La valse

Conceived in 1906, La Valse was originally called Wien (German for "Vienna”), in homage to the Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss II. When, after the First World War, Ravel returned to his early first draft, its whirling themes were cast in a very different light. Ravel had experienced the horrors of the war while serving as an ambulance driver on the front; he was also suffering a bereavement following the death of his mother. These were dark times, and the commission from Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev, in 1919, only added to Ravel’s woes after Diaghilev declared the music unsuited to ballet. (Ravel and Diaghilev would never work together again.) Rather than a ballet, then, what emerged was "a choreographic poem for orchestra", set in an imperial court, in about 1855, where waltzing couples whirl into focus, lit up by a chandelier. Ravel presents us with the characteristic elements of the waltz—we hear fragments of its rhythm, snatches of melody as the waltz is built up and then taken apart, culminating in a climactic danse macabre coda. Was this, as some critics have suggested, an allusion to the fall of the Second German Empire and the death of its much-loved dance genre? Ravel himself denied there was any connection, but it’s tempting still to hear in its toppling structure a decadent civilisation spinning out of control. La Valse later found success in New York as a ballet, paired in 1951 with his Valses nobles et sentimentales, choreographed by George Balanchine.