Hahn's operetta Ciboulette fits a genre which has not traveled extensively beyond its native France. Hahn, a fixture of the French salon, had charm to spare; early in his career he composed genteel works with perfect ease and sang in a pleasing light baritone. Many of those with whom he associated were sensitive, refined products of what might be called a hothouse environment, and often indolent. Hahn formed a very close friendship with the writer Marcel Proust, with whom he shared many of his thoughts and feelings.

The music that flowed from him with such facility may have lacked profundity, but it certainly did not lack elegance. Hahn's perceptions and artistic judgments were acutely drawn. He rejected insincerity. Rather, he said, "I like taste, I detest extravagance, I loathe imposture." And further: "The voice, the human voice, is more beautiful than all the rest!" He opined that "Don Giovanni is musically far below Marriage of Figaro, in turn inferior to the sublime Così fan tutte."

The same freshness and surprise that informs his many songs are what make Ciboulette such a small masterpiece. Ciboulette recaptures the composer's younger years and represents a bucolic life filtered through the sophistication of the large city. As annotator Pierre Petit has put it, "The Paris portrayed in Ciboulette is much more that of Utrillo than that of real-life working class women at the beginning of the century."

Ciboulette came about through the invitation of Robert de Flers, a friend of Hahn's who had recently been appointed editor of Le Figaro. He wrote to Hahn asking both that he undertake regular music-critical writing for the publication and that he compose an operetta to a text co-authored by Flers and Francis de Croisset. The column proved a considerable success, running for more than two decades—and Ciboulette won instant acclaim when it was premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés on April 7, 1923.

The story is simple. A young woman of beauty and intelligence is told by a clairvoyant that she will marry a man found under a cabbage leaf, won from a woman who turns instantly white, and whose proposal comes in a tambourine. Ciboulette is aided in achieving her desire by an older man, experienced in the ways of love. Such a plot could be kept aloft only by music of lightness and unceasing invention. Flers was correct in believing that Hahn was the person to compose such a score.

The operetta is one of those that blur the line between classical and popular music in a distinctively French way; it sets out, perhaps, to be a twentieth-century counterpart to the hit nineteenth-century works of Offenbach and others, and it succeeds delightfully. While few will ever be able to experience this work in live performance (it demands style-conscious singers fluent in French), an acquaintanceship with a recording is highly rewarding. Listeners will not fail to appreciate the delight and musical richness that inform the score's every page.

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