A Noble and Sentimental Guy

Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales” were first performed in a “blind tasting” concert in Paris in 1911. The pianist, one Louis Aubert, played a whole program of new works, listing only the names of the pieces. The audience was asked to fill out a ballot at the end, guessing who the composers of the new pieces were. In the case of Ravel’s new offering, listeners were stumped, guessing Kodaly, Satie and even the arch pedant Théodore Dubois, whose “Traité d’Harmonie” I suffered through when learning harmony as a teenager.

Gerald Larner’s biography states that the audience was scandalized by the Ravel waltzes, that they were greeted with “howls of protest and derision.” (What premiere in 1911 was NOT greeted with howls of protest and derision?) Perhaps the title’s reference to the Schubert waltzes of the same name threw people off. There is a bit of family resemblance in the “galant” style of Ravel’s first waltz and the Schubert waltzes in Viennese style, but from here on the similarities are barely recognizable. Ravel uses the waltz to probe more complex regions of emotion and color and to push his harmonic world to a new frontier.

What’s surprising is that a crowd of knowledgeable listeners—the concert was presented by SMI, a breakaway organization founded by Ravel, Koechlin and other progressive musicians—didn’t recognize Ravel’s harmonic and textural world. While there is a hint of Satie in the gymnopédie-styled second waltz, Ravel’s harmonic language is miles removed from the chaste triads of Satie.

Ravel pushes the envelope of tonal relations, introducing breathtaking arrays of ninths, elevenths, thirteenths and Neapolitan “substitute” chords, all of which he mixes with stepwise modal triadic movement characteristic of Debussy’s later piano music. The effect in the softer passages sweeps you away with its atmospheric and melancholic sensuality. It is the ideal musical analogy of Proust’s art of emotional and sensory recall. In the “noble” waltzes, particularly in the first and seventh, Ravel as the “Apache,” the inventor of dizzying, cliff-hanging harmonic relationships, comes to the fore.

The orchestral version, which I’ll be doing with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London on March 11 and at Salle Pleyel in Paris on March 16, is a masterpiece of orchestral luminosity. “La Valse” is more of a crowd pleaser and receives many more performances because of its grand climax. But “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” are more subtle and more daring. With that said, I would defer to the original solo piano version because it reveals the radicality of the harmonies more readily. Everyone has his or her favorite pianist for Ravel, but for me the shock of what these waltzes contain was brought home to me by, of all performers, the Russian pianist Sviastoslav Richter. You can hear that HERE. Richter’s peculiar blend of introversion and impulsive fire matches those same qualities that make Ravel what he is—one of the truly great ones.