![]() The variations by oboe, violins and flutes, mild, slightly timid but nevertheless sweet and elegant.Led by the violins, the orchestra erupts into the work's principal waltz theme.Ī series of waltzes follows, each with its own character, alternating loud and soft sequences. Eventually, the harps signal the beginning culmination of instruments into the graceful melody. Silently and gradually, instruments play fragmented melodies, gradually building into a subdued tune on bassoons and violas. The beginning starts quietly (the mist), with the rumbling of the double basses with the celli and harps subsequently joining. ( November 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. Ravel described La valse with the following preface to the score: ![]() The music was also used for ballets of the same title, one by George Balanchine, who had made dances for Diaghilev, in 1951 and the other by Frederick Ashton in 1958. The ballet was premiered in Antwerp in October 1926 by the Royal Flemish Opera Ballet, and there were later productions by the Ballets Ida Rubinstein in 19 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. Diaghilev challenged Ravel to a duel, but friends persuaded Diaghilev to recant. Subsequently, it became a popular concert work and when the two men met again during 1925, Ravel refused to shake Diaghilev's hand. Ravel, hurt by the comment, ended the relationship. After hearing a two-piano reduction performed by Ravel and Marcelle Meyer, Diaghilev said it was a "masterpiece" but rejected Ravel's work as "not a ballet. Ravel completely reworked his idea of Wien into what became La valse, which was to have been written under commission from Serge Diaghilev as a ballet. ![]() You know my intense attraction to these wonderful rhythms and that I value the joie de vivre expressed in the dance much more deeply than Franckist puritanism. Ravel described his own attraction to waltz rhythm as follows, to Jean Marnold, while writing La valse: After his service in the French Army, Ravel returned to his original idea of the symphonic poem Wien. In Ravel's own compositional output, a precursor to La valse was his 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales, which contains a motif that Ravel reused in the later work. An earlier influence from another composer was the waltz from Emmanuel Chabrier's opera Le roi malgré lui. The idea of La valse began first with the title "Vienne", then Wien (French and German for " Vienna", respectively) as early as 1906, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II. In his tribute to Ravel after the composer's death in 1937, Paul Landormy described the work as "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 year of the choreographic setting, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.)" In the course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. 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." He also commented, in 1922, that "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. This dance may seem tragic, like any other emotion. 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." Ravel himself, however, denied that it 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. It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work. La valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 19 it was first performed on 12 December 1920 in Paris. For George Balanchine's ballet, see La Valse (Balanchine).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |