AURIC: La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast)
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Georges Auric (1899-1983) Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) Complete Film Score, 1946 The Film Once upon a time there was a Merchant who had a son,...
Georges Auric (1899-1983)
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête)
Complete Film Score, 1946
The Film
Once upon a time there was a Merchant who had a son,
Ludovic, and three daughters, Felicie, Adelaide and
Belle. The last of these was handsome, modest and
sympathetic, and therefore the Cinderella of the family.
One day the old man went away on business, eventually
learning that he has lost all his money. On his way
home he becomes lost in a forest and in his wandering
comes upon a splendid and mysterious castle. Entering,
he falls asleep at a sumptuously laid table. The
following morning, woken by distant roaring, he makes
his escape through the park, picking a rose, the present
he has promised his daughter Belle. At this moment
the Beast appears in front of him, a horrifying creature
dressed as a prince, who tells him that he must die for
his theft, unless one of his daughters will take his place.
After his return home on the back of Magnificent, a
flying horse, the Merchant tells his family of this
strange adventure and Belle at once offers herself in
sacrifice for her father's life. Avenant, a friend of
Ludovic, who is in love with Belle, objects, but the girl
secretly makes her own way to the castle and after
wandering for a long time through its magic rooms and
corridors, she meets the Beast, who treats her
courteously and showers her with precious gifts. Belle
realises that the Beast has a kind heart and she suffers
because of his ugliness. She learns, however, that the
sentence of death will be cancelled, if she agrees to
marry the Beast, but this she cannot do.
Belle is homesick and this and the news that her
father is ill persuades the Beast to allow her to go home
for eight days. As a token of his love for her he gives
her magic objects, the secrets of his power, among them
a glove, a looking-glass and a golden key. Ludovic and
Avenant are excited at Belle's return in a fine dress and
decked out in jewels. At the instigation of Felicie and
Adelaide they steal the key, mount the magic horse and
fly to the castle, planning to kill the Beast and seize his
treasure. Belle's compassion for the Beast, her gaoler,
has reached a state approaching love. In the magic
looking-glass she sees the lonely, weeping Beast and by
means of the magic glove instantly has herself
transported back to the castle. She finds the Beast
suffering in the park, while, in a nearby pavilion into
which Ludovic and Avenant are climbing from the roof,
a statue of Diana comes to life. Avenant is killed by an
arrow from the bow of the goddess and is changed into
the form of the Beast, while the Beast, to whom Belle
has confessed her love, promising to marry him, dies
and comes to life again, transformed into a Prince
Charming looking like Avenant. He quells Belle's
astonishment and her initial disappointment at having
lost her mysterious companion by promising to take
her away to a kingdom where she will be a great queen.
Jean Cocteau's adaptation of the original fairy-tale
by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711-1780)
was shot between August 1945 and May 1946 in the
difficult post-war period after the so-called âge d'or
au cinema français, the golden age of the French
cinema, which saw the production of Marcel Carne's
Les Enfants au Paradis and Les Visiteurs au soir. It is
astonishing to remember that Cocteau's film was made
under considerable pressure on a very small budget and
by a cineaste who in the early 1930s had produced a
surrealist picture for insiders Le Sang d'un Poète and
collaborated as script-writer on some four other films,
but enjoyed a reputation principally as a poet. La Belle
et la Bête only slowly won international renown,
whereas today his name is associated above all with
this film. Cocteau, who directed the picture with the
assistance of Rene CIement, was at a difficult period of
his life, suffering bouts of illness that led on occasions
to hospital treatment. In his book La Belle et la Bête:
Journal d'un film, published in 1947, he gives a moving
and passionate account of the making of the film and
there are further valuable accounts of the production
from the cameraman Henri Alekan and from Andre
Fraigneau, the latter recalling a conversation with
Cocteau on his film-making and on his collaboration
with Georges Auric.
Josette Day's unforgettable interpretation of the
rôle of Beauty and the cinematic debut of Jean Marais
as the Beast, with the marvellous camera-work of Henri
Alekan and the sets of Christian Berard, make this one
of the most memorable films, to which the sumptuously
scored music of Georges Auric makes a significant and
valuable contribution.
The Composer
Georges Auric studied at the Conservatoires of
Montpellier and Paris and finally at the Schola
Cantorum with Vincent d'Indy. In his early twenties
he joined the composers Darius Milhaud, Francis
Poulenc, Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre to form
the famous Groupe des Six, of which Cocteau was a
patron. Auric's talents are to be found predominantly
in his music for the theatre and the screen. In addition
to his ballets Les Matelots, Pastorale, Les Enchantements
de la Fee Akine, La Concurrence, Les
Imaginaires, Le Peintre et son Modèle, Phèdre (on a
libretto by Cocteau), Chemin de Lumière, La Chambre
and Euridice written for the ballet companies of Sergey
Dyagilev, Ida Rubinstein and David Lichine, his
incidental scores and his opera Sous le masque, Auric's
credits as a composer can be found on some forty
French, forty American and fifteen British films. As a
writer of both complete scores and of songs, Auric
collaborated during almost half a century with such
directors as Marc Allegret, Jean Delannoy, Henri-
Georges Clouzot, Max Ophüls, William Wyler, John
Houston, Otto Preminger, Charles Crichton, Thorold
Dickinson, Terence Young and Henry Cornelius.
