pianist 2

One of the more amusing Ravel images is a photograph taken (probably by Alfredo Casella) in his avenue Carnot apartment in 1912. It shows Ravel and Nijinksy sitting together at the piano, the composer at the bass and the dancer at the treble, the latter crossing his left hand over his right. As Ravel’s slightly satirical expression seems to confirm, Nijinsky was not a serious pianist, but the very fact that they chose to amuse themselves in this way - as a diversion from their preparations for the first performance of Daphnis et Chloé - indicates how widespread the piano duet had become as a domestic entertainment in the century and a half since Mozart had, so to speak, invented it.

Like most composers of his generation, Ravel in his youth had got to know much of the orchestral repertoire by means of piano-duet arrangements. He was so familiar with the medium that the children’s piano duets he had completed in 1910, Ma Mère l’Oye, are as effective as anything written for four hands at one piano. As a student he had also enjoyed playing duos with his pianist friend Ricardo Viñes. His first masterpiece, Habanera, was written for two pianos. Much of his orchestral music exists in two-piano versions made by the composer himself: La Valse was actually first performed in the two-piano version by Ravel and Casella in Vienna in 1920. How much music by other composers he arranged for four hands no one knows but, judging by something he said when he was first asked to transcribe a movement from Debussy’s Nocturnes in 1901 - “having revealed some skill in this kind of work” - it was probably more than a little.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Nocturnes arranged for two pianos by Maurice Ravel

Nuages: modéré

Fêtes: animé et très rythmé - modéré mais toujours très rythmé

When Ravel agreed to collaborate with two other young musicians, Lucien Garban and Raoul Bardac, in a two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturnes in April 1901 he took on much the most difficult task of the three: “Sirènes is certainly the most perfectly beautiful,” he wrote, “but also the most dangerous, not least because it hasn’t been heard yet.”Nuages and Fêtes had been performed by the Lamoureux orchestra in December 1900 but, because of the difficulty of assembling the voices for Sirènes, the complete work would not be heard until October 1901.

In 1908, however, Ravel returned to the Nocturnes to tackle the two movements previously but unsuccessfully assigned to Garban and Bardac. This time the arrangements proved to be brilliantly effective. Obviously, Ravel could not accurately reproduce the Whistlerian study in grey represented by Debussy’s innovatory string-writing in Nuages but much of the poetry of that piece - inspired by clouds reflected on the smooth surface of the Seine on a moonless night - is still there in the piano harmonies floating so weightlessly on the 6/4 metre and in the firmly defined but mysteriously meaningful melodic figure projected along the surface at structurally strategic intervals. The hint of gamelan-style heterophony introduced in the pentatonic middle section is a particularly imaginative aspect of the present arrangement. Fêtes - inspired by a torchlight procession of the Garde Républicaine in the Bois de Boulogne - is no less sensational as arranged by Ravel than as scored by Debussy. In fact at the climactic point two thirds of the way through, where the opening jig-like tune is superimposed on the fanfares of the march, the two-piano version is actually clearer than the original.

Rapsodie espagnole

Prélude à la nuit: très modéré

Malaguena: assez vif

Habanera: assez lent et d’un rythme las

Feria: assez animé – très modéré – assez animé

The two-piano version of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, his first major orchestral work, is not a an arrangement in the ordinary sense of the word. The third movement, Habanera, was first performed as a two-piano piece in 1898 and it must have been partly to make use of that early but still unpublished masterpiece of musical impressionism that the composer conceived the idea of the Rapsodie espagnole in 1907. So it is the orchestral rather than the two-piano version of Habanera which is the arrangement. As for the other three movements, Ravel would have worked on them at the keyboard and would almost certainly have written out a piano version before orchestrating them.

Certainly, the Rapsodie espagnole is little less convincing on two pianos than it is in its orchestral colours. The four-note descending motif which runs through Prélude à la Nuit, and which recurs in both Malaguena and Feria, is just as effective in creating a nocturnal atmosphere and the snatches of languorous melody are just as suggestive of the Andalusian setting of the piece. If the two-piano version lacks a little in personality in the cante jondo episodes in both Malaguena and Feria, where the soulful voice of the cor anglais is such an asset in the orchestral version, Habanera could not be more evocatively scored than it is here. And, of course, there is no reduction in the seductive authenticity of the dance rhythms in Malaguena and no loss of festive brilliance in Feria, the ending of which is as exciting as the demands on the two pianists are excessive.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner’s study of the life and music of Maurice Ravel was recently published by Phaidon Press