Suite from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman)

After the enormous success of their 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal returned to Baroque-era inspiration for his next collaboration with the reigning king of German opera, Richard Strauss. Hofmannsthal suggested reworking Molière’s comedy-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which first played for the court of King Louis XIV in 1670 with incidental music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal struggled to find the right format for their Molière adaptation. They first incorporated an abridged translation into the 1912 theater-opera hybrid Ariadne auf Naxos, but a format that embedded an entire opera within a substantial play proved cumbersome. When they revised Ariadne auf Naxos in 1916, they removed most remnants of the Molière play, including the charming incidental music Strauss had composed, some of it based on Lully’s original score. But that music and some new additions came back when they revived the Molière project on its own, and Strauss found an even more congenial home for that material when he assembled this concert suite in 1920.

The suite’s Intermezzo was originally the prelude to the second act, written to accompany the entrance of several aristocrats in music that Strauss marked “galant and graceful.” The tentative hiccups and unsteady chromatic slurs in the Minuet capture the awkwardness of a dance lesson.