Pavane pour une Infante défunte

Ravel once said that he chose the title of Pavane pour une infante défunte it simply because he liked the sound of it. Later, and more helpfully, he described it as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.” Either way, its melodic line floating over a lute-style accompaniment with an enchanting combination of gravity and serenity, it has a uniquely distinctive fragrance – and no less in the piano original than in the orchestral version.

Modernist though he was in many ways, Ravel took a delight in reviving old dances like the minuet or the Viennese waltz. The Pavane pour une Infante défunte, which was written for piano in 1899 and arranged for orchestra in 1910, is one of the earliest works in that particular line. The composer once remarked that the title means very little - he just liked the sound of it - but he more helpfully described it on another occasion as “a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.” Whatever he had in mind exactly, there is something both graceful and remote in the melody so elegantly introduced by solo horn over pizzicato strings in the opening bars and, after some development, recalled by flutes and violins at the end.

Ravel was born in Ciboure in the French Basque country, just across the river from the historic Maison de l’Infante in St-Jean-de-Luz where the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain met Louis XIV before their wedding in 1660. That probably has 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 it does coincide rather nicely with his description of the piece as “a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.” Whatever he had in mind exactly, there is something both graceful and remote in the melody so elegantly introduced by solo horn over pizzicato strings in the opening bars and, after some development, recalled by flutes and violins at the end.

The Pavane pour une Infante défunte reflects two of Ravel’s major interests, his fascination with ancient dance forms and his life-long passion for Spanish music. The combination of these two fruitful sources of inspiration resulted in one of the most successful of all his works, mere student though he was when he wrote the original piano version in 1899. The orchestral arrangement was written eleven years later.

Pressed to explain the title of his Pavane pour une Infante défunte – which is probably best translated as “Pavane for an Infanta of the Past” rather than “Pavane for a Dead Infanta” – he said at first that he chose it simply because he liked the sound of it but added later, and more helpfully, that he thought of it as “a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.” It could be that he had a specific Infanta in mind: just across the river from where he was born is the historic Maison de l’Infante in St-Jean-de-Luz, which is where, at the half-way point between Madrid and Paris, the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain met Louis XIV before their wedding in 1660.

Italian in origin though it was, the pavane would certainly have been danced at the Spanish court “in former times” – perhaps even 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 pour une Infante défunte with its stately and yet graceful melody on first horn floating over the lute-like accompaniment of pizzicato strings. Although the composer later castigated himself for the “weak construction” of the piece, its miniature rondo form does give maximum exposure to the lovely main theme and the Mona Lisa kind of fascination in the subtly sustained ambiguity between major and minor harmonies.

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.

On his first assignment as a music critic, for the Revue Musicale in 1912, Ravel found himself having to attend a concert which included his own Pavane pour une Infante défunte. He wasn’t at all embarrassed about having to review a work he had written as long as thirteen years earlier: “From this distance I can no longer see its qualities,” he said. “But, alas, I can certainly see its faults: the too flagrant influence of Chabrier and its weak construction.”

    Although there is certainly a strong outside influence (but from Fauré, surely, rather than Chabrier) the Pavane is characteristic Ravel both in its hispanicism and in its re-creation of an ancient dance form. It has an evocative atmosphere - Ravel’s declaration that he chose the title only because he liked its sound is contradicted by his reference on another occasion to “a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court” - and it has a graceful melody    which is exposed to maximum effect by the simple but by no means weak construction. Above all, perhaps, it has a Mona Lisa kind of fascination in the subtly sustained ambiguity of major and minor harmonies.

Pavane pour une Infante défunte

The most familiar of all Ravel’s piano pieces is also in some ways the most enigmatic. We know that it was written in 1899 and dedicated to the Princesse de Polignac who, as heiress of the Singer sowing-machine fortune and one of the richest and most influential musical patrons in Paris, was well worth cultivating. What inspired its uniquely evocative atmosphere, on the other hand, we do not know. Ravel once declared that the title was meaningless and that he made it up simply because he like the sound of it. On another occasion he unequivocally described it as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.”

    Commenting on the work thirteen years later, the composer confessed that he could “no longer see its qualities. But - alas! - I can certainly see its faults: the Chabrier influence is flagrant and the form is quite poor.” Here is another enigma. The Pavane pour une Infante défunte surely owes more to the Fauré Pavane than to anything by Chabrier. As for its “quite poor form,” the rondo structure is effective above all in that it gives the main theme - floating above its lute accompaniment with an enchanting combination of seriousness and serenity - ample opportunity to renew itself in different keyboard situations.

