L'Heure espagnole

The single-act comédie musicale focuses on the extravagant Concepción, the wife of a watchmaker, who makes secret assignations with a sequence of lovers in her husband’s shop. Maurice Ravel’s rich musical imagination is displayed both in his creation of the sounds of clocks at the beginning of the opera and the influences of Spanish music, particularly vivid in the final Habanera. Alongside the parodistic slant of the libretto, the quotation technique and the concealed operatic parody with which the composer was targeting the Dramelyrique of Debussy and Massenet is reminiscent of the world of operetta. The comic-erotic single act work which in its day was described by music critics as ‘musical pornography’ for the insinuating ambiguity of both the score and the plot is now considered one of the most charming one-act operas in the repertoire.