On a car ride home from Caramoor last spring, Bénédicte Jourdois and I were brainstorming about themes for the coming season. I had what I thought was a cockamamie idea for a season opener, sure to be shot down by my colleague. Just to get it off my chest, I tentatively said, “For years I’ve been thinking about a program where every song is a person’s first name. When I was in college I had this record of Jacques Brel—“ “Les prénoms de Paris!” she exclaimed. “Oh, that’s fantastic, let’s do it.” “Really?” “I love it. It will be fun.”

The two of us set to work in the modern method, dropping names into a Google doc. From this seemingly random brain-dump there magically emerged a wide-ranging but shapely playlist, with a beginning, middle, and end. Brel’s “first names of Paris” morphed into NYFOS’s “first names of three continents,” offering portraits of lovers and warriors, straight arrows and real oddballs.

I knew from the start that we’d begin with Francis Poulenc’s brief, sparkling “Paul et Virginie.” The song is based on the eponymous 1788 French novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In just 90 seconds Poulenc and poet Raymond Radiguet summon up the innocent, idealized love affair of the teenage protagonists, bypassing the book’s tragic ending. Radiguet was a literary sensation in Paris, publishing two ground-breaking novels in his late teens. His sudden death at age twenty from typhoid fever was a profound loss to the artistic community, and indeed to the world of literature. Poulenc began writing “Paul et Virginie” just before the writer’s death in 1920, and was able to sing him an early sketch of the song. But he felt he lacked the compositional know-how at that time to capture the essence of Radiguet’s verses, and waited until 1946 to craft the final version.

I am always on the lookout for songs by the Spanish composer Eduardo Toldrà, and thanks to one of his Catalan advocates, Albert Carbonell, I have the complete songs of Toldrà tucked away on my computer. Trawling through the titles, I came across “Lorenzo y Catalina,” a 1945 setting of a folk song from Asturias. Using the simplest means, Toldrà fashions an arrangement of tremendous charm. Lorenzo (aka St. Lawrence) represents the sun, Catalina (aka St. Catherine) the moon. I’ll spare you the gory details of their torture, but the miracles following their grisly deaths linked each of them to their celestial avatar. There are no violent martyrdoms in this song, just the joyous marriage of the sun and the moon.

It’s not an accident that we turned to Romantic-era French art song for a section called “Lovers, Enraptured.” After all, some stereotypes are well-deserved. Duparc’s “Phidylé,” Fauré’s “Lydia,” and Hahn’s “A Chloris” combine pristine elegance with falling-out-of-your dress voluptuousness, a uniquely Gallic brew.

While Fauré and Hahn led relatively untroubled lives (by composers’ standards), Henri Duparc was a haunted soul. Fiercely self-critical, he stopped composing at 37, and later destroyed most of what he’d written. All that remains are 17 songs, many of them masterpieces. The grand scope, generous textures, and depth of feeling in “Phidylé” are a reminder of Duparc’s fascination with Wagner. So is the wide dynamic expanse, from the hushed, unruffled first page to the orgasmic conclusion.

Fauré’s “Lydia” takes us to the other extreme: intimately scaled like a sedate string quartet, it responds to Leconte de Lisle’s sexy poem with chaste music, painting a portrait of an ardent but well-mannered suitor. Music theory nerds will delight in the raised fourth in the melody, which lifts “Lydia’s” tune into the Lydian mode for a few bars. Everyone else: relax and enjoy “Lydia’s” blend of modesty and fervor, the hallmark of so much of Fauré’s music.

Reynaldo Hahn’s “A Chloris” takes Fauré’s delicate classicism one step farther. The poem by 17th-century poet Théophile de Viau evokes ancient Greece, while Hahn’s stately walking bass line and floating melody are a tribute to Bach, specifically the famous “Air on the G-String.” As World War I raged outside the musical salons, the composer provided a brief oasis. For three minutes, gay, (half-)Jewish Reynaldo Hahn breaks free of the homophobia and anti-Semitism of Paris to create a vision of mutual love that even the gods would envy.

