Bizet was invited to compose incidental music for Alphonse Daudet’s drama L’Arlesienne by the impresario Leon Carvalho, who had produced Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Gounod’s Faust and Romeo et Juliette, and Bizet’s own Les Pecheurs de perles during his illustrious career with the Paris Theatre-Lyrique. Carvalho had since become director of the Theatre du Vaudeville, where he hoped to revitalize the melodrama, which in its original meaning was a practice of accompanying the most significant of the spoken texts with music, usually of the symbolic sort.Carvalho’s budget was small, and Bizet was constrained to compose his music for an orchestra of twenty-six.

Bizet wrote more than two dozen individual passages of music or the three-act play, most of them melodramas of a dozen bars or less based on one of the five or six motives that describe the critical situations in the play. Between the acts and for scene changes he provided fully developed movements, and of coarse there was an orchestral overture. There was music, as well, for on-stage dancing and an offstage chorus.

The story is of a young man, Frederi, who has lost his heart to a woman—who is only spoken of, never seen—of suspect virtue. She is from Arles, that picturesque walled city in the region of Provence immortalized in the paintings of Van Gogh. (Daudet was born in nearby Nimes.) The music adopts provencal tunes, like the “March of the Three Kings” you hear at the beginning, and supplies an occasion for the farandole, a festive street dance where lines of dances in traditional costume, each linked to the next by a shared handkerchief, wend their way through the streets behind a player of the pipe and tabor. It’s the sort of dance they enjoy doing on the bridge at Avignon, just up the river from Arles.

Bizet drew his own suite from L’Arlesienne, rescoring it for full orchestra, shortly after the play opened. The Prelude is identical to the overture of the play: five statements of the “March of the Three Kings,” the three tutti variations offset by two quieter ones; then, in the saxophone, the bittersweet theme of the Innocent, the half-witted but insightful younger brother of the hero; and finally, in the strings, Frederi’s motive, often transmogrified during the play into a sort of Fate motive. The minuet precedes wedding festivities in act III—these end in tragedy—as does the carillon movement. The Adagietto is heard at the moment when the venerable Mere Renaud, having arrived for the wedding, encounters for the first time in perhaps fifty years the family retainer Balthazar, her former lover. The lovely pastoral duet for flutes in the middle of the carillon is the music of Mere Renaud’s entry.

Arranging he second suite was the work of the composer’s long-time friend and associate Ernest Guiraud, who also saw as best he could to the preservation of Carmen. The Pastorale is the morning music before act II, which begins at dawn on the Vaccares salt marsh in the Camargue, southern Provence; its middle section, with tabor, is in the play a tra-la chorus of offstage merrymakers. The Intermezzo is the entr’acte between the two scenes of act II, based on another Provencal folk melody; the minuet is not from L’Arlesienne at all, but rather from La Jolie Fille de Perth, Bizet’s opera of 1867. The piece de resistance is the justly celebrated Farandole, and it was Guiraud’s most satisfactory idea to introduce it with the “March of the Three Kings” and then to superpose the two.