"I'm sending you a piece in which every note presents a difficulty," Chabrier wrote to Edouard Risler, a prominent pianist and the dedicatee of the Bourrée fantasque. That is an even more apt observation today than in 1891, when it was composed, as it calls for a sec, crackling touch and sparing use of the pedal, oddments of style out of favor from at least the mid-twentieth century. But the essential difficulty in animating the Bourrée fantasque is overtaking its spontaneity, its feel of inspired improvisation, for nothing is more dispiriting than a rote performance that may have the letter well enough in hand but misses the Bourrée's zesty spiritedness. The rapid-fire repeated-note theme rounded with a turn or gruppetto with which it opens is one of those miracles that genius shakes abundantly from its sleeve and that lesser mortals can only envy—bits of common musical small coin seized upon by a great personality and fashioned into a compelling, original, inevitable statement, rather like a scintillantly pointed observation that seems so ripely obvious that one marvels that it slumbered obscurely for so long. The real wonder is how Chabrier found such ebullience within himself when he was already firmly in the grip of the syphilitic paralysis that would devour his mind over the next two years—by the time his Gwendoline reached the Opéra de Paris, in December 1893, he could no longer recognize its music as his own. But, as expounded in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, the ravages of syphilis stimulated some creative minds (e.g., Schubert's, Wolf's, Nietzsche's)—to a preternatural brilliance before snuffing them out. In his final productive year-and-a-half, Chabrier also composed the mixed bag of the Pièces (5) posthumes for piano, the exquisite Ode à la musique for chorus and orchestra, and the magnificent first act of Briséis, which promised to rival the greatest French operas of the nineteenth century. The Bourrée fantasque's initial sally recalls less its thumping Baroque model than an apotheosis of can-can—an explosion of panic, manic gaiety paradoxically straitly laced by the deadpan logic of its exposition. Suddenly, the pace slackens and molto espressivo a sensuous, sinuous melody ascends amid opulent harmonies in a flirtatious tease not unmixed with winsome sentiment. His premises primly stated, Chabrier develops them with unfailing invention, coups de théâtre, and a coruscating dialogue that keeps one's attention gratifyingly riveted until the final coy peroration. The so-called "gay 'Nineties" live forever in its exuberant fantastications.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.