NB: Pavane was written in the first place as a piano piece in 1899 but did not achieve popularity until it was arranged for orchestra in 1910 (first performed in this form 1911)

Sérénade grotesque

Miroirs

Jeux d’eau

Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn

Prélude

A la manière de…

Le Tombeau de Couperin

Pavane pour une Infante défunte

The most familiar of all Ravel’s piano pieces is also in some ways the most enigmatic. We know that it was written in 1899 and dedicated to the Princesse de Polignac who, as heiress of the Singer sowing-machine fortune and one of the richest and most influential musical patrons in Paris, was well worth cultivating. What inspired its uniquely evocative atmosphere, on the other hand, we do not know. Ravel once declared that the title was meaningless and that he made it up simply because he like the sound of it. On another occasion he unequivocally described it as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court.”

    Commenting on the work thirteen years later, the composer confessed that he could “no longer see its qualities. But - alas! - I can certainly see its faults: the Chabrier influence is flagrant and the form is quite poor.” Here is another enigma. The Pavane pour une Infante défunte surely owes more to the Fauré Pavane than to anything by Chabrier. As for its “quite poor form,” the rondo structure is effective above all in that it gives the main theme - floating above its lute accompaniment with an enchanting combination of seriousness and serenity - ample opportunity to renew itself in different keyboard situations.

Sérénade grotesque

Chabrier’s influence on Ravel’s first acknowledged piano work, written in 1893 while he was still a piano student at Conservatoire, is indisputable. At the same time, although it remained unpublished during the composer’s life time, the Sérénade grotesque is essential Ravel. Actually outdoing Chabrier in the dissonance of the harmonies in the outer sections, with whole-tone chords aggressively strummed as though by a whole band of guitars, he matches him in the sentiment of the Andalusian love song in the middle. More than an anticipation of the Alborada del gracioso Ravel was to write more than ten years later, it is a first and not unsuccessful effort to realize the same concept.

Miroirs

Noctuelles

Oiseaux tristes

Une barque sur l’Océan

Alborada del gracioso

La vallée des cloches

“Miroirs,” Ravel authoritatively declared, “marked a considerable change in my harmonic evolution.” Friends who had liked his Jeux d’eau when they first heard it four years earlier - and with good reason, since it had added a whole new range of impressionist colours to the resources of the piano - were, as he frankly observed, dismayed by Miroirs.   

    If they had a problem with the first movement, Noctuelles, it would not have been in the harmonies or the piano technique, which are a direct development of those of Jeux d’eau. It would have been in the disconcertingly unpredictable fluttering motion inspired by a line by the dedicatee of the piece, Léon-Paul Fargue: “moths which take clumsy flight from barn to barn to tie themselves to other beams.”

    Oiseaux tristes, on the other hand, is far from Jeux d’eau. “Evoking,” according to the composer, “birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer” and echoing with the repeated notes associated with the song of a lonely blackbird, it anticipates the eery atmosphere of Le Gibet in Gaspard de la nuit. The structure is so free, moreover, that - in the improvisatory spirit uncannily shared by Ravel with Debussy at this particular time -    the piece might well have been “torn out of a sketch book.”

    Une Barque sur l’Océan - an exact contemporary and close equivalent of Debussy’s La Mer - resumes the splashing figuration of Jeux d’eau. Rocking gently at its A major moorings at first, the boat is carried into deeper harmonic waters where winds, signalled by double-trilled crescendos high in the right hand, drive    it into swirling squalls. An apparent restoration of tranquillity, with the rocking motif now in E major, proves to be illusory. It is only in the last bars that the theme returns to the security of A major.

    Alborada del gracioso, the one movement to be encored when Viñes gave the first performance of Miroirs in 1906, is a direct development of the burlesque Spanish serenade Ravel had explored more than ten years earlier in Sérénade grotesque. Presented more stylishly here, as a vigorous seguidilla with a soulful copla in the middle, the scenario achieved its final realization in the masterful orchestral version - with an eloquent bassoon as the lugubrious dawn serenader - arranged by the composer himself thirteen years later.

    Vallée des cloches is also a return to an earlier concept, this one having been first tried out in 1897 in Entre cloches, the clangourous partner of Habanera in the two-piano Sites auriculaires. Though based on the same idea of a counterpoint of bells sounding from different directions, Vallée des cloches is a very much more poetic and persuasive piece. The sonorously harmonised middle section enshrines one of the most masterfully sustained melodies to be found anywhere in Ravel’s music.

Jeux d’eau

When Ravel first played Jeux d’eau to his friends it was, one of them declared, “a revelation.” Written in 1901, before any of Debussy’s watery pieces, it is in fact one of the earliest works of keyboard impressionism. “It is the origin,” said Ravel, “of all the pianistic innovations people have claimed to find in my work.”

