About this Piece

In his collection Letters from My Windmill, French author Alphonse Daudet included a story about 20-year-old Jan from a Provençal farm who falls in love with a girl from Arles (the eponymous arlésienne). When it is revealed that she has taken other lovers, the affair comes to an abrupt end, but Jan’s infatuation remains. Unable to recover from his heartbreak, Jan kills himself.

Daudet later expanded the story into a three-act play, which premiered at Paris’ Théâtre du Vaudeville in 1872 with incidental music by Georges Bizet. A musical prodigy who entered the Paris Conservatory at age 9, Bizet enjoyed early success and won the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious award for young French composers. But over the subsequent years he struggled to bring projects to completion, in part due to serving in France’s National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

With the war over and peace returning to France, theater director Léon Carvalho commissioned Bizet to write incidental music for Daudet’s play, and the composer delivered 27 individual pieces for a small ensemble. The play was a failure by most measurements, but Carvalho presciently assessed the production, saying: “The piece is a little too somber for my theater, but I think the music will be a powerful attraction, and it will soften somewhat the cruelty of the play.”

Bizet capitalized on this bright spot and created the first L’Arlesienne Suite for full orchestra that same year. His collaborator Ernest Guiraud later arranged a second suite, after Bizet’s untimely death at age 36.

The first suite begins with a stately theme that undergoes several transformations through various combinations of instruments culminating in the full orchestra—until a melancholy theme performed by solo alto saxophone emerges. L’Arlesienne was among the first purely symphonic compositions to include Adolphe Sax’s invention and marked a turning point for the instrument’s inclusion in orchestral works. The charming Minuet floats by with twirling triplets and skipping staccatos, before the violins, violas, cellos, and the alto sax join for the swooning Adagietto that seems to embody the term bittersweet. The last-movement Carillon opens with a brilliant horn fanfare, but soon a mournful tune intercedes; unlike the tragedy of the original play, though, the fanfares return, ushering in an ending full of cheer and sunshine.

—Amanda Angel