Les Mariés De La Tour Eiffel is peculiar work, composed by committee as it were. The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower is a ballet to a libretto (it calls for two narrators) by Jean Cocteau, who originally called it The Wedding Party Massacre. Resulting from a commission to Cocteau and composer Georges Auric, the involvement of other composers of Les Six, came after Auric couldn't complete the score in time. It was first performed in Paris in 1921
A synopsis of the ballet is this:
The new couple have a wedding breakfast on Bastille Day (July 14) at a table on one of the platforms of the famous tower. A guest makes a pompous speech. When a humpbacked photographer bids everyone to "watch the birdie," it appears that a telegraph office suddenly springs into existence on the platform. A lion comes in and eats one of the guests for breakfast and a strange figure called "a child of the future" appears and kills everybody. Nevertheless, the ballet concludes with the end of the wedding.
Cocteau said the ballet was about "Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life."
The musical numbers, which are interspersed with narration and acted scenes, are as follows:
- Overture (14 July) - Georges Auric
- Marche nuptiale - Darius Milhaud
- Discours du Général (Polka) – Francis Poulenc
- La Baigneuse de Trouville – Poulenc
- La Fugue du massacre – Milhaud
- La Valse des dépêches – Germaine Tailleferre
- Marche funèbre – Arthur Honegger (in which he quotes the Waltz from Gounod's Faust)
- Quadrille – Tailleferre
- Ritournelles – Auric
- Sortie de la noce – Milhaud.
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