Ravel the Decadent by Puri Michael J.;

Author:Puri, Michael J.; [Puri, Michael J.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199735372
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Dialectic of the Idyll and the Bacchanal

Throughout this chapter I have taken license in referring to the finale of Daphnis as a Bacchanale since it appears in the score only as a “Danse générale,” the generic designation for a ballet number that involves the entire corps. However, when revelers “dressed in Bacchic costume” stream across the stage at the beginning of the dance, we are in no doubt as to what we are witnessing. Due to a strong affinity between the finale and the War Dance on the basis of their music, as well as their action—which, in the case of the War Dance, involves an increase in activity until the pirates finally collapse in drunken exhaustion—I have considered the War Dance to be at least bacchanalian, if not an outright bacchanal.

All of which raises the question, what exactly is bacchanalian about the Bacchanale and the War Dance? From these two examples we can extrapolate a number of hallmark characteristics. In general, the music is aggressive, belligerent (in the etymological sense of “warlike”), primitivist, elemental, relentless, frenzied, heterogeneous, borderline chaotic, eruptive, and ecstatic. Specific compositional features include a lively tempo, swift, chromatic melodies, brash and discordant harmonies, sharp and widespread accentuation, quivering textures (trills, tremolos, and drumrolls), driving percussion, a continuous pulse stream in small rhythmic divisions, and long-range intensifications that lead to massive climaxes. In Ravel’s music, however, a bacchanal is just as important for what it is not: an idyll. Ravel does not simply juxtapose the two genres but rather sets them into a dialectic, which means that the one cannot be understood without the other and that the one implies the presence of the other whether or not the other is actually present. Moreover, as the members of a dialectic, the idyll and the bacchanal embody poles of experience, complementary ways of doing and being. Since they are both potentially memory genres, their dialectic is also mnemonic: The idyll is passéist, likes to “ruminesce” at leisure and sublimate desire into a beautiful, static vision, while the bacchanal is oblivious to or at least unsentimental toward the past and finds its participants mobilized by raw, unsublimated desire.

We have already seen how this dialectic informs Daphnis, as reflected in multiple dichotomies: the bipolar behavior of the Dance of Daphnis, with its composed exterior and hemorrhagic interior, the opposition between the Religious Dance of part one and the War Dance of part two, and the hybridized Daybreak and Bacchanale, where the former is an idyll crackling with libidinous energy and the latter a bacchanal with a nostalgic conscience. The dialectic is not confined to Daphnis, however, but is remarkable in Ravel’s entire oeuvre, surfacing most often in finales that either remain content to foreground idyllic moments against a bacchanalian background or work toward a synthesis of the two. One example that immediately comes to mind is the “Final” of the Trio (1914). Its primary theme is perfectly idyllic, evoking the nascent dawn with pianissimo harmonics and tremoli in the strings, as well as pentatonicism and open fifths in the piano.

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