Ravel 9780300170122

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R AV E L

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ROGER NICHOLS

R AV E L

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2011 by Roger Nichols The author and publishers have made every effort to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced in this book. In the event of any omission, please contact the publishers, who will make any appropriate correction in future editions. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S, Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk Set in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Roger. Ravel / Roger Nichols. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–300–10882–8 (alk. paper) 1. Ravel, Maurice, 1875–1937. 2. Composers—France—Biography. I. Title. ML410.R23N52 2011 780.92—dc22 [B] 2010052136 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Sarah, with all my love; and in affectionate memory of Nigel Fortune, kindest and wisest of friends

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Contents List of illustrations in the text List of plates Preface I II

1875–1902: A dandy blossoms

ix xi xiii 1

1902–1905: Testing the Establishment

42

III

1905–1908: Mirrors, birds and the supernatural

66

IV

1908–1911: A bold operatic Concepcion

99

V VI VII VIII IX X

1911–1914: Nobility and sentiment

133

1914–1920: Patriotism and loss

177

1920–1925: Waltzing towards a love regained

215

1925–1928: Jazz, America and the joy of monotony

271

1928–1937: Two concertos and a long farewell

304

Postlude: The pirate and the clockmaker

348

Source abbreviations

358

Notes

360

Ravel chronology

390

Catalogue of works

399

Select bibliography

403

Index

413

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List of illustrations in the text Rights were not granted to include these illustrations in electronic media. Please refer to print publication. 1

Diagram of Joseph Ravel’s automobile, 1868

4

2

Ravel’s birth certificate

6

3

Extract from Henri Ghys’s diary

9

4

Excerpt from Myrrha

37

5

Diagram of Joseph Ravel’s automobile engine, 1903

48

6

Letter from Debussy to Ravel, 4 March 1904

53

7

Diagram of the ‘Whirlwind of Death’

60

8

Ravel’s angry letter, 4 February 1906

81

9

‘The Peacock’ by Toulouse-Lautrec

86

10

Satie’s letter to his brother about Ravel, 14 January 1911

119

11

Programme of Durand concert, 5 March 1913

151

12

Ravel’s drawing for the title page of Le tombeau de Couperin

191

13

Ravel’s autograph of the ‘marriage’

201

14

Ravel’s decoration for a chair at Le Belvédère

224

15

Cartoon of Ravel by Aline Fruhauf

226

16

Ravel the virtuoso, cartoon by Jean Godebski

234

17

Ravel and friend, cartoon by Jean Godebski

238

18 Opening bars of the Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré, given to the pianist Youra Guller ‘to send her to sleep’

246

19 The only known page of Colette’s autograph of L’Enfant et

20

les sortilèges

265

Ravel’s letter to André Mangeot, 18 July 1927

287

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

x

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21

Ravel conducting Boléro, drawing by Luc-Albert Moreau

300

22

Ravel’s handprints

336

23 One of Ravel’s last handwritten letters, 1 April 1934, to Marie Gaudin

340

24 Dedication in Basque to Marie Gaudin: ‘Marienzat, ene amodiorik handiana’ (to Marie, my fondest love)

342

List of Plates 1

View of Ciboure from St-Jean-de Luz

2

Fisherwomen in Ciboure

3

Marie Ravel

4

Joseph Ravel

5

Ravel as a small child

6

Edouard, Joseph and Maurice Ravel

7

Ravel at 20

8

Ravel and Gaudin, 1899

9

Prix de Rome contenders, 1900

10

On the beach at St-Jean-de-Luz, 1902

11

Cipa and Ida Godebski

12

Ravel, 1907

13

Ravel en auto in the Basque country, 1911

14

On the beach at St-Jean-de-Luz, July 1914

15

At the piano, in uniform, c1915

16

The lorry driver

17

Orchestrating Pictures at an Exhibition, 1922

18

Front and rear views of Le Belvédère

19

The study in Le Belvédère

20

Objets d’art in Le Belvédère

21

Mme Reveleau in the tiny kitchen

22

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Jacques Thibaud, Ravel and Madeleine Grey

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LIST OF PLATES

xii

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23

Ravel and bandleader Paul Whiteman, New York, 1928

24

A 53rd birthday party for Ravel, New York, 7 March 1928

25

Aunday at Le Belvédère

26

L’Impromptu du Belvédère, 10 June 1928

27

Edouard Ravel with Mme and M. Bonnet

28 Ravel in his D Mus gown outside the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 23 October 1928 29

Ravel and Marguerite Long, St-Jean-de-Luz,1930

30

With Pelota players at the Festival Ravel, Ciboure, 24 August 1930

31

Coaching Jacques Février in the Left Hand Concerto, early 1937

Nos 3, 9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 28 and 30 are reproduced by courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; nos 13 and 29 are reproduced by courtesy of the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris.

Preface This book began as a reworking of my Ravel volume in the Master Musicians series, published by Dent in 1977. But the large amount of material that has become available since then has meant a threefold expansion of the original, in which some thirty-year-old remnants can still be found, but which is effectively a new view of the composer and of his life. I have also removed some passages of musical analysis which I felt might daunt the general reader. These and some other observations (which make no great claims, since I am not a professional analyst) can be found, together with a more detailed worklist and chronology of Ravel’s life, on my website: www.rogernichols.org. or by emailing [email protected] Any study of this composer must begin with the invaluable information in Arbie Orenstein’s biography and in his collection of Ravel’s letters, articles and interviews. He has also been unfailingly patient with my many enquiries over a period of years. Further unstinting help has come from Philippe Rodriguez who, in the course of his own work on the Apaches, has unearthed any number of interesting facts about Ravel, for which I am deeply grateful. I should also like to thank the pianist and French music scholar Roy Howat for the great care with which he read through the whole book, and for improving it enormously both in fact and expression; and the artist Charles MacCarthy for his comments on it and for his invaluable ability to see the larger picture. For this present volume and for its predecessor I also owe a large debt to many friends and correspondents, which I am happy to acknowledge: Lynn Bayley, George Benjamin, Sir Lennox Berkeley, Anne Bessand-Massenet, Malcolm Binns, Edward Blakeman, Tobias Bleek, Pierre Boulez, Stephen Broad, Sidney Buckland, Gaby Casadesus, Myriam Chimènes, Margaret Cobb, Chris Collins, Lisa Cox, Winton Dean, Roger Delage, Michel Delahaye, Richard Dowling, Henri Dutilleux, Howard Ferguson, Jacques Février, Anthony Goldstone, David Grayson, Lord Grenfell, Madeleine Grey, Paul Griffiths, Ingrid Grimes, Denis Hall, Charles Alvar Harding, Denis Herlin, Catherine Hilliard, Robin Holloway, Bill Hopkins, Steven Huebner, Edward Johnson, Emily Kilpatrick, David Kimbell, David Lamaze, Richard Langham Smith, Gerald Larner, Rex Lawson, Simon Maguire, Yvon Le Marc’hadour,

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xiv

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PREFACE

Marcel Marnat, Marie-Ange Mayoussier, Gerard McBurney, Madeleine Milhaud, Claude Moreau, Nick Morgan, Jean-Michel Nectoux, Robert Orledge, Domenico de’ Paoli, Vlado Perlemuter, Gerald Pointon, Caroline Potter, Tully Potter, Anthony Powers, Deborah Priest, Manuel Rosenthal, Michael Round, Jean Roy, Tony Scotland, Nigel Simeone, David Soames, Jonathan Stone, Alexandre Tansman, Andrew Thomson, Charles Timbrell, Jean Touzelet, Rigbie Turner, Stephen Walsh, John C.G. Waterhouse, Dame Gillian Weir, Rachel White and Stephen Zank. In addition I am grateful for the assistance of the staffs of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of the British Library, of the Département de la Musique in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, of the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler and of The Morgan Library and Museum. ROGER NICHOLS Kington January 2011

CHAPTER I

1875–1902

A dandy blossoms O

f all the descriptions of Maurice Ravel, probably the most widely known is that supposedly given by Stravinsky: ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’1 – a phrase that has annoyed more than one Ravel supporter over the years. It can, it is true, be heard as carrying connotations of obsessive accuracy and lack of feeling. But there are two reasons why even the most committed Ravelomane should take it seriously. Firstly, Stravinsky himself was no slouch when it came to putting meticulous order into his music, and indeed into his possessions. As a friend wrote: ‘Stravinsky’s writing desk resembled a surgeon’s instrument tray. . . . Each one of these bottles of multi-coloured inks in their hierarchical array played its lowly part in a grand affirmation of a superior order. . . . We may be reminded of the definition of St Thomas [Aquinas]: beauty is the splendour of order.’2 So his comment about Ravel can equally be interpreted as one of admiration. The second reason to take Stravinsky’s remark seriously is that it comes nearer to genetic truth than he knew. Recent research by Philippe Morant establishes that one of Ravel’s great-great-grandfathers, Denis Gabriel Rousset, was described on his marriage certificate in 1762 as a ‘maître horloger’ (master clockmaker).3 Nor is this surprising. The village of Collonges-sous-Salève, where one of Ravel’s female ancestors died in 1688, and the town of Versoix, where a male ancestor was born and two others married in 1696 (and where Ravel’s father was born in 1832) both lie on the south-west bank of Lake Geneva, just north of Geneva itself, in the heart of clockmaking country. In 1906, while staying at Hermance on the opposite bank of Lake Geneva, Ravel wrote, ‘I left a cousin working as a clockmaker, and now I find he’s one of the first violins in the theatre in Geneva.’4 For many others, clock- and watchmaking were supplementary activities to farming. Nor were all those involved with clockmaking skilled workmen: ‘from the end of the seventeenth century, some peasants of Gex, in order to fill out their meagre incomes, took to making rough outlines of watches, called “blancs”, which they sent on to Geneva nearby’.5 Ravel’s paternal grandfather Amé Ravex was born at Collonges in 1800 and orphaned four years later, together with two elder brothers and one younger,

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when both their parents died within twenty-four hours of each other, presumably of some infectious disease. All four children were taken in by a great-uncle, Etienne Deruaz de Corsy, whose name surely deserves to be remembered. In 1827 Amé was able to buy a tiny smallholding (‘un bout de jardin’) in Collonges and in 1829 married Caroline Grosfort from Versoix. The marriage certificate does not mention his trade, although Amé has been frenchified as Aimé. But on the birth certificate of his first child, Maurice Ravel’s father Pierre-Joseph, born at Versoix on 19 September 1832, Aimé is listed as ‘Ravel Ami agriculteur’ and his wife as ‘marchande’. Eighteen months later he applied for Swiss nationality, and we learn that he, now Amé named as, ‘is a small retailer and possesses 18,000 florins . . . is a Catholic . . . has two children . . . is prompt in the performance of his military service, his reputation is of the best and his request strongly supported by the mayor, the curé and almost all the leading citizens of Versoix.’6 A document from the clerk of one of his employers further tells us that previously Ami Ravel ‘was in the service of M. Girod-Mégard in Versoix, for five years as a country servant and for three as “maître-valet”, and that he behaved with zeal, energy and intelligence; and I have only good reports to give of his morality. Versoix, 16 February 1834.’ We know from other sources that Pierre-Joseph had four younger siblings: Marie, Alexandrine, Louise and finally Edouard, born as late as 1847, who was to become a notable painter. Whatever status and financial means Aimé had as ‘agriculteur’ and/or small retailer, by the age of thirteen Pierre-Joseph was away at boarding school, as we know from a letter to his mother, addressed on the envelope as ‘épicière à Versoix’: Pensionnat Saint-François Onex, Canton de Genève 12 December 1845 Dear Mama, I forgot to ask you when you came if you would kindly agree to let me learn music, because Monsieur Angelin has told us that the music master would be coming next week and I should be happy if you would let me learn it, because that will give me great pleasure, dear Mama. I had said to you that I should like to learn the flute, but I’m told that gives you stomach ache, so I should prefer to learn the trumpet – it would be very kind of you. Drawing lessons are also starting next week which will give me great pleasure. . . . Adieu, dear Mama, I embrace you with all my heart. Adieu Your respectful son Ravel Joseph7

To judge from Pierre-Joseph’s later career as an engineer and Edouard’s as a painter, it looks as though Aimé’s determination to make a better life for

1875–1902: A DANDY BLOSSOMS

3

himself was passed on to some of his children – and to at least one of his grandchildren. The whole question of whether Pierre-Joseph was Swiss, French or Savoyard can be summed up in Morant’s single sentence: ‘Supposing that Pierre-Joseph Ravel’s ancestors always lived in Versoix [even before those mentioned from the 1690s], they would have been at the mercy of all the occupations suffered by the area around Gex, and so would have been Burgundians for almost four centuries, Savoyards for three and a half, French for the next two, and Swiss only fifteen years before he was born.’ Perhaps the best way of dealing with the matter was Maurice Ravel’s purely geographical one, when he said simply, ‘My paternal ancestors came from the Jura.’8 The provenance of the surname has also been much disputed. RolandManuel says that the ‘patronymic belongs to certain Jewish families; in such cases Ravel is derived from “Rabbele” – a young rabbi – which gave rise in America and, recently, in Germany, to a belief in Ravel’s semitic origins.’9 But the family trees supplied by Morant show that the name derived from Ravex and Ravet (both pronounced Ra-vay), and Roland-Manuel supposes that at some stage the final ‘t’ of Ravet, deriving from ‘Rabbele’, was misread as an ‘l’. Morant mentions three other possibilities. Ravet is a Norman name for a grower of horse-radishes (‘raiforts’). It could also derive from ‘rapa’, whence ‘rave’, meaning rape or coleseed. Morant prefers a third derivation which links the names Revat and Revet to ‘ribet’ and ‘revon’, both of which mean ‘a shoemaker’s nail’. So, further back, the composer’s ancestors could have been cobblers. Nothing supports Roland-Manuel’s statement that Aimé was a baker,10 which he seems to have got from the composer’s cousin Alfred Perrin. One other point of interest in Ravel’s paternal ancestry concerns PierreJoseph’s mother Anne-Caroline, whose family came from the village of Balanod, which is indeed in the Jura, but was governed by the Spanish from 1566 to 1678. Whether the composer’s family ever boasted any Spanish clockmakers, we do not know. Nor do we know how long Pierre-Joseph stayed in Versoix, but at some point, he attended the Geneva Conservatoire and won a first prize for piano.11 In his 1928 autobiographical sketch Ravel, in one of the few recorded mentions he made of his father, says he was ‘far better trained in this art [music] than most amateurs’.12 But music remained for him a hobby beside his métier as an engineer: he is said to have invented a machine for making paper bags as well as a machine gun.13 The next we know of him for certain is that he obtained visas to travel to France as an engineer in 1857 and 1859 and to Spain in 1861.14 By 1868 he was in Paris, and in that year patented a steam-driven, three-wheel automobile (the steam produced by the combustion of petrol) which developed a power of 3 CV (patent no. 82263 J.R., dated 2 September 1868); he did so certainly without knowledge of the experiments of either Victor Lee in Leicester in 1862 or of Joseph Wilkinson in Birmingham in 1865.15

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Sadly, during the upheaval of the Commune in 1870–1 his factory and its contents were either demolished, wrecked by a shell or simply lost: Maurice Delage, presumably relaying information from Ravel, says that Pierre-Joseph, who had successfully driven a car powered by his engine from Neuilly to Saint-Denis and back, spent four years fruitlessly searching for it.16 Whether or not out of a desire to escape the unpleasant political aftermath (we do not know which side he supported), he then tried his fortune as an engineer on the railways being built in Spain by Gustave Eiffel and others, soon becoming ‘technical advisor’ for the new line between Madrid and Irun on the northern Spanish coast. As this stretches for some 400 kilometres through some of the most mountainous terrain in the whole country, Pierre-Joseph’s appointment while only in his very early forties testifies to remarkable engineering skill. At Aranjuez in 1872, he met Marie Delouart, a Basque. She was then thirtythree, having been born, illegitimate, in Ciboure in the Basses-Pyrénées (now Pyrénées-Atlantiques) on 24 March 1840. Marie’s mother, Sabine Delouart, was herself also born illegitimate on 11 March 1809, and became a fish-seller on the quay of the Nivelle river. In the words of Etienne Rousseau-Plotto, ‘the fisherwomen of Ciboure or kaskarotes had a fairly miserable and tough existence. They belonged to a very distinct group of the population of the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz, probably descended from the gypsies who reached the Basque country in the 17th century [in fact, in the Middle Ages]. . . . They went off to sell their merchandise, carried on their heads, on foot, at a run, as far as Biarritz, Bayonne and Hendaye.’17 From Ciboure to Bayonne is a distance of 20 kilometers. Kaskarote means ‘worthless’ in Basque. Rousseau-Plotto has more to say about them:

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

Diagram of Joseph Ravel’s automobile, 1868

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They had a reputation for agility and were remarkable dancers of the fandango; they were generally considered to have light morals. They lived poor lives, in the absence of their husbands who were all sailors or ship’s carpenters, and were courageous in looking after their children, being credited with exceptional physical powers. They made up a very special group in society, one that was for a long time humiliated, but that slowly became integrated at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. They were considered as political ‘lefties’, which did not prevent most of them from being devout believers. Their physical beauty and strength of character sometimes led to them marrying men of a better ‘class’.18

For anyone familiar with Ravel’s own character and preoccupations, parts of this description are bound to excite interest. The dance runs through the whole of his output from the Sérénade grotesque to the dance rhythms underlying the three songs of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, and we may note that Boléro was originally called Fandango. While Ravel for the most part offered a pacific front to the world, there could be no doubting his strong character whenever he was crossed in some matter he thought important. His political sympathies were always Left-inclined and finally – even if this is a point rarely mentioned for some strange reason – he had a beautiful face, whether bearded or cleanshaven. It is worth mentioning too that even if the husbands of kaskarotes were officially designated ‘sailors or ship’s carpenters’ (for some reason wood was thought never to be contaminated by the leprosy that kaskarotes were popularly thought to carry), there is strong evidence that many of them operated less respectably as pirates: so when it came to depicting the abduction of Chloé, Ravel may have been on more familiar territory than his collaborators knew. The two kaskarote aspects that would seem to be foreign to Ravel are religious belief and light morals, except in his reputed liaisons with ‘ladies of the night’. Indeed there might be a case for a Freudian interpretation of his passion for order as in part a reaction against the illegitimate births of his mother and grandmother. Ravel’s attitude to religion is something we shall return to. For the moment it is enough to note Rousseau-Plotto’s statement that Marie (in Basque parlance Mayi Ttiki – ‘little Marie’) ‘obviously received a traditional Catholic education’, although he does not cite a source for this. From Narbaitz we learn that in 1871 (a date Rousseau-Plotto reasonably amends to 1872) Marie made a trip to Madrid accompanying a Madame Feix, who ran a fashion shop in Paris and every year took her wares to Madrid, stopping off on the way in St-Jean-de-Luz with a friend of the Delouarts; and it may have been in Madrid (or possibly, as Ravel claimed, in the gardens of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez some 45 kilometres to the south of the capital) that she met Pierre-Joseph. According to the memories of the Gaudin family (other close friends of the Delouarts), Marie and Pierre-Joseph decided to marry after only a

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2 Ravel’s birth certificate

fortnight’s acquaintance.19 What we know for certain is that Pierre-Joseph brought his bride-to-be back to 41 rue Lepic in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, and that they were joined in a civil marriage in Montmartre on 3 April 1873, presided over by the mayor, who was none other than Georges Clemenceau. On Maurice’s baptismal certificate of 13 March 1875 he is described as ‘born of a “legitimate” marriage’, which at that time meant a religious ceremony.20 But no document attesting this has been found. Sabine Delouart had had two illegitimate children: Pierre, born in 1836 and given the surname Casabon (the married name of one of his aunts), and Marie, Ravel’s mother. There is absolutely no evidence for Pierre Narbaitz’s suggestion that Marie’s father might have been a Spanish nobleman21 and Rousseau-Plotto is probably nearer the mark in calling this ‘a comfortable hypothesis to explain certain facets of Maurice Ravel’s character’.22 Whether Marie had ever followed her mother’s profession as a fish-seller we do not know. Perhaps not enough has been made of the extraordinary disparity in the social standing and attainments of Pierre-Joseph and Marie: he, the educated, successful engineer; she, an illegitimate, practically illiterate, Basque-speaking kaskarote. Even if Pierre-Joseph’s parents were no longer around to disapprove (Aimé had died the year before their marriage, Anne-Caroline in 1865), we may surmise that his siblings cannot initially have been overjoyed by the union. In any case, for Marie the transition from the peace of Ciboure to the relentless hubbub of French-speaking Paris must have been little short

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of traumatic. The only respite came in the evenings since the city was still under martial law, complete with curfew, following the Commune in 1871 – a restriction not lifted until 1876. For the birth of their first child Marie returned to Ciboure. Marnat, following Narbaitz, presumes that this was so that the child would be ‘of the country’ – that is, Basque.23 Rousseau-Plotto, however, prefers the more prosaic explanation that Marie’s mother had died in Ciboure on 22 December and that Marie went either to look after her in her last days or for the funeral, and was then unwilling to make the return journey when seven months pregnant.24 Certainly there seems to have been no move for Marie to return to Ciboure for the birth of Edouard three years later. In any case Maurice was born in Ciboure at 12 quai de la Nivelle on 7 March 1875, around ten o’clock in the evening. Marie’s aunt, Gracieuse Billac (Gachoucha), a servant in the Gaudin family for sixty-four years, was concierge in this grand house on the quayside, and presumably Marie was staying in her quarters. The baby was baptized six days later at St Vincent’s church with the name Joseph-Maurice: Joseph after his father and Maurice after one of his paternal uncles, who was also his godfather. Neither was present at the ceremony. In June 1875 Marie and baby Maurice, accompanied by his godmother Gachoucha, returned to Pierre-Joseph in Paris, now at 40 rue des Martyrs in the 9th arrondissement – perhaps with more room to accommodate Gachoucha and the baby. Maurice was to make occasional visits to Switzerland and, as we shall see, far more frequent ones to the Basque country, notably after his father’s death. He took after his mother in looks, the eyes and chin especially, and he himself attributed a certain lack of flamboyance in his personal relationships to his Basque blood. But Paris was to remain his centre of operations. This is hardly surprising when we consider the city during his adolescent years. The 1880s and 1890s in the French capital may not have been all that subsequent nostalgia has portrayed, but they were at least more intellectually stimulating than the 1860s, when Offenbach led musical fashion, and an embittered Berlioz died never having seen his opera Les Troyens on stage. Not least of the Third Republic’s virtues was its understanding that the arts should be seen as a barometer of social and intellectual health. Rivalry with Germany was responsible for much of the best French music up to 1914, whether respectfully imitative or, as Ravel’s own was to be, sharply reactive. The tone was set by the founding of the Société nationale de musique (SNM) in 1871 under the rubric ‘Ars Gallica’, with its aim ‘to give a hearing to works . . . by French composers . . . to support the performance and diffusion of all serious musical works, and to encourage and expose . . . all musical enterprises . . . providing they give evidence of their composers’ elevated and truly artistic aspirations’.25 By the time Ravel was born, the Société nationale had organised forty-three concerts of French chamber and orchestral music. It

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would host the first public hearing of Ravel’s music in March 1898, by which time, thanks to a coup by Vincent d’Indy, foreign works had been allowed into the hallowed precincts – the first interloper being Grieg’s String Quartet in 1887. Outside the Société nationale, a huge variety of music was played by the Parisian orchestras directed by three conductor/impresarios: Jules Pasdeloup with his Concerts populaires (founded 1871), Edouard Colonne with the concerts that took his name (1873), specializing in contemporary French music, and Charles Lamoureux with his Société des nouveaux concerts (1881), which initiated Paris audiences into the delights of Wagner. On the operatic front, Charles Garnier’s new Opéra had opened with a flourish just two months before Ravel was born and between 1885 and 1895, that is between Ravel’s tenth and twentieth birthdays, gave the Parisian or world premieres of Rigoletto, Otello, Lohengrin and Die Walküre, Reyer’s Sigurd, Massenet’s Le cid and Thaïs, Messager’s Les deux pigeons, Paladilhe’s Patrie!, Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Samson et Dalila and Chabrier’s Gwendoline. In the same period the more intimate Opéra-Comique introduced La traviata, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui, Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys, Messager’s La basoche, Bruneau’s Le rêve and Massenet’s La Navarraise, along with Cavalleria rusticana, Hänsel und Gretel, Les pêcheurs de perles, Werther and Falstaff. For a musical boy, there was then no shortage of stimuli. Furthermore, Ravel had a secure base from which to make his explorations. Whereas Fauré was a late and unwelcome addition to his family and Debussy an early but no less unwelcome one to his, Ravel, his parents and his brother Edouard (born on 13 June 1878) were bound by ties of strong mutual affection that were for each of them lifelong. The family was perhaps not what we might term ‘highbrow’ but certainly Ravel did not have to struggle against parental opposition in choosing music as a career. His father always retained his love of music and, in the composer’s words, ‘was able to develop my tastes and to give timely encouragement to my enthusiasm.’26 His mother seems not to have been specially gifted in this domain, except as a singer of Basque and Spanish lullabies that were surely a profound influence on the young Maurice. But her portrait suggests a woman of determined common sense, with just a hint of mischief about the eyes. Her gift to Maurice was simply love. Between the two there was from his earliest days one of those very close and powerful relationships that sometimes link mother and son. Mme Ravel is scarcely mentioned in contemporary memoirs of Maurice; we know she attended some performances of his works, but not to what extent she could appreciate them. His professed attitude to her was one of devoted forbearance, even pity – but his friends were unanimous in diagnosing a much deeper and more important attachment than this. Possibly Maurice himself was reluctant fully to admit his dependence on her until the shock of her death in 1917. However, by the standards of his contemporaries on the other side of the Channel we may surmise that in childhood he was well and truly spoilt. In

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a school photograph of around 1885 both he and Edouard have much longer hair than the other pupils, while a painting which now hangs in the composer’s study in his house at Montfort l’Amaury shows Maurice at the age of fourteen: a grave little boy still with long hair, rather stiffly posed, wearing a Russianlooking furry hat and dark, loose-fitting clothes; definitely an exquisite. The precocity is well caught in a friend’s description of him as a Florentine page – a subservient surface not quite masking an assurance and awareness of his gifts that needed only sympathetic patronage to bring them to maturity. Of Ravel’s general schooling until 1889 we know nothing beyond the photograph mentioned above, which must relate to a teaching institution of some kind. His mother was obviously incapable of instructing him in academic subjects, so any additional duties in this area would probably have fallen to Pierre-Joseph. Maurice’s earliest piano lessons were from a friend of Chabrier, Henry Ghys, who took him as a 7-year-old piano pupil, noting in his diary for 31 May 1882 that the boy ‘appears intelligent’. Five years later Charles-René, a pupil of Delibes, began to instruct him in harmony and counterpoint. In 1913 Charles-René described Maurice’s childhood compositions as ‘works of real interest, already indicating his aspirations towards a style of original and highly condensed purity’ (‘l’art recherché, élevé, quintessencié’),27 and went on to emphasize that his conception of music was something innate, not something he had to work at – perhaps not a statement Ravel would have agreed with. As a pianist, Ravel passed around 1888 from Henry Ghys into the hands

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

Extract from Henry Ghys’s diary

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of Emile Descombes, a professor at the Conservatoire who had not only known Chopin but also had the doubtful privilege of teaching Erik Satie from 1879 to 1882.28 For the first twenty-one years of Maurice’s life, the family lived in the 9th arrondissement. Now known as ‘Opéra’, this quarter, leading up to the boulevard de Clichy and the lower slopes of Montmartre, was popular with artists and musicians. It was, in the words of Gerald Larner, ‘a reasonably cheap, comparatively quiet, convenient and not unstylish place to live’.29 This area was not a surprising choice for an engineer with artistic leanings. Altogether more surprising is the number of moves the Ravel family made before Maurice’s thirtieth birthday in 1905; initially within the 9th (three between 1875 and 1896) and then one outside it (1896–9), back again (two moves between 1899 and 1901), then outside it again (1901–5). The move to the suburb of Levallois at that point was to enable the ailing Pierre-Joseph to be near his factory, but most of the earlier ones have never been explained. At all events, in 1880 the family decamped to 29 rue de Laval (now rue Victor-Massé) and in 1886 to a fifth-storey apartment at 73 rue Pigalle. Ravel’s delight at finding a house of his own after the First World War, defective plumbing and all, could well have been a response to this lack of a stable early home. It was therefore from the rue Pigalle that, in the six months from 6 May to 6 November 1889, the 14-year-old Ravel made the regular two-mile walk, crossing the river, to reach the Fourth Paris International Exhibition, housed in specially erected pavilions on the Champ de Mars. As Annegret Fauser’s detailed description of the Exhibition’s musical contents tells us,30 a huge variety of foreign music could be heard, including contributions from America, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Morocco and Egypt among many others. No German music or artists were included; but then Parisians knew all too well what Beethoven and Schumann sounded like, and even bits of Wagner. For young French composers the Exhibition provided an unrivalled opportunity to expand their musical knowledge and inevitably each took from it what he needed. In Erik Satie’s case, this was the music of the Romanian gypsies, which surfaces in his Gnossiennes. For Debussy it was the Annamite theatre and the Javanese gamelan. As Danièle Pistone has pointed out, exoticism was able to gain a foothold in Western European music as the strength and stability of the classical vocabulary began to be undermined.31 For Ravel too, the gamelan was a crucial influence (see Ma mère l’Oye, p. 113), and even if he had tinkered with the Javanese gamelan that had been delivered to the Conservatoire in 1887,32 hearing it played professionally would have been a quite different experience. Also undoubtedly influential were the two concerts of Russian orchestral and piano music at the Trocadéro at the end of June, which featured works by Glinka, Glazunov and Tchaikovsky as well as by the ‘mighty handful’: Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Even if the enormous spaces of the Trocadéro were only a

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quarter full, the programmes, ranging from the overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila of 1842 to a Lyadov Novelette of 1889, gave an invaluable overview of the Russian repertoire. The first half of the first concert on 22 June concluded with Rimsky’s symphony Antar, and eight years later we find Ravel and his friend Ricardo Viñes playing it as a piano duet (‘superbly Oriental’ and ‘a marvel of colours’ says Viñes).33 The critics’ response to the Russian concerts was, at best, lukewarm. Indeed Adolphe Jullien’s complaints about Glazunov’s Stenka Razin anticipate to some extent those levelled against Ravel’s first orchestral piece later in the decade: ‘an uncommon instinct for combining the strangest rhythms and for drawing from them effects of an extraordinary violence and vividness . . . also an exaggerated search for colour, for picturesque effect, a veritable abuse of orchestral developments and combinations, and above all the absence of any overall plan’.34 Whatever the truth of these complaints, Ravel would undoubtedly have benefited from the hundred or so scores of Russian music on display in the Champ de Mars, which were then donated by the publisher Jurgenson to the Conservatoire library.35 ‘Picturesque effect’ was also encouraged by the Javanese gamelan music at the Exhibition, and Ravel’s music for the next fifteen years or so was to be shot through with the resonance of bells, explicit or implicit, and with the gapped scales that, together with modes, were to be one of his ways of rejuvenating the conventional tonal system. No doubt he also responded, as did many others, to the expressive qualities of the young Javanese girls’ dancing, though what effect that might have had on his music must remain questionable. For professional musicians, the attraction of the 9th arrondissement lay partly in the presence of the Opéra, and partly in that of the Conservatoire on the rue Bergère in its south-eastern corner. Here in the autumn of 1889, no doubt encouraged by Descombes, and perhaps also by his own rendition of an excerpt from Moscheles’s Third Piano Concerto at the Salle Erard in June (his first public performance), Maurice auditioned for the Conservatoire with a movement from a Chopin Concerto and was accepted as a pupil in Eugène Anthiôme’s preparatory piano class. There is no need to stress the widening of horizons such an event must have brought for a sensitive fourteen-year-old. Moreover, the previous November he had made friends with a boy of his own age at the cours Schaller (a piano course that met on Mondays at 5, rue Geoffroy-Marie), whose musical enthusiasms matched his own and who was destined to be a pianist of the first order. Ricardo Viñes, a Catalan born in Lerida, was later to give first performances of many of the piano works of Ravel and Debussy. Surviving discs of his mature playing reveal it as highly coloured, with elaborate pedalling and use of extreme dynamic levels; by all accounts his character was of a similar cast – he died in poverty in 1943, having gambled away all the money gained from his concert career. His passion for literature (Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé) and for composers such as Chabrier, whose reputations were not high in the groves of

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Academe, was undoubtedly as important for Ravel’s development as anything he learnt from his teachers. In Viñes’s diary we find invaluable information about Ravel’s teenage years. Two of his first entries mentioning Ravel, of 23 November and 21 December 1888, describe him as ‘this boy with long hair’ and ‘the long-haired boy, that is Mauricio Ravel’. This not only confirms the testimony of photographs that the young Ravel wore his hair longer than was normal, or perhaps even fashionable, but maybe also that for his mother en intimité he was Mauricio rather than Maurice. On both occasions Viñes’s mother was present and we know that the two women became close friends, brought together not least by their both being effectively exiled. To call her son ‘Mauricio’ might have been for Marie a further consolation. Ravel studied for two years in Anthiôme’s preparatory piano class. In January 1890 he played a Chopin Polonaise and in June the finale of a Mendelssohn Concerto. Whichever concerto it was, it would seem that for a 14-year-old Ravel was not doing badly, and a month later, on 10 July, as Viñes tells us, he won a second prize in the preparatory class. Somehow Viñes had got to know the great French bass Pol Plançon, and on the afternoon of 26 August 1890 Plançon offered him two tickets for the Opéra that evening. The tickets were for men only, so the other one was offered to Ravel and the two 15-year-olds had the enormous privilege of sitting in two of the best seats for Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette with Emma Eames as Juliette and Plançon (‘who sang divinely’, noted Viñes) as Frère Laurent. Was this occasion at the back of Ravel’s mind when, nearly forty years later, he wrote: ‘While the Italians are seeking for new means of expression and the Germans are reacting against Wagner and the sentimental music of Schumann, we [the French] have our own objective: to follow the line of conduct laid down by Gounod’?36 But despite Ravel’s apparent successes as a pianist, Anthiôme, from his reports, seems to have discovered nothing remarkable in his pupil. In his last two reports, of January and June 1891, when Ravel played Schumann’s G minor Sonata and a sonata by Hummel respectively, he contents himself with ‘bon élève’.37 However, in July Ravel managed to win a first prize for his playing, the only one awarded, which entitled him to join Viñes in Charles de Bériot’s senior class in the autumn of 1891. De Bériot was the son of the Belgian violinist Charles Auguste de Bériot and the famous singer Maria Malibran, who had died in 1836 when young Charles was three and a half. He may not have been a great composer, but he was more perceptive than his predecessor of both the strong and weak points in Ravel’s make-up. Of Viñes he wrote in January 1892: ‘he plays quantities of every kind of music with the same exact and lively understanding’. About Ravel he is more guarded: ‘Excellent overall musician. He seems to be a hard worker, something only the future will confirm for me.’38 Even with bribery, Ravel’s mother had never

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succeeded in getting him to practise methodically; and what he would not do for her, he was not likely to do for a professor, however understanding. At the same time (November 1891) Ravel entered the harmony class of Emile Pessard, whose reports over the next four years make frequent use of the word ‘exact’, but who fails to communicate any enthusiasm for a pupil who was to become one of the most original harmonic writers of any age. His only other comments, both significant in their different ways, are that Ravel is careless – and that he turns up late. Henry Ghys, his early teacher, kept up with his talented pupil and on 13 February 1892 they performed Schumann’s Andante and variations for two pianos.39 Maurice was still corresponding with Madame Ghys in 1914.40 But at the Conservatoire things did not go so smoothly on the piano front. Viñes’s diary entry for 6 June 1892 records that in the preliminary exam to identify those students allowed to enter for the end-of-year competition, he himself played one of the two Liszt Polonaises to general acclaim, but that Ravel was not permitted to proceed. The only other unsuccessful candidate was Fernand Lemaire and it is worth noting that both Ravel and Lemaire became at some juncture pupils of the Spanish pianist Santiago Riéra.41 Whether this marked a change of teacher or merely supplementary lessons, whether it was undertaken in a spirit of wounded pride, or whether they studied with Riéra only after leaving the Conservatoire in 1895, there is no means of knowing. In any case Lemaire went on to win a first piano prize in that year. Meanwhile Ravel and Viñes were spending a lot of time together away from the Conservatoire: August 1892. Wednesday 10, after lunch I went to Ravel’s. They asked me to stay to dinner and . . . We didn’t have a moment’s boredom. We played the piano a bit, talked, drew. . . . Maurice showed me a very gloomy drawing he has done for a descent into Edgar Poe’s Maelstrom. When I was there today he did another one, also very black, for Poe’s Manuscript Found in a Bottle. Monday 15 . . . to Ravel’s in the afternoon. We didn’t go out all day but enjoyed ourselves, almost all the time at the piano, trying out new chords and playing over our ideas. . . . Edouard went to an exhibition of bicycles on the Champ de Mars. After dinner we went out on to the balcony and looked at various constellations.42

From 1893, a new complaint is voiced in de Bériot’s reports; that Ravel’s pianism has become what nowadays we would call too ‘romantic’. In January he played the Grieg Piano Concerto for the half-yearly exam, and de Bériot did not disapprove of his style, but in June his performance of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade brought the comment, ‘plays with feeling and warmth, but not always under control’,43 and similar criticisms recur over the next two years. In January 1894 his performance of Schumann’s Fantasie demonstrates ‘plenty of temperament, but a tendency to overdo his effects; must be held in check’.44 Three later reports

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all mention the passion (chaleur) of his playing. Only in his final report of June 1895 does de Bériot seem satisfied that Ravel is at last making progress. But he did not win a prize and, as was the rule after a run of such failures, was dismissed from de Bériot’s class in July. In the same month he was dismissed from Pessard’s harmony class for the same reason. This dichotomy between Ravel the harmonist and Ravel the pianist, between the precise and the passionate, is one that has been widely and persistently misunderstood. It is the central paradox of the composer’s nature. Viñes claimed after Ravel’s death that between the ages of fourteen and twenty the composer was at his most natural,45 that he was by nature a being of complex and deep emotions who, as he left adolescence, trained himself to be more sociable, simple and direct, and to hide the complexities of his character beneath an appearance of whimsical good humour. As we shall see, there were to be a few occasions when his emotions cracked the crust of bonhomie and spilled out with a force born of suppression. His brother Edouard touched on this rapprochement between instinct and the lessons of social intercourse: ‘Maurice liked to have his own way, but he had to be sure others considered it the best way too – otherwise his pleasure was spoiled.’46 It is not hard to see a similar approach at work in Ravel’s music. The initial impact on the listener is rarely revolutionary. Only when the charm has worked and the listener finds himself ‘considering it the best way too’ do the deeper implications begin to strike home. Ravel’s musical interests were wide-ranging, even if he never found much in Beethoven – ‘music was getting along so nicely before “le grand Sourd” ’47 – and the Wagnerian ferment of late nineteenth-century Paris left him untouched. He adored the music of the Russian Five, of Chopin, Weber and, above all, Mozart. Among contemporary composers he was attracted to Chabrier, whose modal aversion to leading-notes he shared. He and Viñes included in their repertoire Chabrier’s Trois valses romantiques for two pianos of 1883 and in January 1893 they were practising with a view to playing the pieces to the ailing composer, which they duly did on 8 February – a rendez-vous possibly facilitated by Ghys. ‘Chabrier came and stayed with us an hour and a half,’ wrote Viñes. ‘He said we played very well and with a lot of taste.’ But according to Roland-Manuel, who presumably had it from Ravel, Chabrier also confused them with contradictory advice.48 And at the concert performance next day, ‘Chabrier never appeared as he promised he would.’49 According to Jean Françaix (who does not cite a source), Chabrier wrote to a friend the day after Ravel and Viñes’s visit: ‘Yesterday two extremely well-dressed young people came to play me my Trois valses romantiques. The first played very well; the second played like a pig: but what a musician!’50 No prizes for guessing which was the pig! From remarks Ravel made later in life, and from his music, we know that Saint-Saëns and Massenet both influenced him, Saint-Saëns in the elegance and accuracy of his writing, Massenet in his lyrical suavity. This is not to say that Massenet’s music was beyond reproach for a teenage student. A fellow pupil in

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Pessard’s class later recalled that ‘shortly after the first [Paris] performance of Massenet’s Werther [at the Opéra-Comique on 16 January 1893], Ravel brought the score to Pessard’s class and before the professor’s arrival started parodying the aria “Pourquoi me réveiller, O souffle du printemps?” (Ex. 1.1), playing it in the major mode and so bringing out its resemblance to “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” which we all started singing in chorus.’51

[

Lent]



   



p

 

         

Pour - quoi me



ré - veil -



ler,

            

Ô souf - fle du

prin

-





temps,

Example 1.1. Massenet, Werther, opening of Werther’s Act III aria

The other non-Establishment figure Ravel met around this time was Erik Satie who, since 1891, had been a ‘cabaret artiste’ as house pianist at the Auberge du Clou, at 30 avenue Trudaine, a mere 500 metres from the Ravel apartment on the rue Pigalle. Ravel may have met him there or, as Orenstein claims, at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes (the setting for Degas’s famous picture L’absinthe), where the two were introduced by Ravel’s father.52 Lesure also informs us that another regular of the Nouvelle Athènes was Debussy, to whom Pierre-Joseph introduced his two ‘timid and silent’ sons.53 Even if Ravel’s innate respect for proportion and balance would never allow him to go to the lengths of Satie in his piano piece Vexations, the three Gymnopédies, in their mannered individuality, appealed to him enormously as being antiacademic and economical in expression. The first and last of them had been published in 1888. But given that the two men had met, by 1893 Ravel may also have seen manuscript copies of other Satie piano pieces such as the Sarabandes and Gnossiennes. At what point Ravel decided that composing was his vocation we do not know. Various sketches and academic exercises survive from before 1890, including two sets of piano variations on themes by Grieg and Schumann, but nothing that shows individuality. The earliest music available to us that bears any kind of Ravelian stamp dates from 1893: the Sérénade grotesque for piano and the Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer. The epithet ‘grotesque’ appears for the first time in the biographical sketch Ravel dictated to Roland-Manuel in 1928, so we have no reason to think that in its original form it was anything other than the 18-year-old Ravel’s honest response to a traditional formula. In its whole-tone chords and consecutive sevenths and in its ostinato figurations the Sérénade is very much in the latest fashion, notably that of the Chabrier of the Bourrée fantasque, which was published in 1891 and first performed in public at the Société nationale de musique on 7 January 1893 – that is, just a

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month before Ravel and Viñes played to him. At the same time the guitar imitations and little Spanish curlicues like that in bars 13–14 look forward to ‘Alborada del gracioso’,54 as does the nascent fantastic irony to ‘Scarbo’ where the brief ‘sign-off ’, disappearing up into the ether, was to be far more effectively managed. But here the chromaticism is laid on too thickly, as are the syncopations, and the result is a muddle. The Ballade, on a text by the Belgian writer Roland de Marès, is rather more successful. Ravel responded to the ‘great bells of Bohemia and the little bells of Thule’, which celebrate the ascent of the queen’s lovelorn spirit, and captured something of the poem’s artificial nostalgia. If the deliberately archaic fifths sound rather less convincing and the piano part is often awkwardly written, the song testifies to at least two of the composer’s abiding interests by combining bell noises with the management of monotony. The song’s true stylistic home becomes clear at the phrase ‘son âme blanche Vers les étoiles s’exhala’, which betrays antecedents in Satie’s Trois mélodies, published in 1887. 1894 saw no new Ravel pieces completed. He was still working away at harmony and counterpoint exercises for Pessard and at his piano technique for de Bériot, especially with regard to his already mentioned performance of the Schumann Fantasie on 17 January. Paul Landormy recalled that the Fantasie and Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque were Ravel’s only two party pieces at this time, which ‘he played with very strange ideas in mind, but with a technique that was rather rough and stiff ’.55 Sometime in the spring Ravel met Grieg at the house of a fellow student in Pessard’s class, William Molard, and, when he ventured to play one of the master’s Norwegian Dances on the piano, was gently reproved by Grieg for not playing rhythmically enough. Lionel Carley suggests it may have been on this occasion that Delius, also present, categorized contemporary French music as consisting of Grieg plus the third act of Tristan; to which Ravel replied, ‘It’s true. We’re always unfair to Grieg.’56 In July Ravel competed again for a harmony prize, unsuccessfully. Otherwise we know nothing of his activities, except that on 17 September he and Viñes went to Chabrier’s funeral at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, and that when they reached his house, ‘Ravel wanted to go back home and change his suit and hat because he didn’t feel he was properly dressed.’57 Here again the young Ravel gives notice of a crucial element of his mature self; and as he approaches his twentieth year, this is perhaps a good place to take stock of his character and attitudes, of the world in which he found himself, and of how that world regarded him. Rebecca West, viewing the Paris of the Nineties through the portraits of Jacques-Emile Blanche, was not overimpressed: ‘the sages, the ones with spiritual difficulties, the ones that had chosen instead to have difficulties with Algerian youths, the ones who had both kinds of trouble, and all the rest . . . who moved in Paris as goldfish in a bowl.’58 Certainly being seen, at the theatre or on the boulevards, was for some

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the essence of existence, from which sprang the tenacious image of the stylish, extrovert, ‘Naughty’ Nineties. But on the political front, the early Nineties in Paris were a good deal more than naughty: they were at times downright dangerous. The anarchist paper Le Père Peinard, which lasted from 1889 to 1894 and was couched in the racy slang of the Parisian working class, urged its readers ‘to commit theft and arson, counterfeit bank notes, destroy the houses of the rich, desert if you are conscripts, pillage the middle classes and kill the enemies of the working people.’59 Words led to action and three high-profile anarchists were guillotined for their bombing activities. First was Ravachol on 11 July 1892, the great martyr of the French anarchist cause, leaving behind him an anarchist song: Dansons la Ravachole, Vive le son, vive le son, Dansons la Ravachole, Vive le son De l’explosion.

