What kind of man was he?

Very reserved - not because he was unfeeling but, on the contrary, because he was emotionally so vulnerable that he attempted to protect himself, both in his life and in his music, by not giving too much away. If he had trusted you, you would have found him a loyal and endearingly childlike friend. Even then you would have had to be very discreet about his small stature, of which he was acutely aware, and his sexuality, which he kept firmly repressed. As he said to someone he did trust, “I am a Basque. Basques feel things violently but they say little about it and only to a few.”

Basque? I thought he was French.

He was born in the French Basque country, in a fishing port called Ciboure, just across the Nivelle from St-Jean-de-Luz, not far south of Biarritz. His parents took him to Paris when he was only a few months old but, because of his particularly deep affection for his Basque mother and regular holidays at St-Jean-de-Luz, he remained a Basque at heart.

So Stravinsky’s famous description of Ravel as “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers” is all wrong.

It’s half right. His father, an engineer who invented an early form of the internal combustion engine, was Swiss and it was from him that Ravel inherited his respect for fine craftsmanship, his admiration for machines and perhaps also his creativity. His emotional life, on the other hand, revolved round his mother, whom he loved to the exclusion of all others (even after her death in 1917). She inspired in him not only his intense pride and loyalty but also his love of Spanish music. In his own words, “the clicking and roaring of my father’s machines and the Spanish folk songs sung to me by my mother” were the two fundamental of his musical personality.

So that’s Ravel in a nutshell?

It certainly applies to a work like Boléro or his one-act comic opera L’Heure espagnole. But many other factors contributed to the formation of what was actually a highly complex personality. There was the brilliant artistic, literary and social life of Paris, where he was brought up and where he lived for forty-six years until he moved out to his little house at Montfort l’Amaury in the Ile de France. There was his always fragile health and his quixotic service as a lorry driver on the Western Front in the First World War. There was his professional training at the Paris Conservatoire, where his composition teacher was Gabriel Fauré, and there was his actually rather more fruitful admiration for non-academics like Erik Satie and, above all, Emmanuel Chabrier.

What about Debussy?

Yes, he learnt much from his great contemporary, from L’Après-midi d’un faune and Pelléas et Mélisande in particular. But Debussy also learned much from him, not least in translating impressionism into piano music. And Ravel’s advance into fauvism and expressionism which, respectively, make the Rapsodie espagnole and La Valse such intense experiences, left Debussy some way behind.

So was he a great composer?

If a great composer is a composer on a large scale, the answer can scarcely be yes. He wrote nothing longer than his sixty-minute ballet Daphnis et Chloé ballet, and that cost him an immense effort. If greatness is commensurate with perfection, of artistic revelation no less acute for being on a small scale, yes, he was one of the greatest of all composers of his time.

Gerald Larner©

further reading

Larner, G: Maurice Ravel (Phaidon Press, 1996)

Nichols, R. (Ed): Ravel Remembered (Faber 1987)

Orenstein, A. (ed): A Ravel Reader (Columbia University Press, 1990)

further listening

Boléro: CBSO/Simon Rattle (with Daphnis et Chloé complete - EMI CDC7 54303-2)

Piano Concerto in G: Cécile Ousset/CBSO/Simon Rattle (with Piano Concerto in D for the left hand and Le Tombeau de Couperin piano version - EMI CDC7 54158-2)

Rapsodie espagnole: LSO/Pierre Monteux (with Daphnis et Chloé complete and Pavane pour une Infante défunte - Decca 448 603-2DCS)

Le Tombeau de Couperin: Montreal SO/Charles Dutoit (with Ma mère l’oye, Pavane pour une infante défunte, Valses nobles et sentimentales - Decca 410 254-2DH)

La Valse: CBSO/Simon Rattle (with Alborada del gracioso, Fanfare from L’Eventail de Jeanne, Ma mère l’oye, Shéhérazade, La Vallée des cloches arr Grainger - EMI CDC7 54204-2)

Valses nobles et sentimentales: Montreal SO/Charles Dutoit (see above)