Inaugural concert

Dance is the thread that unites the pieces by early 20th century French composers performed in this concert. But to looking closely one also discovers another thread, more subtle and less obvious, but perhaps more fascinating: it is exoticism or more exactly four different modes of exoticism. The exoticism of Le boeuf sur le toit is the exoticism without aestheticizing frills and dreamlike fantasies of a musician seduced by Brazilian motifs personally heard on the streets of Rio. The exoticism of Shéhérazade is the dream of one who has never seen those faraway countries and peoples and therefore dreams of them bending them to his own fantasies and desires, making exoticism rhyme with eroticism. Gymnopédie's exoticism unfolds not in space but in time, traveling back through the millennia to to take us to ancient Sparta: this, too, is pure dreaming, without any ambition to recreate historical reality.

Apparently, there is nothing exotic about the Vienna of La Valse, but for Ravel, that world that is close in time and space but now wiped out by the Great War and has become in a mirage like the East of Shéhérazade is also exotic.

A new generation of French musicians emerges in the years immediately following the Great War. They have Jean Cocteau on their side, who, still very young, is already a dominant figure on the Parisian artistic scene. It is he to baptize as the "group of the Six" that handful of composers and to write their artistic manifesto, Le Coq et l'Arlequin, which rejects the symbolism of Debussy and his precious, vaporous and indeterminate sounds, to to which he contrasts the dry and essential sound of Satie and also music-hall, circus, and Afro-American music. Cocteau actively collaborates with those musicians whose mentor and guide he has appointed himself, and a resounding moment of that collaboration is Le boeuf sur le toit, conceived from Darius Milhaud as a cinéma-fantasie intended to accompany a silent Charlot film, but later transformed into a ballet-pantomime on Cocteau's advice.

During the war Milhaud had been secretary of the French embassy to Rio de Janeiro, and Le boeuf sur le toit is a demonstration of his love for Brazilian music, its rhythms, colors, vitality (samba, tango, maxixe) and even its melancholy (fado). In fifteen minutes or so some thirty or so Brazilian folk tunes are quoted with the greatest freedom and without any predetermined formal plan, including the song O boi no telhado (The Ox on the Roof), which had been enormously successful in the Rio carnival of 1918 but which is not the main tune, the one that returns again and again, as one might be led to to believe.

With an alienating effect, the choreography designed from Cocteau for the ballet's Paris premiere in 1920 accompanied this lively music with very slow movements, like a slow-motion film. It was also Cocteau's to create the surreal subject matter, which sees the most disparate patrons (a bookmaker, a dwarf, a boxer, a woman dressed from man, men dressed from woman, a policeman who is decapitated by the blades of a fan but resurrects...) played not from dancers but from circus performers.

It was such a success that soon afterwards a bar named Le boeuf sur le toit was actually opened to Paris, which in the 1920s was the gathering place of the Parisian artistic avant-garde.

The taste for exoticism surfaces several times in Maurice Ravel'sopera , who can find exoticism just beyond the borders of France, in Spain, or in more distant countries, such as Greece and Madagascar, or even in an undefined Orient, a fantasy world that cannot be enclosed within precise geographical boundaries. Already in 1898 he had thought of aopera inspired by the Thousand and One Nights, and this idea was reborn in a new guise in 1903, when a young poet, who had chosen the Wagnerian pseudonym of Tristan Klingsor, read him some of his lyrics. Ravel immediately set three of them to music, titling them Shéhérazade. In the first, Asie, the narrator dreams of escaping from real, prosaic life to immerse himself in a boundless, fantastic continent where there is no misery and beauty and luxury triumph, inextricably linked with blood and cruelty. In La flûte enchantée a slave girl, locked in her master's house, hears her lover playing the flute, far away, at night: the spleen of separated lovers is inseparable from subtle and delicate eroticism. In L'indifférent, a young man with eyes as sweet as a girl's does not accept the invitation to enter and turns away, waving goodbye with a graceful gesture: the explicit sensuality of the text is reflected in the exhausted languor of the music. The sensual and precious elegance of the solo voice in these three lyrics is multiplied by the refined and fabulous orchestral palette of an unparalleled magician of instrumentation such as Ravel was.

Expelled from the Paris Conservatoire because he was judged to be untalented, Erik Satie is constitutionally intolerant of the musical establishment, plays piano in cabarets for a living, and preaches simplicity and poverty in music in contrast to that era of refined aestheticism, lavish orchestras, and new and complex musical theories. He is already an old man when Cocteau points him out to the young people of the "group of six" as an antidote to Claude Debussy, yet at one time Debussy and Cocteau had been friends and had esteemed each other. Irrefutable proof of this is the orchestral transcription Debussy had made in 1897 of two of the three Gymnopédies for piano composed in 1888 from Satie, reversing their order so that the third Gymnopédie became the first in his transcription.

The title of these short pieces refers to the Spartan festivals of gymnopédies, during which naked youths performed ritual dances and gymnastic exercises. Similar to each other-almost three variations of the same slow waltz rhythm and simple structure-the three Gymnopédies are ethereal, vaporous, minimalist (many decades later John Cage would see in Satie a forerunner of minimal music), and their character is serene but with an undercurrent of nostalgia and mystery. Successions of static chords, melodies with an archaic flavor, slow rhythm and repetitive structures all tend to to reach a contemplative state that excludes human passions and stops or at least slows down the passage of time as much as possible.

When he was about to to compose La Valse, Ravel was thinking of a ballet that would be an apotheosis of the waltz, set-where else? - in the Viennese court at the time of Franz Joseph and the Strausses. But by 1919, when he actually put his new composition on the stave, the blizzard of war had obliterated that world and permanently erased the dream of the carefree, happy Vienna musically symbolized by the waltz. The initial project thus took another direction, and Ravel himself described La Valse as a "fantastic and fatal whirlwind," emphasizing not so much the joyous exaltation of the waltz as the tension underlying this music.

The dark side of Valse is revealed from the very beginning from a dull quiver that pulses underground, creating a sense of unease. Yet the waltz theme, which gradually emerges from that indistinct background, appears light, even frivolous. This theme asserts itself, dissolves, appears again, less and less sparkling and more and more exacerbated, to reach a paroxysmal climax in the finale, when the orgiastic unleashing of the rhythm and the intoxicating colors of the virtuosic orchestral palette captivate and overwhelm the listener, but cannot totally conceal the disturbing and demonic side of the Valse.

text by

Mauro Mariani