Music and Vinyl: Milhaud - Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit

French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) was a member of Les Six - the group of Paris-based composers (which included Poulenc and Honegger) whose music was in many ways a reaction against the Germanic tradition exemplified by Wagner and the impressionistic music of Debussy and Ravel.

Darius Milhaud

Milhaud, a violinist who studied composition at the Paris Conservatory, and also with Vincent D'Indy, became a secretary to the French ambassador to Brazil. The music of Brazil had its influence on Milhaud and he produced a number of pieces evoking invoking the sounds of the carnival. A Brazilian folk tune he came across was "The Bull on the Roof" - which he translated in French as "Le boeuf sur le toit", and which became the title of a piece composed as if it was accompanying a silent film from Charlie Chaplin.

However avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau - almost a "manager" for Les Six - persuaded Milhaud that the music should be used as a ballet, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. This surrealist production of 1921 - with action "pleasantly devoid of all meaning" - has characters such as the Black Boxer, the Barman, the Jockey, the Black Billiard Player, the Red-Haired Lady, the Décolletée Lady, the Man in Evening Dress, and the Policeman - all wearing large cardboard heads.

The musicologist Robert Matthew-Walker calls the work "a rondeau-avec-reprises, a stylization of Rameau and Couperin". The music cycles through all the major keys and some minor ones. Milhaud quoted extensively from Brazilian tunes. An analysis published in 2002 cites more than 20 pieces by 14 Brazilian composers referred to in the score. The lively opening motif – Milhaud's own invention and not a borrowing – recurs throughout. It is interspersed with several subsidiary themes, principally a syncopated melody for strings, an elegant theme for woodwind and a brassy theme for trumpets. They are developed into a rhapsodic passage for strings, and another with a strong Latin-American flavour. As the work nears its conclusion the themes are brought together in an exuberant coda. The analyst Richard Whitehouse writes, "The music is permeated by polytonal inflections that are a common feature of Milhaud's music in this period, giving it unexpected harmonic twists, while ensuring that the work's melodic and rhythmic appeal are never in doubt".

The recording here was originally released on Mercury Living Presence in the US and by Philips in the UK in 1967.