The second anarchist to die was Auguste Vaillant, who set off a nail-bomb in the French parliament. In the months between his execution on 5 February 1894 and that of the third anarchist, Emile Henry, on 21 May, the terror was at its height, with another anarchist blowing himself up as he tried to get into the Madeleine, and with daily rumours of bombs all over the city. So, while 1894 might have been a quiet year for the composer Ravel, this could hardly be said of Paris generally. We do not know how he reacted to the situation, but on the strength of his Leftward leanings later in life, it would be surprising if he did not harbour some sympathies with the terrorists’ antibourgeois stance, albeit without condoning their activities. This raises the question: was Ravel a bourgeois? As we shall find throughout his life, his character elicited varying opinions. Alfred Cortot described him as ‘a deliberately sarcastic, argumentative and aloof young man, who used to read Mallarmé and visit Erik Satie’60 – not quite an anarchist, but somewhere along that road. On the other hand his fellow student Louis Aubert claimed after Ravel’s death that in those early days ‘no one was freer than he was from obvious vanity. Certainly he set great store, rather naïvely, by extreme elegance in his clothes. But I wonder whether this was not so much out of a desire to be noticed as to lose himself in the anonymity of a certain bourgeois correctness, and thus avoid the appearance of being an “artist” which was then all the rage.’61 Much has been made of Ravel’s inclination towards dandyism. But not enough, perhaps, of what dandyism entailed. In Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le dandy’ he explains: Dandyism is not, as some unthinking people appear to believe, an extravagant taste for one’s toilette and material elegance. For the perfect dandy,

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these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. Also, in his eyes, which are fastened above all on distinction, the perfection of his toilette consists in absolute simplicity, which is, indeed, the best way of distinguishing oneself. Dandyism is above all a burning need to fashion for oneself an originality that is contained within the outer limits of what is acceptable.62

So a dandy should not provoke outrage; he should merely mark out for himself an individual position such as anybody could have assumed, if only they had thought of it. There is surely a link here with Ravel’s insistence later in life that any composer could have written what he had, if only they had been prepared to put in the hard work.63 Needless to say, we all have different views about where to situate ‘the outer limits’. When Ravel caused scandals – with his 1905 offerings for the Prix de Rome, with Histoires naturelles, Valses nobles et sentimentales, the cat duet in L’Enfant et les sortilèges, ‘Aoua!’ in Chansons madécasses, and, of course, with Boléro – it could be simply that he misjudged (or judged precisely?) where those limits were being set by his audiences. In every one of these cases, one can argue over the extent to which he set out to provoke, if at all. A couple of years later Viñes’s diary records, ‘to Ravel’s, who lent me Du dandysme and De Brummel by Barbey d’Aurevilly’.64 On entering the Conservatoire in 1889, both boys would have received some basic teaching in classical French literature. But their enthusiasm was reserved for ‘decadent’ (what today we might call ‘alternative’) writers, many of whom, such as d’Aurevilly, Sabatier, Saint-Pol Roux or Jean Lombard, are now unknown to all but specialists. Some, however, have stayed the course: Baudelaire, first of all. Viñes’s recalcitrant nature comes out in October 1894: ‘to Ravel’s to take back the Baudelaire he lent me. There I saw the six poems from Les fleurs du mal that have been condemned and banned: needless to say, they’re the finest.’65 A few years later Ravel lends him Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes, and as mentioned earlier, in August 1892 Viñes had gone to Ravel’s and seen his ‘very gloomy drawings’ after Poe. Ravel would have known these tales through Baudelaire’s fine translations. It is a curious fact that, while these three authors obviously appealed to Ravel through their originality and (in the cases of Baudelaire and Poe) their ‘dangerousness’, he never set any of their texts, whereas all of them figured large in the output of Debussy: in the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, Pelléas et Mélisande, and the two unfinished operas, La chute de la maison Usher and Le diable dans le beffroi. Blackness is the keynote in two settings Ravel made of poems by Verlaine. Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit probably dates from 1894 or early 1895, to judge by Ravel’s formation of the letter ‘a’ which, as Orenstein observes, he altered during 1895. The song survives as a fairly complete four-page sketch, lacking only the accompaniment for several bars, including a coda.66 Ravel seems to

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have been aiming to create the monotony of the poet’s life in a prison cell through regularly alternating chords, but it is hardly grounds for blame that his setting comes nowhere near that of Fauré’s, as Prison. We may speculate that word was going round the Conservatoire that Fauré had set this poem, in December 1894, and that, not for the last time, Ravel was testing his technique with a bout of emulation. He completed his second Verlaine setting, Un grand sommeil noir, on 6 August 1895. It might be hazarded that this was, in part, a response to his failure to pass the medical for compulsory military service on grounds of a hernia, lack of height (1.57m; 5′3′′) and weight,67 or even to his expulsion from the Conservatoire, following his poor showing in the harmony exam that July. But throughout his life, most of his music was to remain detached from the events of the outside world, except where these could be translated directly into sound: bells, birds, the sea, trains, factories. This song forges an unlikely connection between Verlaine and Poe. When it was eventually published in 1953, the composer’s friend Roland-Manuel drew attention in his preface to musical similarities with Duparc’s Lamento and with Satie’s Sarabandes, no doubt referring to the way the harmonies oscillate around a central chord (Ex. 1.2a). But two other, possibly closer, similarities are with the opening bars of Debussy’s La Damoiselle élue (Ex. 1.2b), which was premiered at the SNM on 8 April 1893 and which, Ravel later declared,

Lent et sourd (mais toujours très marqué)

     

   

    



   

 

 

 

   

    

 

 



   

 

 

p

 

 

 

 

Example 1.2a. Ravel, opening of Un grand sommeil noir

Lento con calma

molto sostenuto

Example 1.2b. Debussy, opening of La damoiselle élue

 

 

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20

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‘revealed Debussy to me’;68 and to those of De fleurs, the third of Debussy’s Proses lyriques (Ex. 1.2c). Lent et triste









  





p



            

3 



 

Dans

l'en





- nui







3





    



si

dé

-

so - lé - ment

 vert

  

  

  

  

  

    

 

  

    

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

  



  

  

 

 

pp

 

 

          









Example 1.2c. Debussy, opening of De fleurs

Both the third and fourth of the Proses lyriques had been premiered at the SNM on 17 February 1894 with Debussy accompanying his then fiancée, Thérèse Roger. Debussy’s own text, describing ‘the empty, green boredom of the hothouse of grief ’, is obviously not far removed from Verlaine’s ‘a vast, dark sleep descends on my life’. Faced with a shorter text, Ravel experiments with a total retention of the initial undulating pattern and produces a song of unrelieved gloom whose intensity is heightened by a vocal line that extends over two octaves. It is the picture of a young man’s despair, a not wholly convincing piece, but an instructive glimpse of the dark side of Ravel’s nature that was to show itself throughout his career. The two other pieces he wrote towards the end of 1895 belong to worlds that have come to be seen as more essentially Ravelian. The Menuet antique for piano was the first of Ravel’s five minuets for the instrument (including a brief but charming one of 1904, published recently). Unlike the Sérénade grotesque, the Menuet antique sported its arguably spurious epithet from the beginning. If one response to the bourgeois nature of the Third Republic was to hurl bombs, another was to withdraw in imagination to the safe enclave of a previous century, and the adjective ‘antique’ leaves no doubt that this was what Ravel was trying to do. (He never wrote a Menuet moderne, even if the ‘Menuet’ in Le tombeau de Couperin is more than it seems; see p. 194) Within its conventional ternary framework, the Menuet antique holds a few gentle surprises. It is not unfair to call the piece ‘pseudoantique’.69 Ravel’s ideas of classical history were, as he admitted over Daphnis et Chloé, filtered through the illustrations of the late eighteenth century. His imagined era was one where social order, embodied in the minuet, was mysteriously reconciled with the personal freedom enjoyed by the shepherd of legend, who decorously fingers his panpipes on the cover. The freshness and naivety recall those same qualities requested by Chabrier for his ‘Idylle’ from the Dix pièces pittoresques,

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and cadential leading-notes are rather self-consciously flattened. The many sequences involve a certain amount of decorative counterpoint. Occasionally modulations are a shade awkward (the move to F sharp minor at the last line of page 2), but in general there is a remarkable sureness about the succession of ideas and some textural inventiveness both in low, grumpy dissonances and in pianistically ungrateful cross-hand work which foreshadows the fourthdominated textures of Jeux d’eau. The best music comes perhaps in the F sharp major trio section, where the repeated quavers of the accompaniment make implicit reference to the middle section of Chabrier’s ‘Menuet pompeux’. Neither of these two early piano pieces gives a hint of the individuality and the maturity displayed by the ‘Habanera’ from Sites auriculaires for two pianos which Ravel produced in 1895 and which, in 1907, he was to incorporate in his Rapsodie espagnole, orchestrated and slightly condensed. Here, as in Un grand sommeil noir, he explored the possibilities of an ostinato, but one less rigidly organized. Instead of chords he takes merely an octave C sharp and even this is twice briefly replaced by E natural. Against these octaves he pitches a variety of dissonances, often sounding D natural or C natural or both against the intermediate C sharp, and animates the whole by the triplet-plus-duplet rhythm of the ‘Habanera’. This rhythm was nothing new to the Paris of the time, but the harmonies were an amazing invention for a 20-year-old and this piece must be recognized as seminal in the development of the so-called ‘impressionist’ piano style. Meanwhile, in June of that year, M. Pessard had found his efforts in the harmony exam ‘exact’. A month later Ravel failed to win a prize in the harmony exam and shook the dust of the Conservatoire off his feet – perhaps, he may have thought, for good. Whatever hindsight may descry about his harmonic inventiveness, Ravel at twenty still had a long way to go. Among his Conservatoire contemporaries, Viñes had won his first prize for piano in 1894 and was now on the concert circuit, Alfred Cortot would shortly go off to Bayreuth as a répétiteur on the way to pianistic glory, and Reynaldo Hahn was already the darling of the salons, crooning Si mes vers avaient des ailes through a cigarette to his own accompaniment. Meanwhile Ravel was still living at home, unknown and, as far as we can tell, with no prospect of a position or job of any kind, other than the occasional music lesson such as those he gave to the daughter of a M. Goldenstein, who on 16 October thanked Viñes’s mother for recommending him. As we saw, even the army did not want him.70 Meanwhile we must assume that his brother Edouard had, by the age of seventeen, already shown signs of the interest in engineering that would lead him to join his father in business. Of course it is easy to exaggerate the situation: over a century later middle-class French and Italian families continue to support their sons through their twenties and beyond. But Viñes, in his diary entry for 1 November 1896, while acknowledging Ravel’s position, supplies evidence that, for him at least, the superficial Ravel concealed a character of a different order:

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in spite of the high opinion I had of Ravel’s intellectual powers, I thought, because he is so secretive about the least details of his existence, that there was perhaps a touch of parti pris and fashion-following in his opinions and literary tastes. But . . . I see that this fellow was born with inclinations, tastes and opinions, and that when he expresses them he does so not to put on airs and be up to date, but because he really feels that way; and I take this opportunity of declaring that Ravel is one of the most unlucky and misunderstood people of all because, in the eyes of the crowd, he passes for a failure, whereas in reality he is someone of superior intellect and artistic gifts, at odds with his surroundings and worthy of the greatest success in the future. He is, what’s more, very complex: there is in him a mixture of mediaeval Catholicism and a satanic impiety, but he also has a love of art and beauty that guides him and makes him respond sincerely.71

This, from the 21-year-old Viñes, contains some of the sharpest insights ever made into the real Ravel. ‘Secretive’, a man honest about his feelings, ‘at odds with his surroundings’, ‘very complex’ – these ring true. Less easy to accept is the ‘mixture of mediaeval Catholicism and a satanic impiety’, unless we know more about the diarist himself. Viñes was a fervent Roman Catholic, and it is possible that what he took to be ‘mediaeval Catholicism’, in a Ravel who was never any kind of religious believer, was merely an acceptance that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth’ than can be explained by the Code Napoléon. As for ‘satanic impiety’, a case can be made for this if we think of ‘Scarbo’, and perhaps even ‘L’Arithmétique’ in L’Enfant et les sortilèges, and it is relevant to know that at some point in this year Ravel introduced Viñes to Odilon Redon, for whose art he apparently had a great admiration.72 We have seen too that Ravel chose to study the piano with Santiago Riéra, a specialist in Liszt, in whom Catholicism and impiety had found a particularly fruitful conjunction. But it is more than possible that Ravel merely shocked Viñes with some atheistic or agnostic pronouncement. After finishing the ‘Habanera’ in November 1895, Ravel was immediately involved in arranging a group of Chansons corses (Corsican Songs) for a series of lectures on the subject by Austin de Croze at the Théâtre de la Bodinière; the first two were given on 24 January and 10 February 1896, followed by further lectures in March. His old piano teacher Henry Ghys was also involved and may well have suggested Ravel, as being unemployed and in need of financial support. Ravel himself conducted – the first time we know of him in this capacity – and as well as soloists there were small male and female unison choirs, supported by a chamber orchestra of harp, harmonium, mandolin, guitar, celesta and string quartet. Although only about half of the orchestral material is in Ravel’s hand, the score is entirely so and we must assume that the instrumentation is his. With his habitual ear for colour he uses varied combinations from within the available

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resources. The ‘Sérénade de Serra’, sung by the baritone soloist, is accompanied simply by violin and harp, while the ‘Chanson satirique’ employs the ‘satirical’, or at any rate unusual combination of guitar and harmonium. It would seem that considerable money may have been available as the baritone Marius Chambon, the only singer named on the score, belonged to the Opéra. The instrumentalists included a member of the organ-building Mustel family, whose founder, Victor, had invented the celesta, and a member of the Casadesus family – probably the 16-year-old Henri, who was to become a virtuoso viola player. But while Ravel was the arranger, the routine nature of the harmonies suggests that they were the work of someone else, possibly Henry Ghys.73 On 12 November 1895 Viñes noted in his diary that Ravel and his mother came over in the afternoon and that he and Ravel ‘talked about literature and art; he told me that the copy of Gaspard de la nuit I bought in London is very rare. We went to the Conservatoire where the ladies’ entrance examination was taking place.’ Six days later Viñes and his mother visited the Ravels in their new apartment on the boulevard Rochechouart, and a week after that he records that ‘Ravel came and played me his new, strange compositions and showed me the works of Arthur Rimbaud that have just been published.’74 Here we can see not only the seeds of the piano suite Ravel was to compose a dozen years later, but that he still took an interest in the Conservatoire and its doings. The strange new compositions’ would presumably have included the ‘Habanera’, and possibly the Menuet antique also qualified under this heading. The first eleven months of 1896 saw no new work from Ravel. Instead we learn from Viñes of joint explorations of French literature (Robert de Montesquiou, Henri de Régnier, Léonce de Joncières, and Gaspard, which Ravel took away on 25 September) and science (Leclercq’s Physionomie and Cuti’s Phrénologie). Apart from his 21st birthday on 7 March, these months seem to have included four noteworthy events, of vastly differing import for his future. At some point in the year the Ravels moved to 15 rue Lagrange in the 5th arrondissement, the only time they were to live south of the river. No reason for the move is known, although proximity to the Conservatoire was no longer an issue. Secondly, on 24 January and 10 February the performances took place of the Chansons corses, and thirdly at some point in February Marie Olénine d’Alheim sang Musorgsky’s song cycle The Nursery, which was to give a new orientation to the word setting of both Debussy and Ravel. But most crucial of all for Ravel was the death of the Conservatoire Director Ambroise Thomas on 12 February, and Massenet’s resignation as a composition professor on 6 May – not necessarily, as has been suggested by some, in pique at being passed over for the directorship,75 but more likely because outside obligations were making it impossible to do justice to his teaching duties. The appointment of Gabriel Fauré to replace Massenet marked a distinct shift in emphasis. Fauré had studied not at the Conservatoire but at the far less prestigious Ecole Niedermeyer; in 1892 his application for the

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composing post of Ernest Guiraud (who had just died) had been violently rejected by Thomas (‘Fauré? Never! If he’s appointed, I resign.’76); and one of his first remarks on finally being appointed was, ‘What would Massenet say, seeing me sitting in his chair?’77 In short, Fauré was a bold choice (and his election as Director nine years later bolder still – see p. 64) and testified to the perception in official quarters that the Conservatoire was in danger of becoming too conservative. Ravel was to be one of the first budding composers to take advantage of Fauré’s revolutionary regime. The only other news we have of him before he returned to composing in December 1896 again comes from Viñes. On 1 November the two of them went to the Concerts Lamoureux where they heard, among other items, the Tristan Prelude. ‘By a strange coincidence’, writes Viñes, ‘at the very moment when, feeling deeply moved, I was thinking to myself there was nothing in the whole of creation as sublime and divine as this superb Prelude, at that moment Ravel touched me on the hand and said: “That’s how it always is, every time I hear it . . .” and in fact he who looks so cold and cynical, Ravel the super-eccentric decadent, was trembling convulsively and crying like a child, really deeply too because every now and then I heard him sobbing.’78 Not the least of Ravel’s achievements, then and later, was his capacity to compartmentalize his admiration for Wagner from his own composing process and, to all appearances, spare himself the agonizing struggles between Wagnerophilia and Wagnerophobia that racked Chabrier, Chausson, Debussy and so many others. Ravel’s setting for voice and piano of Mallarmé’s Sainte, composed that December, is dedicated to the poet’s daughter Geneviève, recently married and known to the artistic world as the distributor of hot punch at her father’s famous Tuesday gatherings. The poem celebrates the calm presence of the saint in her stained glass window and, above all, the permanent tradition that she embodies. Ravel’s response is to deploy undulating chords as in Un grand sommeil noir, but in orientating them towards major tonalities rather than minor he achieves not gloom but a restrained radiance that is a remarkable achievement from a man without religious faith. Modality is no more than hinted at but it is noticeable that in the first two stanzas based respectively on G minor – D minor and C minor – G minor, the vocal line avoids first E flat, then A flat. This gapped scale is responsible for much of the song’s individual tone. At the same time the quasiplainsong recitation of the opening bars eventually blossoms into a more lyrical style at the mention of the angel’s harp. With a neat turn of symbolism Ravel finishes the song on the dissonance of a major ninth, suggesting that the saint, even as ‘musicienne du silence’, has a future as well as a past. For all that it recalls both Debussy’s song ‘De fleurs’ and Satie’s Prélude de la porte héroïque du ciel, Sainte is technically and expressively a far more mature work than Un grand sommeil noir, representing, like the Menuet antique, an attempt at a non-historical re-creation of a past style and relying not on literal but on spiritual pastiche. It also escapes self-conscious adolescent melancholy.

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The second piece Ravel wrote in December 1896 was the song ‘D’Anne jouant de l’espinette’, to which he composed a companion in 1899 to form the Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot. Rather surprisingly, he was to turn only once again to a poet of the sixteenth century, in his commissioned Ronsard setting of 1924. Elsewhere he preferred to match his precise, clearly sculpted sonorities against superficially more recalcitrant material, as in poems by Mallarmé, de Régnier and Fargue or the prose poems of Jules Renard. ‘D’Anne jouant de l’espinette’ mixes classical and romantic features: Ravel demands the song be performed ‘d’un rythme précis’, but casts it in 5/4 time with two expressive rallentandi (though the penultimate bar sets a lifetime’s habit in its marking ‘sans ralentir’); and although the accompanying instrument is specified as ‘clavecin ou piano (en sourdine)’, the pedal marking in bar 1 and on the final two chords of the song imply a very unusual harpsichord indeed. Throughout, the rigid metre of the eight iambic pentameters is subverted by the 5/4 phrasing, but is then confirmed in the last two lines, only to be broken finally in order to throw weight on to the clinching ‘estre un peu aymé d’elle’. The year 1897 was the last of Ravel’s obscurity. He and Viñes continued their self-imposed programme of musical and literary education (Debussy’s Rêverie and Proses lyriques, Chabrier’s La Sulamite, Franck’s Eolides, RimskyKorsakov’s symphonies, Balakirev’s Thamar, a string quartet by Glazunov, Schumann’s Piano Concerto; works by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Lombard, Saint-PolRoux, Gautier’s Emaux et Camées and, as a target of mockery, General Bellemare’s L’Empire, c’est la paix).79 Otherwise, mediocre pianist though he may have been, Ravel was earning at least some money as an accompanist. On 8 February he took part in a concert of the Société philharmonique de La Rochelle,80 and on the 24th of that month Viñes notes that Ravel ‘is still on tour in the Midi’;81 the fortnight’s gap and the fact that La Rochelle is on the Atlantic coast both imply that the tour was fairly extensive. At some point in 1897, according to his own later account, he had moved on to study counterpoint privately with André Gedalge.82 Gedalge had won a 2nd Prix de Rome in 1885 and then acted as assistant in Guiraud’s and Massenet’s Conservatoire classes, so Ravel’s choice of teacher may have been intended as a sighting shot at returning to that institution. At all events it was a choice he was later delighted to have made, as were Koechlin, Ibert, Honegger and Milhaud among many others, Milhaud recalling that the hardest but most rewarding task Gedalge would set him was to ‘write for me eight bars that can be sung without accompaniment’83. This may have been prompted by Milhaud playing him the first movement of his First Violin Sonata, after which Gedalge asked, ‘Why have you got seventeen D sharps on the first page?’84 The Violin Sonata Ravel wrote in April 1897 may have served to show Gedalge that time spent teaching him would not be wasted. In June 1929 Ravel inscribed the opening violin phrase in an autograph album, with a dedication ‘à Paul Oberdoerffer / en souvenir de la 1re audition de la 1re sonate inachevée (18 . . .) /

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Maurice Ravel / Juin 1929’.85 This would seem to indicate that Oberdoerffer, who taught violin at the Conservatoire and composed light pieces for the instrument, was the soloist at the first performance. It also makes clear that the single surviving movement of the sonata, which was not published until Ravel’s centenary in 1975, was initially intended to be followed by another or others. Featuring an orthodox key-scheme and a slightly repetitious development section, it veers rather between Franckian intensity and modal freshness. Where the two combine, as at the end, the result is striking and bears a strong resemblance to the style of Delius, who was in Paris at the time. The opening theme, played by the violin, shares with that of the later Piano Trio a Dorian outline and an asymmetric rhythm (here too possibly with a suggestion of ‘Basque colouring’), but while Ravel could make something of the modality, integrating such asymmetry was as yet beyond him. The chromatically descending triads at bar 34 in the first movement would later be taken up in more sophisticated fashion, and over a tonally stronger bass line, in ‘Le gibet’ (bars 24–5). In the autumn of 1897 Ravel had an offer of a post as music professor in Tunisia. In a society where removal even to the French provinces risked cultural death, such an offer speaks of desperation on someone’s part. Pierre-Joseph’s? At twenty-two Maurice certainly seemed to be taking his time. But fortune was about to move in the young composer’s direction. On 28 January 1898 he returned to the Conservatoire to study composition with Fauré. This fact, baldly stated in many a musical dictionary, raises at least one interesting question: why Fauré? Before his election to the Conservatoire in 1896 Fauré’s teaching, apart from coaching the choirboys of the Madeleine, had been confined to private lessons. From 1892 he was able to give up even these, on his appointment as inspector of musical education. As already mentioned, he was a bold choice for the Conservatoire post and, in the eighteen months of his tenure, had understandably had no time to indicate that his class was to be one of the most famous and productive in the Conservatoire’s history, launching the careers of Charles Koechlin, RogerDucasse, Florent Schmitt, Georges Enesco, the critic Emile Vuillermoz (all of whom he inherited from Massenet), and the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, who came to him in 1901. Ravel was the only one to arrive from outside the Conservatoire. It seems likely then that Fauré was his deliberate choice, one based on Fauré’s compositions. If he had attended the Société nationale concert of 3 April 1897, he would have heard first performances of the songs Prison and Soir and the Sixth Barcarolle; and on 4 November one of Fauré’s greatest songs, Le parfum impérissable, sung by the tenor Emile Engel. What young composer, however proud, would not be prepared to put aside past failures in order to study with such a man? Not merely a genius (even if this was a term Ravel distrusted), but one who was clearly happy to bend the rules in the cause of art (see the two pairs of consecutive fifths in bar 11 of Le parfum impérissable).

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Outside the Conservatoire, the Dreyfus case was setting France in an uproar after the publication of Emile Zola’s letter ‘J’accuse’ on 15 January 1898, following the acquittal of Esterhazy two days earlier. Marcel Marnat’s statement that Ravel was a Dreyfusard,86 for which unfortunately he offers no evidence, is at least plausible, given the composer’s later Leftist views and his support for underdogs of all kinds, not least Jews. At all events, he had his own uproar some weeks later. On 5 March 1898, whether or not as a result of Fauré’s support for his new pupil, Ravel’s music was for the first time performed at a concert of the Société nationale, when Sites auriculaires for two pianos was played by Viñes and Marthe Dron, and was received coldly. Larner records that Pierre Lalo, writing in Le temps, ‘liked neither the title nor the sound’ of the pieces, while Pierre de Bréville, in the Mercure de France, went so far as to call them ‘revolting’.87 The year before, Ravel had added to the ‘Habanera’ a second piece called ‘Entre cloches’ whose title and substance clearly foreshadow ‘La vallée des cloches’ from Miroirs of 1905. The ternary form is somewhat crudely deployed but continuous use of perfect fourths in both melodic and harmonic guises points to Ravel’s growing concern with the sonorities one could extract from the piano, especially by a mixture of staccato touch with legato pedal. Unfortunately, his experiments with interacting planes of sound (the perfect fourths in one piano often being set against chromatic chords in the other) caused problems at this first performance. A possible creative motive for ‘Entre cloches’ can be found in Viñes’s diary entry for 14 September 1896, which tells us that he and Ravel went to the Exhibition of the Théâtre de la Musique so that Viñes could show his friend ‘the piano with two keyboards, one of which is built in reverse’. Nina Gubisch’s editorial note to the entry explains that ‘at the Palais de l’Industrie, Gustave Lyon, of the Maison Pleyel, had previously showed Viñes a piano with two keyboards, one of which was constructed in reverse: the bass to the right and the treble to the left. The instrument was probably the work of a Russian manufacturer’88 – a provenance which would only have increased its interest for Ravel. The sequence of events might be reconstructed as follows: in 1895 Ravel composes the ‘Habanera’ for two conventional pianos; in September 1896 he sees the new instrument; in December 1897 he composes ‘Entre cloches’, perhaps already intending the two pieces to be played at some point on the new instrument; once the concert date of 5 March 1898 is fixed, then he has to write two special scores for the reversed keyboard (neither of which has survived); after the concert the conventional scores remain in Ravel’s possession and that of ‘Habanera’ is incorporated into the two-piano version of the Rapsodie espagnole published in 1908. The new instrument had a short life, not prolonged by this performance. We do not know whether Viñes or Marthe Dron drew the short straw of playing on the ‘reversed’ keyboard. But Viñes admitted that both pieces were played badly, and that in ‘Entre cloches’ he got a quaver ahead, ‘producing an unspeakable effect’. In addition, the off-beat, Satie-esque title would hardly have commended

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the work to the audience of the Société nationale, who were not progressively inclined: Chausson admitted that having a work performed at one of their concerts was rather like going in for an exam. Ravel no doubt was disappointed and perhaps not much cheered by one reviewer who was ‘dazzled by the fantasy and originality of these astonishing little pieces’;89 he always preferred right notes to fantasy. Luckily it did not discourage him from continuing experiments with new instruments all through his life. As a rider, it may be worth mentioning that the title ‘Entre cloches’ was no more than an accurate description of the situation of the two pianists. Playing on two keyboards but on a single set of strings, they were more ‘among bells’ than they would have been on two conventional pianos. A few weeks after the Sites auriculaires debacle Viñes gave the first performance of the Menuet antique, on 18 April at the Salle Erard. This caused no stir, nor even a mention in Viñes’s diary, but the publisher Enoch brought it out that same year, the first of Ravel’s music to appear in print. Marnat points out that the last piece in Viñes’s programme was a two-piano arrangement of Albéniz’s Rapsodie espagnole, which Ravel would surely have stayed to hear; nor is it impossible that this was the seed for his own Rapsodie a decade later. The earliest fruits of Ravel’s study with Fauré, the two songs Chanson du rouet and Si morne!, written respectively in June and November 1898, show Ravel still more keenly affected by atmosphere than by the material objects which play so large a part in his later work. In the Chanson du rouet a girl sings to her spinning wheel which she loves ‘more than gold and silver’, but Ravel’s involvement with this hand-driven machine is nothing like so passionate as it was to be with, for example, the clocks and automata of L’heure espagnole. Under the only really sentimental tune in his output, the piano carries the predictable rhythm and some exploratory, chromatic harmonies, whose weight Ravel does not always gauge accurately. Si morne! is a companion to Un grand sommeil noir. It is easy to see the attraction for the young, sensitive, withdrawn composer of this poem about the miseries and terrors of introspection: ‘always to be folding in upon oneself in gloom, like some heavy cloth that bears no pattern of flowers’. His debt to Debussy is obvious but the work has real power and demands a singer with nearly a two-octave range. The piano writing, too, includes some individual textures, with arpeggios split between the hands and tangling with the melodic material in the manner of ‘Ondine’. In June 1898 Fauré found his pupil ‘gifted and hardworking. Still not very far advanced in his study of fugue (first year).’90 He was thirty years Ravel’s senior but their friendship soon became close, based on a common respect for technique and for the conventional forms of music, and on a common sense of humour (Madeleine Goss quotes the beginning of a Fauré sonnet: ‘Je regardais passer l’omnibus sur le pont / Avec cet air pensif que les omnibus ont.’91) Nevertheless there was no question of Ravel following slavishly in his master’s steps. In particular, Fauré was uninterested in orchestral effects, whereas for Ravel they remained throughout his life a subject of unfailing fascination. Both

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Fauré’s reports for 1899 contain reservations: in January he finds Ravel intelligent, gifted and hard-working but ‘trop recherché, trop raffiné’ (too affected, too refined) while in June he is a pupil ‘of rare gifts, but still unsettled in his aspirations which are, for the moment, in something of a muddle’.92 It is interesting to speculate to what extent these criticisms bear on Ravel’s earliest known orchestral work, an overture to a projected opera Shéhérazade, which he had begun around 1895 but then abandoned for one called Olympia (see pp. 32 and 131).93 But he completed the Shéhérazade overture in 1898 and conducted it at a Société nationale concert on 27 May 1899. Initially he wrote the overture for piano duet, but the idea of orchestrating it and having it performed at the Société nationale may have come from Fauré, who wrote to Chausson a few days before the premiere: I’m the one who encouraged Ravel to propose the work to our Committee. . . . He would not have considered doing so if I hadn’t pushed him. . . . The promise of a performance has thrilled him. Surely it would be a very cruel change of heart to take his name off the programme just as he’s busying himself from morning till night with copying the parts? Shouldn’t our Society be encouraging the young? Didn’t it encourage us when we were mere beginners? I beg this favour for Ravel. . . . A refusal would cause me infinite pain.94

Obviously Chausson was worried about having the piece on the programme. Part of the problem was that d’Indy, originally billed to conduct, found he was already engaged, as he explained to Ravel in an undated letter.95 In desperation Ravel turned to his friend Koechlin, who refused.96 So it was left to Ravel himself to conduct, much against his wishes. Beyond this, even the briefest glance at the score shows why it might cause concern to Chausson, as a disciple of César Franck who had fully imbibed his teacher’s views on the moral import of music – d’Indy admitted to Ravel that he himself had been ‘very hostile to your work before it went into rehearsal, because I was seeing what seemed to me the negation of everything I had considered as the principles of Art’,97 but had been to some extent won over by actually hearing it. This ‘ouverture de féerie’ demonstrates in the clearest possible light Ravel’s enthusiasms for the music of Debussy and of the Russian ‘Five’, with moral import at a minimum. The cut of the main B minor theme (Ex. 1.3) recalls the Borodin of the Second Symphony,

Mouvement modéré de marche

Oboe

   



         

            

p

Example 1.3. Ravel, overture Shéhérazade, fig. 2, bar 8



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and the brass fanfares, answering each other tritonally from C major to F sharp major before combining, those of Boris Godunov. The opening phrase, with its sharpened fourth and flattened seventh, probably came from Debussy, as well as the frequent whole-tone scales. Ravel was later to condemn this work as ‘a clumsy botch-up and full of whole-tone scales; so many indeed that I was put off them for life’.98 The critic Pierre Lalo, then at the beginning of his forty-year campaign against Ravel, stated in Le temps (13 June 1899), ‘If this is M. Ravel’s idea of an overture “constructed in the classical manner”, then we must say that M. Ravel has a vivid imagination’ – a reference to Ravel’s note in the concert programme vaunting the work’s ‘plan classique’ and giving a blow by blow account of its progress.99 Certainly the construction is not revolutionary. Almost every phrase is immediately repeated, either exactly or with varied colouring, and the grandiose minor version of the gentle ‘mélodie persane’ is not an entirely happy moment. Part of the final section of Lalo’s review is worth quoting for several reasons: ‘the harmonic substance is extremely curious, almost too much so: here M. Ravel is visibly under the influence of a composer who should be loved but not imitated, M. Claude Debussy. And the orchestration is full of ingenious combinations and piquant timbral effects. All this may produce an artist. One must urge M. Ravel not to ignore unity and to think more frequently of Beethoven.’100 Lalo has come under fire in some quarters for daring to mention Beethoven, and with hindsight we can see that this was one suggestion Ravel was never going to accept. But Lalo was right to the extent that Shéhérazade is little more than a buffet of tasty morsels. Precisely marked percussion parts (the cymbal struck with a sponge-headed stick, then softly with a mallet), harp glissandi and string harmonics show plainly where Ravel’s real interests lay. It needed another composer, Pierre de Bréville, to point out that the best music comes near the end (the four bars beginning at figure 20), on legato strings.101 Like the first performance of the Menuet antique the previous year, this one also shared the programme with a work by Albéniz, the premiere of Catalunya (Suite populaire no. 1). Marnat, referring to this piece’s explosive quality, may be right in suggesting that it was an influence on ‘Noctuelles’.102 Whether Ravel knew it or not, in choosing Fauré as a teacher he would do more than benefit from the older man’s musical talents – these in any case, as all his pupils agreed, were dispensed through what he was rather than through what he taught. But outside the Conservatoire Fauré had vital contacts in the world of the salons. Historians of democratic views have tended to give the salons a bad name and certainly Proust has many diverting things to say about Mme Verdurin and her little clan of aesthetes. But the salons did a vital job in what is now called ‘networking’. Fauré made it his business to introduce his pupils into this arena, two of whose stars were Mme de Saint-Marceaux and the Princesse de Polignac. Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, married to a painter, held her salon on Friday evenings after dinner and insisted that everyone turn up wearing their everyday clothes. Very sensibly, she realized that the last thing a businessman

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wanted after a long day was to have to change into tails or evening dress; she also prized the informal atmosphere this created. Here the 23-year-old Ravel could meet Mme Alexandre Dumas, Pierre Louÿs, the young Colette and her husband Willy, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet and, among musicians, Chausson, Lalo, d’Indy, Messager, Dukas and Debussy (to whom he had already lent the score of ‘Habanera’, with results that we shall see). The Princesse de Polignac, born Winnaretta Singer of the sewing-machine family, modelled her salon on Mme de Saint-Marceaux’s and used her enormous wealth to promote both old music and that of her contemporaries. For example, she put on a full-scale concert performance of Rameau’s Dardanus in 1895, and in 1888 had funded two performances of Chabrier’s opera Gwendoline with singers who would be capable of taking their roles at the Opéra, should that house ever recognize the value of the work (which it duly did in 1893). After the First World War she commissioned a series of important compositions, ranging from Stravinsky’s Renard to Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Maybe Fauré’s motives were not wholly disinterested. It would have done him no social harm to introduce a smart, good-looking, intelligent young man like Ravel into a society that prized novelty and was always on the lookout for the next fashionable trend, in music as in dresses. He knew from experience how hard it was to break into the Parisian musical world, and that the Ravel family was not rich. It is possible that he had helped Ravel find a job playing the piano from June to early October 1898 in the casino at Granville, from where Ravel wrote Mme de Saint-Marceaux the earliest of his letters to survive: Saturday 20 inst [August 1898] Madame, The little symbolist, very happy that you deign to take some slight interest in his music, is full of regrets that he has not perpetrated any new song lately. Some people might suppose that he is overwhelmed with remorse. Nothing of the kind, unfortunately, because he is incorrigible and in a permanent state of procrastination. Meanwhile he is doing a bit of fugue and a lot of bicycling. He will take the liberty of sending you his last composition, at least two months old now, and which, as luck would have it, is singable. As to the bizarre outline of one particular phrase, I strongly suspect that, in his role as musical Alcibiades, he fashioned it on purpose. Forgive him, Madame, and please accept his most respectful homage.103

This missive deserves a careful look, both at the detail and at the overall tone. For a young composer of 1898 to describe himself as a ‘symbolard’ was nothing unusual – Symbolism was everywhere and the phrase has the feel of a private joke between them. But this is the only place in the whole of Ravel’s writings where he refers to himself as being ‘petit’, forming part of the deferential opening, after which the self-deprecatory third sentence follows naturally.

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The two phrases that insistently call for explanation are ‘the bizarre outline of one particular phrase’ and ‘his role as musical Alcibiades’. The song in question must be the Chanson du rouet and Orenstein is undoubtedly right in identifying the ‘bizarre outline’ as the quotation from the Dies irae in the bass in bars 47–50, although it is not as bizarre as all that, since it accompanies the lines ‘When, near to death, I submit and go to my cold, eternal bed’. ‘His role as musical Alcibiades’ is more problematic. Alcibiades could, as Orenstein suggests, be regarded as a lawgiver or, in Michel Delahaye’s view, as an ‘intelligent, brave hero, known also for his beauty, his casual elegance, his oratorical gifts and the preciosity of his language’.104 This view is supported by Baudelaire’s mention of Alcibiades as an example of the dandy.105 But he was equally notorious as a turncoat and hell-raiser, abandoning his post as general of the Athenian army and going over to the Spartans, and was also suspected of smashing sacred statues one night when drunk, and of dressing up as a woman and partaking of the Eleusinian mysteries to which no man was permitted entrance. Had Meg de Saint-Marceaux spotted Ravel’s antiEstablishment tendencies? Did she even foster them? Or had they perhaps argued about the Dreyfus case, she taking the government’s part? We have no direct evidence of Ravel’s views on the affaire but, given his Leftist sympathies, the chances must strongly be that he was a dreyfusard, if we accept that many of the letters to Dreyfus and his champion Emile Zola came from people who described themselves as ‘petites gens’ (from the lower classes), but also that being a dreyfusard was ‘a way of distinguishing oneself from the mob’.106 Whatever the truth, the tone of the letter is a strange mixture of deference and complicity. To her diary she confided, ‘Is he happy listening to his music? No way of knowing. What a strange character. He has talent but he’s full of mischief.’107 This at least is the generous translation of ‘méchanceté’, a word that can also mean unkindness, spitefulness or malice. For his part Ravel said to Viñes that ‘the Saint-Marceaux are snobs’, to which Viñes added, ‘He’s wrong, they’re utter snobs.’108 This did not prevent their being useful. About this time Ravel wrote music for a salon performance of a ballet called Parade to a scenario by Antonine Meunier. The two marches, two waltzes and a mazurka are free of individuality, but no doubt did what was required of them. According to Roland-Manuel, it was around this year that Ravel began to think about the opera Olympia, based on Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann; although nothing came of this, Roland-Manuel records that the chiming of clocks for the entrance of the sinister Dr Coppelius were later incorporated into the opening ‘symphony’ of L’heure espagnole.109 The performance of the Shéhérazade overture in May did not spur Ravel on to immediate industry. In July he entered the fugue competition at the Conservatoire but, for whatever reason, did not submit his work. Otherwise he was unproductive until the end of the year when he wrote a second Marot song and the Pavane pour une Infante défunte.

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In ‘D’Anne qui me jecta de la neige’, as in its companion piece, the bar lengths vary, with a number in 5/4 and 7/4, working against the regularity of Marot’s iambic pentameters. The ‘cold’, bare fifths give way in bar 6 to warmer chromatic harmonies as the snowballs light a fire in the poet’s heart. As he pleads with Anne, the fifths return over modal harmonies, before a return to their original bare state indicates that his pleas are unheeded. The success of the Pavane pour une Infante défunte was always a little galling for Ravel, as he came to recognize its formal shortcomings and its dependence on Chabrier’s piano style.110 He was further irritated by inquiries as to the identity of the princess in question (he claimed to have chosen the title, good Mallarméan that he was, for its sound alone) and by pianists who played it too slowly; as he remarked to Charles Oulmont, it is the princess that is defunct, not the pavane.111 It is perhaps indicative of his valuation that he dedicated the piece, not to Viñes, but to the very much alive Princesse de Polignac. Admittedly, she did not feel it was a work of much substance either.112 But even if it is not great music, the melody is instantly memorable and far from obvious in construction, the first paragraph being built of phrases of 2 + 5 + 5 bars in length. In his own recording on a piano roll Ravel takes more liberties with the tempo than the text indicates, and even if we attribute to hamhandedness, or to inaccurate transmission through the medium, the sudden bursts of fortissimo in unlikely places, there is no doubt that he purposely exaggerates the unexpectedness of the middle section, marked in the music but seldom observed. The last seven bars come out at well below the opening speed and the final chord is distinctly softer than the previous two (as in the later orchestral score). If one prefers to be guided by what Ravel said rather than by what he did (given his limited pianistic gifts, a tenable position) then, as well as keeping the piece moving, one should note that, according to Marguerite Long, he ‘used to say that one mustn’t turn it into a drama’113 and that he said to Henriette Faure ‘everyone’s familiar with the tune, Heaven knows, but at the same time as making the accompaniment secondary, you must insist on its slightly mechanical aspect’.114 Somehow these leanings towards objectivity have to be reconciled with the marking ‘Assez doux, mais d’une sonorité large’ – by no means the only time a Ravel piece was to be riven with contrary impulses. Sometime in 1899 the Ravel family moved back north of the river to 7 rue Fromentin in the 9th arrondissement at the foot of Montmartre. Once more, we know no reason for the move, which left Ravel with a full mile’s walk to the Conservatoire. Here he began his attempts to storm the fortifications of the Establishment, composing a practice exercise in January 1900 for the Prix de Rome with a cantata Callirhoé. The Prix de Rome was a competition held every summer for painters, sculptors, architects, engravers and composers. The winner of the Grand Prix in each category was sent to Rome for two years at government expense, which then allowed travel to Germany or Austria for a third year and a return to Rome or Paris for a final one, after which the subsidy might continue for as

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much as a further three years. Quite apart from the financial inducement, to be able to attach the title ‘Grand Prix de Rome’ to your name opened any number of doors for an aspiring artist. The path to the title began with a preliminary examination in May consisting of a four-part fugue and a short piece for choir and orchestra on a set text; those who did best in these were then allowed to go on to the final section of the concours, a setting of a commissioned cantata text, usually for three soloists and orchestra, lasting somewhere around thirty minutes. For this the contestants were put into almost solitary confinement for a month; food was left outside the door. For many years the music of Ravel’s Callirhoé was missing, but two extracts (one in vocal score, one in full score) have recently been deposited in the Music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,115 making up something less than half the cantata in all, which may have been all that Ravel completed. As usual in these cantatas, there are three protagonists, Apollo, Diana and Callirhoé, one of Diana’s nymphs. Apollo, dressed as a shepherd, bemoans his exile by Zeus and sings to his lyre. Callirhoé appears out of the reeds. Apollo proclaims his love. Callirhoé out of devotion to Diana ought to remain chaste but, charmed by Apollo’s singing, she gives in and a duet ensues. There ensues a ‘longue extase’ for orchestra alone describing Callirhoé’s capitulation, after which dawn breaks and horn calls announce Diana’s imminent arrival. Here the two manuscripts break off. Two brief examples will show both the backward- and forward-looking elements in Ravel’s score. For the ‘longue extase’ (Ex. 1.4a) Ravel understandably chose to give the examiners something familiar.



 

  

 3  

 





       



p Bass: E



Example 1.4a. Ravel, Callirhoé, extract

The symmetrical, rising phrases on string octaves with a long note in the middle of the bar over an E flat pedal . . . Massenet might have left the Conservatoire but his spirit lived on. Less familiar though are the opening bars of the cantata (Ex. 1.4b), depicting a pre-dawn scene ‘in Thessaly in legendary times’ Lent     

 p    

   







 

 

Example 1.4b. Ravel, Callirhoé, extract

  

  

   



  

   

   







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Here in embryo are the opening bars of Daphnis et Chloé, though in this case the chord in stacked fifths accompanying the solo flute spreads downwards instead of upwards. Elsewhere there is not much to remark, except that orchestral effects already found in the Shéhérazade overture recur: cymbal struck with spongeheaded stick; harp plus first violin harmonics; second violins divisi, tremolo, on the tip of the bow, on the bridge. The last page of the vocal score also contains some sketches of vocal lines where the text is accompanied by rhythms alone, with few indications of pitch, suggesting that Ravel was moving away from what has been called Massenet’s ‘melodization’ of the French language.116 On 18 January Fauré, having seen this cantata extract, wrote in his report, ‘very artistic temperament, less exclusively attracted than before by . . . the extreme. Distinctly settling down [assagissement]’.117 But Callirhoé did not find favour with higher authority. On 21 March Ravel wrote to Dumitru Kiriac, a fellow student in Fauré’s class who had returned to his native Bucharest: For the January exams I patiently put together a scene from Callirhoé, and was really counting on it to make an impact: fairly grey music, prudent in its passion, and with bold strokes that were within the grasp of those gentlemen of the Institut. As for the orchestration, Gedalge had found it clever and elegant. All of that for a complete washout. As Fauré was trying to stand up for me, Monsieur Dubois assured him that he was under an illusion about my musical nature. What is worrying is that these criticisms are levelled, not at my cantata but, indirectly, at Shéhérazade – as you’ll remember, the Director was there for the performance. Am I going to have to fight for five years against this influence? I really don’t think I shall have the courage to keep up my present attitude to the end.118

By ‘une pareille attitude’ presumably Ravel meant one of calm resignation, which was no doubt abetted by consoling and encouraging words from Fauré and Gedalge. And his prophesied chronology of Dubois’s antagonism was all too accurate. No doubt, like everyone else in the city, he then took time off to wander round the last of the pre-war Paris Exhibitions, which was officially opened on 14 April. But in May it was time to confront the enemy once again in the first of his five attempts to win the Prix de Rome. In the preliminary examination his Fugue in D, on a remorselessly academic subject, is texturally dense, scrappily written and lacks a number of necessary accidentals. The title of the fourpart chorus, Les bayadères (The nautch girls), encouraged him to include a tambour de basque, a fair amount of modal writing and some exotic melismas, but the sad truth is that, in an effort to conform, Ravel merely succeeded in being rather dull. The original text of Les bayadères, by Dr Henri Cazalis, had already been set in 1873 under the title Danse indienne as a song for voice and piano by Emile

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Paladilhe, one of the Conservatoire composition professors and hence a member of the 1900 jury. Paladilhe’s setting, over a hypnotically repeated rhythm, also employs modality and exotic melismas, but even so Ravel was not permitted to proceed to the cantata. The first prize was won by Florent Schmitt. In his final report of June 1900 Fauré is still happy with his pupil, mentioning Ravel’s ability to exceed expectations ‘with an engaging wealth of imagination’ and that he is ‘hardworking and punctual’.119 But no words of Fauré’s could prevail against officialdom (Dubois’s response of 3 July to Ravel’s fugue was ‘Impossible because of terrible technical errors’120) and, in accordance with Conservatoire rules, having failed the Preliminary exam twice in a row, Ravel was expelled from Fauré’s class that month. He was then left without instruction until the following January when he returned as an ‘auditeur’. But he was hardly without stimulus. It would not be rash to guess that of all the influences brought to bear on Ravel in 1900 the most potent was the private performance he attended, together with Raoul Bardac and Lucien Garban, of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande – one of those legendary sessions at which the composer, seated at the piano, became an orchestra and a succession of soloists to rival those of any subsequent production.121 It is hard to square the influence of such an occasion with the ‘settling down’ noted by Fauré, but if it did cause Ravel any further disorientation, this did not manifest itself in his work over the next eighteen months, slender though this was in quantity. He also attended the first performance of the first two of Debussy’s Nocturnes on 9 December, and it was here that he introduced Viñes to Satie.122 On a rather different plane was the appearance chez Mme de Saint-Marceaux on 20 January 1901 of Isadora Duncan, who delighted Messager with her dancing, accompanied by Ravel playing preludes and waltzes by Chopin.123 Sometime early in 1901 the Ravels moved again, after only a couple of years, to 40bis rue de Douai, still in the 9th arrondissement (Viñes in his diary entry of 11 April 1901 calls it Ravel’s ‘new apartment’124). At the Conservatoire, although Ravel was only an ‘auditeur’, sitting in on composition lessons with no formal involvement, he entered a Prelude and Fugue in January for a composition prize, without success. Whatever Ravel’s feelings about this (calm resignation?), he was soon involved in a project far more to his liking. On 8 April he wrote to his fellow student Florent Schmitt, who was in Rome after winning the Prix at the fifth attempt, saying that he was busy with ‘choruses and fugues with an eye on the competition – also the transcription of Debussy’s admirable Nocturnes, in collaboration with Bardac. As I’ve shown some aptitude for this kind of work, I’ve been given the job of transcribing on my own the third movement, “Sirènes”, perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of the three and certainly the trickiest, especially as it’s not yet been heard.’125 The commission came, directly or indirectly, from Debussy himself, who had asked Raoul Bardac to transcribe ‘Nuages’ and ‘Sirènes’ for two pianos,

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4 Excerpt from Myrrha

giving ‘Fêtes’ to Lucien Garban.126 We do not know whether it was Bardac or Debussy who finally entrusted ‘Sirènes’ to Ravel, nor to whom Ravel had shown his ‘aptitude’. No transcription of the Nocturnes was in fact published until the one by Fromont in 1909, credited to Ravel alone. Probably this incorporated the 1901 version of ‘Sirènes’, perhaps with alterations, together with new versions of ‘Nuages’ and ‘Fêtes’. Denis Herlin is surely correct in assuming that Ravel’s work on ‘Sirènes’ earned him the copy of the full score inscribed ‘à Maurice Ravel. / en réelle sympathie. / Claude Debussy. / Av / 1901’.127 Viñes’s diary tells us that on 25 March ‘I met Ravel who is just off to Monte Carlo to make music with a bloke who has a yacht’ – possibly another spin-off from Ravel’s salon activities – but by May, it was time again to turn his thoughts to the Prix de Rome. His Fugue (in F) is altogether a more accomplished piece of work than the previous year’s and even includes some reasonably subtle harmonic movement. A couple of missing accidentals were supplied by the examiners and an inaccurate, if beautiful, stretto duly ringed. For the chorus, a setting of Victor Hugo’s lines ‘Tout est lumière, tout est joie’ from his Spectacle rassurant, Ravel stayed even closer to tradition than before, now bringing the solo soprano in for the third of the four verses rather than right at the end, as he had in 1900. The orchestration, if lacking in contrast and definition by his standards of even a couple of years later, is efficient, and harmonically the final

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paragraph works well, with the vocal cadence delayed until the last word ‘sourit’. The brief orchestral coda adds nothing except perhaps a curious memory of Götterdämmerung in its D major – D minor – A major cadence. If Ravel was trying to please the examiners he succeeded, and was allowed to try his talents on the cantata text, Myrrha, by one Fernand Beissier. These texts were, in their turn, the fruits of competition, but it is often hard to imagine what the losing entries must have been like. Conflicts between love and duty were de rigueur, storms and floods a perpetual hazard. Towards the end of Myrrha the directions specify that ‘suddenly the roaring of the floodwater makes itself heard’, and Ravel obliges with a whole-tone tremolo. Reading the score, we may find ourselves wondering what he is doing ‘dans cette galère’. There are original touches of orchestration, such as a theme on two oboes doubled at the octave below by a solo trombone, but overall it is a brilliantly-worked exercise in pastiche, incorporating contributions from Massenet, Lalo and even, in moments of excitement, Halévy. In an interview a quarter of a century later, Ravel actually referred to the piece as a ‘cantate parodique’,128 and in 1914 Roland-Manuel confided that it was written ‘in the style of a sentimental operetta; it was nothing but slow waltzes’.129 The final flourish is unduly short – a mere twenty-three bars, although Ravel, in a letter to Lucien Garban of 26 July, says that it was the orchestration that was rushed and that this was why he was awarded only the ‘deuxième accessit’, in effect the third prize. He mentions further that Massenet and various other notables supported him throughout, but either this must have been hearsay or else Massenet confided this to him afterwards. No record was ever kept of how individual members of the jury voted, only of the number of votes for and against. The winner, André Caplet, came to be recognized later as a first-class musician, but at the time Ravel claimed that his first prize ‘surprised everyone. Certainly his cantata was deeply mediocre – as a composition, that is, because his orchestration was remarkable’.130 Ravel’s claim of mediocrity is not borne out by a recording of Caplet’s cantata:131 where he proves himself strong in those areas where Ravel’s offering is weakest, namely the blood-and-thunder moments and the imposition of authority in the person of the high priest Bélésis. While in the lyrical passages the honours are about even, Caplet gives a much clearer shape to the trio section and his final orchestral flourish, at three times the length of Ravel’s, makes for a far more satisfactory ending. But Ravel was happy to have done so well at his first attempt and with a fairly good grace resolved to try again the following year. Presumably during all his Prix de Rome labours he was also working on his two-piano transcription of ‘Sirènes’, if only from the evidence of two Debussy letters: whereas that of 19 April, postponing a meeting, has the formal heading ‘Cher Monsieur’, by 8 July this has become ‘Cher ami’.132 The following month he sent Ravel the full score of the Nocturnes mentioned above. Meanwhile the Ravel family moved yet again, sometime between 8 and 26 July, to 19 boule-

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vard Pereire in the 17th arrondissement. We know nothing for certain of Ravel’s activities over the next four months (a projected visit to St-Jean-de-Luz in August may or may not have taken place), except that on 11 November he finished his piano piece Jeux d’eau. In a letter of 8 April 1901 to his friend the composer Florent Schmitt, Ravel wrote of ‘the “Faust” of Liszt, this astonishing symphony containing, at an earlier date and what is more so much better orchestrated, the most outstanding themes of the Ring’.133 Such an opinion ran clean against the orthodoxy of the time, but in Liszt Ravel found more than a superb orchestrator. The mixture of élan, virtuosity and passion in Liszt’s piano music excited him. The title Jeux d’eau obviously invites comparison with Liszt’s Jeux d’eau à la villa d’Este, and Ravel, asked how it should be played, answered ‘like Liszt, of course’. There may have been some Ravelian whimsy in this, but the precision of rhythm and dynamics that he wanted demand nothing less than virtuoso technique. The manuscript sent to the printers134 bears a daunting metronome mark of s =152, but even the revised s =144 of the first edition, though removing the breathlessness, is not for sluggards. His particular insistence, too, on regularity of speed flies in the face of much that has been condoned in the name of rubato. At the end of bar 6, for example, the temptation to linger voluptuously over the whole-tone scale on the final quaver is strong; here, and at the end of the piece, it must be resisted – which is not to say that the pianist should not ‘breathe’ between phrases. Corrections that Ravel made to his earliest manuscript include some that reduce the chords of the left hand so that the proportion of overtones to notes actually sounded is increased. His conception of the piano lies somewhere between the ‘melody’ instrument of Chopin and the box of hammers and strings it really is, and this middle ground is surely the area that Liszt had begun to cultivate (Bruyr posits ‘Au bord d’une source’ as an inspiration for Ravel’s high major seconds135). Hélène Jourdan-Morhange quotes Viñes as saying of this piece that ‘Ravel advocated the use of the pedal in high passages, in order to give the blurred impression of vibrations in the air, rather than distinct notes.’136 The epigraph, ‘Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille’ (river god laughing at the water that tickles him), taken from Henri de Régnier’s poem ‘Fête d’eau’ in the collection La cité des eaux, was inscribed by de Régnier himself on the title page of the earliest autograph of Ravel’s piece before that collection was published in 1902. The book was inspired by the fountains of Versailles and the ‘Dieu’ of the quotation is used in the sense of godhead or divinity, referring not to a god but to the goddess Latona sitting naked on the back of a tortoise (Gerald Larner makes the interesting point that this Bassin de Latone was ‘the one fountain in working order at Versailles at that time’137). Latona was a goddess of fertility and the mother of those particularly active deities Apollo and Artemis: these facts, together with Régnier’s epigraph, bear on Henriette Faure’s two performances in Ravel’s presence 20 years later.

