Sérénade grotesque (1893)

Menuet antique (1895)

Pavane pour une Infante défunte (1899)

Jeux d’eau (1901)

Menuet (1904)

Sonatine (1903-5)

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

Miroirs (1904–5)

Noctuelles: très léger

Oiseaux tristes: très lent

Une barque sur l’océan: d’un rythme souple

Alborada del gracioso: assez vif

La vallée des cloches: très lent

Gaspard de la nuit (1908)

Ondine: lent

Le gibet: très lent

Scarbo: modéré – vif

Menuet sur le nom de Haydn (1909)

Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911)

Modéré

Assez lent

Modéré

Assez animé

Presque lent

Vif

Moins vif

Epilogue: lent

A la manière de … (1912)

(a) Borodine

(b) Chabrier

Prélude (1913)

Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–17)

Prélude: vif

Fugue: allegro moderato

Forlane: allegretto

Rigaudon:    assez vif

Menuet: allegro moderato

Toccata: vif

For Ravel, a composer who trained first as a pianist and who did most of his writing at the keyboard, the piano was a constant and lifelong companion. Although his work for solo piano ended with the completion of Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1917 – largely, one suspects, because his own technique as a pianist was by then in decline –    he by no means abandoned the instrument. The Piano Concerto in G, which he hoped to play himself but which he had to hand over to Marguerite Long for its first performance in 1932, and the Concerto in D for left hand, written at much the same time for Paul Wittgenstein, are inspired demonstrations of his continuing mastery. But even without the two concertos (and Ma mère l’Oye for four hands), Ravel’s piano music would be a thoroughly distinctive, uniquely visionary and infinitely cherishable contribution to artistic creativity in the 20th century.     

The two earliest of Ravel’s works for piano – both of them written when he was still a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire and before he entered Gabriel Fauré’s composition class – are remarkably prophetic of the composer he was to become. The influence of Emmanuel Chabrier, a hero-figure along with Erik Satie among his Parisian contemporaries, would retreat, although it would never completely disappear. But his love of the Spanish idiom, inherited from his Basque mother and developed at this stage through his friendship with fellow piano student Ricardo Viñes, would persist until his very last work. His fascination with the long-outmoded minuet, of which there are four more examples in his piano music, would last at least until his enthusiasm for the waltz displaced it.

The Sérenade grotesque, which actually outdoes 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 and which matches him in the sentiment of the Andalusian love song in the middle, is a clear anticipation of the Alborada del gracioso Ravel was to write in Miroirs more than ten years later. He had such affection for the Menuet antique, another case of Chabrier taken to extremes round a lyrical middle section, that he made an orchestral version of it as long as 34 years after it was written.

There is also an orchestral version, a very popular one in this case, of Pavane pour une Infante défunte, which, although he later took a dislike to it, the composer knew was a likely winner from the start. The title, he claimed, is meaningless and was chosen mainly for its sound. But then he described the piece as “an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanich court.” Either way, it is uniquely magical as the melodic line floats over a lute-style accompaniment with an enchanting combinatioin of gravity and serenity.

Written in 1901, before any of Debussy’s watery pieces, Jeux d’eau is 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.” Liszt used a similar technique of arpeggios at the top of the keyboard to simulate the sound and the movement of the play of water in a fountain in his Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, But whereas Liszt’s piece 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 a line about a “river god laughing at the water that tickles him” from Henri de Régnier’s Fête d’eau. 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.

Ravel’s next revivals of the minuet after the early Menuet antique occur in the Sonatine and a tiny (as yet unpublished) piece in C sharp minor dating from much the same time. Jotted down on the other side of a harmony exercise of Ravel’s pupil Maurice Delage, the slight but elegant Menuet is a clear predecessor of the Menuet sur le nom de Haydn. The Mouvement de menuet in the Sonatine is more developed and, indeed, its middle section is in every sense the centre point of the whole work. The opening Modéré, which moderates the impressionist figuration of Jeux d’eau without excluding it, was written as an entry for a competition for a first movement of a sonatina. Although the competition was eventually cancelled, far from abandoning the Modéré, Ravel added a minuet and a finale to complete a three-movement work three years later. His structural strategy was to highlight the pleading downward fourth with which the work begins by recalling the opening theme in the middle section of the Mouvement de menuet, though now in triple time rather than duple time, and recalling it again, though now in quintuple time, as a regularly recurring lyrical episode in what is basically a toccata finale.

“Miroirs,” Ravel 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 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 Ricardo Viñes gave the first performance of Miroirs, is a direct development of the burlesque Spanish Sérénade grotesque. Presented more stylishly here, as a vigorous seguidilla with a soulful copla in the middle, the scenario was to achieve its final realization in the masterful orchestral version of this piece – with an eloquent bassoon as the lugubrious dawn serenader – arranged by the composer 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.

