For most of us destined to be lovers of classical music, one of our most marvelous memories is the first time we heard Maurice Ravel. It’s like music that has always existed in some pastel Neverland. When as a teenager I first heard Pavane for a Dead Princess, I swooned as I rarely have for any music. And all this came from a man given to keeping his life and emotions to himself, and not much interested in putting them into his music, either.
Ravel was a splendid melodist and possessed one of the most refined ears for harmony and instrumental color of any composer. No matter how traditional his materials, no matter what his influences, he never sounded like anybody but himself. As a craftsman Ravel was so fastidious that in his time he was sometimes accused of being all technique and no feeling. Rather, he believed that technique and emotion worked together. (When somebody suggested he should write an orchestration textbook, Ravel replied that he would only be willing to write a book about his mistakes.)
He was born in a village called Saint-Jean-de-Luz, his father Swiss and his mother Basque. There was a certain sense during his career that he inherited his precision from his father and his sensibility from his mother, including a lasting interest in all things Spanish. His parents were highly cultivated and encouraged their son’s gift for music. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at age fourteen and stayed there off and on for sixteen years, despite being an indifferent student who seems to have annoyed most of his professors. Ravel was not actively rebellious but simply went his own way without much caring what anybody thought.
By the time he left the Conservatoire for good in 1905 he had already written two of his finest works and been the subject of a major musical scandal. That year the jury of the Conservatoire declined for the third time to give him its leading award, the Prix de Rome. This drew attention, as Ravel was already an admired composer in France, already paired with the well-established Debussy. Eventually they would be called founders of the impressionist school. The uproar over the Prix de Rome rocked the cafés of Paris, and the backlash was intense enough that the director of the Conservatoire was forced out.
The first major work of Ravel’s is Pavane for a Dead Princess, a miniature whose exquisite sighing melodies and distinctive perfumed harmonies announced the presence of a genuine new voice. As with several of his pieces, Ravel wrote it first for piano and later orchestrated it. Then in 1903 he finished the astonishing String Quartet, a work ravishing from beginning to end, which seems from its first moment to take the medium Haydn first perfected and make it into something freshly invented—the same old four instruments sounding like a whole new world of color. The quartet also shows Ravel’s attachment to old forms and genres and the tonal world that went with them—but to those old keys and harmonies he added tints and tinctures distinctly his own.
In 1899, the year of the Pavane, he and Debussy both had the same transformative experiences at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, where they heard the splendrous colors of new Russian orchestral works conducted by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and the exotic sounds of a Javanese gamelan. The latter music, dreamy and languid and ringing with gongs, had nothing do with the forms or melodies or harmonies they had learned at the Conservatoire. It gave both men a new vision of the possibilities of music, a new sense of freedom and daring.
Although Ravel would often be accused of building his style off Debussy, the reality is that he learned from any number of sources throughout his career, Debussy among them. Another inspiration for both men was the puckish Erik Satie, who wrote harmonies by ear rather than by rule. All of them in their own fashion turned away from the heart-on-sleeve grandiosities of late romanticism. Debussy and Ravel were friendly for a while, but when opposing factions formed around each of them, they found it best to keep their distance. Whatever the politics of the time, their mutual influence on the music that followed them has been incalculable. To mention one example: classic American songwriting from Gershwin on would be unthinkable without impressionist harmony.
As a person Ravel was relentlessly private, fastidious, dandyish in his dress, completely sunk in his work. Given his slight figure and chiseled features, one observer said he looked like a well-dressed jockey. His sexuality has been a subject of long and unresolved debate. He composed slowly, pursuing a perfection he knew he could never reach. “I did my work slowly, drop by drop,” he said. “I tore it out of me by pieces.”
All the same he had strong friendships, the early ones formed around a collection of young aesthetes dubbed the “Apaches” (Hooligans), indicating a collection of outcasts strange and a little scary, enthusiasts for the new and outré in ideas and arts. One of the presiding deities of the Apaches was Edgar Allan Poe, whose bizarre and fantastical imagination and concise craftsmanship Ravel cited as a major influence (so did Debussy).