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Initially he complained, ‘Your fountains are sad ones.’ She repeated the piece, ‘above all, thinking happy thoughts, so as to turn what I had previously thought was a meditation into a sparkling divertissement. Ravel said: “That’s more like it, but you could even so be a little dreamier at the end . . . as long as . . .”, and I cheekily finished his sentence with “you don’t slow down”.’138 Melodically Jeux d’eau proceeds by repetition of ideas that change shape only slowly. There are only two, one textural, one melodic. But this uniformity of rhythm, tempo and melody is counteracted by harmony and texture that change all the time. In visual terms, from a distance the fountain’s flow of water and its overall appearance seem constant, but at closer quarters the play of light and wind emphasizes its natural, small-scale irregularities. The harmony goes far beyond that in the Pavane. Major ninths now move unselfconsciously about their business, and the sound of the major seventh predominates (Ex. 1.5). Très doux (e = 144)

     



   



pp

  2



  

 

 

                         

 

 

 

 

 

   

 



 

Example 1.5. Ravel, opening of Jeux d’eau

Essentially, much of the brilliance of the piece comes from the clash of semitones in a high register, either within the major-seventh chord or in less conventional ones. The most striking of these is the combination of C major with F sharp major (already used in the overture Shéhérazade), whose sinister, metallic sound on the keyboard was later to be the genesis of Petrushka. Aesthetically and technically, Jeux d’eau is undeniable proof of Ravel’s ability to exceed expectations and, his earlier ‘Habanera’ being still unpublished, must be regarded as the key work for the ‘Impressionist’ school of French piano writers. In the view of the pianist Gaby Casadesus, the sonority had specifically French roots: ‘Ravel was so fond of Erard, and this piano was very, very light. For Ravel it was very easy to play fast and I’m sure he composed Jeux d’eau on an Erard – not a very beautiful tone, but very easy, technically.’139 Viñes gave the piece its first performance, with that of the Pavane, on 5 April 1902 at the Société nationale, and he recorded ‘a great success’ in his diary.140 Despite this, the publisher Demets had to conquer Ravel’s modesty and wrest the manuscript away from him; Ravel also ‘persuaded me not to take out a copyright, with the result that some twenty pirated versions of the French edition of Jeux d’eau exist in the USA.’141 Four years later, the composer was in a position to see how important a work it was. In a well-known letter to Pierre

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Lalo (which he wrote on 5 February 1906 but which Lalo did not publish in Le temps until 9 April 1907) he said: ‘Sir, you go on at some length about a rather individual style of writing which you claim was discovered by Debussy. Now, my Jeux d’eau appeared at the beginning of 1902 and at that time Debussy had written only the three pieces for the piano (Pour le piano). I need hardly say to you that it is a work for which I have a fervent admiration, but from the pianistic standpoint it says nothing really new.’142 As well as this letter, Ravel had also penned a postcard. He sent both to the music critic Michel D. Calvocoressi, one of his lifelong friends, with a request that he forward only one of the missives to Lalo – it is probably right to assume that the tone of the unsent card was somewhat sharper.143 So why Ravel’s diffidence over publishing Jeux d’eau? He may well have been reluctant to bring out a work in which he believed, but which he knew to be revolutionary, before he had achieved success of a more traditional kind. Or he may not have been able easily to bring himself to call the work ‘finished’. Throughout his life it was an article of faith, adhered to with few exceptions, that once a work was completed there should be no tinkering; composition was a métier and the public were not there to be experimented on. Whatever the truth, it is not only one of his most popular works but also, as he said himself; ‘the starting point of all the pianistic novelties that have been remarked on in my output’.144

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CHAPTER II

1902–1905

Testing the Establishment To hear Jeux d’eau well played is a life-enhancing experience, but photographs of the composer himself at this time produce a rather different effect. One, from the summer of 1901, of the four Prix de Rome candidates, shows him aloof; impeccably dressed in straw boater, dark suit, striped socks and white shoes, with moustache, the kind of side-whiskers known as favoris, a disdainful expression – and seated (?deliberately) nearest the camera. In another, taken on the beach at St-Jean-de-Luz probably the following spring, the white shoes are still in evidence, the favoris longer, the boater replaced by a beret and an expression now less of disdain than of a Basque ferocity to deter any but his closest friends. Although still living with his parents, as from July 1901 at 19 boulevard Péreire, he spent many of his evenings between two kinds of society, both, in their different ways, ‘exclusive’. Firstly, the society of the ‘salons’. Jacques-Emile Blanche, the portrait painter, described his first meeting with Ravel at one of Mme de SaintMarceaux’s Fridays in a fashionable quartier in north-west Paris. Fauré and Messager performed their weekly hit, the quadrille on themes from Die Walküre. All the musical establishment of Paris was there. The impressive frock-coat of Vincent d’Indy sounded the only note of severity in the informally dressed assembly of young ladies willing to sing a chorus: the Liebeslieder Waltzes of Brahms, or something by Chabrier. As usual, Willy and Colette were there. A strange little man, a newcomer, was nervously turning the pages of a score, Russian no doubt, which someone was playing. In his short, tightly fitting jacket, he looked like one of the Plaza aficionados or a lad from a racingstables. ‘Who is that?’ ‘Maurice Ravel,’ replied Debussy, without further comment on his future rival. Soon, I got to know this marvellous musician, who was not always prepared to take part in the endless selection of works . . . which the guests would choose at random from their hostess’s vast library.1

Blanche goes on to describe how, in sessions of four-hand piano music with Ravel, his companion played only on the understanding that there would be

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‘no Beethoven, Wagner or Schumann or other “romantics”, and that we would confine ourselves to the generous output of Mozart. When I tired of this, he would treat me to a mixture of scorn and pity. If I laughed at his obstinacy, he became annoyed. Whereas I could derive some amusement from his exclusive tastes, he could do no such thing over my indifference to Couperin and Rameau’.2 Even if such behaviour speaks of parental indulgence as well as passionate belief, Ravel’s self-discipline never allowed these episodes to go beyond the bounds of good manners; and to be ‘un type’ was an invaluable advantage in the eyes of one’s hostess. A few years earlier the critic Calvocoressi had similarly offended by daring to say uncomplimentary things about Debussy. Ravel had responded in kind on the subject of Wagner, Franck and d’Indy, and their mutual suspicion was healed only by playing the piano-duet version of Balakirev’s Thamar.3 Calvocoressi, Viñes and Ravel then formed the nucleus of what was to be a group of young artists and intellectuals who met at first on Saturdays to indulge in the usual practices of argument, tobacco, strong coffee and late nights. Although it has been claimed that the group was among the earliest supporters of Pelléas, Philippe Rodriguez has found that in April 1902 ‘practically none of the [group] knew each other apart, of course, from those who were fellow students’.4 In 1903 the original three were joined by the painter Paul Sordes, the designer Emile-Allain Séguy, the poet Léon-Paul Fargue, the conductor Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht, the pianist Marcel Chadeigne, the poet Tristan Klingsor (real name Léon Leclère), the Breton composer Paul Ladmirault, and Maurice Delage, who had suddenly developed a passion for music after hearing Pelléas and became one of Ravel’s few pupils. His enthusiasm often outran his expertise. Calvocoressi recalls that ‘Delage used to tell me all about his ordeals with counterpoint, blessing and cursing Ravel in the same breath’.5 The first meeting of the group, with five members present, took place chez Sordes in May 1903 and their first joint attendance at Pelléas did not occur until the second revival that October.6 The composer Déodat de Séverac joined in 1904 and later members included Manuel de Falla, André Caplet, Florent Schmitt, Emile Vuillermoz, Lucien Garban (who was later to be employed by Ravel’s publisher Durand), the painters Edouard Bénédictus and Georges d’Espagnat, and the Abbé Léonce Petit. After complaints about the noise from Sordes’s studio, Delage rented a detached cottage in Auteuil, and the weekend’s music-making would extend through the night. As the band of enthusiasts passed one day along the Paris boulevards a newspaper-seller called out ‘Look out! Apaches!’ and, as the name was used of undesirables and what the French call ‘marginaux’, on the edge of society, they adopted it with relish. The word could be derived from ‘appassionato’, for those whose enthusiasm spreads beyond conventional bounds. Either way, it fitted young men who worshipped the brilliant, often brutal music of the Russian ‘Five’ and whose faces sported a variety of

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whiskers. By 1905 Ravel had grown a luxuriant beard but Viñes’s appearance remained mostly constant over the years, ‘his long face crossed by a large moustache, as of a docile policeman’.7 (Some later photos show him sans moustache). Klingsor records that ‘when it was a question of sightreading some new work, it was Sordes who went to the piano; Ravel would listen motionless. He compared, analysed secretly, worked while appearing to do nothing’.8 It becomes clear that Ravel’s occasional refusal to perform at Mme de SaintMarceaux’s was not affectation. He would play when and what he wanted to because, being unable to dissimulate, he could not do justice to music that he didn’t like. The exclusiveness of the Apaches was protected by two devices: a call-sign – the opening notes of Borodin’s Second Symphony, chosen by Ravel9 – and a fictitious personage, Gomez de Riquet, invented by Ravel conceivably in imitation of Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury. The pressing invitations of this Spaniard permitted the courteous dispatch of bores and parasites. Women were not admitted: years later Klingsor explained that this was not due to any anti-feminist bias, merely to avoid sexual complications.10 One talented female singer did penetrate the sanctum, in order to throw her cap at Ravel, but to no avail.11 Ravel returned to Fauré’s class in October 1901 as an auditeur, while working on Jeux d’eau. On 30 November Viñes found him at Debussy’s apartment at 58 rue Cardinet when he went to play the suite Pour le piano for the composer,12 before giving the work its first public performance at the Société nationale on 11 January 1902. While it is clear that, for the moment, Ravel was one of Debussy’s inner circle, the propinquity of these two events no doubt sharpened Ravel’s appreciation of how radical Jeux d’eau really was (see the letter quoted on p. 41). As in 1900 with Callirhoé, Ravel spent January of 1902 writing a preparatory exercise for the Prix de Rome, this time titled Sémiramis (the text on which Florent Schmitt had composed his prize-winning cantata in 1900; Sémiramis was also the mother of Sardanapalus, the doomed king in Myrrha – at times the Prix de Rome could seem rather like a family business). A portion of the score has recently surfaced.13 The music for the first scene is entirely traditional, with chromatic double bass octaves under tremolos to signify impending trouble, a modal/oriental dance on flute not that different from one in Debussy’s winning cantata L’Enfant prodigue of eighteen years earlier (if it works, copy it!), and arching, impassioned lines for phrases such as ‘Ah, viens! Sémiramis, O reine adorée!’ Far more interesting than the music itself is the nature of its presentation to the world on 7 April. Jeux d’eau had by then been published by Demets and on 5 April (as mentioned above) Viñes premiered it and the Pavane at the Société nationale. Two days later his diary records: ‘This morning I went to the Conservatoire to hear Ravel’s cantata Sémiramis which the orchestra, conducted by Taffanel, studied, rehearsed and played: it’s very attractive and

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entirely oriental in flavour. The whole Ravel family was there.’14 Until the previous year Paul Taffanel had been the conductor of the prestigious Société des concerts du Conservatoire and he was still the chief conductor at the Opéra. From 1897 he also conducted a newly-formed orchestra of Conservatoire students15 and presumably it was this orchestra that performed. Even so the occasion argues for strong support from Fauré, who was present at the session, and altogether Ravel’s hopes for the Prix de Rome proper must have been high. But before then he enjoyed one of the most profound experiences of his life. On 30 April, after a tumultuous final rehearsal two days earlier, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande was premiered at the Opéra-Comique. Jacques Rivière, later the editor of the Nouvelle revue française, described the opera as evoking ‘a marvellous world, a cherished paradise where we could escape from our problems. . . . We escaped there, knowing the secret door, and the world no longer existed for us.’16 In common with many of his musician friends, Ravel is said to have attended every one of the fourteen performances in the first run, which ended on 26 June. This cannot be quite true, because for the final performances he would have been in purdah working on his cantata. But if he had gone to the fourth performance on 8 May, it would have been directly after working on the preliminary round of the Prix de Rome the same afternoon, surely a deeply disorientating experience. Musical considerations apart, his handwriting in the two examination pieces is appallingly scrappy, a blatant rejection of the careful calligraphy of the previous year, suggesting that his heart lay elsewhere. The fugue in B flat, despite a subject based on Ravel’s favourite descending fourths, is stiff, with some ungainly progressions, but the chorus ‘La nuit’, despite a lack of memorable melodies, rather daringly rejects Massenet in favour of the Chabrier of La Sulamite and À la musique. He was allowed to progress to the final part of the concours, but named last of the six candidates. The summer of 1902 passed in visits to Pelléas at the Opéra-Comique, in beginning a vocal score of Delius’s opera Margot la Rouge, and in making his second attempt at a Prix de Rome cantata. The text involved, Alcyone, was taken by Eugène and Edouard Adénis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As always, they were the winners of a competition with a prize of 500 francs; they beat some twenty other competitors. The journalist writing in the Petit courrier of 28 June, when the cantatas were performed, also notes that ‘never, never has a libretto been offered in prose’,17 undoubtedly a reference to the prose librettos for Massenet’s Thaïs and, more recently, Charpentier’s Louise, and implying that, as ever, the Institut was behind the times.18 The only event in the story is a storm, with personal interactions reduced to a minimum between Queen Alcyone, her nurse Sophrona, and her departed husband King Ceyx, who dies in the storm before reappearing twice: first as a ghost, then as a corpse brought in by fisherman, upon which Alcyone duly

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expires. Whatever stylistic risks Ravel took in the preliminary chorus, the vocal lines of his cantata are, as Marcel Marnat says, ‘a pastiche of Massenet, a highly successful pastiche supported by a freer and better judged handling of the orchestra than in the past’, involving both ‘Rimskyan outbursts’ and ‘Debussyan tremblings’.19 In banishing Pelléas entirely from his mind, Ravel could be said, in the words of Debussy about his unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chimène a decade earlier, to have won victories over himself. Not that Debussy was entirely absent since, as José Bruyr was the first to point out, the theme of the development in the first movement of Debussy’s String Quartet serves as the main melodic idea of the whole cantata (Ex. 2/1).20

Un peu retenu

  

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 

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3





  

Example 2.1a. Debussy, String Quartet, I, fig. 2, bar 3

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   

Example 2.1b. Ravel, Alcyone, passim

The use of material from what was already a well-known work can hardly have done Ravel any favours with the jury, especially given Debussy’s standing as a dangerous revolutionary. He was not awarded a prize of any kind, the Premier Grand Prix going to one Aymé Kunc, who from 1914 was to spend 30 years as director of the conservatoire in his native Toulouse. The article in the Petit courrier mentioned above lists Ravel’s output so far as ‘Two songs and a Pavane for piano, Debussyan, of subtle colouring, requiring skilful and delicate execution. Menuet antique, likewise.’ For whatever reason, nothing is said about Jeux d’eau. Massenet was absent from the preliminary jury, which consisted of Saint-Saëns, Dukas, Reyer, Lenepveu and Paladilhe, with three supplementary members: Marty, Widor and Fauré. No Ravel letters survive to tell us of his reaction to this setback, or whether he continued to blame Dubois’s hostility. Certainly he had chosen his three soloists carefully: the Petit courrier names Jane Hatto, who would be singing Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni at the Opéra the following October and would premiere Ravel’s Shéhérazade songs in 1904, Mlle Lacombe (Marie-Suzanne LacombeOlivier) who had made her debut as Maddalena in Rigoletto at the Opéra in 1896, and the tenor Léon Laffitte who had sung the role of Faust in Gounod’s

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opera there in 1899. Ravel took extreme care in choosing performers all his life. It is therefore worth mentioning that his partner in the piano duet version of the score, which was all the jury heard (though a full score was provided for those who wanted one), was a fellow-student called Léon Moreau, who was to reappear in Ravel’s life some twenty years later in a less helpful role (see p. 274). The next we know of Ravel he is in St-Jean-de-Luz, from where, in September and October 1902 he writes two letters to Delius about his piano transcription of Margot la Rouge. Back in the capital on 16 October, he writes to his childhood friend Jane Gaudin, blaming his tardiness on ‘the busy, fevered existence in Paris. . . . You wouldn’t believe how sad I was to leave StJean-de-Luz. . . . for the first time in my life, I would have been returning to Paris without any pleasure, if I hadn’t been coming back to my family.’21 Part of his fevered existence involved completing the slow movement of his String Quartet by the end of the year. The first movement followed in January, when Ravel submitted it for a composition prize. Once again he was unsuccessful, one of the examiners dubbing the movement ‘pénible’ (laborious, or tiresome) and Dubois complaining that it ‘lacked simplicity’.22 As a result, Ravel was definitively expelled from the Conservatoire – that is, until his return in the role of examiner . . . In the meantime, on 10 December in Lyon, Joseph Jemain and Georges-Martin Witkowski gave the first performance of the Ravel/ Bardac/Garban two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturnes. By the spring of 1903 Ravel’s friendship with Debussy seems to have reached perhaps its apogee. A brief note from Debussy of 21 February23 contains two nuggets of information, both illuminating in their different ways. It begins, ‘Since you’ll certainly be at the Société nationale concert this evening . . .’, confirming that Ravel could be relied upon as a regular attender even at those concerts where his own music was not being played. This in turn allows us to speculate on the composers Ravel would almost certainly have met there over the previous year, including Roussel, Tournemire, Vierne, de Bréville and Charles Bordes, and performers including Blanche Selva and, as pianist, the conductor Rhené-Baton. The second fact is that Debussy was involving Ravel in a deception. His note continues: ‘would you be good enough to give me some tips [quelques tuyaux] on what’s been played. . . . I’ll venture to ask you to get this to me by tomorrow morning.’ The reason was that Debussy was supposed to be reviewing the concert for the magazine Gil Blas – and a review signed by him did appear two days later.24 It was a wise move to engage Ravel’s cooperation, since three Duparc songs were replaced at the last minute by three of René de Castéra’s (‘charmantes’, says Debussy) and two by Charles Bordes. Whether or not Ravel knew what was up at the time, he must have realized when he read Gil Blas on the 23rd. On 21 April he and Viñes gave another performance of the Nocturnes arrangement, at the Schola Cantorum – a further instance of d’Indy’s support for the 28-year-old composer. By the end of the month Ravel had finished the

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String Quartet; though, with the preliminary round of the Prix de Rome due in May, he may well have put it at the back of a drawer. For the fugue subject the authorities this year turned to serious pseudo-Bach in E minor, but Ravel was able to avoid the awkwardnesses of his previous offering and did as much as could be expected with such mediocre material. Both this fugue and the chorus, ‘Matinée de Provence’, are written in a small, confident, beautiful script, far superior to that of a year earlier, and the harmonies of the chorus were clearly designed to please: of its 83 bars, no fewer than 37 are filled either with the tonic A major or with the dominant E7, and elsewhere the harmony barely progresses beyond the Mendelssohnian. Ravel was permitted to proceed to the cantata stage. The text of Alyssa for once abandoned classical and biblical literature, being set ‘in Ireland in legendary times’. Ravel’s heart must have sunk as he read through the text and found ‘noises of battle, off ’ – his attempts at these in Myrrha had been unconvincing; would two years’ further experience work the miracle? The love-versus-duty plot is seriously banal. While the hero Braïzyl is besotted with the fairy Alyssa, his country needs him to help ward off 30,000 invaders. The ghost of his father, killed in the combat, persuades him to leave the enchantress: ‘Father, rejoice!’ he exclaims; ‘You are reborn in your son!’

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With hindsight, we can see how far removed this stuff was from Ravel’s natural emotional territory. He resorts to the obvious expedient of diminished sevenths, without managing to disguise their low intellectual value. Fairies on the other hand were nearer to his heart. The text begins with a long solo for Braïzyl, surrounded by dancing elves, and calling on Alyssa to appear. ‘The Dance of the Elves’ in the Prelude (Ex. 2.2) comes nearer than anything else in the work to the Ravel we know, with its tremolos, pizzicatos, fresh, airy woodwind writing and not-quite-conventional juxtapositions of triads. (Danse des elfes) [Vivace]

  



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

 

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   

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3





 





    



 

 

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

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

    



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

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3



 

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

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

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

   

  

p

 



   





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    

 

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 





 

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

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3

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    





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p 

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

 

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  

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



               

 

 



 



  

  

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pp 

   

 

   

  

   



                    





  

Example 2.2. Ravel, Alyssa, fig. 3, bar 6

In later years such progressions would come to include an augmented triad, or two. The bulk of the cantata mixes Massenet with bits of Wagner and perhaps even, in Braïzyl’s aria, of Puccini (in March 1903 La bohème had reached its hundredth performance at the Opéra-Comique). As Marnat says, ‘Needless to say, the sauce was bound to turn sour and this mishmash seasoned with overblown vulgarity had no chance of seducing the jury.’25 The Premier Prix went to Raoul Laparra, whose Valse op. 2 had been published in Paris in 1885 when he was only nine, and who went on to have quite a successful career as an opera composer, notably with La habanera, premiered at the OpéraComique in 1908. A third failure left Ravel severely disappointed. On 11 July Florent Schmitt brought comfort, saying ‘the Prix can’t have long to live. I’ve read a good report of you with Debussy’s name at the bottom. That’s worth all the prizes in the world.’26 As it turned out, Schmitt would have done better to interchange these propositions: the Prix de Rome survived until 1968, while Debussy’s inclination to say nice things about Ravel or his music was soon to end. More direct evidence of Ravel’s disappointment, as well as warning of the storms ahead, comes in his letter of 11 September to his childhood friend Jane Gaudin (now Courteault):

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I’m back at the grindstone and now look on the Rome concours as a bad dream I have absolutely no intention of going through again. Despite Laparra’s triumph, he can’t have a very happy memory of it either, and I don’t think he’ll want to relive the moment when Fauré, his professor and mine, declared in front of the whole Institut that this decision was scandalous and clearly reached in advance. That was certainly everyone’s opinion, I have to say; which doesn’t alter the fact that Fauré’s behaviour was considered extremely courageous, firstly because Laparra was a pupil of his, and secondly because by doing so he has closed the doors of the Institut to himself for ever – and he was set to occupy the first place that became vacant. As for the happy winner, faced with his teacher’s unexpected attitude he had a nervous attack.27

Ravel might well have given up at this point. It can indeed be argued that the further his real style moved away from the academic mode required for these essays, the harder success was going to be. Much has been made of his delight in solving problems and in working in ‘artificial’ styles, but it is important to bear in mind that these problems and styles were always of his own choosing; and if the problem proved intractable, then the sketches were destroyed or locked away or reused later. A further consideration was simply money. Entering for the Prix involved a financial loss, ‘for the candidates had to spend a whole month immured within the precincts of the Chateau de Compiègne . . . and were given only house-room and a grant of one hundred francs . . . towards their upkeep – which . . . cost them five or six times that amount’.28 Against these factors were ranged the hopes of Fauré and of Ravel’s parents. Ravel’s response to failure was to set about composing a series of works that took him as far from the Prix de Rome as he could go. One of these, the song Manteau de fleurs (Cloak of flowers), must charitably be ascribed to financial need. The author of the text, Paul Gravollet, was an actor (according to one source, a member of the Comédie-Française). We must hope he was a better actor than poet. He persuaded no fewer than twenty-two composers to set his poems, and the ensuing collection was published by Hamelle in December 1905 under the title Les frissons. Debussy’s contribution was ‘Dans le jardin’, whose autograph title page is dated May 1903; according to Chalupt, it was through Debussy that Ravel received his own commission. Presumably Ravel wrote his song around the same time. He enjoys himself with the whole-tone chords and consecutive ninths that he had had to abjure for the Prix de Rome, but the result adds little to his glory, and his attitude to the text can be summed up by a further reminiscence from Chalupt: ‘ “Les lis ont le droit d’être blancs” (lilies have the right to be white) affirms the poem. “The right! The right!” muttered the mischievous composer as he embroidered this cloak; “it’s more than a right that lilies have to be white: it’s a duty!” ’29 The works through which Ravel now distanced himself from storms, floods and military mayhem were five folksong settings, the song cycle Shéhérazade

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(entirely unrelated to the early Overture), and the Sonatine for piano. If he was serious in not wanting to go through the Roman nightmare again, then the String Quartet too could be safely disinterred. The six months from July 1903 may appear to be empty of incident: Ravel, apart from sitting on the committee of the Société nationale,30 was simply doing what he was born to do. On 7 November the Apaches hosted an exotic evening with piano, including Glazounov’s Fantaisie orientale and possibly the first outing of Shéhérazade.31 Five days later Jane Bathori sang ‘Asie’ on its own, again with piano and at ninety minutes’ notice, in a concert organized by Emile Vuillermoz at the Bouffes-Parisiens.32 The five folksong settings were of Greek tunes and two of them, ‘Quel galant m’est comparable’ and ‘Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques’, were later to reappear as numbers 3 and 4 of the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques. The history behind the original five songs, as told by Calvocoressi after Ravel’s death, is that in February 1904 Pierre Aubry had to give a lecture at short notice on ‘The songs of oppressed peoples’ (Greeks and Armenians). He asked me to help him select some Greek songs and to find a singer. I approached Mlle Louise Thomasset who agreed to learn these songs in a hurry, but wanted piano accompaniments. So I turned to Ravel. Together we chose four songs from the collection by P. Matsa (Constantinople, 1883) and ‘Quel galant’ and ‘Les cueilleuses de lentisques’ from the collection by Pernot. He composed the accompaniments in 36 hours – an extraordinary tour de force – and the lecture took place on Saturday 20 February 1904 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales. . . . The manuscripts of the three other songs from the Matsa collection (Ravel found their accompaniments too scanty [trop sommaire]) are, I fear, lost. Their titles were: ‘A vous, oiseaux des plaines’, ‘Chanson du pâtre épirote’ and ‘Mon mouchoir, hélas, est perdu’.33

If the accompaniments to these were too scanty, the ones we have are by no means over-succulent, with simple harmonies and many bare fifths. In ‘Quel galant’ Ravel curiously but effectively negates the Aeolian A mode of the tune by treating it tonally in G major. In ‘Les cueilleuses’ on the other hand the Lydian D sharps are a feature of both tune and accompaniment. It may be worth pointing out that ‘lentisques’ have nothing to do with lentils: Pistachia lentiscus, the lentisk tree, exudes mastic, ‘a pale yellow gum-resin . . . used for varnish, cement, liquor’.34 For the girls engaged in gathering this stuff, having sticky hands may well have made the ‘blond angel’ of their desire seem further off than ever. Until these performances Ravel had had no premieres of his own music, as opposed to pastiches for Rome, since Viñes played Pavane pour une Infante défunte and Jeux d’eau in April 1902. If he had appeared to ‘reculer’, it now became clear that this was unarguably ‘pour mieux sauter’. On 5 March, the day when the Cours de Cassation ordered a supplementary inquiry in the Supreme Court into the Dreyfus Affair, leading to Alfred Dreyfus’s liberation, Ravel’s

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String Quartet received its first performance at the Société nationale, played by the Heymann Quartet, opening a programme that also included seven of Chabrier’s Pièces pittoresques (no doubt to Ravel’s delight). This premiere could also be seen as a liberation – of the real Ravel. Whatever academic failure lay behind him, after this performance he could no longer be patronized, urged to learn lessons from Beethoven, chastised over his taste for Russian music or written off as just another salon composer. He could of course still be accused of being a Debussyste, and would be so for a number of years yet. As for the unsubstantiated but long-standing rumour that Debussy begged him not to change a note of the work, the letter that gave rise to this has, happily, now surfaced. What Debussy in fact said was perhaps more interesting: Friday 4 March /04 Cher ami, Bardac has just told me of your intention to have your Quartet – and especially the Andante – played less loudly. . . . In the name of all the Gods, and mine, please, don’t do that. Think of the difference in sonority between a hall that’s full and one that’s empty. . . . It’s only the Viola that slightly obscures the others and could perhaps be toned down? Otherwise, don’t touch anything and all will be well. My cordial affection. Claude Debussy35

This gives rise to a number of points. First, it is clear from the remark about the viola that Debussy had accepted an invitation to listen to the final rehearsal – an invitation certainly not issued to just anybody. It also suggests that Ravel was aware that the texture might sound too orchestral – a regular criticism over the last century. Thirdly the letter proclaims the closeness of Raoul Bardac to both parties, a link soon to be severely tested. Nowadays the Quartet can be heard as being at once homage to and exorcism of Debussy’s influence. Like Debussy’s, it is in four movements and cyclic, with the possible exception of the second movement. In construction, Ravel’s is the more subtle, even if he did not possess Debussy’s ability to make a different theme out of similar material.36 One view of the first movement’s structure, carried through till the end of the work, is propounded by Gerard McBurney as a game of pairs: ‘it’s like one of those folk-dances where, phrase by phrase, you swing from one partner to the next . . . and you never quite know whose hands you’re going to be holding in a few bars’ time’,37 like the fandango Ravel knew well from St-Jean-de-Luz. This richness of possible interpretations argues as forcefully as anything for the Quartet as the work of a newly-matured composer, intent on pursuing his individual concerns. The second movement, like Debussy’s, is partly an essay in pizzicato, inspired possibly, as Debussy’s may have been, by the gamelan at the 1889

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6 Letter from Debussy to Ravel, 4 March 1904

Exhibition, although Rousseau-Plotto suggests rather the massed mandolins Ravel must have heard on the place Louis XIV in St-Jean-de-Luz.38 The outer sections are built on two themes, in turn Aeolian (pizzicato) and Dorian (arco) while the middle section seems to be an attempt at a respite from such frenetic activity. The orchestral quality of some of the writing in the Quartet generally stems not from Ravel’s inability to compose a movement within traditional textures (the first theme demonstrates beyond doubt his ability to do so) but from the continual suppression of the music’s natural expansiveness. The Russian influence over the third movement is unmistakable, while in the finale Ravel continues the rhythmic game of the second movement, replacing the 6/8 – 3/4 contrast with one of 5/8 (5/4) – 3/4.

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The critics can probably be forgiven for not appreciating the work’s individuality at first hearing. What was less than helpful, whether from the anti-camp of Pierre Lalo39 or the pro-camp of Jean Marnold,40 was finding similarities with Debussy, even if Marnold went on to claim that ‘a spontaneous art or . . . unfailing . . . instinct ensures the communication of his thought . . . remember the name of Maurice Ravel. He is one of the masters of tomorrow.’ As yet the pairing of their names appeared to cause no rift between the two composers. For his part, Ravel was no doubt happy that his hard intellectual graft should emerge as ‘spontaneous’ and ‘instinctive’. It is hardly possible to imagine a greater contrast in apparent aesthetic aims than that between the intellectual rigour of the Quartet and what comes across as the indulgent hedonism of the song-cycle Shéhérazade, on three prose-poems from the collection of 100 poems entitled Schéhérazade, published by Ravel’s fellow-Apache Tristan Klingsor in 1903.41 Debussy is still a major influence on the musical language (and indeed the choice of prose-poems mirrors that of Debussy’s Proses lyriques in 1892–3 and the Trois chansons de Bilitis and Nuits blanches in 1897–8), but the orchestral sound is generally firmer and brighter than in Pelléas; the pale Mélisande is here given body as well as soul, and the prevailing texture of low, soft strings under high, clear woodwind suggests rather the voluptuous flesh under sparkling jewellery that we see in Gustave Moreau’s many studies of Salomé. Another influence, if only at one remove, is Rimsky-Korsakov, since three of the poems, not set by Ravel, mention this composer by name. Contrary to what has sometimes been stated, there is no thematic identity with the Overture of five years earlier (merely a kinship of atmosphere). Conscious orientalizing is limited to a somewhat conventional orchestral picture of ‘the fat-bellied mandarins under their umbrellas’, and otherwise Ravel is content to follow the poet whose chief joy, as described in the first song ‘Asie’, lies not in the exotic adventures themselves but in their retelling; ‘in lifting, like Sinbad, my old Arabian cup to my lips from time to time, an artistic interruption of the tale’. The tranquillity of the poet’s recollection is mirrored in the music: all three songs begin and end in their original keys at a dynamic level of piano or below. Ravel also removed any undue frisson by substituting ‘cup’ for Klingsor’s Arabian ‘pipe’, either because, as the poet maintained, a soprano could not be asked to sing about smoking a pipe, or because of that word’s slang usage as a member of the male body. Before setting the poems to music Ravel persuaded Tristan Klingsor to recite them out loud to him. The rhythms and spoken inflections of the language formed an important influence on Ravel’s vocal writings (see the discussion of Histoires naturelles, pp. 85ff.), but he often allowed himself a more melodic vocal line than is the norm in Pelléas. Even if Debussy may have inspired the flexible rhythms (Ravel openly admitted Debussy’s ‘spiritual influence’ in his autobiographical sketch), the curve of the phrase (Ex. 2.3) is reminiscent rather of Massenet:

1902–1905: TESTING THE ESTABLISHMENT

   

pp

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Je

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Très lent ( = 40)

    

3

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            

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vou - drais m'at- tar - der au pa - lais en - chan - té

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   3        



Et comme un vo - ya - geur é - tran - ger

Example 2.3. Ravel, ‘Asie’, bar before fig. 12

Certainly Ravel wanted the singer to be in the spotlight. In a letter to Ernest Ansermet in 1921 he commented on the beauty, power and clarity of Madeleine Grey’s voice: ‘Thanks to her, we heard Shéhérazade as something other than a symphonic poem.’42 In his word-setting, Ravel occasionally looks forward to the more populist style of Histoires naturelles in the suppression of mute ‘e’s, and the 1929 recording by his close friend Marcelle Gerar suppresses a few more,43 but these are far from constituting a basic policy as in the later cycle. The two songs that follow are shorter than ‘Asie’ and scored for a smaller orchestra. Both are ‘private’ songs of love. In ‘La flûte enchantée’ the master of the household sleeps with ‘his long yellow nose in his white beard’, but the slavegirl hears her lover playing the flute outside. The flute melody therefore acts partly as a symbol of love, distinguished by its Phrygian modality, and partly as an external event incorporated into the song, which is itself largely based on the dotted rhythm with which the flautist begins. Even so, when, in the final three bars, we hear the flute phrase in its original form, it is again totally externalized. We are no longer inside the girl’s mind, and this withdrawal of empathy is deeply disturbing. The world of dreams and hopes is revived in the last song, ‘L’indifférent’, but now they reach a conclusive end in disillusionment. The frequent muting of the strings also finds a conclusion here, where they are muted throughout. This seems to inhibit two gusts of passion in the violins which, like the outburst in ‘Asie’, hint at profound depths of feeling. The object of the watcher’s emotion is an androgynous boy.44 But he does not stop to be admired, and at the very words of disillusionment, ‘mais non, tu passes’, the smooth, luxurious texture is snapped for a moment, before the impact of his receding beauty again strikes the watcher’s heart and all is legato once more. But of what gender is the watcher, and of what sexual orientation? Not the least problem is the ambiguity of the word ‘indifférent’: ‘je lui suis indifférent’ can mean either ‘I have no particular feelings for him/her’ or ‘I excite no particular feelings in him/her’. Given that the title ‘L’indifférent’ can apply either to the watcher or to the boy, this allows for four different linguistic interpretations: if it applies to the boy, then either (a) he has no particular feelings for the watcher, male or female (plainly true), or (b) he excites no particular feelings in the watcher, male or female (plainly untrue); if it applies to the watcher, then either (c) he (‘indifférent’ being masculine) has no particular feelings for the boy (plainly untrue) or (d) he excites no particular feelings in the boy (plainly true).

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The last possibility has to be considered; and the conductor Camille Chevillard seems to have been uncomfortably aware of it, since he said to Ravel about the work, ‘I hope you’ll have it sung by a girl.’45 That Ravel too was well aware of the latent ambiguity is clear enough from a letter to Georges Jean-Aubry of 1907, about which song a soprano might sing in London. Sur l’herbe had upset audiences in Zurich and Geneva. ‘Personally,’ wrote Ravel, ‘I’d prefer “L’Indifférent”. But Londoners would be upset in their turn, for different reasons’.46 In the English capital the Oscar Wilde scandal was an all-too-recent memory. Although the autograph full score lists the songs neutrally as ‘Trois Poèmes pour Chant et Orchestre’, the two French recordings made in Ravel’s lifetime were both by sopranos (‘La fluˆte enchantée’ and ‘L’indifférent’ by Suzanne Cesbron-Viseur and the whole cycle by Marcelle Gerar, both in 1929), as have been all the recordings the author is aware of since then. As to the order of the songs, the first complete performance, for some reason in the order ‘La flute enchantée’, ‘L’indifférent’, then ‘Asie’, was given on 17 May 1904 at the Société nationale by Jane Hatto with an orchestra conducted by Alfred Cortot (and, as the last work of the last Société nationale concert of the 1903–4 season, rather well placed to be ruminated upon). The autograph full score, the two published scores of 1904 and 1914 and Gerar’s recording all put ‘Asie’ first and ‘L’indifférent’ last, making for a more melancholy, withdrawn conclusion. Both these questions, of order and sexual orientation, are addressed in the illuminating chapter contributed by the critic and Apache Emile Vuillermoz to the volume Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de des familiers, published in January 1939, just a year after the composer’s death. Firstly, in discussing Shéhérazade he adopts, without comment, the order of the first performance, suggesting that it is not quite the closed book presented by the printed evidence. And secondly he dares, as he would surely not have done in the composer’s lifetime, to lift the veil that has always lain over Ravel’s own sexual inclinations and practices. Since the Quartet and Shéhérazade together represent the emergence of the composer in his true musical colours, this would seem to be an appropriate point to broach the matter of Ravel’s sexual orientation as a 28-year-old increasingly in the public eye. Vuillermoz writes of ‘L’indifférent’: Here, Ravel finds a way to manage an ambiguity of an unusual kind. We do not know who makes the approach to this young stranger whose eyes are ‘as gentle as a girl’s’ and who goes on his way ‘his hips lightly swinging in his lazy, feminine gait’. Is this ephebe rejecting the invitation of a courtesan or that of a Greek philosopher? When we know what has been called the sexual enigma of Ravel, who was himself ‘un indifférent’, we are troubled by the whole of the delicate mystery that hovers round this brief text, full of such strange resonances, and we realize that this song is one of those works in which the composer has unveiled one of the best protected areas of his sensibility. He abandons his usual pudeur and lets himself go in a sort of lyrical effusion,

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discreet but penetrating, that constitutes in the totality of his oeuvre an exceptional confession. In a few bars, he has found a way to imbue his decription with an ardour and a fervour that are not to be found in most of his works, which are put together with a more careful sangfroid and a more vigilant self-control.47

Not for the last time, Ravel seems to have been ‘pushing the envelope’. The great majority of the hundred poems in Klingsor’s collection give us a male narrator of openly heterosexual orientation, and both Chevillard and (in mentioning ‘a Greek philosopher’) Vuillermoz may simply have fallen for one of the many ‘teases’ Ravel posed in the course of his composing career. As to Ravel’s own orientation, the evidence, as we shall see, is mixed, but hardly paints him as an ‘indifférent’. The absence of any wife or petite amie decides nothing. At this stage in his career, he may simply have determined not to let anything stand in the way of his composing. Perhaps no better description of the essence of Shéhérazade can be given than Ned Rorem’s, from his booklet that accompanies Pierre Boulez’s 1972 recording with Heather Harper and the BBC Symphony Orchestra: ‘the contradictions rising from all that shimmer, the sincere elegance, the tailored lust, the sheer sound linked to the sheer sense’.48 Ravel himself always had a high regard for the work. Over twenty years later he told his pupil Manuel Rosenthal, ‘In some years from now, you will have learned everything about composition, but there is something that is impossible to keep, and that is the freshness of youth. And you have to regret it all your life. And I said, “But about your own music, what would be the freshness of youth you have lost after a while?” And immediately he said, “Shéhérazade. It’s full of things that I am ashamed today to have written. But there is something in this composition that I have never found again.” ’49 Shéhérazade, together with the Quartet, confirmed that Ravel had ‘arrived’. Rousseau-Plotto makes the point that it was around this time that he grew his beard.50 Maybe this was an outward and visible sign of a growing inner confidence. But, as if feeling that these two works had given French critics and audiences quite enough to think about for the moment, he brought no other new music before the public until Viñes introduced the Miroirs in January 1906. In the meantime he was still living with his parents and brother on the boulevard Péreire, writing the first movement of the Sonatine, going to concerts, turning out the occasional popular song for professional songsmiths (Manuel Rosenthal claimed he was the composer of Marchetti’s well-known waltz Fascination51), possibly teaching a music class in a private institution (see below) – and not entering again for the Prix de Rome. It would seem that he had suffered enough. More congenial by far were the meetings of the Apaches. On 24 March Viñes records an evening ‘at Maurice Delage’s with “toute la bande”; we

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laughed a lot at a parody done by Ravel and Delage of Pelléas et Mélisande.’52 Was Ravel trying to exorcise the Pelléas influence, as Chabrier had twenty years earlier with his pastiches of Tristan? Then, on 16 June, Viñes introduced Ravel to a family who were to become some of his closest friends: ‘dinner with the Cipa Godebskis, to whom I introduced Ravel. . . . We made music, I and Ravel, who played the first movement of his Sonatine. They liked it a great deal. Bonnard was there too.’53 Cipa Godebski, a year older than Ravel, was the son of a successful Russian sculptor and a rich mother, Matylda Natanson. He, his Polish wife Ida, and his two children Mimie and Jean, lived at that time on the rue Saint-Florentin, leading on to the Place de la Concorde and it was in their salon that Ravel came to know such luminaries as the writers Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, André Gide and Jean Cocteau, and painters including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Cipa’s half-sister Misia was also very much part of the circle, ‘Misia, whom Mallarmé had known well and often referred to in his writings, Misia whose elegance, intelligence and beauty had made her a veritable muse even before she left Thadée Natanson [her cousin] and married Alfred Edwards, the proprietor of the newspaper Le matin.’54 Natanson had been an editor of La revue blanche, the artistic magazine that appeared from 1891 to 1903, and Edwards was to use his own newspaper to give invaluable support in the affaire Ravel of 1905. Misia provided Ravel with a link to some of the powerful men in French artistic life and became an invaluable ally and confidante in his later dealings with Sergei Diaghilev. As for Cipa, though not a professional musician, he was passionately devoted to the arts and had been a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec. Perhaps more importantly, in a musical argument with Ravel he could hold his own. The composer was also to be a regular visitor to their country house, La Grangette, at Valvins near Fontainebleau.55 According to Marnat,56 it was through the Godebskis that he was asked to take on a music class of well-to-do young female students – not a task for which his independent, Left-wing views naturally fitted him, and the venture was fairly short-lived (see p. 80). Two stories of the year 1904 well illustrate Ravel’s character. During this period he took over from Debussy the conducting of an amateur choral society founded by Chausson’s brother-in-law Lucien Fontaine. Whereas Debussy was strict and conscientious, Ravel ‘contented himself with beating time abstractedly, always in a hurry to get away’.57 Amateurs were never in Ravel’s line. But if he could be oddly remiss in matters he thought unimportant, as a friend he was unfailingly true. In June 1904 Debussy left his first wife Lilly for Emma Bardac. Ravel, although he knew Mme Bardac well (indeed had dedicated to her ‘L’indifférent’ from Shéhérazade), felt that right was on Lilly Debussy’s side and, together with Misia and the singer Lucienne Bréval, contributed to a small regular income for her in her distress. Debussy must surely have got to know of it and, given Misia’s statement that ‘Debussy never forgave me for this’,

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it is highly likely that the break-up of the two composers’ friendship also dates from this moment.58 No further correspondence between them is known after the letter of 4 March cited above. From both of these stories we get the impression of Ravel as someone with firm ideas of what he did and did not want, who could be ‘difficult’, who did not always stop to count the cost of his actions in material terms. On 11 October, in the course of an Apaches meeting chez Delage, ‘Ravel gave us a first hearing of “Oiseaux tristes”, a new piano piece which I [Viñes] was the only one to like’.59 Thirty years later Calvocoressi also remembered this and similar occasions: ‘Only once, in those early days, did a work of his bewilder us for a time. It was “Oiseaux tristes”, which he played to us again and again without our being able to understand what he was after. He was rather disconcerted to find us indifferent to a piece into which he had put so much of himself. Sordes summed up the humour of the situation by drawing a verbal picture of Ravel hawking about, on his extended finger, two forlorn little birds whom nobody would have anything to do with.’60 On 6 November Viñes records that he and Ravel stayed until one o’clock in the morning at the flat of Jean Marnold, one of many evenings spent with the critic who was to remain one of Ravel’s most fervent supporters.61 Viñes’s plain sentence, ‘Marnold was enthusiastic about “Oiseaux tristes” ’, perhaps carries the implied rider ‘unlike the rest of them’. The year 1905 was to be one of the more exciting, even traumatic, in Ravel’s career. But it began calmly enough. On 13 January he and Viñes were at Mme de Saint-Marceaux’s salon, where Viñes played ‘Debussy’s new pieces Masques and L’isle joyeuse’, while Ravel again courted incomprehension with ‘Oiseaux tristes’ and also performed Debussy’s Esquisse [D’un cahier d’esquisses], of which he was to give the first public performance six years later.62 His personal relations with Debussy were never going to alter Ravel’s profound admiration for his older colleague. Towards the end of the month he made two visits to the Opéra, with very different aims and results. On 24 January he attended the premiere of Georges Marty’s opera Daria,63 in which the soprano making her Opéra debut in the title role was Geneviève Vix, six years later the splendid creator of Concepcion in L’heure espagnole. Then on the 28th he was invited by Misia Edwards, together with Viñes, Grovlez, Pierre Bonnard and Cipa and Ida Godebski, to the Opéra ball. Viñes recorded in his diary: ‘It was the first time I had been to the Opéra ball, and as always when I see young, beautiful women, lights, music and all this activity, I thought of death, of the ephemeral nature of everything, I imagined balls from past generations who are now nothing but dust, as will be all the masks I saw, and in a short while! What horror, Oblivion!’64 It is more than tempting to suggest that, as Viñes walked the streets of Paris with Ravel in the early hours, he discussed this sentiment with his companion – and that Ravel’s Wien of the following year, and its development as La valse fifteen years later, bear traces of Viñes’s melancholy meditations.

