“La Valse” may be the darkest work in the entire canon of ballets created by George Balanchine. (Some may propose “Orpheus” as an alternative. However, the Orpheus myth is so familiar that we already know its inevitability. There is little to prepare anyone seeing “La Valse” for the first time for the full macabre extent of its coda.)
On the surface the ballet is what the title says it is, a composition organized around the diversity of settings of waltz music. The scenario is in two parts, both setting compositions by Maurice Ravel. The first of these is set to the 1911 piano suite “Valses nobles et sentimentales” in the orchestral version published in 1912. (For my part I know the music best through Lucien Garban’s four-hand arrangement, which was published in 1918.) The second part consists entirely of the “choreographic poem” “La Valse,” which Ravel concluded in 1920.
Ravel’s out-of-balance waltz near the conclusion of his “La Valse” (from IMSLP, public domain)
Neither of these compositions has much, if anything, to do with the light-hearted waltz rhetoric of the Viennese composers, the best known of them being Johann Strauss II. Ravel himself denied that he composed “La Valse” as a reflection of the grotesques that arose both during and after World War I; but many (myself included) find it very difficult to block out those associations, particularly when the underlying rhythmic pulse goes out of kilter. “Valses nobles et sentimentales,” on the other hand, tends to be more wistful; but that wistfulness often loses track of the dominating sense of a Viennese pulse. If “Valse nobles et sentimentales” is not shell-shocked, it definitely flirts with episodes of (deliberate) incoherence.
Both of these compositions foreshadow choreography of impeccable intricacy. Nevertheless, while the “clockwork” of the first part often wanders from the underlying pulse, those peregrinations inevitably reflect Ravel’s own rhetorical devices. At the end of the day, the first part is simply about executing well-synchronized waltz steps over the course of a variety of different rhetorical moods, all resulting in quiet closure as the music from Ravel’s first score concludes.
Ravel’s “La Valse,” on the other hand, always has a basic three-beat pulse as foundation; but, more often than not, the structures built over that foundation are shaky. For most of the score, the relations between the women and the men tend to serve as extensions to the lexicon unfolded during the first part. This time, however, there is a coda in which a new character unexpectedly appears, drawing the “leading lady” away from the crowd with which she is dancing. The choreography clearly shifts to a dance of seduction, but it is only in the catastrophic concluding measures of Ravel’s score that the seducer is revealed as none other than Death.
The entire ballet has so many subtle details that it holds up very well to multiple viewings. John Clifford has uploaded to YouTube a video account that is almost complete, missing only a few of the opening instrumental measures. The performance itself is the one that Clifford himself staged for the Mariinsky Ballet in 2004. Unfortunately, the image quality leaves much to be desired; but, to be fair, Clifford’s accompanying note makes it clear that he was not entirely satisfied with the performance. Nevertheless, there is enough in the content of this video to provide the viewer with a good sense of what Balanchine had in mind, not to mention the many ways in which this ballet marks a significant departure from any other French score that Balanchine selected to choreograph.
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