While still a student at the Paris Conservatory in 1899, Ravel conceived an opera to be based on the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. Well-aware of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), Ravel wrote his own Shéhérazade Overture based on the legends, but the work’s lack of success when Ravel conducted it that June gave him pause, and he prohibited it from being published. Then in 1903 he was inspired to set three poems by fellow member of the Apache society Tristan Klingsor (pseudonym of Leon Leclerc), whose cycle entitled Shéhérazade had just been published. Wrote Leclerc:

Ravel immediately announced his intent of setting some of my poems into music. His love of difficulty led him to choose, in addition to “L’indifférent and La flûte enchantée, one which, by reason of its length and narrative form, seemed the least likely suited for his purpose: Asie. The fact is that at this time he was extremely preoccupied with the challenge of adapting music to speech, heightening its accents and inflections and magnifying them by adapting them into melody; and to assist him to carry out his project he asked me to read the poems out loud to him.

Like much of France and other European countries at the turn of the twentieth century, Ravel was fascinated with evocations of the Far East. The interest was not so much a kind of armchair tourism, but rather represented in the words of musicologist Kurt Oppens—whose knowledge of French poetry was second to none—“the decadence of a hypercivilized culture.” Worth quoting at length, Oppens wrote:

Concerning decadence: all such once-fashionable catch names and slogans isolate one single element that, in truth, is common to all art. Every new style is “decadent” in the sense that it pays the price of progress by falling off from a previous achievement. Ravel’s Shéhérazade, however, is decadence with a capital D, a prototypical example of what Decadence as a movement was about. The kind of travel described in a poem such as Asie leads out of the boundaries of the self into archetypal images, a world of subconscious dreams, or eroticism and murder, a mixture that in its concrete political embodiments, led to the unspeakable tragedies of [the twentieth] century. . . .

The emotonal-musical climax coincides with these words: “Je voudrais voir des rose et du sang; / Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine.” (I would like to see roses and blood; / I would like to see those who die for love or else for hate.” . . . The “I” of Leclerc’s poem does not think of dying; he is looking at death and responding to it as if it were a stimulant, an aphrodisiac. . . .

Ravel’s music for “Asie” is essentially one big rolling wave, a masterfully articulated and controlled crescendo and decrescendo. (The element of control is of course non-decadent; decadent art is in itself a contradictory or dialectical proposition.)

It is fascinating that when Ravel conducted these songs himself, he began with “Le flûte enchantée,” followed by “L’indifférent,” and ended with “Asie,” as in the order of the premiere, which was sung by Jane Hatto of the Paris Opéra on May 17, 1904, with Alfred Cortot conducting the orchestra of the Société Nationale. The published order makes for a more subdued ending, in keeping with the intimate love songs of “La flûte enchantée” and “L’indifférent.”

Of the two shorter songs, “La flûte enchantée” offers an intimate melody—often sad, occasionally joyful—evoking the thoughts of the poem’s slave girl, who in her master’s house hears her lover playing the flute. “L’indifferent” also unfolds as a private love song, one shrouded in an air of mystery both as to the poem and Ravel’s setting. Is the protagonist Scherherazade herself seducing a young boy or is the androgenous nature of the addressee something that attracted Ravel? Whatever the case, Ravel skillfully captures the elusive, maybe dreamed or imagined-from-afar seductiveness of the poem.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe

Texts and Translations

Asie

Asie, Asie, Asie,

Vieux pays merveilleux des contes de nourrice

Où dort la fantasie comme une impératrice

En sa forêt tout emplie de mystère.

Asie,

Je voudrais m'en aller avec la goélette

Qui se berce ce soir dans la port,

Mystérieuse et solitaire,

Et qui déploie enfin ses voiles violettes

Comme un immense oiseau de nuit dans le ciel d’or.

Je voudrais m’en aller vers des îles de fleurs

En écoutant chanter la mer perverse

Sur un vieux rythme ensorceleur,

Je voudrais voir Damas et les villes de Perse

Avec les minarets légers dans l’air,

Je voudrais voir de beaux turbans de soie

Sur des visages noirs aux dents claires;

Je voudrais voir des yeux sombres d’amour

Et des prunelles brillantes de joie

En des peaux jaunes comme des oranges;

Je voudrais voir des vêtements de velours

Et des habits à longues franges,

Je voudrais voir des calumets entre les bouches

Tout entourées de barbe blanche;

Je voudrais voir d’âpres marchands aux regards louches,

Et des cadis, et des vizirs

Qui du seul mouvement de leur doigt qui se penche

Accordent vie ou mort au gré de leur désir.