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Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

7 Diagram of the ‘Whirlwind of Death’

On 5 February Viñes and Ravel were playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade at the Godebskis’ and five days later Viñes played Pavane pour une Infante défunte and Jeux d’eau at the Salle Aeolian, noting ‘great success and even “succès monstre” ’. No doubt gratified by this, on 7 March Ravel celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Meanwhile hopes at least of similar success were being entertained by his father and brother. Ravel wrote to Jane Courteault on 27 March that Edouard is equally busy. He’s spending a large part of the day and every evening at the Casino de Paris where he’s overseeing the running of the ‘Whirlwind of Death’, whose description you may have read in the papers. With the help of my father’s advice, he’s its inventor. We’re full of hope. Its success grows by the day. Offers of engagements are reaching us from all sides, especially from America. Perhaps it’s the beginning of wealth! Which would be none too soon for my father, you have to agree. But I’m very afraid this may delay our visit to St-Jean-de-Luz by another year, at least for my father and brother, particularly Edouard, who’ll have to travel with his machine.65

‘Le Tourbillon de la Mort’ made its first appearance at the Casino de Paris on 22 March and caused a sensation. The Ravel car, driven by a Mlle Randal,

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made a complete somersault ten metres in the air, and Le Figaro understandably enthused: ‘the word “intrepid” is not enough, one has to say “heroic”.’ But then, with wealth for the inventors beckoning, disaster struck: on 14 April the car crashed and next morning Mlle Randal died of her injuries.66 The effect on the Ravel household can hardly be imagined. And for Maurice it could hardly have come at a worse time. Because of his age, this was the last year in which he was eligible to sit for the Prix de Rome. Should he now make one final attempt? Almost certainly by 15 April he had already entered. He decided to go ahead and, following the successes of the Quartet and Shéhérazade, the press took notice. The Mercure musical noted in its edition of 15 May: ‘M. Ravel intends to sit this year for the Prix de Rome, in which all our best wishes go with him.’ These wishes were to be unavailing, but the sparks that flew in the course of the ensuing affaire did not provide a steady light in which the facts could be viewed. Ravel was under pressure from several directions. Firstly, from Fauré. Out of the nineteen contestants in 1905, eight were students of the senior professor, Lenepveu, with the remaining eleven shared between Widor and Fauré. Three years earlier, in January 1902, Fauré had complained that four out of his own class of six were undistinguished,67 ten years after Ambroise Thomas had (as we saw on p. 24) blocked his appointment as a professor of composition. Fauré was eventually appointed four years later, but in 1905 he was still the junior of the three professors, so Ravel’s success was no doubt important to him. The second source of pressure was from the musical establishment, the press, his parents, in short everyone who expected him to walk away with the prize. But the third and most significant source probably lay in himself. Ravel after all had his pride; and the temptation of finally facing down Dubois’s persistent opposition may have been a determining factor. If he won the prize, Dubois was proved wrong; if he did not . . . then Ravel must have realized that serious questions were bound to be asked about the Prix de Rome, the Conservatoire and the man who directed it. Once he had made the decision to enter, then he had a further decision to make: should he opt for the blameless pastiche of previous years or not? In the event he decided against. He must have known the risk he was running and, deliberately or not, he went too far. With eighteen other candidates he was cloistered in the Château de Compiègne on 6 May and was presented with a C major fugue subject of more than usually stupefying banality. His working of it, apart from being almost unreadable, ends on a C major chord with a B natural in the c-clef – furiously amended by an official hand. The only official report that has survived, from Xavier Leroux, describes the exercise as ‘of no great musicality, thin, and badly written’.68 Although Leroux was kinder about his chorus, L’Aurore (‘some nice things, well orchestrated, rather long-winded’), it does contain some conjunct consecutive fifths and other horrors.

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[Moderato]

 

 

   

Sur



    

- phirs

  

  

   

 





l'herbe

 

i

- ri



     

-

sée

 

 

 

 

ro -

On voit la 

       

  Mille

   

-

ai

  5

 

5

sée

Cou - ler

en

sa -

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

les

lé

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

gères

Example 2.4. Ravel, Aurore, letter C, bar 6

The official text books of both Henri Reber (Traité d’harmonie, Paris, 1862, p. 69) and Emile Durand (Traité complet d’harmonie théorique et pratique, Paris, 1884, pp. 509–10) allow for disjunct consecutive fifths, but not for conjunct ones as in Example 2/4,69 and there is no reason to suppose that by 1905 these rulings had been relaxed. Probably the jury was equally unimpressed by the alternations of A flat major/D major (by Rimsky and Musorgsky out of Berlioz) in the central orchestral interlude. Altogether, despite the judgments of some biographers to the contrary, it seems inescapable that Ravel was throwing down a gauntlet, saying, ‘What has been approved enthusiastically in my Pavane and Jeux d’eau ought to be good enough for you.’ The fact that for our ears a century later L’Aurore is by far the most musical and imaginative of Ravel’s Prix de Rome choruses is, of course, irrelevant. The jury of 1905 picked up the gauntlet, probably reasoning that once they accepted such things from Ravel, the floodgates of solecism would be wide open. In this context the remark of one of the jury, Paladilhe, that they would not tolerate being treated as idiots is not so stuffy as it sounds. At any rate, the jury’s judgment of 12 May refused Ravel permission to proceed to the final section of the concours. Predictably, some portions of the national press erupted with indignation, though the outcry was not widespread: out of twenty-seven musical journals consulted by Sophie Brès, only four expressed amazement. But these were further stirred by Paladilhe’s declaration, in an interview in La liberté on 25 May, that the complaints ‘are merely the insignificant whinings of candidates who have failed’ and that ‘the Minister of the Fine Arts has apparently been troubled by this decision: I absolutely couldn’t care less.’70 The journalist calling himself ‘Covielle’ reported, in his article for Le matin of 21 June, that

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the Conservatoire students he collared in the institution’s courtyard indignantly pointed out that ‘it has never happened, since the foundation of the Prix de Rome, that second prize winners of one year were not admitted to the final round in the year following.’71 The intercalation of Ravel’s failures in the concours of 1902 and 1903 and of his absence in 1904 hardly invalidated this. As Pierre Lalo wrote in his robust, if tardy defence of Ravel in Le matin on 11 July, ‘this exam in which students have to write a chorus and a fugue has no object except to show the state of their musical knowledge. If one year they know how to write this fugue and chorus correctly, they will do the same the following year: knowledge of that sort doesn’t disappear.’ But then Lalo had not read Ravel’s entries. Romain Rolland, as well as Marnold and Calvocoressi, joined in on Ravel’s side. Louis Laloy, in Le mercure musical of 1 June, raised the point (in italics) that ‘the only six accepted were pupils of Monsieur Lenepveu, the only teacher who was also a member of the jury’. Lenepveu’s plea that it was hardly his fault he had been made a member of the Institut, and so was automatically given a seat on the jury board, fell on deaf ears.72 Even more devastating was Laloy’s recounting, obviously from a primary source, of a conversation between Lenepveu and a pupil who had handed him a passage in orchestral score: ‘But, my young friend, there is a serious error here; you want a soft effect and you are using trombones.’ ‘But, Maître, I have marked them pianissimo.’ ‘No, my friend, no trombones, keep them for loud passages.’ So spoke the old teacher, unaware of what Monteverdi knew at the beginning of the seventeenth century: that the timbre of the trombone in pianissimo is more mysterious than that of the muted violin, and that nothing can replace it.’73

Lenepveu would also seem not to have noticed, or at least approved, the soft trombones that sound so magical in La damoiselle élue and Pelléas, two of Ravel’s favourite works. Does a rearguard action against such intransigent deafness really seem so unlikely, given the way Ravel had been treated by the Conservatoire authorities? The sanest comment came from the Courrier de l’orchestre, which reckoned that for Ravel ‘his talent does not need the consecration of the Prix de Rome’.74 A fortnight later, it was Ravel’s friend Jean Marnold who raised the temperature with a virulent article in Le mercure musical, calling Paladilhe ‘a nothing’ and saying that it was a disgrace for such incompetents to be allowed to judge a musician of Ravel’s calibre. The next day the press announced that Fauré had been appointed the new director of the Conservatoire. The general assumption at the time and since has been that Dubois resigned as a direct result of l’affaire Ravel. This is untrue. As early as 12 March Le ménestrel announced Dubois’s impending retirement, and

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on 13 April he received details of his pension. On 22 May Le petit journal published the first expression of surprise at the competition results. The very next day Dubois sent in the necessary documents referring to his retirement at the end of the year. From this it would seem that Fauré’s entry into post on 1 October at most reflected an earlier retirement by Dubois than he originally planned, although the affaire may also have put an end to any hopes Lenepveu or Paladilhe had of becoming director. Perhaps the most important document to emerge from the fracas was Fauré’s declaration of directorial intent, published in Le Figaro on 14 June: ‘I should like to take a line that is both classical and modern, sacrificing neither contemporary practice to hallowed traditions, nor traditions to the fashion of the moment. Above all, I favour liberalism: I would not wish to exclude anything that has a serious contribution to make. I am not biased in favour of any school and there is no type of music I am inclined to ban, provided it is the outcome of a sincere and well-founded point of view.’75 That Ravel, in his view, had ‘a serious contribution to make’ was absolutely clear from the support he had given him over nearly a decade. Traditionally Ravel is portrayed as an unemotional and dignified observer of the uproar. ‘Covielle’, in a second article in Le matin of 22 June, recorded a conversation with the young composer which portrays him as dignified, but hardly as unemotional. Ravel mentions his second prize from 1901, Lenepveu’s unique presence on the jury out of the three professors, the fact that at thirty he cannot compete again, that indulgence on the part of the jury is not unknown since in 1901 they let a candidate go through to the concours who had not managed to finish his fugue, and that he possesses a document recommending the decision be revoked, signed by a majority of his fellow students. However he is not going to produce this, preferring not to compromise the signatories’ future careers. He concludes with a show of fatalism that ‘M. Dubois is on his way out, and M. Lenepveu could be arriving . . .’76 Towards the end of his life, Ravel had a different explanation for the fracas, telling Manuel Rosenthal that Saint-Saëns, presiding over the jury and with Ravel’s chorus in front of him, had remarked to his eminent colleagues, including Lenepveu: ‘But don’t you see that this young man is making fun of us? Look at this passage: it’s Lenepveu, and there, there’s a bit of Saint-Saëns, and Reyer, etc. He’s thumbing his nose at the lot of us and he’s certainly not going to get the Prix de Rome!’ Rosenthal remembered that ‘Ravel admired Saint-Saëns and was really rather proud that Saint-Saëns had spotted his joky insolence.’77 But there remains one possibility in the affaire that has never been considered because the evidence has not been available, namely the fatal crash of the ‘Tourbillon de la Mort’. Given the effect on the Ravel family, could Maurice seriously envisage leaving Paris for at least two years – that is, abandoning his mother, whom he loved most in the world, to cope alone with a traumatized husband and son, both of whom on that Easter Monday, 24 April, were appearing before the

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juge d’ instruction, quite possibly trying to head off a charge of criminal negligence?78 Simply withdrawing his entry would inevitably have drawn accusations of musical cowardice. Did he, then, deliberately ‘throw’ the competition? If so, it was obviously something he could never confide to anyone. But whatever the truth, he must have taken comfort in the fact that his actions influenced Fauré’s appointment; and that, in the years that followed, Fauré (now nicknamed ‘Robespierre’) began to turn the venerable Conservatoire upside down.

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CHAPTER III

1905–1908

Mirrors, birds and the supernatural The ten years after the affaire saw Ravel produce well over half his output, and of these the most prolific were the three considered in this chapter. One of his examiners, Xavier Leroux, who found some good in his 1905 chorus, had mentioned in 1901 that music seemed to pour out of him in abundance, and although Ravel regarded this remark with his usual wry humour (‘a curious fact has been revealed to me: namely that I possess a melodic tap in a place which you will allow me not to specify more clearly, and that from it music flows without any effort’1), until World War I his productivity was not usually a cause for concern. Only in 1911, over the final section of Daphnis et Chloé, did he first suffer from prolonged bouts of reappraisal. This fluency may have arisen partly from having acquired, by his thirties, a technique that would stand up to whatever strains he imposed on it, but partly from personal happiness. He had a reputation, good health, a future and, above all, friends. Immediately after the affaire, in early June, Ravel accepted an invitation to spend a holiday with Misia and Alfred Edwards on their yacht, Aimée (named as a pun on her initials, ME). The cruise took him through the waterways of France, Holland and Germany and finally on a sea voyage from Ostend to Le Havre. A welcome change from the feverish atmosphere of the preceding weeks, this holiday was remarkable for the visual stimuli it provided: the Exhibition at Liège, with pictures by Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Velázquez, the brightly-coloured houses of Amsterdam and, most impressive of all, windmills and factories. Ravel wrote to Delage on 29 June: ‘Yesterday excursion to Alkmaar. Cheesemarket with continual bell-ringing. On the way one of the most magnificent sights. A lake surrounded by windmills. Over the fields, windmills to the horizons. Whichever way you look you see nothing but turning sails. In front of this mechanical landscape, you end up thinking you are an automaton too. So I hardly need to tell you that I am not concentrating on anything. But I’m storing it all away and I think all sorts of things will come out of this cruise.’2 He wrote again on 5 July, as they sailed on the Rhine, of Haum which they had seen the day before: ‘a gigantic foundry where 24,000 men work day and night. . . . At dusk we disembarked to visit the factories. How can I describe to you these castles of flowing metal, these cathedrals of

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fire, the incredible symphony of conveyor belts, of whistles, of terrible hammer blows that enclosed us? Over it all a red, lowering, burning sky. . . . What music there is in it all! I have every intention of making use of it.’3 Sadly, the music inspired by it has not survived, from his unfinished opera La cloche engloutie, but his librettist André Ferdinand Hérold did leave a description of the decor for one tableau: ‘The scenes in the foundryman Henri’s workshop would have been especially powerful. Ravel did not envisage a small artisan’s workshop, but dreamt of a huge factory, equipped like the largest ones you see nowadays, and he would have used vast numbers of noises, of hammers, saws, scrapers and sirens.’4 A mention of Ida Godebska is almost the only clue Ravel gives that the other passengers were not total strangers to him. He says nothing, for instance, of Bonnard’s presence on board – maybe, as a regular member of the Godebski entourage, his presence was not worth noting. Even if Ravel was not ‘concentrating on anything’, it is clear he was being highly receptive to visual impressions. As Bonnard and his fellow artist Pierre Laprade were probably recording their own impressions on canvas, it is easy to understand Ravel’s indifference to them, intent as he was on assimilating the scenes for himself. One of the joys of this voyage was that he did not have to organize anything that involved timetables or trains – his normal travelling pattern was a farrago of hectic packing and missed connections. Even so he had to join the Aimée after the start of the voyage in order to finish a work commissioned by Erard, the instrument builders. The previous year the rival firm of Pleyel had commissioned Debussy to write music (Danses sacrée et profane) to show off their new ‘chromatic’ harp, which ‘dispensed with pedals and achieved full chromatic compass from two rows of strings which slanted across each other to make each row available to either hand.’5 This was, in effect, a development of the arpa doppia required for Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Erard’s riposte was to ask Ravel to write a work for harp that would demonstrate the superiority of their traditional model with pedals. Whether or not they were trying to exploit a rift in the Debussy/Ravel relationship is unknown, but for Erard the outcome was a success on all fronts, not least because ‘Debussy’s pieces are now commonly played on the pedal harp, and are in fact easier on this than on the chromatic harp for which they were conceived.’6 In a letter of 11 June to Jean Marnold, the critic of the Mercure musical (see p. 63), Ravel wrote: ‘Eight days of solid work and three sleepless nights allowed me to finish it, for better or worse!’7 The musical public has long decided that it was ‘for better’. Written for harp accompanied by flute, clarinet and string quartet, Introduction et Allegro belies its prosaic title. Ravel was possibly amusing himself (as he had in Sites auriculaires) by adopting Satie’s habits; Satie’s title Pièces froides is likewise not just uninformative, but actually misleading.

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From an aesthetic point of view the Introduction et Allegro may fairly be called a minor work, but technically it is more successful than the String Quartet in the metamorphosis of themes. The tension built up resolves into the harp cadenza, ‘where every pedal is used in all positions to demonstrate the instrument’s powers in quick modulations’.8 This in turn leads straight into the recapitulation, as in the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, where Ravel admired the composer’s method of making the recapitulation sound inevitable: there it is done by continuing the violin’s figuration over the structural break, here by the harp’s reminiscence of the Introduction, ending on a dominant chord which the recapitulation resolves to the tonic, exactly as at the start of the exposition. From this description the plainness of the title may seem appropriate, but an element of fantasy is provided by the scoring, and this is certainly what makes the most immediate impact on the listener. Fast double tonguing on the woodwind, cross-string arpeggios in the strings, harmonics and glissandi on the harp – all lend a discreet but powerful magic to the tightly-organized structure. Although a fastish waltz is the basis, Ravel’s favourite cross-rhythms are much in evidence, and these contrasts are echoed in that between the brittle, bell-like sounds of the harp and the softer-speaking instruments that surround it. We need hear the work only once to appreciate that the harp is the leader, often turning the argument its own way quite abruptly (as when the others lose themselves at figure 10), and that an oboe or bassoon would be alien to this original and beautiful sound-world. In a letter of 26 February 1911 to Inghelbrecht, who had asked about treating it as an orchestral piece, he replied that ‘it is not, strictly speaking, an orchestral piece . . . but it could be managed. The strings could be doubled or tripled. And, as long as you kept some passages as solos, that could sound even better than in the original.’9 Ravel returned to Paris from his seven-week cruise in the last week of July. As an escape from the Prix de Rome and from real life generally it had worked well. Only one thing had clouded his mental horizon, what he referred to obliquely in a letter to Delage of 12 July as ‘the mission’.10 Back in Paris on 9 August, he explained further to Ida Godebska: The first opportunity would be taken to entrust me with an apparent mission that will allow me to stay in Paris, or at least not to go too far away. A simple pretext to provide for me out of the budget, in short. On which question I go to see Gaveau, from whom I received a summons when I was in Amsterdam, as you know. And I learn that it was the said Gaveau . . . who had had this brilliant idea and suggested it to the Minister. Goodness, when I heard that, I couldn’t resist telling him how keen I was to go to the Orient, which he took note of. Naturally, on the way home I was already beginning to regret having spoken so hastily. And everything is conspiring to upset me. Yesterday evening I visited Mme Bénédictus, whose brother has recently

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been appointed an appeal judge in . . . Pondicherry! His letters full of ecstatic impressions: extraordinary atmosphere, motley crowds, palaces, elephants, monkeys, gazelles, Ceylon, Batavia, dash it all! The effect soon made itself felt: this morning I walked out of Constantinople station on to a terrace overlooking the Bosphorus. And as I was leaning over to look at a view which I was being assured was marvellous, someone came and woke me up.11

This suggests that word had gone out to ‘find Maurice a job’. The generosity of the Edwardses, and of Delage (whose parents were Ravel’s hosts this summer in Mary-sur-Marne, before they and Delage himself spent some days in Morgat, Roscoff and Saint-Quay-Portrieux), was no substitute for a living wage. From Ravel’s letter it looks as though he was hoping to receive such a wage for not doing very much. For the moment he resigned himself to staying in Paris. And ‘resigned’ was the mot juste. On 27 August 1905 he wrote from Portrieux: ‘for the first time in my life I have no desire to return to Paris, to the middle of that city of ambushes, hatred and calumnies, lying in wait for you as soon as you’ve been away for a matter of months. However long you’ve lived in that atmosphere of deceit, you’re always naïve enough to be disillusioned by friends and even by people you don’t care about.’12 A week later he confessed to Ida Godebska that he was ‘convalescing from a crisis of morale of the blackest kind’.13 The gloom may have been induced by the lack of a job; or even, now that the affaire Ravel had run its course, of no longer being in the public eye. Another possible cause is mentioned in the letter of 27 August: ‘I’ve finally begun that symphony I’ve been thinking about for 2 years.’ No more is known of this project until a letter of March 1908. On a happier note, he also writes that in the few days he spent in Paris between trips he finished the Sonatine – and with this work began one of the most important professional relationships of his career. Auguste Durand (1830–1909) had been a pupil of Saint-Saëns and an organist before going into partnership in 1870 with the publisher Schoenewerk and buying up the stock of another, Maison Flaxland. Understandably, Saint-Saëns’s works made up a considerable part of the catalogue of Durand & Fils, but on 17 July 1905 a contract was agreed that they should become the exclusive publishers of the music of Saint-Saëns’s bête noire, Claude Debussy. Auguste’s son Jacques (1865–1928), had been a fellow student of Debussy’s at the Conservatoire and, although he did not officially assume joint control of the business until 1909, it seems likely that it was through him that Ravel was also offered a contract in 1905, for first refusal on all his future compositions. Despite needing the money, Ravel would accept only half Durand’s offer of 12,000 francs a year, ‘so as not to risk feeling compelled to turn out a greater amount of music’.14 On 16 September he signed a specific contract authorizing Durand to publish the Sonatine, which they did on 23 November to the tune of 500 copies.15 Whatever the state of his finances, it can hardly have been solely the 100 francs prize money that decided Ravel to follow Calvocoressi’s suggestion in

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1904 and enter an international competition for the first movement of a piano Sonatine. An Anglo-French magazine called the Weekly Critical Review was promoting this, but as it drifted towards bankruptcy the competition was cancelled. Ravel was left as the sole entrant.16 Strangest of all, Ravel’s movement was longer than the specified length of seventy-five bars – he did not usually break the rules of the game once he had made up his mind to play. What had begun as an exercise in adapting his style to sonata form took on a life of its own, and the other two movements, as mentioned above, were completed by August 1905. As with Introduction et Allegro, we should not let his limited aesthetic aims blind us to his mastery of technique which, as in so many of his works, lifts the expressive level beyond those aims, even despite them. As Stravinsky said: ‘We always find at the source of invention something irrational, over which the spirit of submission has not gained control and which escapes from its constraint – what André Gide has so well expressed in his dictum that the classical work is only beautiful by virtue of its suppressed romanticism.’17 The clearest example of this is the pp subito in the third bar (Ex. 3.1). Ravel pulls on the reins and, knowing now that he has tamed the first mettlesome impulse of his inspiration, allows the phrase the second time to expand. Modéré



    

doux et expressif

B  5

p[



    

4

4

5

5

 

 

                                1



 

]



1



 



B





2



 

  5

4

1



4

5

4

 

1 

2



  



  

  [  ]                  



3 sub. pp [

        2 

1



 

   

                        mf

]  





           

        

5         [ ]              4                                    



  



    













 

Example 3.1. Ravel, opening of Sonatine





 

2

1

2



 

 



 







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Dynamics are supremely important, throughout the first movement in particular. As Vlado Perlemuter says,18 at the a tempo before the double bar pianists rarely make enough of the sighing diminuendo on to the first beat of the bar, without which the phrase comes out as wooden and trite. When, at the beginning of the development, the phrase is repeated lower and at a uniform pp dynamic we feel an inexorable movement forward, a kind of urgent floating, that accords well with the traditional mood at this juncture of the form. Melodically, the Sonatine derives from the Introduction et Allegro and through it from the String Quartet, and the perfect fourth is a notable feature in all three movements. It was first performed by Paule de Lestang, the partner and future wife of the critic Léon Vallas, on 10 March 1906 in Lyon, and was well received. But when Gabriel Grovlez gave the first Paris performance exactly three weeks later there were grumbles about its technical difficulties, and one critic voiced what was to be a perennial complaint about Ravel’s music, that it was well-written and charming, but lacking in emotion.19 It was a work Ravel later played on foreign tours, being just about within his technical grasp; although Perlemuter remembered turning pages for him during the last movement and not knowing where it might be tactful to do so.20 The composer’s friend and interpreter Jacques Février believed that the omnipresent perfect fourth represented the word ‘maman’ – as in the final bar of L’Enfant et les sortilèges – and when teaching the piece would always demand a pleading accent on the upper note.21 Another friend, the conductor Manuel Rosenthal, remembered being present at a play-through, towards the end of Ravel’s life, of an arrangement of the Sonatine by Carlos Salzedo for flute, cello and harp. The composer was ill by that time and found speaking difficult, but he went to the piano to indicate how the first phrase of the first movement should be played. Salzedo exclaimed, ‘But it’s Massenet!’ Ravel managed to reply, ‘Of course.’22 He told Henriette Faure that the last movement, by far the most difficult of the three, should be played almost throughout ‘without prudence or mercy’.23 At some point in 1905 Ravel made his debut as an author, writing both words and music for the little song Noël des jouets. Each of the five verses has its topic: the sheep in the toy crèche, the Virgin Mary in her crinoline (more echoes of Massenet), the sinister dog Beelzebub lurking (low major seconds) to eat up baby Jesus who is made of coloured sugar, the final adoration ending with the word ‘Noël!’ It is hardly a major work but undeniably charming. Most of his energies in the autumn of 1905 were absorbed in completing the piano suite Miroirs, to say nothing of the latest family house-move, this time to the rue Chevallier in the north-western suburb of Levallois (now rue Louis Rouquier). We know the completion dates of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’ and of ‘Noctuelles’ (May and October 1905 respectively), but not of the other three, although Viñes and Calvocoressi (see p. 43) record hearing Ravel play (an early version of?) ‘Oiseaux tristes’ a year earlier.24 Viñes found Ravel correcting the

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proofs of the whole set on Christmas Eve 1905.25 In an autobiographical sketch dictated in 1928 Ravel said: ‘The Miroirs form a collection of pieces for piano which mark a change in my harmonic development pronounced enough to have upset those musicians who till then had had the least trouble in appreciating my style.’26 This development is most noticeable in ‘Noctuelles’ and ‘La vallée des cloches’, the first and last of the set, and consists largely of a new boldness in the placing and spacing of dissonant appoggiaturas. They suggest marvellously the undecided fluttering and wheeling of the moths (noctuelles), but this realism is achieved at the expense of orthodox harmonic practice (Ex. 3.2). [ = 128 environ] poco rubato

 

  

  







 p 















             









           

 



  

  

 





         

 







 

 









               





 





















  

pp très léger

ff 

   

            

 

















Example 3.2. Ravel, ‘Noctuelles’, bars 117–20

Here too, we see the characteristically opposing rhythms of the hands as the climax approaches. At this point, on the two-hand trill, the hands unite and a post-Lisztian cascade is a balancing disintegration of this climax as well as representing some kind of extreme activity in the moth world. The piece is dedicated to one of the composer’s closest friends, the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and was inspired by his lines, ‘Les noctuelles des hangars partent, d’un vol gauche, Cravater d’autres poutres’ (The nocturnal moths launch themselves clumsily from their barns, to settle on other perches). Fargue was, like moths and indeed Ravel himself, a nocturnal animal and the two men were still going for long night rambles through Paris in the early 1930s.27 Perhaps not too much should be made of the positioning of this piece at the head of the set; but Vuillermoz remembered that Fargue’s ‘most casual remarks had an authority about them’,28 so probably he was to some degree responsible for guiding the Apaches’ aesthetic progress.

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In his autobiographical sketch Ravel goes on to say: ‘The earliest of these pieces to be written, and the most typical of all to my way of thinking, is the second of the set, “Oiseaux tristes”. It evokes birds lost in the oppressiveness of a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer.’ What exactly Ravel meant by ‘typical’ we shall probably never know. It is in fact untypical of the set as a whole in its very free structure. In all the others a considerable amount of material is repeated, either at pitch or transposed, but in ‘Oiseaux tristes’ there is no repetition except of bars 7–9 (21–3) and even here the basic transposition down a semitone is not followed in the harmonic detail. The logic of the piece is sustained purely by the repeated B flat and the following arabesque, suggested to Ravel by a blackbird’s song.29 Roland-Manuel recounts a relevant story: One evening, when Ricardo Viñes had been to present his interpretation of D’un cahier d’esquisses to the celebrated composer [Debussy] of this littleknown piece, he arrived at the rue de Civry full of what he had heard: Debussy had declared to him that he was dreaming of a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound improvised, of works which would seem to have been torn out of a sketchbook. Ravel was present at the gathering. Quite unexpectedly he approved of the idea and confessed that the music he was working on was based on similar principles: ‘I shall be glad’, he said, ‘to produce something to set me free from Jeux d’eau’.30

It is possible that in fact Debussy played D’un cahier d’esquisses to Viñes rather than the other way round.31 But this does not affect Ravel’s approval of the principle behind the piece, and he was to give its first public performance six years later. Ravel emphasized the importance of distinguishing two levels in the texture of ‘Oiseaux tristes’: ‘the bird calls on a high, rather strident level, with rapid arabesques, and by contrast, the sombre, stifling atmosphere of the forest on a lower level, rather heavy and muted, with a lot of pedal but not much movement’.32 Talking about the beginning of the last page, he said ‘ad libitum does not, as some pianists think, mean “all over the place” (en désordre) – and to keep them on the straight and narrow I’ve written presque ad libitum’,33 while his ironic sense of humour shows up in the dedication to Viñes: ‘It was fun to inscribe to a pianist a piece that was not in the least pianistic.’34 To escape the artifices of mankind, Ravel turned in the first three of these Miroirs to the natural world; to moths, birds and the ocean. But the sea never had the appeal for him that it had for Debussy, whereas he was a great bird lover and could imitate their songs with extraordinary precision. In the piano roll he made of ‘Oiseaux tristes’, he plays the beginning arabesque faster than written so that in bar 8, for instance, he arrives on the B flat well before the third quaver. Without a doubt, the result is more birdlike than the rhythm as

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RAVEL

published. The power, too, of the opening repeated note is uncanny: note how the final phrase is arrived at simply by the force of the repeated D sharps in the previous three bars – there is no other reason why a diatonic eleventh chord on A natural should lead to E flat minor. The third piece, ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, is the longest, and the most conventional in texture, which is that of Jeux d’eau writ large. It is as well to make clear that, being finished in May, it had nothing to do with the Aimée cruise, nor with Debussy’s La mer, which was not performed until 15 October. The arpeggios, moving up and down the keyboard almost throughout, and the multiple trills in the extreme treble both inevitably recall Liszt’s grand manner, while the combined triads of F sharp minor and C sharp minor in the upper and middle register bring to the rippling demisemiquavers a distinctly bitter nostalgia missing from Jeux d’eau. There are themes but they never get very far. In the first ten bars the same figuration is repeated ten times in both hands, and the promised melody that emerges from the left and right thumbs turns out to be only an inversion of the right hand motif, serving a purely textural, not structural, purpose. The pedal is supremely important in controlling the great washes of sound, and although Ravel made an orchestral version of the piece, it did not please him. Written in the late summer of 1906 and given its only performance in Ravel’s lifetime on 3 February 1907, it prompted this report two days later from Gaston Carraud, critic of La liberté: ‘like a succession of colours imposed on a drawing barely sketched. . . . Unfortunately the view changes every moment . . . a confusing kaleidoscope and we cannot even tell what kind of weather prevails on this ocean.’ As Ravel no doubt concluded, the piece looks totally orchestral on paper but depends in fact on the interaction of different registers inside the same sound box so that the thumbed phrase already mentioned draws its strength from the sounds on either side of it, and neither oboe, cor anglais nor muted trumpet can match the resonance of the original timbre. In the words of Messiaen, ‘there exists an orchestral kind of piano writing which is more orchestral than the orchestra itself and which, with a real orchestra, it is impossible to realize’.35 ‘Alborada del gracioso’, the most often played of the five pieces, marks the onset of the Spanish fever that was to grip Ravel over the next two years. Following in the steps of Domenico Scarlatti, he turns the keyboard instrument into a huge guitar. Nearer to Ravel’s own time, the popularity of Spanish idioms in French music, at least since Carmen, was obviously important, and probably Chabrier’s España was a particular influence: Ravel and Viñes heard it together on 5 February 1905, sitting in Misia Edwards’s box.36 Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque might have lent its repeated notes, and of course at the back of Ravel’s mind were always the songs he had heard at his mother’s knee.37 Marcel Marnat further suggests a literary source, the ‘Sérénade’ from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, featuring a lady on her balcony wooed by a distinctly unsuccessful suitor.38 But the most solid literary evidence is to be

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found in a letter of 14 September 1907 from Ravel to Ferdinand Sinzig of Steinway and Sons in New York: I understand your bafflement over how to translate the title ‘Alborada del gracioso’; precisely why I decided not to translate it. The fact is that the gracioso of Spanish comedy is a rather special character and one which, so far as I know, is not found in any other theatrical tradition. We do have some sort of equivalent in the French theatre: Beaumarchais’s Figaro. But he’s more philosophical, less well-meaning than his Spanish ancestor. The simplest thing, I think, is to follow the title with the rough translation ‘Morning Song of the Clown’ [Aubade du bouffon]. That will be enough to explain the piece’s humoristic style.39

There has been some polite argument over whether the piece’s Spanishness is specifically Andalusian or Castilian. Henriette Faure, as a non-Spaniard, may have been wise to say that it is a mixture.40 Nonetheless, there is convincing evidence that the outer sections, whose Phrygian modality is undeniably Andalusian, are really in the style of a seguidilla, enclosing a central copla, and that Ravel’s decision to abandon the traditional 3/8 time signature of the seguidilla in favour of longer bar lengths explains why these are irregular (6/8 and 9/8). The piece also has strong claims to be a forerunner of ‘La sérénade interrompue’ from Debussy’s first book of Préludes.41 It reminds us ‘how much the composer liked to go right up to the limits of what is tolerable’,42 and has long been regarded with terror by pianists, especially as they have to perform it on modern pianos with heavier repetition than the Erards that Ravel and Viñes both favoured. In its treatment of staccato, repeated notes and glissandi, both single and double – which Ravel could do wonderfully well, probably because of his squarish thumbs – it is really three studies rolled into one. But Faure relays good news in that Ravel regarded the execution of the repeated notes as less important than that of the glissandi, ‘which by interrupting the repeated notes reduce them to a secondary role.’ At the same time Ravel told Perlemuter that he ‘preferred a good single-note glissando to a bad double-note one’ and Gaby Casadesus that she could ‘play them in single notes, or with your nose if you want.’43 But good double-note ones were understandably his favourite: Viñes records in his diary on 13 April 1908 that the composer intends to write a letter to the critic Léon Vallas defending the pianist against Vallas’s charge that his glissandi were fudged.44 At all events, the tempo must be implacable.45 As in his first Spanish piece, the ‘Habanera’ of Sites auriculaires, Ravel delights in exploiting the clash of a single note against the combined semitones on either side of it (e.g. F sharp against F natural and G natural) to imitate the subacid tones of the guitar. The piece is also full of passages where pianists have to prepare a careful balletic scenario for each hand if they are not to end up like Alice’s ball of wool. Formally it is a straightforward enough ABA. The central

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section is a mock-melancholy recitative in which luxuriously spaced harmonies replace traditionally functional cadences – an idea that comes off particularly well in the orchestral version Ravel made in 1918, with solo bassoon answered by divided strings. Once more the ‘recapitulation’ reappears in mid-stream (at a point equivalent to bar 33 of the ‘exposition’) and once more it follows the practice of sonata form in being pitched a fifth lower (B flat/E flat), even if neither key is especially close to the tonic D major. The last thirty-four bars are surely one of the most exciting codas in all French piano music. The ideas tumble over themselves in their haste to be heard, and after their fifth denial in the form of piano or pianissimo subito the final climax is all the more powerful. The last piece of the set, ‘La vallée des cloches’, contains a rich, romantic tune in its central section; otherwise it is a marvel of small, fragmented phrases and carefully gauged sonorities, with the outer sections are built entirely from the sounds of bells (Ex. 3.3). The five sets of bells are superimposed with great metric freedom, the whole welded together by the interval of the perfect fourth that dominates two of them. Très lent ( = 50)



 

    



   



 

pp

 

 pp       

 



   





 





très doux et sans accentuation

        

 





 

  



      

    

 

  

    



 



 



     

p un peu marqué





  

mf

  





 



   







p

  

Example 3.3. Ravel, opening of ‘La vallée des cloches’

Ravel once complimented Charles Oulmont on a performance of these pieces by saying, ‘Bravo! This evening you showed us my “mirrors” and not distorting ones. That doesn’t always happen!’46 Indeed, the Miroirs probably encourage a greater diversity of interpretation than any other of his piano works. It is

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not a question of notes. Ravel’s own performance of ‘La vallée des cloches’ on piano rolls is extremely inaccurate in the rhythms of the outer sections, where he prolongs the semiquaver bells. It is more a question of the suppressed romanticism, transmissible to an audience by nuances of touch and pedalling. In our own day, he would possibly have written those semiquavers in some kind of open-ended notation in accord with that improvisatory quality he had approved in D’un cahier d’esquisses. At the same time his instructions to Henriette Faure over the general character and colouring of ‘La vallée des cloches’ were most precise: Ravel was merciless about my playing of this piece, which he condemned as heavy and unvaried in timbre. At the opening, he tried to get me to play the carillon of double semiquavers in the right hand, and the more settled sound of the high octave bells that punctuate them in the left, on two very distinct levels. And the whole thing had to remain within a pianissimo which he could, in some mysterious way, achieve without it sounding feeble. The insinuating character of the high left-hand octaves means that one mustn’t use the wrist, which would only over-ink the sketch. The great, calm, lyrical outpouring [of the central section], on the other hand, requires a profound sonority and a legato that comes from a hand closely wedded to the keys, and from a weight of arm that one ideally gets from sitting rather low at the keyboard. Ravel, like Liszt indeed, used to sit low at the piano. Liszt in his day had made a low stool a profession of faith. ‘If you sit too high,’ he used to say to his pupils, ‘even if you have the soul of an angel, nothing profound or expressive can be produced.’47

In an addendum to his autobiographical sketch, Ravel addressed the question of what the title Miroirs portends – and we can discern here a slight testiness over the tendency of critics to resort to hand-me-down formulae: The title Miroirs . . . has authorized my critics to consider this collection as being among those works that belong to the Impressionist movement. I do not contradict this at all, if one understands the term by analogy. A rather fleeting analogy, at that, since Impressionism does not seem to have any precise meaning outside the domain of painting. In any case, the word ‘mirror’ should not lead one to assume that I want to affirm a subjectivist theory of art. A sentence by Shakespeare helped me to formulate a completely opposite position: ‘the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things’ (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2).48

If this phrase of Brutus’s strikes us as somewhat perplexing in a Ravelian context, lines spoken by Cassius shortly after may offer some illumination: ‘And since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your

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glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of.’ We may ask therefore, are the Miroirs a glass in which to read Ravel’s own character? His identity as a night animal is already established. Are we to think of him also as a solitary singer lost in some kind of forest? A creative artist afloat on a sea of passion? A good-humoured jester but, being human, one for whom ultimately the bell tolls? Such ideas may seem fanciful, and maybe he meant only that the Miroirs represented technical and aesthetic challenges he needed to face in order to find out his own capabilities, before embarking on any more ambitious project. Certainly four out of the five subjects – insects, birds, humour and bells – were to tempt him in future works. Only the sea remained closed to further exploration, whether owing to the failed orchestration of ‘Une barque’, or because he realized La mer was an impossible act to follow. Viñes gave the first performance of Miroirs at a Société nationale concert on 6 January 1906 (his diary records ‘un succès monstre’) and ‘Alborada’ was encored. Most of the critics, though not all, were impressed, with Camille Mauclair coming closer to the heart of Ravel than many: Ravel . . . brings off the charming, paradoxical miracle of persuading us to accept this imitative harmony which we had numbered among the ancient errors of musical aesthetics . . . Truly, we are in the presence of an art that was not even foreseeable a few years ago. But I don’t know what this art is likely to produce. I fear it will take us back to those dangerous, wearisome exercises in virtuosity for its own sake: because Ravel’s music is full of tenderness, emotion and ideas, but it conceals all that beneath a surface of flashing, kaleidoscopic precious stones, which few hands will set in motion without believing that this glitter is the be-all and end-all of their activity. The demands on technical dexterity here are such that we are led to think, not so much of any classical mastery of the instrument, as of the tricksy charm of Japanese jugglers.49

Ravel might not have approved the reference to ‘imitative harmony’, but otherwise Mauclair’s ability to see beneath the surface was a welcome antidote to critics such as Bouyer, who classed the Miroirs with Debussy’s Images as ‘the nec plus ultra of independent, capriciously excavated arabesque’ (!), or Joseph de Marliave (recently married to Ravel’s future interpreter Marguerite Long), who reacted against what he called ‘iced Debussy’ and complained that, ‘instead of getting close to his sources, of surrounding himself with nature and opening his eyes and heart to it, M. Ravel seems to have taken the cold surface of his mirror away to his laboratory; and there, crouched over it, he dissects and examines through a magnifying glass the artificial images he discerns there’.50 Pierre Lalo, predictably, was not pleased and furthermore thought he detected plagiarism, in the third and last pieces, of Séverac’s piano suite En Languedoc, to be premiered by Viñes at the Société nationale on 3 February 1906, albeit ‘a very

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distant echo and one transposed into another mode’.51 Ravel wrote next day to Séverac with tongue-in-cheek apologies ‘for plagiarizing you (Lalo dixit). But really that’s not my fault. Also, how was I supposed to know that there could be such similarities between an ocean-going vessel and a village fête?!!’52 Perhaps the most surprising response was found at the end of a eulogistic review by Ravel’s friend Jean Marnold: ‘Coming after the picturesqueness of Jeux d’eau, the romantic grace of the Quartet and the sparkling exoticism of ‘Asie’, the Miroirs make a very similar impact to the sudden revelation of Kreisleriana in the work of Schumann . . . I have been assured . . . that at the very moment of their gestation [Ravel] was, by his own admission, passionately absorbed in the works of Beethoven, the late, last-period Beethoven.’53 Unlikely as this may seem, it is perhaps no more so than an interest in Julius Caesar. . . . In the autumn of 1905 Ravel had added three songs to two of those already written (see p. 51) to make up the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, and these were performed by Marguerite Babaïan, Louis Laloy’s sister-in-law, at a lecture recital on Greek popular song presented by Calvocoressi on 28 April 1906. The first song, ‘La chanson de la mariée’, was correctly retitled by Ravel when he orchestrated it 30 years later as ‘Le réveil de la mariée’ (which might vulgarly be translated as ‘The Bride’s Wake-up Call’). The Phrygian modality of the original (G minor with A flat) suggested to Ravel not just an occasional A flat major chord, but a succession of five chords in which the frisson between A flat and G minor is intensified by chromatic harmonies. The skill, or genius, lies not merely in knowing what the melodic line suggests – an everyday gift – but in divining to what degree one can supersede these suggestions, without doing violence to the original or having tune and accompaniment simply fall apart. ‘Là-bas, vers l’église’, also on a Phrygian tune, celebrates villagers buried in the local cemetery, and the final words, ‘du monde tous les plus braves’, suggest they were killed in battle (singers be warned: the English translation on the Durand piano score bears no relation to the true meaning of the text!). Here Ravel keeps the harmony simple, within the Phrygian mode, and confines the bass to tonic, subdominant and dominant. With wonderful economy, the spread chords in the right hand evoke bells. The final song, ‘Tout gai’, is in a tonal A flat major, with not an accidental in sight, and the slight variations in the second of the two verses are just enough to preclude predictability. According to Manuel Rosenthal, ‘one of [Ravel’s] compositional principles was to forbid all identical repetition: it was always necessary to introduce something new (a harmony, a modification of the rhythm, an orchestral colour)’ and Ravel held it against both Debussy and Poulenc that they employed what he called ‘le style bègue’ (the stuttering style).54 These songs were, with the Introduction et Allegro and the Sonatine, the first of Ravel’s compositions accepted by Durand; Miroirs, published in the summer of 1906 by Demets,55 had been accepted by that publisher before the Durand contract came through.

