The wonderful world of  One Thousand and One Nights , which had already inspired  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Shahrazad  , had attracted, in 1898, the attention of the twenty-three-year-old Maurice Ravel, who had composed an overture which, however, at its first performance on 27 May 1899 at the Salle du Nouveau Théâtre in Paris, received a less than favourable reception, especially from the critics. Indeed, while Pierre Lalo, in his review in Le Temps on June 13, 1899, cited the section of the program written by Ravel that outlined the structure of the overture, he declared, "If you look for what the program indicates in the music, you will have a hard time perceiving it." The anonymous reviewer of "L'Ouvreuse du cirque d'été" was even harsher, calling Ravel "a mediocrely gifted debutante." This overture, Ravel's earliest surviving orchestral work, was not published during his lifetime by the French composer, whose imagination, however, would be once again stimulated, five years later, by the world evoked in the famous collection of short stories. On this occasion, his imagination was stimulated by an encounter with the poet Tristan Klingsor, who in 1903 had published a collection of free verse poems inspired not so much by One  Thousand and One Nights  as by Rimsky-Korsakov's famous orchestral suite. From these poems, Ravel chose three that, strangely, have no connection to  One Thousand and One Nights  and in which the eponymous protagonist, Scheherazade, is not named. Klingsor offered an interesting explanation for this choice:

Frédéric Deloche

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Feb 28, 2026

Ravel · Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana

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Conductor in Shéhérazade by Ravel

Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana

Conductor in L'enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel

Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana

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