Weekly SpinOn: Voyage Romantique

In the 19th century, many composers began turning toward the unfamiliar — not necessarily to document it, but to imagine it. Romanticism was a period shaped by introspection, emotion, and the power of suggestion. Distant places such as Spain, the Middle East, or Japan were not explored musically in realistic terms, but used as settings for mood, color, and contrast.

What was often called “the exotic” in music was rarely based on direct knowledge. Instead, it reflected how foreign cultures were perceived — through literature, travel accounts, or opera librettos — and how they could be translated into musical language. For composers like Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Puccini, and Borodin, the unfamiliar offered new rhythms, harmonies, and orchestral textures. What they created were not portraits of real places, but imagined soundscapes.

This playlist brings together four works that show how Western composers engaged with the idea of the foreign — often stylized, sometimes reductive, but always musically inventive.

Track 1: Rapsodie espagnole, Habanera – Maurice Ravel

The first track starts our journey not to the real Spanish countryside, but to a fantasy of how Ravel imagined it.

Maurice Ravel was fascinated by Spain — not necessarily the real country, but the idea of Spain: its colors, rhythms, and atmosphere. He was born in 1875 in the French Basque town of Ciboure, not far from the Spanish border. His mother was of Basque-Spanish descent, and her culture left a deep impression on him. Spanish themes would return again and again in his music — perhaps most famously in Boléro, but earlier and more subtly in his Rapsodie espagnole, written between 1907 and 1908.

The Rapsodie espagnole was one of Ravel’s first major orchestral works. He had originally written the Habanera movement as a piece for two pianos in 1895 — and more than a decade later, he returned to it, expanding it into a four-part orchestral suite in which the Habanera became the 3rd movement. The result was a beautifully crafted tone poem that doesn’t tell a story, but evokes a place and mood — a kind of musical postcard from a dream version of Spain.

The habanera rhythm itself originated in Cuba, traveled through Spain, and became popular in French music of the 19th century. Ravel knew this rhythm well — he studied it, loved its elegance and sway — and here he uses it to create a quiet, mysterious atmosphere. There’s no big melody, no dramatic arc. Instead, Ravel gives us texture and tone — flickers of harmony, slow-moving phrases, and careful orchestral color. You feel the heat of a summer night, the distant hum of dance, the softness of shadows.

While Karajan did not cover a wide range of French music, he returned regularly to a select group of works — especially by Ravel, Debussy, Berlioz, and Saint-Saëns — which he shaped with his signature focus on color, clarity, and formal balance. In this recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, he takes the music at a deliberate pace and avoids heavy gestures. The result is transparent and finely balanced, allowing Ravel’s orchestration to emerge with quiet precision.

Track 2: Scheherazade, Op. 35: I. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

With this second track, the playlist shifts from Ravel’s stylized vision of Spain to a much broader and more cinematic soundscape. Scheherazade, composed in 1888, is Rimsky-Korsakov’s most famous orchestral work, inspired by the Middle Eastern tales of One Thousand and One Nights. But like Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov wasn’t trying to reconstruct an authentic culture — he was painting a scene as it might be imagined through 19th-century eyes: colorful, dramatic, and distant.

The opening movement, The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, sets the tone. After a bold introduction in the low brass — often interpreted as representing the Sultan — a solo violin enters, playing an ornamented, winding melody that symbolizes Scheherazade herself. From there, the music unfolds in long, wave-like arcs. The strings swell and fade like tides, while woodwinds and harp add flashes of light and texture. Rather than telling a specific story, the movement captures the motion and scale of the sea, and the sense of being carried somewhere unknown.

Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the great orchestrators of the Romantic era, and this piece is a showcase for his skill. Every section of the orchestra has its moment — the music is constantly shifting in color and density. His influence would be felt well into the 20th century, especially in the works of Ravel and Stravinsky.

Karajan’s recording with the Berlin Philharmonic brings out the architecture of the piece more than its theatrical side. The tempo is controlled, and the transitions are seamless. He avoids overly dramatic gestures, instead focusing on balance and pacing. The solo violin, rather than standing apart, is smoothly integrated into the orchestral texture — part of the whole rather than a character on stage.

As part of this playlist, Scheherazade opens up the idea of “voyage” into new territory — no longer a quiet street or a private mood, but a vast and open world, full of risk and imagination. The piece doesn’t describe a real journey, but it evokes what it feels like to leave the shore.

