Sonatine

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé   

But for the challenge of a competition for the first movement of a sonatina – sponsored by an Anglo-French periodical, The Weekly Review in 1903 – Ravel would probably not even have thought of writing anything as unfashionable at the time as a sonatina. But, having committed himself to this neo-classical exercise, he made something entirely personal of it – not least by way of the pleading falling fourth which opens the first movement and which, in one way or another, supplies much of its melodic material. The Menuet, for example, a favourite dance form with Ravel, is based on an upside-down version of the same interval. The last movement, a toccata or moto perpetuo, which Ravel himself had difficulty in playing, recalls the opening theme of the work as a second subject before adopting its basic interval as a positive obsession.

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

But for the challenge of a competition sponsored    by an Anglo-French periodical, The Weekly Review, in 1903, Ravel would probably not even have thought of writing anything as unfashionable at the time as a sonatina. But, having committed himself to this neo-classical exercise, he made something entirely personal of it – not least by way of the pleading falling fourth which opens the first movement and which, in one way or another, supplies much of its melodic material. The Menuet, for example, a favourite dance form with Ravel, is based on an upside-down version of the same interval. The last movement, a toccata or moto perpetuo, which Ravel himself had difficulty in playing, recalls the opening theme of the work as a second subject before adopting its basic interval as a positive obsession.

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

The usual explanation for the neo-classical style of Ravel’s Sonatine – which was so unexpected after his inspired extension of the impressionist repertoire of the piano in Jeux d’eau – is that it was stimulated by a competition sponsored by a magazine. That is true. What is not true is that Jeux d’eau and the first movement of the Sonatine are so very different. Whatever the classical orientation of the Sonatine, the first subject of the opening Modéré movement splashes exhilaratingly through something not unlike the running-water arpeggio figuration in parts of Jeux d’eau. The Mouvement de Menuet is no more classical, in spite of its archaic cadences, than the Modéré: there is more Chabrier in it than anything of the eighteenth century. But if the romantic melody that rises up through the left hand to a climax at the end of the first section is pure Chabrier, the magical modulation into the very short trio section, which quietly recalls the main theme of the first movement, is pure Ravel.

The main theme of the Modéré is also recalled in the Animé finale. This time it appears in the form of a legato second subject in quintuple time ingeniously introduced into the brilliantly impulsive triple time of the rest of the movement. Perpetuum mobile or toccata, it is technically so demanding that Ravel declined the opportunity of adding it to his piano-roll recording of the first two movements of the work.

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

The usual explanation for the neo-classical style of Ravel’s Sonatine - which was so unexpected after his inspired extension of the impressionist repertoire of the piano in Jeux d’eau - is that it was stimulated by a competition sponsored by a short-lived Anglo-French magazine called The Weekly Critical Review. That is true. What is not true is that Jeux d’eau and the first movement of the Sonatine are so very different. Whatever the classical orientation of the Sonatine, the first subject of the opening Modéré movement splashes exhilaratingly through something not unlike the running-water arpeggio figuration in parts of Jeux d’eau.

The Mouvement de Menuet is no more classical, in spite of its archaic cadences, than the Modéré. As in the Menuet antique of 1895 there is more Chabrier in it than anything of the eighteenth century. But if the romantic melody that rises up through the left hand to a climax at the end of the first section is pure Chabrier, the magical modulation into the very short trio section, which quietly recalls the main theme of the first movement, is pure Ravel.

The main theme of the Modéré is also recalled in the Animé finale. This time it appears in the form of a legato second subject in quintuple time ingeniously introduced into the brilliantly impulsive triple time of the rest of the movement. Perpetuum mobile or toccata, it is technically so demanding that Ravel declined the opportunity of adding it to his piano-roll recording of the first two movements of the work.

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

The usual explanation for the neo-classical style of Ravel’s Sonatine – which was so unexpected after his inspired extension of the impressionist repertoire of the piano in Jeux d’eau – is that it was stimulated by a competition for a sonatina sponsored by a short-lived Anglo-French magazine called The Weekly Critical Review. That is true. What is not true is that Jeux d’eau and the first movement of the Sonatine are so very different. The opening theme of the Modéré, introduced in F sharp minor by the two hands in octaves, is accompanied in the inner parts by bubbling arpeggios not unlike the running-water figuration in Jeux d’eau.

