Alphonse Daudet set his play "L'Arlésienne" in his beloved Provence. The story deals with a farmer named Frédéri who becomes infatuated with a woman of Arles (the title character, who never appears onstage), and resolves to marry her and bring her back to his ancestral farm. He learns, however, that the woman is another man's mistress, and sinks into depression. Despite the devoted attention of the innocent country girl Vivette, Frédéri commits suicide on the eve of his arranged marriage to her. Bizet provided small spurts of music to underpin the action, in the manner of contemporary film music, and these pieces required substantial fleshing-out and rescoring to produce coherent concert suites. Bizet arranged the first suite himself, but the second was compiled after his death by his friend Ernest Guiraud.

The first suite's Prelude contains three themes. First is the stern "Marcho dei Rei," an eighteenth-century Provençal tune that undergoes four simple variations. Next is an andante melody for saxophone (one of the mere twenty-six instruments in the original pit orchestra). This uncertain theme is associated with Frédéri's mentally retarded brother, and it's accompanied by a four-note flute motif that is inverted to introduce the Prelude's turbulent last section, associated with Frédéri's passion.

Next is a Minuetto, originally the intermezzo separating the play's second and third acts. It's a robust and imposing waltz-minuet in C minor; in the middle is an extended, flowing Trio section in A flat, which ends with a diminuendo achieved by the strings dropping out stand by stand.

The Adagietto, one of the score's high points, originally formed the background to a conversation between a man and woman meeting for the first time in fifty years, recalling the feelings for each other they left unexpressed in their youth. Bizet's music is a masterpiece of tenderness and delicacy, quietly scored for strings.

The first suite ends with the Carillon, which originally opened the play's last act with joyously pealing wedding bells represented by an insistent three-note figure. The middle section of this ABA structure mirrors the unsteady gait of the old woman from the Adagietto as she sees for the first time in half a century the old farm buildings that were once dear to her heart.

Bizet used most of his best music in the first suite, so for the second, Guiraud had only leftovers to deal with. He compensated in part by pulling in music from other sources, and composing new music upon themes from the incidental score.

The second suite opens with a Pastorale, originally the prelude to Act 2. This broad Andante evokes the rolling Provençal countryside with a simple theme subjected to several treatments and interspersed with gentle, rustic woodwind passages. Next comes an Intermezzo; despite its portentous unison opening theme, the piece dissolves into a sweet Gounod-like melody for saxophone and horn over a pizzicato, arpeggiated accompaniment.

Guiraud borrowed the Minuet that follows from Act 3 of Bizet's La Jolie fille de Perth. It's a lovely flute-and-harp piece that originally accompanied a scene of aristocratic seduction, with a ceremonial Trio section for full orchestra.

The suite ends with another Guiraud brainstorm. It's the Farandole, a hectic, pipe-and-drum-driven peasant dance based on the Provençal "Danse dei Chivau-Frus." In a simpler form it originally accompanied the moment in the pre-nuptial festivities when Frédéri resolved to kill himself. To make a more brilliant finale, Guiraud weaves into it the Prelude's opening theme, the "Marcho dei Rei."

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