PROGRAM NOTES

JACQUES IBERT Divertissement

Composer: born August 15, 1890, Paris; died February 5, 1962, Paris

Work composed: 1929-30

World premiere: November 30, 1930, at the Odéon in Paris

“I want to be free – independent of the prejudices which arbitrarily divide the defenders of a certain tradition and the partisans of a certain avant-garde.” – Jacques

Ibert

At age 29, after interrupting his musical studies to serve in World War I, Jacques Ibert won his nation’s highest compositional honor, the Prix de Rome. Before the war, while at the Paris Conservatoire, Ibert initially studied both drama and music before he chose to focus exclusively on composition. As a result, Ibert maintained a lifelong interest in drama and dance; in addition to his purely instrumental music, he wrote seven operas, five ballets, more than a dozen film scores, and a wide variety of music for the theatre.

In 1929, Ibert composed incidental music for the Paris production of Eugéne Labiche’s 1851 comedy, Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat). A year later, Ibert reworked the music into one of his most popular compositions, the Divertissement for orchestra. The score is a cleverly constructed pastiche of popular tunes of the day, jazzy riffs, and Viennese waltzes. In the Cortège, Ibert quotes the “Wedding March” from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while the Finale features a riotous can-can punctuated by blasts from a police whistle. The mischievous quality of the music perfectly captures the essence of the play’s ridiculously convoluted plot, which revolves, not surprisingly, around a lost straw hat.