Daphnis et Chloé

In 1909, Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes company, commissioned Ravel to compose a large-scale dance work. The result was Daphnis et Chloé, completed in 1912 for the stage premiere in Paris that year. Stagings of the ballet are now rare, yet the complete original score, with its wordless chorus adding further colour and atmosphere, is today regularly performed in the concert hall. The scenario, based on a pastoral romance by the 2nd-century Greek writer Longus, tells the story of the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloë. Their love is first troubled by mutual misunderstandings, then thwarted by a group of marauding pirates who kidnap the heroine. Daphnis pleads for help from the god Pan, who intervenes to restore Chloë to him, and all ends happily in a general Bacchanale dance. While Ravel’s score is a spectacular masterpiece of orchestration, it also excels in its use of stylised dance forms to recreate a classical world within the context of a sumptuous ballet staging. The second of the two concert suites extracted by Ravel from the hour-long original score quickly became popular. It begins with a richly melodic and gorgeously orchestrated dawn scene, followed by Daphnis’ and Chloë’s dance enacting the myth of Pan and Syrinx (a famous solo for the orchestra’s principal flutist, who is then joined by the other players in the section, including alto flute and piccolo, to create a kind of extended-range mega-flute). The suite ends with the wild “Bacchanale”, which took Ravel a full year to compose and orchestrate.