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Ravel Unravelled

by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Programme note

Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.

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~6225 words · 6237 words

CD/0 Boléro

S/1 Ravel,1928-30

Q Ravel’s Boléro, one of the most popular and most-recorded works of all time. What kind of man could have written such an extraordinary piece of music ? The music itself seems to tell us little about him. But the more that one begins to know about Ravel the man the easier it becomes to understand and appreciate everything he wrote , not just Boléro. And what he wrote, in all kinds of forms and for all sorts of voices and instruments, is among the greatest music composed in the last hundred years. The problem is that Ravel himself was never very keen on revealing his innermost thoughts to other people. He liked to keep his private life to himself and those who knew him best were loyal to him in their reluctance to say very much either. So there are many loose strands of information - some of them true , some of them false - which have got tangled up together in a confusing and misleading way. What we hope to do this evening is untangle those strands - to unravel Ravel - by looking at his background and his upbringing and relating events in his life to his music.

To begin near the end, what about the claim that Boléro was the product of a composer suffering from dementia?

A You only have to look at that photograph, taken a couple of years after Boléro, to see that he wasn’t. He was suffering from a kind of dementia when he died, but that was seven years later, in 1937. We need to dispose of some of the myths straight away. He certainly had his problems - including an addiction to Caporal cigarettes - but he was not schizophrenic, he was not reclusive and was not embittered in any way. He was an extremely conscientious, diligent composer, wedded to his work, and it wasn’t until 1933, when he was 58, that his illness seriously affected his composing. Tonight we’ll be hearing extracts from several things he wrote after Boléro - like the last movement of his Piano Concerto in G: there’s nothing unhealthy about this joyous and sociable piece of music.

CD 1/1 Piano Concerto in G: last movement - 1.01

Q There are so many myths surrounding Bolero - one conductor claims Ravel wrote it because he needed something straightforward enough for him to be able to conduct - but what is the true story behind that maddening, memorable, one-idea creation - music that’s become so familiar from its guest appearances in Bo Derek’s film TEN or in Torvill and Dean’s ice-skating routines.

S/2 Ida Rubinstein in Bolero costume

A He’d been commissioned to provide the score for a ballet with a Spanish setting by Ida Rubinstein, a rich dancer and choreographer who’d been a star member of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Since it didn’t entail much work - all he had to do was orchestrate some piano pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia - he didn’t allow much time for it. It was only then that he discovered that another composer had the sole rights on the Albeniz pieces and wasn’t allowed to touch them. So, having the time only to orchestrate fifteen or twenty minutes of music, he had the brilliant idea of writing one very short piece of music in Spanish style and repeating it over and over again against the same rhythmic accompaniment, adding more and more instruments, getting louder and louder until he had achieved the sixteen or seventeen minutes Ida Rubinstein wanted. It’s a finely calculated, brilliantly engineered construction which, because it’s repetitive, has something hypnotic about it. As Ravel once said to another composer, “I’ve written only one masterpiece - Boléro - but unfortunately it has no music in it.”

Q ‘Finely calculated and brilliantly engineered’ you say - what does that tell us about Ravel?

S/3 Ciboure on the river Nivelle

A It tells us a lot about him. Ravel was born here in Ciboure, in the large house in the centre of what is now known as the Quai Maurice Ravel. The photographer was standing on the other side of the river Nivelle in St-Jean-de-Luz, a very charming old town on the Atlantic coast between Biarritz and the Spanish border. Ravel stayed there for only the first three or four months of his life but, partly because his mother was Basque and spoke fluent Spanish, he retained a life-long affection for the whole region, including Spain. His father, who had met his mother in Spain but was now in business in Paris, was a Swiss engineer. Ravel inherited from him his precise craftsmanship, his sense of structure and his love of machines. He said that his musical personality was formed by “the Spanish and Basque songs his mother sang to him and the clicking and whirring of his father’s machines.” That explains the sensuous Spanish melody and the mechanical construction of Boléro

Q ‘A Basque mother and a Swiss engineer for a father’ - which of his parents was the more important influence on his life?

S/4 Joseph Ravel with his two sons

A Undoubtedly the mother but that doesn’t mean that his father didn’t play an important part in his upbringing. This photograph, showing Ravel at the age of about ten with his father and his younger brother Edouard, shows how close they were. If you think of the usual Victorian family portrait, the informality here is quite remarkable. Joseph Ravel seems to have taken on the responsibility for his son’s eduction - there is no record of Maurice Ravel ever going to school - and, since he had wanted to be a musician himself, he encouraged Maurice in his musical interests. He supported him during his years at the Paris Conservatoire and apparently never nagged him to get “a proper job.” Although it was Edouard who followed his father into the motor manufacturing business, Maurice always retained his interest in cars. In fact, he loved all kinds of mechanical things. He collected clockwork toys even when he was gown up. Someone once gave him a mechanical bird and recalled how Ravel took it from him, held it in his hand, and declared that he could feel its little heart beating! The dividing line between mechanical and living things was far less clearly defined for him than it is for most of us. Here is a song from the Histoires naturelles called Le Grillon,” The Cricket.” Listen to the piano part and the quite remarkable simulation of the cricket winding up a tiny watch, turning a key in a delicate lock and descending into its home on an intricately engineered little pulley.

CD 1/2 Histoires naturelles: Le Grillon - 1.51

Q Leaving behind the fishing boats of Ciboure, the traditional Basque music and dancing, the delicious spicy food and the local ball game - pelota - Ravel was taken to live in Paris and, thanks to his father, became Ravel the Parisian.

S/5 Nouvelle Athènes, Montmartre

A Yes: although he was Swiss, his work was in Paris. Ravel’s mother would no doubt have been quite happy to stay in the Basque country after her son was born there in 1875, but her husband’s work meant that they had to go back to Paris. They settled first in Montmartre - not on the “butte,” the hill where the famous Moulin de la Galette was and where the Sacré coeur was being built at the time - but south of that, on the other side of the Boulevard de Clichy, not far from where the Moulin Rouge was …and still is. Yes, Pigalle had its seamy side even then - and I think it had an effect on the young Ravel - though it was nothing like it is now. Until the trend-setters moved to Montparnasse, Montmartre was the centre of Parisian artistic life. At one time Ravel lived within a few yards of Toulouse Lautrec for example. It was the meeting place of the Impressionist painters, of writers like Zola and composers too. The Conservatoire was not far away and the Salle Pleyel concert hall even nearer. Montmartre was particularly fascinating for its artistic cabarets like Le Chat Noir, where Erik Satie played the piano, and for the intellectual cafe life. The Nouvelle Athènes, which had replaced the Café Guerbois as the artistic café, was just round the corner from where the Ravel’s lived at one time. I’m pretty certain that Ravel’s father was familiar with all this and that he introduced his son to some of it.

Q Not surprisingly, given the artistic buzz and bohemian conviviality in and around Monmartre, it wasn’t long before Ravel had the opportunity to get to know his two greatest composer-heroes, Erik Satie and Emmanuel Chabrier. It was through his father that the young Ravel first made the acquaintance of Erik Satie.

S/6 Picasso portrait of Satie

A Yes, both Joseph Ravel and Erik Satie had portraits painted by one of the leading members of artistic café life, Marcel Desboutin - the Satie portrait you see there is a much later one by Picasso - and it was presumably through Desboutin that Ravel’s father and Satie got to know each other. Ravel used to amuse his fellow-students at the Conservatoire by playing Satie to them - which amused them because Satie’s music was entirely unacademic. So it was a thrill for Ravel, who was a bit of a rebel himself, to meet Satie. Although Satie turned rather nastily against Ravel in the 1920s, Ravel never ceased to be grateful to him for what he had learned from him as a young man.This is part of Satie’s First Gymnopédie, to be followed immediately by the beginning of a piece from Ravel’s Mother Goose, Beauty and the Beast.

CD 1/3a Satie - Gymnopédie No.1

CD 1/3b Mother Goose: Beauty and the Beast - 2.45

Q Ravel may have sworn that he owed Erik Satie a great deal but it was the brilliant, if unconventional pianist and composer Emmanuel Chabrier, from the Auvergne, who held a special place in Ravel’s affections.