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RAVEL

At some point in 1905 the Ravels moved again to 11bis rue Chevallier in the north-western suburb of Levallois-Perret. From this we may deduce that after the Tourbillon disaster, although Pierre-Joseph was still working, he was glad to be spared the journey from central Paris, and perhaps also to escape the notoriety and possible blame the crash had brought him. The first three months of 1906 saw three first performances of Ravel’s music: Viñes played Miroirs at the Société nationale on 6 January, Paule de Lestang played the Sonatine in Lyon on 10 March and Jane Bathori, accompanied by Ravel, sang Noël des jouets on 24 March. Also, on 31 March, Gabriel Grovlez gave the first Paris performance of the Sonatine. Buoyed by these encouragements, Ravel may perhaps be forgiven for flexing his muscles on a couple of issues. On 5 February he wrote the open letter to Lalo already quoted (p. 41) over the new ground broken by Jeux d’eau; the previous day he had finally severed relations with his class of young bourgeois students, in a missive addressed through a third party that left them in no doubt of his feelings: Mademoiselle, On receiving your first letter I was, I confess, slightly offended by the kind of behaviour one normally reserves for a manservant rather than for a teacher, whatever his artistic talents. But, now that you have informed me that this was my pupils’ unanimous decision, I am nonplussed. So this is the recompense for the efforts which, for nearly 2 years and in a wholly disinterested manner, I have been making to try and arouse musical ideas in people who were not really interested. I did sometimes arrive late for my classes but, not once, did I find a full complement of students, which would strictly speaking have been polite. The time of the lesson, initially agreed by everyone as being Sunday morning, was changed a number of times on various pretexts: high masses, courses at the Sorbonne or oversleeping. I now see that I was too indulgent in allowing the students to come and go as they pleased, very often with no work done. I had some hope that the only reason for this was that their original ideas were so threadbare, and that the study of composition proper would make them more assiduous. And now . . . because I forgot the final change of date for a class, I am treated in this insolent fashion! The financial advantages accruing from this course will, thank God, not lead me to regret being freed from pupils who are so . . . ungrateful. The presence of ladies among them prevents me from employing a stronger term.56

Here for once, beneath the velvet jacket and the bohemian whiskers, is the flash of steel, not unmixed with a certain peevishness; the tone of someone who, modesty and jokes aside, is absolutely aware of his own worth, as man and artist, albeit rather insistent on what he feels to be his due. If such glimpses of the inner Ravel are rarely vouchsafed, we may cite his pudeur or modesty, but also the plain fact that as he grew older and more famous, people became

1905–1908: MIRRORS, BIRDS AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

(a)

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

(b) 8 Ravel’s angry letter, 4 Feb 1906

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increasingly wary of trespassing on his privacy or taking advantage of his kindness. Once we are alive to his fond of aggression, already evident in his behaviour over the Prix de Rome, we can see it surface quite regularly until the First World War, and sporadically thereafter. Nor is aggression the only unappealing facet of this letter, taken in context. A mere four days later he could write to Jane Courteault, ‘Materially, my life is working out very well at the moment. . . . For a start there are lessons, too well paid to be abandoned’.57 Maybe his show of temper was something he wanted to hide from his old friend. And while we are considering some of the rather less estimable sides of Ravel’s character, we duly learn from this same letter that he had entirely failed to tell Jane of his mother’s accident nearly a year earlier, when ‘she had fallen off a rather high stepladder and ruptured blood vessels in her leg. This has meant her being absolutely immobile for many months and even now she is still hobbling.’ His excuse was that ‘I really thought I’d told you all about that, but I’ve had such a hectic year, I can partly be forgiven.’ Nor does he mention that on 16 January Edouard and his father had filed the ‘tourbillon de la mort’ with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (patent no. 810303), presumably in an attempt to sell it to some American entrepreneur and be free of the associated distressing memories. His brain was still teeming with ideas for new works. But, if Miroirs was truly a testing ground, and given the success of its first performances, Ravel showed new confidence in planning over the longer term and not hurrying his ideas. Some of them never led to finished works. Others took time. Whether or not the genesis of La valse, not completed till 1920, derives from his visit to the Opéra ball in January 1905, it certainly goes back to this year of 1906 when he wrote to Jean Marnold on the subject of the waltz: ‘You know my intense feeling for these marvellous rhythms; I find a deeper expression of the enjoyment of life in the dance than in Franckist Puritanism. . . . I am well aware what is in store for me at the hands of the acolytes of neo-Christianity but I’m not bothered.’58 Five months later he was proud to tell Misia Edwards that the conductor Edouard Colonne had asked him for a new work to play that winter, and that he was thinking of ‘Vienne’, which he proposed to dedicate to her.59 Another idea, this time one that never came to fruition, was a setting of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die versunkene Glocke, translated by André Ferdinand Hérold as La cloche engloutie, a copy of which he found on a bookstall on the quais.60 To Ravel, with his love of the fantastic, there was enormous appeal in this story of Heinrich, the bell-founder, who deserts his wife at the summons of the fairy Rautendelein. Maybe it resonated with the story of the Ursuline convent drowned in the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz in 1782. Elves, witches and watersprites are on every hand – the water creature Nickelmann, who has read his Aristophanes, intones ‘Brekekekex! Quax!’ – and some of the music later appeared in L’Enfant et les sortilèges, notably the bell sounds at the beginning of Act II of La cloche, which were refashioned as the opening of the later opera.61

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Ravel wrote to Delage on 12 June: ‘For two weeks now I’ve been at it full stretch. I have never worked with such furious energy. Well yes, at Compiègne [for the Prix de Rome], but that wasn’t so much fun. Writing a dramatic work is an exciting business.’62 Two other interesting features can be gleaned from the surviving sketches. In the ‘Chanson de Rautendelein’ (Ex. 3.4a) we see Ravel inventing his own folksong (a skill he later praised in Poulenc, to that composer’s delight63). In the way of folksongs, the tune circles round central notes: G sharp in the first two bars, then A sharp, before settling on a climactic low C sharp. ∗

Chanson de Rautendelein

          



           



     



 

























 

 



 3                















     



















 









 

 



 

 



















 











 













 

* 2 blank bars inserted here



HENRI

  



  

      

C'est bien, c'est bien

   

 











por - te_on peut



Pour - tant 

3







voir

la

pe - tite







  



 





ce - ci m'é - tonn(e)

 

é -





   



3





  

V[ou]s sa - vez que, de ma 3







glis(e)

sur

la













mon- tagn(e)

Examples 3.4a and b. Ravel, sketches for La cloche engloutie

The second extract (Ex. 3.4b), sung by Henri (Heinrich), points forward in the descending fourths that end both phrases, and in the treatment of ‘étonne’, ‘église’ and ‘montagne’ as two-syllable words, with final mute ‘e’s elided (see pp. 85ff.; the note values of the first bar of Ex. 3/4b are clearly adrift, but are reproduced as they appear on the microfilm: BnF Mus. Vm. micr. 734). A letter to Léon Vallas on 8 April contains what is probably the first mention of a third project, like La cloche engloutie destined never to be completed: ‘I’m abandoning piano writing for the moment and, apart from a concerto, the only works I have in prospect are orchestral or operatic.’64 This concerto could well have been Zazpiak-Bat (The Seven [Provinces are] One), a piano concerto on

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Basque themes that still lay on his worktable in 1913. According to Gustave Samazeuilh, Ravel could not find a satisfactory idea for the expressive central movement. Samazeuilh also fancies that some of the first and last movements found their way into the corresponding sections of the G major Concerto.65 However, Domenico de’ Paoli, who discussed the work with Ravel in 1922, recalls that it was to be in one movement consisting of seven episodes, each one referring to one of the seven Basque provinces (all said to be visible from La Rhune, which Ravel often climbed, near St-Jean-de-Luz), and that he eventually realized the irreductibilité (intractability) of such material as a basis for extended composition.66 Yet a fourth unfulfilled project was a setting of Maeterlinck’s sombre domestic tragedy Intérieur, of which no more is heard. Work on La cloche engloutie continued with interruptions through the summer and all the indications are that this was to be a full-scale opera: Delage later remembered it was to be in three or five acts,67 while Roland-Manuel’s 1914 biography refers to a work-in-progress in four acts and five scenes.68 July was also notable for a meeting between Ravel and Willy, whose sour remarks about the overture Shéhérazade had possibly continued to rankle. ‘Yesterday evening’, Ravel confided to Delage, ‘at [Henri] Février’s house, touching reconciliation between Maurice Ravel and Gauthier-Villars. It’s true we didn’t fall into each other’s arms in floods of tears! But anyway, it passed off very easily. He made the first move, I made another’.69 There is no way of knowing from this account whether Ravel had decided Willy was too important to have ranged against him, or whether Willy felt that Ravel was, after all, the coming man – perhaps as a result of following Willy’s advice to put in the hard work. In either case, the rapprochement was made visible in print the very next day in ‘my puff in L’écho de Paris. In addition, a letter to Viñes in which the illustrious critic declares himself “charmed by my excellent grace and wit”.’70 An especially sweet emblem of his new standing in the world manifested itself in the form of an invitation from Fauré to sit on the jury for the counterpoint examinations at the Conservatoire, as we learn from a passing reference in a letter to Ida Godebska.71 This was just one of Fauré’s many decisions designed to bring new life into dusty corridors; elderly teachers were cast out and teaching programmes transformed. He went as far as to abolish his own composition class in favour of two classes of counterpoint and fugue – it might well have been the exercises of one of these that Ravel was asked to examine – and turned a sharp and largely censorious eye on the singing classes.72 The ‘aggressive’ Ravel, without a teaching post, was no doubt happy to lend his support to the carnage. With Ravel’s career beginning to take off, it was unkind of fate to choose this moment to decree a sharp decline in his father’s health. Promises of a holiday in Pierre-Joseph’s native Switzerland had to be postponed until mid-August because of a slight cerebral haemorrhage he had suffered in his sleep around early June. Before this he had been seriously depressed, a condition probably

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brought on by the disaster of the somersaulting car, and he was led to believe this was the cause of his chronic exhaustion. Ravel wrote to Jane Courteault: I’ll go with him on my own; a stay of this sort would be too expensive for four people. My poor Mama is not too well either. Arthritis has struck her injured leg and she’s limping pitiably. That’s the news from here: as you see, not very jolly. As for me, I go on working. I’m encouraged by the critics’ response. From time to time I receive most enthusiastic articles . . . even from America. I’m happy particularly for my parents’ sake, as every article brings them new pleasure . . . In your letters, don’t make too much of my father’s condition. Only mention ‘neurasthenia’, so I can show them to him.73

Ravel stayed with his father at Hermance on Lake Geneva from around the middle of August until 20 September. Back in Paris in October he put the finishing touches to his orchestration of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, with the intention of returning to La cloche engloutie after that. He enjoined Ida Godebska not to miss seeing the Gauguins at the Salon d’automne74 and although he makes no mention of Diaghilev’s exhibition of Russian art which also formed part of the Salon, at Calvocoressi’s on 23 October 1906 he and Viñes did meet Walter Nouvel, Diaghilev’s secretary.75 Was this where Daphnis began? Ravel’s date of 1907 in his autobiographical sketch for the first outline of the ballet, though regularly ‘corrected’ by scholars to 1909, may after all be true.76 For all his grand ideas, the only finished work from the latter half of 1906 was on a less exalted level, even if the response was highly charged. As we have seen, in Shéhérazade he had followed Debussy’s Pelléas in attempting to set to music the inflection of spoken French, but whatever his success in that, the scale of the orchestration so heightens the effect of the whole that we respond to the broad melodic shaping of the vocal line rather than its detail. The example above from La cloche engloutie (Ex. 3.4b) indicates that he was experimenting with a less conventional, more popular style of word-setting, although it must remain doubtful how much of this style would have been audible in an opera house. But in October 1906, in addition to working on La cloche engloutie and on the unsuccessful orchestration of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, he began the song-cycle Histoires naturelles for voice and piano on prose poems by Jules Renard.77 This set of five songs marks an important step in Ravel’s evolution, as significant as those of Jeux d’eau and Miroirs. It was not just that he pushed to extremes his concern with spoken language, even though this was far from incidental to the overall effect; rather that in this work he, now accepted as a composer of outstanding gifts, openly questioned the barrier set up in France between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ music. On one side stood the composers of the Schola Cantorum, d’Indy, Dukas and Roussel; the opera composers such as Massenet and Charpentier and, at that time, Debussy (whose well-known ‘popular’ works like ‘Golliwogg’s Cake

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Walk’, ‘Général Lavine’ and ‘Minstrels’ date from a few years later); and established masters such as Saint-Saëns and Fauré. Saint-Saëns was allowed to produce a romp like Le carnaval des animaux because even in its more lyrical moments it never pretends to be anything else; nevertheless it was not published until after his death because he did not want the Germans to use the work as an example of French frivolity. And in writing his Dolly suite Fauré was committed to a serious purpose, bringing good music within the reach of young players. On the other side stood the composers of operetta and the innumerable writers of popular songs. The only nineteenth-century French composer who had really attempted a rapprochement was Chabrier, much admired by Ravel. Speaking of the Dix pièces pittoresques, Martin Cooper says, ‘the piquant and often clumsy harmony and the rhythmic verve, the confusion of sentimental nostalgia and almost brutal café concert atmosphere were something quite new and peculiar in Chabrier’.78 But Chabrier at that time could easily be dismissed as an amateur who did not know any better. For someone of Ravel’s professional accomplishment to dabble in the unclean waters of popular culture was something quite different. As we might expect, Pierre Lalo felt strongly: ‘The Histoires naturelles are rather in the style of café concert, café concert with ninths; but I would almost be tempted to prefer café concert all by itself.’79 Note

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

9 ‘The Peacock’ by Toulouse-Lautrec

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the ‘almost’: the respectable critic of Le temps could hardly admit to unalloyed pleasure from such a source. The verbal fisticuffs between Lalo and Ravel provoked by this article were protracted and acrimonious.80 The critics in general took Ravel seriously but, like Lalo, simply did not understand what he was trying to do. Nor did Renard. In his Journal entry for the day of the first performance, 12 January 1907, he records that Ravel came and asked him to go and hear the songs: ‘I told him I knew nothing about music and asked him what he had found to add to the Histoires naturelles. He replied, “I did not mean to add anything, just to interpret them.” “But how?” “I have tried to express in music what you have expressed in words.” ’ Was Renard reporting this conversation accurately? Some critics have doubted it. Even so, it is perfectly possible that Ravel did intend merely to transpose the songs from one medium to another but that, being a creative artist, he failed to stay within his self-imposed limits. Turning to the music, we can without difficulty find chapter and verse to support the hostility shared by the more conservative members of the Société nationale audience. In ‘Le paon’, the peacock preens himself in expectation of his marriage, and Ravel builds to a climax that disappears in a cloud of dust: ‘la fiancée n’arrive pas’. The disillusionment of the peacock is all the more brutal because Ravel has compressed the eight syllables that the ‘serious’ tradition demanded – ‘la fian-cé-e n’ar-ri-ve pas – into six – ‘la fian-cé(e) n’ar-riv(e) pas’ – in the manner of colloquial French speech. This lapse was more shocking still for being surrounded by the hallowed rhythms of the French overture. It’s also possible that in setting the peacock’s discordant cry of ‘Léon! Léon!’ Ravel may have gleefully seized the chance to refer to Paul Léon, the director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts which had so recently and controversially removed the composer from the final round of the Prix de Rome.81 The cricket, ‘Le grillon’, is fussy and nervous and his obsessions come across in a series of ostinati. Nevertheless, the musical portrait does add something to the words. We read the poem at a uniform rate and the obsessions come at us continuously. Ravel, by spacing the text variously in time, alters our perception. For instance, where the cricket rests (‘il se repose’) no reader would pause for as long as Ravel’s music commands (Koechlin records that the Schola Cantorum faction erupted with particular indignation at this point82). This spacing allows the listener time to identify with the activities and emotions of the little insect, and to feel sympathy with him. The music also adds significance to the last line of the poem, which presents an apparently arbitrary contrast with the smallscale interests of what has gone before: ‘In the silent countryside the poplars rise like fingers in the air, pointing at the moon’. Here, by presenting in an unambiguous triad the D flat major that has shadowed most of the song, Ravel is able to make us feel not that the cricket is too small to be worth notice but that his life is worth notice precisely because it is part of the larger life we ourselves live. What’s more, for anyone who has visited Ravel’s house at Montfort l’Amaury,

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the portrait of the little insect raking the narrow sandy paths of his habitat inescapably conjures up an image of the composer as cricket. Ravel dedicated the third song ‘Le cygne’, to Misia Edwards, and Stuckenschmidt is probably not far from the truth in saying that it ‘tells of the swan that glides across the pond just as the luxury yacht Aimée did through the canals of northern France and Belgium’.83 A less charitable explanation would be that Misia herself was the swan, gliding smoothly through society with her eye firmly on the main chance. The piano part is marked ‘très doux et enveloppé de pédales’ and the setting of seven semiquavers in the right hand against two in the left makes for effortless progress, quite different from the precise gestures of ‘Le grillon’, and indeed with a more intangibly floating quality than the four-againsttwo semiquavers of Saint-Saëns’s famous incarnation. The serene passage of the swan is twice interrupted: in the middle of the song, where he plunges his neck into the water, then draws it out again ‘like a woman’s arm out of a sleeve’ and brings up – nothing; and at the end, as the narrator realizes that all the swan’s elegant posturing has been cover for his greed. Both these interruptions follow the text in their abruptness. In a perceptive article, Basil Deane writes: ‘The action proceeds by accumulation rather than development . . . Intimately bound with the overall sentence structure is the skilful interlocking of linguistic levels. Rhetoric and colloquialism are juxtaposed; the polished literary phrase is preceded or followed by a matter of fact aside.’84 Or as Jankélévitch puts it, ‘poetry is strangled by the prose of everyday life’.85 The beginning of the fourth song, ‘Le martin-pêcheur’ (The Kingfisher), presents this interlocking of levels in an acute form (Ex. 3.5). On ne peut plus lent       

 

     



     

  

 











- du,

         

 





 

 



  

  



 















Ça

n'a

pas



  

pp

 

  





  



 





ce

soir,





 

 









 



mais

je





 





rap - porte

 

 

 

ppp 



Example 3.5. Ravel, opening of ‘Le martin-pêcheur’







 







une

rare

3











é - mo - tion.





mor -

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‘Not a bite all evening,’ says the fisherman, ‘but I have been through a moving experience.’ Deane further underlines the ways in which Ravel has echoed Renard’s description of his own style as ‘vertical, diamond-like, with no blots’:86 the quality of his [Ravel’s] dissonance could well be described as ‘diamanté’. Chords are hardened by such devices as the addition of seconds and sevenths to the basic triads, by the chromatic alteration of notes, by the simultaneous presentation of major and minor third in the same chord.87 This harmony is also technically sophisticated. The first six chords prepare the listener for some profound lyrical statement; but when it turns out to be a piece of slang (‘Ça n’a pas mordu ce soir’), the piano emphatically does not react. It ‘keeps its cool’ in marked contrast to some members of the first audience, who at this point rose to an apogee of outrage . . .88 a pity, because they were then hardly in the mood to appreciate the rapt wonderment of the rest of the song. The longer the fisherman sits looking at the kingfisher which has come to sit on the end of his rod, the more afraid he is of making a noise to disturb it. The singer must somehow convey breathlessness while breathing deeply. We may believe Pierre Bernac when he says, ‘This is the most difficult mélodie of the set, both musically and in its interpretation, but also perhaps the most beautiful.’89 The pianist’s worst moments come in the last song, ‘La pintade’ (The Guinea Fowl). With its gruppetti and shrill, explosive acciaccaturas, the style looks back not just to that of ‘Alborada’ but to that of another fowl-piece, ‘BabaYaga’s Hut’ from Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It forms an entertaining and aesthetically uncomplicated finale to the set. The ensuing furore has often been referred to as a second affaire Ravel, and although it had none of the practical consequences of the first, it marked even more clearly Ravel’s determination to be himself. Strangely, Debussy was shocked by what he deemed an abrogation of artistic responsibility and referred to Ravel’s writing as ‘factitious Americanism’.90 Ravel’s fellow-pupil Louis Aubert remembered many years later that even Fauré had reacted indignantly: ‘I’m very fond of Ravel. But I’m not happy with people setting stuff like that to music.’91 However the vocal style at least of Histoires naturelles was Ravel’s own: Ravel’s friends were interested and amused to find in them the habitual inflections of the author reproduced with an amazing fidelity. . . . When he delivered himself of one of those perfectly fashioned ideas which were his speciality, he would make a very characteristic gesture: slipping the back of his right hand quickly behind him, he would do a sort of ironical pirouette, lower his eyelids to conceal the malicious twinkle and end his little speech abruptly with a falling fourth or fifth.92

While commentators have regularly blamed the expressions of disapproval largely on Ravel’s vulgar elision of mute ‘e’s, it has strangely gone unnoticed

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that he was far from consistent in this practice, and that there seems to be little or no reason as to why he elided some and not others. Maybe several of the audience were simply disconcerted by not knowing when or why the next ‘e’ would be missing. Debussy’s stricture is all the more curious because this cycle, as Louis Laloy recognized,93 in its lifelike directness unmistakably recalls Musorgsky’s The Nursery, a work Debussy adored. According to Camille Mauclair, the work also related to another of Debussy’s interests, the poetry of Jules Laforgue, with its abandonment of traditional poetic diction; Mauclair was less happy with the fact that, as a result, Bathori ‘mimes, acts, suggests, indicates, accents – but she doesn’t sing.’94 Laloy records two other points of interest. ‘As for the composer, seated at the piano, stiff and impassive, he was the only person in the entire hall who betrayed no emotion.’ In other words, the uproar provided Ravel with a superb opportunity to play the dandy and experience ‘le plaisir d’étonner et la satisfaction orgueilleuse de ne jamais être étonné’ (the pleasure of causing astonishment and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished).95 Laloy gives another reason for the uproar, in that ‘those who had claimed him as their champion expected from him nothing less, and certainly nothing more, than symphonies worthy of Beethoven and operas as colossal as Wagner’s’,96 and were deeply disappointed. The cycle did not reappear at the Société, again with Bathori and the composer, until 20 March 1920. But by this time Poulenc had proved with Le bestiaire that Ravel’s initiative, together with Chabrier’s, had been a fruitful one. Whatever Ravel’s inner reactions to the reception beneath his impassive exterior, there was no let-up during 1907 in the pace of life. On 3 February Gabriel Pierné and the Colonne orchestra gave the premiere of Ravel’s arrangement of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’. A fortnight later he wrote a grateful letter to a female correspondent who had obviously enjoyed the piece, admitting that there were indeed times when a composer could be a bit depressed by ‘the hostile incomprehension of the public’. The writer could have been a certain O. Muller de Pre . . ., mentioned in Viñes’s diary entry of 11 February, in which case it is sad to report that her enthusiasm provoked hearty laughter all round.97 Despite her support, Ravel agreed with the majority that his orchestration had failed (it was published posthumously in 1950). Also unimpressed was Amédée Boutarel, the critic of Le ménestrel, and his notice of 9 February shows what thick skins young composers in Paris needed: . . . when we have said that rhythmical movement in the wind section informs us of how the boat is gently rolling, that the harpists’ fingers executing glissandos the length of their instruments produce a sound signifying how the waves are getting up, when we have descried the storm in the clamour of the brass and have understood the celesta to be expressing

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the glitter of starlight on the sea, the truth remains that we have been in the presence of an inconsistent fragment containing not the slightest musical interest.

To thank his admiring correspondent further, Ravel offered an invitation to a concert at the Cercle musical on 22 February mainly of his own music, including the String Quartet, Histoires naturelles (‘my latest work, for which I have a particular affection’) and the first performance of the Introduction et Allegro, with Micheline Kahn playing the harp part. Why this last piece, completed in May 1905, should wait so long for a performance remains a mystery, unless Mlle Kahn was the first harpist brave enough to tackle it. In March 1907 Ravel wrote the first of the three pieces that were to give the name to his ‘Spanish year’, the Vocalise-étude en forme de Habanera, for a collection of vocalises made by the Conservatoire singing teacher A.L. Hettich.98 The insistent rhythm acts as a perfect foil for the acrobatics of the voice, but the piece hardly calls for concentrated analysis. It was possibly an obiter scriptum derived from the finale of the one-act opera L’heure espagnole on which Ravel was engaged during the first part of the year. As we shall see, writing the opera was considerably less of a struggle than finding a theatre manager prepared to accept it. It was finally given its premiere at the OpéraComique in 1911. At the same time as Ravel was busily manufacturing the delicate Spanish scrunches of the Vocalise-étude, the greater Parisian world was intrigued by something on an altogether larger scale, namely Félia Litvinne and, especially, Chaliapin singing excerpts from Borodin’s Prince Igor in Diaghilev’s first concert of Russian music on 16 March. Diaghilev wrote, perhaps not altogether regretfully, knowing the publicity value of émotions fortes in Paris, ‘My first concert ended with an appalling scandal. . . . [The Prince Galitzky scene] was so extraordinarily successful that the applause went on and on and there seemed no limit to the number of times the excited public would recall Chaliapin. Nikisch got ready to conduct [Glinka’s orchestral fantasy] Kamarinskaya which was to conclude the programme. Several times he raised his arms, ready to start, but the public, by now quite out of hand, refused to be silenced. Mortally offended, he threw down his baton and walked out of the orchestra pit.’99 This early excitement, however, was not destined to survive the whole series of five concerts, concluding on 30 May. By that time most Parisian concertgoers had had more than enough and no critic from the Revue musicale attended, or at least noticed, two of the last three concerts, while the one on 26 May was summed up as ‘un peu gris’ (rather dull). Debussy mentions the series only once. Writing on 23 May to Gabriel Astruc, the impresario who had set it up, he calls the concerts ‘admirable – a hint of nepotism in the

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programmes, and for concerts that call themselves “historical” some notable omissions. But certainly it was excellent to put on the 2nd act of Boris.’100 From Ravel, though, nothing has come down to us. But it is inconceivable that he did not attend most, if not all, of the series, given that his friend Calvocoressi was closely involved and that he himself was among the French composers present at the final banquet given by Jules Ecorcheville on 29 May, together with Fauré, d’Indy, Messager, Roussel and Schmitt.101 Viñes noted in his diary that he was introduced to Diaghilev, Chaliapin, Glazunov and RimskyKorsakov,102 so presumably Ravel was also thus honoured. Rimsky and Ravel discussing orchestration over îles flottantes . . . how many thousands of francs would one have given to be a fly on the wall! Undoubtedly, the attraction Russian music held for Ravel undoubtedly remained as strong as ever, as we can see from the various Russian projects he was involved in over the next fifteen years or so. Meanwhile an entry in Romain Rolland’s diary for 22 May touches on a subject about which Ravel generally seems to have had little to say, the broken friendship with Debussy. Rolland records that it ‘seems to distress him. It is clear that it all comes from Debussy who has, I know, a violent antipathy for Ravel’s music (or for its success). Ravel speaks of him with much dignity and modesty, telling Marnold that Debussy really has no reason to be jealous of him and that there is nothing in his success to make him anxious.’103 ‘Violent antipathy’ may have been putting it too strongly, as Lesure claims, but undoubtedly his strictures on Histoires naturelles would have got back to the composer – who, typically, let them ride. The two songs Ravel composed during the year could not, in their various ways, be more different from that cycle. Les grands vents venus d’outre-mer, written in April, is a setting of a symbolist poem by his friend Henri de Régnier, so highly condensed and evoking such fleeting yet powerful images that it would be hard for the music to keep pace with it. As Debussy had done with Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, Ravel moves towards generalizing the emotion. The result is a song that may go beyond Un grand sommeil noir in technical expertise but still falls well short of Ravel’s later explorations into the dark side of life – ‘Le gibet’, La valse, the second Chanson madécasse. Frankly the song must be regarded as a failure, certainly when compared with a piece in the same vein such as Debussy’s ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest’. This is one of the very rare occasions when Ravel’s complexity descends into complication, and possibly Debussy had this song in mind when he wrote in 1911 that ‘Henri de Régnier, who writes dense, classical verses [des vers pleins, classiques], cannot be set to music.’104 In Sur l’herbe, completed on 6 June, Ravel returned to the conversational air of Histoires naturelles, but retaining all mute ‘e’s and a general bon ton in setting Verlaine’s snatch of eighteenth-century salon conversation (‘Greetings, Marquis! You’ve got your wig on crooked. This old Cyprus wine is first class’).

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The courtly atmosphere is Ravel’s home territory, suggested by Phrygian modality and then adorned with chromatic alterations. Needless to add, the ‘do, mi, sol, la, si’ and ‘do, mi, sol’ of the poem are treated as they deserve. This was his third and final setting of Verlaine, after Un grand sommeil noir and the incomplete sketch of Le ciel est, pardessus le toit, both of which he had recently condemned as ‘far too juvenile and left unpublished’.105 Whether he began Le ciel . . . before knowing of Hahn’s and Fauré’s settings (1892 and 1894 respectively), we cannot tell. Neither they nor Debussy set either Un grand sommeil or Sur l’herbe, so Ravel here, while avoiding odious comparisons, could still tell himself that in the latter song at least he had set one poem by Verlaine to his own satisfaction. On 22 May 1907 two of Ravel’s doughtiest supporters, Jean Marnold and Romain Rolland, invited Ravel to the former’s apartment for dinner – with Richard Strauss. Strauss was in Paris conducting Salome at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with Emmy Destinn in the title role and, since Ravel had declared that Salome and Pelléas were the two outstanding operas of the last fifteen years, there was a certain logic in the party going off to the Opéra-Comique to see Pelléas that evening. It was one of the last on which Mary Garden and Jean Périer would sing the title roles they had created five years earlier, and quite possibly the last time Ravel would see them in those roles. A moving occasion for him, then. But his enjoyment cannot have been much enhanced by the glumness emanating from his German confrère. After Act I Strauss asked Rolland, ‘Is it like this all the time? Nothing more? There’s nothing in it.’ And in the Taverne Pousset afterwards Strauss elaborated macaronically with ‘Cela manque de Schwung [It lacks whoomph]’.106 There is certainly no lack of Schwung in the opera L’heure espagnole which Ravel had begun sometime around May. Franc-Nohain’s play of the same name had been a great success at the Odéon theatre in 1904 and the choice of an almost ready-made libretto was partly dictated by Ravel’s wish to please his father by achieving that ultimate accolade for French composers, a staged opera (Ravel’s cuts and changes to the text do not affect the plot, merely tightening the structure or providing words that would carry more easily: thus in Scene 3, ‘Il va falloir’ becomes ‘Il faut pourtant’). Pierre-Joseph’s decline was now becoming worrying (in a letter to Jane Courteault on 16 August Ravel laments that ‘my poor papa is constantly getting weaker and for two months he’s hardly been able to walk’107), so any such tribute had to be completed with the utmost speed. Ravel must indeed have applied himself, since he was able to play through a version in piano score as early as 6 July to the director of the Opéra-Comique, Albert Carré, and the following day gave what Viñes calls an ‘aperçu’ of the opera chez Marnold.108 A letter to Ida Godebska written four days later says that there was ‘no result, or at least not much’, but the composer holds out hope as Carré asked for a few changes and then to hear the work again. He found the subject slightly near the

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knuckle – which, says Ravel, ‘will not surprise you, given the austerity of our upright director’s morals’ (Carré was a notorious womanizer) – but was willing to go along with it.109 In the event, the opera was postponed until 1911, as noted above. And even by the middle of November 1907, only a month after completing the vocal score, Ravel had to tell Ida that his father ‘mixes up everything, and no longer knows where he is at times. I’ve abandoned hope that he will see my work on stage: he is already too far gone to understand it.’110 That summer Ravel had joined Schmitt in a concert in Le Havre on 8 June of songs and piano pieces which were all new to the town, in Ravel’s case Sainte and the recently completed Les grands vents, and the Sonatine, Pavane and ‘Alborada’, all played by himself.111 Possibly his efforts at this last piece persuaded him never to try it again in public. A couple of months later he left with Maurice Delage for a car trip round Brittany, visiting Mont-Saint-Michel, Tréguier, Quimper, La Pointe du Raz and Morgat, and around 20 August he went to stay with the Godebskis at Valvins. With Carré still stalling, Ravel presumably left the opera in vocal score, waiting for a definite date before starting on the orchestration. Instead, by the end of October (by which time he was back in Levallois) he completed his third Spanish product of 1907, a four-movement work initially for two pianos entitled Rapsodie espagnole. Viñes suggested that the awkwardness of some of the piano writing meant Ravel would do well to orchestrate the piece, which he now did. This awkwardness to some extent derived from the fact that in playing it as a piano duet, which Ravel and Viñes did to an impressed Falla, they had to make do with a two-piano score that involved a fair amount of hand crossing (despite accounts to the contrary, Ravel never made a piano-duet version).112 Meanwhile Ravel agreed to give lessons to a slightly older English composer, recommended to him by Calvocoressi. By the autumn of 1907 Ralph Vaughan Williams would seem to have achieved unqualified success in his own country. The three Norfolk Rhapsodies were applauded, the last two under the composer’s direction in September prompting The Times critic to say ‘All are scored with remarkable skill, and the thematic development is ingenious and often most humorous.’ A fortnight later his choral work Toward the Unknown Region was hailed as a ‘very striking work, original, and showing a homogeneity that very little of the British school reveals’.113 What more could a 35-year-old composer ask? His second wife Ursula answers the question: Ralph was still restless; not forced by lack of money to have a regular job like most of his friends, he felt guilty about having all his time for himself and feared he was not using it fully . . . he consulted his friends and came to the conclusion that he should go to France. His first idea was to work with d’Indy

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but, on the advice of Calvocoressi, who gave him an introduction, he asked Ravel to accept him for lessons.114

Despite several sources suggesting that Vaughan Williams did not begin these lessons until early in 1908, it seems clear115 that they followed swiftly on their first meeting, which almost certainly took place in Paris on 13 December 1907. All sources agree that Vaughan Williams was in Paris for three months and he was certainly back in England by 3 March, when Ravel wrote to him there about a possible Paris performance of what Ravel called his ‘Fantasia’ (maybe In the Fen Country). Vaughan Williams’s descriptions of his lessons, and the memories later channelled through his second wife, are especially vivid and, since they show us Ravel the teacher for the first time, are worth quoting at some length. In his Musical Autobiography, Vaughan Williams wrote: He was much puzzled at our first interview. When I had shown him some of my work he said that for my first lessons I had better ‘écrire un petit menuet dans le style de Mozart’. I saw at once that it was time to act promptly, so I said in my best French, ‘Look here, I have given up my time, my work, my friends and my career to come here and learn from you, and I am not going to write a petit menuet dans le style de Mozart’. After that we became great friends and I learned much from him. For example, that the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner was not necessary. ‘Complexe mais pas compliqué’ was his motto. He showed me how to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines. It was an invigorating experience to find all artistic problems looked at from what was to me an entirely new angle. Brahms and Tchaikovsky he lumped together as ‘tous les deux un peu lourds’. Elgar was ‘tout à fait Mendelssohn’, his own music was ‘tout à fait simple, rien que Mozart’. He was against development for its own sake – one should only develop for the sake of arriving at something better. He used to say there was an implied melodic outline in all vital music, and instanced the opening of the [Beethoven] C minor symphony as an example of a tune which was not stated but was implicit. He was horrified that I had no pianoforte in the little hotel where I worked. ‘Sans le piano on ne peut pas inventer de nouvelles harmonies.’ I practised chiefly orchestration with him. I used to score some of his own piano music and bits of Rimsky and Borodin to which he introduced me for the first time.116

In letters of the time to Calvocoressi, Vaughan Williams expressed his gratitude for the introduction to a teacher who ‘is telling me exactly what I half felt in my mind I ought to do – but it just wanted saying.’ But he was also looking beyond the Ravelian sphere. ‘Have you’, he wrote, ‘a partition of the Symphonie Montagnarde of d’Indy – I see it is being performed shortly.’117 In view of

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Ravel’s opinion of d’Indy as a teacher (in the 1920s, when a young composer said he was being taught by d’Indy, Ravel’s response was ‘Malheureux! Vous êtes perdu!’118) perhaps Vaughan Williams was wise enough to keep this interest to himself. Before leaving this topic, a few observations are in order. Firstly, the Mozart minuet story is not quite what it seems. Three years earlier Vaughan Williams had ‘retired for a month to a Yorkshire farmhouse with several classical scores and the themes of my own “compositions”. These themes I proceeded to treat and develop according to my classical models, choosing, of course, themes which more or less corresponded in structure . . . The model I most frequently use is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sonata op. 2 no 2.’119 He may therefore have refused to embrace Mozart minuets simply because this was old ground. Our eyebrows may lift slightly higher at Ravel’s apparent enslavement to ‘nouvelles harmonies’ as a sine qua non of composition: after all Ma mère l’Oye was only just round the corner, offering a compendium of modal techniques with barely a new harmony in sight. As for Tchaikovsky being ‘un peu lourd’ . . . his besetting sin might simply have been that he was not one of the Mighty Handful and lacked that frisson of the exotic that Ravel clearly craved. One final reminiscence of Vaughan Williams’s Paris visit is tantalizingly incomplete. After lunch at a restaurant with Ravel and his publisher Jacques Durand, the latter dug Vaughan Williams in the ribs saying, ‘Now we go see some jolly tarts, ha?’ According to his wife, ‘Ralph was surprised and interested, but the girls were disappointing. It was seven years since the death of ToulouseLautrec, but the types he had painted still persisted, a style not embraced in Ralph’s canon of beauty, and guaranteed, he said, not to tempt any young man to lose his virtue.’120 Nothing is said of Ravel. But would his publisher, who knew him well, have made the suggestion unless it was presumed he might accept? In the early months of 1908, while Vaughan Williams back in England was writing a string quartet under the influence of ‘a bad attack of French fever’,121 Ravel played through the complete L’heure espagnole to Carré,122 and began orchestrating the Rapsodie espagnole for its first performance at the Concerts Colonne on 15 March. The work was built round the ‘Habanera’ that had formed the first movement of Sites auriculaires (see pp. 27–8) and it says much for Ravel’s skill, or for his early maturity, that the gap of twelve years is quite undetectable in the music. It seems clear that in resurrecting his piano piece Ravel was motivated not entirely by ‘Iberomania’. Debussy had attended the performance of Sites auriculaires in March 1898 and had asked Ravel to lend him the score.123Therefore, when Debussy’s ‘Soirée dans Grenade’ appeared in 1903, with its habanera rhythm and harmonies likewise clashing against an insistent C sharp, it is fair to assume that Ravel was somewhat resentful. At all events, in its new orchestral guise the ‘Habanera’ pointedly bears the date 1895. The first movement, ‘Prélude à la nuit’, is governed by the descending fournote phrase (F–E–D–C sharp) heard at the outset (Ex. 3.6).

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Très modéré

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ppp

p

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

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           

                    

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Example 3.6. Ravel, opening of ‘Prélude à la nuit’

It cuts across the 3/4 time signature and accommodates itself to all modulations; its superiority is absolute, even in the two cadenzas for pairs of clarinets and bassoons, whose melodic outlines also belong to the quasi-oriental octatonic scale. The strings are muted throughout and the movement is truly preludial in character. The A major on which the ostinato comes to rest becomes ambiguous once more in the ‘Malagueña’, between major and minor. As soon as this ambiguity is threatened by a positive climax, the flow of the music is interrupted by a solo for cor anglais and with the help of the opening four-note phrase the movement dissolves into nothingness (Calvocoressi reported that the ‘Malagueña’ was encored, not the ‘Habanera’, as sometimes claimed124). The ‘Habanera’ is the only section that does not contain the four-note phrase, but its own rhythmic ostinato is enough to link it structurally with its companions. Interestingly, Ravel was later unhappy with his orchestration of this movement, feeling that it used too many instruments for the number of bars.125 This judgment, which to Poulenc demonstrated Ravel the master craftsman, probably owed something to Poe’s belief that ‘the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit’;126 just as Poe felt that the tone and content of any poem dictated its ‘proper length’, so the length of a piece of music might in turn dictate the maximum forces it should ‘properly’ employ. The élan that has so far been deliberately stifled breaks out in the final ‘Feria’, a liberation signified by the distant tritonal relationship of its C major to the F sharp major of the ‘Habanera’. Shadows return in the F sharp minor central section and again the four-note phrase casts its spell. Indeed for all its noise and colourfulness (glissandi, muted brass and double-bass harmonics are supported by a varied and active percussion section) and its reminiscences of Chabrier’s España, the promised apotheosis in C major is nearly denied us by a brutal eruption of the whole-tone chord – which Ravel, in spite of his own claims, never forswore, though he handled it with considerable circumspection. Already he had sensed the power of a symphony orchestra to destroy its musical material, the power that he was to exploit to its utmost in La valse and Boléro. This destructive undertow, allied to stiff technical demands, may have contributed to what Laloy called ‘the boorishness of an orchestra which continually, at the rehearsals and almost at the performance, gave signs of discontent

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or irony . . .’. Laloy also latched on to the spirit of excess that inhabits the work, whether to the composer’s satisfaction or not: ‘This is a very well-observed Spain, but observed by an eye which is mocking, and will gladly overdo or deform: the Spain of Cervantes or Goya, with more artificial lines, more distorted forms, and more fantastical caprices; a Spain tending a little towards the Japanese style, full of piquant details, winks, grimaces, and unexpected, almost impossible contortions.’127 The impact of even a middling performance of ‘Feria’ may be euphoric, but at times the ‘impossible contortions’ come dangerously near to taking over. It is typical of Ravel that he should simultaneously draw inspiration from his past work and suggest things to come. For Ravel, the search lay not so much beyond him as within him, in finding new and more accurate means of expression for preoccupations that formed themselves early and which were not to change in essence after this year of 1908: fairy-tales, visual images, deep depression, sardonic humour, exotic fantasy, formal precision, almost-vulgar high spirits and, the last to break through the barrier of his pudeur, an increasing awareness of evil and the realization that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’.

CHAPTER IV

1908–1911

A bold operatic Concepcion The success of Rapsodie espagnole was no doubt some consolation for Ravel’s disappointment at the beginning of the year over L’heure espagnole. As he told Ida Godebska, on 14 January I put on my Toledo voice and go off to see Carré with Bathori. . . . I hum even more out of tune than usual, start by breaking three notes on a tin-pot piano, let Bathori loose on the difficult arias, and we await the final decision: refused. . . . Impossible to impose a story like this on the innocent ears of the Opéra-Comique’s regulars. Just imagine: these lovers shut up inside clocks and being carried up to the bedroom! We all know what they’re going to do up there!! [sic]. . . . I see now . . . that the worst fault of Carmen, Manon, Krysis or Queen Fiammette was picking their noses too much.1

Ravel’s dismay must have been exacerbated by knowing that, as a play, L’heure espagnole had enjoyed a run of fifty-eight performances at the Odéon between August and October 1904. A ray of hope appeared nonetheless in the shape of Mme Cruppi, the wife of the recently appointed Minister for Commerce and Industry. Outraged at Carré’s decision, she initiated what Ravel called ‘un échange de correspondance des plus savoureux’ (a decidedly spicy exchange of letters). But, for the time being, Carré remained obdurate, taking refuge behind the usual game of unfulfilled promises. On 26 March Ravel reported to Cipa Godebski that he had ‘seen Mme Droz yesterday, who was told by Carré that L’heure espagnole would not be understood’. The composer commented tartly, ‘I quite realize it’s rather abstract.’2 It would seem as though Carré, under Mme Cruppi’s assault, was abandoning the defence of morality for slightly shakier ground. Trouble of a different sort arose in March 1908 over Ravel’s transcription of Debussy’s Nocturnes, though it seems to have affected Debussy more than Ravel. On 9 March Debussy arrived at Durand’s office to find the publisher absent sick but Ravel sitting in his chair!3 Unfortunately there is no record of the conversation that ensued, if any. Debussy further had to swallow the fact that Ravel’s two-piano transcription, for which Ravel signed a contract for 300

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francs on 17 April, was to appear from the publishers4 Fromont later in the year and, though this is merely implicit in Debussy’s reaction, there is nothing he can do about it.5 This sad vignette provides further evidence of the current and future relationship between the two composers who had once been good, if not close friends: Debussy recognizes Ravel’s talents, though not always (as with Histoires naturelles) the uses he puts them to, and at the same time is jealous of Ravel’s social abilities (has he now taken over Messrs Durand, for heaven’s sake?); Ravel yields to no one in his veneration of Debussy’s genius and supports his music publicly, but regretfully recognizes that the gulf between them, whether engineered by followers or not, is now too wide to be bridged. Meanwhile Carré was continuing his defensive action against L’heure espagnole. In his letter to Cipa of 26 March Ravel mentions four works on which he now intended to concentrate, only one of which did, possibly, come to fruition, and not including the work he was in fact to begin in May: La cloche engloutie would shortly be abandoned, a ‘symphony’ is not heard of again until 1931,6 St François d’Assise reappeared as an unrealized project, and only the ‘trio’ might refer in a general sense to the one he was to write in 1914. One has the impression that his Spanish works of 1907 represented a kind of default position, maybe inspired by the songs his mother sang him. From here on the way forward was far from clear. There were harbingers in his previous oeuvre of the two piano works he began in 1908, Gaspard de la nuit for solo piano and Ma mère l’Oye for piano duet, but discernible as such only with hindsight. In the 1890s Viñes had introduced Ravel to the work of Aloysius Bertrand whose prose poems, collectively entitled Gaspard de la nuit, were first published the year after his early death in 1841. He was therefore a contemporary of Ravel’s favourite Edgar Allan Poe and, although his style is more concentrated than Poe’s, he shows a similar obsession with demons, ghosts and the whole world of the supernatural. On 25 September 1896 Viñes allowed Ravel to take away his copy of Gaspard and did not get it back until 20 December 1897, Ravel claiming it had been at the bottom of a trunk.7 Perhaps though he was moved to write his suite by the appearance in 1908 of a new edition of the work, published by the Mercure de France. The volume includes fifty-one poems in six books, an address to the literary critic Sainte-Beuve and thirteen ‘pièces détachées, extraites du portefeuille de l’auteur’. Ravel chose three of the poems, ‘Ondine’ from the third book, entitled ‘La nuit et ses prestiges’, and ‘Le gibet’ and ‘Scarbo’ from the ‘pièces détachées’. The volume also bears the subtitle ‘fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’. Bertrand explained that ‘Art always has two antithetical faces. . . . Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who hides away, snail-like, in his retreat, whose thoughts are taken up with meditation and prayer. . . . Callot, on the other hand, is the loud-mouthed, loose-living wastrel who swaggers about the square, kicks up a din in the tavern and fondles the gypsies’ daughters. . . . The author of this book envisaged art under this double

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personification.’ Ravel followed this principle to the extent of making the central piece as different from the outer ones as possible. In the eponymous poem, Ondine (the water sprite) appears initially to be pale and interesting. Only in the final paragraph does she display her true character: she offers the poet a ring and the kingdom of the waters, ‘but when I replied that I loved a mortal woman, she was angry and sulked; she cried a little, and with a burst of laughter disappeared in a shower of drops that fell in pale streams down the blue window-pane’. Ravel, by opposing harmony to melody, texture, rhythm and dynamics, evokes the danger lying beneath the attractive surface: possibly he was here remembering the lamiñac, the mysterious water nymphs of Basque legend, whose fate was never to have their wishes fulfilled. The piece begins in the treble with both pedals down, the demisemiquavers murmur seductively (‘if you don’t count the exact number of rhythms in the opening figure, it doesn’t matter’ said Ravel8) and in the third bar, ‘très doux et très expressif ’, begins ‘the siren’s song’. But the harmony of the murmuring accompaniment, a major triad with a minor sixth, in effect suggests an augmented triad and all the triumphant antitonal powers therein. Ravel does not attempt to follow the story-line, if that were indeed possible, but we may conceivably hear the four bars of unaccompanied melody just before the end as the refusal of Ondine’s request and the following arpeggios as her varied reactions. Certainly she vanishes as she materialized and the dangerous A natural very properly clears and leaves the D flat major triad in secure possession. Technically ‘Ondine’ develops from the earlier water-pieces, Jeux d’eau and ‘Une barque sur l’océan’: arpeggios are the basic material and the fast rippling of demisemiquavers within a heavily pedalled texture serves as an ostinato. But the changes in register and in deployment of the ostinato are now more abrupt. The climax rises to a majesty beyond anything Ravel had so far written and characteristically it is underlined by minor rather than by major chords. ‘Ah! What do I hear? Is it the night wind howling, or the corpse sighing from the gibbet? . . . It is the bell tolling from a town far beyond the horizon and the body of a hanged man that glows red in the setting sun.’ ‘Le gibet’ too goes back to Ravel’s earlier work, to the bells in ‘Entre cloches’ and ‘La vallée des cloches’ and to the repeated B flat of ‘Oiseaux tristes’, and its sombre intensity is surely a development of the adolescent ennui expressed in Un grand sommeil noir. Although Ravel assured its dedicatee, Jean Marnold, that it is the easiest of the three pieces,9 in fact it makes extreme demands on a pianist’s technique, not so much in actually playing the right notes as in the control of timbre and dynamics. Henri Gil-Marchex’s claim that it calls for twenty-seven different kinds of touch can hardly be taken literally,10 but the fact that the soft pedal is used throughout does not make any easier the pianist’s task in keeping the B flat octave of the bell distinct from the music that surrounds it; and yet not louder. ‘This bell’, the composer told the young pianist Henriette Faure, ‘does not dominate, it is, it tolls unwearyingly.’11

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ppp très lié

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un peu endehors   m.g.     m.d.          

