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''La valse'', ''poème chorégraphique pour orchestre'' (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920 (premiered in Paris on 12 December 1920). It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work. The work has been described as a tribute to the waltz, and the composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of ''La valse'', summarized the ethos of the work: "Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz."〔Benjamin, George (July 1994), "Last Dance". ''The Musical Times'', 135 (1817): 432–435.〕 Ravel himself, however, denied that it is a reflection of post-World War I Europe, saying: "While some discover an attempt at parody, indeed caricature, others categorically see a tragic allusion in it – the end of the Second Empire, the situation in Vienna after the war, etc... This dance may seem tragic, like any other emotion... pushed to the extreme. But one should only see in it what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement." 〔Ravel, letter to Maurice Emmanuel, 14th October 1922 , in Arbie Orenstein (ed.): ''A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews'' (NY: Columbia UP, 1990), 229.〕 He also commented, in 1922, that "It doesn't have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and it also doesn't have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic argument, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.)" 〔"The French Music Festival: An Interview with Ravel", in De Telegraaf, 30.9.22, in Arbie Orenstein (ed.): ''A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews'' (NY: Columbia UP, 1990), 423.〕 In his tribute to Ravel after the composer's death in 1937, Paul Landormy described the work as follows: "....the most unexpected of the compositions of Ravel, revealing to us heretofore unexpected depths of Romanticism, power, vigor, and rapture in this musician whose expression is usually limited to the manifestations of an essentially classical genius". == Creation and meaning == The idea of ''La valse'' began first with the title "Vienne", then ''Wien'' (French and German for "Vienna", respectively) as early as 1906, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II. An earlier influence from another composer was the waltz from Emmanuel Chabrier's opera ''Le roi malgré lui''. In Ravel's own compositional output, a precursor to ''La valse'' was his 1911 ''Valses nobles et sentimentales'', which contains a motif that Ravel reused in the later work. After his service in the French Army, Ravel returned to his original idea of the symphonic poem ''Wien''. Ravel described his own attraction to waltz rhythm as follows, to Jean Marnold, whilst writing ''La valse'': "You know my intense attraction to these wonderful rhythms and that I value the ''joie de vivre'' expressed in the dance much more deeply than Franckist puritanism."〔 Ravel completely reworked his idea of ''Wien'' into what became ''La valse'', which was to have been written under commission from Sergei Diaghilev as a ballet. However, he never produced the ballet. After hearing a two-piano reduction performed by Ravel and Marcelle Meyer, Diaghilev said it was a "masterpiece" but rejected Ravel's work as "not a ballet. It's a portrait of ballet". Ravel, hurt by the comment, ended the relationship.〔Orenstein,Arbie. ''Ravel: Man and Musician'', Dover, New York, 1991, p. 78, ISBN 0-486-26633-8〕 Subsequently, it became a popular concert work and when the two men met again during 1925, Ravel refused to shake Diaghilev's hand. Diaghilev challenged Ravel to a duel, but friends persuaded Diaghilev to recant. The men never met again. The ballet was premiered in Antwerp in October 1926 by the Royal Flemish Opera Ballet, and there were later productions by the Ballets Ida Rubinstein in 1928 and 1931 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska.〔Deborah Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (Ashgate, 2006), 157ff〕 The music was also used for ballets of the same title by George Balanchine, who had made dances for Diaghilev, in 1951 and by Frederick Ashton in 1958. Ravel described ''La valse'' with the following preface to the score: :''"Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855."'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「La valse」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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