L’Heure espagnole

after the play by Franc-Nohain

After the first performance of L’Heure espagnole at the Opéra-Comique in May 1911 one of Ravel’s more virulent critics dismissed the piece as a “pornographic vaudeville.” Franc-Nohain, the author of the one-act comedy on which it is based, very rightly protested – the play had enjoyed a long run at the Odéon without any such imputation being made against it -– and the music critic of La Liberté was forced to withdraw his remark. Even so, a plot motivated entirely by its heroine’s undisguised sexual appetite might seem an unlikely choice of subject matter for the first opera of a composer as inhibited in these matters as Ravel is supposed to have been.

In fact, he would rather have been getting on with another project based on Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Die versunkene Glocke (La Cloche engloutie or The Sunken Bell). But that was to be a five-act opera which would have taken him years to complete and now, after an unfortunate event in the composer’s family, he did not have the time. Joseph Ravel, who had always supported his son in his musical career (though he was himself an engineer), had suffered a stroke in the summer of 1906. Maurice Ravel was determined that his father’s major ambition for him, which was success in the opera house, would be fulfilled before he died. In fact, because of protracted hesitations at the Opéra-Comique over the dubious subject matter of L’Heure espagnole, Joseph did not live long enough to witness its performance there. He did, however, have the satisfaction of seeing the vocal score published by Durand shortly before his death in 1908.

It could be that his father’s taste had some influence on Ravel’s choice of text. As he said, however, there was “a heap of things” that attracted him to Franc-Nohain’s comedy: “the mixture of everyday conversation and deliberately ridiculous lyricism; the atmosphere of unusual and amusing sounds surrounding the characters in the clock shop; finally, the opportunity to make good use of the picturesque rhythms of Spanish music.” For a composer brought up “on the clicking and whirring of my father’s machines” and “the Spanish folk songs sung to me by my mother” L’Heure espagnole, set in a clock maker’s shop in Toledo, was ideal material. All he had to do to fashion a libretto from it was change a few words and make a few cuts.

The “everyday conversation” in Franc-Nohain’s play was important to Ravel because, in a departure from the spoken-dialogue tradition of opéra-comique, he enjoyed setting it naturalistically, observing the rhythms and inflections of ordinary speech without exaggerating them. In a note to the singers he emphasises that, with one exception, their parts should be not so much sung as spoken (quasi parlando). The exception is Gonzalve, whose poetic pretensions are matched by a “deliberately ridiculous lyricism.” In another departure from convention Ravel insists that “the laughs are not in the comically arbitrary accentuation of words, as in operetta, but in unusual effects in harmony, rhythm, melody and orchestration.”

Many of those unusual effects are to be heard in the magical orchestral introduction – originally conceived for Coppelius’s workshop in an abandoned opera on the Olympia story by E.T.A. Hffmann – which not only sets the clock-shop scene but also recurs from time to time to confirm it. Over an eerie background of slowly shifting harmonies on wind and muted strings in a mixture of quintuple and triple time, three metronomes tick at different tempi, bells ring out of time, a mechanical trumpeter sounds a fanfare, puppets dance to a musical-box celesta, an imitation cock crows on the detached mouthpiece of a sarrusophone, a metallic bird utters a shrill call on the piccolo. On his first entry Torquemada, the clock maker who is about to be cuckolded, is taunted by one of his own cuckoo clocks.

Ramiro, the mule driver who is finally to do the cuckolding, introduces himself over the masculine tread of the rhythmic motif that is to stay with him throughout, in all sorts of variants from the positively clumsy to the surprisingly nimble. He is also responsible for the first outburst of Spanish music – a vigorous jota inspired by his account of how his pocket watch once saved the life of his toreador uncle at a bullfight in Barcelona. The main source of Spanish dance rhythms, however, is Gonzalve, who makes his first appearance on a prolonged flamenco vocalization and whose feeble poetic improvisations are based largely on the habanera or the malagueña.

Concepcion very briefly joins Gonzalve at one point in an habanera, though more in anger than sympathy, and expresses the extreme of her frustration in an aggressively percussive seguidilla with an ironically pathetic bassoon solo. The old banker Don Inigo, on the other hand, seems to regard Spanish music as beneath him and prefers either the ceremonious dotted rhythms of the French overture or a seductive waltz tune. Stepping out of character to point the moral at the end, all five singers join in an extravagantly overloaded habanera - the only real ensemble in fifty Spanish minutes.

As for the erotic element in the story, it surely appealed to the composer on a level no less fundamental than that of the clockwork machinery and the Spanish dance rhythms – though more for what does not happen between Concepcion and Gonzalve than for anything that does happen. Much of Ravel’s music, which largely avoids love scenes, is about frustration. “My only mistress is music,” he once said and, as Francis Poulenc observed, he had no known love affair with anyone of either sex. As his feeble performance in Torquemada’s clock shop confirms, Gonzalve’s only mistress is poetry. True, if Gonzalve is a self-portrait it is not very flattering, but irony and self-deprecation were as much part of Ravel’s way of life as his celibacy.

Gerald Larner