Among his best known scores for British and American
films are Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender
Hill Mob (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), Roman
Holiday (1953), Bonjour Tristesse (1957), The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1957) and The Innocents
(1961). Above all, however, Auric is to be remembered
for his unique collaboration with Jean Cocteau,
including six films that were directed by Cocteau
himself (Le Sang d'un Poète, La Belle et la Bête, Les
Parents Terribles, L'Aigle à deux Têtes, Orphee and
Le Testament d'Orphee) and three directed by others,
but with Cocteau as a script-writer (L'Eternel Retour,
Ruy Blas and Thomas l'Imposteur).
The Music
Cocteau approached Auric on the matter of a score for
La Belle et la Bête on Christmas Day 1945. Since the
synchronization of his film had to be finished in April
1946, there was little time left for the composition and
orchestration of a score of such dimensions. The
director had full confidence in the composer since their
early collaboration on Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and
therefore found it unnecessary to give him detailed
instructions on where and how to score. Unlike the
music of the earlier film, subject to Cocteau's dictatorial
and almost abusive approach, Auric's music for La
Belle et la Bête, played by a symphony orchestra under
Roger Desormière, unsynchronized and contrasting,
gave the picture new and fascinating dimensions. Its
own "musical background", as Cocteau called it, preset
through the images and their editing, seemed at first to
be endangered by Auric's highly atmospheric score,
but the conceptions of director and composer would at
the end come together on two different levels, expressing
both the same thing and eventually
"neutralising each other", as Cocteau finally declared.
In some particular cues, the director had been able to
persuade the composer to stop or interrupt the music at
once, in order to obtain the dramatic effect of silence.
Auric's score consists of 24 musical cues. Its
overall orchestration includes three flutes (with
piccolos), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass
clarinet, two bassoons, three horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, eight percussion
instruments, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel,
celesta, pianoforte, two harps, a wordless mixed chorus
and strings. Nine cues (Tracks 4, 8, 10-12, 13, 17, 18
and 19) are scored for a smaller ensemble, without brass
and with only about 10-15 strings exempting double
basses. In these cues the chorus has an important part.
At first hearing the music seems impressionistic.
There are moments in which the sensual element of
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe and the organum-like fourths
and fifths of his L'Enfant et les Sortilèges come to
mind. The wordless chorus (mouths closed and open)
is also inspired by Ravel's ballet. Les couloirs
mysterieux and Les entretiens au parc have passages
that seem to be closer to Debussy. Nevertheless, in its
excursion into the realm of the magic, the irrational
and the atmospheric, the music of La Belle et la Bête
may be recognised, rather, as symbolist. It has something
of the fascination of paintings by Gustave Moreau
and Odilon Redon or of some pages by the Comte de
Lautreamont and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. The
symbolism of Auric comes, of course, seventy years
later, but this is done for a specific dramatic purpose
and with enormous skill. Most sections describing the
Beast and his surroundings are of a blurred musical
atmosphere, obtained through precise notation, unusual
rhythmic counterpoint, sensitive dynamic changes and
sophisticated and highly intricate instrumental
colouring, ranging from the eerie, mysterious and
dream-like (Les couloirs mysterieux, La Bête jalouse
and Le pavillon de Diane) to moments that are
nightmarish, troubled and brutal (Apparition de la
Bête and Moments d'effrol). A unique element of
drama is heard in the orchestral tutti passages of Le
vol d'une rose and Le miroir et le gant. A handful of
leit-motifs and thematic cells are used, but not to
identify particular characters or emotions: they remain
purely within the domain of music. Harmonically Auric
steps further into atonality than the so-called
Impressionists. His score, starting and finishing in a
brilliant E major, wanders through various unusual
floating tonalities and some episodes of advanced
dissonance. By using a wordless chorus in a film score,
Auric certainly surpassed many contemporary and
subsequent Hollywood scores and as a colourful
orchestrator his only rival was Dmitri Tiomkin.
Cocteau's intention was to give his picture touches
of both the neo-Baroque and the Romantic, inspired as
he was by a story from 1757 and engravings of Gustave
Dore. The additional stylistic dimensions of the music
make of this film a contrasting and unique amalgamation
of elements which are ideal in the rendering of
a fairy-tale on the screen. La Belle et la Bête, however,
is more than just a fairy-tale. Cocteau wanted to
humanise this story and offer a parable of the difficulty
of the communication of feelings between human
beings. This, it seems, is an element that Auric's music
helps to emphasize, reaching a profounder level than
the film explicitly does. On the other hand, the
composer's discreet excursions into neo-Classicism
(as, for example, in the Generique and Prince
Charmant) fit perfectly Cocteau's vision.
In his autobiographical essay La Difficulte d'être,
issued in the same year, Cocteau says of his film: "My
moral steps were those of one who limps, with one foot
in life and another in death, so that it was normal that
I met a myth in which life and death would meet. It
was, therefore, a film which was proper to the
illustration of the border that separates one world from
the other".
