Gaspard de la Nuit (1908)

Scarbo: modéré - vif

Ravel first came across Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit in his early twenties, when he and his great friend and fellow piano student at the Paris Conservatoire, Ricardo Viñes, were devouring as much modern literature – Baudelaire, Poe, Huysmans, Verlaine, Mallarmé – as new music. Bertrand, who had died at the age of thirty-four in 1841, was of an earlier generation than most of the writers they enthused about but his poems in prose were decades ahead of their time. If the composer did not immediately recognize the musical potential in these fantastic, highly coloured and yet precisely crafted miniatures, he did not forget them.

What revived Ravel’s interest in Bertrand must have been a 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 his own “trois poèmes pour piano” Gaspard de la Nuit and it was in January 1909 that Viñes gave the first performance of the work at a concert of the Société Nationale in the Salle Erard in Paris. On its publication, each of the three movements was prefaced by the Bertrand poem (reprinted from the 1908 edition) that had inspired it. Described by Ravel himself as “three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity,” they are piano nocturnes as weird in their way as Bertrand’s night-time visions and, at the same time, they are keyboard studies    in the post-Liszt virtuoso tradition.

In Ondine Ravel seems to have been inspired as much by the extract from Charles Brugnot’s Les deux Génies quoted by Bertrand at the head of his poem as by the poem itself. Brugnot’s “vague harmony” is reflected in the water sounds suggested by shimmering chords, rippling arpeggios, bubbling runs and glissandos in one hand while the “sad and tender” voice of the water nymph is sustained by an expressive melodic line in the other hand. The point near the end where the water figuration briefly gives way to unaccompanied recitative must represent the moment where the dreaming poet tells Ondine that he loves a mortal, provoking her tears, her laughter and her disappearance in a last flurry of arpeggios.

Ravel was almost as fascinated by bells as he was by water. He was obsessed too by harmonic pedal points - like the B flat that tolls quietly but persistently throughout Le Gibet. Bertrand is similarly obsessed by a faint sound he cannot identify as he surveys a macabre scene dominated by a gibbet with its hanging corpse turned red by the setting sun. Just as the mood of the poem changes according to the poet’s variously bizarre interpretations of that mysterious sound, so the emotional and atmospheric significance of Ravel’s eerily repetitive B flat changes according to the slowly shifting harmonic and rhythmic context round it.

Although Ravel presents the pianist with considerable technical problems in both Ondine and Le Gibet, in Scarbo – which he set out to make even more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey – he transcends everything he had achieved before in terms of keyboard virtuosity. It requires the agility, the versatility, the rhythmic vitality, the inexhaustible energy of Scarbo himself as he torments his unfortunate victim in Bertrand’s poem. The unpredictability of this hallucinatory midnight figure is reflected in Ravel’s construction, which consists of a variety of vigorously balletic ideas shuffled, fragmented and reshuffled spontaneously together – the ominously drumming feet of the introduction, a dynamic waltz tune that suddenly arises out of the silence, a Spanish dance plucked as though on the strings of a giant guitar, an episode of two-note dodging and skipping rhythms and peals of demonic laughter.

Towards the end, just after a recall of the drumming introduction, the Spanish dance is heard in a peculiarly pale echo of itself at a much reduced tempo and – in spite of an acceleration propelled by an extraordinary sequence of parallel seconds in the right hand and a full-scale renewal of Scarbo laughter – it never regains its original colour or vitality. Like Ondine, Scarbo just evaporates away.          Ondine

…Je croyais entendre

Une vague harmonie enchanter mon sommeil.

Et près de moi s’épandre un murmure pareil

                      Aux chants entrecoupés d’une voix triste et tendre.

                                                                                              Ch. Brugnot - Les deux Génies

    - “Ecoute! - Ecoute! - C’est moi, c’est Ondine qui frôle de ces gouttes d’eau les losanges sonores de ta fenêtre illuminée par les mornes rayons de la lune; et voici, en robe de moire, la dame châtelaine qui contemple à son balcon la belle nuit étoilée et le beau lac endormi.

    “Chaque flot est un ondin qui nage dans le courant, chaque courant est un sentier qui serpente vers mon palais, et mon palais est bâti fluide, au fond du lac, dans le triangle du feu, de la terre et de l’air.

    “Ecoute! - Ecoute! - Mon père bat l’eau coassante d’une branche d’aulne verte, et mes soeurs caressent de leurs bras d’écume les fraiches îles d’herbes, de nénuphars et de glaïuels, ou se moquent du saule caduc et barbu qui pêche à la ligne.”

*

Sa chanson murmurée, elle me supplia de recevoir son anneau à mon doigt, pour être l’époux d’une Ondine, et de visiter avec elle son palais pour être le roi des lacs.

    Et comme je lui répondais que j’aimais une mortelle, boudeuse et dépitée, elle pleura quelques larmes, poussa un éclat de rire, et s’évanouit en giboulées qui ruisselèrent blanches le long de mes vitraux bleus.

Le Gibet

Que vois je remuer autour de ce gibet?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                FAUST

    Ah! Ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit, ou le pendu qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire?

