The Ballets Russes had arrived in Paris in , and a commission from the company quickly became a signal that a composer had arrived at the summit of cultural life in the city that prided itself as the summit of culture. For their source they turned to the pastoral romance attributed to the Greek author Longus third-century C. The going was not easy. Almost every night, work until 3am.
In spite of the interpreters, you can imagine the savor of these meetings. Ravel fell farther and farther behind schedule—so much so that at one point Diaghilev came close to canceling the whole project. The premiere left listeners and critics divided. Because of the innumerable delays, adequate rehearsal time had not been forthcoming; and the fact that the premiere fell at the end of the season entailed further complications of scheduling, not to mention physical exhaustion on the part of all concerned.
Fokine and Nijinsky were feuding, and the conflict grew so unpleasant that Fokine quit the company once the season was over. From the highway in a fast car to the heavens, our imaginative journey continues — and concludes — with a seaside, sundappled port in this timeless tone poem by Maurice Ravel.
The irascible producer, best remembered for his association with Igor Stravinsky, asked if he could back out as soon as Ravel turned in the score, and it was a series of clashes from that point on.
The ballet was not a hit when it premiered, but the music demanded further attention. A hopeful string theme glides over a rolling bed as woodwinds flit and sing.
A spirit of halfasleep, half-dreaming hope persists even as minor-key clouds pass in front of the sun. In Pantomime, sleepy string chords slide under solo winds, leading into an exotic, flirtatious flute solo accompanied by a quiet pizzicato rhythm. Ravel's innovation in Daphnis was to create a through-composed score rather than a series of separate dances that informed traditional ballet.
Lawrence Kramer credits the score with a brimful of exotic scales, colors, melody and instrumentation, derived in part from the sound-world of orientalist operas Samson et Delilah, Prince Igor, Salome and the symphonic Arabian music of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade , presenting Ravel's European audience with a living museum of glimpses into their cultural origins as well as a tantalizing, dream-like taste of remote pleasures, but all in a "safe" remove, as if the ancient exoticism had been colonized in a triumph of European imperialism.
Ravel obtains a wide range of textures and spatial effects by constantly dividing his strings into eight parts, frequently using mutes and string playing on fingerboards, and placing instruments behind the stage. The chorus, too, is directed to sing variously behind, near or on stage and with open or closed mouths. Kramer further cites as an innovation the prominence of the entirely wordless vocals, far removed from European choral tradition but evoking both the ancient roots of singing and the sensory essence of modern life.
Yet, true to form, even in the most heavily-scored passages, the sonority remains transparent. Lawrence Davies credits "Ravel's bright colors and sharply picked-out instrumentation" as enormously influential, enabling French music to "emerge from beneath the protective shell of Wagnerism" and its thick, rich sonorities. Ravel also was intrigued by the industrial sound of factories, and their regular pounding rhythms clearly found their way into the closing moments of Daphnis.
Edward Downes adds that "with all its brilliant orchestration, intoxicating color [and] sensuous harmonies" Daphnis remains "an essentially patrician score" and that Ravel, "a spiritual aristocrat," never once "relax[ed] his mastery of form and precise craftsmanship. In addition to its wide-ranging tonal centers, with key signatures ranging from six flats to seven sharps, Daphnis is notable for its unconventional rhythms. Although the dancers were distraught by Daphnis , its challenges would pale the following year when they had to confront the rhythmic terrors of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
FOKINE - The libretto was crafted by Mikhail Fokine, who had urged reform by presenting his strong artistic ideas in a manifesto to the directors of the Maryinksy theatre. As summarized by Bill Zakariasen, Fokine wanted to move dance away from stylized formalization to create a connected dramatic experience in the service of great music, an approach clearly consistent with Ravel's own. Fokine has left us the most detailed recollection of his collaborative process with Ravel, although it's clearly one-sided and was written decades later.
He wrote that he liked Ravel's musical ideas, as he envisioned a score with emotion that would inspire the dancers' movements and with motifs based on character and situations, but without Wagnerian weight, and was delighted that the music would be unusual, colorful and unlike any other.
Yet something happened along the way to spoil their relationship. According to Fokine, they had only one difference of opinion - he wanted an extended and violent dramatic sequence for the pirate attack, whereas Ravel wanted a lightning strike; Ravel prevailed, but Fokine later regretted his timidity.
With that sole exception, Fokine claimed to have loved the score from the first time he heard it. Ravel, though, had a far different version of their relationship. In a June letter, Ravel wrote: "What complicates things is that Fokine doesn't know a word of French and I only know how to swear in Russian. In spite of the interpreter, you can imagine the savor of these meetings. Fokine also choreographed Daphnis.