    A similar technique of arpeggios at the top of the piano keyboard is used in Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este to simulate the sound and the movement of the play of water in a fountain. But whereas Liszt’s piece, for all its atmospheric introduction, is an effusion of religious symbolism, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is a celebration of physical sensation - as he affirmed by heading the score with an evocative line about a “river god laughing at the water that tickles him” from Henri de Régnier’s Fête d’eau. As though to emphasize the pagan inspiration, the most clearly defined melody in the piece is presented in the pentatonic mode. So Ravel’s arpeggios rise and, unlike Liszt’s divine aspirations, naturalistically fall. Bubbles of whole-tone harmonies, sprays of chromatic scales, a plunging glissando, a cadenza of conflicting currents struggling to the surface… an infinite variety of watery imagery is incorporated, as Ravel himself pointed out, in more or less regular sonata form.

Menuet sur le nom de Haydn

On the hundredth anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death in 1909 the Revue Musicale published a special issue including short musical tributes – all based on the same given theme – by six of the leading French composers of the day. Unlike some of his colleagues, who couldn’t understand how the notes BADDG could be derived from the letters HAYDN, Ravel entered wholeheartedly    into the cryptic spirit of the enterprise. On one level an elegant eighteenth-century pastiche with a teasingly chromatic middle section, the minuet is also a witty compendium of scholastic techniques, presenting the five-note theme in its original form, extending it, repeating it, reshaping it with octave displacements, reversing it, inverting it… and that’s in only the first twenty-six bars.

Prélude

Written, unglamorously, as a sight-reading test for the Paris Conservatoire in 1913, the tiny Prélude for piano is a far more attractive inspiration than the keyboard obstacle course one might expect in the circumstances. Although there are technical problems, the piece is remarkable above all for its sentiment. Ravel’s tempo marking is “quite slow and very expressive” with the additional and quite uncharacteristic instruction that it should be played “with a free rhythm.” Basically, it is one of those nostalgic slow waltzes so favoured by French composers of the period, from Chabrier and Satie onwards, but harmonically far more interesting than most.

A la manière de…

…Borodine

…Chabrier

The two little pieces “in the manner of” two of Ravel’s favourite composers, Borodin and Chabrier, were written in 1913 at the request of his Italian friend and colleague, Alfredo Casella, himself the composer of several similar pastiches. The Borodin piece, a waltz which displays more keyboard elegance than the Russian composer could ever have achieved, is not a particularly perceptive characterization. The other piece, an ingeniously conceived evocation of what Chabrier might have done if he had been persuaded to sit down and improvise on a melody (Faites-lui mes aveux) from Gounod’s Faust, is outstandingly good value:    a wonderfully witty and touchingly affectionate inspiration, it says more about Chabrier than any amount of harmonic or stylistic analysis. Chabrier himself would have been delighted.

Le Tombeau de Couperin

Prélude: vif

Fugue: allegro moderato

Forlane: allegretto

Rigaudon:    assez vif

Menuet: allegro moderato

Toccata: vif

Ravel began his last piano work in the summer of 1914 as an amusing diversion - provoked by Papal efforts to ban the sinful tango and to revive the ancient forlane in its place - and completed it in the winter of 1917 as a memorial to much that he held dear. “I am working on something for the Pope,” he cheerfully announced as he sketched a Forlane after a model by Couperin. But by the autumn of 1914, after the outbreak of war with Germany, the Forlane was taking its place in what he then called a “French suite.” Work was interrupted by the composer’s service as a lorry driver at Verdun and, even more devastating, the death of his mother in January 1917. Invalided out of the Army five months later, he returned to what was now Le Tombeau de Couperin and, as soon as he finished it, collapsed into creative paralysis.

    It is characteristic of Ravel that it is scarcely possible to distinguish those parts of the work written in 1914 from those written in 1917. The neo-baroque spirit prevails almost throughout and, even though each movement is dedicated to a friend killed in the war, there is little in them that is overtly emotional. There is nothing dry about them either. The melodic charm of the Prélude, heightened by graceful harpsichord-style decoration, and the hint of little-boy-lost Petit Poucet pathos in the Fugue are early and irresistible evidence of that.

The satirical inspiration behind the Forlane is only discreetly evident in its illicitly piquant harmonies, while the Rigaudon is a robust interpretation of an old Provençal dance with a middle section in the disingenuous manner of Chabrier. The most emotional piece is the Menuet, above all in the anguish mounting in chromatic progressions over a two-note drone in the central Musette section. Even in the restless and finally manic Toccata - dedicated to the late husband of the pianist Marguerite Long, who was to give the first performance of the work in 1919 - attractively lyrical phrases are floated on the turbulent surface.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner’s study of the life and music of Maurice Ravel will be published by Phaidon Press in September