Shéhérazade: Ouverture de féérie

Ravel’s interest in the exotic goes at least as far back as the great

Exposition Universelle of 1889. It was there that he heard the Javanese gamelan for the first time and it was there too that he heard Rimsky-Korsakov conducting Russian music, including his own Scheherazade. Both experiences left a lasting impression. If he was less susceptible to the sound of the gamelan than Debussy, who was thirteen years older, he was profoundly influenced by the Russian orientalists. His first orchestral work, the Shéhérazade Overture, and his early song cycle, also called Shéhérazade, are clear tributes to Rimsky-Korsakov - as, in a different way, is the finale of Daphnis et Chloé.

The Shéhérazade Overture is all that survives of an opera project inspired, like Rimsky’s symphonic suite, by the Thousand and One Nights. On its first performance, conducted by the young composer at the Société Nationale in Paris in 1899, it provoked much adverse criticism, not least for its obvious debt to Debussy and above all for its construction “or lack thereof.” Where Ravel actually went wrong was not in the work itself but in a programme note claiming that it was “composed according to the classical structure of the overture” when it is actually much more flexible than that description implies. His critics would have been wiser to take into account the subtitle Ouverture de féérie (Fairy-tale Overture) which gives fair warning of a narrative structure and a probable programmatic content.

Like Rimsky’s Scheherazade, Ravel’s overture makes a feature of the story-teller herself. She appears for the first time in a sinuous, exotically inflected oboe melody in the opening bars and for the last time in a literal repeat of the introduction at the end. It is an indication of the composer’s concern for integration, however, that she reappears in a variety of disguises in the central section of the work, which begins after the story-teller theme has been carried to a shattering climax by trumpets and horns. There are three main ideas here: the first another exotically inflected but rather more urgent oboe melody, the second a whole-tone muted-trumpet call taken up by woodwind, the third a lyrical inspiration for flutes declared by Ravel to be of Persian origin. Although there is a clear recapitulation, where the first and third of those themes are recalled simultaneously, the overture is basically a spontaneously and dramatically motivated continuous development - or as Rimsky described his Scheherazade, “a kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images of oriental character.”

Curiously, while he was justifiably happy with the orchestration, Ravel agreed that the work was “poorly constructed” and withdrew it. He was to turn again to the Thousand and One Nights 35 years later, incidentally, for the subject of a ballet called Morgiane but he was by then too far gone in his final illness to complete it.

Gerald Larner ©2004