The grotto set by Bakst Mawer identifies four primary types of dance in the ballet: ritual deep-rooted pagan spirituality, suggesting an extended lineage from some presumed legendary primordium , high-speed celebrating the sheer excitement of rapid movement , character-portraying an individual aria without words and exotic with deeply-felt rhythm.
Conspicuously missing were the gracious ensemble pieces and amorous pas de deux that audiences had come to expect, if not demand, from traditional ballet. His approach was consistent with Fokine, who envisioned a tale "of literal archaism in terms of Greek pagan dance with an erotic physicality" based on depictions on Greek vases.
Clearly, their concept of archaic stylization was far removed from Ravel's. Pressed for time, Bakst adapted the scenery and outfits he had crafted for the Greek-themed Narcissus ballet he had mounted in the prior Russian Ballet season.
The surviving pictures of the formalized sets and costumes seem vastly discordant with Ravel's lush and sensual music. Upon losing the support of a key patron in , he created his own troupe, the Ballets Russes, and for the season turned to Western composers for fresh ideas and commissioned new works that would break away from stale formulas and that could hold their own with audiences enthralled by star dancers.
At first he was greatly impressed with Ravel's ideas for modernizing the music of ballet, but, as with Fokine, their relationship soured and then turned turbulent.
Amid violent disagreements with Fokine and Bakst, Diaghilev wanted to cancel Daphnis but Fokine refused. Instead, perhaps to assert his authority, Diaghilev hobbled the premiere, scheduling it at the end of the season and placing it first on a long program scheduled to begin earlier than usual and before the fashionable segment of the audience would arrive.
The premiere was further compromised by inevitable comparisons with the sensational unveiling the week before of another Diaghilev production - a ballet set to Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the scandal of its overtly sexual choreography, ending in presumably feigned masturbation with flowing veils.
A Daphnis revival the following year would be eclipsed again, this time by the Rite of Spring. Although barely one-sixth as long, the Faun required rehearsals, leaving too few for the far greater complexity of Daphnis. Thus one critic complained that the music had been betrayed by a negligent production and performance, and another, clearly a traditionalist, objected that it had "very little grace, very little charm and above all very little inspiration.
Later, though, he would come to resent the attention lavished upon Debussy and especially his piano music which, Ravel pointed out, was heavily influenced by Ravel's Jeux d'Eau , leading to the two composers' estrangement. Undoubtedly, Ravel's support of Debussy's abandoned wife didn't help.
NIJINSKY - One reason for Diaghilev's attitude, and for the attention he lavished on the Faun , was his literal love for its legendary lead dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, who also danced the lead male role in Daphnis , and whose spectacular floating leaps may have inspired some of the soaring figures in Ravel's score. When asked for the secret of this astounding technique, Nijinsky reportedly said it was easy - he just paused before coming back down.
Victor Seroff faulted Diaghilev for assuming that Nijinsky's brilliance as a dancer endowed him with genius as a choreographer, despite his lack of "education, culture, taste and above all vision and the ability to communicate his ideas to others. The basic story is a drastic condensation of the only surviving work of Longus, presumed to have been a second-century Greek novelist but of whom nothing is known.
Woodcut by Maillol Universal in its humanity, disarming in its careful observation of nature and thoroughly modern in its psychology, its genesis a hundred generations ago is remarkable. Indeed it eloquently attests to the consistency of human aspirations since ancient times. Although continuous, the score is full of highlights. THE THIRD TABLEAU Day breaks The beauty of nature The final gasps of orgasm soprano and alto parts from Kramer's Classical Music and Post-Modern Knowledge The magical opening evokes primeval wonder as instruments and voices grope for melody amid searching harmonies, their ebb and flow dissolving into a meltingly lovely theme that awakens in wonder and innocence as the materials become more refined and begin to coalesce.
The former motifs are torn in explosive dissonance as the pirates attack, and then subside into a suffusion of mystery as the nymphs stir to life with help from the wind machine and comfort Daphnis. The music then subsides into tense expectation before Pan decisively restores order. For those seeking a more concentrated experience in keeping with the demands of our hurried times, the third tableau often performed alone as the second suite provides an abundant and satisfying taste of the splendor of Ravel's achievement.
As day breaks, nature slowly stirs to life - rivulets flow in harp arpeggios, birds chirp in the flutes, shepherds begin to stir, a gorgeous string theme evokes the sheer beauty of pristine nature, and the sun rises to its full brilliance as a simple repeated sequence builds into an astoundingly powerful climax. Indeed, the music of the opening scene is so masterfully suggestive by itself that a visual depiction on stage seems doomed to compromise its impact.
