Les Animaux modèles

Les Animaux modèles
Serge Lifar and Yvette Chauviré in the original 1942 production
Choreographer	Serge Lifar
Music	Francis Poulenc
Based on	Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
Premiere	8 August 1942 Paris Opera, Paris

Les Animaux modèles, FP 111, is a ballet score dating from 1940–42 by Francis Poulenc. The work was staged at the Paris Opéra in 1942, with choreography by Serge Lifar, who also danced in the 1942 premiere. The themes of the ballet are drawn from the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine.

The sections of the ballet are based on stories from Jean de La Fontaine's Fables. These tales had inspired works by French composers from Lully to Gounod, Offenbach and Saint-Saëns.

Poulenc began work on his ballet in 1940, completing a piano score in September 1941 and orchestrating it between October 1941 and June 1942. He wrote his own scenario for the ballet, making the various animals more human-like than usual. In his words, "The grasshopper has become an ageing ballerina, the ant an old provincial housemaid, the amorous lion a pimp, Death an elegant woman – a kind of duchess with a mask". The commentator Gérald Hugon observes:

[D]ifferent musical styles are brought together in delightful fashion – passionate "grand piano" writing set against the "bad boy's" waltz-java in Le Lion amoureux, the verve of the Offenbachian can-can in L'Homme entre deux âges et ses deux maîtresses, Mussorgskyan turns of phrase in La Mort et le Bûcheron and a deliberate borrowing from Paganini's Caprice No. 24 in Les Deux Coqs.

Hugon comments that all these influences are absorbed by Poulenc and turned into his own style. At the time of the premiere, Poulenc's friend and colleague Arthur Honegger wrote that "the influences that have worked upon him – Chabrier, Satie, Stravinsky – are now completely assimilated. Listening to his music you think – it's Poulenc."

The company for the premiere was headed by Serge Lifar (who also choreographed the work) and Yvette Chauviré. Paris was under Nazi occupation, and the many German officers in the audience failed to spot the composer's defiant incorporation of the anti-German song "Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine" in his score. Poulenc later reduced the full score to a shorter orchestral suite.