Sonatine

QH/8

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Sonatine

Habanera

Menuet antique

La Valse

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Gaspard de la nuit

Sonatine

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

The neo-classical Sonatine, written between the impressionist Jeux d’eau and the visionary Miroirs, is not as anomalous an event in the composer’s development as it might seem. There always was a classical or baroque revivalist in Ravel and, since he did not yet have the benefit of a publisher’s retainer, a competition for a sonatina first movement - sponsored by the Anglo-French Weekly Review - must have seemed an attractive proposition. As it turned out, the magazine folded before a prize could be awarded. But if Ravel was discouraged it was only temporarily and, far from just forgetting about his Modéré first movement, he thought about it for two years and completed the work with a minuet and a finale in 1905.

The first movement of the Sonatine, the first subject of which is carried on something not unlike the running-water arpeggio figuration of Jeux d’eau, is not uncharacteristic in its piano writing anyway. At the same time, although it is discreetly done, the work echoes throughout with the emotive falling fourth with which it begins. In one form or another, the fourth also dominates the melodic material of the Menuet, the middle section of which makes a nostalgic allusion to the opening theme of the work, though now in triple time rather than its original duple time. In the Animé that same theme reappears in quintuple time as a regularly recurring lyrical episode in what is basically a toccata finale.

Habanera

The Habanera was first performed as a two-piano piece, along with Entre Cloches in Sites auriculaires, by Ricardo Viñes and Marthe Dron in 1898. It is not unlikely, however, that it was written originally for solo piano, perhaps on three staves like the Chabrier Habanera which it so much resembles, and rewritten on four staves some time after he and Viñes discovered Pleyel’s newly invented double piano (with a keyboard at each end) in 1896. Certainly, it is not beyond the reach of two hands and Ravel did actually include it in his repertoire of solo pieces for his tour of America in 1928.

Headed in the manuscript by a quotation from Baudelaire,“in the perfumed land caressed by the sun,” Ravel’s Habanera is pure Spanish poetry. It transcends its Chabrier model not by addition, which was the approach Ravel adopted in Sérénade grotesque and Menuet antique, but by subtraction. The harmonies and textures are refined to create an impressionist image so precisely evocative that Debussy, who was present at the first performance, was moved not only to borrow the score but also to imitate it. The kinship between Ravel’s Habanera and Soirée dans Grenade in Debussy’s Estampes is unmistakably clear.

Ravel’s first masterpiece - “the germ of several elements which were to predominate in my later compositions”- Habanera was incorporated in the Rapsodie espagnole thirteen years after it was written.

Menuet antique

Ravel’s first published work - it was put on sale by Chabrier’s old publisher Enoch, appropriately enough, in 1898 - was also his first essay in rethinking the minuet in his own terms. He got progressively better at it, producing his most convincing example in Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1917. The Menuet antique is basically Chabrier but Chabrier exaggerated to an extreme of dissonance and rhythmic irregularity in the outer sections and pastiche charm in the middle section. Even so, Ravel had a special affection for this daring indiscretion of his youth, as he demonstrated by making an orchestral version of it in 1929, as long as thirty-four years after it was written.

La Valse - poème choréographique

With the possible exception of Boléro, all of Ravel’s orchestral works were composed at the piano. Both the solo-piano and the two-piano versions of La Valse, for example, far from being transcriptions of the ballet score, were preliminary stages in its development. They are both finished works, however, not sketches: it was in the two-piano version that the work was first performed in public, by the composer himself with his Italian colleague Alfredo Casella, in Vienna in October 1920.

It was also in a piano version that Ravel and Marcelle Meyer had introduced La Valse to Sergei Diaghilev who, having commissioned the score for his Ballets Russes, now turned it down, declaring it “a masterpiece…but not a ballet…a painting of a ballet.” Although the composer was deeply offended by the incident, Diaghilev’s judgement was not unperceptive. It is true that in affording little more than glimpses of a whole variety of dances as they whirl past the observer, it is more an impression of the waltz than a waltz as such.

As the composer said, “I conceived the work as a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which is linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic and fateful whirlpool.” The fantastic and fateful events are reserved for the second half of a construction which, basically, is divided into two unequal parts. In the first part, after gradually gathering itself out of quiet and rhythmically indistinct rumblings in the bass and a few suggestive scraps of melody, a waltz-time momentum launches a sequence of more less developed dances.

