sexuality

“My only mistress,” said Ravel, “is music.” What he meant by that is that his energies and affections were so comprehensively consumed by music that he had little left of either to devote to anything or, still less, anybody else. He did not mean that he had no time for friends – he had many, of both sexes – but, as Francis Poulenc authoritatively observed, “he had no love affair… No one knows of any Ravel love affair.” You can gather together testimonies from other contemporaries and look through the music for clues but even then you cannot be sure what his sexual inclinations were. Perhaps he just wasn’t interested either way?

A particularly interesting work in this respect is his delightful “comédie musicale” in one act, L’Heure espagnole (The Spanish Hour), which was first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1911. There were several good reasons why Ravel should have chosen Franc-Nohain’s bawdy little play as the basis for an opera. One attractive quality was that it is so short that Ravel had to do little but cut a few lines to adapt it as a libretto. Even more attractive was that it is set not only in Spain but also in a clock-maker’s shop resonant with the ticking and chiming of a variety of time-pieces. The opening of the opera shows just how much that meant to him: over an eerie background of slowly shifting harmonies on wind and muted strings in a mixture of quintuple and triple time, three metronomes tick at different tempi, bells ring out of time, a mechanical trumpeter sounds a fanfare, puppets dance to a musical-box celesta, an imitation cock crows on the detached mouthpiece of a sarrusophone, a metallic bird utters a shrill call on the piccolo.

Still more to the point is that – alongside the opportunity to indulge himself in the Spanish musical idiom he loved so much and which is a prominent feature of many of his scores, from his earliest acknowledged work to his last – there was, one suspects, a character he could identify with.

It is true, of course, that the story derives from the playwright and not the composer. But Ravel did choose it after all. And if there is any reason for that apart from the musical ones it is that he saw something of himself in it. He surely did not identify with the old clock-maker Torquemada, whom his wife Ccncepcion finds so inadequate that she cannot wait for the opportunity to entertain more effective lovers. Frail and short in stature, Ravel might have envied the muscular and indefatigable muleteer Ramiro but he had nothing in common with him and, apart from a taste for waltz tunes, he had no more in common with the lecherous and over-corpulent banker Don Inigo Gomez.

That leaves the poet Gonzalve, a character often made to look ridiculous but one which Ravel felt, significantly enough, should be presented as a real person. He is the lover appointed by Concepcion to amuse her in the precious hour when Torquemada has to go out and perform his weekly duty of attending to the municipal clocks. It turns out, until Ramiro finally saves the day, to be a very frustrating hour for Concepcion, who vents her rage at men like Gonzalve and Don Inigo in a splendid aria “Oh! la pitoyable aventure!” She cannot believe that Spaniards “just two steps from Estramadura” could be so ineffective.

Gonzalve’s problem is not physical – unlike that of Don Inigo who is too fat to get out of the grandfather clock in which he has been smuggled into her bedroom – but aesthetic. He is so obsessed by poetry that every situation or experience brings new verse. The clock-maker’s shop inspires “The Garden of Hours – A Sonnet,” a ticking timepiece “The Heart of the Clock – A Poem,” a chime “The Lovers’ Ringing Bell – A Serenade.” Concealed in his turn in a wooden clock case or, as he prefers, an “oaken envelope” he composes Impressions of the Hamadryad. But by now Concepcion has already despaired of him and has turned her attention to Ramiro.

Clearly, by the end of the play Gonzalve could truly say, “My only mistress is poetry” or at the end of the opera, in which his lyrics are set in flamenco style, “My only mistress is music.” Not that, having been embarrassed into buying an expensive clock, he is in a mood for such reflections.

Gerald Larner © 2011