Joyeuse Marche

“The March is crazily funny,” Chabrier wrote to his wife after the first rehearsal, “the musicians were splitting their sides.” It must have been a wonderful experience for the orchestra assembled by the Association Artistique in Angers in November 1888 to play for the first time in Chabrier’s Joyeuse Marche, or Marche française as it was known at the time. If the musicians had ever met anything like it before it can only have been in the same composer’s España, but not even that most exuberant of French orchestral scores since Berlioz is as brilliantly funny as the Joyeuse Marche. The humour is not so much in the chuckling woodwind in the introduction and the over-the-top horns in the main theme as in a whole series of tiny details, the comic essence of which is their timing. The most obvious of all is the fff cymbal clash just before the reappearance of the main theme after the middle section, But there are several touches of percussion colour, on triangle and side drum above all, and some woodwind sounds, notably on the piccolo, which are briefly but irresistibly and inexplicably funny - and all the funnier perhaps for the occasional glimpse of the more sentimental Chabrier on the strings.