It has been said that the best Spanish music has been written by Frenchmen. Maurice Ravel was partially of Basque origin although born just north of the Spanish border, and always had a particular affinity for the music of his southern neighbor. In 1905 he composed Miroirs, five piano pieces that became instantly popular, primarily through the efforts of his friend, the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes. According to the composer, these pieces “…mark a decided turn in the development of my harmony, so that musicians had to revise the views they had previously been accustomed to hold about my style.”

Alborada del Gracioso was the fourth and most popular of the set. In 1918 Ravel gave it a brilliant orchestration, a foretaste for his orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition four years later. Alborada, literally “Dawn Song,” was a form of morning serenade from the Basque region of Northern Spain, later becoming a popular folkdance. Ravel’s precise meaning in using the word “gracioso” in the title is unclear. While generally translated as “jester,” the gracioso was a stock figure in the rich theatrical tradition of Spanish comedias, the literally thousands of plays written and performed during Spain’s Siglo de Oro, Golden Age. The gracioso was the clever servant – the Spanish version of the “tricky slave” in Roman comedy – who accompanied his master and generally got him out of trouble. Although not a character in a drama, Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza is literature’s most famous gracioso. Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni – itself based on a play by Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina – is another. In view of the history of the gracioso, the image, conjured by Ravel’s work is of a servant serenading his master’s lady.

Alborada is replete with Spanish folkloric harmonies and rhythms. In its orchestrated version Ravel dishes out plum solos, melodic ones for oboe and bassoon, rhythmic ones for trumpet and castanets. With such a variety of orchestral colors, one loses the sense of the lone serenader.