Chabrier is one of the great originals. Through the common musical language of his day—the salon song, the piano genre piece, comic opera—he transformed everything he touched with an irresistible combination of verve, drollery, and refinement. His piano writing is sui generis and utterly inimitable because it is pure invention. "Without hesitation I declare that the Pièces pittoresques are as important for French music as Debussy's Préludes," Francis Poulenc noted. But that is hindsight—until late in his broken-off career, Chabrier was dismissed as an amateur, a dilettante. Maintaining by day a civil service career in the Ministry of the Interior, Chabrier entered capaciously into the life of the grand boulevards, the cafés, the salons, a-swarm with poets, artists, and musicians—thus this son of the Auvergne became the quintessential Parisian.

One would have had to be very discerning to detect genius—though it is there—in such sporadic productions as the Marche des Cipayes (1863) and the Impromptu (1873) for piano. His exquisitely spirited operettas, L'Étoile (1877) and Une Éducation manquée (1879), lifted the inspired fooling of Offenbach into a transcendental dimension, but they had only limited exposure.

In the summer of 1880, Chabrier made a pilgrimage to Munich with Henri Duparc to hear Wagner's Tristan und Isolde—a decisive experience leading to his resignation from the Ministry in November. And in 1881 the ten Pièces pittoresques appeared. Following their première, given by Marie Poitevin at a concert of the Société Nationale de musique, August 9, 1881, César Franck remarked, "We have just heard something quite extraordinary. This music is a link between our epoch and that of Couperin and Rameau."

The "Paysage" of the first number could be by Watteau—with a raucous commedia del arte troupe disembarking. The 18 bars of "Mélancolie" open on a daydream of exquisite wistfulness. "Tourbillon"—"whirlwind"—dusts up hat-snatching, skirt-lifting coruscations to vanish as suddenly as it began. Over an undulating ostinato, "Sous-bois" insinuates a melody redolent of the most blithesome happiness. Through the intricate exoticism of the "Mauresque," frolicsome can-can girls languorously disport themselves. Sans pedal, a fetching legato melody—avec frâicheur et naiveté—spins out over an obsessive two-part staccato accompaniment to evoke an hypnotic "Idylle." The "Danse villageoise" is foot-stomping rustication recollected in crisply elegant satire, to contrast superbly with an "Improvisation" of extended Schumannesque fantasy. Wickedly self-parodying, the "Menuet pompeux" appealed sufficiently to the fastidious Ravel that he orchestrated it. And the "Scherzo-valse" brings the revels to a close with scintillant suggestions of supernatural gaiety.

The sustained alchemy of the Pièces pittoresques owes largely to what has since come to be called "crossover"—the sec crackle of the style sévère played off against sensual Lisztian legato, old modal inflections and new harmonic "audacities" (usually ascribed to Debussy in his prime), commonplace expectations met by the most persuasive melody—the genre piece touched with Falstaffian, Pan-ic genius.

Chabrier himself orchestrated the "Idylle," "Danse villageoise," "Sous-bois," and the "Scherzo-valse" in 1888 as the Suite pastorale.

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