Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Although the surreal image of Le Boeuf sur le Toit (“The ox on the roof”) has been part of the Parisian scenery for more than seventy years - it was adopted as the name of a famously fashionable nightclub in the rue Boissy d’Anglas in the 1920s and has since been appropriated by a smart restaurant in the rue Colisée - it actually originated in Brazil. It was the title (O boi no telhado) of one of many popular songs Darius Milhaud 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, sambas and even a Portuguese fado, and transcribed them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each successive pair. I called this fantasia Le Boeuf sur le Toit… I thought that the character of his music 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 Cocteau’s 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 cowboy, his boxer, his black dwarf, his policeman decapitated by an enormous fan, and his red-haired lesbian performing a Salome dance with the severed head.

The frequently heard and often provocative disunity between melody and harmony in Milhaud’s score derives, incidentally, from the then fashionable device of polytonality, or of music set in more than one key at once.

Joaquin Rodrigo (b1901)

Concierto de Aranjuez

for guitar and orchestra

Allegro con spirito

Adagio

Allegro gentile

As a demonstration that not all the best Spanish music was written by French composers, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is as convincing evidence as any there is. It is true that, like many Spanish musicians of his generation, he studied in Paris and that his most famous score was actually written there, in 1939. And yet, although he distanced himself from the raw folk instinct by associating the work with the civilised values of Aranjuez - the favourite resort of Bourbon royalty thirty miles south of Madrid - it is unmistakably and essentially Spanish. At the same time, although Rodrigo himself couldn’t “play four notes in a row” on the guitar, his Concierto de Aranjuez could scarcely be more idiomatically written.

Another Spanish aspect of the work is that it respects no classical formal principles, apart from the conventional three-movement layout. Rodrigo preferred to allow his material to shape its own framework. At the beginning of the first movement it is as though he is waiting for a melodic inspiration to emerge from the opening rhythmic pattern. It is repeated twelve times in all in the same harmonies before oboe and first violins are stimulated to convert it into something more tuneful in the same key. The rest of the movement consists largely of improvisations on that main theme in a variety of instrumental and harmonic colours and, after a kind of recapitulation, in a vigorously conclusive gesture from the whole orchestra.

The Adagio is another melodic improvisation inspired, surely, by the cante jondo - the soulful “deep song” of the traditional flamenco singer. The equivalent of the vocal part is at first taken by the cor anglais to the accompaniment of a regular four-note rhythmic pattern which continues to the end of the movement. The melody passes next to the guitar, which repeats it and develops it with ever more elaborate decoration of its basically simple line. Little is left of the theme in the cadenza but the orchestra dutifully recalls in its original shape (though not in its original harmonies) before the end of the movement.

According to Rodrigo, the Allegro gentile “recalls a courtly dance” - although it is scarcely likely that the eighteenth-century court at Aranjuez knew many dances varying between duple time and triple time with every few bars. But the orchestra accepts it gratefully enough and preserves the same metrical pattern and the same basic theme throughout. The textures are brilliantly varied until, with nothing left to say on the subject, the soloist discreetly runs out of earshot at the end.

Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Carmen Suite

LesToréadors

Prélude

Seguidille

Les Dragons

Chant du Toréador

Aragonaise

Danse bohème

Bizet himself never wrote a Carmen Suite. For one thing, he didn’t have the opportunity: he died only a year after completing the opera and much of the time that was left to him was taken up by the problems of getting the work staged and revising the score to improve its dramatic effectiveness. For another thing, although the original production was not the complete failure it is traditionally claimed to have been - the composer’s death coincided with the 33rd of a run of 45 performances at the Opéra-Comique - he could have had no idea of how enormously successful Carmen would eventually become and what demand there would be for the more popular numbers in arrangements of all kinds. Had he lived, however, it is not at all unlikely that Bizet would either have put together an orchestral suite himself or have asked a trusted colleague like Ernest Guiraud to do it for him.

Since today’s selection (drawn from the two Carmen suites compiled by F. Hoffmann) does not present the seven numbers in the order in which they appear in the opera, there is little point in attempting to follow the story line. It does begin at the beginning, however, with the festive music which is heard at the start of the prelude to the opera and which reappears in the fourth act as an accompaniment to the procession of the toreadors (including Escamillo) on their entry into the bullring in Seville. The contrastingly tragic theme prominently featured in the next movement is associated throughout the opera with fate and with Carmen herself.

Though Carmen is, in fact, fated to meet a tragic end, she leads a tolerably active life in the meantime: her seguidilla, which lures Corporal Don José from the path of soldierly duty in the first act, is one of the most seductive episodes in the whole of opera. Les Dragons (“The Dragoons”) comes from the first entr’acte and is based on a military melody sung offstage by the now demoted Don José in the second act. It is no match, of course, for the heroic toreador song introduced by Escamillo earlier in the same act and heard frequently thereafter. The remaining two dances are both inspired examples of local colouring - the Aragonaise in the healthy outdoor setting of the fourth act, the Danse bohème in the smoky indoor setting of Lillas Pastia’s tavern in the second act.

Gerald Larner©