A History of the Thé Dansant (1994)

Foxtrot –

Slow foxtrot –

Tango

Written 67 years after Turina’s Corazon de mujer, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s A History of the Thé Dansant celebrates the popular music of the same period. It is based on lines from Selves by his sister M.R. Peacocke who had discovered in the attic a collection of postcards and photographs relating to a holiday taken in the South of France by their parents with Roger Quilter in 1924. The first song combines the rhythm of the Train Bleu with that of the foxtrot, its expressive melodic line curving “like the line of a mouth closed and smiling.” The elegant Slow foxtrot is set under the moon on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean with a “negro band” in the background. The lively Tango recalls a thé dansant in Menton. At the end the poet seems to imagine a conversation between her parents in old age, their memories of that romantic experience awakened by the photographs and merging with the piano’s recall of the melodious Train Bleu foxtrot.