Charles-Valentin Alkan - Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Papagallo (ALKAN'S 202ND BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE)

One of Alkan's first and most discerning twentieth century admirers, Bernard van Dieren, looking over his scattered, enigmatic, often bizarre oeuvre, with only rumor to draw upon for clues to the man behind it, ventured that "The best one could do to 'make something' of his life would be to suggest that it was wrapped in mystery." Despite the discovery of a cache of letters to his friend, Ferdinand Hiller, which throws some light on his day-to-day existence, the most avid research has failed to flesh out Alkan's shadowy remains and nearly everything about him must be inferred from circumstantial evidence. Some of the most revealing circumstances surrounding his Marcia Funèbre sulla Morte d'un Pappagallo (Funeral March for a Dead Parrot)published by Richault in 1859, are that Rossini's 1817 comic opera hit, La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), enjoyed a revival of five performances in Paris in 1858, and that Alkan's closest pupil (and probably his natural son), Elie Miriam Delaborde (1839-1913), as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, arrived in London in 1870 with 121 cockatoos and parrots. If Alkan, that rara avis, was not himself a bird fancier, he was close to one who was. In any case, the allusions, verbal and musical, to Rossini's opera semiseria are compelling. A footnote near the beginning of the score tells us, tongue-in-cheek, "This reminiscence is due solely to an ornithological accident. I pray you, connoisseurs of La gazza ladra, do not attribute the slightest impertinence to the deceased parrot's song." And the score's title page, comically strutting, casts the composer as an Italian -- "Parole e Musica del Cittadino C° Vino Alkan (primogenito)."

In La gazza ladra, the servant girl, Ninetta, has been condemned to death for stealing various valuables which, in fact, a thieving pet magpie has spirited away. The funereal march to which she is led to the gallows is parodied in Alkan's score by a melancholy bassoon and three oboes laconically imitating the parrot's squawk. A tenor enters to ask, in recitative, "As-tu déjeuné, Jaco" -- the French equivalent for "Polly want a cracker?" or "Who's a pretty Polly?" -- repeated by the bass and leading to the lugubrious march in which tenor and bass are joined by two sopranos mournfully declaiming together, "As-tu déjeuné, Jaco? Et de quoi? Ah." From this spare material Alkan wrings some pithy and compellingly concise developments, including a fugato of strangely wailing melismas on "Ah," to an effect at once grotesque, suggestive of operatic hurly-burly, and, in its compositional cunning, sublime. The composer specifies that the reed stops of a harmonium -- an instrument which Berlioz had been pushing since the 1840s and which was catching on by 1859 -- could be substituted for bassoon and oboes. It has been suggested -- on the merest circumstantial speculation -- that Alkan's Marcia Funèbre may have been inspired by, or even figured in, the programs chez the retired Rossini at which the latter's péchés de vieillesse (sins of old age), delightful musical parodies and audacities, were heard.

(allmusic.com)

Please take note that the audio AND the sheet music ARE NOT mine. Change the quality to a minimum of 480p if the video is blurry.

Original audio:    • Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot  
Original sheet music: imslp.org