From early childhood, Maurice Ravel was irresistibly attracted by the world of Eastern tales. As a composer, he made his first attempts at the end of the 1890s to express this attraction in music, but his opera Sheherazade, based on the 1704 Antoine Galland translation of “A Thousand and One Nights” (upon which, as he said, Russian  music exercised a great influence) was to remain incomplete. Only the overture was performed publicly (in May 1899) and its cool reception dissuaded Ravel from continuing. Years later, he remarked “the overture is impoverished and so full of whole tone scales that I’ve had enough of them to last a lifetime.”

This next attempt, setting to music verses by his close friend Tristan Klingsor, did reach completion. The Sheherazade cycle was written in 1903, and following the relative rigour of his preceding composition, the string quartet in F major (“I endeavoured to build constructive music” reported Ravel), it comes as almost lyrical compensation. In its musical language, the influence is Debussy is self-evident; the conversational rather than sung vocal line in places seem to evoke Pelléas et Mélisande. This influence is most apparent in the first song Asie (Asia), but in its rich orchestral material Ravel also employs fragments from his abandoned Sheherazade opera. The second song “The enchanted flute” (La Fl?te enchantée) contrasts a more intimate atmosphere with the pathos of Asie; the orchestration also becomes more transparent. The final song L’Indifférent (“The Indifferent”) seems to represent Ravel escaping from the clutches of Debussy. Its much more melodic vocal line becomes recognisably Ravelian.

Ravel certainly did not exorcise his fascination for Eastern themes with this song cycle: many of his friends recall that in the nineteen thirties, shortly before his death, Ravel was still contemplating a fairy tale opera with an Arab theme, drawing on the Thousand and One Nights.