On the left Maurice Ravel at the Paris Conservatoire 1895
When you’re new to an enterprise, it’s very agreeable when your colleagues kindly prepare the ground for you. The idea of placing the manageable Sérénade grotesque by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) on my desk as my first edition when I joined the G. Henle publishing house was thus a sign of great caring and attention – and served at most secondarily to test me a bit on how I go through all the steps involved in producing an Urtext edition of this piece within a relatively short time. What nobody suspected was that the piece would soon turn out to be a bit of devilry, coping with it requiring the entire editorial toolkit. Although the source comparison can be largely limited to the autograph and the posthumous first edition, the two texts are overflowing with different readings needing to be brought under control.
Maurice Ravel: Sérénade grotesque, excerpt from the source comparison between autograph und posthumous first edition (Editions Salabert 1975)
The Sérénade grotesque is considered Ravel’s earliest extant piano composition. He wrote it around 1893 as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, and it is no coincidence that his teacher Émile Pessard was once a little overwhelmed when Ravel brought the piece to class. At first, the teacher wanted to play the Sérénade himself, but after a few moments he turned the piano stool over to Ravel, saying then that the student had put on paper several anomalies – who knows, this piece might possibly be introducing a new style. (This situation description has come down to us from Ravel’s classmate Gustave Mouchet.) Actually evidenced in this piece – and here we refer to the review of the 1975 première in The New York Times – are already a number of things later characterising Ravel’s music. The Sérénade, for example, like Alborada del gracioso from Miroirs, can be viewed within a guitaristic context. The performance instruction ‘pizzicatissimo’ appearing right at the beginning – this already expresses a lot: as a technical playing directive, it would make sense only on a plucked instrument. For the piano, it describes an interpretative stance and is therefore perfectly suited to the chords characterising the opening, which are permeated with dissonant seconds and are to be struck harshly staccato and arpeggiated at the same time.
Opening with striking performance directives and incisive ‘guitar chords’
(Henle-Urtext)
The sum of the features gives the impression of a flamenco guitar played with rasgueado technique (‘strumming’ is the common word in English). And the Sérénade, in the interplay of its musical sections, is really an adaptation of an evening guitar serenade. Not a staid adaptation, but ironic: One should not play pizzicato, but ‘pizzicatissimo’, not just strikingly, but ‘très rude’ (very roughly), later ‘très sec’ (very dry), soon thereafter, ‘très sentimental’ (needing no translation). Ravel does not do it without a ‘very’ and maximal intensification, and that is just what makes the piece so enjoyable. Why, even, should an 18-year-old exercise composure? Here, he has devised strongly-contrasting, expressive moments, celebrating them with a delight in ironic exaggeration. Although the title on the manuscript is simply ‘Serenade’, the addition of ‘grotesque’ is not posterity’s characterising invention, but was transmitted by Ravel himself, who even named his role model for this piece: the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier, whom he had met personally (likely to have inspired him is specifically Chabrier’s Bourée fantasque – also available in the Henle Urtext, HN 1162).
Our Urtext edition of the Sérénade grotesque (HN 1590) is being published to coincide with the start of the Ravel Year, and I find it amazing that this extravagant piece has found a counterpart in the fingering by pianist Cédric Tiberghien, created especially for us: the bottom note of the final chord, for example, Tiberghien would like to strike with three fingers, all three closely united on a single piano key. Anyone paying attention to economy of movement in instrumental playing may find this absurd. But on closer inspection, this fingering is in itself a work of art, subtly capturing the music’s character. More on this final chord in a moment.
Final chord with Cédric Tiberghien’s extravagant fingering
For still to be explained, indeed, is why the Sérénade grotesque is also the aforementioned little devilry in editorial terms: the reason can be found in the transmission. Ravel did not write this piece for publication (hence the late première 38 years after his death). The autograph is the only ‘genuine’ source – and full of inadequacies. The opening still reads quite satisfactorily: the music text is marked in detail with many articulation and dynamics indications (although noticeable are some inconsistencies). But the further the piece progresses, the less Ravel has written down on paper beyond the mere notes, and even the basic music text suddenly shows a whole measure’s gap in the left hand at some point. Should nothing be played here? Should there no longer be any difference in volume or other keystroke gradation? That would be nonsensical. The reason why Ravel increasingly left out these musical parameters is that the piece is made up of recurring formal sections – and he simply saved himself the trouble of each time fully writing out the signs.
In an edition, however, these gaps must of course be closed by drawing analogies and by carefully tidying up all the little negligences. The 1975 posthumous first edition by Ravel specialist Arbie Orenstein (who rediscovered and premièred the Sérénade) does a great deal in this respect, but in some places rather overshoots the mark. Our Urtext edition remains closer, wherever possible, to the autograph, preserving Ravel’s conspicuous, specialised notation such as the so-called ‘cherry notes’, simultaneously sounding notes f flat1 and f sharp1 within a chord (in the first edition this passage is smoothed out enharmonically).
Flavoursome cherry notes in the Henle-Urtext
Probably the most important innovation in comparison with the previously available music text is, however, the final chord. Here, our edition corrects a real tonal distortion and shows the end of the piece as Ravel actually composed it in the autograph: the final chord has no bass foundation in his music. The lower stave is blank. And here this is not an omission, for Ravel lets the legato slurs emanating from the low bass fifth in the penultimate measure both flow into the upper stave with great impetus. The final chord itself is located exclusively in the high register’s second and third octaves, and Ravel even lifts the pedal at the right time so that in terms of sound it is actually standing all on its own. Doesn’t, in contrast, the full-fingered final chord with a tied bass fifth from Orenstein’s first edition sound more pianistically impressive?
Above: final accolade with the closing chord edited for the first time according to the autograph (Henle Urtext 2024)
Below: final accolade with the closing chord in the posthumous first edition’s variant
(Editions Salabert 1975)
Perhaps. But the Sérénade is just not a piece conceived from the piano, but a pianistic guitar serenade, and as such it ends in the Henle Urtext with Ravel’s original, light harmonics chord – even with three fingers on the bottom note.