La Valse

Maurice Ravel took a compositional interest not only in the Spanish bolero, but also in the Viennese waltz. In March 1920, he completed the score of the work consistently entitled La Valse, about which he later remarked in an interview: It is a dancing, spinning, almost hallucinating ecstasy, an increasingly passionate and exhausting whirl of dancers who get carried away in exuberance. But there are also some grotesque distortions. They remind us that this composition, in addition to the sonorous glorification of the Belle Époque, also represents the dance on a volcano that was already deflagrating at the time.