La valse

La valse (The Waltz), poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920; it was first performed on 12 December 1920 in Paris. It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work.

The work has been described as a tribute to the waltz; the composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of La valse, summarized the ethos of the work: "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." But Ravel denied that La valse is a reflection of post-World War I Europe, saying, "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." Ravel also said in 1922, "It doesn't have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and it also doesn't have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the course of La Valse, I did not envisage a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic setting, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.)"

In his tribute to Ravel after his death in 1937, Paul Landormy called La valse "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."

Creation and meaning

The idea of La valse began first with the title "Vienne", then Wien (French and German for "Vienna", respectively) as early as 1906, when Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II. An earlier influence was the waltz (Fête polonaise) from Emmanuel Chabrier's opera Le roi malgré lui. In Ravel's output, a precursor to La valse is 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.