P. Eluar’s poetry in F. Poulenk’s vocal miniature (from song cycle “Such a day such a night”).
Background.In F. Poulenc’s creative legacy a significant place is occupied by chamber and vocal works. For a long time the balance of poetic text and music in his song lyrics remained outside the research interest. In recent years there have been a number of works studying the composer’s achievements in mono-opera and choral works; chamber and vocal genre came into view in connection with the problems of vocal intonation and phonetic specifics of French texts. However, the issue of image-emotional and rhythm-intonational incarnation of poetry has not been put in the fore-front. Thus, the synthesis of text and music in chamber vocal opuses by F. Poulenc does not lose its relevance. For a long time the lyrics of P. Eluard could not find realization in F. Poulenc’s music. The lack of traditional verse features – metricity, rhymes, assonances in P. Eluard’s poetry aligned it with prose, whereas external inconsistency typical for surreal type statements and fragmentary metaphorical field contradicted the requirements of unity imposed on the musical text. After a long search F. Poulenc found ways of embodying Eluard’s complex poetics in music. One of them is giving the individual intonation to each new poetic nuance. Poulenc’s miniatures with lyrics by P. Eluard are distinctive in their tone lyricism of the love theme and, on the contrary, maximum expression in the display of emotionally sharpened feelings. At the same time, each composition has a unique identity, not only coming from the creative imagination of the composer, who is able to give individual features to countless images, but also inherent in P. Eluard’s poetry, full of mysterious symbols and colorful metaphors. The objective of this article is to study the lexical vocabulary of P. Eluard, to analyze the way F. Poulenc implements figurative contents of the poetic text in general and, in particular, the “highlights” of certain seman-tic groups, the most vibrant and stable lexical items and symbols. Since the identity of Eluard’s language is determined not so much by surreal meta-phoricity, but rather by lexical coloration of his poetry, the author applied the method of comparative analysis of the word usage frequency. Studying the vocal cycle “Such a day such a night”(1937) special consideration was given to vivid and expressive words, which give particular expression to the entire context, and which became due to their frequent use a kind of lexical units that define the coloristics of the author ‘s poetic language. As resultwas revealed that the lexical vocabulary of P. Eluard contains groups of words which, at first glance, belong exclusively to the material, bodily aspect of hu-man existence. Such semantic unit is a block of words related to the description of a person, his/her physical qualities. However, combined with other components of the poetic vocabulary, they kind of lose their own meaning, becoming a symbol of a feeling, demonstrating a state of mind. Not by chance the most extensive semantic unit of Elu-ard’s vocabulary is a number of words reflecting the multi-color palette of a man’s inner world. The thematic analysis of the poems reveals dramatic interrelations that ensure the unity of miniatures. Quiet joy, lyrical enlightened mood of “A good day”(No. 1 in Poulenc’s cycle) corresponds to the poem “We have made night”(cycle finale – No. 9) with emotions similar in “key”: the happiness of shared love, the feeling of love longing. Not accidentally, F. Poulenc chooses a close type of texture, a similar pattern of melodic lines, where the conjunct ascent responds to the emotional excitement inherent in the text. In the same manner Poulenc presents two other poems – “The brow like a lost flag” and “I long only to love you”(No. 3 and No. 7), but here the feeling of love is mixed with the bitterness of loss and loneliness. However, despite the differences in shades, the main coloring of these texts brings the relevant vocal pieces together into a single unit and forms two symmetrical arches, fastening the cycle structure. At the same time in No. 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 – “A ruin an empty shell”, “A gypsy wagon roofed with tiles”, “Riding full tilt”, “Scanty grass”and “Image of the fiery”, the love lyrics is contrasted with different imagery and emotional range: detached, ascetic contemplation, hopelessness and despair, anger and the burning fury that allows you to single out these pieces into a separate thematic block. This kaleidoscopic peculiarity forced the composer to use a wide variety of expressive means, among which the most effective were the intonation of vocal melody and the possibilities of the piano pattern. Detailed consideration of the principles of realization of P. Eluard’s poetry in the vo-cal cycle by F. Poulenc, “Such a day such a night”leads to the conclusion that through-out the whole cycle F. Poulenc persistently avoids repetition, “highlighting” every poetic line differently. This technique is called melodic-intonational shading by the author of the article. It is present in those songs where the composer chose a single type of vocal utterance, whether singing or declamation; due to the structure of the poetic text, it pro-motes the formation of through-strophic forms. Giving a semantic load to certain types of melodic curves indicates the composer’s creation of a tonal vocabulary, where the so-called motif of “joy” can be singled out alongside the recitation on a single sound cor-responding to the usually darkly colored poetic lines. Thus, the originality of the com-poser’s thinking is manifested at several levels: from the search for original solutions for each new lyrical nuance to create a complete image, endowed with individual details, which at the macro level contribute to the creation of a complete circular composition, based on comparison of contrasting imagery spheres.