Kaddish from Deux mélodies hébraïques
Maurice RAVEL, arr. Lucien GARBAN
About this Piece
Throughout his life, Ravel was broadly and creatively engaged with the music of other times and places. He imitated and referenced a wide range of music from previous eras and other countries, and even harmonized and arranged traditional melodies from various cultures. After the success of Ravel’s four Chants populaires (1910), which included a “Chanson hébraïque,” Alvina Alvi, a soprano with the Saint Petersburg Opera, asked him to arrange two additional Hebrew melodies, “Kaddisch” and “L’énigme éternelle.” The latter was a Yiddish folk song that had been published in a Russian collection in 1911; the “Kaddisch” is a liturgical chant, and Ravel gives its spellbinding cantorial melismas a rhapsodic flow, with tolling chords in the piano part. Alvi gave the premiere of the songs in June 1914, in Paris, with the composer at the piano. These were the last traditional melodies that Ravel would harmonize; he orchestrated them from 1919 to 1920. —John Henken