Pleasingly decorative though it is, however, that theme also has an important structural function: it is to reappear in each of the following movements, while its first two notes (the falling fourth heard in the very first bar) echo everywhere. In the meantime, Ravel offers a more thoughtful melody as the second subject required by sonata form at this point. Both themes are developed and duly recalled in the recapitulation, the second theme ending the movement lingeringly and quietly in F sharp major.

The Mouvement de Menuet is no more classical in melodic style, in spite of its archaic cadences, than the Modéré. As in Ravel’s Menuet antique of 1895 there is more Chabrier in it than anything of the eighteenth century. But if the romantic melody that rises up through the left hand to a climax at the end of the first section is pure Chabrier, the magical modulation into the very short trio section, which quietly recalls the main theme of the first movement, is pure Ravel.

The main theme of the Modéré is recalled four times in the Animé finale. It appears here in the form of a legato second subject in quintuple time ingeniously introduced into the impulsive triple time of the rest of the movement. A reckless toccata – where the falling fourth becomes such an obsession as to dominate the closing stages – it is technically so demanding that the composer declined the opportunity of adding it to his piano-roll recording of the first two movements of the work.

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

Piano Trio

Modéré

Pantoum: assez vif

Passacaille: très large

Final: animé

A perfectionist in everything, Ravel had a particularly acute sense of proportion. He once confessed to Francis Poulenc that he considered the Habanera in Rapsodie espagnole “a flop” - not because he didn’t like the music but because “it’s so badly orchestrated… The orchestra’s too large for the number of bars.” Few composers would have been aware of such a fine distinction in scale and fewer still would have let it worry them. Generally, if anything seems out of proportion in a work by Ravel, it is either because our perception is at fault or because, as in the rare case of the Piano Trio he was writing at the beginning of the war in 1914, expressive considerations prevailed over all others.

The piano Sonatine, which was started in 1903 in response to a competition sponsored by The Weekly Review for a “first movement of a sonatina,” is to a large extent a study in proportion. The magazine collapsed before a prize could be awarded but, far from discarding his entry, Ravel was moved by his sense of proportion to write two more movements and complete a sonatina not only in the style but also to the scale suggested by its opening Modéré in F sharp minor. This is not to say that there is no emotional inspiration behind the work. On the contrary, Ravel always insisted that the falling fourth at the beginning of the piece should be played with a pleading accent on the first note, and that opening interval spreads its poignant implications through the whole work.

At the same time, and most characteristically, Ravel makes use of the two-note motif to unify the three-movement structure. The D flat major Mouvement de menuet begins by inverting the salient interval of the first movement and integrating it into the main theme. A magical modulation leads into a trio section which recalls the opening theme of the Modéré and, though only fourteen bars long, echoes the falling fourth no fewer than twelve times. The main theme of the Modéré is also recalled in the Animé finale. This time it appears in the form of a legato second subject in quintuple time ingeniously introduced into the brilliantly impulsive triple time of the rest of the movement. Perpetuum mobile or toccata, however it might best be described, it is technically so demanding that Ravel himself had great difficulty in playing it.

At the climax of Ravel’s Piano Trio, at the very end of the last movement, there are as many as twenty-four bars with all three instruments playing fortissimo. The violinist and cellist are occupied at full stretch with sustained high-pitched trills while the pianist clutches handfuls of notes in chords covering five octaves or more. It seems that the composer, master of proportion and instrumental sonority though he was, has set the piano trio a task it is not equipped to fulfil.

The explanation of this apparent anomaly is that in the six months taken to write the Piano Trio its expressive objective had undergone a fundamental change. What Ravel had begun in March 1914 as a tribute to the Basque country where he was born, and where he was staying at the time, had by September become a fervent statement of patriotism in the face of the invading armies at the beginning of the First World War. The evidence is not only the in the music itself but also in the composer’s heroic efforts to enlist - although he had long been exempt from military service on medical grounds - and his intense disappointment at not being able to take part immediately in what he described as “the most grandiose and the most noble action since man came into existence.” So it is not surprising that he was frustrated by performances of the Piano Trio that failed to sound, as he put it, “trumpet enough” at that climactic point in the last movement.

The essentially peaceable nature of the first movement is immediately evident in the modally flavoured A minor harmonies and the hypnotic 3+2+3 rhythms of the opening theme. Whether this material is authentically “Basque in colour,” as the composer asserted, is not of the first importance. Ravel’s intended tribute to the Basque country is clear enough and is still clearer on the entry of the second subject: quietly introduced at a slightly reduced tempo by the violin, it is also in the Dorian mode and is based on a similar, though not identical, rhythmic pattern. The tender treatment of the new material (in a still declining tempo), the dramatically passionate development of the first theme (in a long acceleration) and the lingering end to the movement combine in as overt an expression of affection as is to be found anywhere in Ravel’s music.