We live in a war-torn world, and every passing day turns me into even more of a pacifist. The only positive thing I can say about war is that its path of destruction gives birth to some beautiful, stirring songs. Our short medley begins with a vision of peace, Wolf’s “Gesang Weylas.” Weyla is the goddess of the island Orplid, a place invented by the poet Eduard Möricke and his university friend Ludwig Bauer. On this magical oasis, heroes returning from battle would live free of illness or hunger. This Shangri-La became an elaborate fantasy that they embellished for years—as Sam Kidd mused, “a kind of nineteenth-century Dungeons and Dragons.”. Eventually Möricke included this poem in his novel Maler Nolten (“Maler, the Painter”) and Wolf fashioned it into a broad, noble anthem—a song I have admired for years and never programmed.

From that peaceful refuge we plunge into the life-and-death perils of France during the Second World War. “Barbara” recalls a moment when the narrator witnessed the joyous meeting of two lovers on a rainy day in the town of Brest. But now Brest has been destroyed by another kind of rain, a shower of bullets and blood, and the poet wonders about the fate of those two young people. The song emerges from the collaboration between poet Jacques Prévert and composer Joseph Kosma, most famous for “Les feuilles mortes,” better known here (courtesy of lyricist Johnny Mercer) as “Autumn Leaves.” Their songs hover between art song and popular song, much like the works of Marc Blitzstein or William Bolcom. Initially popularized by iconic performers like Yves Montand and Juliette Gréco, they were later canonized by Catherine Sauvage and Serge Gainsbourg in classic recordings. Kosma got his start in Berlin, working alongside Kurt Weill in 1929. But Kosma was a gentler, more reticent songwriter than Weill. With the lone exception of “Autumn Leaves,” his music tends to give the lyrics a subtle reading rather than a sweeping tune, always keeping the music at the service of the words.

Sometimes songs can bring about political change. Such is the mythology surrounding Gilbert Bécaud’s hugely popular “Nathalie,” written in 1964. Its story of a fling between a French visitor and his Russian tour-guide was said to have set relations between the two countries on a path towards rapprochement during the Cold War. Bécaud made quite a meal of the song, and his many fans ate it up, chiming in to sing the name “Nathalie” in the refrain. He later wrote a sequel, “La fille de Nathalie,” in the voice of the child the narrator apparently sired during his Moscow encounter with Nathalie. That song is less joyous, detailing the hardships of life in the USSR during the 1980s. By contrast, the original “Nathalie” is all chocolate, vodka, and sex.

NYFOS has not programmed the Lieder of Hugo Wolf with the frequency this great songwriter deserves. We’re making up for lost time with three more of his songs—and all four of them, in fact, come from that same Möricke novel, Maler Nolten. “Agnes” is a young woman’s outpouring of grief as she gives vent to her fear of being abandoned by her fiancé, Nolten. She was once his village sweetheart, but their relationship has not survived his move to a glamorous European capital. On the edge of madness, she sings him a mournful folk-like melody. In the piano we hear an obsessive two-note motif symbolizing the obsessive rocking of despair.

Nolten’s heart has been stolen by another woman, the rootless, enigmatic Elisabeth. Their tortured love affair inspires two poems in the book, where she is called Peregrina, the wanderer, and portrayed first as a temptress and then as a phantom.

The erotic charge of Nolten’s relationship with Elisabeth overwhelms the painter, as does her volatile behavior, He breaks off ties with her, but her spirit haunts him like a ghost, invading the peace of his domestic life. Wolf set the two “Peregrina” poems as an interlocking pair of songs linked by shared motifs. But the emotional tone of each is utterly different: a sober beginning in the first gives way to a passionate climax, while the second evokes Nolten’s sense of emptiness since their separation. While Agnes’s grief unfolds like a mournful folk song, the two Peregrina pieces are opulent, complex, and in a constant state of flux.

You don’t have to be a German Romantic painter to have trouble with women. Love is blind, and so is its tsuris. Take the young, naïve narrator of Jacques Brel’s “Madeleine,” stood up by his date–and not for the first time. But he won’t give up, and the song ends on a note of triumph—next week, she’ll definitely come, and he’ll be there with her favorite flowers once more. Apparently the tune was based on a real-life woman named Madeleine who pulled a no-show on Brel. He had the last laugh: the exuberant song was a huge hit and served as the final number in his concerts for several years.

