Maurice Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade wasn’t his first go at telling a tale of the tales. In 1898, when the great composer was merely a composer, Ravel wrote a concert overture of the same name, with the idea of making a full opera. Boos could be heard at the premiere, and the Frenchman quietly put his piece away.
When he tried again, in 1904, with a completely new work, it was different; better, beautiful. The NZSO presents this later piece on July 25 and 27 in Wellington and Christchurch, with a Gallic pairing of conductor Stéphane Denève and mezzo-soprano Virginie Verrez, in one of the year’s most tempting programmes, which also features music by Boulanger and Strauss.
Ravel’s piece is not the first, the last, or the most famous work to lean on S(c)héhérazade, the storyteller of the 1001 Nights, who weaves her tales each evening to prevent her husband from killing her. Rimsky-Korsakov’s earlier Schéhérazade symphonic suite is better known. John Adams’s Schéhérazade.2 for violin and orchestra (2015) puts a post-#MeToo feminist spin on the story. It needed one.
Rimsky in particular lets his male gaze linger on his subject, with Schéhérazade represented by sensual violin curlicues. Ravel mostly avoids that trap, though one of Shéhérazade’s three movements, L’indifférent, is sung to a young boy, which caused eyebrows to be raised, too. Both composers, though, succumb to the era’s fascination with an imagined Orient. Neither Rimsky nor Ravel visited the Arabian Peninsula, but they weren’t about to let that stop them, and they added exotic flourishes at will. The result in both cases is simultaneously deeply inauthentic and unspeakably beautiful, a pair of fanned peacocks vying for Schéhérazade’s attention.
Not that they were competing; Rimsky’s Schéhérazade premiered in 1888. There’s a connection, though. Ravel’s inspiration came not from the tales of the Arabian Nights, but from poetry written in response to Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. The writer, Tristan Klingsor (real name Léon Leclère – his adopted first name and surname are Wagner references), was part of Ravel’s artsy Parisian crowd known as Les Apaches (The Hooligans). Ravel selected three from 100 Klingsor poems, Asie, La flûte enchantée, and L’indifférent. In 2024, it’s perhaps best not to read the poems too closely (sample text: “I want to see beautiful turbans of silk/Over dark faces with gleaming teeth” – Asie). Bathe instead in Ravel’s music, the sound of a supreme musical colourist working his way towards greatness. l
NZSO, Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Life, Michael Fowler Centre, July 25; Christchurch Town Hall, July 27.