Ravel was also a terrifically generous man, always open to the new. Among the Apaches for a while was the young Igor Stravinsky. When the premiere of his Le sacre du printemps helped touched off the legendary concert-hall riot, amid the melee of screams and fistfights stood Ravel crying, “Genius! Genius!” Stravinsky said that Ravel was the only one to understand the Sacre from the beginning; his other friend Debussy was rather frightened by it. When George Gershwin asked him for lessons, Ravel concluded he might influence the brilliant young American too much and reportedly told him, “Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”
Ravel’s mature works have achieved a kind of iconic status, partly because there are so few of them relative to other important composers. For a sampling of the mature piano works, start with Gaspard de la nuit from 1908, famous both for its enchanted atmosphere and for its outlandish difficulty. It is a work revered and feared by pianists everywhere. The elusive shimmer of the beginning hardly sounds like a piano at all, going further than Debussy in exploring new sonorities on piano. The movements of the piece are based on three eerie fin-de-siècle poems. Ravel said of it, “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words.” So, to describe the piece, the first lines of each poem: (1) “Listen!—Listen!—It is I, it is Ondine who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your windows lit by the gloomy rays of the moon”; (2) “Ah! that which I hear, was it the north wind that screeches in the night, or the hanged one who utters a sigh on the fork of the gibbet?”; (3) “Oh! how often have I heard and seen him, Scarbo, when at midnight the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees.”
From early on few questioned Ravel’s status as a supreme orchestral colorist. The most famous of the orchestral pieces is Daphnis et Chloé from 1912, based on the old Greek tale of destined lovers. It was written for Sergey Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, then in their prime as the most innovative and influential dance troupe of the century—perhaps the last time avant-garde art was grand, sexy, and profitable. The music for Daphnis is in Ravel’s most voluptuous vein, its opening portrayal of sunrise sounding like something beyond an orchestra, or an orchestra on some planet of eternal springtime. As a ballet it flopped, but the two concert suites Ravel extracted, especially No. 2, soon became audience favorites and have been so ever since.
Then there is the inevitable Boléro, based on the traditional Spanish dance, consisting entirely of two alternating themes over a relentless drum rhythm. It begins quietly and swells in the orchestra over seventeen minutes to a manic conclusion. Ravel was modest about the piece, calling it “orchestration without music,” and never comfortable over what a gigantic hit it was. He once said with bitter irony, “I’ve written only one masterpiece—Boléro. Unfortunately there’s no music in it.”
La valse (The Waltz), also originally written for ballet, is a vision of Viennese waltz that seems heard through pastel vapors in a dream. It builds to a climax of shocking violence that tears the waltz apart. Some took it for a symbol of what was happening in Europe as war approached. Ravel did his best to squelch the idea, insisting it was only “an ascending progression of sonority.”
In his later years he moved to a small town and lived as a bit of a recluse, his health damaged by his service in World War I as a truck driver. Still, there was a triumphant tour of America in the 1920s, where he could bask in his love of American jazz at its source. He called jazz the most important musical development of the century. Its colors can be heard in some of his late music including the “Blues” movement of his Second Violin Sonata.
Ravel’s later instrumental music pulled back from the lush textures of his middle period to more distilled and fresh sonorities partly rising from his respect for both Stravinsky and Schoenberg. An example is Le tombeau de Couperin, a tribute to the French baroque harpsichord master, written for piano and orchestrated in 1919. The material is as mellifluous and sensuous as his always was, but his orchestra now is as lucid and refined as burnished silver.
Ravel was sadly reduced in his last years by a mysterious brain ailment. Still hearing music in his mind but unable to write it down, he lapsed into near silence, though still received friends to the end. He had to have known that his music had soared beyond the old scandals and partisan squabbles to become fixed in the ears of the world, one of those things that remind us how exquisite the world can be sometimes.
More Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole; Introduction and Allegro; the opera L’enfant et les sortilèges; his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.