The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (review)

Abstract

The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation. By Deborah Mawer. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xvii, 314 p. ISBN 0-75463029-3. $99.95.] Music examples, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. The appearance of Deborah Mawer's The Ballets of Maurice Ravel is an occasion to be celebrated for various reasons: it is a significant contribution by a leading scholar of twentieth-century French classical music to the surprisingly small body of musicological literature on Ravel; it is the first comprehensive investigation of the role of ballet within the composer's oeuvre; it confronts and helps to overcome the historical divide between scholarly discourses on music and dance, which has endured over and against the continuous mutual implication and entanglement of these two arts. As ambitious as these objectives are, this book rises to meet them through Mawer's thorough research, thoughtful analysis, and elegant prose. Consequently, this book is not only indispensable for those who study Ravel and twentieth-century classical ballet, but also edifying and accessible to a much broader readership that includes musicians, dancers, and interested audience members. Currently a senior lecturer in music at Lancaster University, Mawer is well known for her book on form and tonality in Milhaud (Ashgate, 1997), as well as her editorship of and essay contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is only to be expected, therefore, that she demonstrate in her most recent book an intimate knowledge of Ravel's music, a knack for selecting telling moments from larger musical wholes to make specific analytical points, and an ability to communicate these insights clearly and compellingly. This expertise notwithstanding, Mawer seeks to place dance on an equal footing with music in her analyses, and embraces every opportunity to incorporate other elements into her discussion, especially to the extent that they bring to light ballet's collaborative aspects. The book divides into an introduction and eight chapters, supplemented by a select bibliography and an appendix that tabulates various information about important productions of Ravel's ballets. The framing chapters provide a cultural backdrop for this repertoire and an overview of the research project, while the interior six chapters are devoted to individual works in mostly chronological order by date of composition: Ma mere l'oye, Daphnis et Chloe, Valses nobles et sentimentales, La valse, Le tombeau de Couperin, and Bolero; brief treatments of L'enfant et les sortileges and the opening fanfare for L'eventail de Jeanne appear in chapter postscripts that help to amplify discussions of childhood fantasy and exoticism in Ma mere and neoclassicism in Le tombeau, respectively. Mawer's dedication of single chapters to single works, together with the inherent difference in character that distinguishes one Ravel composition from another (the alternately idyllic and primitivist Daphnis from the mordant and melancholic Valses nobles, for example), shapes the reader's experience of the interior chapters into an archipelagic journey from one enthralling island-world to the next. This focused and systematic method of exposition provides both a thorough investigation of each work and showcases the author's versatility as a scholar, a quality that is especially important for research into ballet. A case in point is chapter 4, which treats the 1911 piano version of the Valses nobles in its refashioning as the ballet Adelaide ou le langage des fleurs. Here, Mawer not only gives an account of the circumstances and personalities involved in the 1912 premiere of the ballet, but also lays out and compares the five extant sources for the ballet scenario, ruminates upon details of music-text relations, establishes a quasi-leitmotivic reading of the enigmatic final waltz, analyzes line drawings for the ballet by the designer Jacques Dresa, reads correspondence between the lead dancer Natalia Trouhanova and the theater director Jacques Rouche closely for its content and tone, studies concert programs, collates reviews of the premiere from contemporary newspapers and journals published both within Paris and without, and even makes reference to historical recordings. …