newspaper, concert review of
13 May 1943).

MILHAUD, D. ‘ISCM Festival [Berkeley, CA, 1–9 August 1942]’ New York Herald
Tribune (August 1942).

Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris

Fonds Schaef fner – Dossier thèmatique – Lockspeiser



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ADDED, Serge, Le théâtre dans les années Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: Editions Ramsay,
1992).

——, ‘Orientation bibliographique: la vie littéraire, intellectuelle et artistique en
France de 1940 à 1944’, Bulletin de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent 35 (1989),
37–58.

ADORNO, Theodor, ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’, The Kenyon Review VII.2
(Spring 1945), 208–17.

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