This is day 15 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD
For another story behind this piece, see a previous entry.
At first glance, this is just another Victorian salon piece, plucked from obscurity when it was used as an alternate variation in the Corsaire pas de deux (for a history of how it got there, see Mr Lopez’s wikipedia page on the subject).
But only at first glance. Either I’m suggestible, or this piece really does do what the title says. The simple three-note rising melody is one that appears as a countermelody, rising or falling, in probably thousands of waltzes. Nearly every Piaf waltz-song has one, the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Evgenii Onegin has one, Marlene Dietrich songs are full of them.
So when that generic countermelody becomes the tune, it might remind us of any number of half-remembered waltz fragments without necessarily remembering what the actual tune was, which is just what a ‘souvenir de bal’ should do. It’s also stated in a harmonically unstable form, beginning on a 2nd inversion of the dominant, quietly, and with a long anacrusis. It quite literally drifts in to our consciousness. And that first chord is rather lovely, isn’t it? If any chord said ‘warm, wistful smile’, that’s the one. Add all this to the fact that hearing the music will bring back memories of the Corsaire variation done by someone you admire at a performance that you really enjoyed, and the whole souvenir de bal(let) thing becomes even stronger.
Beyond that, it’s also a waltz that bears playing slowly, because it’s supposed to be a memory of something rather than the thing itself. It’s also just very, very simple in construction, and leaves space for dancing, which is one of the biggest compliments you can pay dance music.
