FULL SHEHERAZADE (Ravel) Paris 1976 Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Horne
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Shéhérazade
- Composer: Ravel Maurice
- Libretto: Tristan Klingsor
- Venue & Opera Company: Paris Frnae
- Recorded: 1976
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Marilyn Horne
- Conductor: Leonard Bernstein
- Orchestra: Orchestre National de France
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Format: Broadcast
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Shéhérazade is the title of two works by the French composer Maurice Ravel. Both have their origins in the composer’s fascination with Scheherazade, the heroine and narrator of The Arabian Nights. The first work, an overture (1898), Ravel’s earliest surviving orchestral piece, was not well received at its premiere and has not subsequently been among his most popular works. Four years later he had a much greater success with a song cycle with the same title, which has remained a standard repertoire piece and has been recorded many times.
Both settings are influenced by Russian composers, particularly Rimsky-Korsakov, who had written a Scheherazade in 1888. The first composition was heavily influenced by Russian music, the second used a text inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem. The musical relation between the overture and the song cycle is tenuous.
Shéhérazade song cycle
The exoticism of the Arabian Nights continued to interest Ravel. In the early years of the 20th century he met the poet Tristan Klingsor, who had recently published a collection of free-verse poems under the title Shéhérazade, inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite of the same name, a work that Ravel also much admired. Ravel and Klingsor were fellow members of a group of young creative artists calling themselves “Les Apaches” (the Hooligans); the poet read some of his new verses to the group, and Ravel was immediately taken with the idea of setting three of them. He asked Klingsor to make some minor changes before he set to work on the music.
Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade, was composed for soprano solo and orchestra, setting the words of Klingsor’s “Asie”, “La flûte enchantée”, and “L’indifférent”. It was first performed on 17 May 1904 at a Société Nationale concert at the Salle Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, with soprano Jeanne Hatto and an orchestra conducted by Alfred Cortot. The three songs of the cycle are individually dedicated by the composer to Jeanne Hatto (“Asie”), Madame René de Saint-Marceaux (“La flûte enchantée”) and Emma Bardac (“L’indifférent”).
Whether the overture and the song cycle are musically related is debated. According to Ravel’s biographer Arbie Orenstein, there is little melodic connection between the overture and the cycle, with the exception of the opening theme of the first song, “Asie”, which uses a theme, based on a modally inflected scale, similar to one near the beginning of the overture. Ravel originally conceived the cycle with “Asie” coming last, and this order was adopted at the premiere, but his final preference, in the published score, gives a sequence steadily decreasing in intensity; the critic Caroline Rae writes that the music moves “from rich voluptuousness and gentle lyricism to languid sensuousness”.
Asie
The first, and longest, song of the three is in the dark key of E flat minor. It typically lasts ten minutes in performance. It is, in Rae’s words, “a panorama of oriental fantasy evoking Arabia, India and, at a dramatic climax, China.” With the continually repeated words “je voudrais voir…” (“I should like to see…” or “I want to see…”), the poet, or his imagined speaker, dreams of escape from quotidian life into a European fantasy of Asian enticements. The music increases in intensity as his imaginations become more feverish, until subsiding to end placidly, back in the real world.
La flûte enchantée
In this song, a young slave girl tending her sleeping master, hears her lover playing his flute outside. The music, a mixture of sad and joyful, seems to her like a kiss flying to her from her beloved. The flute melody is marked by the use of the Phrygian mode.
La flûte enchantée: text and English translation
L’indifférent
The final song of the cycle has prompted much speculation. The poet, or his imaginary speaker, is much taken with the charms of an androgynous youth, but fails to persuade him to come into his – or her – house to drink wine. It is not clear whether the boy’s admirer is male or female; one of Ravel’s colleagues expressed the strong hope that the song would be sung by a woman, as it customarily is. The song is in E major, with oscillating string motifs in the orchestral accompaniment which, in Rae’s view, are reminiscent of Debussy’s Nocturnes.
Quoted from Wikipedia