Ravel: a ‘criminal’ at the piano

QH/3 & QH/8 intro

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), a “criminal” at the piano

Ravel was not a great pianist. His first ambition was to be one and, after some preliminary instruction from his father and professional piano lessons from the age of seven, it looked for a few years as though he might well become one. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Emile Descombes, who had himself studied with Chopin, and at the same time he attended the Cours Schaller, an establishment for budding virtuosi where Ricardo Viñes - recently arrived from Barcelona to further his musical eduction in Paris - was a fellow pupil and best friend. There was a small setback in 1889 when, after competing for entry in the Conservatoire, while Viñes was immediately accepted in Charles de Bériot’s class, Ravel was admitted only to a preparatory class. But he accepted the situation and worked hard enough where he was - winning a first prize, just ahead of Alfred Cortot - to catch up with Viñes in the advanced class two years later.

Four years after that, having won no further prize, Ravel was obliged to leave the Conservatoire. There was a variety of reasons for this failure but Viñes, who duly won his first prize as an advanced pianist in 1894, most perceptively got to the heart of the matter when he declared that Ravel “ did not love the piano so much as he loved music.” His short stature and his correspondingly small hands did not help - although his unusually long and flexible thumbs were some compensation - but the basic problem was that he had found there was more to music than practising the piano. “You are a criminal,” de Bériot told him, recognising his talent but deploring his attitude, “you ought to be first in the class and you are the last.”

Under the spell of the music of Erik Satie and Emmanuel Chabrier - his thoroughly non-academic role models and admired neighbours in Montmartre - Ravel had already started composing at this time. His earliest song and his first acknowledged piano piece were both written in 1893. He did not immediately give up his ambitions as a pianist - he took lessons with Santiago Riera for as long as two years after leaving the Conservatoire - but by 1898, when he returned to the Conservatoire to study composition with Gabriel Fauré, he had clearly and definitively decided where his priorities were to be. His piano playing declined from then on.

Of course, had Ravel not had his initial training as a pianist, if he had not been able to play Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Chabrier and Satie - to name only some of those who influenced his piano style - he would not have been the composer he was. And if had not had a thorough knowledge of both the instrument and the repertoire he would not have been able to invent new dimensions in colour and expression for the piano as he did, before Debussy, in Jeux d’eau and to go on developing them in later works.

But, although he regularly appeared in concerts until quite late in his life, as a performer Ravel was limited. He rarely played music by anyone else - his participation in the first ever all-Satie concert at the Société musicale indépendante in 1911 was a rare and significant exception in this respect - and much of his own solo-piano music was beyond him. Most of his first peformances, like those of Debussy, were given by Viñes. His piano repertoire for his tour of America in 1928 included only the Menuet antique, Habanera, Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Oiseaux tristes and La Vallée des Cloches from Miroirs, the Sonatine, four movements from Le Tombeau de Couperin, and the little Prélude. He accompanied his songs and played in his violin-and-piano works but even here, as Joseph Szigeti tactfully put it after playing the Violin Sonata with the composer in New York, he “was somewhat nonchalant about his piano playing.”

Ravel was always convinced, on the other hand, that if only he were to put the time in at the piano he could recover his youthful ability. As late as 1931 he was diligently practising for what he had once envisaged as a world tour in which he would be the triumphant soloist in his Piano Concerto in G. It was only when he had worn himself out at the keyboard, to little practical effect, that he reconciled himself to the reality that if he were to introduce and tour the work it could only be as conductor. He reluctantly handed over the solo role to Marguerite Long and then, beginning in Paris in January 1932, accompanied her as conductor on a three-month European tour, taking the concerto to as many as nine capital cities and several smaller centres as well.

That tour was undertaken, contrary to his doctor’s orders, only a year before the symptoms of Ravel’s final illness became so severe that, bathing in the sea at St-Jean-de-Luz one day, he found he could no longer co-ordinate the swimming movements long familiar to him and had to be fished out of the water.

It has been suggested that the same illness had been eroding Ravel’s piano technique for a long time before. All the available evidence suggests the opposite, however. From 1928, when he completed the crazy itinerary of his concert tour of America in remarkably good shape in spite of his congenitally fragile health, he had been living on adrenalin: consciously or not, he sought (and found) relief from his ataxia through the nervous tension of public performance and of nearly missed trains, lost tickets and forgotten luggage. The pressure of travelling was so exaggerated by his absent-mindedness on the European tour with Marguerite Long that - to her intense exasperation - he might almost have been doing it deliberately.

Ravel was not a great pianist but it was the virtuoso in him that, until the odds were too great, defied his illness and prolonged the life of the great composer in him.