S/7 Chabrier: Detaille drawing

A Chabrier also lived in Montmartre, just a few yards away from the Auberge du Clou where Satie played piano at the cabaret. As you can, see - note the bottle on the floor - he wasn’t a tame academic either. In fact, he had never studied music at any institution. I don’t think Chabrier and Satie were friends but what they had in common was a refusal to conform - which appealed to the student Ravel enormously. Chabrier was a great improviser at the piano and was notorious for the damage he frequently did to the instrument. This Chabrier Habanera is comparatively gentle. It’s just one example of his interest in the music of Spain, which is another reason why Ravel adored his music. Ravel’s own Habanera follows.

CD 1/4a Chabrier - Habanera

CD 1/4b Habanera - 2.53

Q Now, where does Claude Debussy fit into all this? He, after all, was the really major figure among progressive composers at the time - and what of the comment by Frederick Delius that ‘without Debussy, Ravel would not exist?’

S/8 portrait of Debussy, photograph by Pierre Louÿs

A Debussy’s music meant a lot to Ravel, particularly the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Musically they had much in common, not least their admiration for Satie and Chabrier. But temperamentally they were very different and eventually they fell out, partly over musical matters - there was much dispute as to who was first with new ideas - and partly over personal ones: Debussy was a lover of luxury - as you can see in this photograph by the writer Pierre Louÿs - and a sensualist in both life and art. Ravel was not. But for a while he was another encouragement to Ravel to defy Conservatoire convention. Debussy had studied there and had won a Prix de Rome but his music was no longer approved in that august institution. When Ravel’s String Quartet came in for academic criticism Debussy - who was no doubt flattered to find so much of his own String Quartet in it - told him, “In the name of the gods of music, and in my name too, do not change anything in your String Quartet.” Happily, he didn’t.

CD 1/5 String Quartet: second movement - 1.39

Q Ravel didn’t seem to need much encouragement to defy Conservatoire conventions so there must have been a reason why he spent so long there as a student - ten years, in fact.

S/9 Fauré and Mrs Patrick Campbell by Sargent 1898

A Several reasons. First of all the Conservatoire, which nearly every French composer of note had attended, gave him a thorough grounding in technique, both as a pianist and a composer. He also wanted to reassure his family, who were supporting him, that he wasn’t wasting his time. If he could win the Prix de Rome, which every year went to the most promising composer at the Conservatoire - allegedly - he would really prove himself and please his father. A third consideration was that at last, in 1896, Gabriel Fauré - a composer he admired and trusted - had been appointed Professor of Composition. Ravel learned much from him - not only about the art of composition but also about the business of winning the support of influential people. At this time, round about the turn of the century, a composer’s career depended at least as much on winning approval in the artistic salons of Paris - usually run by women of high social standing and with plenty of money - as on finding favour with the orchestras and opera companies. Fauré was highly adept in that particularly business and introduced Ravel to some of these high-society circles when he was still a student. It is characteristic of Fauré that when he was in London, for the first performance of his incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, his portrait was sketched by no less an artist than John Singer Sargent in company with no less an actress than Mrs Patrick Campbell. Here is Fauré’s Pavane, which is music straight out of the Parisian artistic salon, followed by Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infanta défunte - a “Pavane for an Infanta of the past” - which clearly derives from it but which has that much more grace, poetry and mystery about it.

CD 1/6 Fauré - Pavane - 1.29 - leading to!! -

CD 1/7 Pavane pour une Infanta défunte - 2.26

Q ‘If he could win the Prix de Rome’, that coveted prize that sent its winner off to the luxury of uninterrupted composition at the beautiful Villa Medici in Rome. If only.....

S/10 Prix de Rome candidates 1901

A In fact, he never won it. He tried four times, beginning in 1901 when he won a second prize. You can see the five 1901 candidates and their two uniformed minders on the steps of the Palais de Compiègne where they were incarcerated for weeks while they wrote their compositions. Ravel is on the far right: note the cigarette, the striped socks, the white shoes and hat and the natty appearance that was soon to develop into a fashionable kind of dandyism. The first prize-winner in 1901 was André Caplet, third from the right. In 1902 and 1903 Ravel got safely through the preliminary round but failed to win any sort of prize. In 1904 he didn’t bother and then, in 1905, he was eliminated in the preliminary round - which caused an enormous scandal. How could a composer who was good enough to get the second prize in 1901 be judged inadequate in the preliminary test in 1905? Worse still all six of the finalists in 1905 were the students of one teacher who, as it happened, was a member of the jury. Not only the musical world but even the popular press was outraged that Ravel - who was by now known as the composer of the popular Pavane pour une Infanta défunte, a very successful String Quartet, and a song cycle called Shéhérazade - was considered incompetent. He had even got ahead of Debussy in this first piece of piano impressionism, Jeux d’eau - a miraculous musical simulation of the play of a fountain, splashing in choice dissonances and running continually in liquid runs and arpeggios.

