Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Suite, Op. 60

Program notes

About the Work

No work of Richard Strauss had a more tangled birth than this one. After Der Rosenkavalier, he and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal wanted to make something for the director Max Reinhardt. Hofmannsthal’s idea was to adapt Molière’s comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme of 1670, cut it down, give it incidental music by Strauss, and replace its closing entertainment with a short new opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. The hybrid was staged in Stuttgart in October 1912 and pleased almost nobody. Theatregoers did not want the opera, operagoers did not want the play, and a house needed two companies to put it on.

The authors pulled the two halves apart. The opera was given a sung prologue in place of the play and reached its familiar form in 1916. The play was revised as a comedy with music in its own right, for which Strauss wrote additional numbers; it was produced by Reinhardt in Berlin in 1918 and had little success. To rescue the music, Strauss chose nine numbers and made them into a concert suite, which he conducted for the first time in Vienna in January 1920. According to one account the orchestra on that occasion was the Vienna Philharmonic.

Molière’s hero is Monsieur Jourdain, a rich tradesman who is determined to become a gentleman. He hires a music master, a dancing master, a fencing master and a tailor, is courted by two aristocrats, and gives a grand dinner. The play was written as a comédie-ballet, with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Strauss honoured the precedent: some movements of the suite rework dances by Lully, and the rest imitate the manners of the seventeenth century with a straight face and modern harmony.

The scoring is the surprise. The composer of An Alpine Symphony uses about three dozen players: woodwind in pairs, two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, percussion, harp, and a string group that the score fixes at six violins, four violas, four cellos and two double basses. A piano sits in the middle and behaves much like a Baroque continuo. The suite, which lasts a little over half an hour, is often named among the first neoclassical scores of the twentieth century.

By a coincidence that the programme’s planner can hardly have missed, it shares its opus number, 60, with the Beethoven symphony that follows.

What to Listen For

There are nine movements. The Overture is a portrait of Jourdain, bustling and self-important, in a pastiche of Baroque gestures. The Minuet is his dancing lesson. The Fencing Master is a short character sketch, all flamboyant energy. In the Entry and Dance of the Tailors the tailors arrive to a gavotte and go on to a polonaise.

The next three movements are the most openly antique. Lully’s Minuet is an old tune in new clothes. The Courante takes up another dance of the seventeenth century. The Entry of Cléonte borrows twice from Lully: a grave sarabande frames a livelier dance for the woodwind, punctuated by the triangle.

The Intermezzo is a double portrait of the two aristocrats in Jourdain’s circle.

The Dinner, the longest movement, is a banquet with a musical joke for every course. The guests enter to a march. The salmon arrives to the wave music of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, since the fish comes from the Rhine. The mutton is served with the bleating sheep from Strauss’s own Don Quixote. Small roast birds bring birdsong from Der Rosenkavalier, and one annotator also hears a snatch of Verdi’s “La donna è mobile”. A solo cello muses between courses, and the suite ends when a kitchen boy appears with the last dish and dances a lively waltz.