Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Piano Works, Vol. 1
La parade
Pavane pour une infante défunte
Sérénade grotesque
A la manière de Chabrier
A la manière de Borodine
Menuet antique
Jeux d'eau
Menuet sur le nom de Haydn
Prélude
Sonatine
Miroirs
From his father, a Swiss engineer, Ravel
inherited a delight in precision and incidentally in mechanical toys, while
from his Basque mother he acquired a familiarity with something of Spanish
culture. Born in the village of Ciboure in the Basque region of France in 1875, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Paris, starting piano lessons at the age
of seven and from the age of fourteen studying piano in the preparatory piano
class of the Conservatoire. He left the Conservatoire in 1895, after failing to
win the necessary prizes, but resumed studies there three years later under
Gabriel Fauré. His repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, even when well
established as a composer, disqualified in his fifth attempt in 1905, resulted
in a scandal that led to changes in that august institution, of which Fauré
then became director.
Ravel's career continued successfully in the years before 1914 with a series
of works of originality, including important additions to the piano repertoire,
to the repertoire of French song and, with commissions from Diaghilev, to ballet.
During the war he was enlisted in 1915 as a driver and the war years left relatively
little time and will for composition, particularly with the death of his mother
in 1917. By 1920, however, he had begun to recover his spirits and resumed work,
although now spasmodically, with a series of compositions, including an orchestration
of La valse, rejected by Diaghilev, causing a rupture in their relations,
and a number of engagements as a pianist and conductor in concerts of his own
works at home and abroad. All this was brought to an end by his protracted final
illness, attributed initially to a taxi accident in 1932, which led to his eventual
death in 1937.
The piano piece La parade is a work of historical interest, rather
than of any particular significance among Ravel's music for piano. It was written
about the year 1898 for Antonine Meunière of the Paris Opéra, designed for interpretive
dancing at home. Ravel was accustomed to improvise at the piano for the dancing
of Isadora Duncan, and La parade may be considered a surviving example
of this activity. It consists of a number of dances, including two marches,
two waltzes and a mazurka.
The Pavane pour une infante defunte, its title chosen for euphony rather
than for any other purpose, was written in 1899 and later orchestrated. Although
a relatively minor work, it is among the most evocative of Ravel's compositions,
in its nostalgic evocation of some remoter past, suggested by the rhythm of
the old dance and the poignancy of its melodic line.
Ravel's Sérénade grotesque was written about the year 1893. As in the
Pavane, there remains a detectable influence of Chabrier, as the composer
himself later suggested. The Sérénade, its opening marked Très rude
and pizzicatissimo, has about it an irony of intention in its dissonances
and left-hand staccato leaps. It is followed by a pastiche of Chabrier, in the
form of a suggestion of how Chabrier might have treated the flower song from
Gounod's Faust. A la manière de Borodine is a quick waltz in the
perceived style of the Russian composer, a reminder of the esteem in which the
Russian nationalist composers were held by Ravel and his contemporaries. These
two pieces were written in 1913. The Menuet antique of 1895 again reflects
something of Chabrier and, like the later Pavane, evokes an earlier age.
Jeux d'eau (Fountains), written in 1901, is a work of a very different
kind, exploring new possibilities for the piano. Performed in 1902 by Ricardo
Viñes, in a programme that included the Pavane, the latter proved very
much more acceptable to many of the audience, while Jeux d'eau seemed
cacophonous. The score is headed by a quotation from 'Fête d'eau', a
poem from Henri de Regnier's La cité des eaux: Dieu fluvial riant de l'eau
qui Je chatouille (River god laughing at the water that tickles him). The
work is based on two themes, which are extensively developed before their re-appearance,
but the predominant impression is that of cascading arpeggios, a development
of a technique earlier used by Liszt, not least in his 1883 Jeux d'eau à
la Villa d'Este. Ravel dedicated his composition to his teacher Fauré.
Ravel wrote his Menuet sur le nom de Haydn in 1909 in response to a
commission from the editor of La revue musicale de la société musicale indépendante,
Jules Ecorcheville, for an issue commemorating the centenary of the death
of Haydn. For centuries composers had on occasions turned to some form of alphabetic
cryptogram for musical themes. Most literally accessible among composers, Bach
provided Liszt, among others, with the simple B-A-C-H (the German equivalent
of the notes B flat, A, C and B natural). Haydn is not so easily translated
into letter notation, but using an adapted Renaissance system the letters of
his name were made to give B-A-D-D-G, and this motif appears in Ravel's Menuet
in this order, and also in inversion and in retrograde form, concealed in
its pastiche eighteenth century context. His Prélude was written in 1913
as a sight-reading test for women students at the Conservatoire. In spite of
the occasion of its composition, it remains a gently evocative piece.
Ravel's Sonatine, a model of fastidious classicism that contrasts with
his elaborate Jeux d'eau of 1901 and Miroirs, was completed in
1905. In harmonic language and melodic contour the sonatina is characteristic
of the composer. It opens with a first theme marked doux et espressif, leading
to a brief second subject, based on a modal C sharp, the dominant of the F sharp
of the first subject. A classical development derives its opening from the codetta
and goes on to make use of the principal thematic material of the exposition.
The third section recapitulation, ushered in by a passage of passionate intensity,
restores the serenity of the first theme, while the second theme re-appears
now in the tonic major. The second movement takes the mood if not the form of
a classical minuet, shifting subtly in tonality. The lively final movement transforms
material of the first movement in a work that is motivically united and beautifully
constructed, the descending fourth of the opening of the first movement providing
a recurrent figure in this form or in its inversion. Two thematic elements of
the opening of the last movement shift in tonality, before the re-appearance
of a transformed version of the principal theme of the first movement, later
changed still further in rhythm and contrasted with the dominant motif that
marks the movement. The sonatina ends with a brilliant and still essentially
modal F sharp major.
Miroirs was written in 1904 and 1905 and each of the five pieces that
make up the work was dedicated to one of the 'Apaches', the name chosen
by Ravel and his circle of friends that marked their unconventional attitude
to established artistic traditions. Noctuelles (Night Moths), dedicated
to the poet Leon-Paul Fargue, harmonically daring in its depiction of the moths
of the title, is followed by Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds), dedicated to
Ricardo Viñes, music that draws its inspiration from the bird-calls with which
the piece opens. Une barque sur l'ocean (A Ship on the Ocean), dedicated
to the painter Paul Sordes, makes formidable technical demands, with its widespread
arpeggios, through which the melodic line is always to be heard. This is followed
by Alborada del gracioso (The Jester's Aubade), dedicated to the Greek-born
Calvocoressi, a brilliant vision of Spain. Miroirs ends with La vallée
des cloches (The Valley of the Bells), for Maurice Delage, one of Ravel's
few pupils and four years his junior. In this last piece Ravel claimed the inspiration
of the many church bells to be heard at noon in Paris. Here the bells are heard,
at first tolling in the distance, in a piece of subtly suggestive beauty.
Keith Anderson