Ramuntcho

Suite No.1

Ouverture sur des thèmes populaires basques (Overture on Basque folk tunes)

Le jardin de Gracieuse (Gracieuse’s Garden)

La chambre de Franchita (Franchita’s Room)

Fandango

Suite No.2

La cidrerie (The Cider House)

Le Couvent (The Convent)

Rapsodie basque (Basque Rhapsody)

Pierre Loti’s 1897 novel Ramuntcho is as much about the French Basque country, its scenery and its way of life, as it is about its young hero. The turning point in a not very eventful story comes when Ramuntcho, smuggler and pelota champion, returns to his village after military service and finds that Gracieuse, whom he was expecting to marry in spite of her mother’s opposition, has been coerced into entering a convent. He plans with her brother to abduct her but when it comes to the point he loses his nerve and leaves her there. The necessarily more dramatic stage version – which was first performed in 1908 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris in 1908 – ends with a scene in the convent where Gracieuse, challenged by her Mother Superior to make the choice between God and Ramuntcho, drops dead under the emotional pressure.

The success of the production owed more than a little to Pierné’s incidental music which – described at the time as “full of the conflicting languor, passion and religious fervour of the Basque country”¹ – supplied much of the local colour which is so lovingly described in the novel but difficult to represent on the stage. The Overture to the play, which opens the first of two orchestral suites drawn from the Ramuntcho music in 1910, is a demonstration of how seriously and at the same time how entertainingly Pierné set about creating an authentically Basque backdrop. Rather than designing a unified symphonic construction, he put together a sequence of episodes each with its own tempo and, beginning with a rhythmically distinctive zortzico in 5/8 time, its own Basque material.

Gracieuse’s Garden, set where Ramuntcho and the chaste Gracieuse had their secret meetings before he left for military service, is an idyllic inspiration featuring and expressive exchange between two flutes. On his return to the village he finds his mother Franchita close to death – an event anticipated in Franchita’s Room, which is chilling in its minor harmonies on muted horns, dark in its bassoon and cello colours, desolate in a solo viola’s musing on a Basque lament. Ramuntcho and Gracieuse also used to meet at village dances such as that represented here by a Fandango with picturesque interventions from a pair of piccolos and a drum echoing the pipe and tabor bands of the region.   

The second suite begins with the Cider House which reflects the conviviality of the place where Ramuntcho and his smuggler companions would plot their sorties into Spain and, no doubt, entertain themselves with folk tunes like the two introduced separately here and combined in the closing bars. The Convent is a contrastingly ethereal piece reflecting in its scoring for muted strings the rarified atmosphere of the convent and, with the entry of an ancient Basque canticle on woodwind, anticipating the death of Gracieuse. At the end of the second suite the Basque Rhapsody balances the Overture on Basque tunes at the beginning of the first. But, while it too is constructed in episodes each with its own Basque tune, it conforms to the rhapsody type by beginning unhurriedly and gradually increasing in speed. The central highlight is another 5/8 zortzico, this one introduced by piccolo and oboe over an ostinato rhythm on a traditional Basque drum, and the exhilarating ending is based on the unofficial Basque anthem Gernikako arbola.

1original in English