Qui veut ouïr chanson,chansonnette nouvelle? So begin many old French chansons, before going on to tell some tale, tender, touching, amusing or cruel. The paths such songs have taken to reach us in the present day are often eventful and rarely direct; they have come down over the ages, crossing borders, acquiring new words here, another tune there, and adopting the language, music, usages and history of each region.

The gap between folk music and art music appears to have widened in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but songs were an exception, moving freely between country and town, folk music and art music. Even the most erudite composers remembered the songs that had been sung to them in their childhood, and those heard in the streets, at celebrations or in the taverns. Sometimes a piece was exchanged so often between the two worlds that it is now impossible for us to determine its exact origin. Take, for example, the melody of La Furstenberg. In his instrumental music for Thomas D'Urfey's comedy The Virtuous Wife Purcell harmonised this piece for four violins, and it is also echoed in Campra's opera-ballet L'Europe galante (1697). In 1703 it reappeared as Saint Martin's Lane in Henry Playford's The Dancing Master, an anthology containing many folk dances.

In France it became widespread under the name of La Furstenberg, possibly as a mockery of the countess of that name, who was said to be the Bishop of Strasbourg's mistress. The words given by Ballard in his Recueil d'airs sérieux et à boire de différens auteurs of 1700 are particularly bawdy. Yet the melody was also known at the French court. In 1712 Philidor copied it into a collection of music for use at court dances – danses qui se jouent ordinairement à tous les bals chez le roy – and it also appears, copied by hand, in many amateur songbooks .

We are on firmer ground when it comes to the romances that flourished in the eighteenth century in the salons of the aristocracy. Generally by known authors, these often originated in art music, and some of them were subsequently taken into the folk repertoire and were then transmitted orally. Simple and innocent in tone, their words telling some tender, touching and often melancholy tale, their melody easy and ‘natural', they are predominantly pastoral and galant in style – features that are quite clear in Les tendres souhaits to words by Charles-Henri Ribouté (1708-1740), a controller of revenue by profession, and to music borrowed from Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), and in Ah! vous dirai-je maman, presented here in its original version (‘Mon cœur dit à chaque instant / Peut-on vivre sans amant!') rather than the one intended for children (‘Moi je dis que les bonbons / Valent mieux que les leçons'). The theme of pastoral love had been very popular ever since the publication of Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée in 1607. Song collections were full of Sylvies and Sylvandres, shepherds with crook, flock and sheepdog, verdant groves and streams of limpid waters. Plaisir d'amour is one example. The text of this romance appears in Célestine, nouvelle espagnole by the poet Florian (1755-1794). Believing that her lover has deserted her, Célestine finds refuge in a grotto, where she overhears the song of a young goatherd, accompanied on a rustic flute, who laments the loss of ‘ungrateful Sylvie'. Set to music by Martini in 1785, this song was a resounding success. That was the time when Marie-Antoinette, seeking an escape from the formal protocol of the court, indulged in playing the shepherdess in the hamlet she had had built in the grounds of Versailles. Were these romances merely sparkling trifles for performance in the salons of the nobility? Maybe. But as their fortunes show, they had genuine appeal and they were also in keeping with the spirit of the times. This longing for a return to basics, also illustrated by the success of Rousseau's Le Devin du village of 1752, was possibly a consequence of the gulf that existed between the ordinary people and the elite.

The popularity of a tune or song may be gauged by the number of different versions to which it gave rise. The poets who frequented the salons wrote their own words to fashionable tunes. Les tendres souhaits, for example, became La romance de Clarisse, L'infidélité pardonnée, L'heureuse disposition and La mouche expirante, à une dame qui la faisoit souffrir , while Malbrough was turned into La belle indécise. The same popular tunes also found their way into opera parodies and opéras comiques. When the conflict with the Comédiens du Roi was at its height and the actors who worked at the Théâtres de la Foire found themselves forbidden to speak or sing on their stages, they circumvented the repressive edicts of their powerful rivals by miming their parts and using large placards displaying each performer's text, which was sung by the audience to popular tunes of the day. After the ban had been lifted and the Théâtres de la Foire were permitted to give ‘spectacles mixed with music, dance and symphonies under the name of Opéra-Comique', the custom of peppering pieces with fashionable melodies was continued. Thus the tune of Le Curé de Môle, which is also that of Yan Petit que danse, appeared in a parody of Rameau's Castor et Pollux performed by the Comédiens italiens du Roi in 1737 , and the melody of La Furstenberg was borrowed in 1762 for an air in Adolphe Blaise's Annette et Lubin.

