Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel was one of the three major composers—the others were Gabriel Fauré (for a time Ravel’s composition teacher) and Claude Debussy—who brought French music out of its 19th-century preoccupation with opera, and its subordination to German symphonic music, into a new, more characteristic phase partly inspired by exotic and antique models. At its core, as with Debussy, was piano music, but Ravel also survived after World War I to write a variety of vocal and instrumental works that partly reflected the modernistic tendencies of music in the 1920s.

Early Years: A Young Rebel

Ravel was born to a Basque mother and a Swiss father in the village of Ciboure, in the Basque region of southwest France. But when he was three months old, the family moved to Paris, where Ravel lived until moving out after the war to the village of Montfort L’Amaury, 30 miles west of the capital. All his life he was something of a loner: asexual (apparently), closest always to his mother, and resistant to authority and the establishment. At the Paris Conservatoire, which he entered as a pianist at the age of 14, he was almost entirely unsuccessful in the prize culture that prevailed there. He was twice excluded from his classes (piano in 1895 and composition in 1903), and, most drastically, he failed in five attempts at the Prix de Rome (the last of these in 1905, when he was 30 and already a well-known composer). Perhaps it was in distant response to these (obviously corrupt) rejections that he turned down the Légion d’Honneur in 1920.

Middle Period: Mechanisms and Atmospheres

By 1905 his music included an early violin sonata (1897), the F major String Quartet (1902–3), a suite of songs with orchestra called Shéhérazade (1903), and several important piano works: the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), the Sites auriculaires (1895–97) for two pianos, and, above all, Jeux d’eau (1901)—a piece whose exploration of piano sonority, under the influence of the gamelan that Ravel (like Debussy) had heard at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, was probably a vital stimulus for the series of piano sets Debussy himself began the following year.

Ravel: Quartet in F major for Strings

Jeux d’eau is characteristic also in its quasi-mechanical quality. The water in a fountain flows, and the sunlight glitters on it as a result of fixed parameters: the design of the fountain and the time of day. Ravel enjoyed inexpressive devices of this kind and soon wrote other piano works that disguise feeling in a mechanistic cloak. In Miroirs (1904–5), the “Noctuelles” (“Moths”) flutter like an aeolian harp in a gentle breeze; the boat in “Une barque sur l’océan” is at the whim of wind and waves; and even the sad birds (“Oiseaux tristes”) can seem as if trapped in a series of kindly mechanisms. The ostinato figures in “Ondine,” the first piece of Gaspard de la nuit (1908), suggest the chilly inhumanity behind the water fairy’s temptations. In his one-act opera L’heure espagnole (1907–9), Ravel turned this opposition into a comedy of clocks as mechanisms that both enable and frustrate sexual license.

Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit for Piano

In other works of this time, he cultivated what might be called a “distanced” eroticism. The antique coloring of the Introduction and Allegro for a septet of strings, winds, and harp (1905) suggests the sunlit sensuality of a remote classical landscape, and his ballet Daphnis and Chloë, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909 for the Russian ballet, brings this landscape into focus to an orgiastic degree that still manages to keep the emotion at arm’s length. The much later La Valse (1919–20, though offered to Diaghilev as a ballet subject already in 1909) has an even more extreme quality of repressed passion. These orchestral works are notable for the brilliance of their scoring, and they remind us that Ravel also orchestrated many of his own piano works, as well as the works of others—most famously Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

His numerous songs, some with orchestra, often have a similar quality of the distant exotic, like the imaginary travelers’ tales of the sumptuously scored Shéhérazade, or the musical costume prints of the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques with piano (1904–6), or the bird and insect portraits of the Histoires naturelles (1906). Even Ravel’s various Hispanic pastiches, though prompted no doubt by his Basque ancestry, were mostly composed before he actually visited the country for the first time in 1924. It is typical that his Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé—composed for chamber ensemble in 1913 after seeing the scores of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Japanese Lyrics—respond to the atmosphere of these sometimes obscure poems, whereas Debussy, in his exactly contemporary (perhaps rival) settings, responds in more detail to the words.

Late Period: Neoclassicism and Jazz

When war broke out in 1914, Ravel was completing his Piano Trio, but then volunteered for war service and, after failing to be accepted as an air force pilot, served as a driver in the Motor Transport Corps. His only significant composition of the war years was Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–17), a piano suite (later orchestrated) that brought to a head his attraction to the antique. This particular kind of neoclassicism then acted as a prelude to a refined modernism in his postwar music, though he never adopted the functional, “wallpaper music” attitude of Jean Cocteau and his protégés—Les Six (a group of six French composers) and Erik Satie—who, in fact, turned against Ravel as an “establishment” figure. (“Ravel has just refused the Légion d’Honneur,” Satie said, “but all his music accepts it.”)

The Duo Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920–22) and the Violin Sonata No. 2 (1923–27) present a tighter and somewhat more abrasive version of his pre-war style. And though the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1920–-25), with a libretto by Colette, is more varied and colorful, it also has a consciously modern flavor, with jazz and café elements, and a range of weird orchestral effects for the “sortilèges”—the spells that bring to life the furniture and utensils that the child has abused. In the Chansons madécasses (1925–26)—a set of three art songs for soprano and small ensemble—Ravel journeys once again to a remote and exotic land, the island of Madagascar in the 18th century, but the lone singer is accompanied now by just a flute, cello, and piano, used sparingly or to evoke a strange, sometimes harsh environment.

Ravel: Sonata for Violin and Piano

Perhaps his most famous work of all, Bolero was composed in 1928 as a ballet for Ida Rubinstein: another machine, endlessly repeating a single melody—“a masterpiece,” Ravel quipped, “with no music in it.” Finally, at the end of the 1920s, he composed both of his piano concertos: the brilliant, jazzy, and bluesy G major concerto (1929–31) and the more introspective left-hand concerto (1929–30), written for Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war. Soon afterwards, Ravel was diagnosed with Pick’s Disease, a degenerative condition of the brain. He composed only one more work, the song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée for Voice and Orchestra (1933), endured a distressing brain operation, and died in December 1937.

Watching and Listening

Ravel’s two most Classical chamber works, the String Quartet and Piano Trio, show a mastery of traditional form. Both are cyclic: the same themes turn up in every movement in each case. The Duo Sonata and Violin Sonata (strictly No. 2; No. 1, from his student days, survives only in one movement), both composed in the 1920s, have a more distinctly modern flavor: the Duo, by the nature of its instrumentation, rather sparse, at times dissonant; the sonata self-consciously up-to-date, with a “Blues” slow movement and jazzy finale. His other ensemble scorings are less like chamber music than reduced orchestras, very finely heard. The Introduction and Allegro is the best example, almost a miniature harp concerto. The ensemble accompaniments to the Mallarmé and Madagascan songs provide variety of color rather than a specifically chamber music texture or character.

Ravel: Sonata for Violin and Cello

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