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Étienne Méhul: “Ouverture Burlesque” (1794)
From the album Toy Symphonies & Other Fun
Here’s something a bit more light-hearted, after a few rather intense offerings in previous weeks. What are “toy symphonies,” you ask? According to Raymond Lewenthal, curator of this delightful record, the toy symphony is a whimsical relic of 18th and 19th-century domestic music making:
Here was music in which the whole family could participate…the elders playing on “serious” instruments such as the piano, violin and cello, while the children took care of organized noise in the form of peeps, tweets, thumps, and what have you. Sometimes the elders took all the parts, to the delectation of the children. Sometimes the children were advanced enough to manage everything, to the vast entertainment of doting grown-ups.
This lost art of amateur musicking was quite the big deal in the days before ubiquitous sonic accompaniment. Toy symphonies were composed (and no doubt improvised) not only by casual musicians, but also by professional composers. One particularly famous toy symphony, long attributed to Joseph Haydn, is now thought to have been written by Leopold Mozart, father of you-know-who.
In French, the toy symphony was known as the “symphonie burlesque,” which is the genre invoked in this piece by the French composer Étienne Méhul (1763-1817). Méhul, the veritable court composer of the French Revolution, created a number of bombastic musical spectacles to celebrate the new Republic, including a performance for the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794. For this work, Méhul allegedly marshaled a chorus of 300,000 voices, which was split up into four “armies” which sang the root, third, fifth, and octave of the tonic chord.
The Ouverture burlesque finds Méhul in a much more intimate mood. This recording prominently features a blown membranophone instrument known in French as the mirliton, but better known among English speakers as the noble kazoo. An instrument with a much longer pedigree than one might think, the mirliton was discussed in organological treatises by Francis Bacon and Marin Mersenne. Lewenthal’s assertion that this is the first appearance of the instrument on record, however exciting the notion, must be taken with a grain of salt.
Méhul’s piece ends with the marking “charivari,” at which point the band breaks out in a riotous coda in six different keys at once. Noise should always be this much fun.
Played 100 time(s).
November 24, 2010, 4:22pm
