ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the history, meanings, and development of a genre can be considered as a strand in the history, meanings, and development of a type of feeling. A particular historical track will be traced within this rich intersecting field of genre and expression to lead to the interpretation of Ravel's sentimental waltzes. Discussion of sentimentalism in the context of musical genre intensifies the significance of discourses relating place and gender. Sentimental figures yearn for the centripetal; sentimental bodies hanker to move around a shared centre or point of assumed common origin, rather like the embrace and revolving circles of the waltz. A powerful aspect of these techniques is Flaubert's capacity to extract complex poignancy through ambiguous engagement with the established tropes of the sentimental tradition. The change of tone is prominent as Bovary's death approaches. Rozsa's Bovary waltz is a mid-twentieth-century reinvention of the mid-nineteenth-century waltz, widely indebted to Ravel's evocation of 1855 Vienna in his La valse.