As the first half ends, on a fortissimo climax, the low rumblings are heard again. The momentum is quickly recovered but it is more pressing this time. Melodies familiar from the first half reappear but now under the pressure of an accelerating tempo, rising dynamic intensity, and increasingly reckless harmonic aggression in what the composer himself described as a “frenzy.” In its civilised context, the ending is as violent as anything in The Rite of Spring.

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Modéré

Assez lent

Modéré

Assez animé

Presque lent

Vif

Moins vif

Epilogue: lent

The first performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales in Paris in May 1911 was not one of Ravel’s happiest concert-hall experiences. The Société Musicale Indépendente was trying out the idea of presenting new music anonymously and asking the audience to name the composers afterwards. Although a tiny proportion of those present identified the authorship of the Valses correctly, some of Ravel’s best and most knowledgeable friends greeted the work with boos and jeers.

Actually, there was some excuse for an audience being taken aback by the heavily dissonant harmonies at the beginning, for dismissing the assault of unresolved appogiaturas as an accident or a hoax, and for finding nothing there to remind them of the Ravel they thought they knew. Contrasting the Valses with the virtuoso pieces in Gaspard de la Nuit. Ravel himself referred to “a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder.” He had clearly underestimated the effect those “harder” harmonies would have, particularly in a work inviting comparison with Schubert’s Valses nobles and the Valses sentimentales and Liszt’s Soirées de Vienne.

The distinction between “noble” and “sentimental” is no more clearly defined in Ravel’s waltzes than it is in Schubert’s. It is possible, almost, to trace an alternation of quicker and slower tempi in Ravel’s sequence, with a corresponding alternation of dances in mainly detached articulation and dances in mainly legato articulation, the latter often associated with dotted rhythms. The composer declared that the seventh to be “the most characteristic.” Certainly, in its stylistic alignment to Johann Strauss rather than Schubert, it is a clear anticipation of La Valse and, in its reconciliation of the conflicting rhythmic and harmonic interests of left hand and right in the middle section, the most ingenious. It is followed by a highly poetic Epilogue which acts as an impressionistic kind of recapitulation by recalling more or less clear images of all except the fifth of the preceding waltzes.

Gaspard de la Nuit

three poems for piano after Aloysius Bertrand

Ondine

Le Gibet

Scarbo

Ravel first came across the work of Aloysius Bertrand in his early twenties, when he and Ricardo Viñes were devouring as much modern literature as new music. At that time Poe was the great inspiration and Bertrand had to wait. What reawakened the composer’s interest in these fantastic miniatures must have been the new edition of Gaspard de la Nuit published by the Mercure de France in 1908. Certainly, it was between May and September of that year that he wrote the work, approaching it first in a spirit of parody and then, as he said, “getting carried away.”

Ravel described Gaspard de la Nuit as three “romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Clearly, he was in a Lisztian frame of mind. “The devil has had a hand in it. No wonder for the devil is indeed the author of the poems,” he said, echoing Bertrand’s own fanciful claims. The subject of the first of the pieces, Ondine the water nymph, is not malevolent however. Romantic convention would have her seduce the poet and draw him down to her watery realms, from which he would never return. In this case, in the verses prefaced to the score, when the poet tells her he loves a mortal, “she weeps a few tears, bursts out laughing, and disappears in a shower of spray which trickles down white on the window panes.” That tearful moment must be the four bars near the end when, for the first time, the “sad and tender voice” of Ondine is heard without its accompaniment of rippling water - a sound echoing as much from Liszt’s Au bord d’une Source, incidentally, as from Jeux d’Eau .

Ravel was as fascinated by the sound of bells as he was obsessed by harmonic pedal points. In Le Gibet a B flat bell tolls quietly but persistently through the piece - like the bell ringing on the city wall beyond the horizon in Bertrand’s poem. It is a desolate scene with a mossy gibet and a corpse turned red by the setting sun. As the wind changes, the rhythm of the bell is disturbed; and as the key changes from the basic E flat minor and back again, the repeated B flat fascinatingly changes in its harmonic meaning and its emotional intensity.

Like Ondine, Scarbo, though alarming, is not malevolent. He is a midnight hallucination, a dwarf figure who changes shape and size, who is elusive and overwhelming and apt to flicker out like a candle. His is perhaps the most inspired and certainly the most original music in the work. It is a highly capricious movement of strange rhythmic incongruities, varying disconcertingly between the Viennese and Spanish. It is punctuated by silences, periods of stillness, and the peals of Scarbo laughter first heard just after the acceleration out of the short introduction. “Quelle horreur!” Ravel wrote under the theme that emerges at that point.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner’s study of the life and music of Maurice Ravel will be published by Phaidon Press in September

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