This appears to be France's answer to such American recordings as Columbia's of Stephen Foster's "Social Orchestra": an evocation of the popular music of an earlier day within a utilitarian framework. The orchestra is of just such a composition as one might have encountered at a dance at some chateau or other big country estate in, say, the Ile de France or Touraine in the middle of the last century. There are examples of solo cornetting and clarinet ensembling reminiscent of bandstands in the park. The music consists of waltzes, schottisches, a polka, a mazurka, a fandango, and, rather puzzlingly, a march--perhaps a nod to Gallic worship of la gloire militaire. Put the record on and you can imagine that you are Emma Bovary, starry-eyed at her first and only grand country ball--though why anyone would want to be poor Emma escapes me. The music is all by long-forgotten Frenchmen, but that fact aside, one might easily substitute for the chateau the columns and magnolias of the Old Plantation. Or so the contents of my grandmother's folio of piano music, with those lovely engraved covers, seem to proclaim. However, Ariane Segal's accompanying notes evoke Renoir, and that's just ducky with me.
Mme. Segal's remarks are generally evocative, though here and there they appear to have lost something in translation. Can anyone out there explain to me, for instance, why on fair days "word of the country balls made all Paris run to the Tuileries, and later to the Moulin de la Galette at the top of the Montmartre hill"? Granted that Montmartre still qualified as a suburb a century ago, surely the Tuileries has hardly qualified as "country" for some time! At any rate, the image evoked is fascinating.
We are told that M. Bentaberry spent years working up the music. Would that Mme. Segal had found someone equally dedicated to explain it, for the notes (unsigned) are a compendium of nonsense and folklore. The explanation of the waltz, for example, goes back to a chauvinistic bit of pseudo-etymology that has long since been discounted by most musicologists. It would have us believe that a French Renaissance dance called la volta was somehow exported to Germany, where it became the walzer (pronounced roughly "volltza"). Both dances were in three-four meter and both involved jumping, but the volta pretty clearly died out around 1600 and nothing links it with the Austrian or Bavarian backwoods. Since contemporary sources tell us that it was just becoming popular in the 1550s,’ it is also pretty hard to take the information that it was first danced in Paris on November 9, 1178!
As for the polka, I suppose one could say that it originated in Austria if "Austria" includes the Hapsburg empire. However, it is, as I assumed everyone knew, a Czech folkdance. There are polkas--not so called--going back to at least the turn of the century, though the name does not turn up until the 1830s. It does not (as we are told it does) mean "half" but rather "Polish girl," though no one knows why. After 1830 it raced westward like wildfire, arriving on these shores in the reign of President Polk, which created much merriment.
The schottisch (not Scottish!) almost certainly did not originate in Scotland, nor did the ecossaise, with which it is sometimes confused. The name is German, but we first hear of it in England in the 1840s, where it was also called "German polka." The mazurka came into Germany from Poland at the end of the seventeenth century, but its district of origin is known as Mazowsze or Mazovia, not Mazuria, though the inhabitants are sometimes called Mazurs. And I find nothing about a Basque origin for the Spanish fandango, which may have been imported from South America.
