Most musicians dream of playing Carnegie Hall. Joseph Bertolozzi dreamed of playing the Eiffel Tower. Quite literally.
This mad visionary and his technicians ascended the Tour Eiffel in 2013, turning the iconic French landmark into a gigantic percussion instrument. The results can be heard on his album “Tower Music,” which was released on the innova Recordings label in 2016.
95 years earlier, Jean Cocteau brought together five of his composer protégés, all members of Les Six, to provide music for a ballet set atop the Eiffel Tower – on July 14, Bastille Day. (The sixth member, Louis Durey, declined, pleading illness.)
The scenario of “Les mariés de la tour Eiffel” (“The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower”) describes a wedding breakfast on one of the tower’s platforms. A series of surreal and vaguely satiric incidents involve a pompous speech made by one of the guests, a hunchbacked photographer asking the assembled guests to “watch the birdie,” the sudden appearance of a telegraph office, a lion devouring one of the guests, and the arrival of “a child of the future” who commits mass murder. The ballet concludes with the end of the wedding.
Cocteau encapsulated the ballet’s themes as “Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” Quel illumination!
Francis Poulenc, who provided the music for some of the numbers, alongside that of Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre, referred to the piece as “toujours de la merde.”
Vive la France – and Happy Bastille Day!
“Tower Music”:
“The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower”:
In performance, following introductory info, beginning at 6:52:
