La Valse Composed from 1919-20 Maurice Ravel Born

LA VALSE COMPOSED FROM 1919-20

MAURICE RAVEL BORN IN CIBOURE, FRANCE, MARCH 7, 1875 DIED IN PARIS, DECEMBER 28, 1937

Deeply moved by works of Debussy from the 1890s, around 1900 Ravel began to find his own answers to the questions about harmony, color, and instrumental texture that the late 19th century had left unresolved. As a new century dawned, so did hopes of a “new music,” and this impulse found expression in the music of composers as diverse as Elgar and Schoenberg, Puccini and Debussy. At the beginning of the decade, Ravel’s music began to appear in print for the first time: The publisher Demets brought out elegiac pieces such as the Pavane for a Dead Princess and revolutionary works such as Jeux d’eau. Buoyed by these successes, in 1904 the composer wrote Miroirs, a remarkable set of “impressionistic” piano pieces that some would later compare to the paintings of Monet or Van Gogh. After this he was destined to join Debussy in writing a new chapter in the history of French music.

AN “APOTHEOSIS OF THE VIENNESE WALTZ” There is a popular element in the work we hear today that was inspired by the past and that conveys both nostalgia and shrewd critique. Ravel conceived La Valse as an “apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which is entangled in my mind with the idea of the whirl of destiny.” He completed the piece, which he had first called Wien (Vienna), at the end of World War I, when Vienna’s destiny—as the former center of the empire that the war dissolved—had indeed determined a new course for the Western world. As such it became a sort of “Death and Transfiguration” for the very concept of the waltz, as it had been defined through two centuries and perfected by the Strauss family a quarter-century earlier. If the piece contains a dark and even somewhat sinister element, this is in keeping with the time and place of its inception. World War I had, after all, altered the shape of the world as no war ever had. Composed originally as a dance score for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, La Valse used material sketched years earlier—some of which had already appeared, in fact, near the end of the 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales. Diaghilev found the piece untenable for the ballet, claiming that it would be too expensive to produce. Thus it was first performed as a concert piece, on a program of the Concert Lamoureux in Paris on December 12, 1920; Camille Chevillard was the conductor. Not until October 1926 was La Valse presented as a ballet, in a production by the Royal Flemish Ballet in Antwerp, with the great Ida Rubinstein.

A CLOSER LOOK Ravel described the piece thus: “Eddying clouds allow glimpses of waltzing couples. The clouds gradually disperse, revealing a vast hall filled with a whirling throng. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of chandeliers blazes out: an imperial court around 1855.” This brilliantly orchestrated work conveys both the gaiety of the waltz and, as a reflection of Vienna’s somewhat paralytic new destiny, a level of seriousness that is ultimately disquieting.

—Paul J. Horsley