La Valse for Piano Four-Hands (arr. Garbon)
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées
Died December 28, 1937, Paris

Though Ravel, like many French composers, was profoundly wary of German music, there was one German form for which he felt undiluted affection-the waltz. As a young piano student, Ravel fell under the spell of Schubert's waltzes for piano, and this led him in 1911 to compose his own Valses nobles et sentimentales, a set of charming waltzes modeled on the Schubert dances he loved so much. Somewhat earlier-in 1906-Ravel had planned a great waltz for orchestra. His working title for this orchestral waltz was Wien(Vienna), but the piece was delayed and Ravel did not return to it until the fall of 1919. This was the year after the conclusion of World War I, and the French vision of the Germanic world was quite different now than it had been when Ravel originally conceived the piece. Nevertheless, he still felt the appeal of the project, and by December he was madly at work. To a friend he wrote: "I'm working again on Wien. It's going great guns. I was able to take off at last, and in high gear." The orchestration was completed the following March, and the first performance took place in Paris on December 12, 1920. By this time, perhaps wary of wartime associations, Ravel had renamed the piece La Valse.

If La Valse is one of Ravel's most opulent and exciting scores, it is also one of his most troubling. Certainly the original conception was clear enough, and the composer left an exact description of what he was getting at: "Whirling clouds give glimpses, through rifts, of couples waltzing. The clouds scatter little by little. One sees an immense hall peopled with a twirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of chandeliers bursts forth fortissimo. An Imperial Court, about 1855."

The music gives us this scene exactly: out of the murky, misty beginning, we hear bits of waltz rhythms; gradually these come together and plunge into an animated waltz in D major. If La Valse concluded with all this elegant vitality, our sense of the music might be clear, but gradually the music darkens and drives to an ending full of frenzied violence, and we come away from La Valse not so much exhilarated as shaken. Ravel made a telling comment about this conclusion: "I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal sort of dervish's dance."

Is this music a celebration of the waltz-or is it an exploration of the darker spirit behind the culture that created it? Many have opted for the latter explanation, hearing in La Valse not a Rosenkavalier-like evocation of a more graceful era, but the snarling menace behind that elegance. Ravel himself was evasive about the ending.

He was aware of the implications of the violent close, but in a letter to a friend he explained them quite differently: "Some people have seen in this piece the expression of a tragic affair; some have said that it represented the end of the Second Empire, others that it was postwar Vienna. They are wrong. Certainly, La Valse is tragic, but in the Greek sense: it is a fatal spinning around, the expression of vertigo and the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of paroxysm."

In the course of its composition, Ravel arranged La Valse both for solo piano and for two pianos. Ravel and Italian composer Alfredo Casella gave the first public performance of the two-piano version in Vienna at an unusual concert that also featured Arnold Schoenberg conducting his Gurrelieder.

The concert took place in the Kleiner Konzerthaussaal in Vienna on October 23, 1920, two months before the première of the orchestral version, and on that occasion La Valse proved a huge success in the city that had originally inspired it. At this concert, La Valse is heard in an arrangement for piano four-hands by Lucien Garbon.