Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Although the surreal image of Le Boeuf sur le toit (“The ox on the roof”) has long been part of the Parisian scenery – ever since a famously fashionable nightclub in the rue Boissy d’Anglas was named after Milhaud’s and Cocteau’s ballet in 1921 – it actually originated in Brazil. It is the title (O boi no telhado) of one of the popular songs the composer brought back with him to Paris in 1918 after serving    . “Still haunted by my memories of Brazil,” Milhaud recalled, “I assembled a few popular melodies, maxixes and sambas … and transcribed them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each successive pair. I called this fantasia Le Boeuf sur le toit.”

When he said “a few” popular melodies he really meant as many as 28 – nearly all of which are traceable to published sources but none of which is attributed, either in the score or elsewhere, to its true author. Wholesale piracy on Milhaud’s part it might have been but few if any of those tunes would have been remembered without his use of them in a score so entertaining that one could forgive him almost anything.

“I thought that the character of this music,” Milhaud said, “might make it suitable for accompaniment to one of Charlie Chaplin’s films.” In fact, when the score was first performed, in February 1920, it was not in a cinema but in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées as an accompaniment to a ballet devised by Jean Cocteau, designed in part by Raoul Dufy and set in an American bar during Prohibition. Even so – and even though the ballet was a landmark in the development of the scandalous reputation of the composers arbitrarily grouped together as “Les Six” – it is probably more helpful to think of a Chaplin silent film than of Cocteau’s bartender, his boxer, his bookmaker, his policeman decapitated by an enormous fan, and his red-haired lesbian performing a Salome dance with the severed head.

The melody Milhaud himself wrote is the cheerful rondo theme, which opens the work on trumpet and recurs no fewer than 15 times as tune follows tune with reckless abandon, without pause for breath and frequently - in the polytonal manner fashionable at the time - in blatantly and divertingly “wrong” harmonies.

Gerald Larner © 2007

Although the surreal image of Le Boeuf sur le toit (“The ox on the roof”) has long been part of the Parisian scenery – ever since a famously fashionable nightclub in the rue Boissy d’Anglas was named after Milhaud’s and Cocteau’s ballet in 1921 – it actually originated in Brazil. It is the title (O boi no telhado) of one of the popular songs the composer brought back with him to Paris in 1918 after serving for two years as secretary to Paul Claudel, poet and French ambassador in Rio de Janeiro. “Still haunted by my memories of Brazil,” Milhaud recalled, “I assembled a few popular melodies, maxixes and sambas … and transcribed them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each successive pair. I called this fantasia Le Boeuf sur le toit.”

When he said “a few” popular melodies he really meant as many as 28 – nearly all of which are traceable to published sources but none of which is attributed, either in the score or elsewhere, to its true author. Wholesale piracy on Milhaud’s part it might have been but few if any of those tunes would have been remembered without his use of them in a score so entertaining that one could forgive him almost anything.

“I thought that the character of this music,” Milhaud said, “might make it suitable for accompaniment to one of Charlie Chaplin’s films.” In fact, when the score was first performed, in February 1920, it was not in a cinema but in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées as an accompaniment to a ballet devised by Jean Cocteau, designed in part by Raoul Dufy and set in an American bar during Prohibition. Even so – and even though the ballet was a landmark in the development of the scandalous reputation of the composers arbitrarily grouped together as “Les Six” – it is probably more helpful to think of a Chaplin silent film than of Cocteau’s bartender, his boxer, his bookmaker, his policeman decapitated by an enormous fan, and his red-haired lesbian performing a Salome dance with the severed head.

The melody Milhaud himself wrote is the cheerful rondo theme, which opens the work on trumpet and recurs no fewer than 15 times as tune follows tune with reckless abandon, without pause for breath and frequently - in the polytonal manner fashionable at the time - in blatantly and divertingly “wrong” harmonies.

Gerald Larner © 2007