Chanson de Mars from Pâris ou le bon juge (1906)

Claude Terrasse owed his success in the musical theatre - where he became Messager’s only serious rival - to the perception of Charles Gounod, or so the story goes. He had started his career as an organist and composer of religious music and might have spent the rest of his life in the church if, they say, Gounod hadn’t been reduced to laughter by one of his canticles: “No!” he is quoted as saying, “what a wonderful bit opéra-bouffe that would make! Have a go at operetta.” And he did, starting with La p’tite femme de Loth in 1900 and ending, more than thirty such works later, with Faust en ménage in 1923. His hellenic extravaganza Pâris ou le bon juge, to a libretto by the expert partnership of Flers and Caillavet, was first performed at the Théâtre des Capucines in 1906. The double-entendre emphasised with such panache in Venus’s appropriately march-time Chanson de Mars would surely not have failed to amuse an attentive audience even then.