Here’s a little quiz: Le Boeuf sur le toit is

1. A Brazilian folksong
2. The name of a nightclub in Paris
3. An avant-garde theater piece by Jean Cocteau
4. A piece for small orchestra by Darius Milhaud
5. All of the above.

Anyone good at taking multiple choice tests can figure out the answer to that one easily. If “all of the above” is one of the choices, it is nearly always the expected answer. But how do all these bits of fact fit together? 

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud was born in 1892 into a Jewish family that had lived in Aix-en-Provence for eight centuries. His parents were musically gifted, and he was precociously so. At age 3, he could play duets with his father on the piano. He learned to play violin at 7 and began composing at 13.

He entered the Paris Conservatory as a violin student but soon turned his attention to composition instead. His teachers included Dukas and Widor. At the same time, he became friends with numerous writers and painters, especially Paul Claudel.

When the First World War broke out, Milhaud’s rheumatoid arthritis rendered him unfit for military service. The French government appointed Claudel as ambassador to Brazil in 1916, and Claudel took Milhaud along as his secretary. Two years of experiencing the native music of Brazil left an indelible impression on Milhaud. In fact, he later commented that of all the many places where he traveled, only Brazil influenced his style.

Les Six

Milhaud returned to Paris in 1918 and soon met Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Satie gathered a group of composers around him that he called les nouveaux jeunes (the new youth). Besides Milhaud, they were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre.

When Satie lost interest in his group, Cocteau gladly took his place as their mentor. Known as Les Six, they remained lifelong friends, although they didn’t have enough in common musically to count as a school of composition.

Milhaud’s polytonality

Cezanne’s paintings made the landscape of Aix-en-Provence well known to the world. In his youth, Milhaud had the daily experience of walking in it.

Occasionally at night, he experienced overlapping beams of energy from the earth and sky, “a thousand simultaneous musics rushing towards me from all directions.” He later pointed to this experience as the source of his experiments with polytonality.

Although he was not the first composer to compose music in two or more keys at once, he was the first to analyze the technique and used it more consistently than most other composers.

He used it extensively in works as early as piece Le Boeuf sur le toit. It is present to some extent in his entire output, which was considerable. At his death in 1974, he had published op. 443.

Le Boeuf sur le toit

Milhaud describes his inspiration for Le Boeuf sur le toit as “haunted by my memories of Brazil.” In 1919, he assembled several popular Brazilian dances and composed an original theme between each two of them that makes the piece kind of like a rondo. Unlike a regular rondo, however, each occurrence is in a different key—twelve keys in all.

The title translates “O boi no telhado,” the Portuguese name of one of the Brazilian tunes. In English, it’s “the ox on the roof.”

Milhaud’s original thought was to use it to accompany one of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films. Cocteau objected. He proposed instead to devise a live show to go with the music.

Cocteau hired some circus clowns and acrobats to play the various parts. Everyone wore huge masks designed by Guy-Pierre Fauconnet. As Milhaud described them, they “lent peculiar distinction to all the gestures, and made hands and feet unperceivable.” But Fauconnet died suddenly before he could produce his designs. Raoul Dufy actually made the masks, costumes, and scenery.

The first performances took place at a small club called Comédie des Champs-Elysées. For some reason, Cocteau was afraid the public would not come, so he sent out three hundred special invitations. It resulted in what Milhaud recalled as an unbelievable crush at the door.

Besides Le Boeuf sur le toit, the evening’s performance included pieces by Erik Satie, Georges Auric, and Francis Poulenc.

Under the name The Nothing-Doing Bar, the piece enjoyed two weeks of performances in London’s biggest music hall in July 1920. Milhaud recalled, it “was sandwiched in between a number by Japanese acrobats and Ruth Draper’s highly original sketches.” It was hugely successful with the public, but English critics viewed it with much less enthusiasm than French critics had.