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  

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ppp très lié



                         B       



   

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 

Example 4.1. Ravel, ‘Le gibet’, bars 20,21

Even more than in ‘Ondine’, both hands have to be bifunctional and prepared to move instantly from one job to another. Example 4.1 marks the climax of the attempts to destroy the sound of the bell with unrelated harmonies, and once it has survived this onslaught of sevenths and ninths its dominion goes unchallenged for the remainder of the piece. This scheme is analogous to that of sonata form, in which the tonic key is attacked by the dominant and others and should emerge stronger for the test. In ‘Le gibet’ the bell persistently creates a B flat tonality round it so that in the last five bars it is impossible to say whether we hear E flat minor or B flat major. The key word is ‘monotony’. Over the opening notes of the bell Ravel wrote ‘through to the end without hurrying or slowing down’ and over the short-lived central theme ‘in relief, but without expression’. He also referred to the repeated ‘Nevermore’ of Poe’s raven which, like the bell, at once completes the whole and takes on a symbolic life of its own. Some years later, in a letter to Calvocoressi, Ravel writes that he has been practising five of his piano pieces with a view to making a recording: I won’t ask Ricardo . . . firstly I expect he’ll be in Spain about now; secondly I’m particularly keen to have Gaspard de la nuit on record and Viñes has never seen fit to play these pieces, ‘Le gibet’ in particular, in the way the composer intended. And I mean ‘seen fit’: I don’t know whether you’ve been present at any of those meetings where he has assured me that if he observed the nuances and speeds I wanted ‘Le gibet’ would bore the audience to death. He has remained intransigent over this.12

We have already referred to the highly coloured quality of Viñes’s playing. Fargue described him as turning the piano into ‘un express-bar de délices’.13 It is ironic that Viñes, without whom Ravel would probably never have come to know the poems of a fairly obscure writer, should fail to understand what he

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had brought about. After Gaspard, Ravel entrusted his old friend with no more first performances. The virtuosity of ‘Scarbo’ is of a more obvious sort. Ravel wanted to write a more difficult work than Balakirev’s Islamey and arguably managed to write an even better one. The spirit of Liszt is also active, but ‘while the Transcendental Studies deal usually with one kind of difficulty in each piece (arpeggios, octaves, scales) . . . ‘Scarbo’ . . . is like a fiendish encyclopaedia of all the traps, obstacles and snares that an inexhaustible imagination can devise for a pianist’s fingers: repeated notes, trills, alternating chords, headlong leaps, passages of wrist staccato . . . The hand can never settle down.’14 Not the least of the difficulties is that it is ‘a piece written pianissimo with multiple outbursts . . . in a tempo that must be rigorously controlled, with silences and accents to give it the necessary relief ’. It is often played much too loudly.15 These silences, as the dwarf Scarbo stops flitting hither and thither and freezes in a pose, are oddly disconcerting, perhaps even more so than the advanced harmonies founded on multiple unresolved appoggiaturas (Ex. 4.2). [Vif]

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Example 4.2. Ravel, ‘Scarbo, bars 121–6

The initial nine bars of frozen octave Es are subsequently reduced by disturbingly irrational degrees (9–7–6–3–3–2–2) until they join the two-note phrase, to develop into a sinister peroration. Alexander Goehr remembers Messiaen referring to this passage as showing how ‘a sequence of absolute durations could be in its way as expressive as could be a melody of pitch levels.’16 On a more traditional level Perlemuter notes the importance Ravel placed on the ‘orchestral effects’ and quotes the composer’s own words: ‘I wanted to write an orchestral transcription for the piano!’ Ravel also said, ‘I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism’ and then admitted in a whisper, ‘Perhaps it got the better of me.’17 The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard takes up

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this caricatural aspect in his statement that ‘the challenge of the alliance of an aesthetic of excess and the compositional control gives this piece an unqualified originality’.18 It was to be Ravel’s final pictorial piece of piano writing, but even if we recognize its links with the past, we should also be aware of how much it belongs to his true nature and how much it looks forward to later works. Apart from anything else, ‘Scarbo’ is cruelly prescient of the insomniac that Ravel was soon to become – the phrase ‘Quelle horreur!’ he appended to the rising right-hand phrase in bar 32 could almost be read as his comment on sleepless nights.19 From Gaspard dates the increasing trouble Ravel had in getting his music into shape. To Ida Godebska he wrote: ‘Gaspard has been the very devil to finish, which is not surprising since He is the author of the poems.’20 But in true Ravelian fashion, the devil is at no point the sulphurous extrovert of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust; indeed all three pieces begin and end softly. Moreover Ravel was to build on the allusive harmonic discoveries of ‘Scarbo’ in the more ‘classical’ Valses nobles et sentimentales. Ravel worked on Gaspard in the rue Chevallier in Levallois from May to early September 1908, with visits to a Moscow choir at the Salle Gaveau on 3 June, and to Pelléas at the Opéra-Comique on the 17th with the role of Mélisande now taken by Maggie Teyte, ‘an adorable doll. Physically more of a Mélisande than Garden; vocally superior. But she sings the role with total incomprehension.’ She was only one element of a noisy evening, a ‘general massacre . . . really too painful for those who heard the earliest performances’.21 Also in June, Ravel seems to have spent some days at the Godebski’s country house La Grangette in Valvins (Ile de France), correcting the proofs of Rapsodie espagnole, and he then returned there once Gaspard was finished for a well-deserved holiday. But creativity was far from exhausted, even if it now took a different, less challenging direction. As we can see from ‘Ondine’, Ravel had always loved fairy stories and like many adults he delighted to shelter his own pleasure behind that of younger friends. Physically he was nearer to their level than most men, and Jacques Ibert’s widow remembered how, when his absence was noted from a party in the Ibert household, he was found on the floor in the nursery playing with the children’s toys – alone.22 He shared with children too a direct vision and a capacity for enthusiasm. Now, late that September, he wrote the first piece, ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’, of what would become a suite for piano duet, Ma mère l’Oye, for Ida and Cipa Godebski’s young children Mimie and Jean. In 1906 Tristan Klingsor, the poet of Shéhérazade, who also fancied himself as a composer, had published his Chansons de ma Mère l’Oye, so maybe Ravel felt there was more professional work to be done in this vein. In July he had looked after the two children, with the help of their English governess, while their parents were in Spain; though ‘help’ was perhaps a euphemism, as ‘the children, who are not particularly fond of Miss, began to

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display the fact rather too overtly’ and Ravel’s skills as mediator were called upon.23 Many years later Jean recalled that Ravel had even gone so far as to pay court to Miss – adding ‘in jest, of course’.24 In another letter in September to their parents, absent again, Ravel gives a run-down of life at La Grangette: ‘difficult conversations with Miss using gestures and dictionaries, stories to tell the kids, not too sad at night, to avoid nightmares, gloomy in the morning, to stir the appetite. Occasionally excitements: on Sunday a drunkard who nearly drowned; and a runaway horse (I never managed to explain to Miss what that meant).’25 An autograph of the ‘Pavane’, once belonging to Jean Godebski, is dated ‘20/9/08’, and it could be that Ravel would have gone on to complete the suite in the following weeks, had fate not intervened. At the end of September his father’s health took a turn for the worse and Ravel returned home. On 13 October 1908 Pierre-Joseph Ravel died of a cerebral thrombosis at the age of seventy-six. Although the death of Ravel’s mother, at the same age some eight years later, has always been signalled as the crucial event in his life, that of his father has often passed almost unnoticed by biographers. His attachment to his father was understandably not so childlike or dependent, but none the less he was deeply affected by the loss. The death was made more traumatic by Ravel’s desire that his father should receive the last rites. Viñes recorded that ‘In the afternoon, Ravel had sent for the Abbé Petit, saying to Calvocoressi that he [his father] was not a believer but that he wanted to believe. But when the Abbé Petit arrived, half an hour after the death, he did not recite the prayer for the dead because Calvocoressi explained Ravel’s father’s beliefs to him and the matter rested there. . . . It was Falla who went to fetch the Abbé Petit’,26 something Falla was to remember on Ravel’s own death nearly thirty years later. Viñes also gives a glimpse of what Pierre-Joseph’s illness had meant for the family: ‘My heart bleeds for poor Mme Ravel, because her life has been terrible.’ Pierre-Joseph was buried in the Levallois cemetery in a civil ceremony. Maurice’s loss was further intensified by the fact that his father was the only other trained musician in the family and possibly the only one who could really appreciate the scale of his achievements. Now, at thirty-three, Maurice became the head of the family. Very soon afterwards the three remaining members, the widowed Marie, Maurice and Edouard, moved from the suburb of Levallois to an apartment in central Paris, 4 Avenue Carnot in the 17e, (‘place de l’Etoile, with a magnificent view, a lovely apartment, ready to move into. It even has electricity’27). The three of them lived here until Marie’s death in 1917. Announcing the move to Viñes, Calvocoressi’s mother mentioned that ‘Durand has guaranteed him 500 francs a month so that he can work calmly on his opera La cloche engloutie.’28 It is tempting to measure the impact on Ravel of his father’s death in terms of his completed output during the next two years. It looks remarkably small until we remember that in 1909 he began serious work on Daphnis et Chloé. It

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is surely typical of Ravel that such a painful reminder of his own mortality should neither stop him composing nor urge him to a wanton dynamism, but instead lead to a new deliberation and self-criticism, a new sense of responsibility. Around this time he shaved off his bohemian beard for good. For Ravel the year 1909 began with the first performance of Gaspard by Viñes at the Société nationale on 9 January. It had been almost exactly two years since a Ravel work, Histoires naturelles, had been heard under these august auspices, and three since Viñes had premiered Miroirs, so Gaspard was widely noticed. More surprising perhaps, in view of its bold harmonies, is that it was widely liked. ‘Ondine’ provoked a rash of airy French phrases (‘féerique délicatesse’, ‘ruissellement harmonieux’: fairy delicacy, harmonious rustling), while the ‘bitter uneasiness’ of ‘Le gibet’ and the ‘dreamlike, hallucinatory and rather morbid phantoms’ of ‘Scarbo’ were also appreciated.29 Ravel must also have been relieved to learn from the same source, Jean Chantavoine, that the ‘dangerously seductive’ shadow of Debussy was finally lifting; though possibly startled to be told by Laloy that ‘never perhaps have a composer and his interpreter found themselves more perfectly in agreement than Monsieur Ravel and Monsieur Viñes’.30 From the latter’s diary31 we learn of an approach through him by the English writer George Moore, wanting to discuss writing a libretto for Ravel. No more is heard of the idea. Apart from writing a sixth ‘chanson grecque’ called Tripatos, Ravel finished only two projects during the rest of the year. The transcription of Debussy’s Nocturnes for two pianos, referred to above, was probably a mature refashioning of the one that he had started eight years earlier. The contract with Fromont for this new version is dated 17 April 1908.32 The final years of the decade were the years of ‘Debussysme’ when, despite dissenters such as Chantavoine, Ravel was constantly being written off as a facile imitator of his rival. With this transcription and the one of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune for piano duet that he made in 1910, Ravel continued to affirm that art was greater than, and not to be confused with, the artist. The other work of 1909 was the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn for piano. The musical journal Revue musicale S.I.M. (Société internationale de musique) commissioned a number of French composers to write pieces in honour of the centenary of Haydn’s death in May 1809.33 It seems the commissions went out a little late. And not all those approached were cooperative. Saint-Saëns wrote to Fauré: I have received a letter from M. Ecorcheville (the founder of the S.I.M.) who wants to honour Haydn, and quite right too! But he wants the music to be written on the composer’s name in notes (HAYDN expressed as B, A, D, D, G). . . . I am writing . . . to ask him if he will prove to me that the two letters Y and N can signify D and G. I would ask you to do the same. It would be annoying to get mixed up in a farcical business that would make us a laughing stock in the German musical world.34

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Ravel, together with Debussy, d’Indy, Widor, Hahn and Dukas, had no such inhibitions. His response was a beautifully proportioned little piece, during which HAYDN appears backwards and upside-down. Ravel even introduced a tour de force of his own inventing: in bars 38–43, over a B natural pedal, a quasi-chromatic scale runs upwards through fifteen notes from tenor A sharp to treble C sharp, at which point it turns into . . . YDN (Ex. 4.3): [Mouvement de Menuet] mystérieux et sourd

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Example 4.3. Ravel, ‘Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn’, bars 38–46

Harmonically, the Menuet shares its lemon-flavoured semitonal clashes with its counterparts in the Sonatine and Le tombeau de Couperin. Ravel’s theatrical ventures continued to occupy him during 1909. On 15 January he had signed a contract with Durand for La cloche engloutie, the sketches for which he had looked over the previous June and found ‘out of date, to be started again’.35 Meanwhile, on 23 September 1908 he had told Jean Marnold ‘Durand has forwarded to me the Opéra-Comique poster sent to him by Carré. [Séverac’s] Le cœur du moulin and L’heure espagnole appear here in curious conjunction. But such . . . curiosities . . . will pass away, you may be sure’; four months later he wrote again to Marnold, ‘Carré summoned us yesterday to talk about the interpretation of L’heure, which is due to appear with [Strauss’s] Feuersnot in May’.36 Both ideas did duly pass away. By Christmas 1908, however, Ravel was getting on with the orchestration, and hoping that the recent

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publication of the vocal score might encourage the director to stick to his timetable.37 On 14 March 1909 he wrote to Cipa: ‘I’m finishing l’heure. Durand will have the last pages of the score tomorrow’,38 suggesting that Carré was being honourable. And indeed a meeting with Carré on the 26th settles matters: Ravel’s opera will be staged, with Feuersnot, in May.39 Alas for the promises of opera directors! Ravel would still have to wait another two years to see his work at the Opéra-Comique, Strauss for ever. Needless to say, nothing of these difficulties surfaces in Carré’s own memoirs, where he congratulates himself on staging an opera by a composer who, he was assured, ‘was quite good at imitating “sad Debussyism” but who was bound to come a cropper in “jolly Debussyism”’.40 Ravel’s letter of 14 March is also outspoken about the orchestral music played at a Société nationale concert the day before, featuring two songs by Schmitt and a symphonic poem by Inghelbrecht among offerings from a group of very minor composers: Praise be to your mumps, for preventing you from attending the Nationale’s concert! Ah, lousy composers! They can’t orchestrate so they fill in the gaps with ‘Turkish music’. Fugal episodes replace technique, themes from Pelléas do duty for inspiration. And the noise it all makes! Tam-tams, tambourines, military drums, glockenspiels and cymbals, all over the place. Inghelbrecht holds the record with an extra helping of xylophone and Chinese bells . . . Still, he’s quite adept. Something of a fly tickler: but at least every now and then he makes them sneeze. Throw in a little music and it’d be fine.41

Whether ‘Inghel’ ever actually saw this letter before its publication in 1956 must be doubtful. But word gets round in Paris. Certainly it is from about this time that relations between the two Apaches become distant, and in Inghel’s case positively hostile. However, as we shall see, Ravel regarded the coolness as being due to ‘extra-musical reasons’ (see p. 117). In April 1909 the Vaughan Williamses invited Ravel to stay with them in Cheyne Walk for a concert he had been invited to take part in (his first concert abroad) with Florent Schmitt, Jane Bathori and her husband, the tenor Emile Engel. Maurice Delage came along as interpreter. The concert was given under the auspices of the Société des concerts français de Londres, founded in 1907 by Tony Guéritte, with his brother-in-law Georges Jean-Aubry as artistic director; Jean-Aubry was assiduous in promoting concerts of French songs and chamber music until 1915. Possibly the critic Edwin Evans also played a part in the invitation, since Ravel and Viñes had met him in the publisher Demets’s office on 29 December 1906,42 but on the other hand Ravel, Viñes and Jean-Aubry had been good friends for a couple of years. Ravel played the Sonatine and accompanied Bathori in the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and Histoires naturelles.43 The Times reviewer says nothing very new, is understandably unshocked by the word setting, but finds that Schmitt’s songs ‘placed

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beside Mr. Ravel’s . . . are apt to appear a little laboured’.44 Ursula Vaughan Williams’s biography of her husband records . . . a pleasant visitor. Ralph enjoyed taking him sight-seeing, and was fascinated to find that he liked English food – the one thing the Cheyne Walk household had foreseen as a problem. But it was no problem at all: it appeared that steak and kidney pudding with stout at Waterloo station was Ravel’s idea of pleasurably lunching out. He also wished to be taken to something he described as ‘Vallasse’, which Ralph rightly interpreted as the Wallace collection.45

Some time that summer, probably through Misia Edwards, Ravel met Diaghilev – possibly at the dress rehearsal of the Gala russe on 18 May, where Edouard Vuillard’s diary notes his presence together with Misia and Cipa46 – and in a blitz that also targeted Reynaldo Hahn and, unsuccessfully, Fauré and Debussy, Daphnis et Chloé was commissioned with the impresario’s nonexistent funds.47 The composer was soon initiated into the Ballets russes’s way of doing things: ‘I have to tell you that I’ve just spent a mad week preparing a ballet scenario intended for the next Russian season. Practically every evening, work till 3 am. What complicates matters is that [the choreographer] Fokine doesn’t know a word of French. All I can do in Russian is swear. Despite interpreters, you can imagine the flavour of these discussions.’48 On the other hand, Diaghilev wrote to Benois that the project was ‘going like a dream’49 . . . Quite how far Ravel got with composing the music of Daphnis in 1909 is unclear, but the absence of much else in his schedule suggests that he was hard at work – and maybe even writing one or two things down. In August he orchestrated the Pavane pour une Infante défunte and on 12 September he announced to Jules Ecorcheville that the Haydn minuet was finished (his term is ‘confectionné’, which can mean either ‘constructed’ as of a machine or ‘made up’ like a suit or dress: Ravel’s invitation to Ecorcheville to come and ‘l’essayer’ or ‘try it on’ at his apartment leans towards the latter).50 Otherwise he was correcting proofs of the orchestral score of L’heure espagnole and, probably, in October meeting Delius, whom he hadn’t seen for a number of years.51 The year 1910 was relatively quiet for Ravel. Luckily the avenue Carnot was high enough to escape the extraordinary Seine floods in January and the worst he had to endure that month was editorial interference with an article he had written for the 1 January number of Le courrier musical on Chopin52 – in this, Chopin’s centenary year, Ravel had agreed to be vice-president of a Société Chopin instigated by the musicologist Edouard Ganche.53 Certainly the text does not read much like Ravel and he vowed never to write for that journal again. Nor did he. On 12 February Gabriel Pierné conducted the Colonne Orchestra at the Odéon Theatre in incidental music to the play Antar by Chékry-Ganem, an Arab poet living in Paris. The play ran for several nights. The music included not only passages from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Antar and an

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extract from his Mlada, but also two of Rimsky’s songs (op. 4 and op. 7) and extracts from Félicien David’s ode-symphonie Le désert. The two songs were orchestrated and the remainder apparently reorchestrated by Ravel. The opus 4 song comes in Act II, and the opus 7 one in Act I and again in III. At the end of Act III is found the intriguing indication ‘Entrée de Cléopatre – Mlada – Mme Mata Hari – la Danseuse’.54 Unfortunately Ravel’s orchestrations of the two songs have disappeared. Thanks to the researches of Marcel Marnat, we know that the Odéon performances were not the first run, which had taken place in Monte Carlo, starting on 7 January, conducted by Léon Jehin. ‘Mata Hari, then at the height of her fame, appeared in the dance scenes, surrounded by an Arab troupe brought from southern Algeria . . . this concoction seems to have been put together by Gabriel Astruc, who had taken Mata Hari seriously and who – as initial publisher of the Quartet and Shéhérazade – was keen for Ravel to participate, and for himself to share in Diaghliev’s “oriental” successes.’55 Astruc was now moving out of publishing into administration: in October 1910 Ravel approved his transfer of the Quartet and Shéhérazade to Durand.56 Whether Mata Hari as Cleopatra aroused Ravel’s interest we are not told. At any rate there were other excitements in Paris during the summer, the most prominent being undoubtedly the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird on 25 June. What impressed the critics was the unity of the production, but to another composer Stravinsky’s score was likely to be astonishing per se. Maybe it did have ‘for Russian export’ stamped all over it, as Stravinsky was later to claim; it was nevertheless a remarkable fusion of Russian and French styles, both in notes and in orchestration; even if Ravel can hardly have failed to notice that the last twelve bars of ‘Kastchei’s Dance’ were blatantly borrowed from the last six of Rapsodie espagnole,57 the work as a whole must have put him on his mettle in composing Daphnis. For, while he had always been an independent spirit, we can see in Ravel, after his father’s death, a new willingness to stand up and be counted, a tendency almost amounting to aggression. Musically, the most notable display of this is in the opening bars of the Valses nobles; and it is detectable in some measure in the fracas that led to the foundation of the Société musicale indépendante. A certain amount of friction is probably valuable in any artistic community. If so, Vincent d’Indy, head of the Schola Cantorum, performed a useful function in French musical life, possessing ideals inherited from Franck and a character that could come across as inflexible; Varèse was less temperate about him: ‘. . . enseignement bigot . . . l’homme hypocrite’.58 Ravel, writing to Stravinsky in January 1913, exclaimed: ‘When you think that M. d’Indy, whose Fervaal I heard the other day, is in good health! There’s no justice.’59 At the end of the first decade of the new century there was ill-feeling among many Conservatoire-trained composers who felt that d’Indy, in the name of the Schola, was in fact controlling the Société nationale. Matters had come to a head over Maurice Delage’s symphonic poem of 1908 Conté par la mer, scheduled for performance at the

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Société nationale the following year. Reports vary over whether the point at issue was general or particular. According to Falla’s biographer Jaime Pahissa: At an uninviting hour on one of those disagreeably cold and wet Paris days, Falla and Ravel played an arrangement for piano duet of Delage’s symphonic poem Conté par la mer in the Salle Pleyel. . . . With the score in front of him [d’Indy] jotted down his impressions, and Florent Schmitt sat behind him in order to see what he had written. When the audition was over, the friends met in a nearby café. Soon Florent Schmitt arrived and told them that everything had gone wrong. D’Indy had written on Delage’s work: ‘Pas de musique; pas d’orchestre; jolis coins’ [No music; no orchestral technique; nice bits].60

Another interpretation of the incident comes from Ravel’s biographer José Bruyr: ‘Now this work . . . contained a low C which looked as perilous as a slippery banana skin. D’Indy claimed that, on the horn, this C couldn’t be sounded. Other people, naturally including Ravel, claimed that it perfectly well could. The quarrel grew so bitter that Fauré set a small conspiracy in motion. . . . A few days later there was a meeting in his office, involving Aubert, Caplet, Dukas, Huré, Koechlin, Schmitt, Vuillemin and Ravel!’61 This was the beginning of the Société musicale indépendante. Roger-Ducasse and the critic Emile Vuillermoz were also on the founding committee, with the publisher A.Z. Mathot as secretary.62 Two points here need clarification. First, which low C is under discussion, always presuming we are talking of real not notated pitch? If the one below the bass stave, then Ravel had only to point to the fourth horn in the first movement of Rapsodie espagnole, third bar of figure 5, to prove that not only could it be sounded, it had been just a few months earlier; if the one below that (C’), then d’Indy had a point – Koechlin’s orchestration treatise states that ‘it is almost never possible to play this fondamental’ and then only on the notes B flat, B natural and C sharp.63 Likely though Ravel might be to delight in proving d’Indy wrong over a technical matter, a letter from him to Koechlin says nothing about any low C, but makes it clear that he, not Fauré, was the moving spirit in the enterprise: Societies, even national ones, don’t escape the laws of evolution. Except that one is free to withdraw from them. That’s what I’m doing in sending my resignation as member [of the Société nationale] by the same post. I presented three works by pupils of mine, including one of particular interest. This, like the others, was refused. It didn’t offer those solid qualities of incoherence and boredom, baptized by the Schola Cantorum under the names ‘construction’ and ‘profundity’ . . . I’m planning to found a new society, more independent, at least to start with. Any number of people are interested in the idea. Will you join us?64

As Robert Orledge was the first to point out, ‘Koechlin’s own orchestral work Les temples from the Etudes antiques (op. 46 no. 1) was also turned down by

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the Société Nationale on 15 January 1909, which may be another reason why Ravel wrote first to Koechlin about the formation of his “new and independent society” on the following day’.65 Koechlin’s answer, as indicated above, was ‘yes’. The Société musicale indépendante, or SMI, as it was soon known (interpreted by less welcoming elements in the Parisian musical world as Société de musique invertébrée66), was always meant to be as free as possible of rules and regulations. Setting it up nonetheless took time, not least because Mathot, the secretary, went to town over the publicity, drawing from Jean Marnold the response that ‘a purely artistic enterprise’ should not be ‘promoted like an issue of Russian capital or an Italian tenor returned from America’. Mathot’s challenge to a duel was happily settled through arbitration.67 There was also the question of raising finance. Throughout its 25-year history, the SMI was short of money, with no support from the state: in a letter of 1912 Vuillermoz, returning to Koechlin only 1,100 francs from the 6,000 he had lent the Society, admits ‘the struggle has been hard.’68 The first concert of the SMI was finally given on 20 April 1910. It was marked by three first performances: of Fauré’s song cycle La chanson d’Eve, Debussy’s D’un cahier d’esquisses (played by Ravel) and Ma mère l’Oye. Following the interruption after the ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’ caused by the death of Ravel’s father, we don’t know when Ravel completed Ma mère l’Oye, but his message to Cipa on 10 April that the music had gone to the copyist suggests that the final touches had been put to it not long before. Ravel’s publisher Durand later took the credit for persuading the composer to add four more pieces to the ‘Pavane’, and Ravel got the Godebski children to play them for him in private.69 Intelligent composers have generally found it less effective to counter troubling musical trends with pamphlets and manifestos than with music. As a palpable hit against pedagogy, Ma mère l’Oye has few rivals, avoiding as it does ‘those solid qualities of incoherence and boredom’ by the widest imaginable margin. Linguistic tussles with Miss were a small price to pay for the close family atmosphere at La Grangette and the enthusiasm of his two young listeners. Thirty years later Mimie wrote of her father’s friends: Ravel was my favourite because he used to tell me marvellous stories. I would sit on his knee and indefatigably he would begin ‘Once upon a time . . .’. And it was Laideronnette, Beauty and the Beast and above all the adventures of a poor mouse he had made up for me. . . . It was at La Grangette that Ravel finished or anyway presented us with Ma mère l’Oye. But neither my brother nor I was of an age to appreciate such a dedication and we saw it rather as something entailing hard work. Ravel wanted us to give the first public performance but the idea filled me with a cold terror. My brother, being less timid and more gifted on the piano, coped quite well. But despite lessons from Ravel I used to freeze to such an extent that the idea had to be abandoned.70

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So the first performance at the SMI was given by two young girls, Jeanne Leleu (later a Prix de Rome winner and professor at the Conservatoire) and Geneviève Durony. Ravel took the first four of his tales from three seventeenthand eighteenth-century writers, Charles Perrault, the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye was the source for the first two pieces and the title, Madame d’Aulnoy’s story ‘Le serpentin vert’, from her Contes nouvelles, ou les fées à la mode, for the central ‘Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes’, and ‘Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête’ comes from Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants, contes moraux. The final ‘Le jardin féerique’ is a child of Ravel’s own imagination. In his autobiographical sketch Ravel wrote: ‘The idea of evoking in these pieces the poetry of childhood naturally led me to simplify my style [manière] and to refine my means of expression [écriture].’71 Rather on the lines of the balanced excess and control noted by Aimard in ‘Scarbo’, it is precisely the matching limitations of manière with écriture that make this suite a masterpiece. The job is not as simple as it sounds. Modality plays a large part but, as in Sur l’herbe, it is often lightly seasoned with chromaticism. The naturalness with which the oscillating three-note figure enters in bar 5 of the opening ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’ and the controlled tension of the tiny middle section (bars 9–12) are the result of a consummate technique, even if the aesthetic aims of the whole are limited. ‘Petit Poucet’ (Tom Thumb) had left a trail of breadcrumbs to guide him and his brothers home from being abandoned in the forest, but the birds have eaten the crumbs and the brothers are lost. The conjunct thirds of the accompaniment depict their journeying and the varying time signatures their hesitations. Ravel turned to the pentatonic scale for ‘Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes’; its restrictions were a challenge to his invention. In an interview published on 31 March 1931, he admitted the piece derived much from his visits to the gamelan at the 1889 Exhibition (Ex. 4.4).

    

                                 

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Example 4.4a. 1889 transcription by Julien Tiersot of gamelan piece, reprinted in Fauser, p.181

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[Mouvement de Marche ( = 116)]                        

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     

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pp 

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Example 4.4b. Ravel, ‘Laideronnette’, bars 9–16

Towards the end of each part of the ternary structure he increases tension by introducing chromaticism, which then resolves back inside the pentatonic scale.72 The counterpoint in the third part between the themes of the first two shows Ravel’s concern not to leave the ‘seconda’ player out of the limelight; the same device in the next piece ‘Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête’ does more by underlining the reconciliation between Beauty and the Beast. All these schemes are simple, obvious even. But Ravel makes them work and wonderfully ‘evokes the poetry of childhood’. A note of adult nostalgia creeps in only with the last of the set, ‘Le jardin féerique’, as the grown man looks back to the time when he too could believe in a magic garden. Gradually the memory of childhood takes possession of him until the ‘magic’ glissandi transport him to a C major of unalloyed ecstasy, crowning, in Roland-Manuel’s words from Baudelaire, this ‘ “green paradise of childhood loves” where desires are unaccompanied by remorse’.73 Manuel de Falla later wrote that he sometimes suspected that for ‘Petit Poucet’ and ‘Le jardin féerique’ Ravel might have used sketches for the Saint François project mentioned in his letter to Cipa Godebski of 26 March 1908, for which Ricciotto Canudo was to provide the libretto.74 Indeed Falla specified to the Italian scholar Domenico de’Paoli that the themes in these two movements were those of the sermon to the birds and of St Claire respectively.75 Further support comes from Mimie’s recollection that it was Ravel who made her read St Francis’s Fioretti.76 Some of the composer’s friends, however, were initially unimpressed. Louis Aubert told Manuel Rosenthal years later that many of the Apaches had been hailing Ravel as Debussy’s

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successor; but after he played them Ma mère, they joined the detractors of Histoires naturelles (see pp. 89ff.) in feeling they had been wrong.77 At the end of 1911 Ravel orchestrated the suite and also, in response to a commission from Jacques Rouché, the director of the Théâtre des Arts, expanded this orchestral version to accompany a ballet. Whether the orchestral suite is ‘better’ than the original must remain largely a matter of personal preference. In the original set pieces the composer kept close to the letter of the piano score, adding only some more bird noises in ‘Petit Poucet’ and four bars to the ‘gamelan’ crescendi in ‘Laideronnette’. He reserved the orthodox string sound (arco, senza sordini) almost entirely for the last movement. But however close Ravel stayed to the letter of the original, his mastery of the orchestra is evident, often in the most unspectacular way. Twenty years later Rosenthal asked his opinion about the orchestration of Rosenthal’s one-act opéra-bouffe Rayon de soieries, which had just been premiered at the Opéra-Comique. Ravel replied that what Rosenthal had achieved was only instrumentation; he defined orchestration as creating an atmosphere around the notes in the manner of the sustaining pedal on the piano. Rosenthal felt that the very opening of the ‘Pavane’, where the lower line is entrusted to solo horn and pizzicato violas, both muted, perfectly demonstrates the craft of true orchestration.78 The expansion of Ma mère l’Oye as a ballet score, premièred at the Théâtre des Arts on 29 January 1912, almost doubles the length of the original suite and contains some of the most beautiful music Ravel ever composed, replete with birdsong, rustling strings and magical horn calls. Ravel’s scenario for the ballet required not only a new ‘Prélude’ and linking interludes but new ordering, with ‘Les entretiens de la Belle et la Bête’ brought forward to follow the ‘Pavane’. The various versions of this scenario are fully discussed by Deborah Mawer.79 In the one printed for the first performance, the Good Fairy ‘goes to kiss the sleeping princess on the forehead and gives her The Stories of Mother Goose for her dreams.’ This idea of a story-within-a-story was basic to Ravel’s conception. The framing narrative concludes at the beginning of ‘Le jardin féerique’ as Prince Charming enters and sees the Sleeping Princess, who wakes as dawn is breaking. In general, piano duettists would surely benefit from reading the details of the choreographic action. To give just one example, in ‘Les entretiens’ it is helpful to know that in bars 97–105 (Assez vif – Rall.) ‘the Beast falls to his knees sobbing’, and that at the following return to the original tempo ‘Beauty, reassured, plays with the Beast coquettishly’. Ravel continued to work on Daphnis through the first months of 1910 and completed the first version of the piano score on 1 May. He also made regular visits to his friends, Apaches and others, and particularly the Godebskis, Calvocoressi and Delage. Through the Godebskis Ravel had got to know Arnold Bennett, at that time living in Paris, and on Saturday, 4 June Bennett noted that he finished writing the second chapter of the last part of Clayhanger and that ‘Ravel and his mother came for tea yesterday; only both of them preferred water.’80

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Also in 1910 Ravel published a revised edition of the String Quartet, his piano duet version of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and his orchestration of Pavane pour une Infante défunte. But the only completed new work apart from the final material for Ma mère l’Oye was the set of Chants populaires. For a competition organized by the Maison du Lied in Moscow towards the end of the year, Ravel wrote accompaniments to seven folksongs in various national styles. The Maison du Lied had been founded in 1908 by the singer Marie Olénine d’Alheim, who since 1896 had specialized in singing music by Russian composers and who invited Ravel to participate in this biennial competition. Four of his settings were awarded prizes and published first by the Moscow firm Jurgenson and later (1925) by Durand; of the other three a reconstruction by Arbie Orenstein of the Scottish one was published in 1975, but the Flemish and Russian songs remain untraced. In the pathetic inflections of the Italian song we can hear evidence of Ravel’s admiration for Puccini, and in the hypnotic rhythms of the Hebrew setting that penchant for monotony which runs through his whole oeuvre, not to mention persuasive grounds for the rumour, unfounded, that he had Jewish blood. Predictably he is at home in the Spanish song, exploiting the ambiguity of key (G minor or D major?) implicit in the final cadence of the melody and treating us to the almost inevitable semitonal scrunches (here E flat and C sharp against a persistent D). The Scottish song is a setting of Burns’s ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon’, a charming piece that makes much of a sharpened fourth, with only the discreetest suggestion of bagpipes. Perhaps the most charming is the French song. Without exotic stimulation, Ravel avoids the artiness or sentimentality to which hundreds of well-known second-class models must have tempted him. For the pianist the way in which the bass of the ritornello develops from a dominant (before verse 1) through a threefold tonic (before verses 2–4) to an ultimate tonal progression for the end of the song is one of those simple masterstrokes that never fail to delight. The tune and text of this song, collected in the area round Limoges, had been published by the Schola Cantorum in 1904, no doubt making Ravel’s success all the sweeter. Presumably he decided not to publish the three unsuccessful settings because in a printed edition they would not, like their companions, be able to boast the epigraph ‘Primée au 5e concours de la Maison du Lied de Moscou (1910)’. He may also have felt slightly nettled that the prize for the Russian folksong was won by Mme Olénine d’Alheim’s brother. . . . With the piano version of Daphnis finished on 1 May, Ravel then turned his attention to the contract (something all collaborators with Diaghilev were well advised to do). An anguished letter went off from Ravel at La Grangette to Calvocoressi on 3 May, complaining that if the Opéra put on Daphnis, Madame Stichel [the Opéra ballet mistress] would get a third, Fokine another third and I should have to put up with the rest. But under no circumstances would I allow my work to be played on those

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terms. We have spent (I say we, because I worked on it too) quite a few night hours putting the scenario together; what’s more I’ve redone parts of it since, and for months now I’ve been slaving away on the music. I think it would be grossly unfair for me to get only a third.81

But of course there was absolutely no question of Ravel giving up on the project at this stage and only four days later he was so busy orchestrating Daphnis (‘and it’s not going quickly’82) that he couldn’t find the time to come to Paris for the Opéra premiere of Strauss’s Salome with Mary Garden in the title role. At the end of September he was still orchestrating,83 and probably by this time his offer to Gabriel Pierné for the following season of ‘a very considerable fragment’ of the ballet for the Concerts Colonne had been accepted.84 He gave two further indications around this time of his ability to distinguish between man and artist in the case of two men whose friendship he had forfeited. On 14 April Durand had brought out the first book of Debussy’s Préludes. The SMI committee, including Ravel, had no doubt been delighted to welcome first performances of four of them by the composer (‘Danseuses de Delphes’, ‘Voiles’, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ and ‘La danse de Puck’) for its fourth concert on 25 May. The last piece was encored. Ravel had already got hold of the score of the Préludes (albeit with no written dedication these days), and planned to find consolation for missing Salome by playing to himself these ‘admirable masterpieces’.85 A few days later, in the same vein, he shed a little light on the role played by some critics in the quarrel between Debussy and himself: ‘There’s a certain “Submerged cathedral” and various “Sounds and scents” etc., and come to that everything else, which are splendid. Despite the croakings of his treacherous supporters, the Carrauds, Lalos and the rest, he’s not dead yet [il n’est pas encore mort celui-là].’86 Ravel’s other notable broken friendship, as we have seen, was with Inghelbrecht. But this did not prevent him from writing on 20 August to Jacques Rouché, asking whether he had yet found a conductor for his Théâtre des Arts and recommending Inghel as ‘a remarkable musician who, in my opinion, has not yet achieved the position he deserves’, adding ‘I should point out straight away that friendship plays no part in this recommendation. For extra-musical reasons I am on fairly cool terms with M. Inghelbrecht.’87 What these reasons were has never been discovered, although it may possibly have referred to Inghel’s later assertion to Stuckenschmidt, ‘that Ravel had occasional encounters with prostitutes’.88 Had Inghel been indiscreetly spreading the word? Apparently Ravel was unaware that Inghel and Rouché had also parted company after an argument over rehearsal time for a ballet called Les dominos, to Couperin harpsichord pieces orchestrated by Inghel.89 But Inghel did figure in one of the two other notable events for Ravel that took place in June 1910. On the 9th, at the fifth concert of the SMI, he conducted the choir and orchestra of the Association Hasselmans in a programme of songs by Musorgsky and Casella, together with a number of first performances. These

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included Gonzalve’s aria from L’heure espagnole (a dig in the ribs for Carré) and two works rejected by the Société nationale, at least one of them partly responsible for the SMI’s foundation: ‘Les temples, le soir, au bord de la mer’ from Koechlin’s Etudes antiques, and Delage’s Conté par la mer. If Ravel hoped the Delage performance would strike a blow against d’Indy and the SN committee, he was disappointed: ‘The reviews were extremely brief and some frankly bad. Pierre Lalo (admittedly a Société nationale supporter) found the work “weak and complex”, while Charles Cornet (who, after the war, would invert himself to become Charles Tenroc, editor of Le courrier musical) merely wrote that “[the work’s] principal merit is to have contributed to the appearance of the new society. . . . This tale of seagoing folk is as obscure as the ocean depths.” ’90 The second event that touched Ravel closely was, as already mentioned, the premiere by the Ballets russes of Stravinsky’s Firebird at the Opéra on 25 June, conducted by Pierné and with Karsavina and Nijinsky in the principal roles. As Stephen Walsh records, ‘What struck the Parisian reviewers . . . was the integration of music, dance, and design. . . . Most of his colleagues praised Stravinsky on the understanding that he was merely the latest – if also the most gifted – in a long line of Russian colorists in the nationalist tradition.’91 Inevitably influencehunters appeared, citing Rimsky (no prizes there), Debussy, Wagner, even Mendelssohn and Grieg – also Ravel, which must have pleased him, as he wrote the same evening to Delage in the country: ‘My dear fellow! You must take off your galoshes at once: Firebird goes further than Rimsky-Korsakov. Come quickly . . . what orchestration!’ Delage remarked that ‘Since [writing about] Chabrier, Ravel hadn’t been known to cover three whole pages with his enthusiasms’.92 After the performance Debussy came backstage to congratulate Stravinsky and took him out to supper. When Stravinsky met Ravel is less clear, but the latter’s links to the Russian ballet through Calvocoressi and the ongoing Daphnis project probably made it sooner rather than later. An unidentified Stravinsky song was performed at the SMI on 6 February 1911 and by the autumn he had become a friend of Delage.93 Some years later, Stravinsky ‘was to define the ambiguous position he occupied between a sullen Debussy and the “Apache” tastes of the SMI by saying “Debussy was my father, Ravel was an uncle.” . . . Stravinsky . . . must have been happy to find in Ravel not only a true connoisseur of Russian music but, even more, a discerning critic who came closer to the truth than the Parisian press.’94 In short, Stravinsky knew that Firebird had its faults and longueurs, and knew that Ravel knew. After these two lean years, 1911 and 1912 were unusually fat ones. On 16 January 1911 Ravel played some pieces by Satie in the opening concert of the SMI’s second season: the Prelude to the first act of Le fils des étoiles, which he was shortly to orchestrate, followed by the second Sarabande and the third Gymnopédie. It was probably in this month too that he sent Satie a score of Ma mère inscribed ‘To Erik Satie, grand papa of the Entretiens [de la Belle et de la Bête] and other things, the affectionate homage of a disciple, Maurice Ravel’.95

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Since their meeting in the 1890s in the Montmartre Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, Ravel and Satie had drifted apart – or rather, Satie had moved out of Paris in 1898 to the southern suburb of Arcueil and lived a life firmly removed from the Establishment concert circuit. He therefore fitted well with the SMI’s intention of finding new music in places where the Société nationale would not think, or deign, to look: in its first three years the SMI programmes ranged from harpsichord pieces by Purcell and Bull and organ pieces by Frescobaldi and Buxtehude to piano pieces by Kodály, Otto Klemperer’s Piano Quintet, Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge (with Ravel playing the piano part) and, at least in intention, the first movement of Bruckner’s Ninth, although this was withdrawn at the last minute.96 Ravel may not have actually written the programme note for 16 January, but he must surely have approved its contents: Erik Satie occupies a truly exceptional place in the history of contemporary music. On the fringes of his time, this isolated composer years ago wrote a few short pages that are the work of a precursor of genius. Although they are unfortunately few in number, these pieces surprise by their anticipation of modernist vocabulary and by the almost prophetic character of certain harmonic discoveries. . . . M. Claude Debussy offered a striking homage to this subtle researcher by orchestrating two of his Gymnopédies, performed at the Société nationale [on 20 February 1897] and M. Maurice Ravel, by playing today the second Sarabande, which bears the amazing date of 1887, proves the esteem in which the most ‘advanced’ composers hold this creator who, a quarter of a century ago, spoke the daring ‘slang’ of the future.97

Thus was the first stone laid in the edifice of the ‘Satie phenomenon’ that has continued to grow ever since, provoking probably about equal amounts of delight and disdain. Satie himself, who in his fashion also aspired to be

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

10 Satie’s letter to his brother about Ravel, 14 Jan 1911

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something of a Baudelairian dandy with his velvet suits, made a point of not being impressed. On 14 January he wrote to his brother Conrad, ‘Ravel is a prix de Rome [sic] of very great talent. A more astonishing Debussy. He assures me – every time I meet him – that he owes me a great deal. Fine by me.’98 Three days later he refers specifically to the concert: ‘the “Young Ones” are organizing an anti-d’Indy movement and have just put on the Sarabandes, the Fils des étoiles etc., works formerly regarded as the fruit of complete ignorance, but mistakenly, according to these “Young Ones”. That’s life, dear boy! It’s beyond comprehension.’99 And ten days after the concert, a third letter reports on the reception: ‘For many, it was a revelation. The forward-looking musical press is all for me . . . As for the traditionalist press, as always, it dribbles rudely over your poor brother, who has never done good or ill to anyone.’100 On 25 March Debussy conducted a second performance at the Salle Gaveau of his orchestrations of the two Gymnopédies in a concert otherwise of his own music, including the Villon songs and Caplet’s orchestration of Children’s Corner. Satie wrote gratefully to ‘Mon bon Ravel’ to acknowledge that ‘This is something I owe to you’.101 But again, not for the last time, Satie proved hard to please entirely: in the words of Alan Gillmor, ‘As once before, fourteen years previously, the enthusiastic reception of the Gymnopédies in their lovely “impressionistic” orchestral dress reflected most favorably on Debussy, causing the wounded Satie to register a complaint about his old friend: “Why won’t he allow me just a little corner of his shade? . . . I don’t want to take any of his sun.” ’102 But Ravel must take the credit for being the prime mover in launching Satie’s ‘serious’ career. While avant-garde critics like Calvocoressi sharpened their pens on Satie’s behalf, at the beginning of 1911 Ravel embarked on his second visit to Britain, with concerts in London, Newcastle and Edinburgh, again organized by JeanAubry under the auspices of the Société des concerts français. With him went the Willaume String Quartet together with the leader’s wife Léontine Willaume-Lambert as soprano, and a solo pianist, Maurice Dumesnil, formerly a pupil of Viñes, who played works by Franck, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Dupont and Ravel and possibly acted as interpreter, while Ravel confined himself as usual to the less demanding items of his own oeuvre, Pavane pour une Infante défunte and accompaniments to the Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot and some of the Histoires naturelles. The Newcastle recital on 20 January was noted in The Musical Times (1 February): ‘For some time the Classical Concert Society has been alive to the pressing claims of the modern French school. . . . Three of the extraordinary songs from the “Histoires naturelles” were included. The Parisian Quartet . . . played very beautifully the same composer’s imaginative and plaintive Quartet, revelling in the many opportunities afforded of romantic colouring.’ The Edinburgh Classical Concerts recital on 21 January, beginning with a performance of Ravel’s String Quartet, received a longer and more thoughtful review two days later from the critic of The Scotsman:

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The modern French school, of which Debussy is the most prominent, and of which M. Maurice Ravel, whose works formed the centre of interest at Saturday’s recital, is a younger and more assertive exponent, has cut the connection with the past. . . . [It] takes up the position that as nature is full of discords, the musician is entitled to follow nature, and discard the rules. . . . The opening quartet for four strings was permeated by a sort of vague beauty that could not possibly be gainsaid. The sense of chord-relationship – which after all is based on natural laws – is slackened or abandoned; the music moves in an atmosphere of uncertainty; it is original in the last degree. . . . M. Ravel . . . takes up a poem by a decadent French modern whose ideas of versification are somewhat on the plane of Walt Whitman; or it may be an oldworld stanza from Clément Marot, who wrote ill-spelled French poems about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And having made his song, having fixed a semi-dramatic, semi-melodic series of notes for the vocalist, he takes the pianoforte accompaniment away into the back of beyond, severing the chord-relationship, and sometimes even the time-relationship, by means of a curious artistic trickery – it is really nothing more – that fascinates so long as you have before you a highly talented vocalist. . . . The elegance, the finesse of the performance, was indisputable. It was French, and it may be noted that whereas much of Germany’s modern music is disposed to be strenuous, this freak of the new French school is markedly quietistic. But when the charm and the strangeness and the perfection are admitted, there remains the question whether a new departure in music which is based upon defiance of form can persist.103

One or two sillinesses aside (Marot’s misspellings, for example), this may be taken as a standard British view of the ‘Impressionist’ or ‘atmospheric’ school. In his mention of trickery the reviewer echoes Debussy’s labelling of Ravel as a ‘fakir-charmeur’ in response to Histoires naturelles, and in calling Ravel the more assertive of the two composers he latches on to an important quality that was to be a hallmark of Ravel’s production during the year. For all that ultimately the review could have been signed ‘Confused of Edinburgh’, the judgments over the French school’s relative quietism and over the paramount value of idiosyncratic performance are absolutely on the mark. The only evidence Ravel has left of this tour is of his nearest passion to music, in the form of a signed photograph of himself with the dedication ‘to Madame James R. Simpson/ respectful souvenir of our trips/round the antique shops of Edinburgh/Maurice Ravel/11/II/11’.104 The composer’s lust for toys and knickknacks was obviously upon him long before he found a house of his own in 1920. On his return to Paris, Ravel answered a questionnaire sent out by the magazine Musica: ‘What should be set to music? Good poetry or bad, free verse or prose?’ Eighteen other composers and poets replied, including Fauré, Debussy, Dukas, d’Indy and the poets Pierre Louÿs and Henri de Régnier.

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This question plainly put Fauré, Debussy and Ravel in difficulties. Fauré claimed that he had ‘never been able, for example, to set the true Parnassians to music because, despite the elegance and attractive sound of their poetry, it’s all in the words and behind the words there are no real ideas’;105 but at the same time he warns that ‘One must never try and set a mediocre poet, because it needs only one word too many or a clumsily placed adjective to spoil the finest musical paragraph’. Hence the frequent changes he made in his texts, well documented by Jean-Michel Nectoux.106 Debussy admits to being inconsistent. Having said that ‘real poetry has its own rhythm which is rather constricting for us [composers]’, he concludes by recommending that composers should ‘leave the great poets in peace’. But in between these two statements he confesses he has just set three ballades by Villon, hardly a second-rater. Why? ‘Because I’d been wanting to for a long time.’ No principle could stand in the way of Debussy’s plaisir, even though he recognized that it was ‘very difficult to follow and place the rhythms exactly and at the same time find inspiration. If one just fabricates, if one is content with a work of juxtaposition, obviously that’s not hard, but then it’s not worth doing either.’107 Ravel’s view was close to Debussy’s: It seems to me that, in dealing with things that are truly experienced and felt, free verse is preferable to regular verse. Regular verse can, even so, produce very beautiful results, provided the composer is willing to efface himself entirely behind the poet and consents to follow his rhythms step by step, cadence by cadence, without ever displacing an accent or even an inflection. In a word, if the composer wants to work on regular poetry, his music will simply underline the poem and support it, but be unable to translate anything in it or add anything. I believe it is better, especially if you are ever dealing with emotion and fantasy, to choose free verse. It seems to me criminal in fact to ‘destroy’ classical verses.

Ravel goes on to support this view by citing Renard’s Histoires naturelles (‘delicate, rhythmic, but rhythmic in a quite different way from classical verse’) and Pelléas, whose prose allowed Debussy ‘to render so delicately the stylized naivety, the simple affectation of these characters belonging to missals or tapestries’.108 So far, so consistent. But why, in that case, did Ravel for the rest of his life follow his own advice only twice, in the Deux mélodies hébraïques and in the Chansons madécasses? His own verses for the Trois chansons of 1914–15 may be irregular but they are undoubtedly verse, not prose; and the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (his next song venture after the 1911 questionnaire), Ronsard à son âme, Rêves and Don Quichotte à Dulcinée are all settings of rhythmic and often rhymed poetry. All we can say is that the best composers are entitled to change their minds or, like Debussy, to ride roughshod over their own diktats.

