Alborada del gracioso

One of the earliest pieces Ravel ever wrote - in 1893, when he was still a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire - was a Sérénade grotesque for piano. Although it was to remain unpublished during his lifetime, it is a remarkably prophetic work, a parody serenade with Spanish-dance outer sections, aggressively strummed as though by a whole band of guitars, and a sentimental love song in the middle.

So we don’t have to worry too much about the exact meaning of Alborada del gracioso, another parody serenade in the Spanish idiom, which was first published as one of five piano pieces in Miroirs in 1906. It clearly derives from the same concept as the Sérénade grotesque and, in spite of its poetic Spanish title, it is probably not based on any more specific kind of scenario. Ravel once confessed that he chose the title of the Pavane pour une Infante défunte because he liked the sound of it. The same could be true of Alborada del Gracioso, its appeal enhanced perhaps by the associations of the alborada, the morning serenade of troubadour tradition, with the Basque country where the composer was born and by the comic pathos identified with the gracioso, the “fool” of classical Spanish theatre.

Obviously a more mature and more accomplished composition than the earlier piece, the Alborada del gracioso is more elegant in construction, more sharply focused in its harmonies, more precise in characterisation, and very much more evocative and authentic in its use of the Spanish idiom. It is clearly identifiable, in fact, as a brisk seguidilla in 6/8 interrupted, after a misleadingly final-sounding tonic chord of D major, by a slower copla in 3/4.

Ravel’s orchestration of another of the Miroirs pieces, Une Barque sur l’Océan, was one of his rare failures. The orchestral version of Alborada del Gracioso - the guitar figuration of the seguidilla vigorously plucked on strings and harps, the castanet rhythms echoing throughout the orchestra, the caricature voice of the gracioso impersonated by a bassoon in its expressive top register - was a brilliant success in that it at last, after twenty-five years, realised the full dramatic potential of an idea first tried out in the Sérénade grotesque.

Gerald Larner©2003