Ravel, "La Valse", the apotheosis of waltz

French composer Maurice Ravel was not very tall. He was only six feet six. For this reason, when World War I broke out, he thought he could make his contribution in defence of the homeland from the incipient branch of aviation, because his short stature, in turn, implied a little weight. However, all his attempts to be enrolled as an aviator were in vain, and he was eventually dispatched to the Verdun front as an ambulance driver.

During the war, six of his friends fell in combat. His mother also died, in 1917. At the end of the war, Ravel was devastated, an insistent discouragement besieged him and the beginning of a creative block seemed to be prevailing.
But in 1919, Russian music critic and ballet entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev brought him back to creative work by commissioning him to write a ballet to be staged by the school of dancers and choreographers Diaghilev had created ten years ago, the Russian Ballets company.

Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937)

Maurice was attracted by the project. Since 1906, the idea of ​​an orchestrated piece paying homage to the "waltz" form and by the way to Johann Strauss Jr., has long been in his mind. Ravel had in high esteem the greatest exponent of this dance in the past century. Even the idea already had a title, "Vienna". So, it was enough for Maurice to rethink the concept, working with the available material in a new way.

The result was the 13-minute choreographic poem La Valse, which was brought forward to Diaghilev in 1920. The Russian guy did not agree and rejected it. He later commented among his acquaintances that this was not a ballet but a painting of a ballet.

Ravel, who was a celebrity in Europe at that point, was not amused by the comment, and the relationship between the two artists was broken forever. La Valse, then, had to be presented as a concert piece, with its premiere in December 1920. It was only six years later that it made its choreographic premiere, in Antwerp, in October 1926.

Ravel made a version for two pianos a few years later, but it is the concert piece version the one that is currently most frequently performed on world stages. It is the one we now hear, in a rendition by the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the South Korean conductor and pianist Myung-Whun Chung.

Although they have an undeniable presence, it is not easy to discover in this piece from the first half of the 20th century, moments that make us evoke Strauss' waltzes and salons from 1850. Likewise, listening to it is not recommended to fall asleep.

Its genesis, just after the war, has given rise to the most diverse and apocalyptic impressions among scholars. That the piece breathes a smell of the end of civilization, a smell of death. Or that its design in one movement graphs the birth, fall, and destruction of a musical form: the waltz.

Filled with great vigour, majesty, compulsion, frenzy, chaos, and in the midst of all this, some melancholy too, the piece is indeed a waltz ... but only to the penultimate measure. With the last one, a binary compass, the work seems to achieve the purpose for which it seemed intended: total dislocation.

For its author, however, everything is simpler. It should only be seen in it – Ravel said – what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sound, to which the stage adds light and movement.