Three pieces from Miroirs (1904-5)

Oiseaux tristes

Une barque sur l’océan

Alborada del gracioso

While Debussy and Ravel were not the best of friends, each know what the other was doing by way of Ricardo Viñes, who was the favourite pianist of both of them. Oiseaux tristes, the first of the five Miroirs in order of composition, was written at about the same time as Ravel heard from Viñes that Debussy “was dreaming of writing music so free in form that it would seem to be improvised, of creating pieces which might have been torn out of a sketch book.” Ravel not only expressed his sympathy with Debussy but also revealed that he was actually working on such a piece at the time. “I would really like to do something that would liberate me from Jeux d’eau,” he said, excited by the prospect of discovering another new sound after his creation of the first authentic example of piano impressionism three years earlier.

According to Ravel, Oiseaux tristes (Sad birds) “evokes birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer.” It is so far from Jeux d’eau that the repeated notes associated with the song of the blackbird, echoing through the piece from the first bar to the last, anticipate the tolling bell of Le Gibet in Gaspard de la nuit. The atmosphere here, with the hot-house harmonies and the confining rhythmic ostinato, is very much more sultry however. It would have been this piece rather than anything else in Miroirs which, in the composer’s words, “disconcerted those musicians who were most familiar with my style” when the work was first performed by Viñes in 1906.

Not all the pieces in Miroirs are as far from Jeux d’eau as Oiseaux tristes. Une Barque sur l’océan (A boat on the ocean) is another study in water impressionism, comparable to the earlier work in technique but anticipatory of Debussy’s La Mer in its structural breadth and the variety of sounds and sensations observed from a small boat on an intermittently choppy sea. At first it seems that the boat is rocking gently at its moorings: the first theme is repeated over and over again at the same pitch and against much the same A major arpeggios before getting into deeper harmonic water. Winds, signalled by double-trilled crescendos high in the right hand, carry 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 return to the security of A major.

Alborada del gracioso (The fool’s aubade), the only piece in Miroirs that reflects a human presence, derives from a concept Ravel had explored more than ten years earlier in his Sérénade grotesque - which is also vigorous Spanish dance music articulated in guitar-like figuration and offset by expressive if caricatured vocal melody. Presented very much more effectively in Alborada del gracioso as a seguidilla in the outer sections with a copla in the middle, the idea achieved its final realisation in the orchestral version (with an eloquent bassoon as the gracioso) arranged by the composer himself thirteen years later. His orchestral arrangement of Une barque sur l’océan was less successful.

Gerald Larner © 2008