Cocteau’s description

Cocteau wrote a preface to explain his intentions. Here are parts of it:

“Le Boeuf sur le toit” is the name of the bar where our play takes place. Do not look for significance in the name, any more than would in the names “The Smoking Dog” or “The Blind Horse.” It was the name of a very popular Brazilian maxixe [a popular dance form]. I am borrowing it for the needs of the cause.”

He goes on to complain that the Parisian public had regarded his earlier piece Parade as a farce. So he deliberately made Le Boeuf sur le toit into a farce, “a real medieval farce, with masks, men playing women, pantomime, and dance. The timing had to be such that the disorder and improvisation would be effective though by no means accidental. Charlie Chaplin sets an example for us in these modern farces where he achieves real greatness. . .

“Do not look for either double meanings or anachronisms in Boeuf. It is, and I repeat, an American Farce done by a Parisian who has never been to America.” (It is set in American speak-easy during Prohibition.)

In order to keep the farce from distracting the audience from the music, the 25-piece orchestra played it twice, once as an overture and the second time to accompany the farce. Cocteau thought he had made a mistake in Parade of having the dance too strictly adapted to the music. Milhaud’s music is very fast, so to avoid redundancy between the eye and the ear, Cocteau paired it with very slow gestures.

One review

Most of the reviews I have found describe the pantomime in some detail but say little about the music. The most extended description of the music comes in one by G. de Pawlowski.

But what are extraordinary are the large cardboard heads of the actors, which are extremely amusing because of the remorseless immobility that they give to the different characters, according to the same method in ancient theatre.

What is delightful is Darius Milhaud’s music, which is also one of the most interesting works. This composer has an extravagantly passionate soul for all music. All the harmonies, all the recurring motifs, all the charming dissonances jostle each other and are justified in an orchestral ensemble that is particularly remarkable. It is the music, it must be said, that more easily grapples with the mystery of the subconscious than the plastic arts, and what would be intolerable to our eyes easily becomes enchantment to our ears.

There is a French expression “boeuf sur la langue,” or ox on the tongue, which means paid not to talk. Pawlowski points out that “boeuf sur le toit” has nothing to do with it.

The nightclub

After the success of Le Boeuf sur le toit, Cocteau and his group spent a lot of time at a bar called La Gaya. Milhaud and Auric, joined by Arthur Rubinstein, often performed a six-hand piano version of the piece. The bar became so popular it outgrew its space.

And that’s where a bit of confusion began. In Milhaud’s words,

When the Bar Goya was transferred to new premises, its owner, Moyses, asked Cocteau and myself to allow him to use the name Le Boeuf sur le toit. The idea tickled our fancy, and we agreed. We had no inkling that this would cause so much confusion; from then on, it was supposed that we were the owners of this bar, an error that was all the more deeply rooted because we went there so often, and it was stated in the program notes for concerts that I had called my ballet after a night club.

Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the nightclub, still exists, although it has moved several more times. Le Boeuf sur le toit, Milhaud’s orchestra piece, remains one of his best-known pieces. Cocteau’s pantomime appears to be best remembered for its association with Milhaud’s music.

Sources:

Conversation with Milhaud / Darius Milhaud and Henry Breitrose, Music Educators Journal 56 (March 1970): 54-56.
Darius Milhaud biography / DariusMilhaud.org
Notes without music: an autobiography, by Darius Milhaud (Alfred Knopf, 1953), excerpted in Le Bœuf sur le toit / Darius Milhaud, Jean Cocteau, J. M., Nancy E. Nes, Louis Laloy, Jean Bastia and Victoria Nes Kirby; in The Drama Review 16 (September 1972): 27-45.
Preface to Le Boeuf sur le toit / Jean Cocteau, translated by Nancy E. Nes from Comedia, February 21, 1920.  excepted from Le Bœuf sur le toit / Darius Milhaud, Jean Cocteau, J. M., Nancy E. Nes, Louis Laloy, Jean Bastia and Victoria Nes Kirby; in The Drama Review 16 (September 1972): 27-45.