Maurice Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2

Parents who have trouble getting their children to practice a musical instrument may want to try the method Maurice Ravel’s parents employed: they bribed him six sous an hour to practice the piano. They must have soon felt it money well spent, for their son entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1889 at age 14 and by the time he left the school in 1905 had composed dozens of works for piano, voice, and chamber instruments.

In 1909, Sergey Diaghilev, director of the Ballet Russe, offered  Ravel a commission for a ballet. Diaghilev’s choreographer Mikhail Fokine chose as the subject the story of Daphnis and Chloé, a pastoral tale credited to the Greek poet Longus. Ravel completed a piano score by 1910, but the work of orchestrating the ballet, with its intricate sonic depictions of natural phenomena, mythical gods, and passionate emotion, as well as the many revisions demanded by Fokine, required two more years from the perfectionist composer. As a comparison, consider that 1909 was the same year Diaghilev commissioned the ballet The Firebird from Igor Stravinsky. By the time Ravel finished his own commission in April, 1912, Stravinsky had completed (and the Ballet Russes had performed) The Firebird as well as Petrushka, and he was working on The Rite of Spring.

The story of Daphnis and Chloé concerns two young orphans raised by shepherds on the island of Lesbos. They meet and fall in love, but are separated when a group of pirates abduct Chloé. The god Pan takes pity on Daphnis and rescues Chloé from the pirates. The couple celebrate and the ballet ends in a Dionysian bacchanale. In setting this tale to music, Ravel wrote that he tried to present not a work of “archaic fidelity” but a “vast musical fresco … faithful to the Greece of my dreams.” 

The ballet
premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on June 8, 1912,
with Vaslav Nijinsky and Thamara Karsavina dancing the title roles. Despite
their talents and those of the composer and choreographer, the ballet was not a
huge success. This was most likely because Nijinsky had premiered his
choreography for Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) a
few weeks earlier, with himself as soloist, and had caused a scandal with his
depiction of the faun’s erotic longings. Ravel’s work simply got lost in the
scandal.

The lukewarm response to his composition did not deter Ravel from releasing two orchestral suites based on the ballet. The first suite consists of music from the second act (in the pirates’ camp), while the second suite, played at today’s concert, is almost the entire third act of the ballet. Ravel’s student Alexis Roland-Manuel described the two suites as containing “the essential and best-written parts” of the ballet, and held that Suite No. 2 was the composer’s greatest work in both imaginative and orchestral achievement.

The suite opens with Lever du jour (Daybreak), depicting a despondent Daphnis prostrate before a woodland altar to Pan. He is awakened at sunrise by his fellow shepherds, who soon bring Chloé to him. Woodwinds play very rapid arpeggios representing flowing water on the rocks of the altar, interspersed with flute birdsong, while the strings play a broad lyrical melody for the lovers. The music builds to a huge crescendo augmented by harp and triangle, depicting the sunrise. In Pantomime, the two reunited lovers perform a dance portraying the love of the god Pan for the nymph Syrinx. Individual woodwinds–a pair of oboes that share a solo, a clarinet, and a long, complex flute “solo” played by piccolo, flutes, and alto flute–accompany the flirtatious dance of the young lovers. Daphnis and Chloé declare their passion for each other and the music becomes ever more agitated as the herdsmen and women rush in and begin a wild dance to the god Pan. Ravel sets this final portion of the work, the Danse générale (General Dance), in a 5/4 meter that gives a feeling of uncontrolled forward movement. This section also makes use of the full spectrum of orchestral color, from whirling strings and woodwinds to insistent, crashing percussion. The exhilarating climax is as close as one can get in music to a Dionysian revel–a celebration that usually led to its ancient worshipers dancing wildly until they fell to the ground, utterly spent.