L’Arlésienne Suite No.2

Pastorale

Intermezzo

Minuet

Farandole

One peculiarity of Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne is its absentee title role: the Girl from Arles is neither seen nor heard from the beginning of the first act to the end of the last. Another peculiarity is that it cannot be performed without Bizet’s score, which is far more than incidental music in the ordinary sense: as well as the orchestral movements familiar from the two concert suites, there are six off-stage choruses and as many as fourteen pieces designed to played as an accompaniment to the dialogue. True melodrama though it was - with music and the spoken word intimately linked - the public didn’t much like L’Arlésienne on its initial production at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris in 1872 and it was taken off after twenty-one performances.

While the failure of L’Arlésienne was a disaster for Daudet, it wasn’t so bad for Bizet, who had the bright idea of arranging four of the most tuneful instrumental pieces for performance in the concert hall, where they proved to be an immediate and lasting success. It was so popular, in fact, that four years after the composer’s death his friend and colleague Ernest Guiraud compiled a second L’Arlésienne suite - though not without some difficulty, since he had so much less of the incidental music to choose from.

Fortunately for Guiraud, who needed a good opener, there was still the Pastorale. One of the most melodious movements in the original score, it is also - particularly in the central dance episode featuring piccolo and drum - an attractive example of Bizet’s ability to create local colour without drawing on actual Provençal folk material. There was also the dramatic E flat Entracte which Guiraud presents here as an Intermezzo: “It is wonderfully beautiful, eloquent, heartbreaking,” said Daudet to Bizet, moved above all perhaps by the expressive middle section reflecting the dilemma of his hero, Frédéri, torn between the faithful Vivette, who has always loved him, and his passion for the Girl from Arles, who never will.

For an equivalent movement to the Minuet in the composer’s own Suite, however, Guiraud had to look elsewhere. He found what he wanted in Bizet’s opera La Jolie Fille de Perth - a mellifluous minuet for flute and harp with a contrastingly formal middle section (the saxophone counterpoint to the reprise of the flute melody was Guiraud’s idea). If that seems slightly alien to the Provençal setting of the rest of the Suite, the Farandole goes straight and unmistakably back to Arles. Beginning on full orchestra with the old Provençal carol “March of the Kings” used by Bizet himself in the Prelude, it changes tempo for the traditional “Dance of the Mad Horse” on flute and piccolo and finally, following a precedent in the original score, puts the two together in an unlikely but brilliantly festive combination of dance and march.