in “the scented land caressed by the sun”

“Spanish,” Ravel once remarked, “is my second musical language.” He was actually born in the French Basque country, in Ciboure, a fishing village on the Atlantic coast just north of the Spanish border. Although he was taken within a few weeks of his birth to Paris – where his Swiss-born father was establishing an engineering business – something of the Basque country went to Paris with him. Something of Spain went too. His mother, a Basque of Spanish descent, spoke not only her own language but also, having spent several years in Madrid, fluent Spanish. “The Spanish folk songs sung to me by my mother to send me to sleep at night formed my first instruction in music,” the composer recalled.

Of course, as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, he absorbed a world of other influences – not least from the example of his teacher Gabriel Fauré, from his love of the music of Emmanuel Chabrier, from his interest in the innovations of Claude Debussy and from his admiration of the technical mastery of Camille Saint-Saëns. Even so, although he seems not to have returned to the Basque country until he was in his twenties, Spanish music was not forgotten. Indeed, it was so fashionable in Paris round the turn of the 19th century that he could scarcely have avoided it. He had a particular affection for Chabrier’s España, which had exploded on the Parisian scene with such a vivid splash of authentic local colour in the mid-1880s, but all the modern French composers he liked best had written (or were about to write) at least one work in the Spanish idiom. One of his best friends in his youth was the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, a fellow-student at the Conservatoire. Later in life he befriended Manuel de Falla during the few years the Spanish composer spent in Paris before the First World War.

Ravel’s Spanish connections were, in fact, many and they were multiplied by the frequent visits he made to Ciboure and nearby St-Jean-de-Luz – ­to renew and sustain his Basque inheritance – from about 1901 onwards. So it is not surprising that from his earliest acknowledged work, Sérénade grotesque, to his last composition, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, there is a whole series of scores that draw more or less heavily on the Spanish idiom – including, of course, the four highly attractive items represented in today’s programme.

Rapsodie espagnole

Prélude à la nuit

Malaguena

Habanera

Feria

The next expression of Ravel’s passion for the music of Spain, after the Sérénade grotesque of 1893, was the Habanera    for two pianos first performed, as one of two Sites auriculaire, by the composer with Ricardo Viñes in 1898. Ten years later, after he had further indulged himself in the Spanish idiom in the piano version of Alborada del gracioso, he incorporated the still unpublished Habanera in the Rapsodie espagnole - the first purely orchestral work of his maturity and in some ways his most inspired.

The poetic atmosphere of Prélude à la nuit (Prelude at night) is obtained by extraordinarily simple means. A gentle ostinato of four notes in descending order draws a veil over events which are only half perceived in the background - the merest hint of a dance rhythm on woodwind and pizzicato basses, a snatch of melody on clarinets, a passionate but still distant expression of nostalgia on divided strings. The scene is twice illuminated by cadenzas (one for clarinets, one for bassoons), echoing perhaps from the Capriccio espagnol, which Ravel had heard Rimsky-Korsakov himself conduct eighteen years earlier.

Although there is no example of the malaguena (a moderately lively dance in triple time) in Capriccio espagnol, there is one in Chabrier’s España. Ravel’s Malaguena is introduced by an ostinato strummed on lower strings with clarinets picking out another four-note phrase in descending order. The main theme is introduced by muted trumpets heightened by percussion colours, the somewhat sleepy reply of the violins only briefly delaying the action.    Cut off at its height by an outburst of flamenco song on cor anglais, the dance is not taken up again:    night falls in the shape of the four-note phrase from the Prélude à la nuit which is neatly integrated with the malaguena ostinato just before the end of the movement.

Chabrier also wrote an Habanera, which Ravel knew and which was clearly the inspiration for his own early Habanera    for two pianos. Certainly, Ravel’s main theme, introduced by oboe and cor anglais over delicate rhythmic figuration on the strings, is not very different from Chabrier’s. But Ravel’s objective, as indicated by a line from Baudelaire at the head of the manuscript - “in the scented land caressed by the sun” – is more poetic than Chabrier’s. His treatment of the habanera rhythm, beginning with a syncopated variant on clarinets in the opening bars, is more sophisticated and his view of the dance is more elusive: it is observed mostly at an impressionist distance and is seen in full focus only on a subsidiary motif before it quietly evaporates at the end.

There is nothing elusive about the festive last movement which, like Chabrier’s España, is based on the vigorous triple-time jota native to    Aragon in the north-east of the country. Anticipation is aroused by a delicately scored introduction, contrasting the bright colours of upper woodwind with muted harmonics and tremolandos on lower strings, and the main theme enters comparatively quietly on three muted trumpets. High spirits and dynamic energy are not restrained for long. As in Malagueña, however, the dance is cut off at its height by a soulful cor anglais solo, accompanied in this case by eerie glissandi on a double bass and two cellos, and night falls again in the shape of the four-note phrase from Prélude à la nuit. But this time the dance is taken up again, driven to a climax and, after a pause for breath, powered through an acceleration to a dazzlingly brilliant ending.

Pavane pour une Infante défunte

The house where Ravel was born in Ciboure is just across the river from the historic Maison de l’Infante in St-Jean-de-Luz. It was there, half-way between Madrid and Paris, that the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain met Louis XIV before their wedding in 1660. This might well have nothing to do with the Pavane pour une Infante défunte - Ravel once claimed that he chose the title simply because he liked the sound of it - but at least it is not contradicted by his later and more helpful description of the piece as “a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.”

