This tweet
Everywhere there's a saxophone, let's take it out and put in a clarinet instead.
— Sørina Higgins (@SorinaHiggins) May 2, 2022
the other day got me thinking about Jacques Offenbach. Long ago I heard a musicologist lamenting, not very seriously, that Offenbach didn’t know about the saxophone: what wonderful craziness might he have composed for it? That lament, I now know, is historically incorrect. The saxophone was invented in the 1840s and Offenbach was still writing in the 1870s. But the old man was kind of right. Why isn’t there a saxophone solo in, for example, the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld?
This is my favorite performance of that overture. Apart from the musicianship, there are lots of reasons to love it. One is the oboe player’s look of relief when she finishes her solo (1:40 in).1 Another is the manic grin on the violinist’s face at 7:42 when the galop starts. But the biggest reason is how the conductor carefully sets it all up, but once the galop gets going, he just lets the orchestra run wild. Exactly what old Jacques would have wanted.
Everyone thinks of the galop infernal as the “cancan music”.2 But any nerdy child also knew the story of Orpheus, and I couldn’t put them together. What the devil, I wondered, was supposed to be happening on stage while the orchestra was playing that? No way to find out. Nobody I knew had ever seen a performance. The #1 reason to love the World Wide Web is that it can settle those questions I had in my childhood, which can lie dormant for half a century. Now I know:
Notes
- Why oboe players don’t suffer from repetitive stress injuries to their sinuses, I’ve never understood.
- And you know what? Just this once, everyone is right. The word “cancan” actually appears in the libretto.
Steve S
Of course Offenbach knew about saxophones.
The evidence is in the “Couplet des Rois” from La Belle Hélène:
Ces rois remplis de vaillance
C’est les deux Ajax.
Etalant t’avec jactance
Leur double thorax
Parmi le fracas immense
Des cuivres de Sax.
The German subtitle for the Lausanne Opera production renders the last two lines as “Es glänzen die Ajax wie die o-Phone von Herrn Sax.” That a different production translates “cuivres de Sax” as “brass band” while a third transforms “Sax” to the Tunisian city of Sfax are clever ruses to throw people off the scent.
Joe
It worked! I was so far off the scent that the bloodhounds are still laughing at me.