Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor

The Piano Trio was the last work Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) composed before the outbreak of World War I in France, in August 1914. He completed it, in fact, at the end of that month, having already tried to enlist in the French army. (He was refused on account of his small stature.) The trio is superficially in the standard four-movement form, but is internally unorthodox and colored by exotic elements, especially in terms of rhythm.

Introduction

Since completing his String Quartet in 1903, Ravel had composed hardly anything for instrumental ensemble, and no conventional chamber music. (The Introduction and Allegro of 1905 is more like a miniature harp concerto.) The Piano Trio emerged rather from a long series of solo piano works, none of which, however, use sonata-type forms. So, in suddenly choosing to write for piano, violin, and cello, Ravel took on two major issues: the issue of formal design and the notoriously recalcitrant question of balance between the modern piano and a pair of string instruments. His solutions are not the least interesting things about this fine and unusual work.

History

The outbreak of World War I found Ravel’s work in an unusually diverse phase. On the one hand he had been much involved with the theatre. His ballet Daphnis et Chloé had been staged by impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1912, and in the same year he had himself conducted the premiere of a ballet, Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, danced to his orchestration of his piano work Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911). He had spent a good part of the spring of 1913 collaborating with Igor Stravinsky on the orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera Khovanshchina, and he was still nominally working on an opera called La cloche engloutie, based on a play by Gerhart Hauptmann, but soon abandoned. On the other hand, there were the beginnings of a piano concerto called Zazpiak-Bat, based on themes from Ravel’s native Basque country, where he was staying when war broke out. This, too, was soon abandoned, but it left its mark on the Piano Trio, which opens with a rhythm also found in the concerto sketches, and which Ravel himself described as “de couleur basque” (“of a Basque coloring”).

After being turned down for military service, Ravel embarked on the composition of a piano suite, Le tombeau de Couperin, modelled on dance types from 18th-century French keyboard music. But he had not given up the idea of fighting for France, and in March 1916 he was finally accepted as a truck driver in the motor transport corps, and was sent as backup to the troops fighting at Verdun. Partly for this reason, partly because of his mother’s death (in January 1917), and partly because of his own variable health, Le tombeau de Couperin was the only work after the piano trio that he completed during the war.

Ravel: Trio in A minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello

Form

The quasi-sonata-form first movement (“Modéré”) largely ignores the harmonic niceties of the textbook. The first and second themes are in the same key (so far as key can be firmly identified with a harmonic style like Ravel’s); but the first theme is recapitulated after the second—as a sort of coda, and in the relative major (C major)—while the second theme returns in its original key—a highly unclassical procedure that Ravel had previously adopted in his String Quartet.

The curious 3 + 2 + 3 (“Basque”) rhythm of the main first-movement theme is complemented by the peculiar form of the scherzo second movement: Pantoum (“Assez vif,” or “rather lively”). A “pantoum” is a verse form (Malayan in origin) with four-line stanzas, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third of the next. A specific form of the pantoum involves the alternation of elements that are pursued independently of one another, and Ravel seems to be mimicking this idea with alternating themes in the main section, while the trio (middle) section combines first-theme material with much slower moving, chorale-like music in a conflicting meter—a slow 4/2 against quick 3/4—so that they seem to retain their independence.

The third movement, Passacaille (“Très large,” or “very broadly”), is a very free passacaglia with an evolving theme in two sets of entries for each instrument, followed by a brief development section and a climax, and concluding with four further entries of the varied theme.

The finale, Final (“Animé,” or “lively”), is, like the first movement, in a somewhat disguised sonata form, without a clear division between the development and recapitulation sections. Ravel’s biographer Roger Nichols suggested a parallel between the slightly ceremonious second theme and the chordal opening of the whole work. Another parallel is metric, since the finale is in 5/4 time, alternating with 7/4—a subliminal reminder of the irregular division of eight beats in the first movement, as well as of the 5/8 meter in the finale of the String Quartet.

Analysis

Like his teacher Gabriel Fauré, Ravel had difficulty toning down his piano writing to give room to the string instruments; the usual balance problem of chamber music with piano is by no means always solved in Ravel’s piano trio. Particularly in the outer movements, the piano writing is extremely full, with enriched chords and grand climaxes, and in the whole work the piano is silent for only ten bars, seven of them in the slow movement. Ravel sometimes counters this by having the strings play in unison two octaves apart, thus bringing their line forward, or by breaking up the piano harmonies into passagework (patterns outlining the chords). The problem is much less marked in the quicksilver scherzo, and in the slow movement—in which the music is more linear—and Ravel gives more space to the individual entries of the passacaglia theme.

The trio’s rhythmic irregularities are striking, and raise interesting questions. The so-called “Basque” meter of the first movement is actually ambiguous: supposedly a division of eight into 3 + 2 + 3, the “heard” division is more like 3 + 3 + 2 because Ravel places an accent on the final quarter note. The violin and cello statement of the theme is nevertheless notated as 3 + 2 + 3, yet still with an accent on the final quarter note. Similarly in the second theme, the notation implies 3 + 2 + 3, but the accent contradicts them. The metric polyphony in the middle section of the Pantoum (multiple meters at once) is marvelously intricate, with conflicting barlines between the two types of music. The alternating fives and sevens of the finale are almost simple by comparison.

Critical Thoughts

Although Ravel was regarded as a Debussyist by contemporary critics, and even today is often bracketed with his older colleague, the two composers were profoundly dissimilar in the kind of music they wrote. Two people can have similar voices, speak a common language, yet say things quite differently—and the same is true in music. Ravel was certainly influenced by Debussy’s harmonic and textural innovations (and made some of his own that influenced Debussy in return), but he did not, on the whole, adopt Debussy’s revolutionary discourse. Ravel speaks his modern language, as it were, in an essentially 19th-century way. The piano trio is a brilliant example of the grafting of a new vocabulary onto an old syntax. The music flows, rises, falls, climaxes, and decays as Classical/Romantic music has always done. In the first movement especially, the drama is expressed through multiple changes of tempo—many of them metronome-marked, and always with a strong sense of forward progress. The contrapuntal, even quasi-fugal, development of the finale announces the approaching climax of the whole work, as surely as the finale fugues in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony or Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

Legacy

The Piano Trio had its first performance in Paris’s Salle Gaveau on January 28, 1915, in a concert that also included the premiere of Gabriel Fauré’s song cycle Le jardin clos. According to the pianist involved, Alfredo Casella, the performance of the trio was mediocre, and may (Roger Nichols surmises) have prompted Ravel to revise the distribution of parts in the Pantoum.

Parts of the piano trio figure, alongside other music by Ravel, on the soundtrack of the 1992 French film Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter), directed by Claude Sautet.

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Article by Stephen Walsh