Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto and Ravel's Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloe are so well-known and so highly-regarded that it is more than a little surprising that both were created with difficulty and both had a rocky start. While Beethoven was composing his final piano concerto--now known as the "Emperor"--the French army was besieging Vienna. When the cannonade was intense, Beethoven rushed to the cellar of his brother's house, where he covered his ears with pillows to preserve the little hearing he had left. By the time the concerto was finished, Beethoven's deafness was so advanced that he had to forego playing it himself. The first performance--in Leipzig, 1811--won a rave review, but the premiere in Beethoven's home town, Vienna, with his star pupil, Carl Czerny at the piano, was a bust! The Viennese music critic laid the blame squarely on the "proud and overconfident" Beethoven, who "can be understood and appreciated only by connoisseurs."

Serge Diaghilev, music director of the famed Ballets Russes, commissioned Ravel in 1909 to write the music to a ballet based on a second century Greek romance about a young shepherdess and a goatherd. Ravel fell in love with the idea, and told his friends that he was at work on "a large fresco painting, less in keeping with antiquity than with the Greece of my dreams...that which French artists at the end of the eighteenth century imagined and painted." At a little under an hour, it was the longest work Ravel ever wrote and it took him three years. Then everything began to go wrong. The Russian scene designer, Léon Bakst, used the brightest colors he could find, in contrast to the subtle shades Ravel had in mind. During rehearsals the principal dancer--Nijinsky--and the choreographer--Fokine--couldn't seem to agree on anything and the corps de ballet could not negotiate the five beats of the final bacchanale until they were taught to whisper Ser-ge Dia-ghi-lev as they danced. The premiere was not one of Ravel's greatest triumphs...but better days were ahead for Daphnis et Chloe.