CD 1/8 Jeux d’eau - 2.46

Q Newspapers and gossip being what they are, the publicity surrounding the scandal associated with NOT winning the prize in 1905 must have been worth practically more than the prize itself. And surely this must have satisfied Ravel’s father...

S/11 L’Heure espagnole

A Apparently not, because it was for his father - who felt that true success was in the theatre - that he wrote his first opera, L’Heure espagnole or “An hour in Spain.” It is a fascinating work because it has the same contrast or conflict as Boléro between a mechanical element on the one hand and Spanish sensual temperament on the other. It’s set in Torquemada’s clock-shop in Toledo. Here is the mechanical beginning, inspired no doubt by the “clicking and whirring” of Ravel’s father’s machines, as the curtain rises and before the mule driver Ramiro - the one in the centre of the picture there - comes in to have his watch mended.

CD 1/9 L’Heure espagnole: beginning - 2.48

Q ‘ A mechanical element on the one hand - yes - but what about the sensual Spanish element in ‘L’Heure espagnole’?

A Well, once a week, for one hour only, old Torquemada has to go out to regulate the municipal clocks. Now, this is the only time when his young wife Concepcion - you see her there, bottom left - can entertain her lovers. She’s furious to find that on this occasion Ramiro is waiting in the shop for Torquemada to come back to repair his watch. However, she has the bright idea of concealing her lovers in grandfather clocks - first a poet called Gonzalve and then a corpulent old banker - and getting Ramiro to carry the clocks upstairs to her room for her, one after the other. He doesn’t know they’re there, of course, and he’s so strong that he doesn’t notice the weight. As it turns out, neither of them is any good - the poet is too keen on versifying and the banker too fat to get out of his clock. So, as in so many situations Ravel set to music, the result is frustration - except that, in this case, at the very end of the opera, Concepcion sends Ramiro upstairs again but without a clock and, I imagine, there’s no failure on his part. Anyway, when it was performed for the first time - after Ravel’s father had died unfortunately - it was described by one critic as a “pornographic vaudeville” which, though obviously exaggerated, does indicate that it was pretty scandalous for its time. Sex was a subject Ravel preferred to suppress rather than write about and I’m sure he chose Franc Nohain’s play to please his worldly-wise father. This conflict between mechanical time and Spanish sensuality was basic to his nature, but sexual machismo was not. I feel that Ravel identifies to some extent with the poet character Gonzalve - whose only passion is improvising poetry in the Spanish style - even though he makes fun of him.

CD 1/10 L’Heure espagnole: Gonzalve - 1.04

Q So is Ravel admitting that though Gonthalve is made to seem ridiculous, preferring poetry to women, he - Ravel - actually prefers making music than making love to women like the clockmaker’s wife

S/12 Portrait of Mme Ravel by Edouard Ravel

A Yes, and I think he was indirectly, perhaps even subconsciously, telling his mother that. She was the only love of his life - which is one reason why he never married - that and music, his “seule maitresse,” his “only mistress” as he called it. As you’ll see in the next picture, that portrait of hi mother, painted by his uncle Edouard - his father’s artist brother - still hangs on the wall of the house at Montfort l’Amaury, where Ravel lived as a bachelor for the last sixteen years of his life. Incidentally, if you go and visit that house - which is a kind of museum preserved much as he left it when he died - you’ll see from the very small dimensions of his bed and his bedroom that he always intended to remain a bachelor. When one of his best friends, another composer, was divorced Ravel wrote to his wife and told her that he was determined not to get married: “We are not made for marriage, we artists,” he said. “We are rarely normal and our life is even less so.” To another woman friend he once declared that “love never rises above licentiousness.” What gave him that idea I don’t know - it could be something to do with his upbringing in Montmartre and perhaps also some kind of jealousy of his father in relation to his mother.

