Léon Bakst’s scenery design for the original production of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, Paris, 1912.
one of the most enchanting flute solos in the entire orchestral literature. (Actually, the melody is divided between the orchestra’s flute players, to give the musicians a chance to breathe!) Ravel’s melody follows no classical models — it hovers around a certain pitch to which it keeps returning, then moves and hovers around another pitch, but there seems to be no predetermined direction in which the melody progresses; nor does it respect any fixed metric structure. Daphnis and Chloé embrace one more time, and the ecstatic Danse générale gets underway. Rather unusually for a ballet, large stretches of this dance were written in the asymmetrical meter of 5/4, to which dancers and musicians in 1912 were unaccustomed. (It is said that they had to scan the words Ser-gei Dia-ghi-lev, Sergei Dia-ghi-lev until they got the rhythm right.) This asymmetry and the use of ostinatos throughout this final section remind us that the energy and daring of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is less than a year away. (Ostinatos, consisting of a repeating rhythmic figure or short melodic motif, were among Stravinsky’s favorite musical techniques. Both Daphnis and Chloé and The Rite of Spring end with similar effects — short rhythmic units repeated, varied, and stirred up to a paroxysm. The fact that Stravinsky was to carry this effect even further takes nothing away from the brilliance and excitement of Ravel’s finale.) —Peter Laki Copyright © Musical Arts Association
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About the Music
The Cleveland Orchestra