The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is often associated with dance, and La Valse (The Waltz) was written in 1919 both as a dance and about the dance. Ravel said he hoped to create "a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz," but Serge Diaghilev, who had commissioned the music for his famous Ballet Rouses, rejected the work because he felt it was not suited for the stage. Ravel was deeply hurt, and the music was not performed as a ballet until many years later.

Ravel himself said the music was inspired by the waltzes of Johann Strauss, and La Valse does capture echoes of glorious old Vienna, along with dissonance and despair that brings it into his own time in war-torn Europe.

A program note published with the score reads: "Whirling clouds give glimpses, through rifts, of couples dancing, The clouds scatter, little by little. One sees an immense ball peopled with a twirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth, fortissimo. An imperial court, in or about 1855" In Ravel's words, his apotheosis of the waltz resembles "the mad whirl of some fantastic and fateful carousel."