What Language Does the French “Musical Comedy” Speak? On Some Stylistic Experiments of the Legrand — Demy Tandem

The article is devoted to analysing the stylistic dialogue in the music of Michel Legrand to three films by Jacques Demy: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and Donkeyskin (1971) created in the genre of “comédie musicale” (musical comedy, musical). In the first part of the article the author examines the French sources of the American musical (from the comedy-ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliere and Lully to the operettas by Jacques Offenbach), which allow us to comprehend the deep connection of the genre with the European art of the past and to understand the naturalness of the appeal to the idea of the musical by Demy and Legrand. The second part is an introduction to Jacques Demy’s creative method which is characterized by ambivalence, constant balancing between the auteur and mass cinema, between a realistic approach and theatricality. The third part is devoted to studying the origins of Michel Legrand’s stylistic experiments (on the one hand — serious academic education, training with Nadia Boulanger; on the other— work with world-class jazz musicians), as well as to analysing three layers: jazz (improvisation, the nature of arrangements and harmonies on the example of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), romantic (the application of the features of the genre of piano concerto in The Young Girls of Rochefort) and baroque (the use of the principles of orchestration, polyphonic forms, rhetorical figures in the Donkeyskin). The author concludes that Legrand and Demy, along with Bernstein and Sondheim, Webber and Rice, marked with their creativity the overcoming of the musical genre crisis of 1940–1950s associated with a shortage of meaningful librettos, lower quality of vocal-symphonic material, and a shift to entertainment and visual appeal to the detriment of musical dramaturgy. Despite the immutability of the basis of a musical, the director and composer expanded understanding of the genre and gave it an elegant French accent

Art · Art history · Baroque · Comedy · Improvisation · Literature · Musical · Polyphony · Romance · Visual arts · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis