Title: Le
Régiment de Sambre et Meuse
French
National Defilé March
Composer: Jean
Robert Planquette (1848-1903).
Band arranger:
Joseph François Rauski (1837-1910).
Orchestrator:
J S Seredy or L. P. Laurendeau
English
Translation Courtesy of Robert M
Goodman; Mechanicsburg, PA
SAMBRE
ET MEUSE, Robert Planquette
One
of the most famous French marches outside France
is Sambre et Meuse,
which is almost considered the French national march, played with bugles also
in other countries. French military
music is equally well known and misunderstood. One sign of this is all futile
efforts made to explain the meaning of the French concepts marche, [march] defilé [processional] and pas redouble [quickstep]. One reason for this is, of course,
linguistic, i.e., that French military music authorities only express
themselves in their own idiom, and another is that the surrounding world cannot
understand why the Frenchmen drown their marches in bugles, which usually
entertain regular soldiers and which comprises a cross between a hunting horn
and a trumpet called a clairon [bugle].
Jean
Robert Planquette (1848-1903) was born on July 31, 1848 in Paris, but considered himself Norman. His father was a sculptor and modern choral
singer at the Paris Conservatory. Robert
grew up under very poor conditions, but studied at the Paris Conservatory,
including with Jules Laurent Duprato, and received a first prize in song and a
second prize in piano. He started his
career as a pianist and composer of songs to later become famous for 23
operettas, of which the best known is Bells of Corneville which
premiered in 1877. He was also a
versatile singer and was able to both sing baritone and falsetto tenor soli to
mimic the female voices. He died on
January 28, 1903 in Paris.
About
1870, he published his Refrains du Régiment [regimental refrains], a collection
of twelve military marches of which the most famous is Sambre et Meuse, which
was a musical setting of Paul Cézano's 1867 patriotic poem Le Régiment de
Sambre et Meuse with motifs from the French Revolution. It refers to a mythical regiment named after
the war-torn region of the rivers Sambre and Meuse in northern France and Belgium.
At
the request of a senior officer, the music director of the 18th Infantry
Regiment, Joseph François Rauski (1837-1910) arranged the march for military
band, which was first performed in 1879 at the Place de Verdun in Pau. Rauski should be praised for its arrangement,
but should not be credited as being the composer, since little new thematic
material had been added. It is therefore
not correct to write that Rauski "on themes from the song, composed the
march." The reason for the erroneous
data (including an A. Turlet, a publisher in Paris, who made a transcription for piano and
small orchestra) would be that the gentlemen of the SACEM [Central Organization
of Swedish Workers] stated him as being the composer. The French music historian Émile Vuillermoz
writing a 1937 essay about these relations concluded "As some have decided to
award a French composer 'immortality', let them do it right and not confuse one
adapter's rights with the rights of the musician who really was the father of a
celebrated and glorious piece of music." Unfortunately, it is also played, as a rule, in connection with the
incorrect author Turlet, after an American arrangement with the incorrect
title, French National Defilé March, which is particularly remarkable when
one in the USA believes that defilé [processional] is something essentially
different from pas redoublé [quickstep] as it is in this case.
The
march was the regimental march of the 5th Battalion, Canadian Machine Gun
Corps, that was set up in 1919 as a unit in the Non Permanent Active Militia
and later merged with the Régiment de Dorchester et
Beauce in order to form to Le Régiment de la Chaudiére that retained its
regimental march. In Canada, it is
also the regimental march of Le Régiment de Maisonneuve.
Swedish
musicians have often had difficulties with French work's titles, and an amusing
example was A 6's musical director Enock Nilson. In his band were, from 1920 to 1930,
musikstyckjunkarna [?] Bror Sandberg and Carl Böös, and when Sambre et Meuse would be played,
it instead became Sandberg and Böös. Whether the march was then played with hunting horn or clairon parts is
not known, but at the Guards Comrades' concert at Hasselbacken on September 21,
1997, they were.
Lars
C Stolt
.