Commenting on the work in the Revue Musicale in 1912, thirteen years after it was written, Ravel was rather hard on it. “From this distance I can no longer see its qualities,” he wrote. “But, alas, I can certainly see its faults: the too flagrant influence of Chabrier and its weak construction.” On both counts, it is difficult to understand what he meant. True, it does bear some resemblance to the Idylle in Chabrier’s Pièces pittoresques but it is actually closer to the Pavane by Gabriel Fauré, his teacher at the Conservatoire at the time. In writing a piece for Parisian salon society - the original piano version is dedicated to the Princesse Edmond de Polignac - Ravel could have found no better model. Ravel’s Pavane is less perfumed than Fauré’s but conceptually and texturally the two works have much in common.

Apart from the Infanta of the title, there is nothing specifically Spanish about the Pavane pour une Infante défunte. Italian in origin though it was, however, the pavane would certainly have been danced at the Spanish court “in former times” - perhaps even, in Ravel’s imagination, by the Infanta Maria Teresa as portrayed at the age of 14 or 15 by Velázquez in about 1653. Certainly Ravel could have invented nothing more evocative of some such scene than the opening bars of his Pavane with its stately and yet graceful melody on first horn floating over the lute-like accompaniment of pizzicato strings. As for the allegedly “weak construction,” its miniature rondo form - with a timely application of harmonic and dynamic pressure just before the final return of the main theme in enriched colours - seems perfectly well calculated. Indeed, if the composer had really disapproved he would not have arranged the work for orchestra, so securing maximum exposure for it, in 1910.

Alborada del gracioso

Althoug the Sérénade grotesque, the piano piece Ravel wrote as a student in 1893, remained unpublished during his lifet time it is a remarkably prophetic work – a parody serenade with Spanish-dance outer sections, aggressively strummed as though by a whole band of guitars, and a sentimental love song in the middle.

So we don’t have to worry too much about the exact meaning of Alborada del gracioso, another parody serenade in the Spanish idiom, which was first published as one of five piano pieces in Miroirs first performed by Ricardo Viñes in 1906. It clearly derives from the same concept as the Sérénade grotesque and, in spite of its poetic Spanish title, it is probably not based on any more specific kind of scenario. Perhaps, as with Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Ravel chose the title of the    because he liked the sound of it. Anyway, according to the Spanish troubadour tradition, an alborada is a morning serenade, a lover’s farewell to his mistress of the night before. The precise role of the gracioso, the “fool” of classical Spanish comedy, is not quite so clear. It might be helpful to think of the parodistic    bassoon solo in the middle section as a mock-serenade by some Leporello comic-servant figure standing by while his Don Giovanni master entertains his latest conquest with a stylish improvisation on the guitar.

Obviously a more mature and more accomplished composition than the earlier piece, the Alborada del gracioso is more elegant in construction, more sharply focused in its harmonies, more precise in characterisation, and very much more evocative and authentic in its use of the Spanish idiom. It is clearly identifiable, in fact, as a brisk seguidilla in 6/8 interrupted, after a misleadingly final-sounding tonic chord of D major, by a slower copla in 3/4.

Ravel’s orchestration of another of the Miroirs pieces, Une Barque sur l’Océan, was one of his rare failures. The orchestral version of Alborada del Gracioso - the guitar figuration of the seguidilla vigorously plucked on strings and harps, the castanet rhythms echoing throughout the orchestra, the caricature voice of the gracioso impersonated by a bassoon in its expressive top register - was a brilliant success in that at last, after twenty-five years, it realised the full dramatic potential of an idea first tried out in the Sérénade grotesque.

Boléro

Ravel, who had a technique equalled by few of his contemporaries, thrived on problems. In the summer of 1928, however, when he was looking forward to a Basque-country holiday in St-Jean-de-Luz, he met a problem even he feared he couldn’t solve. All he had to do, apart from swimming in the sea, he thought, was orchestrate a selection of pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia for a flamenco ballet to be performed in Paris in November. Since he enjoyed orchestration, as well as being exceptionally good at it, he felt that arranging a few piano pieces by a Spanish composer he greatly admired would scarcely spoil his holiday. But then, on his way south with a Spanish colleague who was driving him to St-Jean-de-Luz, he found to his dismay that the right to make arrangements of Albéniz’s music had been granted exclusively to another composer and there was nothing he could do about it.

Ravel’s first reaction was to panic. He couldn’t let down Ida Rubinstein, the dancer who had commissioned the score, but nor could he create from scratch even a short ballet in the three or four months still available. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. The emergency inspired him to draw on his most fundamental resources, on the aptitude for engineering he had inherited from his Swiss father and the love of Spanish music imbued in him by his Basque mother. The piece he was to write, well in time for the ballet performance, derives its excitement from the tension between mechanical repetition on the one hand and authentic Spanish melody on the other. While it amounts in time-sheet terms to little more than orchestration, in terms of invention it is an extravagantly daring and original piece.

A friend, who happened to visit Ravel not long after the inspiration for Boléro had hit him, remembered seeing him dressed for the beach and picking out a tune with one finger on the piano. “Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?” the composer asked him. “I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.” It wasn’t as simple as that of course. There are actually two themes rather than one and what he repeats is not a just a phrase but a whole paragraph. To take the opening paragraph as the model: a side drum starts up the rhythm which will persist throughout; a flute introduces the first theme and a clarinet repeats it; then a bassoon introduces the syncopated second theme and a clarinet repeats it. The whole episode is now repeated four times, always with a different orchestration and with gradually more and more colour added, sometimes in different harmonies but always, until the explosively climactic moment fourteen bars before the end, in the same key.

    “I’ve written only one masterpiece,” Ravel once told Honegger, “and that’s Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.” What Spanish musicians find unfortunate about it is not so much the alleged absence of music as the fact that the work has neither the tempo nor the form of an authentic bolero – as one of the composer’s Spanish colleagues pointed out to him. Ravel’s reply – “That has no importance” – has proved to be entirely justified.

Gerald Larner ©2006