Pavane pour une Infante défunte — Pre-concert Talks & Other Notes

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Pavane pour une Infante défunte

Sérénade grotesque

Miroirs

Jeux d’eau

Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn

Prélude

A la manière de…

Le Tombeau de Couperin

Pavane pour une Infante défunte

The most familiar of all Ravel’s piano pieces is also the most enigmatic. We know that it was written in 1899 and dedicated to the Princesse de Polignac who, as heiress of the Singer sowing-machine fortune and one of the richest and most influential musical patrons in Paris, was well worth cultivating. What inspired its uniquely evocative atmosphere, on the other hand, we do not know. Ravel once declared that the title is meaningless and that he made it up simply because he like the sound of it. But on another occasion he unequivocally described it as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.”

Called upon to review the orchestral version of the work on his first assignment as a music critic, for the Revue Musicale in 1912, the composer confessed that he could “no longer see its qualities. But - alas! - I can certainly see its faults: the Chabrier influence is flagrant and the form is quite poor.” Here is another enigma. The Pavane pour une Infante défunte surely owes more to the Fauré Pavane - and to Fauré’s intimate knowledge of the musical taste of the high-society Parisian salon - than to anything by Chabrier, including the only superficially similar Idylle. As for its “quite poor form,” the rondo structure is effective above all in that it gives the main theme - floating above its lute-like accompaniment with an enchanting combination of seriousness and serenity - maximum exposure.

Sérénade grotesque

In 1893, while he was still a piano student at Conservatoire, and at about the same time as he met his composer role models in Montmartre, Ravel completed two works - a piano piece and a song - which, though they remained unpublished in his lifetime, he regarded as worthy of acknowledgement: “The influence of Emmanuel Chabrier was visible in the Sérénade grotesque for piano,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch, “that of Satie in the Ballade de la Reine morte d’aimer.”

The Spanish orientation of the Sérénade grotesque is particularly striking: it was to remain a prominent feature of his work for the next forty years. Setting out to outdo Chabrier in the dissonance of the harmonies in the outer sections, with whole-tone chords aggressively strummed as though by a whole band of guitars, he matches him also in the sentiment of the Andalusian love song in the middle. But there is no precedent in Chabrier for the parody-serenade scenario of the piece, which is a clear anticipation of the Alborada del gracioso Ravel was to write more than ten years later. In fact, it is more than an anticipation: it is a first and by no means unsuccessful effort to realize the same concept.

Miroirs

Noctuelles

Oiseaux tristes

Une barque sur l’Océan

Alborada del gracioso

La vallée des cloches

The first of the Miroirs in order of composition, Oiseaux tristes, was written not long after Ravel had heard from his pianist friend Ricardo Viñes that Debussy “was dreaming of writing music so free in form that it would seem to be improvised, of creating pieces which might have been torn out of a sketch book.” To the surprise of those who knew him, Ravel not only expressed his agreement with Debussy but also revealed that he was actually working on such a piece at the time. “I would really like to do something that would liberate me from Jeux d’eau,” he said. Jeux d’eau they liked, and with good reason, since it had added a whole new range of impressionist colours to the resources of the piano. Miroirs, on the other hand, as Ravel later declared, “marked such a considerable change in my harmonic development that it disconcerted those musicians who were most familiar with my style up to that point.”

Not all the pieces in Miroirs are as far from Jeux d’eau as Oiseaux tristes. The piano technique and sounds of the outer sections of Noctuelles are basically the same in fact. It is the eerily unpredictable fluttering motion - inspired by a line from Léon-Paul Fargue, “The moths which take clumsy flight from barn to barn to tie themselves to other beams” - which is different. The instability is such, in fact, that Ravel introduced a slow middle section firmly grounded on a harmonic pedal point to stop the piece floating away.

Oiseaux tristes, according to the composer, “evokes birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer.” It is so far from Jeux d’eau that the repeated notes associated with the song of the blackbird, which echo through the piece from the first bar to the last, anticipate the tolling bell of Le Gibet in Gaspard de la nuit. The atmosphere here, with the hot-house harmonies and the confining rhythmic ostinato, is very much more sultry however. The structure is so free, moreover, that the piece might well have been “torn from a sketch book.”

