Ravel, La valse
We associate the waltz with late 19th-century Vienna and particularly with the many waltzes of Johann Strauss. It was a time of opulence and stability, or so it seemed. But as Professor Carol likes to explain (in Discovering Music and elsewhere) with reference to her favorite book title, A Nervous Splendor, it would all come crashing down in the blink of an eye.
World War I changed everything. The “nervous” part of the splendor was the intimation that it would be swept away, as it was. Carol shows how the artists and composers saw the chaos to come and expressed it in their works.
But Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) wrote La valse in the aftermath of World War I. He knew the before and the after. He experienced the war firsthand, joining the French artillery at the age of 40. Each movement of his Le tombeau de Couperin (featured earlier in this series) was dedicated to a friend killed in the war.
La valse was originally intended as a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev. Ravel called it a poème chorégraphique pour orchestre. Diaghilev rejected the work as not suitable for ballet, but has become a popular concert piece. It is a tribute to the waltz, but is it more? Commentators have considered the work a commentary on the war “that plots the birth, decay, and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz.” Ravel, however, maintained otherwise:
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.
We won’t be able to answer that question here, but I invite you to consider the article by Boris Giltburg that addresses that question. It will also walk you through the work.
The work exists in three versions, one for orchestra, one for two pianos, and a solo piano version. I have included two videos below. The first is the difficult and virtuosic solo piano version performed by Boris Giltburg. But listeners are far more likely to encounter the original orchestral version, and you will find that below also.
You can listen to both and make your own comparison. The two versions make very different impressions, I think. What do you think are the strengths of each version, and do you find one clearly preferable?
