Shéhérazade

This week’s topic is Ravel’s early(ish) – 1903 – song cycle for soprano and orchestra based on poems by ‘Tristan Klingsor’ (Léon Leclère).

As you might gather from Gustave Moreau’s La Toilette above, Shéhérazade is, among other things, an good example of the fin de siècle ‘decadence’ which seems to have affected much of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Stravinsky once described Ravel as ‘the Swiss watchmaker’, but in this work Ravel responds to the colour, sensuality and cruelty of Leclère’s poems with an intensity which gives the lie to that description.

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