Le bougeois gentilhomme Suite Op.60

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Le bougeois gentilhomme Suite Op.60

Overture

Jourdain-Minuet

The fencing master

Entrance and dance of the tailors

Minuet of Lully

Courante

Entry of Cléonte

Intermezzo

The Dinner

Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos was originally presented as as a kind of supplement to a German version of Molière’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme in Stuttgart in 1912. Although the play had been adapted by the librettist of the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the incidental music was supplied by Strauss, the two pieces did not combine well.

The first performance of the double production - which lasted for as long as five hours - was a disaster. Happily, the opera could be rescued and, given a new prologue, became one of the most successful of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaborations. There could be no separate existence for the Molière-Hofmannsthal play, however, as a performance of a revised version with additional incidental music by Strauss conclusively confirmed in 1917. All that survives of it, for practical purposes, is the concert suite that the composer extracted from his incidental music in 1919.

When Molière’s comédie-ballet - a satire on the absurdly aristocratic pretensions of Monsieur Jourdain, a rich Parisian bourgeois - was first performed in 1670 it was accompanied by music by Jean-Baptiste Lully. Strauss was obviously aware of that but, while he actually quotes three tunes by Lully, he did not attempt a straight pastiche of 17th-century manners in his own incidental music. Although he scored it for a smaller orchestra than was customary for him, employing the piano as a kind of continuo instrument, and although remained vaguely in perod, with a consistently light touch and all kinds of baroque and classical allusions, most of the material in it and all the personality behind it are his.

The Overture, which introduces two of the main themes associated with Monsieur Jourdain, offers characteristic examples of playful wit in its bustling opening and of gentle lyricism in the oboe sicilienne towards the end. For the episode in which Jourdain’s dancing master attempts to teach him the minuet Strauss turned to a decorous number in a ballet score, Die Insel Kythere, which he had started and abandoned twelve years earlier. Jourdain’s fencing master is represented by rather more aggressive material for trombone and trumpet. The Entrance and Dance of the Tailors begins with a gavotte borrowed from Die Insel Kythere and includes a brilliant polonaise for solo violin. Lully makes his first appearance by way of a gracious minuet melody he used in his music for Molière and which is introduced here by oboe, repeated by flute and taken up by horn with a solo violin counterpoint. After the Courante, an ingeniously sustained canon on Strauss’s own material, there is more Lully in the Entry of Cléonte - a solemn sarabande for string octet and a contrasting lively dance for woodwind.

A graceful Intermezzo, marking the entry of two real aristocrats who parasitically turn Jourdain’s pretensions to their own advantage, precedes the tour de force of Strauss’s incidental music, the Dinner. Beginning with a grand march, the Dinner includes references to Wagner’s Rhine motif (to accompany the entry of the Rhine salmon), Strauss’s own bleating sheep in Don Quixote (for the gigot of lamb) and, after a lovely cello solo, the dawn chorus from Rosenkavalier (for the dish of larks and thrushes). What “La donna è mobile” is doing there is not entirely clear. Speculation is halted by the final item on the menu, an omelette surprise from which a kitchen-boy springs out to dance one of Strauss’s most intoxicating Viennese waltzes.

Gerald Larner ©2005