The emotive powers of such well-known tunes were also turned to good account by the Church. That of Yan Petit que danse (or Le Curé de Môle ) was published as a noël in 1675. Ah! vous dirai-je maman became a canticle, to the words Ô digne objet de mes chants or Ô vous dont les tendres ans in the Opuscules sacrés (…) à l'usage des catéchismes de la paroisse de Saint-Sulpice. In the same collection the melody of the pastoral song Les tendres souhait is used as a setting for Christ's Passion, to the words Au sang qu'un Dieu va répandre. This seems a fair enough destiny for secular songs, many of whose tunes had been borrowed from liturgical music.

Instrumental music also borrowed freely from the song repertory. In La belle vielleuse of 1783 Michel Corrette presented Malbrough as a minuet, as well as variations on both Ah! vous dirai-je maman and La Furstenberg. The latter also inspired him to write a Concerto comique. We find Ah! vous dirai-je maman again in François Bouin's hurdy-gurdy method of 1761 ( Méthode habile de vielle ), François Devienne's flute method of 1794 ( Nouvelle méthode théorique et pratique pour la flûte ), and the everlasting romance also gave rise to numerous keyboard variations, by composers ranging from the brilliant to the obscure, from Mozart to Benaut, who was also the author of variations on La Furstenberg. This taste in instrumental music for folk songs went hand in hand with a renewed interest in ‘rustic' instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy, played by Queen Marie Leszczynska, and the bagpipe, which was taken into art music as the musette . Furthermore, ‘Tambourins' and ‘musettes', names also referring to dances in duple time, achieved great success on the eighteenth-century stage. In the salons such songs were also accompanied on the violin, guitar, harp, harpsichord or pianoforte. On this recording Plaisir d'amour and Ah! vous dirai-je maman are accompanied on the latter.

Many songs appeared in the numerous anthologies that were published in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while countless others were never written down but were transmitted orally. In 1852 Napoleon III assigned his Minister of State and Religious Education Hippolyte Fortoul to organise the gathering of folk songs as a ‘great monument to the anonymous poetic genius of the people'. Anthologies were published by Weckerlin, Millien, Arnaudin, Rolland, Canteloube and many others. Some of them had been precursors : Gérard de Nerval, for instance, who in 1842 had published his Vieilles ballades françaises, collected in the Valois region of France. Chopin also took part in the rediscovery of the folk heritage by the Romantics. During his stays at Nohant, the home of the novelist George Sand, he transcribed traditional melodies of Berry with Pauline Viardot, as Bartók did later with the folk songs of Central Europe. George Sand subsequently used some of Chopin's transcriptions for the staging of François le Champi, and pipers and hurdy-gurdy players often appear in her novels; a fine example is Les maîtres sonneurs. On this recording Le Poème Harmonique presents one of the two extant bourrées transcribed by Chopin, not in a keyboard version but on two bagpipes, as the composer may have actually heard them played at a village fair.

