From East to West

It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that folk idioms, borrowed from the French regions or imported from foreign lands, began to have a profound effect on French music. Ravel’s Piano Trio (1914), with its Basque rhythms, is a good example. And Suite orientale (1900) by Mel Bonis explores the modal colours and ornamentation characteristic of the East. Some dances and musical forms also found their way to France from abroad in the early days of Romanticism. These included Hungarian melodies, which Franz Liszt, amongst others, took to great heights, and Italian barcarolles, which became a must for pianists playing in the Parisian salons.