The genesis of La Valse can be traced back to as early as 1906. At the time, Ravel intended to write a ‘grand waltz’ as a tribute to Johann Strauss. Initially titled Vienne (and later in its German spelling Wien), the project was however left aside after the outbreak of the First World War and the death of the composer’s mother in 1914. It was not until 1919 that Ravel picked it up again, and yet the work was by then referred to as La Valse, a change which indicates the Frenchman’s aspiration to give a national taste to the waltz.
Although Ravel envisaged La Valse to be a ‘choreographic poem’ for orchestra, composing dance moves for the work had proven to be a particular problem. While La Valse was originally intended for the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev—the impresario who also commissioned Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for the company—dismissively remarked that the piece is ‘not a ballet’, but merely ‘the painting of a ballet’. As a result, La Valse was eventually premiered as a concert work at Salle Gaveau in Paris on 12 December 1920, with the Orchestre Lamoureux directed by Camille Chevillard.
La Valse was composed with the image of a mid-nineteenth-century imperial ballroom in mind. The music begins with the rumbling of the lower strings, during which fragmented motifs gradually develop into a portentous dancing scene. As Ravel described, this denotes ‘the breaks in the swirling clouds’, where ‘waltzing couples may be glimpsed’. On the arrival of a marked theme on the violas and bassoons, we find ourselves now in ‘an immense hall filled with a whirling crowd’. The ‘light of the chandeliers’ then bursts forth as the entire orchestra joins force, and the waltz theme has become officially fully fledged. In what follows, we hear a series of characteristic thematic treatments, through which Ravel pays homage to the diverse styles in Strauss’s waltzes. At the return of the original theme, however, the music is getting increasingly out of hand, culminating in a sequence of disorientated whirling patterns that plunge into the end.
Concert notes originally commissioned for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Saturday 12 February 2022 (event cancelled).
© Kelvin H. F. Lee