To the ‘pious antiquarians', described by Anatole France, who ‘travelled around the countryside collecting from the lips of shepherds and old spinners the secrets of the rustic Muse', we owe the fact that it is still possible for us today to sing these songs of yore. La blanche biche had no doubt been in existence for several centuries when it was finally written down in the mid-nineteenth century, collected in the western provinces of France. The same is also true of La maumariée vengée par son frère, Quand je menais mes chevaux boire, La religieuse rebelle and Les tristes noces. The great age of these songs is indicated by their archaic vocabulary, their use of assonance instead of rhyme and sometimes the employment of early modes rather than modern tonal scales. Transmitted orally, these songs have countless variants in both words and music. Time and geographical location played a part in their evolution, as did the imagination or the lapses of individual singers. Such adaptability is an invitation to inventiveness. N'eran tres fraires is sung here not to the tune that was collected in the South of France but to that of La maumariée vengée par son frère, which tells the same story (although it is not a French translation of the same piece). Qui vòu audir cançon was written specially for this recording by the poet Maurice Romieu, as a revival of a lost Occitan version of the song Les tristes noces.

These songs are about emotion; sometimes they recount a wondrous tale, sometimes simply anecdotes. Their themes, comparable to those of folk tales, tell of individual or social joys and misfortunes. La blanche biche is the story, also found in a similar form in Scandinavian lore, of a girl who is turned into a white hind and is killed in the hunt by her own brother. The unhappily married wife in N'èran tres fraires is avenged by her brother as at the end of Charles Perrault's tale of Bluebeard. The same story was also told in ‘troubadour style' by Moncrif in Les infortunes inouïes de la tant belle, honnête et renommée comtesse de Saulx (1751). Qui vòu audir cançon tells of how a forced marriage separates two lovers and brings about their death. Quand je menais mes chevaux boire is about the fragility of human destiny. La Louison is a conscripts' song and at the same time the lament of an unmarried mother.

History may also show through in the texts of songs (leaving aside those that comment specifically on current events, such as the lampoons on Cardinal Mazarin at the time of the Fronde and all the satirical or political songs that provide an account of the reigns of Louis XIV-XVI and the Revolution). La Perronnelle is the story of a girl who runs away from home to join the troops leaving for the wars in Italy at the turn of the fifteenth century. La Furstenberg, as we have seen, is no doubt a mocking portrait. In a light-hearted tone Malbrough recounts the death and burial of the Duke of Marlborough. This song is believed to have been composed during the War of the Spanish Succession, shortly after the Battle of Malplaquet (1709), when the French army briefly gained advantage and it was believed that John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, had been killed – he in fact won the battle and died in his bed of apoplexy in 1722. Yan Petit que danse, which at first sight appears to be a simple singing game for children dancing in a circle, may not be such an innocent song after all. It is said to have been inspired by a man named Jean Petit, who was sentenced by the Parlement (high judicial court) of Toulouse to be broken on the wheel. The enumeration of the different parts of the body therefore correspond to the breaking, one by one, of his limbs.

The destiny of these songs is quite remarkable. They disappear, turn up again, leave only traces or occasionally survive intact. And they pay no heed to the traditional divisions of time and space. Thus La Perronnelle, despite or because of its very feeble text, remained very much alive for several centuries, before being more or less forgotten. Rabelais mentions the song in the last book of Pantagruel, it appears in seventeenth-century farces and it was collected in the nineteenth century, with other pieces belonging to the oral tradition, in France, Piedmont and Catalonia. The expression ‘chanter la Perronelle', meaning ‘to speak empty words', still exists. If Malbrough became widely known after 1780 and is still alive today, it is because it was sung to the Dauphin by his nurse, Madame Poitrine, who had learned it in her village, and Queen Marie-Antoinette took a liking to the song. Consequently it was taken up by the whole court, before spreading all over Paris. In Le mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais has Chérubin sing the tune of Malbrough, replacing the refrain ‘Mironton mironton mirontaine' with ‘Que mon cœur, que mon cœur a de peine!' The song against the English duke was also appropriate at that time because of France's opposition to Britain in the United States War of Independence. Plaisir d'amour, the last piece on this recording, is the archetypal folk song, lending itself to all sorts of transformations, from Berlioz's version for baritone and chamber orchestra of 1859 to Joan Baez's interpretation in 1968 .

Damien Vaisse