Q His mother was the only love of his life but where does that leave his father and Ravel’s relationship with him?

S/13 Studio at Montfort l’Amaury

A Well, it does seem that Ravel was never happier than when he and his mother and his brother moved into a smart new apartment in Avenue Carnot - very near the Arc de Triomphe. That was after the death of his father and presumably with money he had left. But as for his mother, she was just as important to him after she died as she was in her lifetime. Another woman friend described her as a “veritable cult.” There she is on the wall of Ravel’s studio at Montfort l’Amaury, directly opposite the piano which is covered with the other things - the toys and ornaments - which were dear to him. It’s particularly interesting that when she was alive he had ignored an opera libretto Colette had written for him - L’Enfant et les sortilèges, about a little boy and his relationship with his mother. It was only after his mother died that he realised how much of himself there was in that libretto and how much he had in common with Colette…

Q And one of the things he had in common with Colette was a love of cats....

S/14 Cat costume for l’Enfant et les Sortilèges

A Yes, and as you see in this costume design, cats are featured in the opera. In fact, there is a “licentious” pair of cats whose courtship in the garden makes the little boy feel very lonely. “They love each other,” he says. “They are happy. They’ve forgotten me.” “Maman” - “Mummy” - he calls out. Anyway, at this point all the garden creatures that the little boy has abused turn on him to get their revenge. But at the height of the attack the little boy redeems himself by rescuing a little squirrel that has got hurt and bandaging its injured paw. Then the boy faints. The animals are impressed, as you will hear in the next extract - Il a pansé la plaie - He has bandaged the wound. So they too call to his mother for help, Maman, Maman, they sing a hymn in praise of his compassion and the opera ends with that magic word, “Maman.”

CD 1/11 L’enfant et les sortilèges: Maman - 2.53 - change CDs!!

Q Maman, maman, - what do we know about Ravel’s maman - where did she come from and what sort of maman was she?

S/15 On the beach at St-Jean-de-Luz

A Well, I’d say she was a mother who indulged her children in a big way, particularly Maurice. And he liked it. I think he didn’t really want to grow up. Obviously, that doesn’t explain why he was never more than 5 foot 3 or 4 in height - a fact of which he was very conscious - but it does explain why he remained a little boy at heart. Anyway, she was born in the French Basque country - at Ciboure, like Ravel himself - and though she spoke fluent Spanish she never became completely literate in French. So she was always a Basque or Spanish rather than purely French presence in the household. And she had Spanish friends, like the mother of the pianist Ricardo Viñes who was a class-mate and best friend of Ravel at the Conservatoire. It was partly through her that he had this affinity with Basque and Spanish music and it was because of her that he spent most of his holidays at St-Jean-de Luz, even after she died. The picture shows her in black in the background on the beach at “Luz,” as they called it, with Ravel on the left. The photograph was taken by the artist Alexandre Benois, whose wife and son are also in the picture. It was in the very happy summer of 1914, when Ravel was working on his Piano Trio, which begins with this lovely Basque dance.

CD 2/1 Piano Trio: first movement - 1.58

Q One of the reasons Ravel is so difficult to unravel is because of his reserve but perhaps what he didn’t reveal - even to his closest friends - he did reveal in some of his music and most of all, perhaps, in his Piano Trio.

A Yes, happy though he was when he started on the work, by the time he’d finished it in September the First World War had begun and his life was transformed. He was determined to enlist, even though he was officially exempt and even though he feared that it would break his mother’s heart, particularly after his brother Edouard had joined as an ambulance driver. When he went to Bayonne to attempt to persuade the authorities to accept him for military service, he couldn’t tell her what he was doing - which put him under considerable stress. He recalled “sobbing over the sharps and flats” as he worked on another part of the Piano Trio.

CD 2/2 Piano Trio: third movement (Passacaille) - 1.28

Q Frailly built, well below average in height and width - and already serving his country in composing great music - what drove Ravel? Why should he want to present himself as a potential warrior and military hero?

