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

The music from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne is, after Carmen, the most familiar of his works, yet it has very rarely been heard in its original form, and will continue to be circulated as two popular orchestral suites, not as incidental music for the play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed at the Théâtre 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 number for a fully staged play at that time. Its revival at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1885 was a quite different matter, for it was regularly staged in Paris at the turn of the century, reaching its 1,000th performance in 1951 (see Peter Lamothe, “Theater Music in France, 1864–1914” [Ph.D. diss., University of North 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 Étienne Pasdeloup, Édouard Colonne, and Édouard Deldevez. The first suite was hurriedly put together by Bizet after the play opened. In the Ménestrel 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 particularly 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 Pasdeloup in one of his Concerts Populaires, attended by thousands. The suite drew on four movements (“Prélude,” “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’Arlésienne music to fill out four movements, so Guiraud (if it was he) stole a movement from Bizet’s suite drawn from the opera La jolie fille de Perth entitled Scènes bohémiennes, which at that time was published only in a piano arrangement. This movement was the Menuet, a lovely and very familiar flute solo, which is consequently thought by many to be part of the L’Arlésienne music. The Menuet had therefore to be replaced when the full score of the Scènes bohémiennes was published, for which purpose Guiraud (or someone else) arranged the Marche nocturne.

Two popular orchestral suites based on L’Arlésienne being played constantly in Paris and elsewhere in the 1880s, when Bizet’s music enjoyed a worldwide surge of popularity, 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 orchestrations 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 orchestration and a number of cuts. Further popular attention was...