Track 3: Madama Butterfly: Un bel dì vedremo – Giacomo Puccini

After the vast orchestral imagery of Scheherazade, this third track brings the focus inward. Un bel dì vedremo — One fine day we’ll see — is the emotional centerpiece of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, composed between 1901 and 1903. Set in Nagasaki, the opera tells the story of Cio-Cio-San, a young Japanese woman who waits for the return of her American husband. In this aria, she imagines — or convinces herself — that he will appear again on the horizon. The music captures the tension between hope and heartbreak, between belief and the slow intrusion of reality.

At the turn of the 20th century, European composers were deeply fascinated by the so-called “exotic” — cultures, sounds, and images from outside the West, often filtered through fantasy or limited knowledge. In opera especially, foreign settings allowed composers to explore heightened emotions, unfamiliar musical colors, and moral conflicts from a distance. Madama Butterfly stands squarely in that tradition. Puccini’s Japan was not meant to be ethnographically accurate — it was a carefully crafted world of stylized sounds, intended to feel distant yet emotionally accessible. The opera reflects both the curiosity and the blind spots of its time: it projects a sense of the “Other,” while telling a deeply Western story of love, illusion, and loss.

Puccini was determined to give the opera a sense of local color, even though he never visited Japan. He consulted a number of sources to that end. Most notably, he incorporated elements from the Japanese national anthem, Kimi ga yo, which appears early in the opera as a theme associated with Butterfly. He also worked closely with the wife of the Japanese ambassador in Rome, who advised him on gestures, cultural nuance, and the pronunciation of Japanese words. Some of the melodies he used came from collections of traditional Japanese music brought to Italy by touring performers like Yamaguchi Otojiro. However, much of the “Asian” sound in Butterfly comes from stylized techniques — pentatonic scales, delicate textures, and ornamented melodic lines — filtered through Puccini’s own compositional voice.

This recording, made in the 1970s, features soprano Mirella Freni, one of Karajan’s closest collaborators, with the Vienna Philharmonic. Freni’s voice — warm, lyrical, and emotionally centered — was ideal for Puccini. Karajan admired her natural phrasing and unforced musicality. Together, they recorded several key operas, including full versions of Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, and Don Carlo. Their partnership was marked by a shared understanding of pacing, tone, and emotional restraint. In this aria, Karajan lets Freni shape the scene, keeping the orchestra flexible and unobtrusive.

“Un bel dì vedremo” is a clear example of how early 20th-century opera used the exotic as a dramatic setting. The imagined Japan of Madama Butterfly serves not only as a location, but as a lens through which themes of longing, difference, and emotional distance are intensified. In the context of this playlist, the aria doesn’t just introduce another culture — it shows how Western composers used the idea of foreignness itself to explore deeply personal human experiences.

Track 4: Prince Igor, Act II – Polovtsian Dances (Instrumental) – Alexander Borodin

This final track shifts the focus once more — from the inner world of Puccini’s Butterfly to the festive, open-air spectacle of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. Composed in the 1870s and 1880s as part of his unfinished opera Prince Igor, these dances are among the most famous examples of exoticism in 19th-century Russian music. The version featured here — purely instrumental, without chorus — highlights Borodin’s gift for vivid orchestral color and rhythm.

Set during Act II of the opera, the dances depict an entertainment staged by the Polovtsians — a nomadic Central Asian people — for the captured Russian prince. As with other Romantic portrayals of the “East,” the music reflects fantasy more than cultural accuracy. The melodies are energetic, modal, and highly stylized, often using repetitive rhythmic patterns, bold contrasts, and open harmonies to suggest something distant and unfamiliar. The result is not ethnographic, but theatrical: a Western image of the steppe, filled with movement and heat.

Borodin, a member of the Russian “Mighty Handful,” sought to build a national style that embraced folk elements and non-European themes. But much like Rimsky-Korsakov — who completed the orchestration of Prince Igor after Borodin’s death — his treatment of the exotic was rooted in Romantic idealism. The Polovtsian Dances became popular well beyond the opera stage, later inspiring parts of Kismet, a 1953 Broadway musical, and appearing in concert halls around the world.

Karajan’s interpretation with the Berlin Philharmonic is polished and direct. He doesn’t overplay the exoticism but lets the rhythmic drive and orchestral detail speak for themselves. The textures are clean, the pacing steady, and the balance carefully maintained — a disciplined reading that still leaves room for color and flair.

As the final piece in this playlist, the Polovtsian Dances offer a kind of imagined arrival: not at a real destination, but at a moment of celebration and vivid contrast. It’s a reminder of how 19th-century composers used sound to travel — and how orchestral music could turn the foreign into something irresistibly familiar.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute, Salzburg)