Maryland's Classical Music Station

Maurice Ravel, 150

 

One of the things in which I take great pride—and for which I can take no credit—is that I share my birthday with that most refined and enigmatic of French composers, Maurice Ravel. This month, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth on March 7, 1875.

 

Some quick and random facts: Maurice Ravel was slender and small—just five feet—with an unusually large head. He was known for being a dandy, that is to say, he dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes and placed a great deal of importance on his appearance and grooming. There has been some speculation about whether or not he was gay, but it seems more likely that he was asexual, or simply not motivated by intimate relationships with other people. He was, however, an avid cat lover. He shared his home with Siamese cats (anything from two to six; accounts vary) with names like Mouni and Jazz, and they were allowed to roam freely—even over his piano and music.

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure in France, eleven miles from the Spanish border. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was Swiss by birth and had won a piano prize as a youngster, but he decided to pursue a career as an engineer, inventor, and manufacturer. By the standards of his day, Pierre-Joseph married beneath him; his wife, Marie, was illegitimate and barely literate. But the marriage was apparently a happy one, and Maurice was devoted to his mother.

Some of Ravel’s earliest memories were the folk songs that his mother sang to him, and her Basque-Spanish heritage had a strong influence on his life and music. Just think of his first major orchestral work, Rapsodie espagnole; his Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), which he described as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court;” the Spanish-titled, Alborada del gracioso from his cycle, Miroirs; and surely his most famous work, Boléro, inspired by a Spanish dance in 3/4 time that was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and which Ravel described as “an orchestrated crescendo.”

Both Ravel’s parents encouraged his musical pursuits, and he was admitted to the prestigious Paris Conservatoire (having played Chopin to gain entrance) to study piano with Gabriel Fauré and composition with Emmanuel Chabrier. So far so good. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, Ravel was denied the coveted Prix de Rome four times—despite his entry on one occasion being his now monumentally famous (and famously difficult) Gaspard de la nuit. This rejection caused a furor, and the Director of the Conservatoire resigned in disgust.

Nevertheless, Ravel was already forging his own way as a composer. He developed a particular—one might almost say idiosyncratic—style, which incorporated such diverse elements as modernism, baroque, neoclassicism, and even jazz in some of his later works, like his two concertos. He was a slow and painstaking worker, as a result of which he left us fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Still, in the 1920s and 1930s he had an international reputation as France’s greatest living composer (Claude Debussy had died in 1918.)

Ravel was a masterful pianist, and many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of the best-known orchestrations that you can hear fairly often on WJBC include Pavane pour une infante défunte; Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), his homage to Schubert, Valses nobles et sentimentales; Le tombeau de Couperin in the style of a Baroque dance suite; and—from his five-movement suite, Miroirs—Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada del gracioso.

His ear for the colors of orchestration was exceptional, not only in his own works but for other composers too. What makes his orchestrations so extraordinary is that they become newly conceived works. This might sound self-evident, but there is virtually nothing in Ravel’s orchestral versions to suggest their pianistic origins. Whatever instruments Ravel wrote for, the results sound not only idiomatic but inspired—often surprising, but once you hear it, it’s as if there could be no other more satisfying option. Think of the brilliant orchestration he made of the piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, by Modest Mussorgsky—the doleful tones of the alto sax for the troubadour in The Old Castle; the tuba representing a huge Polish cart drawn by oxen in Bydlo.

And when Ravel put piano and orchestra together, magic happened. The whip-crack opening of his Piano Concerto in G—his last purely orchestral work—is astonishing, especially when contrasted with the filigreed textures of the combined English horn and piano in the slow movement. This concerto and the one for the left hand, written more or less concurrently, are the closest to “traditional” orchestral works, while his only string quartet makes one wish he had returned to that form again.

Given Ravel’s fastidiousness—his impeccable dress sense, his exquisitely structured compositions that befit the son of a Swiss engineer—it is surprising how well he responded to the rough and tumble of theater music. He wrote two operas. The first, described as a comédie musicale, was L’heure espagnole (The Spanish Clock); followed around fifteen years later by the highly imaginative L’Enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments) with a libretto by Colette. His first ballet, Daphnis et Chloé, was a commission from the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, and his last, Boléro, was a commission from Ida Rubenstein, who had danced with the Ballets Russes and later formed her own company. In between came his ballet orchestrations for Ma Mère l’oye and Valses nobles et sentimentales, as well as the choreographic poem La Valse, whose compositional trajectory went in the opposite direction, from an orchestral work to Ravel’s transcriptions for piano duo and piano solo.

As well as being a slow and careful worker, with quality rather than quantity being the identifying attribute of his output, Ravel was also an extremely economical composer. His longest composition is his ballet score for Daphnis et Chloé, which comes in at under an hour. His final work, the song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, is a mere seven minutes long but, as with every one of his compositions, each of the three songs is an exquisitely crafted gem.

These songs had been projected for a movie starring the renowned bass, Feodor Chaliapin, but Ravel was unable to complete the commission. In October 1932, he suffered a blow to the head in a taxi accident, which seems to have exacerbated an underlying cerebral condition. Ultimately this resulted in aphasia—an impairment in his ability to comprehend or formulate language. Igor Stravinsky described it this way: “His final years were cruel, for he was gradually losing his memory and some of his coordinating powers, and he was, of course, quite aware of it.” It seems a testament to the kind of man Ravel was that he remained physically and socially active until his last months. He maintained much of his auditory imagery and could still hear music in his head.

Following an unsuccessful surgical intervention, Maurice Ravel died on December 28, 1937, at the age of 62. He was an atheist, so there was no religious ceremony. He was buried at Levallois-Perret cemetery in the northwestern suburbs of Paris beside the parents who had set him on the path of his extraordinary musical career—one that we celebrate on March 7, on the 150^th anniversary of his birth.