Can-can from Gaîté parisienne

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

arranged by Manuel Rosenthal (1904-2003)

Can-can from Gaîté parisienne

In the few hours he had to spare in a career industriously devoted to operetta – he wrote not far short of a hundred opéras bouffes and opéras comiques – Offenbach found time for just four ballets. Gaîté parisienne is not one of them. That score was put together more than fifty years after his death by the French composer and conductor Manuel Rosenthal for the Ballet russe de Monte Carlo. It consists of twenty or so numbers drawn from some of the more popular of Offenbach’s operettas – La Vie parisienne most prominent among them, brilliantly rescored and arranged to fit a story set in a fashionable but somewhat disreputable Parisian nightspot. A frothy celebration of Second Empire naughtiness, with a libretto by Count Etienne de Beaumont and choreography by Léonide Massine, it was first performed at the Opéra de Monte Carlo in 1938 and was an immediate success (so much so that Warner Bros produced a film version only three years later under the then unproblematic title of The Gay Parisian). Tantalisingly held in reserve until near the end of the ballet (and the film) is a vertiginous galop alluding to the famous can-can from Orphée aux enfers and its even more exuberant counterpart in La vie parisienne.