Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 08/28/2007, uploaded on 01/14/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

La Valse          Maurice Ravel

Though sketches for material used in La Valse go back as far as 1906, the work was composed only in 1919-20. Ravel and Alfredo Casella played the two-piano version in Vienna in November 1920 at a concert of Arnold Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances. The piece that became La Valse was to have been a waltz portrait of unalloyed affection. As early as 1906, Ravel planned a tribute to Johann Strauss to be called Wien. For many reasons he kept getting distracted from the project, and the experience of the 1914-18 war made it impossible for him to retrieve the spirit of the original idea. When, late in 1919, he began work on the score, the world had become a different place. Waltzing Vienna was no longer to be seen in quite the same way, and so La Valse became a bitter and ferocious fantasy, a terrifying tone poem that helped define a new language of musical nightmare.

Ravel completed La Valse on commission from Diaghilev. But when Ravel played it for him, the impresario saw no dance possibilities in it. Still, Ravel published the score as a poème chorégraphique, and there is a prefatory note with a hint of a scenario: "Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855."   Ravel indicates specific musical cues for the scattering of the clouds (the slow tune in thirds) and for the full lighting of the chandeliers. La Valse first made its mark as a concert piece, but a number of choreographers have found it inspiring, including Balanchine, who in 1951 used Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse as a sequence.    Alessio Bax

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.