Bacchus et Ariane, Suite No. 2, Op. 43

Program notes

About the Work

Albert Roussel was sixty-one and at the height of his reputation when he composed ‘Bacchus et Ariane’ in 1930, at about the same time as his Third Symphony. It is a ballet in two acts on a scenario by Abel Hermant, and the Paris Opéra staged it on 22 May 1931 with choreography by Serge Lifar, sets by the painter Giorgio de Chirico and Philippe Gaubert conducting.

The story comes from Greek myth. Ariadne has helped Theseus out of the labyrinth and sailed away with him, and on the island of Naxos he abandons her. In the ballet Bacchus, the god of wine, finds her asleep. She wakes, sees that she has been left, and in despair runs to a cliff and throws herself off, only to be caught by the god. He wins her, and at the end she is crowned and raised among the immortals.

Accounts differ on how warmly the ballet was received in the theatre, but it is in the concert hall that the music has lived. Roussel made the score into two orchestral suites that follow the two acts closely. Charles Munch conducted the first in Paris on 2 April 1933, and Pierre Monteux gave the second there, with the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, on 2 February 1934. The Second Suite, which is the whole second act from Ariadne’s awakening to her coronation, quickly became the more popular of the two and is now among the pieces by which Roussel is most often heard. It shows his late style at full strength: clear outlines and driving, stamping rhythms that put him close to the neoclassical music of the time, in an orchestral sound richer and more sensuous than that label suggests.

What to Listen For

The suite plays without a break for about eighteen minutes and follows the stage action closely. It opens with Ariadne asleep: slow, drifting music with no clear beat. Her waking is drawn in small nervous details, darting figures on the clarinet and plucked strings. The tempo quickens as she looks for Theseus and runs to the rock, and the fall into the arms of Bacchus brings the first big climax.

From there the suite is a sequence of dances that grow steadily more intoxicated. Bacchus dances alone, and the two are brought together in a long, slow stretch of love music, the lyrical heart of the piece. Then his followers arrive, Ariadne dances, and the two dance together.

Everything leads to the final Bacchanale. Roussel builds it on a pounding rhythm that he tightens notch by notch, with the brass and percussion gradually let off the leash. He was a composer who liked to keep excitement on a tight rein, which makes the release at the end all the stronger: the dance sweeps into a broad, blazing coda for the coronation of Ariadne.