Born on March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France; died on December 28, 1937, in Paris, France.
Shéhérazade
Asie [Asia]
La Flûte enchantée [The Enchanted Flute]
L'Indifférent [The Indifferent One]
Composed: 1903
Estimated length: 17 minutes
First performance: May 17, 1904, with Jane Hatto as the soloist and Alfred Cortot conducting.
First Nashville Symphony performance: February 22, 1955, with Guy Taylor conducting at War Memorial Auditorium.
Early in his career, Maurice Ravel had a misfire with his first public orchestral work: a concert overture titled Shéhérazade. The piece originated from his plan to write an opera based on material from The Arabian Nights. The fictional narrator of this collection of stories is the beautiful Scheherazade (to use the conventional English spelling), who avoids the death promised by her cruel husband at the end of their wedding night by telling him cliffhanger stories that fuel his desire to hear her continue.
Ravel never published the overture (premiered in 1899), concluding that it was “rather heavily dominated by the influence of Russian music.” But he remained obsessed with the Scheherazade theme, returning to it a few years later, in 1903, for the orchestral song cycle Shéhérazade. Ravel had by then become a member of the avant-garde scene in Paris, spending time with fellow musicians and artists as part of a Bohemian social group who called themselves la Société des Apaches. (In French, “Apaches” was used to mean “rowdy young hooligans”—a case of owning what had been intended as an insult, much like the term “Impressionists.”) Young Igor Stravinsky was part of the group, as was Tristan Klingsor, the Wagnerian pen name of poet, musician, and painter Léon Leclère.
Ravel selected 3 of the 100 prose-poems from Klingsor’s collection Schéhérazade to create a song cycle, giving it the more French-like spelling Shéhérazade. The biographer Roger Nichols draws a comparison to the painter Gustave Moreau, comparing “the prevailing textures of low, soft strings and high, clear woodwinds” with “the voluptuous flesh under sparkling jewelry” found in Moreau’s decadent, fin-de-siècle paintings of Salome. Ravel insisted that Klingsor recite his poems aloud so he could focus attention on the artful rhythms and sensuality of the sounds—even apart from the sense—as he conceptualized the project musically.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
“Asie” (“Asia”), the first and longest of the songs—all three of which begin quietly—is an escapist fever dream that lures us into the enchanting fantasy realm of this “ancient wonderland.” A more reduced orchestra accompanies the other two songs, which depict scenarios of love and longing. The young enslaved girl of “La flûte enchantée” (“The Magic Flute”) overhears her hidden lover making music through the window outside. “L’indifférent” (“The Indifferent One”), with its gender ambiguity, plays on the ironic tension between desire and indifference, observer and observed.
Scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, English
horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, tam tam, glockenspiel), 2 harps, celesta, and strings, as well as a mezzo-soprano soloist
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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Nashville Symphony & Chorus
Nicholas Hersh, conductor
Tucker Biddlecombe, chorus director
Ellie Dehn, soprano
Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo soprano
Alek Shrader, tenor
David Leigh, bass
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