Ravel first came across the work of Aloysius Bertrand in his early twenties, when he and Ricardo Viñes were devouring as much modern literature as new music. What re-awakened his interest in these fantastic miniatures must have been a new edition of Gaspard de la nuit published in 1908. Certainly, it was between May and September of that year that he wrote these three “romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” He seems to have been in a Lisztian frame of mind at the time: “The devil has had a hand in it. No wonder, for the devil is indeed the author of the poems,” he said, echoing Bertrand’s own fanciful claims.

The subject of the first of the pieces, Ondine the water nymph, is not malevolent however. According to the Bertrand text prefaced to the score, when the poet tells her he loves a mortal, “she weeps a few tears, bursts out laughing, and disappears in a shower of spray which trickles down white on the window panes.” That tearful moment must be the four bars near the end when, for the first time, the “sad and tender voice” of Ondine is heard without its accompaniment of rippling water – a sound echoing as much from Liszt’s Au bord d’une Source, incidentally, as from Jeux d’Eau.

Ravel was as fascinated by harmonic pedal points as he was by the sound of bells. In Le Gibet an eerie B flat tolls quietly but persistently through the piece – like the bell ringing on the city wall beyond the horizon in Bertrand’s poem. It is a desolate scene with a mossy gibet and a corpse turned red by the setting sun. As the wind changes, the rhythm of the bell is disturbed; and as the key changes from the basic E flat minor and back again, the repeated B flat fascinatingly changes in its harmonic meaning and its emotional intensity.

Scarbo is midnight hallucination, featuring a dwarf figure who changes shape and size, who is elusive and overwhelming and apt to flicker out like a candle. It is perhaps the most inspired and certainly, for the pianist, the most challenging music in the work, a highly capricious movement of strange rhythmic incongruities, varying disconcertingly between the Viennese and Spanish. It is punctuated by silences and the peals of Scarbo laughter first heard just after the acceleration out of the short introduction. “Quelle horreur!” Ravel wrote under the theme that emerges at that point.

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 Menuet sur le nom de Haydn is also a brilliantly witty compendium of scholastic techniques.

The first performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales was not one of Ravel’s happiest concert-hall experiences. The Société Musicale Indépendente was trying out the idea of presenting new music anonymously and, although a tiny proportion of those present correctly identified the authorship of the Valses, some of Ravel’s best and most knowledgeable friends greeted the work with boos and jeers. Actually, there was some excuse for an audience being taken aback by the heavily dissonant harmonies at the beginning and for finding nothing there to remind them of the Ravel they thought they knew. Contrasting the Valses with the virtuoso pieces in Gaspard de la Nuit, Ravel himself referred to “a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder.” He had clearly underestimated the effect those “harder” harmonies would have in a work    inviting comparison with Schubert’s Valses nobles and Valses sentimentales.

The distinction between “noble” and “sentimental” is no more clearly defined in Ravel’s waltzes than it is in Schubert’s. It is possible, almost, to trace an alternation of quicker and slower tempos in Ravel’s sequence.    There is a corresponding alternation of dances in mainly detached articulation and dances in mainly legato articulation, the latter often associated with dotted rhythms. The composer declared the seventh to be “the most characteristic.” Certainly, in its stylistic alignment not so much to Schubert as to Johann Strauss, whose waltz tunes Rave loved, it is a clear anticipation of the delirious ballet score La Valse. It is followed by a highly poetic Epilogue which acts as an impressionistic kind of recapitulation by recalling more or less clear images of all except the fifth of the preceding waltzes.

Written, unglamorously, as a sight-reading test for the Paris Conservatoire in 1913, the short Prélude is not the keyboard obstacle course one might expect in the circumstances. Although there are technical problems, the piece, a nostalgic slow waltz, 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.”

The two little pieces À le manière de Borodine and À la manière de Chabrier, tributes to two of Ravel’s favourite composers, were written 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 characterisation. 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 a wonderfully witty and touchingly affectionate inspiration which says more about Chabrier than any amount of stylistic analysis.

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 an 18th-cenutry model by Couperin. But by the autumn of 1914, after the outbreak of war, the Forlane was taking its place in what he then called a “French suite.” Work was interrupted by the composer’s front-line 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 consciously French 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 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 attractively lyrical phrases are floated on the turbulent surface. Significantly for his future as a composer for the piano, Ravel’s declining health rendered him incapable of of playing the Toccata himself.

Gerald Larner © 2008