Six Fables de Lafontaine

Le corbeau et le renard

La cigale et la fourmi

La laitière et le pot au lait

Le rat des villes et le rat des champs

Le berger et la mer

Le savetier et le financier

Offenbach is not known for his songs. He did, however, write as many as a hundred such works, some of them in German (which was his first language) but most of them in French. Unfortunately, he was far from discriminating in his choice of texts: the French poet he drew on more than any other was Édouard Plouvier, who wrote a couple of operetta libretti for him but who is otherwise justly forgotten. Had he turned more often to writers of the distinction of Alfred de Musset, the author of the words of his once popular Chanson de Fortunio, Offenbach might have developed ways of reflecting in music the beauty of well wrought French verse. As it was, given the material at his disposal, he was more interested in the comic potential.

Lafontaine’s fables are both well wrought and rich in comic potential – just the thing, one might think, for a master of operetta like Offenbach. In fact, in 1842, when he wrote the Six Fables de Lafontaine, he was still making his living as a cello virtuoso and had little experience of composing for the stage. Even so, these songs are clearly the work of a composer born to opéra bouffe. The witty characterisation of the wily fox in Le corbeau et le renard, the exaggerated language of his flattery reflected in the operatic gestures of the vocal line, is an early indication of the comic art Offenbach was to develop in his operettas. That, however, is a modest setting in comparison with the lavishly resourceful account of La cigale et la fourmi which, covering a range of expression from pathos to moral indignation, is animated by three different dance tunes – the last of them a waltz culminating in a grandly dismissive cadenza.

La laitière et le pot au lait is a minor masterpiece of musical narrative, with changes of harmony and tempo to match the events of the story – and without the lengthy moral attached to it in the Lafontaine original. The town and country rats having congenially much in common, the drama in Le rat de ville et le rat des champs is reserved for the middle section and the inconvenient intrusion from outside. The classical allusions in Le berger et la mer seem to have inspired Offenbach to set the poem as a gentle parody of opera seria, mixing dramatic recitative with expressive arioso, Lafontaine’s moral again being wisely omitted. For brilliance in characterisation. however, and for the application of grand operatic convention to mundane affairs, nothing in the set is more inspired than Offenbach’s interpretation of the story of the once carefree cobbler and the once insomniac money man in    Le savetier et le financier.

Although the Fables de Lafontaine were not well received on their first performance – one critic remarked that the composer should have remembered the fable about the mountain giving birth to a mouse – they found an echo not only in Chabrier’s farmyard songs of the late 1880s but also in Ravel’s Histoires naturelles in 1906.

Gerald Larner © 2010