Bourreé fantasque

As a native of the Auvergne, a region to which he never forgot his allegiance in spite of all his years in Montmartre, Chabrier was interested in the bourrée not for its classical credentials but for its personal associations. The bourrée was part of the culture of the Auvergne, where it was traditionally performed with a peasant energy that made it something quite different from the courtly dance known to Couperin, Rameau and    J.S. Bach. Chabrier once said, “I dance the rhythms of my music in my Auvergnat clogs” and in the staccato-articulated rhythms of his last piano work, written shortly after his last return visit to the Auvergne in 1891, he does just that.

The Bourrée fantasque is a formidable piece of piano writing which, though it probably owes something to Balakirev’s Islamey in this respect, elevated the repeated note to a new status in the repertoire of keyboard techniques. “I have counted nearly 113 different sonorities in it,” Chabrier told Edouard Risler, the young dedicatee of the work, who compared performing it to “playing the orchestra on the piano.” If the rattling rhythms of the outer sections were to reverberate in Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and Alborada del gracioso, the whole-tone harmonies and impressionistic colouring of the tenderly poetic middle section must have been a source of much interest for Debussy. Not the least impressive aspect of the piece is the way its conflicting personalities are so successfully integrated.