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sai-national.org • SUMMER 2016 • PAN PIPES 13 VARIATIONS ON A THEME Piano reductions of Monsieur Petitpois achète un château and Chanson de Fortunio. most importantly, what IS a moustachette?" If this sounds like the set-up to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, you have found the link from Offenbach to this Tailleferre piece! To round out the plot, elements of farce such as a fainting heroine and a surprise ending are employed. Stock character types from this genre also appear. Adelestan is the handsome hero, Héloïse the lovely maiden in distress, and Oreste the buffoon who "gets it" in the end. e loyal servants are the Notary and Cunegonde (yes, the same Cunegonde from Voltaire's Candide, just 70 years older!). e Duke is an old money traditionalist who is very proud of his family heritage, and Petitpois is the nouveau-riche inventor whose ridiculous invention has suddenly placed him in the upper levels of society. Centore employs wordplay in the text, as part of the humor comes from the names used in the libretto. Petitpois, for example, translates to "little pea." He is also referred to as a tadpole and a green bean in the script. Other names scattered through the opera have similar double meaning, such as references to two La Bombardière ancestors whose names translate to "the undercooked" and "long-ears." Parody has been a long tradition in French music, both as satire and as serious imitation. Erik Satie, Tailleferre's mentor, penned parody chansons during his work with the chansonnier Vincent Hyspa. Satie arranged the music and Hyspa wrote new humorous words. One of these songs happened to be based on a Jacques Offenbach piece from La vie parisienne, a musical connection I will refer to later. Serious imitation as parody was also common in French music, as seen in Camielle Saint-Saëns's "Tortoises" movement from e Carnival of the Animals. is parody lis the familiar "Can Can" melody from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld but slows it down tremendously. Listeners would have known the tune well enough to get the joke. Tailleferre alters this form of parody by using similar tunes and styles to Offenbach's operétte numbers, but does not use exact copies of his melodies. In most operas there is at least one pair of young lovers, and Offenbach's works contain many examples. In M. Petitpois, Tailleferre pairs the lovely young Héloïse with the dashing Lieutenant Adelestan, who manages to steal her away from her dimwitted fiancé, Oreste, early in the production. Soon aer meeting, the couple sing a duet questioning, then giving in to their new found love for each other. Héloïse begins the song with Adelestan soon joining her, and when the lyrical lines combine, both characters sing the same words. is duet would have been recognizable to some of Tailleferre's audience as a parody of the title song from Offenbach's one-act opéra-comique La chanson de Fortunio, written in 1861. Although the opera was not widely known, the song became popular as a recital piece prior to World War I. Looking at the piano reductions of the first few bars of both pieces (see above), you can see the similarities. e arpeggiated accompaniment is almost identical, and the beginning solo line differs only slightly. Further into the duet, more differences occur, but the similarities are still audible. Another layer of parody is not immediately apparent in these examples; both songs serve similar functions in their respective operas. Fortunio sings this song to seduce his employer's wife and it is subsequently used by one of his clerks to seduce Fortunio's wife. In Petitpois, Adelestan is seducing Oreste's fiancée and not his wife, but the objective and result are the same. e vocal staging of the Petitpois duet calls into question Héloïse's fidelity as she begins the piece. In other sections of the libretto, she suggestively hints twice that the castle court yard "must be poetic in the moonlight." Aer it is clear she is leaving Oreste for Adelestan, Oreste remarks that her falling into the arms of a soldier "is becoming a habit." With this in mind, Tailleferre may have chosen to use this sure-fire seduction air to make us question exactly WHO is the seducer! Offenbach had a penchant for placing waltzes in his opérettes, and Tailleferre parodied this practice in Petitpois. She uses a Tyrolian waltz PARODY continued on page 14

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