La valse (12:19)

La Valse, un poème choréographique (a choreographic poem), is an orchestral work written by Maurice Ravel from February 1919 until 1920, and premiered in Paris on 12 December 1920. While the work has been described as a tribute to the waltz, it is in fact a less sentimental reflection of post-World War I Europe. The composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of La valse, summarized the ethos of the work as follows:

“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]

In his tribute to Ravel after the composer’s death in 1937, Paul Landormy described the work as follows:

“…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”.[2]

Contents


* 1 Creation and Meaning
* 2 Description
* 3 See also
* 4 References
* 5 Bibliography
* 6 External links

Creation and Meaning

The idea of La Valse began as Wien (German for “Vienna”) as early as 1906, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss. An earlier influence from another composer was the waltz from Emmanuel Chabrier’s opera Le roi malgré lui.[3] In Ravel’s own compositional output, a precursor to La valse was his 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales, which contains a motif that Ravel reused in the later work. After his service in the French Army, Ravel returned to his original idea of the symphonic poem Wien.