Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) Ballet

Prélude -

Danse du Rouet et Scène (Spinning Wheel Dance and Scene) -

Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane) -

Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) -

Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) -

Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes (Little Ugly, Empress of the Pagodas) -

Le Jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden)

Though a life-long bachelor with no family of his own, Ravel was happy in the company of children and at home in their world. It was for the two youngest children, Jean and Mimie, of his great friends the Godebskis that he wrote his Ma mère l’Oye, “cinq pièces enfantines” for four hands at one keyboard, to encourage them in their piano practising. One of his most enchanting creations, inspired by the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Countess d’Aulnay, it is all the more remarkable for the severe limitations imposed by the restricted technique of two small children.

Three years later, in 1911, Jacques Rouché, director of the Paris Opéra, suggested that Ravel might arrange a little ballet from his Ma mère l’Oye music. So he made orchestral transcriptions of the original five pieces, adding a Prélude and, to suit the Sleeping Beauty scenario he had in mind, a new Danse du rouet together with four interludes to link the now seven movements in an unbroken sequence. Although the ballet was successful enough on its first performance at the Théâtre des Arts in January 1912 - with choreography by Jeanne Hugard and designs by Jacques Drésa - it has not retained a place in the repertoire. In the concert hall, on the other hand, the music of Ma mère l’Oye is, in one form or another, among the most frequently performed of all Ravel’s compositions.

The Prélude, echoing with the distant hunting-horn calls of the Prince who is to make his entry in the last episode, sets the fairy-tale scene and anticipates music associated with some of the principal characters - the woodwind birds who will cause such trouble in Petit Poucet, Princess Florine herself in a chastely expressive solo flute, and the Beast on a plaintive double bass. In the Danse du rouet, a spinning wheel whirring away on the strings, Florine trips, pricks her finger, and faints. To the sound of a gentle Pavane - beginning with a flute solo over a counterpoint on muted horn in unison with plucked, muted violins - she is gently carried to a couch where she will dream the time away until she is reawakened in the approved fairy-tale manner.

She dreams first (in Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête) that she is Beauty in conversation with the Beast - she in a modest waltz tune on clarinet, he gruff but increasingly passionate on double bassoon, the two together in an intimate duet, he finally transformed into a handsome prince with his theme high on solo violin and cello. In Petit Poucet she dreams of Tom Thumb feeling his way on woodwind through the forest of strings, marking the path with crumbs which, alas, are eaten by hungry birds calling on piccolo and flute and twittering in glissando harmonics and trills on solo violin. As Little Ugly, Empress of the Pagodas, Florine is marooned on the Island of the Pagodins - tiny creatures of crystal, porcelain, and precious stones - who sing her and play to her (in pentatonic modes of course) on walnut-shell theorbos and almond-shell viols. Finally, in Le Jardin féerique - in music as romantically expressive as any Ravel ever wrote - the sleeping princess is discovered by Prince Charming, who awakens her with a kiss.

Gerald Larner ©2005