Jean Cocteau was many things, but above all unpindownable. Poet, playwright, artist, filmmaker, collaborator, provocateur, self-inventor: each description fits, but none is sufficient. His work darts and pivots, one mask slipping as another appears. But beneath the surface, the same fixations recur: love, death, dependence and abandonment. This album stays close to his restlessness, touching melodrama and popular culture, prayer and aphorism, dance, cabaret and theatre, as styles collide, and the masks occasionally fall.
We first met him over twenty years ago, through Francis Poulenc’s setting of his monologue La Voix Humaine. It’s the piece we have returned to more than any other, and one we’ve long wanted to record. Finding the right context proved harder. The solution, eventually, was to build a programme around a poet rather than a composer. Cocteau belongs naturally among the disrupters and misfits who have preoccupied us in earlier recordings: figures who resist categories, or who are remembered for one thing while the rest fades.
We open with La Dame de Monte Carlo, Poulenc’s bleak portrait of an ‘old, wretched tart.’ Her despair is real, though lacquered over with wit and bravado. This suicide note doubles as a love letter to the Riviera that both Poulenc and Cocteau adored, where casinos and sunlight can hold despair at bay, for a while. La Voix Humaine stands at the other end of the disc. Between these two solitary women we’ve placed ten songs by composers drawn to Cocteau’s voice, from both his immediate circle and later generations. And as an afterword to Voix, we offer a few lines from Cocteau’s famous prose-poem Discours du Sommeil, spoken — in the spirit of his great collaborator Jean Marais — over music by his favourite composer Bach, to whom he returned repeatedly, not least in Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, his ballet about a young man driven to suicide by an unfaithful lover.
We make no apologies for incompleteness. Any attempt to engage fully with a figure like Cocteau would be doomed from the outset. So this is a partial portrait, shaped by affection and curiosity rather than any claim to being comprehensive. In other words, we’ve chosen a few of our favourites.
Poulenc’s miniature song cycle Cocardes captures poet and composer early on, alive to the energy of the street. Slogans and absurd juxtapositions tumble forward in a breathless loop, each line beginning with the last syllable of the one before, like a verbal circus trick.
Louis Durey’s Prière offers a stark contrast. Written after Cocteau heard the song of a young shepherd during a stay in the Basque country in 1919, it portrays a soldier returning from war, speaking plainly of what he longs for. A more oblique Cocteau is embraced by Arthur Honegger in Locutions. Here, the images arrive through fragments and utterances – falling petals, discarded masks, moments of beauty glimpsed, then gone.
In Sobre las olas, Maurice Delage shows us the sea as a place of play and possibility. Boys heave at the waves, girls flirt with the sky’s reflection, and the whole scene is set to a teasing waltz. A sadder Valse langoureuse haunts Le Bel Indifférent, the play Cocteau crafted for Édith Piaf. In Laurent Chaslin’s setting, it becomes a half-remembered chanson, charm gradually giving way to disillusion as the dance winds down.
With Darius Milhaud, the pulse quickens, in every sense, as American jazz rubs up against Parisian wit in Caramel Mou. This shimmy is steeped in the atmosphere of Le Bœuf sur le Toit, Cocteau’s favourite night-time haunt, devoted to what he called ‘life’s visceral pleasures.’ A quieter, later echo of Cocteau’s world comes from Guy Sacré. Composing in Paris in the 1970s, he set little-known fragments such as Que ne suis-je un de cette Égypte, which contemplates mortality with images of ancient ritual and imagined afterlives.
Finally, a salute to a Sphinx-like presence that hovers over the whole programme. In Hommage a Erik Satie, Cocteau honours France’s most elusive composer by way of another sublime eccentric, the painter Henri Rousseau, whose voluptuous jungle scenes depicted distant worlds he never saw. Georges Auric’s job was simply to add the music, lightly, ironically and with a smile Satie would surely have relished.
All of which leads us to La Voix Humaine. Cocteau’s 1930 play was a stroke of genius, diagnosing the modern ache of ‘depersonalised communication’. We are in pre-war Paris, eavesdropping on a woman, known simply as Elle, as she speaks to a lover who has already left her. We hear only her side of the conversation: the evasions, the revisions, the sudden rushes of hope and despair. The telephone, promising intimacy, delivers its opposite, as interruptions, crossed lines and silences intensify the drama, turning technology itself into an accomplice in emotional cruelty. The problem feels uncannily familiar to our social media age, where connection is easier than ever, but intimacy can feel harder.
When Poulenc transformed the play into a tragedie lyrique, he did so under intense personal strain, having already lost one lover and fearing the loss of another. The role was written for Denise Duval, his favourite singing actress, and became, in Poulenc’s words, a shared ‘diary of suffering’. And Elle’s predicament mirrors Cocteau’s deepest anxieties too. Unrequited love was the great obsessive fear of his life and poetry became a means of testing whether expression could still reach beyond the self – even, as in Discours du Sommeil, from the far side of silence.
Every performer knows the feeling: sending a sound out into a concert hall or recording studio, unsure how it will be received. Cocteau understood the risk instinctively and the urgency never left him. Each work was a renewal, a bet against indifference. The signal has to be sent again, because silence is always possible. Or worse, the line goes dead.
Christopher Glynn 2026 ©
