Date of composition: 1913
Premiere: The second orchestral suite was performed for the first time on 29 March 1914 at the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, conductor: Camille Chevillard
Duration: 17 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First performed on 20 December 1920, conductor: Oskar Fried
Love meets obstacles: this simple formula is still the basic principle of almost every Netflix series – and it was already a driving force for narration in antiquity. Such is the case in the tale by the Greek writer Longus about the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé, set on the island of Lesbos. In this mixture of love story, coming-of-age tale and adventure novel, two foundlings discover first a tender, then a passionate love for each other, withstand abductions and other perils, uncover their true origins – and at last celebrate their wedding: a happy ending.
The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev had a keen instinct for effective musical material for dance, which he commissioned from artists such as Stravinsky, de Falla, Debussy and Satie for his Ballets Russes, sending creative shockwaves through Europe’s ballet world at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1909, he asked Maurice Ravel to set the story of Daphnis et Chloé to music. The ballet’s premiere in Paris in 1912 was only a moderate success, but in the form of two orchestral suites the music found a new life, with the Second Suite soon becoming an audience favourite.
This suite, with its three connected movements, is drawn from the final part of the ballet, Tableau No. 3. After many twists and turns, a new day dawns in the lovers’ realm with a musical “Sunrise” (Lever du jour): a shimmering spectacle of nature with musical birdsong and the rush of waterfalls, unfolding in ever-changing prismatic colours. Ravel here works above all with the characteristic timbres and luminous shades of the woodwinds, giving the flutes – also symbolic voices of pastoral life – a prominent role from the very beginning. At the same time, special string techniques such as glissandi on harmonics continually produce mysterious, strikingly modern effects for the time – creating the impression of a quasi-synaesthetic art in which music, (imagined) dance and visual elements merge.
In the subsequent “Pantomime”, Daphnis and Chloé perform a little dance play in honour of the god Pan, who had saved Chloé from a pirate attack: the mythological love story of Pan and the nymph Syrinx. Syrinx can escape Pan’s advances only by transforming herself into reeds. In his longing, Pan fashions a flute from them, whose arabesques are also woven through Ravel’s score: as a sonic sphere of love, but also of threat. The concluding “Danse générale” in 5/4 time whirls around in infinite circles: an exuberant celebration of life with archaic-ritual elements. Here above all, one senses a spiritual kinship with the music of Stravinsky, whose passion for the expressive worlds of dance Ravel fully shared. Incidentally, Stravinsky himself praised Daphnis et Chloé as “without doubt not only one of Ravel’s finest works, but also one of the most beautiful creations in French music.”