There is a certain satisfaction in worshiping someone at a distance. A pedestal or a balcony allow us to idealize the beloved, giving us all the exhilaration and none of the pain. This kind of reverent adoration is at the core of Beethoven’s “Adelaide,” and, one is told, of Beethoven’s love-life as well. The song’s Italian-opera flow made it an instant classic in 1796. Its six-minute span is cast in the classic form of an aria, with a slow cantilena followed by a brilliant coda at a faster tempo.

Schubert’s “Ganymed,” set to a poem by Goethe, scales the heights in a literal way: the god Zeus, enamored of the handsome Trojan youth Ganymede, lifts him to Mount Olympus where he becomes the cup-bearer to the gods—love not at a distance so much as transported a distance. Schubert takes Goethe’s poem literally, beginning in a broad, pastoral mode as Ganymede praises the divine spirit he senses in the springtime, quickening as Ganymede is seized, and illustrating the flight with rising figures in the piano. Everything settles into a beatific calm as the young man reaches his celestial home. Schubert creates a sound track for this heavenly voyage, an ever-developing tone poem that neither repeats nor develops themes—brand-new compositional territory in 1817.

“An Sylvia,” heard tonight in Shakespeare’s original English, has none of “Ganymed’s” tone-painting or musical invention—just three identical, perfect stanzas with staccato chords in the right hand, a bass line that would make any jazz player happy, and one of those Schubert melodies that sound as if it had fallen out of the sky. Sylvia on her balcony may be loved at a distance, serenaded by her admirers below. But she won’t stay distant forever, not with a song like this.

The wild card in this group is “Petite Ynga” by the Argentinean Carlos López-Buchardo. I try to feature music by this neglected petit maître whenever I can, and NYFOS audiences have been the beneficiaries. This song dates from the early years of his career, most likely during his studies in Paris with Albert Roussel. The ambiguous poem (we’re still debating about its meaning) elicits some lovely textures and harmonies from the composer, a diaphanous blend of Massenet and Debussy, with just a touch of Richard Strauss. It’s a far, watery cry from the earthy Argentine folk roots and rhythmic verve of his songs in Spanish—but don’t miss the very last note, which seems to be sending a brash message: “Don’t forget, I’m from Argentina.” Its discordant jangle always makes us laugh.

Music lovers won’t need introductions to the last four composers—Noël Coward, Harold Arlen, Paul McCartney, and Tom Lehrer. Still, some might crave a refresher course. For them, we’ll speed-date through the list.

—Noël Coward: playwright (Private Lives), composer (“I’ll See You Again”), screenwriter (Brief Encounter), actor, singer, Las Vegas headliner. It was in one of his Vegas shows in the 1950s that he recorded “Nina,” back in the days when night club audiences thrilled to his rapid-fire wit (or pretended to), even the crowd at Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn.

—Harold Arlen: prolific songwriter (“Over the Rainbow,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Stormy Weather”) and Broadway composer (St. Louis Woman) who blended the cadences of Jewish cantorial music and Black gospel to forge a unique sound in American popular song.

—Paul McCartney—well, certainly no thumbnail is necessary for Sir Paul. He wrote most of “Michelle”; the bridge (“I love you I love you I love you”) is attributed to John Lennon.

—Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematics professor who, as a sideline, wrote and performed some of the best satirical songs our country has ever heard (“National Brotherhood Week,” “The Vatican Rag”). A cult figure who became a global phenomenon, Lehrer graced the stage for a couple of decades before reverting to full-time academia. “If they can give the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger,” he said, “there’s no more need for satire.

It’s been a thrill to invite all these people to our party. And look! Nina from Argentina is cozying up to Painter Nolen (certainly he won’t break into a tango); Phidylé is still sacked out while Lydia is downing her fourth martini in the salon; Paul and Virginie are looking after poor, abandoned Agnes; and Nathalie is trying to teach Michelle some Russian. We’ll just slip quietly out the back door.