Let me share with you an overview of the music of the great Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). I’ve highlighted my favourite works.
Piano music
Much of Ravel’s music was conceived on the piano, and then orchestrated a few years later. He is famed as an instrumental colourist, so it’s always fascinating to compare the two versions when we have them. His piano works are more difficult than Debussy’s, and he was a virtuoso player himself as attested by the piano roll recordings we’” lucky to possess. The main collections are all amazing – “Miroirs” (my favourite collection, including “Une barque sur l’océan” and “Alborada del Gracioso”), “Gaspard de la Nuit”, “Valses nobles et sentimentales” (the easiest collection to play) and “Le tombeau de Couperin”. This includes a fugue – the last form you might expect Ravel to try! He was clearly in awe of the old masters. Bach was certainly played on the piano at his house in Montfort-l’Amaury near the forest of Rambouillet (but I only know this for sure because on a tour of his house, visitors were invited to sit down and play something. Not knowing any Ravel by heart, I played a Goldberg variation!). And then there’s La Valse, the most amazingly exciting piece (which I prefer to the orchestral version) and “Jeux d’eau”. Ravel is not all difficult – “Prélude” is a nice easy piece with rich textures and jazzy harmonies.
Ballet music
His ballet music is wonderful – “Daphnis at Chloé” (with a choir), “Boléro” (with its Spanish flavour which you find in a lot of his works – his mother was Basque), and my favourite of all “Ma mère l’Oye”, the five movements after five “mother goose tales” of Perrault like sleeping beauty. And the opera “L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges” (the child and the charms). This was described by Anthony Burgess as follows:
- “L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges, with its libretto by Colette, is surely the one perfect opera of all time. The staging is fantastic: cups and saucers that dance, a whole forest that sings, Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses stepping down from their frame to rebuke the naughty child who treats things and animals badly and is taught, by Nature herself, the necessity of love and compassion. This could have been sentimental, but the citrous sharpness of the music keeps an ironic distance from the subject. There is wit. If there are any tears, they are ours, and they are compelled by the sheer beauty of the sound”
And then there’s “Shéhérazade” (after the narrator of Arabian nights) – three songs for soprano and orchestra: “Asie”, “La flûte enchantée”, “l’indifférent”, which I like very much.
Other works
Other famous works are his piano concerto, and piano concerto for the left hand – written for the brother of Wittgenstein who had lost an arm in the war. This piece has the most exciting opening of all piano concertos. There’s a string quartet, and works for piano and violin (including the amazing “Tzigane” which always gives me shivers down my spine when the piano comes in). And a supreme work – Ravel’s “3 poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé”. These are written for a medium voice (soprano or mezzo-soprano) and small chamber ensemble including a piano, and they are based on three poems written by Mallarmé back in 1899: “Soupir”, “Placet futile” (to which Ravel ascribed the most hauntingly beautiful melody and harmonies), and “Surgi de la croupe et du bond”. Debussy fell out with Ravel over the rights to set Mallarmé’s music, and Debussy produced his own version of the first two poems in 1913, a few months before Ravel, for voice and piano. Of course it’s fascinating to contrast the two and decide which composer one prefers!
To close with another anecdote from Anthony Burgess:
- “Vaughan Williams invited him to London to eat steak and kidney pudding in a restaurant near Victoria Station. Ravel was entranced by the dish and, every weekend, took the Channel boat to eat steak and kidney pudding. The heavy diet did not diminish his delicacy.”