Born on March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France; died on December 28, 1937, in Paris, France.
Daphnis et Chloé
Composed: 1909-12
Estimated length: 50 minutes
First performance: June 8, 1912, in Paris, France in a production by the Ballets Russes, with Pierre Monteux conducting.
First Nashville Symphony performance: January 17, 1992, with Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting at Andrew Jackson Hall, Tennessee Performing Arts Center.
In 1909, the emigré Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev launched an enormously influential ballet company in Paris, the Ballets Russes, in response to the contemporary craze for all things Russian. Their sensational opening season encouraged him to continue with a bold new series of commissions that set in motion the career of a young fellow Russian named Igor Stravinsky. Diaghilev also approached leading French composers of the era. One result was Maurice Ravel’s most ambitious score, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, which he first staged in 1912 (one year before the epochal world premiere of The Rite of Spring).
The source for Daphnis et Chloé is a novel-like romance from late antiquity attributed to the second-century CE Greek writer Longus. Companions since childhood and innocent foundlings raised by shepherds, the couple immortalized by the title becomes separated when Chloé is kidnapped by pirates, but the god Pan intervenes to reunite them.
Ultimately a story of the triumph of love between Daphnis and Chloé, the ballet’s narrative alternates between atmospheric scenes, character-defining set dances, and brief action sequences. Ravel declared that his idea was to compose “a vast musical fresco, less concerned with archaism than with faithfulness to the Greece of my dreams, which is similar to that imagined and painted by French artists at the end of the 18th century.”
The scale of Daphnis et Chloé is larger than that of any other Ravel composition. He clearly conceived the music as part of a carefully integrated whole involving choreography (contributed by Michel Fokine, who was credited with the scenario adapted from Longus) and the visuals imagined by set designer Léon Bakst. The unique dance style of Vaslav Nijinsky—who created the role of Daphnis, together with Tamara Karsavina as Chloé—inspired specific musical gestures.
Ravel—a great admirer of Mozartean clarity— painted his “fresco” with the most subtle blends of colors and harmonies, using an expanded orchestral apparatus that is enriched by the addition of a wordless chorus. Friction between Diaghilev and the creative team nearly led to the cancellation of Daphnis et Chloé. It received only two performances in its first season. Ravel became dissatisfied with the clashing visions of his collaborators and grew furious when Diaghilev decided to cut the wordless chorus from his score during the ballet’s London tour.
The music is usually encountered in heavily abridged form, without chorus, in the second of the two suites extracted by the composer, which has become a staple of the concert hall. But even outside its original theatrical context, the full-length ballet is a marvel of compositional design when heard with all of its intended effects. In another famous characterization of the work, Ravel called it a “choreographic symphony.” Its deft, economic construction from a small group of motifs and harmonic ideas forms a brilliant counterpart to the score’s dazzling spectrum of colors and sonorities.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The ballet’s three parts are seamlessly linked together. The longest is Part One, which opens with a ritualistic scene evoking a mystical aura. Undulating harmonies—enhanced by the chorus—form one of the central motivic ideas of the piece, while the flute plays a theme of fluid rhythms associated with the nymphs and Pan. A solo horn then outlines the couple’s love theme. Both pagan devotion and the various types of love and desire depicted in Daphnis et Chloé become interwoven through the course of the ballet.
In the contrasting sequence of dances that follows, the grotesque movements of the lustful cowherd Dorcon are sharply characterized, as is the ensemble’s mocking laughter when Dorcon loses a dance contest with Daphnis, the latter’s graceful movements depicted by a lilting meter. Ravel’s shimmering orchestration captures the ecstasy of his love, pitting this against the erotic dance of another shepherdess, Lyceion— marked by clarinet figurations—who attempts to charm Daphnis.
As pirates steal on the scene, Daphnis rushes to protect Chloé but is too late. A sandal left behind is evidence that the pirates have abducted her. A nocturne of moody and exotic sonorities (including a wind machine) accompanies the transition to a scene with nymphs who comfort the shepherd. They summon Pan, god of the wild and protector of shepherds.
An unaccompanied chorus serves as a transition to Part Two, which features the menacing, warlike music of the pirates. Chloé dances in supplication, her plaintive state evoked by English horn, and tries to escape her captors. Ravel contrasts the fleeing pirates with the awe-inspiring sounds and textures of the Pan’s timely intervention with an army of satyrs who cause the miscreants to flee in terror.
Ravel’s depiction of nature in the “Daybreak” sequence that opens Part Three is especially celebrated. Using divided strings, he instructs the players to remove their mutes one by one as woodwinds mimic birdcalls. The chorus intensifies the impression of shafts of sunlight dispelling all darkness and worry.
It is at this point that Daphnis and Chloé, now joyfully reunited, dance together for the first time. They perform a symbolic pantomime re-enacting the story of Pan’s passion for the nymph Syrinx, with the flute representing Daphnis/Pan.
A rapturous development of their love music abruptly segues into the orgiastic concluding dance. Ravel’s complex rhythmic patterns proved especially tricky for the original dancers, ending the ballet in a bacchanalian frenzy of “joyful commotion.”
Scored for 3 flutes (2nd and rd doubling piccolo), alto flute, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, military drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, castanets, tambourine, triangle, wind machine, crotales, celesta, xylophone, glockenspiel, 2 harps, strings and mixed chorus, as well as offstage piccolo, E-flat clarinet, horn, and trumpet.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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