Music History 101 :: Maurice Ravel
When my boss, Linda Wehrli, suggested Maurice Ravel for our March Music History 101 Blog, I admit I didn’t know much about him. I was eager to learn more. With his birthday on March 7th
, what better way to celebrate than with a Music History Blog acknowledging his accomplishments?! We hope you enjoy this brief history, music, and story about this remarkable French composer and pianist. Info courtesy of Britannica and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Maurice Ravel was a French composer of Swiss-Basque descent, noted for his musical craftsmanship and perfection of form and style.
Ravel was born in a village near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, of a Swiss father and a Basque mother. His family background was an artistic and cultivated one, and the young Maurice received every encouragement from his father when his music talent became apparent at an early age.
In 1889, at 14, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained until 1905. During this period he composed some of his best known works, including the Pavane for a Dead Princess, the Sonatine for piano, and the String Quartet.
All these works, especially the two latter, show the astonishing early perfection of style and craftsmanship that are the hallmarks of Ravel’s entire oeuvre. He is one of the rare composers whose early works seem scarcely less mature than those of his maturity. Indeed, his failure at the Conservatoire, after three attempts, to win the coveted Prix de Rome for composition (the works he submitted were judged too “advanced” by ultraconservative members of the jury) caused something of a scandal. Indignant protests were published, and liberal-minded musicians and writers, including the musicologist and novelist Romain Rolland, supported Ravel. As a result, the director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, was forced to resign, and his place was taken by the composer Gabriel Fauré, with whom Ravel had studied composition.
Ravel was in no sense a revolutionary musician. He was for the most part content to work within the established formal and harmonic conventions of his day, still firmly rooted in tonality—i.e., the organization of music around focal tones. Yet, so very personal and individual was his adaptation and manipulation of the traditional musical idiom that it would be true to say he forged for himself a language of his own that bears the stamp of his personality as unmistakably as any work of Bach or Chopin.
While his melodies are almost always modal (based not on the conventional Western diatonic scale but on the old Greek Phrygian and Dorian modes), his harmonies derive their often somewhat acid flavor from his fondness for “added” notes and unresolved appoggiaturas, or notes extraneous to the chord that are allowed to remain harmonically unresolved. He enriched the literature of the piano by a series of masterworks, ranging from the early Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and the Miroirs of 1905 to the formidable Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), and the two piano concerti (1931). Of his purely orchestral works, the Rapsodie espagnole and Boléro are the best known and reveal his mastery of the art of instrumentation.
But perhaps the highlights of his career were his collaboration with the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he composed the masterpiece Daphnis et Chloé, and with the French writer Colette, who was the librettist of his best known opera, L’Enfant et les sortilèges.
Although Ravel never married, he enjoyed the society of a few chosen friends but lived the life of a semi-recluse at his country retreat at Montfort-L’Amaury, in the forest of Rambouillet, near Paris. He served in World War I for a short time as a truck driver at the front, but the strain was too great for his fragile constitution, and he was discharged from the army in 1917.
In 1928, Ravel embarked on a four months tour of Canada and the United States and in the same year visited England to receive an honorary degree of doctor of music from Oxford. That year also saw the creation of Boléro in its original form as a ballet, with Ida Rubinstein in the principal role.
The last five years of Ravel’s life were clouded by aphasia (a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate effectively. It occurs due to damage to the brain regions responsible for language processing), which not only prevented him from writing another note of music but also deprived him of the power of speech and made it impossible for him even to sign his name. Perhaps the real tragedy of his condition was that his musical imagination remained as active as ever. An operation to relieve the obstruction of a blood vessel that supplies the brain was unsuccessful. Ravel was buried in the cemetery of Levallois, a Paris suburb in which he had lived, in the presence of Igor Stravinsky and other distinguished musicians and composers.
For Ravel, music was a kind of ritual, having its own laws, to be conducted behind high walls, sealed off from the outside world, and impenetrable to unauthorized intruders. When his Russian contemporary, Stravinsky compared Ravel to “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers,” he was in fact extolling those qualities of intricacy and precision to which he himself attached so much importance.
Can’t get enough of Ravel? Check out the Best of Maurice Ravel on YouTube, courtesy of Essential Classics.
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I’ve been committed to continuing lifelong learning and inspiring creative thinking through art and music since 1989. I’d love to meet you! You’re welcome to chat with me on Zoom or stop by the studio. Just shoot me an email at Linda@pastimesinc.com and I’ll be glad to set up a mutually convenient time.
This reminds me to revisit his solo piano and concerto recordings, been too long. Interesting article, thanks!
So glad you enjoyed it, Barry! Thanks for reading.
Very interesting article and listening to his beautiful music brought many memories of my childhood and my mother who loved his music and we listened in hour house. Thank you very Linda.
So glad it brought back fond memories! It’s our pleasure.
So glad to hear, dear Luiza. Our pleasure!