Pièces pittoresques

Pièces pittoresques (Picturesque pieces) are a set of ten pieces for piano by Emmanuel Chabrier. Four of the set were later orchestrated by the composer to make his Suite pastorale.

In 1880, while on a convalescent holiday at the coastal resort of Saint-Pair (near Granville), Chabrier composed what were to be called Pièces pittoresques. Both Alfred Cortot (in La musique française de piano, PUF, 1932) and Francis Poulenc (Emmanuel Chabrier, 1961) discuss these short works enthusiastically. César Franck, at their premiere in 1881, remarked that those present had "just heard something exceptional. This music links our own time to that of Couperin and Rameau".

The manuscript in the archive of Litolff publishers was destroyed by an air-raid on Brunswick in 1942.

The first performances of individual pieces took place on different dates: 9 April 1881 for Sous-bois, Idylle, Danse villageoise, Improvisation, Menuet pompeux, Scherzo-valse (Marie Poitevin); Mélancolie on 24 December 1887 (Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène); others unknown.

Several of the movements were incorporated by Constant Lambert in the 1934 ballet Bar aux Folies-Bergère.

D-flat major, 2/4; Allegro non troppo – vivo (dedicated to La comtesse de Narbonne-Lara)
For Poulenc, Paysage portrayed a landscape where life was to be enjoyed. The middle section is a voluble depiction of agitation calmed by the return of the main theme.

Paysage opens the cycle with a straight perfect cadence to the tonic D-flat, downgrading what textbooks would tell us should be reserved for a more conclusive moment. Paysage is riddled with rhythmic and harmonic games, not least the absence throughout of a single clear four-bar phrase; the piece's opening section, all in three-bar phrases, makes two teasing feints a four-bar phrases, both thwarted. Poulenc suggests that the piece should be played with "allegresse et tendresse".

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