Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel: Perfection at the Cost of Volume

A side drum plays the same two bars of rhythm roughly 170 times. Two melodies alternate above it and never develop. Everything that happens for fifteen minutes happens because the instrumentation changes and the volume rises, once, to a single surprise modulation at the end. Its composer described it as a piece "without music in it." *Boléro* is now among the most played orchestral works ever written, which is either the great joke of twentieth-century music or its most exact demonstration of what orchestration alone can do.

Ciboure, Paris, and the Conservatoire's Low Opinion

Ravel was born on 7 March 1875 in Ciboure, a Basque town near Biarritz, to a Basque mother, Marie Delouart, and a Franco-Swiss engineer and inventor, Pierre-Joseph Ravel — a parentage that critics have been drawing conclusions from ever since. The family moved to Paris when he was three months old. He began piano at seven, took up formal composition study in 1887, and entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1889, winning first prize in piano in 1891.

His relationship with the institution then collapsed twice. In 1895 he was expelled for pursuing his own line rather than the house style. Readmitted in 1897 under the mentorship of Gabriel Fauré — the one senior figure who consistently backed him — he was expelled again in 1900. The Conservatoire's conservative leadership found him difficult, and he found their teaching irrelevant. Neither judgement changed.

L'Affaire Ravel

The rupture became a national scandal in 1905. Competing for the Prix de Rome, by then already the composer of *Jeux d'eau* and the String Quartet, Ravel was eliminated in the preliminary round. The elimination was so plainly indefensible that it exposed the jury's institutional corruption in public. Director Théodore Dubois resigned; Fauré took over and reformed the Conservatoire. It remains one of the few cases in which an artist lost a prize and won the institution.

Writing for the Piano as Though It Were an Orchestra

The works that made his name are studies in a specific kind of precision. *Jeux d'eau* (1901) reinvented what a French piano texture could sound like; the String Quartet followed in 1902–03; and *Gaspard de la nuit* (1908) is a virtuoso cycle that pianists still measure themselves against. In 1912 came *Daphnis et Chloé*, his largest orchestral canvas.

His method was consistent and slow. He generally composed at the piano and orchestrated afterwards, treating instrumentation as a separate act of decision rather than a coat of paint. He called himself a slow and painstaking worker, valuing melodic clarity and formal exactness over spontaneity, and his perfectionism was a byword among his contemporaries. Across a full career he produced only about sixty performable works, and he wrote neither symphonies nor church music.

He was routinely filed alongside Debussy under Impressionism, a label he rejected on the grounds that his own music was more formally rigorous. The friendship between the two men cooled in the mid-1900s under the pressure of critical factionalism and personal irritation, and after Debussy's death in 1918 Ravel was, by common consent, the leading composer in France.

The War, and the Tombeau

In March 1915, at forty, Ravel enlisted as a lorry driver with the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment, hauling munitions under dangerous conditions and contracting amoebic dysentery. In January 1917 his mother died, a blow from which those close to him thought he never recovered. *Le Tombeau de Couperin*, written across 1914–17, belongs to those years, and takes its title and its manner from a French keyboard tradition two centuries older than the war it was composed through.

In 1920 he declined the Légion d'honneur, consistent with a lifelong scepticism about state honours. In 1921 he moved out to Montfort-l'Amaury, where he stayed.

The Machine Age

The late work is harder and stranger than the reputation for elegance suggests. *La Valse* arrived in 1920. His 1922 orchestration of Mussorgsky's *Pictures at an Exhibition* is so authoritative that the version most of the world knows is Ravel's rather than Mussorgsky's. In 1926 came the opera *L'Enfant et les sortilèges*, to a libretto by Colette.

Then *Boléro*, commissioned in 1928 by the dancer Ida Rubinstein. Ravel had a documented fascination with machinery and industrial sound, and the piece is a machine: an ostinato that does not vary, a crescendo that does not stop. When the Cuban composer Joaquín Nin objected to his tempo, Ravel replied that the matter was "of no interest whatsoever." The 1928 North American tour took him through twenty-five cities in the United States and Canada with most of the leading orchestras; in New York an entire audience rose to applaud him as he walked on. The two piano concertos followed in 1930–31 — one in G, one in D for the left hand alone — absorbing jazz harmony without loosening the classical frame.

Why Maurice Is Called a Genius

The quality is exactness. Ravel's gift was for knowing, to an uncanny degree, what a given sound would do — which instrument, at which dynamic, in which register, would produce the effect he had already decided on. Britannica's summary of him is the standard verdict and a fair one: a composer "noted for his musical craftsmanship and perfection of form and style." *Boléro* is the extreme proof, a work whose entire content is orchestration; the *Pictures* arrangement is the other kind of proof, an act of instrumentation so persuasive that it displaced the original in the public mind.

The counter-case has to be taken seriously, because Ravel supplied most of it himself. His output was small, roughly sixty pieces, with no symphony and no sacred music — he worked in miniatures and single gestures. He described his most famous piece as having no music in it, and a hostile reading of that remark writes off the whole late manner as brilliant surface over an empty frame. He is also, in the standard narrative, the second of the two great French composers of his generation: the innovations of harmonic language are credited to Debussy, and Ravel is cast as the more disciplined follower.

The honest position is that his genius is one of craft rather than of revolution, and that the distinction matters less than it sounds. He did not overturn the language of music. He achieved something that is arguably rarer — a body of work in which, across four decades, virtually nothing is approximate.

The Silence

A taxi accident in 1932 may have aggravated a neurological condition already under way. Progressive memory loss and aphasia followed; the man of absolute precision lost access to language and, by 1933, could no longer compose at all. He underwent brain surgery in December 1937 and died on the 28th, at sixty-two. The nature of the disease is still argued over, with frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease among the proposals. What he left is small, and almost none of it has dated.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Grammy Hall of Fame — 1991
• Notable work: Daphnis et Chloé
• Notable work: Boléro
• Notable work: Miroirs
• Notable work: Piano Concerto
• Instruments: piano
• Genres: opera, classical music and impressionism in music