Milhaud spent the years of World War I assisting poet Paul Claudel, who was then France's ambassador to Brazil. After the war, Milhaud returned to Paris, Brazil-besotted. He soon couldn't help but assemble, in his words, "a few popular melodies, tangos, maxixes, sambas, and even a Portuguese fado and [transcribe] them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each successive pair." The structure is even more ingenious than Milhaud's description suggests; the rondo theme appears 12 times, cycling through 12 different keys rising in minor thirds. This strict harmonic scheme did not prevent Milhaud from using polytonality throughout, adding a comic tension to the lively score. There's nothing the least bit academic about the result, which, for all its Brazilian character, also carries the boozy smell of the French music hall. Milhaud named the piece Le boeuf sur le toit (The Bull on the Roof) after a Brazilian popular song and initially subtitled it "Cinéma-Symphonie," explaining that he hoped it might be used to accompany a Charlie Chaplin film. But poet/provocateur Jean Cocteau immediately appropriated it for an absurdist stage production he conceived, set in a Prohibition-era American speakeasy (The Nothing-Doing Bar) and performed in slow motion by the Fretellini acrobats and clowns from the Médrano Circus. In Cocteau's scenario, a barman serves a bizarre mix of clientele, including fashionable society characters, a boxer, a black dwarf, and a redheaded woman dressed as a man. A policeman arrives, whereupon the barman and his patrons transform the establishment into an innocent milk bar. The copper continues his surveillance, though, so the barman turns on an overhead fan and decapitates him. The cross-dresser does a parody of Salome's dance with the policeman's head, the patrons wander off into the night, and the barman reassembles and revives the policeman, presenting him with the evening's bill. Understandably, Le boeuf sur le toit is almost never presented according to Cocteau's plan anymore and is most often heard as a concert piece. (In the 1980s, however, Swiss director Adrian Marthaler contrived his own quasi-Brechtian treatment for television.) Milhaud was never quite sure what to make of what Cocteau did with this score, protesting in his autobiography that "I, who hated comedy...had only aspired to create a merry divertissement in memory of the Brazilian rhythms that had so captured my imagination."

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