“For as long as there are poets there will be songs. If someone was to put on my tomb: ‘Here lies Francis Poulenc, musician to Apollinaire and Éluard’: that really would be my finest claim to fame,” the composer declared in 1945. Right from boyhood his attraction to poetry was practically equal to his love of music. And in fact the young Poulenc took to song-writing quite naturally, starting in 1919. Poulenc compiled a catalogue of 150 songs, a body of works of consistently high quality, contain...