Une Barque sur l’Océan resumes, naturally enough, the splashing figuration of Jeux d’eau. Calling to mind perhaps the little blue fishing boats in the harbour at the composer’s birthplace in Ciboure, it is an exact contemporary and close equivalent of Debussy’s La Mer. At first it seems that the boat is rocking gently at its moorings: the first theme is repeated over and over again, at the same pitch and against much the same A major arpeggios, before getting into deeper harmonic water. Winds, signalled by double-trilled crescendos high in the right hand, carry it into swirling squalls. An apparent restoration of tranquillity, with the rocking motif now in E major, proves to be illusory. It is only in the last bars that the theme return to the security of A major.

If Alborada del gracioso (“The fool’s aubade”) seems a little out of place in this company the reason could be that it is the only one of the five scenes with a human presence. It might also have something to do with the fact that it is a development of the scenario - vigorous Spanish dance music articulated in guitar-like figuration and offset by expressive if caricatured vocal melody - Ravel had explored more than ten years earlier in Sérénade grotesque. Presented very much more effectively here as a seguidilla in the outer sections and a copla in the middle, the concept achieved its final realization in the orchestral version, with a lugubrious bassoon as the gracioso, arranged by the composer himself thirteen years later.

Vallée des cloches (“Valley of the bells”) is also a return to an earlier concept, this one having been first tried out in 1897 in Entre cloches, the highly clangourous partner of Habanera in the two-piano Sites auriculaires. Habanera survived in an orchestral arrangement as the third movement of Rapsodie espagnole. Entre Cloches was suppressed and superseded by the Vallée des cloches which - though based on the same idea of a counterpoint of bell sounds merging from different directions and though based on the same quartal harmonies and similar pedal points - is a very much more poetic and persuasive composition. The sonorously harmonised middle section enshrines one of the most masterfully sustained melodies to be found anywhere in Ravel’s music.

Jeux d’eau

When Ravel first played Jeux d’eau to his friends it was, one of them declared, “a revelation.” Written in 1901 before any of Debussy’s watery pieces, it is in fact one of the earliest works of keyboard impressionism. “It is the origin,” said Ravel, “of all the pianistic innovations people have claimed to find in my work.” A similar technique of arpeggios at the top of the piano keyboard is used in Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este to simulate the sound and the movement of the play of water in a fountain. But whereas Liszt’s piece, for all its atmospheric introduction, is an effusion of religious symbolism, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is a celebration of physical sensation - as he affirmed by heading the score with the evocative line dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille ( “river god laughing at the water that tickles him”) from Henri de Régnier’s Fête d’eau. The most clearly defined melody in the piece is presented in the pentatonic mode, as though to emphasize its pagan inspiration.

The watery experience in Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is correspondingly more realistic. Ravel’s arpeggios rise and, unlike Liszt’s divine aspirations, naturalistically fall. There are bubbles of whole-tones and sprays of tiny droplets in chromatic scales. Finely calculated dissonances splash in the bright light of the piano’s top register or, at the centre of the piece, hover on a glittering tremolando before a dramatic glissando plunges to the very bottom of the keyboard. Variations in the light and the wind are reflected in changing harmonies and subtle rhythmic distortions. In a cadenza towards the end conflicting currents struggle to the surface in a bitonal clash of harmonies. And yet, as Ravel himself pointed out, the piece is constructed (more or less) in sonata form.

Menuet sur le nom de Haydn

On the hundredth anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death in 1909 the Revue Musicale published a special issue including short musical tributes - all based on the same given theme - by six of the leading French composers of the day. Unlike some of his colleagues, who couldn’t understand how the notes BADDG could be derived from the letters HAYDN, Ravel entered wholeheartedly into the cryptic spirit of the enterprise. On one level an elegant eighteenth-century pastiche with a teasingly chromatic middle section, the minuet is also a witty compendium of scholastic techniques, presenting the five-note theme in its original form, extending it, repeating it, reshaping it with octave displacements, reversing it, inverting it… and that’s in only the first twenty-six bars.

Prélude

No more than 27 bars long, the Prélude for piano - which was written, unglamorously, as a sight-reading test for the Paris Conservatoire in 1913 - is obviously not one of Ravel’s major works. It is, on the other hand, far more attractive than the keyboard obstacle course one might expect in the circumstances. Although there are technical problems the piece is remarkable above all for its sentiment. Ravel’s tempo marking is “quite slow and very expressive” with the additional and quite uncharacteristic instruction that it should be played “with a free rhythm.” Basically, it is one of those nostalgic slow waltzes so favoured by French composers of the period, from Chabrier and Satie onwards, but harmonically far more interesting than most.