Je voudrais voir la Perse, et l’Inde, et puis la Chine,

Les mandarins ventrus sous les ombrelles,

Et les princesses aux mains fines,

Et les lettrés qui se querellent

Sur la poésie et sur la beauté;

Je voudrais m’attarder au palais enchanté

Et comme voyageur étranger

Contempler à loisir des paysages peints

Sur des étoffes en des cadres de sapin

Avec un personnage au milieu d’un verger;

Je voudrais voir des assassins souriant

Du bourreau qui coupe un cou d’innocent

Avec son grand sabre courbé d’Orient,

Je voudrais voir des pauvres et des reines;

Je voudrais voir des roses et du sang;

Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine.

Et puis m’en revenir plus tard

Narrer mon aventure aux curieux de rêves

En élevant comme Sinbad ma vieille tasse arabe

De temps en temps jusqu’à mes lèvres

Pour interrompre le conte avec art . . .

La flûte enchantée

L’ombre est douce et mon maître dort

Coiffé d’un bonnet comique de soie

Et son long nez jaune en sa barbe blanche.

Mais moi, je suis éveillée encor

Et j’écoute au dehors

Une chanson de flûte où s’épanche

Tour à tour la tristesse ou la joie.

Un air tour à tour langoureux ou frivole

Que mon amoureux chéri joue.

Et quand je m’approche de la croisée

Il me semble que chaque note s’envole

De la flûte vers ma joue

Comme un mystérieux baiser.

L’indifférent

Tes yeux sont doux comme ceux d’une fille,

Jeune étranger, et la courbe fine

De ton beau visage de duvet ombragé

Est plus séduisante encor de ligne.

Ta lèvre chante sur le pas de ma porte

Une lange inconnue et charmante

Comme une musique fausse.

Entre! Et que mon vin te réconforte . . .

Mais non, tu passes

Et de mon seuil je te vois t’éloigner

Me faisant un dernier geste avec grâce

Et la hanche légèrement ployée

Par ta démarche féminine et lasse . . .

—Tristan Klingsor

Asia

Asia, Asia, Asia,

Ancient, marvelous country of fairy tales,

where fantasy sleeps like an empress

in her forest filled with mystery.

Asia,

I would like go away with the ship

which is rocking this evening in the port,

mysterious and lonely,

and which finally spreads its violet sails

like an immense bird of night in the golden sky.

I would like to go towards the islands of flowers,

while listening to the wayward sea sing

to an old bewitching rhythm.

I would like to see Damascus and the Persian cities

with airy minarets rising into the sky.

I would like to see beautiful silk turbans

above black faces with bright teeth;

I would like to see eyes dark with love

and pupils shining with joy

in faces with skins yellow as oranges;

I would like to see velvet clothes

and robes with long fringes,

I would like to see pipes held between lips

all surrounded by white beards;

I would like to see harsh merchants with shifty looks,

and cadis, and viziers,

who with a single movement of their bending fingers,

grant life or death according to their wish.

I would like to see Persia, and India, and then China,

The pot-bellied mandarins beneath the umbrellas,

and the princesses with fine hands,

and the scholars who quarrel

over poetry and beauty;

I would like to linger at the enchanted palace

and as a foreign traveler

contemplate at leisure countrysides painted

on fabrics in frames of fir

with a figure in the midst of an orchard;

I would like to see smiling assassins,

the executioner who cuts an innocent neck

with his great curved sabre from the Orient.

I would like to see beggars and queens;

I would like to see roses and blood;

I would like to see those who die of love or hate.

And then come back later

narrate my adventure to those curious of dreams

while raising like Sinbad my old Arab cup

from time to time to my lips

to interrupt the tale with artistry . . .

The Enchanted Flute

The shadow is soft and my master sleeps

wearing a comical bonnet of silk

and his long yellow nose in his white beard.

But I, I am still awake,

and I hear outside

a flute song in which pours out

sadness or joy in turn.

An air sometimes languorous, sometimes frivolous

that my dear lover plays.

And when I draw near the window,

it seems to me that each note flies away

from the flute to my cheek

like a mysterious kiss.

The Indifferent One

Your eyes are soft like those of a girl,

young stranger, and the fine curve

of your beautiful face shadowed with down

is still more seductive in its curve.

Your lip sings on my doorstep

an unknown and charming language

like a false music.

Enter! And let my wine refresh you . . .

But no, you pass,

and from my doorstep I see you leaving

making a last gesture with grace

and your hips gently swaying,

with your feminine and languid walk . . .