S/16 Ravel at Verdun

A I think it was precisely because he was small that he was determined to prove himself. His friends were going and he would have been humiliated if he’d stayed. He got the wrong idea about the war. He saw himself as a dashing hero - he thought at one time he would be accepted as a flyer and he went so far as to buy a very smart officer’s uniform. The reality, as we see here, was different. He was finally accepted as a private soldier and became a lorry driver in very dangerous conditions at Verdun. Here he is standing in his sheepskin coat by the broken wheel of his vehicle. But the last movement of the Piano Trio was written when he still had his dreams of glory and when he believed, like most of France, that one heroic assault from the French army would push the Germans back over the border.

CD 2/3 Piano Trio: last movement - 2.15

Q It wasn’t the mud, the shelling or the generally hellish conditions at Verdun that got to him, though - it was the death of his beloved mother in 1917.

S/17 last picture of mother

A It had a devastating effect on him. In fact, that shock combined with his experiences at the front and a serious illness caused a breakdown and he was invalided out of the army before the war was over. He completed a work he had started before the war started, the Tombeau de Couperin, and then wrote virtually nothing for as long as three years. When writing the Tombeau de Couperin - ostensibly a tribute to Couperin and the French harpsichord composers of the eighteenth century - he could hide his feelings behind baroque conventions. Each movement is dedicated to a friend killed in the War but the emotions are numbed - anaesthetized you could almost say - except at just one point in the Musette, the middle of the Minuet. In this extract we start in the minuet and go on to the Musette, where passion unexpectedly arises and then falls away again.

CD 2/4 Tombeau de Couperin: Menuet/trio - 1.59

Q All those war-time experiences, combined with the loss of his mother must have had some sort of profound effect on Ravel and his music.

A He was never the same again. His view of life was darker, he was more aware of the violence in it - and it shows in much of his music. Here is the end of La Valse, the first major work he wrote after Le Tombeau de Couperin. Before the war he’d intended it to be a tribute to Johann Strauss. Now hear how he felt about the waltz after France had been at war with Germany and, of course, Austria.

CD 2/5 La Valse: ending - 2.29

Q With the death of his mother - his father had been dead for some years now - Ravel was free. Free to get married perhaps?

S/18 Ravel, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Viñes on beach

A There is a story that - in the mid-1920s perhaps - he proposed marriage to a violinist called Hélène Jourdain-Morhange. Certainly he knew her pretty well - she lived quite near Montfort l’Amaury - and he was fond of her. And she was actually shorter than he was: there she is on the beach at St-Jean-de-Luz with Ravel on the left and the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes on the right. The problem with the story is that, as Ravel well knew, she was living at the time with an artist called Jean-Luc Moreau, whom she later married. Besides, she wrote a very affectionate book about Ravel without mentioning anything about a proposal. If he did propose marriage it was for companionship, as with his brother who late in life married the widow of his business partner. By this time, after years of suspicion about love and licentiousness, frustration, illness and unremitting hard work he was quite incapable of romantic love,if not sex itself. Even before the war, when he was writing Daphnis et Chloé for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, he had tremendous trouble coming to terms with the love of the Greek goatherd and shepherdess which, in the romance it is based on, is erotically highly charged. In fact he cuts down their amorous encounters to just three chaste embraces. He was not, however, insensitive to the emotion of love.

CD 2/6 Daphnis et Chloé - 1.43

Q ‘He was not insensitive to the emotion of love’ -- but did he perhaps lose that sensitivity later on?

S/19 Jean-Luc Moreau woodcut for Chansons madécasses

A I’m sure he lost something. In 1926, when he was 51, he set some erotic texts by Evariste Parny, Chansons madécasses, or Songs from Madagascar, purporting to be genuine folksong but actually made up by Parny himself. The woodcuts illustrating each song are, ironically enough, by Jean-Luc Moreau, the man Hélène Jourdain-Morhange was living with when Ravel is supposed to have proposed to her. Now, Ravel’s settings are certainly exotic and they do have an intensity about them but the intensity is produced by purely technical means. It is not erotic. Here is Il est doux from the Chansons madécasses followed immediately by another exotic and erotic song he wrote in Shéhérazade in 1903, 23 years earlier

CD 2/7a Chansons madécasses: Il est doux

CD 2/7b Shéhérazade: La Flûte enchantée - 4.11

Q ‘My only mistress is my music’ he claimed - but maybe it was just that he preferred the company of men to that of women..

