La valse
La valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920 (premiered in Paris on 12 December 1920). 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, and the composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of La valse, summarized the ethos of the work:
Ravel himself, however, denied that it is a reflection of post-World War I Europe, saying:
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. In the course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic argument, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.)"
In his tribute to Ravel after the composer's death in 1937, Paul Landormy described the work as follows:
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, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II. An earlier influence from another composer was the waltz from Emmanuel Chabrier's opera Le roi malgré lui. 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. After his service in the French Army, Ravel returned to his original idea of the symphonic poem Wien. Ravel described his own attraction to waltz rhythm as follows, to Jean Marnold, whilst writing La valse:
List of La valse casts
This is a list of casts for the ballet La valse made by New York City Ballet co-founder and founding choreographer George Balanchine to the eponymous 1920 music of Maurice Ravel (with additions from Ravel's 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales in his orchestration of 1912). The premiere took place Tuesday, February 20th, 1951, at City Center of Music and Drama in New York City with costumes by Karinska and lighting by Jean Rosenthal.
Original cast
NYCB revivals
2009 Winter
2009 Spring
Footnotes
External links
Podcasts:
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and now that we crashed and burned
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when she was in love with the world
and now that we crashed and burned
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