Ravel: String Quartet

Maurice Ravel’s solitary String Quartet was a comparatively early work, partly composed while he was still a student auditing Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire. Soon after finishing it, in April 1903, he entered the prestigious Prix de Rome competition for the fourth time, and was yet again unsuccessful. However, by this time, he already possessed a certain public profile through works such as his Shéhérazade Overture (1898) and the epoch-making piano piece Jeux d’eau (1901), and the String Quartet quickly established him as a mature composer in no need of academic accolades.

Introduction

In Ravel’s String Quartet, there is some evidence of the influence of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet from ten years earlier. Like the Debussy quartet, Ravel’s is in the four standard movements (with the scherzo second) and cyclic, with variants of the same material in every movement.

Although sometimes described as “in F major,” the quartet’s modal character (colored by elements of the old, fixed scales) tends to blur the sense of key, and it was probably Ravel’s inability (or unwillingness) to conceal this aspect of his mature style that killed his chances of success with the rulebound Prix de Rome juries. Just at this time, there was emerging in French music—especially Debussy’s—a tendency that would revolutionize the harmonic grammar of 20th-century music. So, when Ravel was accused of being “Debussyste,” he was being unintentionally recognized as innovatory and forward-looking. Meanwhile, Debussy was writing a series of piano masterpieces (Images) partly inspired by Ravel’s Jeux d’eau.

History

Ravel was born in the Basque estuary village of Ciboure, opposite Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the river Nivelle, but his family moved to Paris when he was three months old, and he grew up Parisian, with Basque sentiments. He first entered the Conservatoire as a piano student in 1889, and it was the beginning of an almost farcical career as a student. After winning the piano competition of 1891, he seems to have become pathologically incapable of ever winning again. In 1895 he was thrown out of the piano classes, but reentered the Conservatoire in 1897 as a composition student in Fauré’s class. Now began his succession of competition failures as a composer. Once again, in 1900, he was ejected from the class, but continued with Fauré as an auditor until 1903, when he finally left the Conservatoire, aged 28. Meanwhile his doomed Prix de Rome attempts continued until 1905, when his fifth and final failure, at the age of 30, created a scandal in the Paris press that led to the resignation of the Conservatoire’s director, Théodore Dubois.

To judge from his list of works up to 1903, Ravel was already no conventional composition student: as well as the Shéhérazade Overture and Jeux d’eau, the list included the Sites auriculaires for two pianos (1895–97) and the solo piano versions of the Menuet antique (1895) and the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899). Between them these works already hinted at the emergence of an individual manner, under the influence partly of Debussy, partly of Fauré, that diverged significantly from the precepts of Ravel’s classroom teachers and the prize examiners. The String Quartet, dedicated to Fauré, is in many respects the culmination of that process.

Ravel: Quartet in F major for Strings

Form

Like so much French music, Ravel’s quartet is superficially orthodox, but actually treats Classical form with a great deal of freedom. The first movement (“Allegro moderato”) has the shape of sonata form, but not the harmonic contrasts that traditionally underpin that form. For instance, the second subject is recapitulated in the same key as in the exposition, ignoring the whole concept of resolution that is the essence of the Classical sonata idea. The scherzo (“Assez vif – très rythmé”) is, as usual, ternary in form, but in place of a conventional trio or second, contrasting section, it has a slow meditation on motives (short series of notes) from the first section.

The slow movement (“Très lent”) is even more unorthodox, designed as a series of fragmentary melodic gestures interspersed with quotations of the main first-movement theme. The finale (“Vif et agité”) is a kind of rondo, but with the unusual feature that its main theme is a texture—scrubbed 16th-notes au talon (on the heel of the bow)—as much as a sequence of notes. The 5/8 time signature of this movement would also be hard to find anywhere else in mainstream chamber music of the previous century and a half.

Analysis

The cyclic aspect of Ravel’s string quartet is much more overt than in Debussy’s, which Ravel possibly treated as a model. Ravel’s biographer Roger Nichols makes two highly perceptive points on this topic: “In construction, Ravel’s [string quartet] is the more subtle, even if he did not possess Debussy’s ability to make a different theme out of similar material.” Often the cyclic element is little more than quotation, though it’s true that there is a general character about Ravel’s melodies that tends to suggest cross-referencing of a less transparent kind. There are also genuine motives: the rising fifth in the scherzo theme comes from the first movement’s second theme, whose triplet eighth-note figure crops up subsequently in every movement in one form or another.

Ravel’s “F major” is a highly un-Classical phenomenon. The technical reason for this is that he never establishes it through dominant harmony (harmony based on the fifth pitch of the scale) but leans all the time towards the subdominant (harmony based on the fourth pitch of the scale) and relative minor (D minor), in effect treating the F-major scale as a mode rather than a key. In the first four bars of the work there is not a single note outside F major, and there is no F-major harmony in any textbook sense. Instead, at the beginning of the piece, the second violin and cello march solemnly up a two-octave F-major scale, then come down in an A-flat major scale because Ravel has flicked that particular switch. This is not adverse criticism: such is Ravel’s style, and it affects his harmonic thinking, often in much more complex—and always interesting—ways, throughout the work.

One other especially French aspect of the work is its instrumental colorings—seldom a specific feature of the Classical string quartet. The pizzicato (plucked) strings of the main scherzo theme (perhaps inspired by the parallel movement in Debussy’s string quartet) are followed by an arco (bowed) second theme, bien chanté (“very singing”), then a sort of dialogue between the two techniques. In the middle section, by contrast, the strings of all four instruments are dampened by mutes throughout, still with alternation of pizzicato and arco. All the time one is conscious of texture as an aspect of substance, which reminds us that Ravel was one of the great orchestrators.

Critical Thoughts

The string quartet had its first performance on March 5, 1904, played by the Heymann Quartet in a concert at the Société nationale de musique in Paris. It seems that at the rehearsal Ravel was anxious about the balance between the four instruments and urged the players to play more quietly, while Debussy, who also attended the rehearsal, begged him not to do so. The point is significant because the dynamic markings in the score are extreme, but always tend towards the very soft. In the printed score (published after the performance, and perhaps reflecting concerns it raised), by far the most frequent dynamic markings are piano (quiet) and pianissimo (very quiet), with the occasional triple-piano (very, very quiet). The fortissimi (very loud) dynamics are often subito (sudden), and die down quickly. Most striking is the elaborate dynamic detailing, often involving graded markings between instruments. It’s clear that Ravel, the master of instrumental color, saw these details as a compositional element, not just as add-ons—which is sometimes the feeling in classical scores, in which dynamic markings are sparing and often little more than a general guide.

Legacy

Ravel wrote no more strings-only chamber music, and nothing else for strings alone except the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920–22). He was always drawn to a varied color palette, which is presumably why he arranged so much of his piano music for orchestra. As for his influence on other composers, perhaps the most interesting case is the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), who studied with Ravel in 1908 and took elements of Ravel’s style into his own music. Since the most overt case—Vaughan Williams’s song cycle On Wenlock Edge (1909)—is scored for string quartet and piano, one might posit Ravel’s String Quartet as part of that work’s background.

________

Article by Stephen Walsh