Suite de Valses

Since his professional training was in law rather than in music, Chabrier’s composing career began at a comparatively late stage in his life. Unlike Tchaikovsky, who underwent a similar training at much the same time but who promptly abandoned the legal profession to enrol as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Chabrier stayed at his desk in the French Ministry of the Interior for nearly twenty years, from 1861 to 1880. So the Suite de Valses , which was written in 1872 (though it was published only in 1913) is not representative of the mature composer. It is by no means a beginner’s work - Chabrier had been writing music since his childhood - and it is far too accomplished to be classed as an amateur composition. But it is not very ambitious in either scale or expression and it is superior to the more sophisticated dance and salon music of the day only in its extravagantly witty harmonies. Although the third of the dances is an ingenious valse à deux temps, and although all three of them are melodically attractive, none of them is anywhere as subtle in rhythm as Chabrier’s later works in waltz time.

The reason why the work remained unpublished during the composer’s lifetime could be that he had doubts about the effectiveness of the overall structure. The introduction - a harmonically adventurous improvisation in 4/4 time on the theme of the second of the three waltzes - is in E major while the dances themselves modulate from C major to G major to E flat major and back to C major, scarcely even touching on E major again. Otherwise, the structure is fairly conventional: each of the three dances is in ternary form and briefly recalled in the coda. Developments which seem more appropriate to the concert hall than the ballroom are marked with optional cuts.