Farandole (L'Arlésienne Suite no. 2)

The second L'Arlésienne suite was put together in 1879, four years after Bizet's death, by Ernest Guiraud, who chose further numbers from the 1872 theatre score and rescored them for large orchestra. Guiraud worked freely, and one movement is not from the play at all. The Farandole sets Daudet's Provençal dance against the Marche des Rois, an old Christmas melody Bizet had used at the opening of the drama, and finally drives the two together to the close. Because the sequence is an editor's rather than the composer's, the second suite has always sat slightly apart from the first.