The Pantoum title, a reference to an elaborate Malayan verse form used by Baudelaire in Harmonie du soir, suggests that the second movement is the solution to another of the daunting technical problems Ravel would regularly set himself. Certainly, the metrical complexity developed during the course of this scherzo-equivalent has no musical precedent. What happens is that in the outer sections two themes - one brightly percussive, the other a curiously Spanish-coloured waltz - alternate, at a comparatively early stage passing over a hint of a broader melody on the piano. In the middle section the alternation continues in the original 3/4 but now in ingenious melodic and metrical counterpoint with the broader melody expressively augmented in 4/2, first on the piano and then on the strings.

The turning point in the expressive direction taken by the work is the Passacaille. It can only have been here that Ravel was, as he confessed, “weeping over the sharps and flats” as he faced the moral dilemma - the choice between his duty to his widowed mother and his duty to his country - the outbreak of war had put him in. There is structural stability in the incorporation of the salient melodic points of the main themes of the previous movements in the passacaglia subject and its regular cycle of repetitions. At the same time, however, the pain is apparent in the arch-form progress from a very low point in pitch and dynamics to a high-placed central climax and back down to the depths again.

Having contrived an ending in A major, the Passacaille leads directly into the Final, which conscientiously takes a melodic hint from the previous movement in shaping its main theme. Purposeful though that theme is, in its A major harmonies and its 5/4 metre, it cannot compete with the F sharp major second subject in terms of heroic splendour. In spite of a development section which recalls the grim mood of the Passacaille and which encounters sinister military trumpet calls on the way, the closing stages of the work witness a triumph so comprehensive that, as the heroic second subject approaches its ultimate destination of A major, the three instruments have to resort to orchestral procedures to make their conclusively jubilant point.

Gerald Larner©2002

Habanera

Menuet antique

La Valse

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Gaspard de la nuit

Sonatine

Modéré

Mouvement de Menuet

Animé

The neo-classical Sonatine, written between the impressionist Jeux d’eau and the visionary Miroirs, is not as anomalous an event in the composer’s development as it might seem. There always was a classical or baroque revivalist in Ravel and, since he did not yet have the benefit of a publisher’s retainer, a competition for a sonatina first movement - sponsored by the Anglo-French Weekly Review - must have seemed an attractive proposition. As it turned out, the magazine folded before a prize could be awarded. But if Ravel was discouraged it was only temporarily and, far from just forgetting about his Modéré first movement, he thought about it for two years and completed the work with a minuet and a finale in 1905.

    The first movement of the Sonatine, the first subject of which is carried on something not unlike the running-water arpeggio figuration of Jeux d’eau, is not uncharacteristic in its piano writing anyway. At the same time, although it is discreetly done, the work echoes throughout with the emotive falling fourth - later to be associated with the love of Daphnis and Chloe and the love of the Child for his “Maman” in L’Enfant et les sortilèges - with which it begins. In one form or another, the fourth also dominates the melodic material of the Menuet, the middle section of which makes a nostalgic allusion to the opening theme of the work, though now in triple time rather than its original duple time. In the Animé that same theme reappears in quintuple time as a regularly recurring lyrical episode in what is basically a toccata finale.

Habanera

The Habanera was first performed as a two-piano piece, along with Entre Cloches in Sites auriculaires, by Ricardo Viñes and Marthe Dron in 1898. It is not unlikely, however, that it was written originally for solo piano, perhaps on three staves like the Chabrier Habanera which it so much resembles, and rewritten on four staves some time after he and Viñes discovered Pleyel’s newly invented double piano (with a keyboard at each end) in 1896. Certainly, it is not beyond the reach of two hands and Ravel did actually include it in his repertoire of solo pieces for his tour of America in 1928.

Headed in the manuscript by a quotation from Baudelaire,“in the perfumed land caressed by the sun,” Ravel’s Habanera    is pure Spanish poetry. It transcends its Chabrier model not by addition, which was the approach Ravel adopted in Sérénade grotesque and Menuet antique, but by subtraction. The harmonies and textures are refined to create an impressionist image so precisely evocative that Debussy, who was present at the first performance, was moved not only to borrow the score but also to imitate it. The kinship between Ravel’s Habanera and Soirée dans Grenade in Debussy’s Estampes is unmistakably clear.

