Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Like last year, 2025 will also see a wealth of composer commemorations, ranging from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (500th birthday) to Georges Bizet (150th anniversary of his death) or from Erik Satie (100th anniversary of his death) to Pierre Boulez (100th birthday), to name just a few of the anniversaries. The spotlight will undoubtedly be, however, on the milestone birthday of Maurice Ravel, born on 7 March 1875 in the French-Basque commune Ciboure to a Spanish-Basque mother and a Swiss-engineer father with French roots. The family moved to Paris just three months later, though Ravel never lost his connection to the Basque region where he often spent the summer months in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a neighbouring commune to Ciboure.
The G. Henle publishing house will also be duly celebrating the Ravel year, focussing not only on the most important French composer alongside Rameau and Debussy, but also on other musicians close to him under the rubric ‘Ravel and Friends’. Although composers such as Gabriel Fauré, Manuel de Falla and Sergei Prokofiev did not exert a formative influence on Ravel’s work, they nevertheless did provide him with invaluable inspiration. He intensively studied, for example, the music of Arnold Schönberg. Whereas the Austrian composer’s theory and aesthetic remained completely foreign to him, Ravel, who upheld referring to a fundamental tone even in bold harmonic progressions, admitted in 1928 that he did not know whether he could have written the Chansons madécasses (1925/26) without Schönberg’s compositions. Ravel editions have adorned the Henle catalogue since 2008 (see the Henle conspectus), and further titles such as La Valse (versions for both piano two-hands and for two pianos) will be added in the Ravel year.
But who was Ravel? Whilst his music is now well researched, the question of his personality is not easy to answer, as he was reluctant to talk about himself and certainly not inclined to discuss what moved him deep down. On his numerous, post World-War I concert tours, he repeatedly had to give interviews, even in some cases giving lectures. But on all these occasions, he provided politely distanced information about contemporary music in general or the technique of his works, without ever revealing anything really personal. Although resulting is an abundance of Ravel documents – above all the correspondence with his large circle of friends and acquaintances –, we know nothing, for example, about his sexual orientation, his religious feelings or his ideological views. When in 1928 he found himself in the predicament of having to provide information about his life and work, he dictated (!) the later so-called Esquisse autobiographique (Autobiographical Sketch) to his pupil and confidant Roland-Manuel, largely limiting himself to a list of dry facts.
First-publication title page of the Esquisse autobiographique in Hommage à Maurice Ravel, the special La Revue musicale (December 1938) number
This protection of his intimacy goes hand in hand with his extremely close family bond. It was not until 1921, at the age of 46 (!), that he left the family home, then comprised solely of his younger brother Édouard after the death of his revered father (1908) and his idolised mother (1917) – and not by choice either, but owing to the fact that his brother unexpectedly got married. He then opted for a bachelor’s life outside the Paris metropolis and bought the villa “Le Belvédère” in Montfort-l’Amaury, a small town west of Paris, which was to remain his residence until his death (see also a video by the Musée Maurice Ravel in French https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zbkubvHW1g or in English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhrfNrdMRJY ).
Ravel’s residence in Montfort-l’Amaury (today, Musée Maurice Ravel)
Surrounding his inner self with a protective wall, so to speak, he was outwardly noticeable for his extravagance, intended presumably to compensate for his deep insecurity and inferiority complex concerning his extremely slight and conspicuously small figure. He indulged in dandyism, sought poses and stylisation, and even maintained a certain aloof coldness in his dealings with friends. Matching this was his enthusiasm for all things fictitious and artificial. Michael Stegemann rightly spoke of masquerades, not only in his social milieu, but also in his works. Ravel described in his Autobiographical Sketch, for example, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12), based on the ancient Longus poem, as an “expansive musical fresco, less archaising than full of devotion to the Greece of my dreams”. Accordingly, it is obvious that the orchestral lieder Shéhérazade (1903) also evoke an imaginary Orient, and the famous Rapsodie espagnole (1907/08) conjures up a factitious Spain beyond all folklore. Like a sponge, Ravel absorbed the most diverse stimuli, with a conspicuous preference for exoticism, children’s and animal worlds, rendering them in an alienated form, with ironic traits also always coming to the fore. But if he persistently put on masks – who was he really? Ultimately, his personality remains a mystery, though it is not far-fetched to think that artificing became, as it were, his second nature – or putting it otherwise: that for the rest of his life he retained the naïve view of a child, for whom the distinction between “natural” and “artificial”, which adults take for granted, is foreign. It is in this sense that one may interpret Ravel’s statement, handed down by his close friend Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, that people would never arrive at the idea that he could be “naturally artificing”.
