L’Arlésienne: Drame en trois actes et cinq tableaux. Version originale de 1872 pour ensemble instrumental et chœur by Georges Bizet (review)

Abstract

THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF BIZET'S L'ARLESIENNEGeorges Bizet. L'Arlesienne: Drame en trois actes et cinq tableaux. Version originale de 1872 pour ensemble instrumental et choeur. Edition critique de Herve Lacombe. (Musica Gallica.) [London]: Choudens, 2010. [Forces in Fr., p. 8-9; introd. in Fr., Eng., p. 11-40; sources in Fr., p. 41-43; bibliog., p. 44; contents, p. 45; score p. 47-210; critical appara- tus in Fr., p. 211-22; facsims., p. 223-35. ISBN 978-1-84772-839-5; pub. no. ACF100056; plate no. ACF021309. $113.35.]The music from Bizet's L'Arlesienne is, af- ter Carmen, the most familiar of his works, yet it has very rarely been heard in its origi- nal form, and will continue to be circulated as two popular orchestral suites, not as inci- dental music for the play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed at the Theâtre du Vaudeville, Paris, in September 1872. The play's beginnings were unpropitious, since it was not well received and it survived only nineteen performances, not a good num- ber for a fully staged play at that time. Its revival at the Theâtre de l'Odeon in 1885 was a quite different matter, for it was regu- larly staged in Paris at the turn of the cen- tury, reaching its 1,000th performance in 1951 (see Peter Lamothe, Theater Music in France, 1864-1914 [Ph.D. diss., Univer- sity ofNorth Carolina, 2008], 68-90, 267).The irony is that the 1885 revival was not an expression of interest in Daudet the playwright, but a response to the enormous popularity of Bizet's music. In its original form and its original light orchestration it was forgotten, but as orchestral suites it was a favorite of the conductors Jules Etienne Pasdeloup, Edouard Colonne, and Edouard Deldevez. The first suite was hur- riedly put together by Bizet after the play opened. In the Menestrel of 13 October 1872 Gustave Bertrand had suggested that the music could be arranged as a concert work, and four days later Massenet heard talk of a suite, a form which he himself par- ticularly cultivated in the early 1870s (Mina Curtiss, Bizet and his World [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958], 340), and on November 10 it was performed by Pasde- loup in one of his Concerts Populaires, at- tended by thousands. The suite drew on four movements (Prelude, Minuetto, Adagietto, Carillon), and filled out the orchestration with full woodwinds, extra brass, and a harp. It was heard at least fif- teen times in what was left of Bizet's lifetime.The success of the suite led the publisher Choudens to commission a second suite in 1879. This has always been attributed to Ernest Guiraud, although his name appears nowhere in the score. There were not enough substantial pieces in the original L'Arlesienne music to fill out four move- ments, so Guiraud (if it was he) stole a movement from Bizet's suite drawn from the opera La jolie fille de Perth entitled Scenes bohemiennes, which at that time was pub- lished only in a piano arrangement. This movement was the Menuet, a lovely and very familiar flute solo, which is conse- quently thought by many to be part of the L'Arlesienne music. The Menuet had there- fore to be replaced when the full score of the Scenes bohemiennes was published, for which purpose Guiraud (or someone else) arranged the Marche nocturne.Two popular orchestral suites based on L'Arlesienne being played constantly in Paris and elsewhere in the 1880s, when Bizet's music enjoyed a worldwide surge of popular- ity, led to the revival of the play in 1885. But rather than revive the original scoring, a full orchestra was engaged by the theater, conducted by Colonne, and the fuller or- chestrations of six of the longer movements were borrowed from the suites and played in the theater. Choudens then published a full score which represented the music as it was then played, that is, with enlarged or- chestration and a number of cuts. Further popular attention was then drawn to two adaptations of this music. The theme that comes at measure 90 of the Prelude, known as LTnnocent's theme, was issued in a vari- ety of arrangements with the words of the Ave Maria attached, while the Entr'acte no. …