La Boîte à joujoux (The Toy-box)

Prélude

Tableau 1: Le Magasin de jouets (The Toy-shop)

Tableau 2: Le Champ de bataille (The Battlefield)

Tableau 3: La bergerie à vendre (The Sheepfold for Sale)

Tableau 4: Après Fortune faite (Fortune Made)

Épilogue

Debussy - or “Papadechouchou” as he liked to call himself - was a very fond father. It was for Chouchou, his only child, that he wrote his Children’s Corner piano pieces between 1906 and 1908 and it was surely with his eight-year-old daughter in mind that he so readily adopted the idea of writing the music for a children’s ballet in 1913. The proposal had come to him from André Hellé, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, in February of that year. By October, “getting Chouchou’s old dolls to give up their secrets,” he had completed half an hour of music which, with its multitude of operatic and other tuneful allusions, he had clearly enjoyed writing. Unfortunately, work on the orchestration was interrupted by the First World War and it was not until December 1919, nine months after the composer’s death, that La Boîte à joujoux was first performed at the Théâtre Lyrique du Vaudeville in Paris. With the orchestral score completed by the composer’s friend André Caplet, choreography by Quinault and sets and costumes designed by André Hellé himself, it proved to be a great success with the public.

“The story,” Hellé explains, “takes place in a toy-box. Toy-boxes are really towns where toys live like people. Or else towns are only toy-boxes in which people play like toys. The dolls,” Hellé goes on, “are dancing. A Soldier sees them and falls in love with one of them. But the Doll has already given her heart to a lazy, frivolous and quarrelsome Punch. Then the Soldier and Punch and their respective supporters engage in a great battle in the course of which the poor wooden Soldier is wounded. Abandoned by the ugly Punch, the Doll goes to help the Soldier, looks after him and falls in love with him. They get married, are very happy and have many children. The frivolous Punch becomes a country policeman. And life goes on in the toy-box.”

The ballet is divided into four scenes or “tableaux” framed within a Prelude and an Epilogue. In the poetically allusive and magically scored Prelude the toy-box is still asleep - although, to judge by a fragmentary fanfare, the Soldier is already stirring. The Soldier makes his definitive entry in the first tableau, together with several miscellaneous characters (like an elephant in suitably exotic mode and an English tin soldier with a curiously unsuitable echo of Debussy’s own Golliwog’s Cakewalk) and the other two main protagonists: Punch is represented by aggressively dissonant material and the Doll by a pretty waltz. Punch and the Soldier come to blows on the battlefield in the second scene, which features the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’s Faust but which is actually less concerned with militant action than with the unhappy plight of the Soldier and the compassion of the amorous Doll.

A reference on flutes to the traditional tune “Il était une bergère” (There was a shepherdess), sets the next tableau in the sheepfold that the Soldier and the Doll are about to acquire and where, to the sound of a shepherd’s pipe (cor anglais), they prepare to make their fortune.

In the last scene, which takes place twenty years later, they have indeed made their fortune and have also amassed a large family of children - though not, as a echo of Mendelssohn confirms, without the benefit of a proper wedding. The children dance an exuberant polka - “with little respect,” said Debussy, “for the intentions of the composer” - and the Epilogue returns the toys to their box for the night.