In his early years, Ravel was influenced by Emmanuel Chabrier and Erik Satie, and for a short time also by Debussy, but around 1900 he very quickly found his own individual tone, allowing him effortlessly to take music of very different kinds – be it from historical genres, domestic or foreign folk songs or modern music including jazz – and process it into something new. This ability can be clearly observed in his first successful composition, the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899) for piano. In his mind was the scenery of the past Spanish court, which explains the choice of the courtly pavane with its alternation between refrain and couplets, but he did not create the ceremonious slow processional dance with historicising music, but with a simple melody over a slightly dissonant accompaniment, thus leading to the melancholy mood suggested by the title (Pavane for a deceased infanta):
Opening of the Pavane pour une infante défunte, HN 1260
A greater contrast to that than the subsequent piano piece, Jeux d’eau (1901), is hardly conceivable. Whereas the Pavane works with the simplest possible means to evoke the atmosphere of a stylised historical dance, Jeux d’eau is a highly virtuosic, harmonically extremely complex work that constantly presents new compositional challenges. Even stylistically, the difference between the two compositions could hardly be greater – here, an initial approach to classicism, later to become much clearer and more mature in Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-17), there, an affinity to impressionistic sound painting. Such contrasts are typical of Ravel’s oeuvre as a whole, faithful to the motto formulated in 1911 that he “endeavoured above all to do entirely varied things”, thus, to undertake with each work something completely new.
Ravel left behind a rather small oeuvre – measured by his creative period spanning four decades – and he did indeed compose remarkably slowly. The genesis of numerous works dragged on for several years. He himself once remarked that he needed a long period of “conscious maturing” until he gradually envisioned the form and development of a new work, after which the writing itself would proceed relatively quickly. But then a lot of time would still need to be spent eliminating everything superfluous, in order to come as close as possible to the intended perfection. Just how painstaking and scrupulous his approach was, is shown by the exceptionally abundant surviving sources for Jeux d’eau. Extant in addition to sketches of various basic motifs are three complete autograph manuscripts, the first of which, although still with numerous deletions and corrections, is already quite close to the final version.
Opening of the first Jeux d’eau transcription (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. 15198)
For the second transcription, Ravel copied this autograph largely unchanged, merely correcting single measures. However, he then completely re-notated his composition, with, apart from adding the dedication to his teacher Gabriel Fauré, the few changes mainly affecting tempo and pedalling instructions. Despite this care, his works’ first editions generally still contain numerous printing errors – which he complained about in frequent letters, but never systematically collected in order to have the errors corrected in new issues. Many of these errors can be traced back, however, to errors in his manuscripts, as tempo and metronome markings as well as metre, accidentals and clef changes form a certain weak point in the otherwise very clear and lucid transcription of his compositions.
A number of titles refer to extra-musical inspirations – examples include Oiseaux tristes or La Vallée des cloches from the Miroirs (1904/05) – but as soon as Ravel was asked for more specific details, he refused to give them, referring only to the music itself. A famous case in this context is Maurice Emmanuel’s enquiry about the background to La Valse (1919/20) in conjunction with an upcoming performance of the orchestral version, for which he was to write the programme notes. In his reply, Ravel first emphasised that the “Poème chorégraphique” (the subtitle) was actually written for the stage and dismissed any speculation that, as several critics wanted to see it, the piece was a parody or a depiction of the fall of the Habsburg monarchy: “To be seen in it is what the music expresses here: an ascending progression of sound, to which the stage will add that of light and movement” (see illustration).
Excerpt from Ravel’s letter of 14 October 1922 to Maurice Emmanuel (private collection): ‘Il ne faut y voir que ce que la musique y exprime: une progression ascendante de sonorité, à laquelle la scène viendra ajouter celle de la lumière et du mouvement.’
Here, Ravel essentially delivered his musico-aesthetic credo. And this fits very well with the statement, again handed down by Roland-Manuel, that if Ravel were asked about his principles, he would refer to the simple statement of a Mozart: there is nothing that music cannot attempt, dare or represent, provided it enchants and always remains music.
Finally, a reference to a recording of the Jeux d’eau by Vlado Perlemuter, who studied Ravel’s piano works with the composer himself in Montfort-l’Amaury in 1927. May Ravel’s music accompany and enchant us in 2025!