John Culshaw views it as "Ravel as a man searching for a means to express the essence of beauty and finding it. Next, the gentle interplay of the pantomime provides a needed respite and at the same time is full of evocative melodic shreds to enable us to picture the narrative it was meant to accompany.
The electrifying final pages simply defy description, other than to return to our initial thought, as the bacchanal surges and throws off constant sparks of euphoric energy as it inexorably builds to a final explosion of unbridled ecstasy. Since we have few hints as to Ravel's own preferred orchestral style, we are fortunate that a remarkable number of the first three decades of Daphnis recordings were led by conductors who had significant ties to the composer.
Victor Seroff considered him a "very poor conductor" who didn't succeed in bringing out the proper perspective of a piece, either overall or in the details, which he attributes to Ravel's lack of experience as a performer and a resultant lack of authority. Ravel conducting Indeed, he quotes Ravel as having said after a concert he had led: "I had no idea what was going on. Our only recording of Ravel as conductor is barely relevant - a rock-steady Bolero , but even then he was assisted by a more experienced conductor, Albert Wolff, his tempo is far slower than his own indication in the score, and in any event that piece is so atypical that little can be inferred - Ravel described it as "orchestral effects without music" and indeed it's nothing more than a single melody wending its way through the instruments.
A recording of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with Marguerite Long, routinely attributed to Ravel, actually was conducted by Pedro de Freitas-Branco, who told the story of Ravel attempting to lead a "filler" side of his Pavane at a tempo that would have lasted nearly seven minutes, whereupon the producer took him out for a drink, Freitas-Branco cut the side speeded up to , and Ravel approved it.
Although Ravel insisted that conductors adhere to the score and even disparaged Toscanini, who held the score sacrosanct, as "one of those incorrigible virtuosi who go about daydreaming as if the composer didn't exist" he complimented others' interpretations and, indeed, even the players in his Bolero take substantial expressive liberties including a wayward trombonist , albeit without altering the tempo.
Several recordings that he supervised or approved display considerable tempo variations and, indeed, his piano professors at the Conservatory had criticized his playing as having "a great deal of temperament," "a tendency to pursue big effects," being "overly-enamored of violence" and "lapsing into exaggeration" although from their rigid academic perspective the degree of Ravel's feeling may have been rather mild.
Perhaps more revealing than his Bolero is the highly inflected recording he supervised by the International String Quartet of his Quartet in F , the score of which, like Daphnis , is full of expression markings many of which the performers ignore.
Perhaps as a tribute to its essential continuity, no recording of the complete Daphnis score arose until well into the LP era although there were plenty of Bruckner symphonies chopped into 78 rpm side lengths. Before then, the only Daphnis recordings were of the two suites that Ravel had extracted from the full score - a Suite 1 , comprising the Nocturne from Tableau I and the Interlude and Danse guerriere from Tableau II; and a Suite 2 , essentially the entirety of Tableau III excepting only a ten-bar introduction.
Perhaps the reason for Koussevitzky's earlier reticence lay in a interview in which the composer had criticized the conductor as "a great virtuoso who always has a very personal style of interpretation, sometimes admirable, but sometimes mistaken.
And the greater the emotion of the interpreter, the greater and more vivid the performance. Koussevitzky had commissioned Ravel to prepare the now-famous orchestration of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in , and had honored the composer with a festival and shared the baton of his orchestra during Ravel's only American tour in , but Gaubert's bond with Ravel went even deeper - he had conducted Daphnis for its revival at the Paris Opera and, an acclaimed flutist, played under Ravel's personal supervision in the recording of Ravel's ravishing Introduction and Allegro.
Reportedly, this Daphnis was the only one Ravel had in his personal record collection. Chief conductor of the Paris Opera and Conservatoire orchestras, Gaubert affords an opportunity to hear a quintessentially French reading.
While his recording of the Tchaikovsky Pathetique is full of rich emotion, deep expression and sharp inflection and attests to his versatility, his Daphnis as well as a La Valse that minimizes the acidic undertone opts for smoothly flowing phrasing, finely judged balances and an overriding tenderness that present an evolutionary sense of continuity and unity, all within an aura of nonchalant diffidence that, more than any other trait, has come to define the French sensibility.
Interestingly, the first Koussevitzky and Gaubert recordings are remarkably similar in feeling, from the barely audible twittering birds, which form more of a grace-note to the wonder of dawn than accurately following the score's specification of en dehors prominently , to the deliberately attenuated climaxes, which emphasize classical grace over heart-pounding drama.
Nearly all of the subsequent era studio recordings of the second suite came from American orchestras and labels.
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