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For the moment, it would seem, coolness with Inghelbrecht had warmed slightly, if we are to judge by Ravel’s letter of 26 February 1911, addressed to ‘Mon cher Inghelbrecht’ (it’s true, ‘Mon cher Inghel’ would have been warmer still), and lamenting ‘What a shame the concert is so soon! I’m going – at the publisher’s request – to orchestrate the Mère l’Oye, and it would have been just what was needed. So all I can offer you is the Pavane pour une Infante . . .’109 Although Demets had published Ravel’s orchestration of the Pavane in 1910, it was not heard in Paris until Christmas Day 1911, when Casella conducted it at the Concerts Hasselmans. The cachet of giving the world premiere went to the French music enthusiast Henry Wood, who had already included it in one of his Gentlemen’s Concerts in Manchester on 27 February.110 Arnold Bennett’s diary entry for 1 March 1911 records ‘Dinner last night at Maurice Ravel’s. He played us extracts from the proofs of his new ballet “Daphnis et Chloë” and I was much pleased.’111 Presumably by ‘proofs’, Bennett was referring to one of the small number of plate-printed advance copies of the piano score of Daphnis that Durand produced in 1910, two years before its publication in 1912 (with revisions), followed by the complete orchestral score in 1913. On 11 March the pianist Ennemond Trillat gave the first performances at the Société nationale of the six homages to Haydn commissioned by Jules Ecorcheville in 1909: Debussy’s Valse lente, Dukas’s Prélude élégiaque, Hahn’s Thème varié, minuets from Ravel and d’Indy and finally a fugue by Widor. Of these composers only Debussy was mentioned by Ravel in an interview he gave to a reporter from The Musical Leader, published on 16 March.112 As to his own music, Ravel says nothing about the Valses nobles et sentimentales which must by now have been complete or nearly so. A score of Daphnis was helpfully left on the piano, prompting the information that, at that stage, Pierné having accepted Ravel’s offer of the previous June, three fragments of the ballet were to be played, and sensibly, given the usual uncertainties about operatic performance, it was announced only that L’heure espagnole would ‘probably’ be premiered in May. Ravel is credited with saying that Satie ‘is the originator of the present form of expression’ (at some point before 11 April Ravel orchestrated the Prelude to Act I of Satie’s Le fils des étoiles which he had played at the SMI on 16 January) and, more surprisingly, that he himself, while considering Pelléas et Mélisande to be a masterpiece, ‘doesn’t understand this particular Maeterlinck play in the same way that Debussy does’. Unfortunately, neither here nor elsewhere do we have details of this potentially fascinating divergence. The mystery deepens when we consider whether or not this interview is the one referred to in Ravel’s letter of 22 March to Cipa Godebski, where he writes that he had been interviewed by letter and had ‘replied with nothing but nonsense.’113 Anyway it’s clear that Ravel in interview is not always to be relied upon. The first performance of the First Suite from Daphnis duly took place on 2 April 1911 under Gabriel Pierné at the Concerts Colonne. The suite,

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consisting of ‘Nocturne’, ‘Interlude’ and ‘Danse guerrière’, presents a continuous section of some thirteen minutes, running from figures 70 to 131 of the ballet score. To the extent that it is continuous, it conforms to Fokine’s desire to construct a work as an entity rather than a traditional succession of numbers, but neither the start nor the conclusion of the suite is convincing shorn of its context: the mysterious rustling of the strings at figure 70, muted on the fingerboard and comprising nine chromatic notes, too obviously derives from earlier material in the ballet, while the final B major chord before figure 131 is too brief (and in the ballet is immediately picked up and reinterpreted by the rough music to which the pirate chief orders Chloé to be brought before him). Reviewers of the First Suite chose to concentrate on its alleged debt to Debussy and on its orchestral effects. An unsigned review in L’éclair the following day found that in listening to the flute solo in the ‘Nocturne’ ‘one thinks inevitably of L’après-midi d’un faune’ and, admitting that ‘these three little things are certainly ingenious, subtle, refined and entertaining’, summed up by saying ‘but it’s no more than a knick-knack.’ Willy was enchanted by the sonorities of Ravel’s ‘orchestre de rêve’, Jean d’Udine perhaps less so by the individual instrumentation, in which ‘there is always something feline, miaowings, something between the noise of a tomcat and the wailing of the wind’.114 Laloy risked further reprimand from his friend Debussy by delivering outright compliments: As an explorer in the world of sound, [Ravel] loves nothing so much as to test its boundaries; one follows him with simultaneous anxiety and delight, trembling at every moment in case he breaks through them; and indeed break through them he does, but only so he can annex the forbidden regions that lie beyond and win them for the world of harmony; these chords which, in anyone else’s hands, would assault the ear, he knows, thanks to an ability that smacks of magic, how to soften and tame so as to produce the strangest delights.115

Whether Debussy ever heard either of the two suites of the whole ballet, we do not know. There is no record of him ever pronouncing on the work. Debussy was, however, in Ravel’s mind and fingers since, on 24 April, he and Louis Aubert opened the twelfth SMI concert with a performance of Ravel’s two-piano transcription of the three Nocturnes. In 1901 (see pp. 36–7) he had already tried his hand at transcribing these in collaboration with Raoul Bardac and Lucien Garban. But the transcriptions published by Fromont in 1909 are attributed to Ravel alone and the two surviving autographs (that of ‘Sirènes’ is lost) are in Ravel’s hand. He admitted in 1901 that, of the three, ‘Sirènes’ was ‘certainly the most perilous’ to transcribe and even his 1909 version, undertaken no doubt after hearing the movement several times in its full choral and orchestral garb, is not completely successful, largely because the neutral piano

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tone cannot sufficiently distinguish between different strands often pitched in the same register, especially between ones for the female chorus and the orchestra. This relative failure says more about the imaginative power of Debussy’s score than about Ravel’s skill as a transcriber. May 1911 was possibly the most important month so far for Ravel’s career. On the 9th Louis Aubert played the Valses nobles et sentimentales at a concert of the SMI, and ten days later L’heure espagnole was given its premiere at the Opéra-Comique. In its continuing attempts to counteract the stuffy atmosphere of the Société nationale, the SMI, encouraged by Koechlin, decided in its second year of life to promote a concert of anonymous works, for which the audience could then suggest authors on slips of paper. Valses nobles et sentimentales were performed ‘amid hoots and protests’ and Ravel’s authorship recognized ‘by a tiny majority’.116 Aubert remembered that by the time he got to the ‘Epilogue’ he was competing against steady conversation.117 It is easy nowadays to laugh at guesses of Kodály and Satie, but the Valses sound very little like Gaspard, Ravel’s last work for piano, being far closer to Le tombeau de Couperin or La valse in taking their inspiration from the dance. Ravel refers to ‘a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder and the lines of the music are made to show up.’118 He refers also to the example of Schubert – an influence that seems to have gone little further than the title, although Roy Howat has pointed out that in the opening of the first Valse Ravel borrowed the rhythm of Schubert’s first Valse noble, but shifted it one crotchet later so that Schubert’s upbeat becomes Ravel’s downbeat (Ex. 4.5).119

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Example 4.5a. Schubert, opening of Valses nobles

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Modéré – très franc ( = 176)

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Example 4.5b. Ravel, opening of Valses nobles et sentimentales I

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Ravel’s score may also have been influenced by Wanda Landowska’s performance of some Schubert waltzes at the SMI concert on 6 March. As with Jeux d’eau Ravel prefaces the score with a quotation from Henri de Régnier, but whereas the earlier one evokes the mood of the piece, the heading to Valses nobles appears to be anti-evocative: ‘le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile’ (barely translatable as ‘the delightful and unfading pleasure of a purposeless occupation’). Dancing is essentially ‘inutile’ and, like this piece, is its own justification. The parallel may be taken further. The flux between the formal steps of a dance and the evolving patterns of the dancers on the floor is mirrored in that between the tightly controlled phrase structures and their expressive content, which is not always what we expect. However, the objectivity of the quotation is brought into question when one reads the Régnier novel. Les rencontres de M. de Bréot, published in 1904, is the tale of an éducation sentimentale. At the very start of the novel, the young M. de Bréot is transfixed by the sight of the beautiful Mme de Blionne dancing: He imagined, not without a slight excitation, that because of the weight of her clothing and the movements she made in dancing, and although this was in the open air, she must be getting hot under her apparel as a Nymph, her skin humid and her body dripping. The sweat must be glistening on her limbs, running down her back and between her breasts and making her damp underclothes stick closely to her skin. And M. de Bréot, as if her silver gown had in a moment become as transparent as the water of a fountain, suddenly imagined Mme de Blionne as though she were absolutely naked before him. He saw, in his mind’s eye, her long legs, her . . .120

. . . etc. It is of course just possible that Ravel chose his quotation (the last words of the novel’s avertissement, or preface) without reading the book; but given that he and Régnier were friends, this seems most unlikely, all the more so since the final chapter of the novel begins with M. de Bréot looking back over his adventures, just as the final movement of Ravel’s work recalls previous ones: . . . when M. de Bréot thought of the various things that had happened during his stay in Paris, a city famous for offering all sorts of experiences, he could not help concluding that, for his part, he had observed merely ordinary events and none of the sort that transform a man. M. de Bréot was still M. de Bréot, for himself as for everyone else. He thought the same thoughts as before and performed the same actions. It is true, even so, that his thoughts also dwelt on the memory of various fairly unusual characters who, when it came to it, had made it worth his while to leave the provinces, thanks to the interest [curiosité] of their acquaintance and the pleasure [agrément] of their company.121

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A combination of curiosité and agrément, paralleling Laloy’s comments above on the first Daphnis suite, is a tempting description of Ravel’s musical style in general and of the Valses nobles in particular, where they are joined by the rhythmic constraints of the dance. There may be less obvious ‘fantaisie’ than in ‘Scarbo’, but the inner tension is at least as great. Harmonically the style is, as Ravel says, harder. This comes about not so much through ‘new’ chords as through the plainer presentation of old ones, and until the epilogue the atmospheric capabilities of the piano are largely shunned. We hear the chords for what they really are in textbook terms, and Ravel’s treatment of them often borders on the academic. The flux referred to above is partly achieved through the interweaving of chromatic scales with the bass ‘circle of fifths’, familiar as the basis of many a Baroque sequence. Critics have frequently mentioned the bitonal texture in the central section of the seventh Valse, which Ravel thought the most ‘characteristic’.122 Here the right hand plays mostly in E major, over the left hand in F major, the left winning over the right at the ends of phrases and finally bullying it into accepting F major in every other bar. This relationship parallels the semitonal one set up in the very first bar of the Valses. At this stage of Ravel’s career the bitonality is always resolved and does not attain the contrapuntal independence that we find in the later Duo for violin and cello or in L’Enfant et les sortilèges. An excellent example of this kind of resolution, achieved through persistence, is the last thirty-five bars of the Epilogue where the bass G asserts itself over all comers and has the last word – a marvellous fusion of technique and poetry. In the novel, M. de Bréot and Mme de Brionne likewise achieve union in the final pages. Noble and sentimental? Neither nobility nor sentiment has an uninterrupted say for long (sentimentality doesn’t come into it) and the studied ambivalence of the Valses has made pianists in general reluctant to play them. Furthermore they pose formidable problems of pedalling, of manual independence and, strangest of all, of rubato, normally anathema to Ravel. In the many cases where phrases in 3/2 and 3/4 times are presented simultaneously, Ravel insisted that both rhythms must be heard. Perlemuter recalls that Ravel made him repeat the opening bars ten times, hands separately, and remarks on the composer’s attitude: ‘I remember with a certain emotion the sight of Ravel, sitting at his desk near the piano, score in hand, while he took me through these Valses. I had never seen his eyes so bright – he was so determined on being understood, on letting nothing slip by either in the notes or, just as much, in its interpretation. Through this passion for perfection in the letter, one found oneself in tune with the spirit.’123 The following year, on 22 April, the Valses were performed in Ravel’s orchestral version as music to the ballet Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, to a story also of Ravel’s devising. The orchestration is certainly among his most miraculous achievements and he profited from the availability of a large orchestra to add a cello countermelody in the fourth Valse.

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128 [Assez animé ( = 80)]

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un peu en dehors

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Cédez à peine

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Example 4.6. Ravel, Valses nobles et sentimentales IV, bars 31–7

Then he realized that this countermelody could, with some dexterity, be accommodated in the piano score; in this revised piano version, dictated to Perlemuter, a single crescendo/diminuendo covers bars 31–7, as in the orchestral one (Ex. 4.6). This addition is a rare example of Ravel changing his mind once a work was in print (another is the indication of tam-tams in ‘Laideronnette’, likewise inserted retrospectively from the full score in Ravel’s own duet copy and that of Robert Casadesus). For him, though, tinkering was in principle unprofessional – like polishing your shoes at a soirée. Meanwhile Carré had finally been persuaded to mount L’heure espagnole at the Opéra-Comique: no doubt Mme Cruppi had remained on the warpath; and according to a verbal tradition in the Massenet family, this doyen of French opera also lent his support.124 The first read-through, with both Ravel and Franc-Nohain present, took place on 20 February, ensemble rehearsals with Ravel in charge began on 3 April, and on 25 April the opera moved into the theatre. There were then two full dress rehearsals on 12 and 15 May, before the répétition générale or ‘press night’ on the 17th. The registre, the theatre’s documentary record of the production, indicates that Ravel was in the theatre more or less every day from 28 April until the premiere on 19 May.125 The story is complicated in detail but simple in essence. Every Thursday the old clockmaker Torquemada leaves his shop to wind up the municipal clocks of Toledo, leaving his wife Concepcion, as he imagines, on her own. . . . However, on this particular Thursday the routine of receiving her visitors is upset by the muscular muleteer Ramiro, who insists on waiting for Torquemada’s return. Thereafter grandfather clocks shoot up and down stairs on Ramiro’s virile shoulders with a precision worthy of Feydeau and, to the muleteer’s mild surprise, some are a good deal heavier than others. Eventually, he supplants his rivals, quite without meaning to, and Torquemada returns, delighted to find his shop so full of clients. The opera ends with a habanera in which all five characters sing the moral, taken from Boccaccio: ‘in the pursuit of love there comes a moment when the muleteer has his turn’. To set to music a story about Spanish automata, both mechanical and human – no wonder Ravel had composed the opera in a fury of excitement

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and at a speed that, for a time anyway, had held out hope of his father seeing it on stage. In a letter to Le Figaro published on 17 May 1911, two days before the premiere, the composer set out his aims: What I’ve tried to do is fairly ambitious: to breathe new life into the Italian opera buffa: following only the principle . . . the French language, like any other, has its accents and inflections of pitch. . . . I wanted to express irony through the music above all, through harmony, rhythm and orchestration, and not, as in operetta, through arbitrary and ridiculous verbal pyrotechnics. . . . The modern orchestra seemed to me perfectly designed for underlining and exaggerating comic effects.126

In Ravel’s hands it does this superbly: witness the explosion of Spanish colour in the first scene as Ramiro presents his watch and explains how his uncle the toreador was saved by it from the horns of death. This is not mere musical opportunism. We recognize Ramiro at once as a man of action, for whom physical strength and courage are primary virtues: he will need his strength as the opera develops and, perhaps, his courage to cope with Concepcion after it’s over. At the premiere, Ramiro was sung by Jean Périer, the creator of the role of Pelléas. Unlikely as this pairing of roles may appear, both demand a voice known in French as baryton-martin – a light, almost tenor-like baritone, named after the French singer Jean-Blaise Martin (1768–1837). Don Inigo, the banker, is designated as a basse-bouffe, Torquemada a trial (high tenor), Concepcion a soprano and Gonzalve, the poet, a tenor. Inside this quintet, clearly contrasted in both pitch and timbre, Ravel allots Gonzalve a special place. In the ‘performing note’ at the front of the score he says: ‘Apart from the final quintet and, for the most part, the role of Gonzalve which is affectedly lyrical, the singers must declaim rather than sing (short ends to phrases, glissandi etc). Almost throughout it is the quasi-parlando of Italian buffo recitative’ . . . and, indeed, of Histoires naturelles which he recognized as ‘studies’ for the opera.127 Gonzalve, then, by lyrical singing declares himself the odd man out, a paradoxical situation in an opera and one matched by the topsy-turvy emotional world he inhabits where, as has been observed, the clocks are in some ways more human than the humans. And yet . . . Hélène JourdanMorhange states: ‘Ravel often told me that he wanted Gonzalve to be a flesh and blood character [ténorisant] rather than a puppet; artists who play the role too often tend to make him ridiculous.’128 Perhaps the truth lies between, and the humour in the struggle of Gonzalve to transmit his passion through an exceptionally refined sensibility – a struggle with which Ravel must have sympathized. Even so Gonzalve’s entry is one of the supreme comic moments of all opera. As he apparently reaches the end of his song celebrating the arrival of the long-awaited day of union with the beloved,

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130

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Concepcion utters his name ‘passionately’ only to receive in reply the beginning of a da capo section. This guying of conventional operatic practice must have come across with unusual force on the opening night when L’heure espagnole formed a double bill following Massenet’s Thérèse; indeed, Jacques Durand later stated plainly that ‘the public who took pleasure in Massenet’s music must have had limited sympathy with Ravel’s’.129 This may have had an effect on subsequent programming, since from 1 July Thérèse was paired with Le voile de bonheur, with music by Charles Pons, and L’heure espagnole with La vie de Bohème.130 There is however one tiny Massenet quotation in Ravel’s opera, from Cendrillon, which may possibly be taken as a ‘thank you’ for his past support in general. The similarity of the texts surely rules out accident (Ex. 4.7).

(Avec rage)

Mme de la Haltière



  

p

f



Oh!











la

dé - ce - van - te_a - ven - tu - re!























Example 4.7a. Mme de la Haltière in Massenet’s Cendrillon, Act II, scene 3

[Modéré] Concepcion



f









Oh!

    

la



Rall.

 

pi - toy - able



 a









- ven - tu

 -

re!

Example 4.7b. Concepcion in Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, scene 17, fig. 83

Ravel’s usual concern for detail is evident everywhere. In the final quintet the vocal lines bear the instructions ‘avec approbation’, ‘d’une voix blanche’ and ‘avec fougue’ (energetically). In the orchestra the string writing in particular is highly complex, incorporating harmonics, glissandi and rapid alternations of arco and pizzicato. Henri Ghéon found the orchestral writing too heavy and Wagnerian,131 while Ravel’s old enemy Lalo thought the orchestration the most attractive Ravel had ever produced but claimed the vocal style ‘puts you in mind of Pelléas played on a gramophone at excessively reduced speed’.132 Reynaldo Hahn, never a Ravel admirer, wrote the opera off as ‘a kind of transcendent ju-jitsu’ in which the performers deliberately played out of time in an attempt to correct this ‘wilfully cacophonic symphony’.133 Even Fauré, in the course of a generally favourable review, had to protest gently against the cult of the wrong note,134 while after Ravel’s death the ex-Apache Vuillermoz claimed the text was simply unsuitable for opera.135

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131

Wholly supportive were Ravel’s one-time fellow student Koechlin, comparing the work to an old netsuke ‘in which the artist has, with impeccable sureness of touch, carved in ivory his ironic, intimate vision of things’,136 and Laloy, who recognized that, like the text, the music did not take itself seriously. He even went as far as to say that ‘This is picaresque Spain, in which things happen rapidly and there is no gap between feeling and action, but a Spain that is dried out, to the point where all humanity has evaporated: the residue is pure farce.’ He clearly feels this was deliberate on Ravel’s part, since he then claims that ‘never has the composer revealed himself more inventive, not more a master of the genre he has made his own, the principle of which is to grant equal satisfactions, albeit of contrary kinds, to intellect and sensibility.’137 Many years later, though, Koechlin felt Ravel had gone too far along this road through the need to follow the libretto and that, despite Ravel’s claims, Gonzalve was a grotesque ‘without any real humanity’, and he compared the work (‘not his masterpiece’) unfavourably to Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui and L’étoile as being operas about real human beings.138 Roland-Manuel reported in his 1914 biography that the public response at both dress rehearsal and premiere was ‘courteous’. It was given nine times at the Opéra-Comique in 1911 . . . and then not again there until November 1945. Few critics if any, apart from Lalo and Hahn, have ever found reason to criticize the instrumental writing per se. Poulenc, at work in 1944 on Les mamelles de Tirésias, admits he has been ‘reading with extraordinary care the orchestral score of L’heure espagnole, with the piano reduction beside it. What a miraculous masterpiece, but what a dangerous example (like that of all masterpieces). When you don’t have Ravel’s magical precision, which alas is the case with me, you have to set your music on sturdy feet.’139 One of the most enchanting of the purely orchestral sections is the introduction which, according to RolandManuel,140 is based on discarded music from Ravel’s projected Olympia, where it accompanied the entrance of Coppelius. The chiming clocks and whirring automata plunge us at once into a world of fantasy. The child in Ravel asks the sarrusophone player to make the sound of a clock (or mechanical cockerel?) by removing the reed from his instrument and to ‘play the rhythm indicated as high as possible without worrying about the notes’. The technician demands that the ticking of the three clocks be started together on the first down beat and then proceed respectively at 40, 100 and 232 ticks per minute – on every eighteenth crotchet (every fifteen seconds) they coincide, and against this structured chaos the rest of the orchestra moves with real rhythmic freedom: the whole procedure anticipates those employed decades later by Messiaen, in such works as Turangalîla and Chronochromie. In the letter to Le Figaro mentioned earlier, Ravel refers to Musorgsky’s Zhenit’ba (The Wedding) as his opera’s only ancestor, even though L’heure does not imitate it closely; interestingly, and maybe quite coincidentally, in a letter of this period Ravel expresses interest in orchestrating it.141 Doubt has

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been cast recently by Steven Huebner on how well Ravel could have understood the Musorgsky opera, given that no French translation was made until 1911, that is, after he had written L’heure espagnole.142 It would be tempting to cite Ravel’s close friendship with Calvocoressi, a fluent Russian speaker, as a possible conduit for the necessary information. However, a proof copy of the first edition of the Russian vocal score of 1908143 bears a note from Calvocoressi recording that this copy was given him by Diaghilev in November 1908, over a year after Ravel had finished the vocal score of his opera. This does still leave the possibility that Calvocoressi possessed some general knowledge of Zhenit’ba before that, and quite likely he would have known that the libretto was written in demotic prose, but it seems to support Huebner’s contention that there was no influence in detail. Whatever its models, Huebner is clearly right in noting the ‘relative disjunction between the melos of the vocal parts and that of the orchestra,’ and in claiming this as one way in which ‘Ravel achieves distance from Wagnerian perspectives, which, in theory at least, place great stock in a shared melos between voice and orchestra.’144 L’heure is, like the Valses nobles, an ambivalent work. Its world is, in the words of Horace Walpole, ‘a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel’. We laugh at Don Inigo impotently straining for his bottom D and being supplanted by the sarrusophone, but we would rather see him than be him. It is perhaps not too impertinent to suggest as model a masterpiece by Ravel’s adored Mozart, Così fan tutte. In both of them the irony is expressed ‘through the music above all’. In both of them the manipulator (Don Alfonso/Maurice Ravel) treads the dangerous path between objectivity and involvement, while we, the audience, for comfort’s sake like to persuade ourselves that it is only a game. Rosenthal reported that Ravel saw the five characters as representing the whole of society (Concepcion is not just a woman, but woman),145 yet Rosenthal admitted sadly that, when conducting L’heure and L’Enfant et les sortilèges as a double bill, he could always feel during the first a coldness in the small of his back. Then, with L’Enfant, warmth would return.146

CHAPTER V

1911–1914

Nobility and sentiment True to the fashion of Paris, Ravel’s first theatrical venture brought him more forcibly to the notice of the public than any previous work. Durand expressed his faith in the 36-year-old by bringing out the orchestral score of the opera within months of the premiere. But another premiere, at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June 1911, gave Ravel notice that he was not to be the sole disturber of Parisian musical peace. We have no direct evidence of Ravel’s enthusiasm for Petrushka, but probably this was what he felt, in common with the rest of the Parisian musical world. However, he may have had mixed feelings: as Marnat says, ‘clearly the long ballet was a genre that could be made to work and he needed to finish Daphnis, all the more so because he was the only composer in France engaged in such a task (with Reynaldo Hahn, over whom he had a number of reasons to try and go one up). The evident superiority of Petrushka over Firebird could only stimulate him. . . .’1 For the moment what Ravel needed after months of hectic activity was a good rest. On 15 July he and his mother left Paris for Ciboure and stayed there exactly three months at the pension Anchochury on the quai de Ciboure, a few steps away from the house where he was born. The hotelkeeper, Mme Isabelle Anchochury, was a childhood friend of Ravel’s mother, and a letter from Ravel to Marie Gaudin, thanking her for arranging the stay, also mentions that as all meals are included, his mother won’t have to be responsible for anything.2 These were three idyllic months, spoilt only by instances of careless Basque speech to which Ravel took great exception (‘In my [great aunt] Gaxuxa’s [Gachoucha’s] day, people spoke a purer Basque! . . . If she could hear you now!’3) and by complaints from fellow guests about Ravel’s piano playing – not so much about its quality as that it tended to take place late at night after his extended rambles. Rousseau-Plotto points out that a postcard to RolandManuel, given the date 1 September 1911,4 was written from the pension Ongi Etori in St-Jean-de-Luz, where the Ravels would often stay until 1914, and deduces from this that Ravel may well have been asked to take his creativity elsewhere. However, the dating of the card is doubtful (see p. 135); it seems more likely it dates from one of Ravel’s subsequent stays, and that the Anchochury residents were prepared to suffer in the cause of art.

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134

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This stay in Ciboure also raised the question of religion. Narbaitz records an incident related to him, as with much of his chapter ‘Retour à Ciboure’, by Isabelle Anchochury’s daughter Elisabeth, who was sixteen at the time of the visit: When he arrived in 1911 at the Hôtel Anchochury, there could be no doubt that not only Maurice, and certainly his brother Edouard, but their mother too were complete strangers to all religious observance. . . . Came the first Sunday morning and Madame Ravel had to face the serious question: would she or would she not go to Mass? Maurice, in the next room, could hear the pious exhortations of her friends. ‘If Mama doesn’t convert this year,’ he thought, ‘she never will!’ He himself, when told she had agreed to go, with his usual kindness was keen to help his mother, ‘titivating and perfuming her’ so that there would be no more beautiful lady at High Mass in Ciboure!5

We cannot wholly exclude the possibility that what Ravel is quoted as calling a ‘conversion’ was in fact a return. Roman Catholicism was strong in the Basque fishing ports. Certainly Marie’s illegitimacy and local reactions to it might have caused her to turn away from the Church, but it is equally possible that on marrying Joseph she found it easier to follow his unbelieving line, and that once he had died, and she found herself again on home territory and among childhood friends, something of her early faith should reassert itself. None of this can be proved. But Ravel’s reaction to his mother’s decision conforms with his statement that he was not an atheist, merely someone who found it so hard to fathom his own motives that those of an unseen God must necessarily be beyond him.6 The rambles that preceded bouts of piano playing took Ravel far and wide through the Basque provinces. Mlle Anchochury remembered one that took Ravel and companions to the peaks called ‘Les trois couronnes’, visible from St-Jean-de-Luz. The 1912 Baedeker Pyrénées warns that ‘the ascent to the highest peak (832m) is for good climbers only’. She recalled that ‘the ramblers didn’t get back till nightfall: they had torn the bottoms of their white city trousers by sliding down the steep mountain slopes, and didn’t dare venture through inhabited areas in daylight’.7 On his return, Ravel is quoted as saying. ‘I’m exhausted but thrilled. From the top I could see three Basque provinces at my feet: Labourd, Navarre and Guipuzcoa; it’s given me the idea of composing a piece I shall call Zazpiak-Bat [The Seven are One, referring to the seven provinces of the Basque country, three French and four Spanish].’8 Whether the inspiration was indeed this trip or a longer excursion by car that September,9 Ravel may have been searching for Basque elements that would continue the work of the Valses nobles in expanding his musical materials. We may share the composer’s regret that these elements ultimately played only a small part in his quest.

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They played no part whatever either in the orchestration of Ma mère l’Oye, which occupied him that September, or in the second part of Daphnis, the only actual composition, or rather recomposition he would undertake over the next eighteen months. Probably his struggles with the Daphnis finale were at least partly responsible for the almost total absence of information about his life during the three months or so after the family’s return to Paris on 15 October. On the other hand, the changes he did eventually make to the piano score he had withdrawn in October 1910 do not seem radical to us, who know the result, consisting as they do in the reshaping of regular 3/4 bars into a mixture of 5/4, 3/4 and 2/4 and in giving a much longer contribution to the chorus. The only fact we have is that on 20 October Satie wrote to Roland-Manuel to say that he was going to Ravel’s the following day and ‘voulez-vous que je vous présente à ce grand homme que j’aime beaucoup?’ (‘would you like me to introduce you to this great man whom I’m very fond of?’).10 The incontrovertible date of this letter must cast doubt on that of Ravel’s card, supposedly of 1 September 1911, referred to above (p. 133) (in which Ravel calls RolandManuel ‘cher ami’) and hence on the colourful supposition that Ravel’s piano playing forced a change of domicile. Altogether more interesting than queries about dates are Roland-Manuel’s own memories of the occasion which, from someone who was to become Ravel’s first biographer and one of his closest friends, are worth quoting at length: In 1911 Ravel was living near the Etoile at 4 avenue Carnot. As Satie and I were about to go through the entrance to the apartment block, a small man appeared whom I took at first to be a jockey. He was wearing a bowler hat and an elegant raglan overcoat. A Malacca cane with a curved handle hung on his forearm and, when I was introduced, the enthusiasm of my handshake sent his cane flying through the air, and when we rushed to pick it up we all bumped into one another and burst out laughing. To start with, Ravel was usually reserved and polite, but this incident broke the ice. In the years that followed I often noticed in him this ability to be amused by nothing much: an ability common to children and great intellects. He shared the apartment on the avenue Carnot with his mother, a charming woman whose sensitive face was surrounded by a halo of white hair, and his brother, whom he complained he never saw: Edouard Ravel was an engineer who got up early and, Maurice being a nightbird, the two met only on the stairs. . . . There was nothing to indicate to a visitor that a composer lived there. Ravel the magician liked to keep even the apparatus of his tricks hidden, and it was only rarely that a pencil or a piece of manuscript paper was left on the table or on the piano, which was almost always shut. The only score I sometimes saw on the music rest was the Breitkopf edition of Sixty Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, and the only manuscript, some years later, was of Maurice Delage’s Poèmes hindous, covered with fearsome

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arabesques in green ink. Ravel had a way of greeting newcomers which could be disconcerting: a mixture of coldness without arrogance, which could seem affected, and the utter simplicity and naivety of a child. However great his liking for you, however close his friendship, the tone of his greeting barely changed. Added to which, he was always incapable of adjusting the expression of his courtesy to the age and standing of the person he was addressing, with the result that the young felt much more at home with him than people of importance, who were considerably surprised to find themselves accorded no special status. We, his friends, were grateful to him for his direct, sincere manner, as we were for a frankness free of all condescension.11

As already noted, it was the enthusiasm of Jacques Rouché, the future director of the Paris Opéra, that led directly to Ravel’s refashioning of Ma mère l’Oye into a ballet. This, together with Daphnis, occupied Ravel after his return to Paris on 15 October. He wrote to Marie Gaudin on 11 November, ‘I’ve hardly left the house; my publisher was sending round to pick up the music as it was finished. Now . . . most of it’s with the engraver.’12 A small orchestra of thirty-two players,13 conducted by Gabriel Grovlez, accompanied the first performance at the Théâtre des Arts on 29 January 1912. Costumes and decor were by Drésa, with whose contribution Ravel, in a letter of early January, expressed his delight (‘c’est de la féerie’), tempered with a few detailed suggestions for improvement: Drésa should, for instance, abandon Ravel’s earlier idea of an arbour to hide the sleeping princess – ‘that would spoil the symmetry of the decor’.14 The combination in a Ravel work of ‘féerie’ and ‘symétrie’ should be no cause for surprise. Ravel’s pleasure at the premiere was widely shared, even to some extent by Reynaldo Hahn who, despite one or two passing hits (the ballet’s ‘refined relaxation . . . proceeds from that aesthetic, so fashionable these days, whose key principle is to obtain through complication effects of almost childish simplicity, or else to reach a paroxysm of affectation through means that are rudimentary’), acknowledged Ravel’s skill ‘in imitating through music not only the sounds of nature and life but also the almost inaudible resonances and even the silences of the atmosphere . . . He moves in the world of instruments like a butterfly in a flower garden, but a blasé butterfly. And his procedures, which might lead another to disaster, are with him out of the ordinary, seductive, and full of surprises and happy discoveries.’ He concluded by calling Ravel’s score ‘this spidery music’ (cette musique arachnéenne).15 What he does not mention finding anywhere is emotion of any kind, and to that extent his review is a rider to that of L’heure espagnole with its ‘transcendent jujitsu’, and a pattern for many reviews of this composer’s music over the years to come in which Ravel’s supposed cold impersonality is contrasted with Debussy’s warm individualism. Satie, on the other hand, was all praise, after the performance of Ma mère on 10 February to which Ravel had invited him. ‘Mon cher ami’, he wrote to the composer two days later,

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I’m very pleased to have seen Ma mere l’Oye on stage. I realized the way I should go. Your beautiful work – which I admire more and more – has remained beautiful; the additions, delightful as they are, have not inflated it. You have achieved grandeur within simplicity. A strong work – as is the case with yours – will always remain strong, despite all the furnishings supplied to aid its presentation. You are a magnificent artist, my dear friend; permit me to tell you so.16

We may imagine Ravel’s delight at receiving this touching and deeply perceptive letter: ‘la grandeur dans le simple’, here was a reply direct to Hahn’s niggling. As to the meaning of the sentence ‘J’ai ressenti ce que je devais devenir’, it’s unclear whether Satie saw in Ma mère a general direction in which his music might profitably go (the piano pieces of 1912–13, including the three sets of Enfantines?), or more specifically ballet music, to which he was to turn his hand six years later in Parade, with spectacular results. On 2 February 1912, the day Hahn’s review appeared, Ravel perhaps took greater pleasure in writing, further to an earlier letter on 4 January, to tell Vaughan Williams that the SMI committee had unanimously accepted On Wenlock Edge for its concert on the 29 February. He hoped Vaughan Williams would be present and might even play the piano part; if not, Ravel offered his own services. In the event RVW came, Ravel played, the bilingual Canadian Rodolphe Plamondon sang, and Fauré and Cyril Scott also took part in their own works. In a much delayed letter of 5 August Ravel congratulated Vaughan Williams on his success, saying that ‘everyone agreed your songs were a revelation’,17 but RVW ‘told his intimates in later years that it was the worst performance he had ever heard, “which was probably why the French liked it”.’18 The culpability of Ravel’s piano playing must remain conjectural. While supervising the production of Ma mère l’Oye and struggling with the finale of Daphnis, Ravel had also spent his Sunday afternoons in January listening to four concerts by the Lamoureux Orchestra, for a review that appeared on 15 February in the SIM. He had written no articles for the press since the one on Chopin for Le courrier musical in 1910, when his text had been hacked about (see p. 109). The presence of Louis Laloy gave the SIM greater credibility, even though after his three orchestral reviews of February, March and April 1912 Ravel transferred his allegiance to Comoedia illustré, where he could flex his critical muscles over performances of opera. Debussy, again through Laloy’s influence, contributed eleven articles to the SIM between November 1912 and March 1914. As a high-profile composer taking up his reviewer’s pen, Ravel clearly felt the need to stake out his emotional and stylistic territory. Anyone wanting to know what made him tick could, and still can glean a great deal from the two opening paragraphs of his first review, as can anyone doubting his combative spirit:

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It seems curious that musical criticism should so rarely be entrusted to those who practise this art. No doubt it is felt that these people have better things to do and that, apart from some brilliant exceptions, themselves works of art, a review, even a perspicacious one, is necessarily a lesser thing than a piece of music, however mediocre. It may also be feared that the professionals, impelled by feelings that are frequently honourable, cannot always judge with absolute independence and that their opinions may be tainted by strong feeling, to put it no lower. One must recognize nevertheless that the judgments of critics who are not composers are not always exempt from such strong feeling. Often in fact a vehement ardour in attack acts as an effective mask of an incompetence that might be inferred from an opinion more gently expressed.19

No names (at this stage) were mentioned or needed: MM. Carraud, Lalo etc. knew who they were. Ravel also advanced with bayonet fixed against those members of the audience who objected to Liszt’s Die Ideale: And why should we be concerned with the faults of this work, and of Liszt’s entire output? Are there not enough fine qualities in this seething tumult, this vast, magnificent chaos of musical material into which several generations of famous composers have dipped their buckets? It is largely to these faults, it’s true, that Wagner owes his over-declamatory vehemence, Strauss his weightlifter’s enthusiasm, Franck the heaviness of his elevation, the Russian school its sometimes showy picturesqueness, the current French school the extreme coquetry of its harmonic grace. But these composers, of such varying styles, do they not owe their best qualities to the truly prodigious musical liberality of this great precursor? Within this form, often clumsy, always abundant, can we not descry the embryo of Saint-Saëns’s ingenious, natural, limpid development sections? And this brilliant orchestration, sounding both powerful and light, what a huge influence it has had on Liszt’s most determined adversaries!20

Even those readers who chose to ignore the aggression of the opening paragraphs must have blinked at Hahn’s ‘blasé butterfly’ promoting Liszt’s ‘bouillonnement tumultueux, dans ce vaste et magnifique chaos de matière musicale’. It is clear that Ravel labelled Liszt ‘to be handled with care’ and in this article we find the first overt profession of Ravel’s magpie tendencies: no source of itself is out of bounds, but you must choose wisely, and sparingly. During March 1912 Ravel continued orchestrating Daphnis for the upcoming season, completing it on 5 April, and also the Valses nobles which, according to Roland-Manuel, he finished in a fortnight.21 On 9 March Viñes played Gaspard at the Société nationale, the first time it had been heard there since the premiere in January 1909 – perhaps d’Indy and co. thought Ravel

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now had plenty of opportunities to get his music played at the SMI. Ten days later Ravel accompanied Jane Bathori in Histoires naturelles in a concert at Lili Boulanger’s.22 His only public appearance that month was again as critic for the SIM, and again in fine combative form. The targets this time were the D major Symphony of Brahms and the D minor Symphony of Franck. The will, declares Ravel, cannot be other than the attentive servant of the instinct. Both symphonies, according to him, suffer from a surfeit of ‘willing’, especially in their development sections, but at least Brahms is a competent orchestrator and one is spared the ‘circus noises’ of the pater seraphicus. His bile duly vented, Ravel has kind things to say about other pieces he heard, including Casella’s orchestration of Islamey, Schmitt’s Psalm 47, and Caplet’s orchestration of Children’s Corner: ‘these pieces obviously just show a great artist amusing himself. But there is more music in a single bar of one of them than in the whole interminable suite called Impressions d’Italie, that envoi from a grateful Rome which some years ago won for its adroit composer the tender esteem of the most venerable members of the Institut.’23 And with that swipe at Gustave Charpentier (‘adroit’ is particularly unkind), Ravel signed off until the following month, when he reviewed the Tableaux symphoniques of Ernst Fanelli. This set of orchestral pieces, dating from the 1880s, had been hailed in the press as the work of a neglected genius, a French Wagner. Ravel, while deploring the hype, found the pieces extremely interesting ‘especially given the period when they were written’, but is careful to concentrate on the orchestral sonorities rather than the music. Having set out his stall in the preceding months, he now has no general points to make, except that Fanelli was emphatically not, as one journalist claimed, an influence on Debussy.24 These persistent defences of his senior colleague were not to end here and, while it is always Debussy the composer who is defended, it is tempting to interpret Ravel’s stand as partial support for those who claimed the two men would have liked to renew their friendship, but that the waters were muddied by their supporters. On 22 April Ravel mounted the conductor’s rostrum for the first time since the debacle of the Shéhérazade overture in 1899, to direct the premiere of the ballet Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, danced to his orchestration of the Valses nobles. The occasion was the performance, by the ballerina Natasha Trouhanova and her troupe, of four ballets by French composers, each conducted by its author: d’Indy’s Istar, Schmitt’s La tragédie de Salomé, Dukas’s La péri and finally Adélaïde. The Russian choreographer, Ivan Clustine, had just been appointed maître de ballet at the Opéra by Messager; the first foreigner ever to hold that post, he at once hit the headlines by being quoted as wanting to banish the tutu: ‘Clustine versus Tutu! Tutu versus Clustine! Who will win?’ asked Comoedia illustré.25 Clustine rectified the rumour by saying the tutu was fine for flowers, butterflies and fairytale characters, but not

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for peasants, bacchantes or Thaïs – and by implication, since Adélaïde is also a courtesan, not for her either. Trouhanova, though possessing an expressive face and beautiful arms and wrists, was decidedly statuesque between ankle and neck, a further reason for Adélaïde to wear ‘an elegant high-waisted evening dress, typical of the early nineteenth century, with a tightly fitted bodice, puffed sleeves and a long skirt adorned at the hemline by roses and flounces’.26 Whether by accident or design, Drésa’s costume thus reflected the suppressed eroticism of Régnier’s novel and Ravel’s score (see p. 126). Trouhanova also seems to have danced Ravel’s ballet in a rather different fashion from the rest. Whereas there she had undulated, leapt and thrown her arms about, as Adélaïde she ‘made a change by offering a conventional ballet silhouette’.27 Certainly the role does not seem to lend itself to leaping or undulating. Ravel’s scenario, which Larner not unfairly calls ‘a pale echo of the first act of La traviata’,28 represents his first depiction of passionate heterosexual attraction (psychologists might like to consider the fact that he chose to do so, here and in Daphnis, through the medium of the dance rather than through song where, apart from the first of the Chansons madécasses, it is signally absent; more often, as in the Marot settings and ‘Nicolette’, it is a subject for cool analysis or plain sarcasm. How deep the passions run in L’heure espagnole is debatable). In her Parisian salon, around 1820, the courtesan Adélaïde is playing hard to get, toying with the melancholy Lorédan and the more dashing Duke. As the subtitle indicates, the action incorporates the language of flowers (a tuberose for voluptuousness, the Duke’s sunflowers for empty riches, Adélaïde’s acacia branch for platonic love, which the Duke spurns), and finally, pulling a red rose from her bodice, she sinks into Lorédan’s arms (figure 74, bar 59), as the orchestral crescendo is halted by a piano subito. After a final brief reminiscence of the score’s opening chords, the two lovers’ embrace is accompanied by music that ‘has a chorale-like quality, whence melodic definition and dynamic are reduced to nothingness’.29 Do Adélaïde and Lorédan live happily ever after? Is the ballet a serious work, or just a procession of games? In relation to the Régnier epigraph recommending ‘a pointless occupation’, repeated over the orchestral score, Deborah Mawer refers to a possible ‘selfironizing on Ravel’s part regarding his act of remodeling Schubert’s waltzes’.30 The sharp contrast in the music between the conventional bourgeois ‘container’ and the highly sophisticated and challenging ‘contained’ allows the possibility, as do the contrasts within the music itself: Larner observes ‘the initial truculence’ of the piano version ‘which provokes liberal use of percussion while its seductive qualities are intensified above all by sensuous violin sounds’.31 Mawer persuasively suggests that the extensive percussion section gives the score a Chabrieresque feel – not something Ravel would have wanted to deny, especially as it was, by chance, in this same month that a statue of Chabrier was finally erected in the little park of his home town of Ambert.32

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Critical response varied. There was gratitude that the Ballets russes were not having things all their own way and admiration for the sets, mixed with doubts about Trouhanova’s interpretations. Among those carried away by the whole enterprise, Francis de Miomandre also noted that Adélaïde was danced in a more classical manner than the other three and that ‘Mademoiselle Trouhanova . . . appears melancholy, dreamy, reserved, disappointed, as is fitting for a heroine who has read Lamartine and regards love as something highly complicated.’33 He also mentions that each ballet was preceded by a fanfare written by the composer in question. Curiously, only that for La péri has survived. As for Ravel’s return to conducting, it went unremarked, which may have been as well. ‘His performance of Adélaïde was correct, if not masterly,’ Roland-Manuel recorded: ‘ “It isn’t difficult,” he admitted the first evening, “It’s always in three-time.” And when we objected that the seventh waltz contained superimposed binary and ternary rhythms, he agreed that made it difficult; “but when I get to that point, I just go round and round.” ’34 Trouhanova was disappointed that her enterprise did not make more of a splash and voiced her determination to give up dancing and take up acting. But for the four composers everything seems to have gone fairly smoothly. ‘It went very well,’ d’Indy wrote to Octave Maus, ‘with an audience of idiotic snobs who overdid the applause.’35. Schmitt’s copy of the programme, signed by d’Indy, Rouché and Ravel, seems to testify to similar satisfaction.36 Ravel’s contribution, dedicated ‘à ce vieux Schmitt / affectueusement / Maurice Ravel’, contains a puzzle in the form of a melodic phrase that Ravel-lovers will find curiously familiar (Ex. 5.1).

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Example 5.1. Ravel, sketch

The rhythm is that of the opening of the Piano Trio, also found in sketches for Zazpiak-Bat.37 But the actual melodic line is found nowhere in the Trio and, even if Ravel was already thinking of this Basque rhythm (zortzico) by the spring of 1912, there seems no obvious link between either work and Adélaïde. Perhaps it was just a private joke. There was to be no rest for Ravel, with the Ballets russes season starting in under two months’ time, and three new works to be rehearsed: Balakirev’s Thamar, L’après-midi d’un faune choreographed by Nijinsky, and Daphnis et Chloé, completed at last after three years of planning and composing. As we have seen, the gestation of Daphnis went back at least to Diaghilev’s commission in 1909, and possibly further to an alleged meeting between Diaghilev and Ravel in 1907.38 Calvocoressi later remembered:

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Ravel with Diaghilev, Fokin [sic], Bakst, Benois and myself in Diaghilev’s little sitting-room (red plush and mahogany, alas!) at the Hôtel de Hollande as it then was, finally deciding for Daphnis and offering suggestions as to particulars of plot . . . Fokin eventually casting the libretto into shape to Ravel’s satisfaction. I also remember that the very first bars of music which Ravel wrote were inspired by the memory of a wonderful leap sideways which Nijinsky (who was to be Daphnis) used to perform in a pas seul in Le pavillon d’Armide, a ballet produced by Diaghilev that very season; and that they were intended to provide the opportunity for similar leaps – the pattern characterized by a run and a long pause, which runs through Daphnis’s dance:39

[Assez lent]

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7

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mf

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3

Example 5.2. Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, fig. 43, bars 3, 4

Ravel read the story in Amyot’s eighteenth-century translation, but in any case there was to be no question of fidelity to Longus’s Greek ‘novel’; in the final scenario very little remains either of the detail which is one of the joys of the original, or indeed of the outline, which tells of Daphnis’s education in the art of love at the hands of the nymph Lycoenion, who found ‘in this young goatherd a greater naïvety than she had expected’. Understandably in a ballet, accuracy was sacrificed to atmosphere. Finally a three-part scenario was agreed as follows. On a spring afternoon on the island of Lesbos a group of girls and youths assembles bringing gifts to the nymphs whose statues we see on the verge of the wood behind them. Daphnis, a shepherd, and Dorcon, a goatherd, dance for the privilege of a kiss from Chloé. Daphnis wins the contest and her kiss leaves him in ecstasy. Lyceion [sic] enters and tries to seduce him and, although she fails, leaves him confused. Suddenly a band of pirates attacks the island and kidnap Chloé. Daphnis, who has gone to find her, discovers one of her sandals and in despair curses the powers who have failed to protect her. He falls to the ground unconscious and the nymphs come down from their pedestals and dance. They revive Daphnis and lead him to a huge rock which changes into the image of the god Pan, before whom Daphnis

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prostrates himself. From the distance comes the sound of a choir as total darkness descends and the scene changes to the camp where the pirates are celebrating their successful raid. The pirate chief compels Chloé to dance for him. Her attempts to escape are forlorn and eventually he carries her off, but mysterious sounds and apparitions interrupt the festivities, culminating in the appearance of Pan, at which the pirates all run for their lives. The final scene begins with the famous dawn music. The shepherds who have found Chloé with the help of Pan wake Daphnis; the pair are reunited and, after they have danced in honour of the love of Pan and Syrinx, a ‘joyeux tumulte’ leads to the final ‘Danse générale’. Troubles between Ravel and Fokine arose because each was aiming at a different ideal: Ravel to create ‘a vast musical fresco, less concerned with archaism than with fidelity to the Greece of my dreams which is close to that imagined and painted by the French artists of the late eighteenth century’,40 Fokine ‘to recapture, and dynamically express, the form and image of the ancient dancing depicted in red and black on Attic vases’.41 This had been his intention since 1907 when he submitted a scenario of Daphnis to the Director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, saying ‘No ballet-master could commit the following mistake: to arrange dances for Russian peasants in the style of Louis XV or . . . create dances in the manner of the Russian trepak to a French theme. Then why permit the constant error in productions based on subjects from Ancient Greece: shall Greeks dance the French way?’42 To which the answer was, if Ravel was to have anything to do with it, yes. The result, as Marnat says, was that ‘nothing ultimately is less Greek than this Daphnis’,43 and Morrison describes it succinctly as ‘a ballet of contrasting neoclassicisms, its visual layer composed of flowing lines and bright colors, its aural layer of floating motives and blended timbres.’44 Their disagreement was only one of the many sources of irritation. Fokine had been forced by Diaghilev in 1911 to produce a Greek ballet, Narcisse, to music by Tcherepnin, and to use sets originally intended for Daphnis. Now Nijinsky was working on a second Greek ballet, L’après-midi, to which, in Fokine’s eyes, Diaghilev was allotting extravagant amounts of time, some 120 rehearsals in all. And Daphnis would be yet a third Greek ballet, with Diaghilev threatening to reuse costumes from Narcisse. As a result Fokine decided to leave the company, so that in choreographing Daphnis he was working out his notice – hardly an ideal situation and, according to the régisseur Grigoriev, ‘he grew more and more restless and nervy, till it became impossible to work with him. He suspected everyone who stood close to Diaghilev of being his enemy, including myself.’45 As we have seen in Chapter 4 (pp. 116–17), Ravel showed himself early on to be sensitive about his rights in the production. In May 1910 he complained, ‘I’ve been slogging away at the music for months now.’46 The slogging went on well beyond 1910, to the point where he asked his friend Louis Aubert to write the ‘Danse générale’ ‘and I will sign it’. Aubert, who told the story to Manuel

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Rosenthal, understandably took pride in having refused.47 But of course an early version of the ‘Danse’, in 3/4, was engraved in piano score in 1910, so Ravel’s struggles must have been to improve this version; which he did, as we have seen, by including 5/4 metre, perhaps with a nod to the Basque zortzico dance. Even so, his debt to the last movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is unmistakable, and Ravel’s claim that he put a copy of Rimsky’s score on the piano to help him may be true.48 But it has to be said that the chronology in all this is uncertain. Piano rehearsals began in May 1912, upon which Diaghilev wanted to cancel the whole project, changing his mind only on Durand’s assurance that Ravel’s orchestration would bring the music to life.49 Then Fokine turned his temper on Bakst, the designer. No wonder that some years later Ravel could write to Misia Sert (formerly Edwards) ‘poor Daphnis has plenty of grounds for complaining about Diaghilev. I know it was not all on one side and that few productions have ever caused such trouble, but it wasn’t always the work’s fault.’50 Originally scheduled for four performances between 5 June and the last evening of the season on the 10th, Daphnis was elbowed out of the first two by L’après-midi d’un faune (both evenings sold out) and so was restricted to just two performances on the 8th and 10th without even an open dress rehearsal – a pre-echo of what happened a year later when Debussy’s Jeux was incinerated in the succeeding glow of Le sacre. Even then, ‘nothing was really ready except the orchestra’.51 Karsavina, dancing the role of Chloé, remembered ‘There was a dance in it for me in which the bars followed a capricious cadence of everchanging rhythm. Fokine was too maddened, working against time, to give me much attention; on the morning of the performance the last act was not yet brought to an end. Ravel and I at the back of the stage went through – 1 2 3 – 1 2 3 4 5 – 1 2, till finally I could dismiss mathematics and follow the pattern of the music.’52 It has to be said that, writing nearly twenty years later, Karsavina misremembered the details, which are in no way capricious, merely unusual, in that a 3/4 bar at [ = 100 is followed by another at [ = 72, and so through the whole number (figs 133–8). Nor can her figures refer to the ‘Danse générale’, since she specifically says ‘a dance in it for me’, and no prima ballerina is going to confuse that with a mêlée for the hoi polloi. But her recollection of last-minute panic is almost certainly accurate. Quite apart, though, from L’après-midi’s moneymaking capacity, Diaghilev clearly had no love for Daphnis and there have never been definitive explanations of this. Certainly it was expensive, with a large orchestra and an off-stage chorus, and Ravel refused to countenance cuts in what has sometimes been felt to be an over-extended score. Diaghilev may have agreed with Fokine53 that Ravel’s ‘Danse guerrière’ was nothing like violent enough. Or, consciously or unconsciously, he may have been desperate to be free of Fokine and all his works (though the choreographer returned to him in 1914). Perhaps the most likely reason is the purely artistic one suggested by John Drummond: ‘Daphnis

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has huge tableaux, in which nothing much happens, and then crucial episodes of the narrative compressed into tiny sections, with hardly enough notes to let the action take place.’54 Chloé’s abduction, for instance, is effected in a mere three bars. But there is no evidence that, as has been claimed, Diaghilev was angry over the concert performance of the First Suite the year before: it was common for extracts of long works to be given as tasters for the final article. Ravel, understandably, was furious at having the expected four performances reduced to two. Roland-Manuel tells a story about him arriving late for the premiere: The three knocks announcing the start had already sounded when we saw him arriving in his gala outfit, holding under his arm a long package done up in brown paper. As we were pressing him to take his place, he asked very deliberately which box Misia Sert was in. ‘Haven’t you got a box?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I want to give Misia Sert something.’ And while Nijinsky was making his stage entrance with his herd of goats, Ravel opened the package and presented Mme Sert with a magnificent Chinese doll.55

Roland-Manuel cites this as an example of Ravel, the supreme dandy, being detached from his own work. Or we could interpret it as a snub to Diaghilev. Or, even more elegantly, as both. We can draw our own conclusions from the fact that, while Adélaïde retains its dedication to Aubert and the ballet of Ma mère l’Oye is dedicated to ‘Jacques Rouché, en amicale reconnaissance’, Daphnis is not dedicated to anyone. Of course Ravel did have a box, containing him, his mother and brother, Delage, Schmitt and Stravinsky: that is, half family, half Apaches, the two poles of his social life.56 But there could be another, more positive interpretation. In her memoirs Misia recalled that when she was a little girl her godmother had given her ‘a doll, dressed in chestnutand-green-coloured satin, almost as large as myself. I called her Rose. Rose could shut her eyes and say “Papa” and “Mama”, in a voice that went straight to my heart.’ But while Misia was away at her convent, ‘my stepmother, uneasy that I should display so much love for the only being I was allowed to fondle, had given her away.’57 Had she told Ravel this affecting tale? The reviews of Daphnis were mixed. There were negative comments from the usual culprits, if with redeeming features. Lalo admitted that ‘The music is more developed, richer; the thematic working is more noticeable and sustained. But it is lacking the first quality of ballet music: rhythm.’58 ‘On the contrary!’ might have been the response from Karsavina and the corps de ballet. Lalo’s complaint about a lack of clarity in the choreography was probably nearer the mark. Gaston Carraud agreed about the rhythm, which was ‘extremely feeble in M. Ravel’s poetic and picturesque score, and as the development always relies on repetition, it gives the impression of marking time, instead of true movement’.59 Perhaps the least enthusiastic reviewer was the 77-year-old Arthur

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Pougin: ‘Much talent in this music, that is incontestable, much willpower, above all much daring: but, one has to admit, very little grace, very little charm, and above all very little inspiration.’60 The reference to ‘willpower’ suggests an attempt to condemn Ravel through his own comments in the March issue of SIM. Pougin, who had been a fiddler in the Opéra-Comique orchestra back in the early 1860s, was no doubt happier with ballets such as Adam’s Giselle (1841). Among the enthusiasts were Robert Brussel, who found that ‘In the ordinary way we are dazzled by M. Ravel; but this time we are stirred; stirred, not because his manner is aggressive or haughty, but because it is infinitely gentle, fresh and tender, as it should be for such a subject’;61 and Vuillermoz, who felt that ‘The last part of the work reveals even a happy carelessness, a kind of nonchalant mastery, sufficient to enrapture musicians who with consternation have seen a certain harshness and affectation become normal to the ironic Muse of L’heure espagnole.’ In contrast to MM. Lalo and Carraud, he thought the dances had ‘a surprising dynamism and an irresistible impulse’.62 Posterity has lauded Daphnis as one of Ravel’s greatest scores, and it would be hard to fault this judgment. But the reasons for its success – largely the opulent scoring, the rhythmic drive and the memorable tunes – are not those features that for Ravel were the most important. In his autobiographical sketch he referred to Daphnis as a symphonie chorégraphique and declared that it ‘is symphonically constructed on a very strict key scheme, using a small number of motifs, whose development ensures the symphonic homogeneity of the work’.63 This threefold reference to ‘symphonic’ and its derivatives indicates his attitude plainly enough. Hearing Firebird and Petrushka he must have sensed their tight organization, especially in the repetition of blocks of material in altered form. As to Carraud’s complaint that the development always relied on repetition, repetition there is certainly, but Example 5.3 shows that his complaint was not wholly justified.