The Recording
The full manuscript of La Belle et la Bête, which was
thought to be lost, was found by the present writer in
1992, together with other film scores to be recorded
later, among the bulk of the manuscripts left by Auric.
Obviously such a quantity of separate sheets had first
to be carefully examined, transcribed, with the help of
computer music software, and compared with the
original sound track. The full orchestral material was
then prepared, while some errors and uncertainties had
to be cleared and important last minute improvements
by the composer (which had not been noted in the
manuscript) had to be considered, as, for example, the
inclusion of chorus interventions in the form of short
cries and vocal lines mostly doubled by instruments of
the orchestra, in Les cinq secrets, Le pavilIon de
Diane and L'envolee. Tempi and dynamics were
chosen to follow those of the soundtrack, with the
artistic liberties a conductor who interprets a score in his
own way is usually allowed to take. Auric's music, in
the present recording, is complete and many cues
(particularly Les entretiens au parc, which in the
soundtrack is drastically and unfairly cut) are heard for
the first time in full. Some appear in the original sound
track brutally truncated and the forti and fortissimi of
some cues had to give way to the dialogue. La farce du
drapier (and its corresponding scene in the film) had
been completely erased from both French and
American 35mm copies and apparently only partly
from the American 16mm version. This single scherzolike
episode in the score sounds stylistically oddly
different and dissonant in various places, compared
with the rest of the music. It accompanies a sequence
in which a rich and ridiculous draper is led up the
garden path and has an interrupted meeting with
Avenant, dressed up as Felicie, later to be robbed by
Ludovic and Avenant in a shady inn. Proposition
d'Avenant is a musical cue which was not used at all
in the film. It should have accompanied a short scene
in which Avenant seeks to prevent Belle returning to
the Beast and his own decision to go and kill his rival.
Finally, as is the case with all old films, the sound
recording of the time could not do technical justice to
the subtleties of Auric's score.
The single cues have no titles in the composer's
manuscript and it was the present writer's task to assign
them so that the listener can find an easy correspondence
with the plot of the film. Their sequence, as
recorded here, is neither in accordance with Cocteau's
original script nor with Auric's own numbering, but
conforms with the shooting script, except in the case of
the above-mentioned La farce du drapier. More
continuity discrepancies are to be found in both
American and the so-caIIed "current" French version,
with which the producer, without consulting Cocteau,
had interfered. In three cases (Depart de Belle, Le
miroir et le gant and Prince Charmant) attaccas to
the following cues were considered. Other such linkings
in the original sound-track (except as indicated only
once by the composer, between the last two cues)
seemed to be matters of mere chance.
That it was only Cocteau's film and not the original
fairy-tale that inspired musicians and film-makers to
further adaptations of La Belle et la Bête seems quite
obvious. Earlier there had been Ravel's fairy-tale suite
Ma Mère l'Oye for piano duet (1908-10), orchestrated
in 1911, with one movement bearing the title Les
entretiens de la Belle et la Bête. In 1976, some twenty
years before the appearance of Walt Disney's animated
picture (with a musical score by Alan Menken),
American composer Frank DiGiacomo had written his
beautiful opera Beauty and the Beast, conceived for
professional singers and on-stage and pit choruses of
adults and children. In 1994, the year in which the
present first complete digital recording was made of
the music from Cocteau's film, composer Philip Glass
eliminated the original sound-track in order to use the
film as a purely optical accompaniment to his opera on
the same subject. This present recording shows what
was lost from Cocteau's work.
Adriano
(edited by Keith Anderson)
La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast) (more info)
-
Generique (Main Title) - 2:01
-
La Belle et Avenant (Beauty and Avenant) - 1:25
-
Dans la foret (In the Forest) - 3:15
-
La salle des festins (The Banquet Hall) - 3:35
-
Le vol d'une rose (The Theft of a Rose) - 1:47
-
Retour du Marchand (The Merchant's Return) - 0:59
-
Depart de Belle (Beauty's Departure) - 1:38
-
Les couloirs mysterieux (Mysterious Corridors) - 3:37
-
Apparition de la Bete (Appearance of the Beast) - 1:38
-
Dans la chambre a coucher (In the Bedroom) - 1:18
-
Le souper (The Dinner) - 3:39
-
Moments d'effroi (Frightful Moments) - 4:13
-
La farce du drapier (The Burlesque of the Draper) - 2:51
-
Les entretiens au parc (Conversations in the Park) - 4:00
-
La promesse (The Promise) - 2:05
-
La Bete jalouse (Beast's Jealousy) - 1:28
-
Desespoir d'amour (Love's Despair) - 1:38
-
Les cinq secrets (The Five Secrets) - 4:04
-
L'attente (The Waiting) - 2:08
-
Proposition d'Avenant (Avenant's Proposal) - 1:26
-
Le miroir et le gant (The Mirror and the Glove) - 3:30
-
Le pavillion de Diane (Diana's Pavilion) - 4:16
-
Prince Charmant (Prince Charming) - 2:51
-
L'envolee (Flying Upwards) - 2:25
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