What’s so funny?

Laughter is rare in music. Jokes abound in comic opera, of course, not least in the innumerable works of Jacques Offenbach, who did more than anyone else to establish the style and conventions of Parisian opéra-bouffe. But in nearly every case the jokes derive from the text, from verbal humour or from a funny dramatic situation. They might well be heightened by the musical setting but they are not primarily musical jokes.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha” harmonised and set to a melodic line is not in itself funny; rhythmically spoken or whispered choruses and the ensembles of kissing sounds evidently so much in demand at the Bouffes-Parisiens might be funny but are basically unmusical; the incongruity of strong metrical accents applied to weak syllables can be funny but is at least as much a literary device as a musical one. Extravagant modulations and chromatic distortions of conventional harmony can certainly qualify as musical jokes, as Mozart demonstrated in his Divertimento in F, K.522, but they are more likely to provoke knowing smiles than spontaneous laughter. As for parody, which can be very funny indeed, it does require familiarity with the object of the satire before it can raise any kind of laugh and is not intrinsically funny.

Chabrier, who must have been a regular member of the audience at the Bouffes-Parisiens in the Passage Choiseul in the 1870s, learned the opéra-bouffe conventions from Offenbach above all but also from his own expert librettists Leterrier and Vanloo and his great friend Charles Lecoq, composer of La Fille de Madame Angot. In L’Etoile he uses them in abundance (avoiding notated lip-smacking in the Quatuor des baisers in Act II, it is true, but making up for it by having Lazuli sneeze in falling sevenths in the first song in Act III). And he uses them with such freshness that he might have thought them up himself. There is, moreover, one brief but inspired example of a purely musical laugh. It occurs in a waltz-time duet for Laoula and Aloës in Act I where they approach the sleeping Lazuli and wake him up by tickling him: the sound of glockenspiel and cymbal colours applied very very quietly to G major harmonies on woodwind and semitone tremors on violins is irresistibly . . well . . ticklish.

It is characteristic of Chabrier that the tickling episode happens in close proximity to Lazuli’s Romance de l’étoile (“Pretty little star” in Jeremy Sams’s translation), which excels in lyricism just about anything to be found in Offenbach. Though written originally for an opera project he never completed and though frequently performed out of context, it has a prominent place in L’Etoile, being featured both as a violin solo in the overture and as a rudimentary kind of leitmotif later on.

Ouf’s cruelly funny Couplets du pal (“This may look like a simple chair”) at the end of Act I - a brilliant example of misplaced accents derived at least in part from an unfinished comic opera project undertaken in collaboration with Paul Verlaine a dozen or so years earlier - is another prominent number, reappearing as the subject of an inspired entracte between Acts I and II and in the very last bars of the work. In this disarming way comedy and tenderness alternate and are heightened in both cases by harmonies which would have been considered daring even in the Opéra itself (the orchestra at the Salle Choiseul at first objected to the score on the ground that they didn’t work at the Bouffes in order to play Wagner!).

As for parody, there is a wonderful example in each of the last two acts: the Choeur des condoléances (“Oh dear it’s all the same to us”) near the end of Act II, where Lazuli is missing and presumed dead, anticipates a similarly lugubrious ensemble in Britten’s Albert Herring; and the Duetto de la chartreuse verte (“It’s too much my head is reeling”) for Ouf and Siroco near the beginning of Act III - a Donizetti burlesque which delighted Debussy - finds another Britten echo in the Pyramus and Thisbe episode in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

With or without purely musical jokes, comic opera depends ultimately on the quality of the tunes. Chabrier’s melodic genius, displayed more generously in L’Etoile than in any subsequent work, was of the same order as his sense of humour - which, if there had been any justice in Chabrier’s professional life, would have made his opéra-bouffe rather than Planquette’s Les Cloches de Corneville (running concurrently at the Folies Dramatiques) the most successful of its time.

Gerald Larner © 1994