Les Biches

Les Biches (French: [le biʃ]; The Hinds or The Does, or The Darlings) is a one-act ballet to music by Francis Poulenc, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska and premiered by the Ballets Russes on 6 January 1924 at the Salle Garnier in Monte Carlo. Nijinska danced the central role of the Hostess. The ballet has no story, and depicts the random interactions of a group of mainly young people in a house party on a summer afternoon.

The ballet was seen in Paris and London within a year of its premiere, and has been frequently revived there; it was not produced in New York until 1950. Nijinska directed revivals of the ballet for several companies in the four decades after its creation. Les Biches, with recreations of Marie Laurencin's original costumes and scenery, remains in the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet and other companies. The music has been used for later ballets, although they have not followed Nijinska's in gaining a place in the regular repertoire.

The music for the original ballet contains three choral numbers. Poulenc made the choral parts optional when he revised the score in 1939–1940, and the work is usually given with wholly orchestral accompaniment. The composer extracted a five-movement suite from the score, for concert performance. The suite has been recorded for LP and CD from the 1950s onwards.

Sergei Diaghilev, proprietor of the Ballets Russes, contacted Poulenc in November 1921 with a proposed commission. The original plan was that Poulenc should write music for a ballet scenario with the title Les Demoiselles, written by the fashion designer Germaine Bongard. The following July it became clear that Bongard did not wish to go ahead; Poulenc wrote to his friend and fellow member of Les Six, Darius Milhaud, that instead "I will probably write a suite of dances without a libretto." At about the same time he told Igor Stravinsky that after consulting Diaghilev and the designer, Marie Laurencin, "I have a clear conception of my ballet which will have no subject – simply dances and songs."

The titles of the numbers in the score indicate that Poulenc followed this plan, but he nonetheless retained two important features of Bongarďs proposed work: a choral element, with unseen singers giving a commentary on the action, and the "demoiselles". In an analysis published in The Musical Quarterly in 2012, Christopher Moore describes the former as reminiscent of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, and the latter as "a corps de ballet of flirtatious young women". For the words, Poulenc spent a considerable amount of time in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, seeking out texts for the choral interjections. He found what his biographer Carl B. Schmidt describes as "some slightly obscene eighteenth-century texts", which he used in three of the numbers in the score.

Poulenc struggled to find the right name for the ballet, and eventually had the idea of calling it Les Biches, echoing the title of the classic ballet Les Sylphides. His chosen title is, as he admitted, untranslatable into any other language. The word biche is usually translated as "doe", an adult female deer; it was also used as a slang term for a coquettish woman. Moore expands on the definition: "As has been often noted, the word biches is itself pregnant with double entendre, referring most obviously to does, but also, in the underworld of Parisian slang, to a woman (or ironically, a man) of deviant sexual proclivities."

By the middle of 1923 Poulenc had completed the first version of the score, after some help with details of orchestration from his teacher, Charles Koechlin. In late October, at Diaghilev's request, he travelled to Monte Carlo to help supervise the production. The composer was delighted with the work of the choreographer, Nijinska, which he described as "ravishing"; he wrote to Milhaud that she had truly understood his score. Between November 1923 and the premiere in January 1924, Poulenc, together with Nijinska, oversaw, by his estimate, "at least 72 rehearsals or close to 250 hours of work". Les Biches was an immediate success, first in Monte Carlo in January 1924 and then in Paris in May, under the direction of André Messager and has remained one of Poulenc's best-known scores. Poulenc's new celebrity after the success of the ballet was the unexpected cause of his estrangement from Erik Satie, of whom he had been a protégé: among the new friends Poulenc made was Louis Laloy, a writer whom Satie regarded with implacable enmity. Poulenc's friend, Georges Auric, who had just enjoyed a similar triumph with a Diaghilev ballet, Les Fâcheux, was also repudiated by Satie for becoming a friend of Laloy.

Poulenc revised the orchestration comprehensively in 1939–1940 (published 1947). He extracted a five-movement suite from the full ballet score (1948), omitting the overture and the three choral movements. The suite is dedicated to Misia Sert. The published score specifies the following instruments: woodwind: 1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 cor anglais, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon; brass: 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba; percussion: percussion bass drum, field drum, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tambourine, tenor drum, triangle; celeste, glockenspiel; and strings.