Ballet music from Faust

In Gounod’s day - and for a long time after that - if you wanted to have an opera performed at the Paris Opéra it had to have a ballet in it. It didn’t matter how incongruous the ballet as long as it was there. So in 1869, when Faust transferred to the Opéra from the Théâtre Lyrique where it had opened ten years earlier, Gounod duly supplied seven numbers of ballet music with dances for such irrelevant protagonists as Nubian and Trojan women, Cleopatra and the classical Greek courtisane Phryné. What they have to do with a story based on Goethe’s Faust and set in 16th-century Germany, don’t even ask. Questions like that would only distract attention from the charm of the opening waltz, the expressive melody for strings featured in the Adagio, the exotic scoring for piccolo and tambourine in the Allegretto, the rhythmic energy and broad gestures of the Moderato maestoso, the sinuous line of the Moderato con moto, the pretty demeanour of the Allegretto and the drama of the closing Allegro vivo.