Although Henry Purcell’s Shakespearean song-setting If Music Be the Food of Love (1692) is metaphorical, and Erik Satie’s 1903 suite for piano duet Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear has nothing to do with fruit, classical music does have many actual references to – and celebrations of – food.
For earthly appetites, one need look no further than Orlando Gibbons’s Cries of London. His consort song for five voices and five viols is effectively an early 17th-century rendering of the sounds of Cockney stallholders advertising everything from “lilywhite mussels and new fresh herrings” to “roasted sausage, hot puddings, fresh cheese and cream, and ripe strawberries”. It may well have been inspired by Clément Jannequin’s Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris – similarly including the everyday sounds of a Renaissance French street market.
While today there are a few restaurants in which music students will entertain you with arias between courses, in centuries past musical accompaniment to dining was a common phenomenon. The concept only became formalised in the 18th century and the best-known collection of such work is Telemann’s Tafelmusik, (Table Music). Published in 1733, it is a traditional set of suites to be played by a small group of string players at banquets.
A musical work inspired by food, which became a popular sensation following its 1898 London premiere, is Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The cantata for tenor, mixed chorus and orchestra sets part of Longfellow’s epic poem, delighting in the lush and sensual choral description of the sumptuous menu: “First they ate the sturgeon … and the pike … then on pemmican they feasted … and buffalo marrow, haunch of deer and hump of bison, yellow cakes of the Mondamin, and the wild rice of the river.”
Belshazzar’s Feast (1931) depicts another impressive meal, this time a lavish banquet thrown by the hedonistic and hubristic Babylonian king. In the biblical cantata by William Walton, apart from generous libations of wine drunk from sacred goblets looted from the Temple of Jerusalem, Osbert Sitwell’s libretto does not tell us what was on the menu. However, a clue is given in a description of the city’s resources for such a meal: “fine flour, wheat, beasts and sheep”, which we might conclude, like the score, was lavish.
On a smaller scale, Erich Korngold’s Die Gansleber im Hause Duschnitz, (The Goose-liver in the Duschnitz House) is a song written spontaneously by the Austrian composer following a meal in 1919, thanking his Viennese hosts by honouring their delicious main course, with his lyrics declaring: “Because a goose liver like this is a wondrous thing … when it’s browned, when it’s crisp and crackly …”
In a rare instance of music from the perspective of the food itself, there is Olim lacus Colueram. Known as the Song of the Roasting Swan, the exquisite aria for tenor and chorus comes from the pseudo-medieval secular cantata Carmina Burana (1936) in which composer Carl Orff manages to create a sense of dizzying musical rotation as the roasting bird delivers its, er, swansong, with the tenor singing at the top of his range in sympathetic anguish.
Turning to something more sugary, Hansel and Gretel, Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 operatic retelling of the Grimm fairy tale, features a gingerbread house covered in sweets. Tchaikovsky’s festive ballet The Nutcracker (1892) is also filled with confectionary, in which, following mice eating gingerbread soldiers, young Clara and her prince are whisked off to the Land of Sweets, which is ruled by the Sugar Plum Fairy, an otherworldly character represented by a brand-new twinkling keyboard instrument, the celesta.
Then there are cookbooks set to music. La Bonne Cuisine (1947) was inspired by Emile Dumont’s culinary guide. From it the American composer Leonard Bernstein arranged four recipes for mezzo-soprano and piano. The gastronomic delicacies are Plum Pudding, Ox-Tails, Turkish Delight and Rabbit at Top Speed – the last well-named, as the entire song-cycle is under five minutes. Three years later with Ode à la Gastronomie (1950), composer Jean Françaix showed that the French can also have a sense of humour when it comes to food. His lighthearted satire punctures the pretentious solemnity of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 tome La Physiologie du gout, offering a both comic and exquisite paean to the sensual pleasures of eating, setting the gastronomic ruminations as a choral work for 13 a capella singers.
Eating, of course, provides a backdrop for dramatic action and consequently it often crops up in opera. A great example is Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, which migrates from a cold and empty flat in Montmartre to the local Cafe Momus. There, among the riot of life, street vendors shout their wares: “Oranges, dates, hot chestnuts, trinkets, crosses, nougat, whipped cream, fruit pies, toffees, finches, sparrows, dates, coconut milk, carrots, trout and plums.” The friends enter the bistro and order sausage, roast venison, table wine, dressed lobster, creme caramel and chicken, before leaving the bill for hapless sugar daddy Alcindoro.
Finally, there is food inspired by classical musicians. French modernist Erik Satie ate only white foods, so for more mouthwatering invocations one must look to the Italians and dishes created in their honour. Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso had a sauce named after him by Uruguayan chef Raymundo Monti. Salsa Caruso is a warm sauce for pasta consisting of cream, onions, ham, cheese, nuts and mushrooms. Meanwhile, Tournedos Rossini is a steak dish created by French chef Marie-Antoine Carême in collaboration with the famously food-loving composer. It consists of beef tournedos pan-fried in butter, served on a crouton, topped with hot slice of foie gras, garnished with black truffle and Madeira demi-glace sauce.
And for afters? How about peach melba, the famous dessert of peaches and raspberry sauce with vanilla ice-cream, created in 1892 by French chef Auguste Escoffier at London’s Savoy Hotel for the Australian soprano Dame Nellie. Quite a final movement, that is.
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