Valses nobles et sentimentales

A set of eight waltzes building on the tradition of Schubert and Brahms, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales was originally written for solo piano. Its dedicatee, Louis Aubert, gave the first performance in Paris on 9 May 1911, and the orchestral version followed a year later. A performance typically lasts about 15 minutes. The title is a tribute to Schubert, who had written different sets headed Valses nobles and Valses sentimentales. There, however, any resemblance ended: this fresh, acidic harmonic language is Ravel’s alone. Yet the piece also represented a very different direction for the composer, compared to his recent virtuoso tour de force, Gaspard de la Nuit. He was seeking, he said, “a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder and the lines of the music are made to show up”. After a striking opening waltz semi-recalling the rhythm of Schubert’s Valses nobles, Ravel alternates the dramatic and the dreamy as the music progresses. The seventh waltz forms a triumphant climax. The music then subsides into the “Epilogue”, a dream-like recollection of fragments from all that has gone before.