La Valse

“A kind of homage to the great Strauss – not Richard, the other one, Johann. You know my deep affection for these marvellous rhythms!” That was Maurice Ravel’s intention in composing La Valse, a piece he described with the following scenic vision: “Through swirling clouds, glimpses of waltzing couples appear. The clouds gradually disperse, revealing a vast hall filled with a whirling throng. The stage slowly brightens until, in a fortissimo burst, the full splendour of the chandeliers is ablaze. An imperial court around 1855.”

Ravel received the commission for the work from Serge Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes had ushered in a new era of dance theatre. The legendary impresario requested music for a new ballet focusing on Vienna and its fashionable dances, and Ravel eagerly agreed. As he confided to his student and friend Alexis Roland-Manuel, he was “mad about waltzes”.

Structurally, Ravel modelled his poème chorégraphique on the traditional sequence of introduction – waltz episodes – concluding section, which at first glance corresponds to the cyclical waltz form that had taken hold in Vienna by the mid-19th century. However, this conventional framework serves merely as an outer shell. From the outset, the introduction departs from the customary invitation to the dance: from an almost imperceptible tremolo in the lower strings emerges a heartbeat-like pulse, before fragmented melodic snippets intensify and the characteristic triple metre takes shape. It is impossible to miss that the Viennese waltz and ball season were not only expressions of joie de vivre, but also a means of enduring the city’s long, dark winters. By the end, the music transforms into an apocalyptic vision, heralded by what Manuel Rosenthal described as a “cry of anguish”. The closing section, in which the tension is stretched to near-unbearable limits before bursting, struck Ravel’s former composition student and close friend as “a harrowing, highly dramatic premonition of death”.

When Ravel presented the work with its feverishly swirling finale to Diaghilev in the spring of 1920, performing it with pianist Marcelle Meyer, the impresario was unimpressed. According to Francis Poulenc, who was also present, Diaghilev told Ravel after the performance: “Ravel, this is a masterpiece, but it is not a ballet. It is a portrait (…), the painting of a ballet!” Stravinsky, however, to Poulenc’s great surprise, remained silent. Deeply offended, Ravel took his manuscript – "as if nothing had happened” – and left. Yet time seemed to prove Diaghilev right: La Valse did not receive its staged ballet premiere until more than six years later, on 2 October 1926, at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp, and it never truly established itself in the dance repertoire. In the concert hall, however, this intoxicating elegy for the Viennese waltz caused a sensation from the very beginning, ever since its triumphant premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 12 December 1920.