L'arlésienne Suite No. 2

When Bizet reworked music he had written for a stage play about tragic love, L’Arlésienne, into a four-movement orchestral suite, it won over the public in ways the play had not. A clear, bright and robustly tuneful score, it borrowed folk melodies from Provence, where the play was set. In mood and colouring it was enchantingly, unquestionably French. And its commercial possibilities weren’t lost on Bizet’s publishers, who wanted more of the same. But Bizet died suddenly in 1875 of a heart attack. The task passed to his friend Ernest Guiraud, a theatre composer who was experienced in musical collaboration and who agreed to look again at the L’Arlésienne material with a view to extracting another suite from it. Following Bizet’s precedent, Suite No. 2 has four movements, starting with a “Pastorale” and “Intermezzo”. Then comes a “Minuet” in which Guiraud cheats a little, using music from Bizet’s opera La jolie fille de Perth. And a concluding “Farandole” (a Provençal dance) revisits the famous marching tune in Suite No. 2’s “Prelude”, Bizet running it into faster, fleet-footed dance music for woodwind and tambourin, a type of drum.