A la manière de…

…Borodine

…Chabrier

The two little pieces “in the manner of” two of Ravel’s favourite composers, Borodin and Chabrier, were written in 1913 at the request of his Italian friend and colleague, Alfredo Casella, himself the composer of several similar pastiches. The Borodin piece, a waltz which displays more keyboard elegance than the Russian composer could ever have achieved, is not a particularly perceptive characterization. The other piece, an ingeniously conceived evocation of what Chabrier might have done if he had been persuaded to sit down and improvise on a melody (Faites-lui mes aveux) from Gounod’s Faust, is outstandingly good value: a wonderfully witty and touchingly affectionate inspiration, it says more about Chabrier than any amount of harmonic or stylistic analysis. Chabrier himself would have been delighted.

Le Tombeau de Couperin

Prélude: vif

Fugue: allegro moderato

Forlane: allegretto

Rigaudon: assez vif

Menuet: allegro moderato

Toccata: vif

Ravel’s work on Le Tombeau de Couperin - his last music for solo piano - was interrupted by two catastrophes, one global and one personal. He started on it in St-Jean-de-Luz in July 1914 as an escape from the Piano Trio which was giving him immesne trouble at the time. The initial impetus was probably news of Pius X’s recent attack on the tango, which was considered morally offensive, and by the somewhat absurd Papal efforts to revive in its place the forlana or furlana, a supposedly innocent dance associated with Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was fascinated also by an article on the French from of the dance in the April 1914 issue of the Revue musicale which was illustrated by the Forlane-Rondeau from François Couperin’s fourth Concert royal. “I am working on something for the Pope,” he wrote to a friend. “You know that this august personage has just launched a new dance, the forlane. I am transcribing one by Couperin…I’m going to see to it,” he added,“that it is danced at the Vatican by Mistinguett and Colette Willy en travesti.”

After the outbreak of the First World War but still in St-Jean-de-Luz - where he was making desperate efforts to enlist for military service in spite of a long-standing exemption on grounds of ill health - he developed the idea of incorporating the Forlane in a “French suite” conceived in much the same back-to-baroque spirit as the late sonatas of Debussy. He did not complete the work, however, until 1917. Invalided out of the Army to which the authorities had so misguidedly admitted him and still in a state of shock after the death of the mother whom he loved above all and everyone else, he wrote the remaining movements before collapsing into a state of creative paralysis which was to last as long as two years.

So what had started as a pre-War jeux d’esprit ended as a post-War memorial, a tombeau not only for Couperin but for much else besides. Each movement was dedicated to a friend killed in the War, the Toccata to Captain Joseph de Marliave, music-loving husband of the pianist Marguerite Long who was to give the first performance of the work in 1919. It is characteristic of Ravel, however, that it is scarcely possible to distinguish the pieces written in 1917 from those written in 1914. There is little that is overtly emotional about them. There is nothing dry about them either: the melodic charm of the Prélude, heightened by graceful harpsichord-style decoration, and the hint of little-boy-lost Petit Poucet pathos in the Fugue are irresistible evidence of that. The satirical inspiration behind the Forlane is evident even in a version faithfully developed, at least in terms of its 6/8 metre and its rondo structure, from a Couperin original. The Rigaudon is a cheerfully robust interpretation of an old Provençal dance with echoes of Chabrier both in the outer sections and in the exquisite combination of primitive rhythms and sophisticated harmonies in the middle section. The Menuet, the last and best example of its kind in Ravel’s piano music, is also the most emotional piece in the suite, a subtle melancholy colouring the elegant line and clear texture of the minuet and, in the central Musette, an outspoken anguish mounting in chromatic progressions in the right hand over a two-note drone in the left.

Ravel’s last work for piano solo was begun in the summer of 1914 as a musicological amusement - in satirical response to Papal efforts to ban the tango and replace it by reviving the ancient forlana - and completed in the winter of 1917 as a memorial to much that he held dear. It became a tombeau not only for Couperin and the harpsichord composers of the eighteenth century but also for friends killed in the War and for the mother whom he had loved above all and everyone else. Already in the autumn of 1914, when the composer was desperately