A Look into Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe
Will Eisenberg

In this paper, I will be looking at the third part of Maurice Ravel’s piece Daphnis and Chloe. This third part is considered Suite 2, and is the final scene of the piece. In 1909, the founder of the Russian ballet Ballet Russes Serge Diaghilev reached out to Ravel to write Daphnis and Chloe. Working with Russian dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine, the symphonie chorégraphique (choreographic symphony), as Ravel called it, debuted in Paris in June of 1912. Daphnis and Chloe is originally based on the Greek pastoral novel of the same title written in the second century by Longus. Between the times of Longus and Ravel, the story was adapted for the stage and became a fairly well known play. 

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Ravel was born into a music-oriented family. When it came time for him to attend college, his parents urged him to go to the Paris Conservatory, a prestigious music school. He entered with hopes of studying and mastering piano, but upon noticing that many of his peers excelled more than he did, he shifted his attention to composing. While attending the Paris Conservatory, his father introduced him to Erik Satie, who was a great inspiration for Ravel throughout his life. He also fell in with the likes of Claude Debussy, who, while significantly older than Ravel and his peers, would spend time with them discussing his musical ideas and compositions. 

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Upon being commissioned to write the piece, Ravel famously aimed to compose “a vast musical fresco, less concerned with archaism than with faithfulness to the Greece of my dreams, which is similar to that imagined and painted by French artists at the end of the eighteenth century.” It can be safely assumed that he is referring to one of many 18th century depictions of the play, as opposed to the original Greek story. Adapting this story for music, after it had been altered for many French and Russian audiences, proved to Ravel that capturing the story’s essence would be challenging. Ravel was something of an idealist, and made it his ambition to match the music with the ballet that Diaghilev had written, as well as Fokine’s choreography and Léon Bakst’s set design. For years he worked to master this balanced perfectionism and, when he finally finished writing, Serge Diaghilev was “not fully satisfied, and wanted to call off the project, and only after much persuasion by Ravel’s publisher did he consent to mount the production.” The work in its entirety is about an hour long, Ravel’s longest ever. Because of its length, many concert programmers began only performing the second suite. 

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The music of Daphnis and Chloe was written for a large orchestra, with full sections of brass, woodwinds, percussion, strings, and a choir. The third part (Suite 2) of the piece is comprised of three pieces: “Lever du jour (sunrise),” “Pantomime,” and “Danse générale (general dance).” The suite opens on a sunrise scene, where, in the first lines of the score, birds—represented by sweeping glissando lines by the harp, flutes, and clarinets—are chirping, and the sun is seen over the horizon. In this scene, Ravel uses a large chord swell at measure marker 157. Here, the flutes, clarinets, and harps are no longer playing in fragmented lines as they were for the sunrise, but they are playing long sweeps. A similar, louder swell happens later in the section, when the lovers Daphnis and Chloe are reunited. These sweeps are almost entirely composed of pentatonic scales, which is indicative of the impressionist movement that Ravel was such a vital part of. Another way that the music was emblematic of the impressionist movement was through Ravel’s use of the orchestra to achieve a specific timbre. Specifically, at measure marker 172, the oboe and English horn play melodies that create a very specific sound; they both pedal a C-sharp, and play melodies around this, creating lush feeling chords. Daphnis and Chloe is not wholly impressionist work, however. Some of the complex rhythmic lines seen throughout, for example, are evidence of Ravel’s formative work as a composer in the modern era. This is most evident in the third section of the second suite, titled: “Danse générale,” or general dance. At measure marker 202, the time signature is a fast 5/4, and the flutes and clarinets can be heard playing complex sixteenth note lines. These lines are acting in tandem with short, but elaborate ostinato lines. The tempo is also ever fluid, and difficult to pin down for longer than a few measures. It is also in this section where Ravel most clearly experiments with parallel chord progressions. The primary tonal center is A major, but he goes in and out of A-flat minor and A-sharp minor, the two adjacent minor chords. Parallelism is a common result of the modern period, and using these chords against the tonal center of A major gives the piece a very atonal sound at times. Atonality, of course, being another major result of modernistic composing. 

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Around the time that Ravel was commissioned to write Daphnis and Chloe, he had begun spending time with Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky and Ravel would often meet at the Paris Conservatory and eventually started sharing musical ideas with one another. This intersection led to a period of great influence for both composers, with Stravinsky’s The Firebird premiering in 1910, and his famous Rite of Spring in 1913. It was thought by many through the 1910s that Daphnis and Chloe would be eclipsed by these Stravinsky compositions (and even more so by Claude Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun which premiered 10 days before Daphnis and Chloe did), but as the landscape or modern classical music began to shift away from impressionism, Daphnis and Chloe remained as a musical touchstone for students, professional composers, and amateurs alike. Interestingly, many 20th century critics claim to hear the influence of Arnold Shoenberg’s style in Ravel’s later works, and cite Scoenberg’s friendship with Stravinsky (and Stravinsky’s friendship with Ravel) as the reason. Upon the premiere of Daphnis and Chloe, Stravinsky was enamored by the music. Its general reception however, was not fantastic. Right up until the premiere of the ballet, there was a fair amount of disagreement among stage directors about various choreographic moments. This led to the dancers having less time than required to practice, leaving them under-prepared for the premiere. However, the music was what caught the attention of critics. The piece’s success was slow but true, and by the 1920s, symphonies from different parts of Europe began playing Daphnis and Chloe as a program in and of itself. 

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While Daphnis and Chloe was written before the onset of World War 1, it is difficult to imagine that it did not have an effect on its creation. In 1912, when the piece premiered, the political attitude in Paris was tense. Germany and France especially were deep in feud, and when the war began in 1914, Ravel thought that his musical career was over, and that he would serve as a military-man for the greater part of his life. In this way, Daphnis and Chloe served as a reference to pre-war Europe. Ravel would go on to serve in the war for the French army, but would return to composing shortly after. 

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Overall, the second suite of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe came to be through years of work, friendships with Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, and many different compositional styles, ultimately making a piece that exemplified early modern impressionism. 

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Works Cited:

Counts, Jeff. “Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, Suite no. 2.” Utah Symphony. 5 May, 2022. https://utahsymphony.org/explore/2022/05/ravel-daphnis-et-chloe-suite-no-2-3/#:~:text=THE%20COMPOSER%20%E2%80%93%20MAURICE%20RAVEL%20(1875,the%20Ballet%20Russes%20in%201909. 

Howard, Orrin. “Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé.” LA Phil. 2023. https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/289/suite-no-2-from-daphnis-and-chloe 

Hunter, R. L. A Study of Daphnis & Chloe /. Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Morrison, Simon. “The Origins of Daphnis et Chloe (1912).” 19th-Century Music 28, no. 1 (2004): 50–76.

Ravel, Maurice. Daphnis Et Chloé Suite No. 2. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Incorporated, 1999.

Zank, Stephen. Maurice Ravel. Garland Science, 2013.