    Ravel’s first masterpiece - “the germ of several elements which were to predominate in my later compositions”- Habanera was incorporated in the Rapsodie espagnole thirteen years after it was written.

Menuet antique

Ravel’s first published work - it was put on sale    by Chabrier’s old publisher Enoch, appropriately enough, in 1898 - was also his first essay in rethinking the minuet in his own terms. He got progressively better at it, producing his most convincing example in Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1917. The Menuet antique is basically Chabrier but Chabrier exaggerated to an extreme of dissonance and rhythmic irregularity in the outer sections and pastiche charm in the middle section. Even so, Ravel had a special affection for this daring indiscretion of his youth, as he demonstrated by making an orchestral version of it in 1929, as long as thirty-four years after it was written.       

La Valse - poème choréographique

With the possible exception of Boléro, all of Ravel’s orchestral works were composed at the piano. Both the solo-piano and the two-piano versions of La Valse, for example, far from being transcriptions of the ballet score, were preliminary stages in its development. They are both finished works, however, not sketches: it was in the two-piano version that the work was first performed in public, by the composer himself with his Italian colleague Alfredo Casella, in Vienna in October 1920.

    It was also in a piano version that Ravel and Marcelle Meyer had introduced La Valse to Sergei Diaghilev who, having commissioned the score for his Ballets Russes, now turned it down, declaring it “a masterpiece…but not a ballet…a painting of a ballet.” Although the composer was deeply offended by the incident, Diaghilev’s judgement was not unperceptive. It is true that in affording little more than glimpses of a whole variety of dances as they whirl past the observer, it is more an impression of the waltz than a waltz as such.

      As the composer said, “I conceived the work as a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which is linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic and fateful whirlpool.” The fantastic and fateful events are reserved for the second half of a construction which, basically, is divided into two unequal parts. In the first part, after gradually gathering itself out of quiet and rhythmically indistinct rumblings in the bass and a few suggestive scraps of melody, a waltz-time momentum launches a sequence of more less developed dances.

    As the first half ends, on a fortissimo    climax, the low rumblings are heard again. The momentum is quickly recovered but it is more pressing this time. Melodies familiar from the first half reappear but now under the pressure of an accelerating tempo, rising dynamic intensity, and increasingly reckless harmonic aggression in what the composer himself described as a “frenzy.” In its civilised context, the ending is as violent as anything in The Rite of Spring.

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Modéré

Assez lent

Modéré

Assez animé

Presque lent

Vif

Moins vif

Epilogue: lent

The first performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales in Paris in May 1911 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 asking the audience to name the composers afterwards. Although a tiny proportion of those present identified the authorship of the Valses correctly, 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, for dismissing the assault of unresolved appogiaturas as an accident or a hoax, 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, particularly in a work    inviting comparison with Schubert’s Valses nobles and the Valses sentimentales and Liszt’s Soirées de Vienne.

    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 tempi in Ravel’s sequence, with 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 that the seventh to be “the most characteristic.” Certainly, in its stylistic alignment to Johann Strauss rather than Schubert, it is a clear anticipation of La Valse and, in its reconciliation of the conflicting rhythmic and harmonic interests of left hand and right in the middle section, the most ingenious. 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.

Gaspard de la Nuit

three poems for piano after Aloysius Bertrand

Ondine

Le Gibet

Scarbo

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. At that time Poe was the great inspiration and Bertrand had to wait. What reawakened the composer’s interest in these fantastic miniatures must have been the new edition of Gaspard de la Nuit published by the Mercure de France in 1908. Certainly, it was between May and September of that year that he wrote the work, approaching it first in a spirit of parody and then, as he said, “getting carried away.”

    Ravel described Gaspard de la Nuit as three “romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Clearly, he was in a Lisztian frame of mind. “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. Romantic convention would have her seduce the poet and draw him down to her watery realms, from which he would never return. In this case, in the verses 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 the sound of bells as he was obsessed by harmonic pedal points. In Le Gibet a B flat bell 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.

    Like Ondine, Scarbo, though alarming, is not malevolent. He is a midnight hallucination, a dwarf figure who changes shape and size, who is elusive and overwhelming and apt to flicker out like a candle. His is perhaps the most inspired and certainly the most original music in the work. It is a highly capricious movement of strange rhythmic incongruities, varying disconcertingly between the Viennese and Spanish. It is punctuated by silences, periods of stillness, 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.

Gerald Larner©

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