S/20 Ravel and Viñes

A I’ve often thought about that and, although there is some circumstantial evidence for it, there is no real evidence. According to Francis Poulenc, who knew the musical world very well - he was a pupil of Ricardo Viñes, the pianist, whom you see in the picture with Ravel there in about 1905 - Ravel had no known love affair of any kind. My impression is that in his student days and for some time after that his closest friends were men. In fact, he belonged to a kind of society that excluded women. Women friends, like Hélène Jourdain-Morhange, came later, after his mother died. There is, incidentally, one particularly interesting song called L’Indifférent, or “Indifference” in the early Shéhérazade cycle where the object of desire is a young stranger whose “eyes are as soft as a girl’s” and whose “hips sway a little with his languid feminine gait”

Q That young stranger in ‘Scheherezade’, doesn’t stay, however. It’s just a fleeting glimpse....

S/21 Picasso Don Quixote image

A Yes, that’s the whole point. Except in those late, erotically unconvincing Chansons Madécasses, sexual encounters in texts set by Ravel end in frustration, as in La Flûte enchantée which we played just now. The first love scene he wrote - the first scene in which the two parties actually address each other - was the Beauty and the Best episode in Mother Goose, which we heard earlier. He was already 35 by then. One of his last songs, written four years before his death sets words addressed by Don Quixote to Dulcinea. Same thing again: Dulcinea was little more than a figment of Don Quixote’s imagination and was never going to reply.

CD 2/8 Don Quichotte à Dulcinée: Chanson romanesque - 2.23

Q Everyone who knew him and left any observations claims that he had no long-term relationship with anyone of either sex. It doesn’t really matter which way he was inclined......

S/22 Ravel with Gershwin etc

A I think not. What matters is that sex to him meant frustration and he avoided it. That’s why he was so happy with children and even with toys like his mechanical bird: they represented no threat and could offer no disappointment. That doesn’t mean he was reclusive, however. He enjoyed parties and was always an amusing companion. You see him here with American admirers, including George Gershwin on the right, when he made a very successful tour of America in 1928. And a man who could write this next piece in Paris in 1922 was a man familiar with nightlife of a city where jazz was all the rage. Incidentally, before we play this extract from the Blues movement of his Violin Sonata, I should tell you that Gershwin was such an admirer that he asked Ravel for lessons. Ravel replied “Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?” If you hear something like ‘I got rhythm’ here you should know that Gershwin heard Ravel and Szigeti play it in 1928, two years before Girl Crazy was staged on Broadway. Stefan Grapelli starts here.

CD 2/9 Violin Sonata, blues - 2.48

Q ‘Someone who enjoyed parties and good company’ who we know could be an amusing companion... It makes the way he ended up - solitary and unable to communicate - even sadder, and it must have been very painful for all those who knew him.

S/23 Ravel old man

A From about 1933 he went into serious decline. One of the first, and one of the most alarming, of the symptoms occurred at St-Jean-de-Luz where he found he had forgotten how to swim and had to be rescued from the sea. Eventually he couldn’t write and he couldn’t say very much. It wasn’t a tumour, as they found when they operated on him in 1937. One hemisphere of his brain had shrunk - which is why he could not coordinate, but they couldn’t do anything about it, and he died soon after the operation. I think the surgeon suspected that it wouldn’t work but he did it because something had to be done to save a man who had been so brilliant and who was now reduced to near helplessness. Worst of all, a man who had always feared loneliness, was now truly cut off by his inability to communicate with others.

CD 2/10 Mother Goose, Petit Poucet - 2.01

Q That was a lonely Tom Thumb from Mother Goose but perhaps we should leave Maurice Ravel in more cheerful mood in the very last piece he wrote...

S/24 Biarritz party 1930

Yes, here he is surrounded by women - Hélène is on the left - at a party in Biarritz when the rue du Quai in Ciboure was renamed quai Maurice Ravel. This Don Quixote drinking song represents him the way he would like to be remembered.

CD 2/11 Don Quichotte a Dulcinée: Chanson à boire - 1.48

Who knows what secrets remain unravelled in the life and music of Maurice Ravel but we hope that a few of them have been revealed and a few ghosts laid to rest in this selection of music, words and pictures, RAVEL UNRAVELLED.

From Gerald Larner’s files: “Ravel Unravelled IOM”