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Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel , 1875-1937, French composer, b. in the Pyrenees. He entered the Paris Conservatory in 1889, where he was later a student of Fauré. Ravel became a leading exponent of impressionism . Along with Debussy, with whom he had an affinity of style, he led French music away from Wagner...
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Les Six
Les Six , a short-lived group of six young early 20th-century French musicians. They were united by their adverse reactions to the extravagant impressionism of French composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and the overwrought romanticism of Germans such as Richard Wagner and Richar...
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bolero
bolero , national dance of Spain, introduced c.1780 by Sebastian Zerezo, or Cerezo. Of Moroccan origin, it resembles the fandango . It is in 2-4 or 3-4 time for solo or duo dancing and is performed to the accompaniment of castanets, guitar, and the voices of the dancers. Ravel's Bolero is in this...
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Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky
Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky , 1839-81, Russian composer. His name is also transliterated as Mussorgsky and Musorgsky. He was one of the first to promote a national Russian style. A member of the minor aristocracy and an officer in the Imperial Guard until 1858, he was later a government clerk. His ...
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Alexis Emmanuel Chabrier
Alexis Emmanuel Chabrier , 1841-94, French composer. His best-known works are an orchestral rhapsody, España (1883); an opera, Le Roi malgré lui (1887); and piano pieces, such as Habanera (1885) and Bourrée fantasque (1891). Chabrier's works display vivid harmonic and or...
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Longus
Longus , fl. 3d cent. AD, Greek writer. The pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloë is attributed to him. Idyllic in nature, the poem tells the charming story of the love of a goatherd and a shepherdess. Daphnis and Chloë was widely popular in France and England in the 17th and 18th cent. a...
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Gabriel Urbain Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré , 1845-1924, French composer; pupil of Saint-Saëns. In 1896 he succeeded Massenet as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory, and was its director from 1905 to 1920. Among his many pupils were Ravel and Enesco. His works, largely of a refined, intimate qua...
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waltz
waltz romantic dance in moderate triple time. It evolved from the German Ländler and became popular in the 18th cent. The dance is smooth, graceful, and vital in performance. The waltz in Vicente Martin's opera Una cosa rara, produced in Vienna (1776), is regarded as the first Viennese wal...
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Pierre Monteux
Pierre Monteux , 1875-1964, French-American conductor, studied at the Paris Conservatory. As conductor (1911-14) of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, he directed the premieres of ballets by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Debussy. He came to the United States in 1916 to conduct the Ballet Russe on its American tour,...
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Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev , 1872-1929, Russian ballet impresario and art critic, grad. St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, 1892. In 1898 he founded an influential journal, Mir Iskusstva [The World of Art]. He took a company of Russian dancers to Paris (1909) and, with the assistance of the pain...
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