CAMA's Masterseries Presents Benjamin Grosvenor, piano ⫽ Friday, March 18, 2022 ⫽ Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara ⫽ 7:30PM

cation to “My dear teacher Gabriel Fauré,”
and a quotation, “A river god laughing at
the water that tickles him,” from a poem by
Hénri Regnier.
As early as 1906, Ravel conceived of
an orchestral tribute to the Viennese waltz,
which he planned to call Wien, which is what
the Viennese call Vienna. But it remained
just an idea until after World War I, when
Serge Diaghilev, the ballet impresario who
had already commissioned Ravel’s Daphnis
et Chloe, Stravinsky’s Firebird and Rite
of Spring, and scores by Debussy, Richard
Strauss, Prokofiev and de Falla, suggested
that Ravel’s Vienna tribute could be a ballet.
Ravel composed La Valse (after the war
with Austria and Germany, a German title
would have been a bad idea) for orchestra,
then made a two‐piano version so that Diaghilev
could hear it. Francis Poulenc, who
was in the room when Diaghilev listened to
it in 1920, wrote that Diaghilev told Ravel
it was a masterpiece, but not a ballet. “It’s
a portrait of a ballet.” Ravel picked up his
score and calmly left the room, apparently
without speaking, and never forgave Diaghilev.
When they met five years later, Ravel
refused to shake his hand, and Diaghilev
challenged him to a duel. Friends eventually
calmed him down. (Another version of the
incident has Ravel issuing the challenge.)
Ravel wrote, “I had intended this work
to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese
waltz, with which was associated in my
imagination with an impression of a fantastic
and fatal kind of Dervish’s dance. I imagined
this waltz being danced in an imperial
palace in about 1855.” The only explicit visual
suggestion is made in a preface to the
score, intended as a ballet stage direction
that refers to letters that are commonly
put into scores so conductors can tell players
where to restart in rehearsal: “Through
whirling clouds can be glimpsed now and
again waltzing couples. The mists gradually
disperse, and at letter A [about a minute
into the piece] a huge ballroom is revealed
filled with a great crowd of whirling dancers.
At the fortissimo at letter B [about another
minute into the piece] the lights in the
chandeliers are full on.”
But the work’s progression from primordial
ooze at the beginning to waltz‐on‐steroids
to a calamitous‐sounding end, coming
just after a war that killed millions and
ended the old regimes of Austria, Germany
and Russia, has led to its being interpreted
as a dark comment on the death of the old
order and its art. Already by 1922, Ravel
complained to an interviewer about how La
Valse had “elicited so much strange commentary.”
He continued to insist that it really
was about Vienna in 1855.
La Valse has been staged as a ballet,
but its real life has been in orchestral
concerts. Ravel’s solo piano arrangement
is full of alternative passages, because it
is impossible to cram the whole work into
ten fingers on one keyboard. Thus at many
points the performer has to choose what
notes to play.
CAMA AT THE LOBERO THEATRE • BENJAMIN GROSVENOR
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