    Serait-ce quelque grillon qui chante tapi dans la mousse et le lierre stérile, dont par pitié se chausse le bois?

Serait-ce quelque mouche en chasse sonnant du cor autour de ces oreilles sourdes à la fanfare des hallali?

    Serait-ce quelque escarbot qui cueille en son vol inégal un cheveu sanglant à son crâne chauve?

    Ou bien serait-ce quelque araignée qui brode une demi-aune de mousseline pour cravate à ce col étranglé?

    C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville sous l’horizon, et la carcasse d’un pendu que rougit le soleil couchant.

Scarbo

    Il regarda sous le lit, dans la cheminé,

dans le bahut; - personne. Il ne put com-

prendre par où il s’était introduit, pour où

il s’était evadé.

HOFFMANN - Contes nocturnes

    Oh! Que de fois je l’ai entendu et vu, Scarbo, lorsqu’à minuit la lune brille dans le ciel comme un écu d’argent sur une bannière semée d’abeilles d’or!

    Que de fois j’ai entendu bourdonner son rire dans l’ombre de mon alcôve, et grincer son ongle sur la soie des courtines de mon lit!

    Que de dois je l’ai vu descendre du plancer, pirouetter sur un pied et rouler par la chambre comme le fuseau tombé de la quenouille d’une sorcière!

    Le croyais-je alors évanoui? le nain grandissait entre la lune et moi comme le clocher d’une cathédrale gothique, un grelot d’or en branle à son bonnet pointu!

    Mais bientôt son corps bleuissait, diaphen comme la cire d’une bougie, son visage blémissait comme la dire c’un lumignon, - et soudain il s’éteignait.

Scarbo: modéré - vif

Ravel first came across Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit in his early twenties, when he and his great friend and fellow piano student at the Paris Conservatoire, Ricardo Viñes, were devouring as much modern literature – Baudelaire, Poe, Huysmans, Verlaine, Mallarmé – as new music. Bertrand, who had died at the age of thirty-four in 1841, was of an earlier generation than most of the writers they enthused about but his poems in prose were decades ahead of their time. If the composer did not immediately recognize the musical potential in these fantastic, highly coloured and yet precisely crafted miniatures, he did not forget them.

What revived Ravel’s interest in Bertrand must have been a 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 his own “trois poèmes pour piano” Gaspard de la Nuit and it was in January 1909 that Viñes gave the first performance of the work at a concert of the Société Nationale in the Salle Erard in Paris. On its publication, each of the three movements was prefaced by the Bertrand poem (reprinted from the 1908 edition) that had inspired it. Described by Ravel himself as “three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity,” they are piano nocturnes as weird in their way as Bertrand’s night-time visions and, at the same time, they are keyboard studies in the post-Liszt virtuoso tradition.

In Ondine Ravel seems to have been inspired as much by the extract from Charles Brugnot’s Les deux Génies quoted by Bertrand at the head of his poem as by the poem itself. Brugnot’s “vague harmony” is reflected in the water sounds suggested by shimmering chords, rippling arpeggios, bubbling runs and glissandos in one hand while the “sad and tender” voice of the water nymph is sustained by an expressive melodic line in the other hand. The point near the end where the water figuration briefly gives way to unaccompanied recitative must represent the moment where the dreaming poet tells Ondine that he loves a mortal, provoking her tears, her laughter and her disappearance in a last flurry of arpeggios.

Ravel was almost as fascinated by bells as he was by water. He was obsessed too by harmonic pedal points - like the B flat that tolls quietly but persistently throughout Le Gibet. Bertrand is similarly obsessed by a faint sound he cannot identify as he surveys a macabre scene dominated by a gibbet with its hanging corpse turned red by the setting sun. Just as the mood of the poem changes according to the poet’s variously bizarre interpretations of that mysterious sound, so the emotional and atmospheric significance of Ravel’s eerily repetitive B flat changes according to the slowly shifting harmonic and rhythmic context round it.

Although Ravel presents the pianist with considerable technical problems in both Ondine and Le Gibet, in Scarbo – which he set out to make even more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey – he transcends everything he had achieved before in terms of keyboard virtuosity. It requires the agility, the versatility, the rhythmic vitality, the inexhaustible energy of Scarbo himself as he torments his unfortunate victim in Bertrand’s poem. The unpredictability of this hallucinatory midnight figure is reflected in Ravel’s construction, which consists of a variety of vigorously balletic ideas shuffled, fragmented and reshuffled spontaneously together – the ominously drumming feet of the introduction, a dynamic waltz tune that suddenly arises out of the silence, a Spanish dance plucked as though on the strings of a giant guitar, an episode of two-note dodging and skipping rhythms and peals of demonic laughter.

Towards the end, just after a recall of the drumming introduction, the Spanish dance is heard in a peculiarly pale echo of itself at a much reduced tempo and – in spite of an acceleration propelled by an extraordinary sequence of parallel seconds in the right hand and a full-scale renewal of Scarbo laughter – it never regains its original colour or vitality. Like Ondine, Scarbo just evaporates away.