Boulez

Ravel’s first published work, Menuet antique for piano was written when he was a 20-year-old student at the Conservatoire. Though extravagantly influenced by one of his Parisian composer heroes, Emmanuel Chabrier, it is prophetic of the mature Ravel at least in its affirmation of the continuing relevance of the minuet, an outmoded dance form he was to revisit several times in his career. As long as 34 years later he found Menuet antique representative enough to make a version for orchestra. Another student work, Shéhérazade, Ouverture de Féerie (1898) – not to be confused with the later Shéhérazade song cycle –- is similarly prophetic, in this case as an early indication of the composer’s lasting interest in the exotic. Nothing inspired him more, however, than his spiritual allegiance to Spain, which supplied the background if not the idiom of Pavane pour une Infante défunte (1899), written originally for piano and orchestrated with much popular success in 1910.

The Spanish musical idiom – which Ravel learned to love mainly through his adored Basque mother – is put to particularly brilliant use in Alborada del gracioso, one of five piano pieces collected under the title Miroirs in 1905. It was arranged for orchestra five years later and to such vivid effect that it still overshadows an earlier orchestral version of a Miroirs piece, Une Barque sur l’océan, which, though withdrawn in embarrassment after its first hearing in 1906, proved to be a seascape masterpiece when it was eventually published. One of the earliest essays in the Spanish idiom was Habanera for two pianos which, written at the same time as Menuet antique and under the same Chabrier influence, Ravel liked so much that 13 years later he incorporated it in the Rapsodie espagnole, the most inspired of all his orchestral evocations of Spain.

Never quite grown up himself, Ravel enjoyed the company of children. It was to amuse two of his young friends that between 1908 and 1910 he put together a set of five technically simple piano duets under the title Ma mère l’Oye. The orchestral version was completed in 1912 for a ballet of the same name, for which the composer supplied not only new material but also a fairy-tale scenario to link the dances in a coherent story line. One of the most touching scenes, Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, which owes a little to Ravel’s other Parisian composer hero, Erik Satie, is his first overt waltz. Gradually replacing the minuet in his affections, the waltz was to become a prominent feature of his music, including at an early stage a startling piano work, Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), which was almost immediately orchestrated for another ballet, Adélaïde ou le langage des fleurs.

The waltz had no place, however, in the greatest of all Ravel’s ballet scores Daphnis et Chloé (1909-12). Based on an erotic pastoral romance by the 2nd-century Greek poet Longus, it required its own distinctive choreographic language. With immense difficulty but with every sign of spontaneity, he created a passionately expressive, exhilaratingly animated score on a structural scale he had never previously attempted. There was no place for the waltz either in Le Tombeau de Couperin, a set of six piano pieces written during the First World War in tribute to the harpsichord composers of the French baroque. Four of the pieces, including his last minuet, Ravel orchestrated a couple of years later. Everything the Viennese waltz meant to him, its dangerous rhythmic energy as well as it seductive melodies, broke out with expressionistic violence in La Valse in 1920.

After that, apart from Tzigane (not recorded here) and a witty fanfare for a corporate work called L’Éventail de Jeanne (1927), Ravel wrote no music for orchestra until Boléro in 1928. Easily his most popular piece, Boléro is an inspired illustration of the axiom that necessity is the mother of invention: to complete an urgent commission in a very short time he had no choice but to repeat the same melodic material over and over again, though with changing instrumental colours, until it explodes under its own accumulated pressure in the closing bars. Necessity also determined the predominantly dark colouring of the phenomenally resourceful left-hand Piano Concerto in D major, written for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in the war.

Ravel produced high-quality songs throughout his career, most of them with piano accompaniment but some blending the voice with a chamber ensemble. Both the works in the chamber category, the modernistic Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) and the exotic Chansons madécasses (1926), are scored with characteristically precise definition – the intense lyricism of the former illuminated by an exquisitely calculated vocal and instrumental texture, the eroticism of the latter reflected in the closely interweaving counterpoint. Apart from the Shéhérazade cycle (not recorded here) and the folk-song settings of the Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques (1904-06), no more than the first and last of which were orchestrated by the composer himself, the only songs with orchestra are the three included in Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (1932). Ravel’s last work, it is his touching farewell to the Spanish idiom.

Neither Ravel nor Debussy wrote a symphony. Symphonic enterprise in France at the time was most likely to be found among disciples of César Franck or those who, like Albert Roussel, had been educated in his principles. While Roussel’s Third Symphony (1930), astringently neo-classical in style, sounds not at all like Franck, the old master’s    principle of cyclic construction prevails.   

Gerald Larner © 2009