La valse

This article is about the musical work. For George Balanchine's ballet, see La Valse (Balanchine).
Maurice Ravel

La valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920; it was first performed on 12 December 1920 in Paris. It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work.

The work has been described as a tribute to the waltz; the composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of La valse, summarized the ethos of the work: "Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz."[1] Ravel himself, however, denied that it is a reflection of post-World War I Europe, saying, "While some discover an attempt at parody, indeed caricature, others categorically see a tragic allusion in it – the end of the Second Empire, the situation in Vienna after the war, etc... This dance may seem tragic, like any other emotion... pushed to the extreme. But one should only see in it what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement."[2] He also commented, in 1922, that "It doesn't have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and it also doesn't have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic setting, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.)"[3]

In his tribute to Ravel after the composer's death in 1937, Paul Landormy described the work as "the most unexpected of the compositions of Ravel, revealing to us heretofore unexpected depths of Romanticism, power, vigor, and rapture in this musician whose expression is usually limited to the manifestations of an essentially classical genius."[4]

  1. ^ Benjamin, George (1992). "Last Dance". The Musical Times. 135 (1817): 432–435. doi:10.2307/1003252. JSTOR 1003252.
  2. ^ Ravel, letter to Maurice Emmanuel, 14 October 1922, in Arbie Orenstein (ed.): A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 229.
  3. ^ "The French Music Festival: An Interview with Ravel", in De Telegraaf, 30 September 1922, in Arbie Orenstein (ed.): A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 423.
  4. ^ Landormy (translated by Willis Wager), Paul (1939). "Maurice Ravel". The Musical Quarterly. XXV (4): 430–441. doi:10.1093/mq/XXV.4.430.