6/21: Make Music Chicago: Music of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is often called an Impressionist composer — it was a term he disliked, but it’s almost impossible not to compare his evocative themes and subtle harmonies to the paintings of the famous French school of Monet and Renoir. The last work Debussy completed was his Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor, the third in a projected set of six sonatas for various instrumental combinations. The cycle was cut short by the composer’s death; the premier of the violin Sonata, in 1917, marked his last public appearance as a pianist. The work is best described by the tempo markings on its individual movements, the first of which is “Allegro vivo appassionato,” or lively, vibrant, and passionate. The second is labeled “Intermezzo: fantastique et léger,” fantastic and light — or perhaps, elusive. The character of the finale, “Très anime” (very lively), was summed up by the composer when he said, “It leaves the impression of an idea turning back on itself, like a snake biting its own tail.”

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) conceived La Valse first as a tribute to Vienna’s Waltz King, Johann Strauss II. He wrote to a friend, “You know how I love those admirable rhythms, and how I feel that the joie de vivre expressed in the dance is much more profound than our French puritanism.” Later, when Serge Diaghilev of Paris’ Ballets Russes expressed interest in working up a ballet to be called Wien (Vienna), Ravel re-identified his idea as a “choreographic poem” and said, “I conceived this work as a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which leaves in my mind the impression of a dizzy whirling, fantastic and fateful. I see this waltz on a background of an imperial palace, about 1855.”

Fantastic and fateful are words that reflect the way the world, and Ravel’s experience of it, had changed between 1906, when the Strauss tribute first occurred to him, and 1919, when he began work on the score for Diaghilev. World War I had intervened, not only destroying the glitter of Imperial Vienna and making it grotesquely irrelevant, but also smashing entire countries, upending the international economy, and snuffing out thousands upon thousands of lives. A ballet about 19th-century Vienna took on incredible overtones of irony. The orchestral score of Wien, renamed La Valse, took place in Paris in 1921 at the Concerts Lamoureux; the ballet did not premier until 1928 (with choreography by Michel Fokine). Ravel had meanwhile created solo-piano and two-piano versions of the music.

The one-piano-four-hands version we hear today is an arrangement by Lucien Garban. The swirling waltz melodies conjure up a glamorous ball scene, but the harmonies and textures project another message too: that the dancers are on the edge of a cliff, or about to sink into some terrible abyss. Musical commentator Gottfried Blumenstein wrote, “The opulently scored orchestral version offers perhaps an illusion that the catastrophe can still be averted: the bare bones of the piano version do not offer this solace.”