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  

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Example 5.3. Ravel, themes from Daphnis et Chloé

One could quote a dozen further examples in which the characteristic falling figure is modified. It is noticeable, moreover, that it tends to occur in the middle or at the end of phrases until the appearance of the Dawn theme which glories in Ravel’s favourite descending fourth. It is easy to find derivative passages in Daphnis: the phrase from Rimsky’s Scheherazade that leads into the ‘Danse générale’, the wordless chorus reminiscent of ‘Sirènes’ in its oscillations between neighbouring tones and following a long line of other wordless choruses,64 or the glissandi in harmonics taken from Firebird – a work to which Ravel was otherwise indebted for bringing to his notice Lubov Tchernicheva, the Firebird’s Princess and the second nymph in Daphnis: she had, according to Stravinsky, ‘infatuated Alfonso XIII and was the only woman who had ever attracted Ravel.’65 Nevertheless Daphnis remains unique among Ravel’s works in its combination of strength and sensuality, of power and gentleness. In the words of Cocteau: ‘Daphnis is the archetype of those works which belong to no school; one of those works that land in our hearts like a meteorite, from a planet whose laws will remain for ever mysterious.’66 More recently the sensuality of Daphnis has itself been been subjected to a critique. In one of the most thought-provoking articles ever written on Ravel’s music, Simon Morrison makes the case that ‘Daphnis and Chloe is beautiful because its beauty has a job to do’, not merely as the inevitable product of technical skill on Ravel’s part, though Ravel’s skill is never in question.67 The closeknit structure of Morrison’s article makes piecemeal quotation dangerous, but I hope that in confining myself to one, slightly edited, passage I can at least encourage a reading of the whole. In Freudian terms, Morrison hears Ravel’s score as an exercise in sublimation. But this is sublimation of a special kind: one that . . . is meaningful only when it is observed. The drives appear to be free only the better to serve the display of mastery and craftsmanship. This is conspic-

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uous sublimation. We then have to ask what values and ideals might have prompted Ravel to make conspicuous sublimation the expressive basis of the ballet. The answer . . . depends on the recognition that conspicuous sublimation is not merely like conspicuous consumption. It is actually a translation of conspicuous consumption from the sphere of commerce to the sphere of art. Conspicuous sublimation is a means of making beauty consumable. Or, more exactly, it is a means for making precisely the kind of beauty epitomized by Daphnis and Chloe, the beauty of sensuous artifice, consumable. That beauty, in turn, is precisely the kind that the culture of late nineteenth-century Europe associated with ‘elemental drives’ – and in that capacity associated, above all, with the sights and sounds that Europeans had found, selectively, to be sure, in the world of their colonial empires. Conspicuous sublimation was the basic technique by which the high arts participated in the cult of exoticism that flowered as the result of these associations.

If we accept this interpretation, it is still impossible to know whether Ravel had any conscious notion that he was sublimating anything. What history does tell us is that Daphnis has proved to be eminently ‘consumable’, especially in concert form. Ravel never again had the opportunity to write for such large forces, so we cannot know whether Daphnis sated his enthusiasm for composing luxury objets d’art, and certainly the temper of the 1920s militated against repeating either the sounds or the assumptions of this ballet. As we shall see, the exoticism of the Chansons madécasses is of a very different cast. In this summer of 1912 Ravel was probably still thinking about, if not actually working on, La cloche engloutie, Zazpiak-Bat, and also Maeterlinck’s Intérieur, though this last project seems to have been abandoned before the others. But after the furious pace of life and the exhausting battles over Daphnis in the previous eighteen months, his health began to show signs of strain and he took an almost complete rest, first at La Grangette with the Godebskis, and then at St-Jean-de-Luz. The only compositions we know from this period are the two tiny piano pieces A la manière de . . ., which he wrote at La Grangette. His friend Alfredo Casella had published a group of six pastiches in 1911 and was now planning a second volume, to which he invited Ravel to contribute. Ravel’s two pieces appeared in 1914, between Casella’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un ascète and Almanzor ou le mariage d’Adélaïde (respectively imitations of d’Indy and Ravel, with the Valses nobles preeminent in the latter). The two subjects chosen by Ravel were among his favourite composers. The Borodin pastiche is a waltz that makes characteristic use of chromatic harmonies over ostinato pedals, echoing the ‘Sérénade’ from Borodin’s Petite suite and the scherzo of his Second Quartet.68 The Chabrier one is also specific, being a pastiche of Chabrier making a pastiche of Siebel’s aria ‘Faites-lui mes aveux’ from Gounod’s Faust. Again, Chabrier’s characteristic cadences and textures (tunes played two octaves apart,

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upward arpeggio flourishes and a semitonally growling bass in bars 31–4) are faithfully reproduced. These lighthearted skits would have been in the nature of refreshment after Ravel’s struggles over Daphnis. But for the first time he seems to have been genuinely concerned about his health, and a letter to Vaughan Williams of 5 August even speaks of an onset of neurasthenia, until then the prerogative of his father and brother.69 The day before, he wrote to Abbé Joseph Joubert, the organist of Luçon Cathedral in the Vendée, who had asked him for a contribution to his eight-volume series Les maîtres contemporains de l’orgue: ‘I am too little acquainted with organ technique to risk writing for this instrument. But I intend to work on it this winter and, as soon as I can, I shall try and fulfil the request with which you have honoured me.’70 Although this has generally been interpreted as a polite refusal, just the first sentence, plus a few polite additions, would surely have done duty for that. It is at least possible that during his stay of several months (he returned to Paris from St-Jean-de-Luz on 15 October, as the year before) he tried out the Wenner organ in the church of Saint-JeanBaptiste, a few steps away from the place Louis XIV where he was staying.71 But he never wrote anything for the instrument. Apart from these two letters, and a claim that he spent time watching the dancing at the newly-opened modern Casino,72 we know nothing of his activities until the letter of 7 October to Rouché about a new project: ‘In principle, undertaking a new work daunts me slightly. I’ve got a heap of things to finish which are barely sketched. . . . I think the scenario of this ballet is not yet completed. I should prefer to be given some indications and then write it myself. The precedent of Daphnis, whose scenario was for me an ongoing obstacle, has made me wary of going through a similar experience again.’73 Nothing more is heard of this proposed ballet and Ravel completed no new work until the first of the Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé the following April. On 10 November he was probably present with Schmitt and other friends at a piano performance by Stravinsky in ‘an isolated detached house in Auteuil’ of Le sacre du printemps74 – or as much of it as was finished; Stravinsky was still a week away from adding the final touches.75 In December Ravel went to see various operas and a ballet he was to review the following month for Comoedia illustré. These were the first two of six reviews he wrote before the war for the magazine, whose senior music critic was his fellow Apache Emile Vuillermoz. Of Camille Erlanger’s La sorcière, premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 18 December, Ravel politely makes clear that this kind of vérisme, albeit suitable to the subject of the Inquisition, is not to his taste and that the composer could have done more with the Spanish and oriental atmosphere. Less politely, he criticises Erlanger’s vocal writing, which is of the most scabrous kind. True, this fault is not peculiar to this work, nor even to others by the same composer. You find it in almost all the vocal

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writing of our age. It is the redoubtable influence of Wagner that is responsible for this kind of misunderstanding that affects most modern composers in their treatment of the most expressive of musical instruments. . . . This wide-ranging declamation can be explained by the vigorous accents of the German language, and in particular by the idiom of Wagner. Applied to the French language, it becomes paradoxical. Comprehensibility, which is after all necessary in the theatre, cannot help but suffer.76

One feels rather sorry for Erlanger, since advice about Spanish atmosphere and word setting from the composer of L’heure espagnole could not really be brushed aside. In the same review of 5 January 1913, Ravel notices the third act of Idomeneo at Rouché’s Théâtre des Arts, compares this ‘splendid fragment’ with the ‘tricks brought to opera by Gluck’ and inveighs against fussy stage action. But the full weight of his disapproval is not brought to bear until his review, published on 20 January, of the Opéra premiere of d’Indy’s Fervaal on 31 December. Erlanger’s espousal of Wagner is a poor, stunted thing compared with d’Indy’s. Here we find leitmotifs ‘developed and modified exactly in accordance with the Wagnerian system’ and the same ‘murky, puerile dialogue’ with ‘the tonic accent, which is fairly light in our language, . . . stressed here with an energy that is all the more painful because it falls in the wrong place’.77 More damning still, in an attempt to be fair Ravel has to resort to words such as honorable and probité. He wrote to Stravinsky on 9 January, in the earliest extant letter of the two men’s correspondence, ‘I haven’t yet finished correcting the proofs of Daphnis [Durand published the full scores of the Second Suite and of the whole ballet in 1913], in which I discovered things to make Astruc’s [non-existent] hair stand on end. I’ve had news of you from Delage, who went searching in the Sacre du printemps for the antidote his own harmonies are in need of.’78 (Delage’s news, from seeing Stravinsky in Clarens at the end of December, might possibly have included the fact that on 17 November Stravinsky had finished Le sacre while suffering with a terrible toothache.79) On 1 February the Société nationale programmed the first three of the Mélodies populaires grecques with a Greek singer, Mme Sorga, accompanied by harp and tambourine, presumably with the composer’s permission. The audience was ecstatic, Paul Landormy in his review noting ‘the tambourine that stirred up so much irreverent irony in the breast of that solemn Société nationale. . . . The singer was encored, and again; they didn’t want to let her go.’ And he added mischievously, ‘O shades of César Franck, where were we heading?’80 Ravel continued his own reviewing activities in February with two articles expressing uninhibited enthusiasm. A performance of Chabrier’s operetta Une éducation manquée at Rouché’s Théâtre des Arts was likely to provoke this on all fronts. Ravel’s remark in Comoedia illustré that, despite its never pretending

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to be other than an operetta, ‘there is nevertheless more real music in this little piece than in many large operatic works’81 can only be read as another nail banged into Fervaal’s coffin. He is less impressed by the libretto and by the volume of the crucial thunderstorm, where he feels the technician was overdoing things. Lully’s Thésée also pleases him, especially in the ‘cantilenas for Venus and Ceres’ where ‘I am more responsive to the charm of his musicianship than to the orderly, slightly dry invention of Rameau’. Ravel’s apparent imperviousness to Rameau remains one of the great musical mysteries . . . Finally he delights in the ballet version of Fauré’s Dolly suite, in Rabaud’s orchestration, and to those tender spirits who are offended by such desecration of the temple of Music he understandably offers ‘the solution of purifying the work by playing it at home in its original form’. In the second review for the month, published in Cahiers d’aujourd’hui, he again took up cudgels on Debussy’s behalf. On 26 January Debussy had

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

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conducted the Orchestre Colonne in the first complete performance of Images (‘Ibéria’ and ‘Rondes de printemps’ had been given in February and March 1910). The audience applauded vigorously but, inevitably, there were critics who knew better, including the trio of Mauclair, Carraud and Ravel’s bête noire, Pierre Lalo. In his review, Ravel went back to Carraud’s assertion in April 1910 that the audience for ‘Ibéria’ and ‘Rondes de printemps’ was divided into two: musicians and what Carraud called ‘les sensibles’ (or people of sensitivity) on the one hand, and people who appreciate music only through the filter of painting or literature on the other. Ravel had no literary outlet for his feelings at the time; three years later, he brings Carraud’s opinion out into the cold light of his contempt: You have got the message then, you who, crassly, let yourselves be seduced by the brilliant charm, the exquisite freshness of ‘Rondes de printemps’; you who feel yourselves being moved to tears by the rustlings of ‘Ibéria’ and the profoundly affecting ‘Parfums de la nuit’; by the new and delicate magnificence of harmony; by all this intense musicality; you are nothing but a littérateur or a painter. And you are fully aware of the scorn implicit in these terms. Well I too, I am nothing but a littérateur or a painter; and, with me, MM. Igor Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt, Roger-Ducasse, Albert Roussel and a host of young composers whose output, even so, is not negligible. Only M. Gaston Carraud, to whom we are indebted for three songs and a small symphonic poem, M. Camille Mauclair, who has made his name precisely through his literary and art criticism, and M. Pierre Lalo, who has produced nothing at all, only these are musicians and ‘sensibles’.82

What composer would not be grateful for such fervent support, especially one who barely a week earlier had written, ‘In short, I am haunted by the Mediocre and I am afraid’?83 But when the two men met at a Durand concert on 5 March, Ravel to conduct Introduction et allegro, Debussy to play the first three of his second book of Préludes before its publication on 19 April, were any words exchanged? Meanwhile Diaghilev was planning to produce in 1913 a new version of Musorgsky’s unfinished opera Khovanshchina and asked Stravinsky to finish the orchestration and to write the final chorus. ‘When I realized’, Stravinsky wrote later, ‘all this entailed, with the score of Le sacre still to be finished, I asked Diaghilev to divide the job between Ravel and myself. He willingly consented and Ravel came to join me at Clarens [on Lake Geneva] so that we could work together. We agreed that I should orchestrate two passages of the opera and write the final chorus while he took charge of the rest.’84 In the event Diaghilev kept most of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version from which Ravel and Stravinsky had been working, cut scenes, changed them round and, in Richard Taruskin’s words, ‘The resulting version had even less claim than

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Rimsky’s to the mantle of authenticity.’85 Taruskin may here be echoing Rimsky-Korsakov’s son Andrei who had got wind of Diaghilev’s plans and on 23 March published an excoriating article condemning the result as ‘musical vandalism’.86 This was sent to Ravel, who responded with a spirited defence of Musorgsky’s original score and of what Andrei termed the ‘empty’ fourths and ‘barbaric’ fifths in the Dissenters’ chorus which, says Ravel, ‘express with rare power the primordial soul of these fanatics. How inappropriate RimskyKorsakov’s graceful harmonizing is beside this defiant nakedness.’87 In all probability Ravel had already experienced Rimsky’s ‘graceful harmonizing’ when three extracts from the opera were performed in Paris in the 1890s: the Prelude, ‘Dawn over the Moskva River’, in 1894, the ‘Dance of the Persian Slave-Girls’ from Act IV in 1896, and Marfa’s Divination Aria, ‘Silï potainïye’, from Act II in 1899.88 Diaghilev finished off the score with Stravinsky’s chorus, but not at the premiere on 5 June, possibly because he knew Andrei would be in the audience, and he had already tangled with Rimsky’s widow Nadezhda over daring to turn Scheherazade into a ballet. (Ravel’s response to Andrei had already been published in the Russian press three weeks earlier, but there is no record of the two men meeting.) What survives of Ravel’s orchestration are two fairly short passages: one of 167 bars beginning with the chorus of Muscovites in Act I (‘Zila kuma, slyla kuma’), the second of 124 bars, in Act III of the Lamm edition, including Kouzka’s song with balalaika accompaniment (‘Zavodilas’ v zakoulkach’).89 Whether this is the whole of what Ravel completed, or was asked to complete, we cannot know: when Stravinsky writes that Ravel ‘took charge of the rest’, this could easily mean merely ‘the rest of what Diaghilev asked for’. Whatever the case, he was hardly exerting himself on Diaghilev’s behalf (and on Diaghilev’s money), given that he and his mother arrived at the Hôtel des Crêtes in Clarens on 17 March and, according to Stephen Walsh, did not return to Paris until near the end of April, after a trip with Stravinsky to Lake Maggiore.90 Maybe he felt that, after Daphnis, Diaghilev owed him some time. Stravinsky goes on: ‘While Ravel was at Clarens I played him my Japanese lyrics. Fond as he was of finely wrought instrumental sound and interested in subtleties of technique, he was bitten by them immediately and decided to write something similar. Shortly afterwards he played me his delightful Poèmes on texts by Mallarmé.’ In fact only the first, ‘Soupir’, was finished at Clarens, on 2 April; the second, ‘Placet futile’, in Paris during May and the third, ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’, in St-Jean-de-Luz by the end of August. The completion dates of the first two, and Ravel’s statement that ‘Soupir’ was the result of a mere three days’ work,91 certainly do not rule out Michel Delahaye’s contention that it was ‘in Paris, in January 1913, that Ravel had the idea for what were initially “Deux poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé”. He arrives at Clarens not only with a volume of the writer’s Poésies – or, failing that, the texts

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carefully copied out – but with the formal and musical outline of his first poem already in his head for the past couple of months.’92 As Delahaye says, ‘the subtle structure of “Soupir” could only have been achieved through patient, profound thought’. The previous December Stravinsky had met Schoenberg in Berlin at a performance of Pierrot lunaire, and his Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise (Three Japanese Lyrics), the third especially, betray an influence in the spiky instrumental writing and wide vocal intervals. Ravel and Stravinsky had also been associated in an earlier Schoenbergian encounter. Calvocoressi speaks of ‘the publication, in 1911 [in fact 1910] of his [Schoenberg’s] famous piano pieces Op.11 – I remember Ravel and Stravinsky looking at them at my house; Stravinsky was particularly excited about certain things in them, and Ravel, although colder, was greatly interested.’93 Ravel’s interest in Schoenberg seems also to have led to the first performance of these three pieces in France, played by Robert Schmitz at the SMI on 28 May 1913, in a typically eclectic programme that also included Chausson’s String Quartet and what was billed as the world premiere of Chansons anciennes anglaises for voice and piano harmonized by Vaughan Williams, not now readily identifiable from the composer’s catalogue. The extent of Schoenberg’s influence on Ravel has been much debated, and certainly Ravel never became an enthusiast for his works overall (see p. 167). His inclusion of Pierrot, in a letter to Mme Casella on the day he finished the first Mallarmé song, in a projected ‘scandalous concert’ to premiere the first two of these (the second still to be finished) and Stravinsky’s Japanese Lyrics, was, he admitted, the result only of hearsay (from Stravinsky) – that is, despite what has sometimes been claimed, he had still not seen a score.94 The concert never happened, and the complete Pierrot was not heard in Paris until Milhaud conducted it, with Marya Freund as reciter, in 1922, following a performance of the first half alone on 15 December 1921. Boulez has said with some justice, ‘What really links these three works is the choice of instrumental forces.’95 These are: Schoenberg (Pierrot lunaire): Stravinsky (Three Japanese Lyrics): Ravel (Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé):

Sprechstimme, piano, violin or viola, cello, flute or piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet voice, piano, string quartet, piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet voice, piano, string quartet, two flutes (inc. piccolo), two clarinets (inc. bass clarinet)

The idea of setting Mallarmé texts was no doubt suggested to Ravel, as to Debussy, by the publication early in 1913 of the poet’s complete works, edited by his daughter and son-in-law, Geneviève and Edmond Bonniot, for the Editions de la Nouvelle revue française. Ravel was the first to respond to this

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impetus, with irritating results for his elder colleague (see p. 159). Possibly, after the sumptuousness of Daphnis, he felt the need to cleanse his palate (and his palette) with something abstract and cerebral. ‘Soupir’ is a fairly obvious choice, and Roland-Manuel, encouraged by Ravel to guess the three poems he had selected, got this one right first time.96 The poem pursues a favourite analogy between the face of the beloved and the world of nature, in the manner of Verlaine’s ‘Clair de lune’, and the setting of the first half is appropriately lyrical. The harmony is confined to a G major/E minor modality into which the voice introduces an alien C sharp, but that is all: the texture carries the interest as far as the second half of the song, where almost abstract chromaticisms underline ‘octobre pâle et pur’. As in ‘Asie’, the instrumental coda returns to the opening idea which, though on paper a straight repetition, now brings with it other, intangible experiences. Delahaye suggests rather convincingly that Ravel here was bringing into play Scriabin’s table of key/colour correspondences which he might have got to know through Kandinsky’s Du spirituel dans l’art;97 and even if Stravinsky, to whom the song is dedicated, was determined at this time to get as far away from Scriabin as possible, the two men may well have discussed such ideas. On the most basic level, it would be strange if a composer of Ravel’s sensitivity did not respond in some way to the patent importance of colour in the poem: successively ‘rousseur’, ‘blanc’, ‘l’Azur’ (a symbol in Mallarmé’s work of the Ideal), ‘pâle’, ‘fauve’ and ‘jaune’. ‘Placet futile’, dedicated to Florent Schmitt, is more lighthearted and the word setting ‘is perfectly in keeping with natural speech inflections’.98 The poet declares his devotion to the princess painted on a Sèvres teacup and wistfully laments his inability to become anything more than the shepherd of her smiles. The vocal line is here more tortuous than in ‘Soupir’ and the instrumental colour more varied, as the poet tries to come to terms with his fruitless love. The opening arabesque

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points also to the influence of Stravinsky’s Japanese Lyrics, hardly discernible elsewhere in the actual notes. Ravel is more sparing than Stravinsky in his use of the piano, which is silent in this second song until the moment when the poet admits that he will never appear naked on a teacup and that he is not

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the princess’s lapdog; these preposterous thoughts provoke the piano to interrupt with what sounds very like rude laughter. With his fondness for ‘finely wrought instrumental sound’ Ravel seems to be aware that in this ensemble the piano is essentially ‘other’, and puts this to good use. His sensitivity to the nuances of the text comes out in other ways too – especially in his setting of the threefold ‘nommez-nous’, where the poet is trying to find a role that suits: the first two times (entries on D sharp and C sharp) he interrupts himself, and only on the third attempt (entry on B natural) does he find the solution, emphasized by the four notes of the opening arabesque in a new order. Undoubtedly the sheer obscurity of Mallarmé’s more difficult poems makes interpretation excusable, if not inevitable. In ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ almost the only fact generally agreed is that the poet’s disillusionment finds no solace. Ravel matches this mood with music of a sustained dissonance (there is one sole unadorned triad, lasting all of a quaver at the end of the penultimate bar), edgy, sinister and thoroughly uncomfortable. Piccolo and bass clarinet extend the compass of the writing and the song sums up the preoccupations of the previous two, activating the melancholy of ‘Soupir’ and continuing the spiritual search of ‘Placet futile’ on a deeper level. The piano is more nearly integrated into the ensemble than in the previous songs and this contributes to the generally static effect. The final phrase ‘A rien expirer annonçant / Une rose dans les ténèbres’ (complete annihilation calling forth a rose in the darkness) is made conclusive not so much by harmonic means as by the placing of ‘ténèbres’ on B flat, the lowest note sung in any of the three songs. Simultaneously, Ravel paints a word, ends a song and ends a cycle. The phrase also recalls the rhythm of Mélisande’s ‘je vois une rose dans les ténèbres’ from Act III, Scene 1 of Debussy’s opera, forging perhaps a tenuous link between the mystery of her character and the alchimie du verbe of Mallarmé’s poem. Ravel never again set texts of such complexity. Similarly these songs, and ‘Surgi de la croupe’ in particular, represent his furthest exploration of musical language. Of course this exploration was grounded in clear principles: ‘Soupir’ is built on just six principal harmonies.99 Even so the response from the critic of the Westminster Gazette to the first British performance, despite Bathori’s singing and Beecham’s conducting, comes as no surprise: ‘An attentive audience listened in absolute bewilderment to some of the strangest exercises in ultramodern cacophony which it would be possible to imagine – Now and then the divergence between the voice part and the accompaniment seemed so pronounced as almost to suggest that Mdme. Bathori-Engel was singing one number while the instrumentalists were playing another.’100 On returning to Paris at the end of April 1913, Ravel was asked by Fauré to write a sight-reading piece for the ladies’ piano concours at the Conservatoire that summer. The Prélude is a charming piece of no pretensions (the pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet hears in it a foretaste of jazz101) and little difficulty beyond the characteristic encapsulation of left-hand thirds inside the right-hand

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octaves. No doubt Ravel derived mild amusement from taking the chromatic six-note motif from ‘Surgi de la croupe’ and re-presenting it in modal attire. This in turn suggests that, although the song was not finished until August, it was already in Ravel’s mind by May at the latest. The concours was won by Jeanne Leleu who, after her acquaintance with Ma mère l’Oye three years earlier, might be thought to have had an unfair advantage. Ravel, sitting on the examining board, was impressed by her performance and dedicated the piece to her. No doubt he buried himself in Debussy’s second set of Préludes, published on 19 April, just before his return to Paris, before being called upon, with many others, to take up arms almost literally on behalf of Le sacre, at its premiere on 29 May in Gabriel Astruc’s newly opened Théâtre des ChampsElysées. Astruc’s plans were nothing if not ambitious. After the inaugural concert on 2 April at which Saint-Saëns, d’Indy, Fauré, Dukas and Debussy all conducted their own works, Astruc’s next coup de maître was the Paris premiere of Fauré’s opera Pénélope on 10 May, with Lucienne Bréval and Lucien Muratore in the main roles; then came Debussy’s Jeux five days later; then, a fortnight after that, Le sacre. Meanwhile Chaliapin sang Boris and was rehearsing Khovanshchina which was premiered, after a six-day delay, on 5 June. Truly an astonishing array of musical experiences. . . . Ravel must surely have gone to both Pénélope and Jeux, but no known letter of his refers to either work. All we have is a glancing reference to the former in an article on Fauré’s songs in 1922 (perhaps actually written by RolandManuel), and a reported refusal later in that decade to reorchestrate the opera: ‘nothing Fauré wrote is orchestratable’.102 However he joined Nadia Boulanger in organizing a ‘Pénélope banquet’ on 28 June for artists and technicians, to the tune of 537 people;103 subsequent exhaustion might help explain why he failed at this point to congratulate Lili Boulanger on her Prix de Rome, a failure that had predictable effects on his relationship with Nadia.104 His opinion of Jeux comes down to us only through Poulenc, to whom he declared a few years later that ‘Jeux, the piano Etudes – all that was not the “good” Debussy’.105 Ravel arranged for Stravinsky, his wife and 6-year-old son Theodore to stay in two rooms at the Splendid-Hotel, within sight of the family flat in the avenue Carnot, and reassured him about the acoustics of the new theatre: ‘perfect, to the point of exposing the subtlety in Berlioz’s harmonies . . . [Benvenuto Cellini was on Astruc’s programme]. Diaghilev and Astruc had a flaming row yesterday. Everything was off. It was all fixed five minutes later.’106 Ravel was well aware of the stature of the new work and had written from Clarens to tell Lucien Garban ‘you must hear Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. I really think it will be as important an event as the premiere of Pelléas.’107 Indeed, according to Stravinsky, ‘in the chaos of conflicting opinions, my friend Maurice Ravel was almost the only one to put his finger on the nub. He understood, and said that the novelty of the Sacre lay not in the detail, the orchestration or the technique of construction, but in the musical essence [l’entité musicale].’108

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On 22 May, a week before the premiere of Le sacre, Ravel had to turn aside momentarily to review the revival of Boris Godunov – whether deliberately chosen by Diaghilev or not, the date was the hundredth anniversary of Wagner’s birth and Messager was conducting Tristan at the Opéra. As usual, Ravel was not disposed to be a respecter of persons. Yes, ‘M. Chaliapine is still the greatest operatic artist of our day and I have good reason to admire, among other qualities, his way of dealing with the recitative, of almost speaking while following the melodic contour.’ So writes the composer of Histoires naturelles. ‘But’, he goes on, ‘he is starting to abuse this technique. In Boris Godunov, there are purely lyrical passages where singing is indispensable and where the composer’s tempi need to be respected. And none of these passages calls for the addition of those sinister cacklings and cavernous groanings that make such a gross and unmusical effect.’109 Beyond that, he calls for at least a partial restitution of ‘the real Boris’, encouraged no doubt by what he had recently discovered in Rimsky’s version of Khovanshchina, and certainly Diaghilev’s artistic conscience should have allowed the work to end with the chorus (as Ravel says, ‘personnage principal’) and not, in tame conformity to custom, with Chaliapine. But, not for the first or last time, Ravel was ahead of his age: the real Boris was not even published until David Lloyd-Jones’s edition of 1975, appropriately the centenary of Ravel’s birth. His article appeared on the day of the Khovanshchina premiere, a week after the memorable premiere of Le sacre. This is not the place to rehearse the ofttold story of that occasion but Ravel, of course, was there, and during the uproar was called a dirty Jew for his pains, which was untrue on both counts. By comparison the Khovanshchina performances went smoothly and were received with tremendous enthusiasm, as Stephen Walsh records, ‘thanks not least to sensational choral singing by the Russian Pokhitonov Choir and a spectacular staging by [Alexander] Sanin’.110 Ravel, though, both then and later, was remarkably silent about his own contribution, either because Diaghilev interfered with his orchestrations, or refused them (we have no evidence they were actually used), or because he had absolutely failed to keep his word: ‘Will [Khovanshchina] thus forever remain a work of RimskyKorsakov?’ Diaghilev had asked; ‘That is what the whole Paris press is saying, what they protest against “at the top of their lungs”, demanding now for several years that someone give them at last “the real Musorgsky, uncorrected by Professor Rimsky-Korsakov”.’111 Calvocoressi had been a protester-in-chief and no doubt carried most if not all the Apaches with him. Ravel though had learned the hard way, through Daphnis, that battles with Diaghilev were certainly exhausting and, almost as certainly, a waste of time. During the late summer of 1913 Ravel’s efforts were mainly directed towards finishing ‘Surgi de la croupe’ by the end of August and returning to Zazpiak-Bat. From his letters we learn that by 29 July he has finished correcting the full score of Shéhérazade,112 for its publication by Durand the following year, that he has been impressed by Bartók’s First String Quartet,113

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that he has better things to do than orchestrate Scarlatti for a Diaghilev ballet, and that he has been revising ‘Placet futile’: Truth to tell, ‘Placet futile’ was finished, but I’ve retouched it. I don’t deceive myself that it was an act of great audacity to try and interpret this sonnet in music. It was vital that the melodic contour, the modulations and rhythms were as precious, as tortuous as the sentiment and images of the text. Despite that, I had to respect this poem’s elegant composure. It was essential, above all, to render the profound, adorable tenderness that infuses it all. Now it’s done, I’m slightly nervous . . .114

If ‘Placet futile’ demanded such care, no wonder it took him until late August to finish ‘Surgi de la croupe’. He also returned to what must have begun to seem like a task imposed by fate, of smoothing Debussy’s artistic path: he tells Roland-Manuel on 27 August ‘I’ve just finished “Surgi de la croupe”. We shall soon be spectators at a Debussy-Ravel match. The other day our editor sent me a desperate letter because Bonniot was refusing permission for “Soupir” and “Placet futile” which Debussy had just set to music. I fixed everything.’115 Dr Edmond Bonniot, Mallarmé’s son-in-law and executor, was a neighbour of the Godebskis at Valvins and, knowing Ravel through them, had happily given Ravel authorization to set these two poems. He was of course being entirely proper in then refusing it to Debussy, all the more as he must have been aware of their difficult relations. Debussy, who had written to Bonniot on 7 August,116 retorted somewhat waspishly, on learning of the situation next day, that ‘the story of the Mallarmé-Ravel family is not amusing.’117 Nor can it have been, for someone who twenty years earlier had been a member of the maître’s intimate circle and its Tuesday evening gatherings. Ravel had left La Grangette for St-Jean-de-Luz sometime in July, where he rented an apartment in a house called Ongi Ethori (in Basque, ‘welcome’), which in those days looked out directly on a square where they danced and played pelota.118 He seems to have spent a lot of time on the beach or writing letters or watching the dancers and pelota players, and it is from the last days of this holiday that Alexandre Benois remembered ‘when dear Maurice, behaving like a mischievous schoolboy, flew in a wide circle and at terrific speed over our heads on a huge merry-go-round at the Ciboure fair, shouting abrupt greetings to us every time he went past’.119 Probably Ravel also met Jacques Thibaud who was spending his holidays there for the first time, possibly drawn to the place by Gustave Samazeuilh, whose Violin Sonata he occasionally played.120 From Samazeuilh we learn that Ravel was still working on Zazpiak-Bat and could not find a satisfactory idea for the expressive central movement.121 Samazeuilh also fancies that some of the first and last movements found their way into the corresponding sections of the G major concerto. What is certain, from the page of sketches published by Orenstein,122 is that Ravel was developing

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the 3 + 2 + 3 rhythm found in his inscription in Schmitt’s programme for the ballet evening in 1911 (see p. 141), which some months later was to underpin the opening of the Piano Trio. The idea for Zazpiak-Bat had come to Ravel, as we have seen, on a strenuous, trouser-destroying climb in September 1911. But it was reinforced by a longer car trip later that same month with Samazeuilh, Alfred Cortot and Léon Blum, the Socialist politician, from St-Jean-de-Luz through Pampelune, Estella, Roncevaux and Mauléon – that is through five of the seven Basque provinces. Now, two years later, and with no Diaghilev commission in view, he was settling down to serious work on the project. We may well ask why, already nearing the age of forty, was he only now turning to a musical source that he had known since childhood, whose every feature must have reminded him of the person he loved best in the world, and which had the added attraction of being, to Parisian ears, ‘exotic’? Possibly a clue lies in the fact that he began to take regular holidays there, with his mother, only after his father’s death. Marie had followed the tradition of many Basque fisherwomen in making a ‘good marriage’; the converse of this is that Pierre-Joseph had undoubtedly married ‘beneath him’, and it could well be that the whole Basque culture, with its utterly idiosyncratic, impenetrable language (the devil is said to have tried learning Basque for seven years, then given up), made him uncomfortable. If so, might Ravel have been attempting, consciously or otherwise, to apply a generally constructionist, paternally orientated technique to maternally orientated material so as to effect a musical marriage – the artistic counterpart to the physical marriage that had made him what he was? Failure on this front must have been hard to accept, so it is no surprise to find offcuts of this abandoned project scattered through the composer’s subsequent works. In 1913 Ravel seems to have carefully balanced his explorations in the regions of Stravinsky/Schoenberg with retrospective activities of orchestration and pastiche. We may cite the similar equilibrium between Gaspard and Ma mère l’Oye in 1908 and between the two piano concertos in the early 1930s. With a self-knowledge that Jung would have admired, he was aware of his light and his dark sides, preferring in his pre-war work to express the former and suppress the latter, or at least deflect it into deceptively harmless channels. But maybe by 1913 this tidy arrangement was causing him trouble. Nearly every work from this time on was the subject of prolonged labour, on which he commented freely and with irritation in his letters. The ineluctable truth was that middle age was claiming him, with all its attendant worries over health, maintaining quality of work and, not least, young composers threatening to overtake him. His stay with Stravinsky in Clarens and his intimate knowledge of Le sacre can have left him in no doubt of where the main competition lay. The Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé may have been some sort of bid for the dissonant ground; but Ravel, while subsequently regarding them as a high point in his creative career,123 seems to have accepted that no further progress in this direction was possible.

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He saw unusually little of Paris between the premiere of Le sacre in May 1913 and the outbreak of war. He stayed in St-Jean-de-Luz until mid-October, with the trip over the border to Spain in early September, then he was in Paris at least until 10 December when Casella played his own eight A la manière de . . . pieces at the SMI, followed by the first performance of Ravel’s two. It was possibly at this juncture in 1913 that Ravel recorded the Sonatine and Valses nobles on piano rolls for Welte-Mignon: neither performance is technically impeccable, but some sense of the works’ spirit nonetheless comes through. On 4 November he, Calvocoressi, the Godebskis and a Mme Andrée went to tea with Arnold Bennett in his Paris apartment, and no doubt on the 6th he was present for the final performance of Boris at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. As Astruc’s brave venture was heading inexorably towards bankruptcy, all the artists gave their services free as a final adieu. The theatre closed on the 12th. Debussy wrote to Inghel, who had been the conductor for this unique season, ‘the god who judges the French must have a damned low opinion of them at the moment!’124 On 12 December Ravel paid a visit to Arnold Bennett and his French wife in England at his house in Essex: Saturday the 13th found them shopping in Ipswich – ‘Shops closed at 1pm’, notes Bennett, ‘at least all good ones except antiquaries. We went into three and bought a number of things. Ravel also.’125 As in Edinburgh. . . . On the 16th, the day before he took part in a concert at the Bechstein Hall, Ravel attended the London Music Club, run by the critic Alfred Kalisch, where, by his own account, he received an ‘aimable réception’.126 Judging by Arnold Bax’s description of Debussy’s visit four years earlier, we may wonder whether amiability was quite enough. The Club was, Bax wrote, a dressy concert-cum-supper affair presided over by Alfred Kalisch, critic of the Star, and a pious thurifer before the altar of Richard Strauss. The Club members were mostly elderly, and notable for wealth, paunchiness, and stertorous breathing. Bulging pinkish bosoms straining at expensive décolletages, redundant dewlaps and mountainous backs were generously displayed by the ladies, whilst among the men ruddy double-chins, overflowing their collars at the back of the neck, and boiled eyes were rife. The assemblage indeed was ever inclined to bring to mind Beardsley’s famous drawing – ‘The Wagnerites’.127

Such are the rewards of international fame. At the end of the year Ravel returned to his task as music critic, attending first of all a double bill of Opéra-Comique premieres on 30 December, of Falla’s La vie brève (La vida breve) preceded by Francesca da Rimini, the work of a certain Franco Leoni. That Monsieur (or Signor) Leoni found little favour is soon clear: Just recently two important works were, among others, turned down by the Opéra-Comique: Eros vainqueur by M. Pierre de Bréville, and La forêt bleue by M. Louis Aubert. Orchestral extracts of these were given in concert and

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were acclaimed. Having been refused by a national theatre which receives a state subsidy aimed specially at performance of works by French composers, these operas found homes, one in Brussels, the other in Boston and then Geneva. . . . Doubtless around the same time M. Leoni’s Francesca da Rimini was accepted. The composer, an Italian living in London, was entirely unknown, not only to the public, but to his French colleagues. So we could only hope that M. Carré had had the good fortune to discover a genius, or at least a misunderstood talent: our disappointment is great.128

This complaint – continuing a long line of such complaints from French critics that would extend into the 1920s and beyond – naturally carried more weight coming from a composer whose opera had been played in the theatre only two years before. As with the Wagnerian influence, that of the verismo school is blamed for overemphasis in word-setting, while ‘as with M. Puccini, certain modern procedures such as successions of augmented fifths, harp glissandos and abuse of the celesta cover up, more or less, the lack of inspiration and orchestration’. The work ran for seven performances and was never heard of again. Not surprisingly, La vie brève is treated a good deal more kindly. Ravel defends Falla against the charge of overreliance on Andalusian ornaments to produce local colour (after all, L’heure espagnole is not free of them either), stating with some justice that no one has ever blamed Massenet for filling Manon with ‘certaines formules trop françaises’; and ‘passion, even if it is expressed here less noisily and more musically than in verismo works, is none the less vivid for that’. As always, though, Ravel is determined to be honest, even if it means insulting the producer’s wife: ‘the frenetic hip-swaying of Mme Marguerite Carré could, at a pinch, give some idea of Andalusian ardour’. The opera was revived at the Opéra-Comique in 1928 and again in 1949. Five days later Ravel was also present in his critical capacity at the French premiere of Parsifal at the Opéra. That he was not entirely comfortable in his role here is obvious from the fact that he devotes a good half of his review, published with that of the Opéra-Comique double bill, to the history of Wagner in France. He praises the performance in general, suggesting that some hardness and heaviness in the brass section is due to Wagner’s instrumentation: ‘splendid’ but not ‘free of imperfections’ (recordings of French orchestras of the time tend to suggest that not all the imperfections might have been Wagner’s). His penultimate paragraph sums up in a litany of questions his puzzlement over his own response: What is the magic of this music that forces us to accept, despite everything, the conventional acting and so-called noble attitudes of these artists, highly talented though they are? Why are we not shocked beyond belief by the oldfashioned, clumsy style of this over-deliberate tableau mouvant; by these modern-style Flower Maidens in their ghastly colours, spinning round in a

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dingy palace; by this gentleman giving himself a foot bath in the middle of a countryside set taken from stock, while from the orchestra rise the strains of the wonderful Good Friday Music; by this pigeon made of straw, suspended by all too visible strings, which descends towards the ciborium as the music reaches the peak of the sublime?

Ravel offers no answer, other than the words ‘magie’, ‘merveilleux’ and ‘sublime’. One senses that his emotional reaction to Parsifal was little different from that to the Tristan prelude in 1896 (see p. 24), but he was convinced of the damage the Wagnerian influence had done to French music and knew that to him, technically and aesthetically, Wagner had very little to say. As often, when we humans are divided within ourselves, Ravel resorts to a joke: ‘No doubt Parsifal is less entertaining than La vie parisienne. Even so it is less boring than the Mass in D [Missa solemnis], that inferior work by Beethoven which is nonetheless spoken of with such admiration at tango tea-parties.’129 Over the Christmas period Ravel had reorchestrated his song Noël des jouets, which Jane Bathori sang in Lyon on 10 January, together with Histoires naturelles to Ravel’s accompaniment. The cycle was a success but Ravel got more joy out of the overheard agreement between two women in the audience that ‘tout de même ce n’était pas du Beethoven’ (all the same, it wasn’t Beethoven).130 The autograph of the Noël reorchestration, in the Salabert archives, bears the enigmatic envoi in the composer’s hand, ‘réorchestré – pour cause de divorce – en Décembre 1913.’ The explanation is that after the 1906 performances the orchestral material, in the possession of a Paris musician who was in the process of divorce, was mislaid. Ravel’s promises to rewrite came to nothing until he was pressed by Bathori for the Lyon concert, when he deigned to supply it with just a few days to go, adding the above rider.131 By 14 January Ravel and Bathori were back in Paris and at the Salle Erard for one of the SMI’s most ear-catching concerts (Satie termed it ‘un grandissime concert’132), entirely made up of world first performances. For whatever reason, the String Quartet by the nineteen-year-old Henri Cliquet (a pupil of Gedalge and Koechlin and, in the 1920s, a member of Satie’s Ecole d’Arcueil under the name Cliquet-Pleyel) was postponed until the next concert a fortnight later. The programme performed was therefore: Maurice Delage: Quatre poèmes hindous for voice, harp, two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, string quartet (Rose Féart, soprano) Erik Satie: Chapitres tournés en tous sens Gaston Knosp: Deux Scherzare (Ricardo Viñes) Igor Stravinsky: Trois poèmes de la lyrique japonaise (Aimée Nikitima, soprano) Florent Schmitt: Une semaine du petit elfe Ferme-l’oeil for piano duet Maurice Ravel: Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (Jane Bathori, soprano)

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Apart from Knosp, who remains little known, and Satie, who would never tolerate belonging to a group that did not acknowledge him as its raison d’être, the other four were the Apaches most en vue on the Parisian scene, and the works performed here their most up-to-date and challenging products. If today the Delage, Stravinsky and Ravel works all bring to mind Pierrot lunaire, it is as well to emphasise that only Stravinsky had actually heard it: Ravel still knew it only from Stravinsky’s description, while the Poèmes hindous were completed by March 1912, nine months before the Pierrot premiere. No doubt Ravel, being the generous man he was, enjoyed reading the reviews of his pupil’s work written by two other Apaches: Calvocoressi reported that ‘The audience was won over, achieved an encore of one of the songs [“Lahore”], and would have been happy to do the same for the others’; Vuillermoz that Delage’s avoidance of ‘laborious oddity . . . gained him the loudest, most demonstrative and – dare we say – the most sincere success of the evening.’133 Ravel, as ever divorcing personal from artistic matters, thanked the conductor Inghelbrecht next day, on his own behalf, that of his friend Stravinsky, and of his ‘glorieux élève’ for a fine performance. And all on just two rehearsals . . .134 For almost the only time in his life, Ravel now chose to give the Paris concert season a miss and by mid-February 1914 he was back in St-Jean-deLuz. Two projects of this period were short lived: an ‘oratorio tragique’, Saint François d’Assise, on a text by Canudo, and a ‘drame lyrique’, Don Quichotte, for which Ravel considered writing his own libretto.135 In the meantime he continued to orchestrate the music of others, being commissioned by Nijinsky to prepare scores of Les sylphides and Carnaval for the dancer’s own company. After Nijinsky’s marriage in September 1913, Diaghilev had responded through his régisseur Grigoriev, probably around 3 December, that the dancer’s services were no longer required.136 Nijinsky and his wife Romola were suddenly out on their own. After refusing any number of offers, including one from Rouché to become maître de ballet and premier danseur at the Opéra for 100,000 gold francs a year,137 Nijinsky finally accepted one from the British impresario Alfred Butt for an eight-week season in the spring of 1914 at the Palace Theatre, London, allowing him to assemble his own company and plan his own repertoire. The fact that the Palace was a Theatre of Varieties was incidental to these important clauses, and no doubt to the overall fee of £1,000 a week. But speed was essential, as the season had to start at the very beginning of March. Nijinsky cannot have met Ravel in London during the latter’s visit, as has been suggested, since he was in Budapest at the time. But he knew that Ravel, though a slow composer, was a fast orchestrator, and may also have guessed that Chopin and Schumann would prove tempting material. Ravel’s exact timetable for this double project is unknown, but he probably began work before leaving for St-Jean-de-Luz and, given the time needed for copying of parts and orchestral rehearsals, would have had to deliver his scores by mid-February at the latest. His cooperation was required because Diaghilev

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retained copyright on the versions of Les sylphides and Carnaval to which Nijinsky had been dancing since 1909, in the respective roles of The Poet and Harlequin, both of them among his most startling successes. For Ravel the project had the attractions both of being a snub to Diaghilev and allowing him to measure himself against the familiar orchestrations by various Russians: Liadov, Glazounov, Taneyev and Sokolov for Les sylphides (together with a final ‘Valse brillante’ by one Stravinsky), and Liadov, Glazounov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tcherepnin for Carnaval. Part of the deal for Les sylphides was that Ravel was allowed to vary the Chopin pieces, although presumably not the two Nocturnes and two Mazurkas that involved Nijinsky.138 Inventive as ever, he opted for three of the Etudes as an overture and two solos for the ballerinas. All that survives is a one-page sketch of the E flat Etude op. 10 no. 11.139 Ravel made no attempt to follow the wide arpeggiation of the original, instead opting for a delicate texture of violins over woodwind, presumably for one of the ballerina solos. Les sylphides was premiered at the Palace Theatre on 2 March 1914 and made no great impact. Cyril Beaumont was disappointed, finding that Nijinsky ‘no longer danced like a god’ and that it was impossible to reconcile himself ‘either to the new scenery, the different music, or the changed choreography.’ The ballet was danced again several times over the following fortnight, while the third week promised Carnaval. But early in the evening of the 16th Nijinsky suddenly developed ’flu and was too ill to dance.140 The ’flu persisted and eventually the season had to be cancelled, with the result that, despite what is claimed in many sources, none of Ravel’s Carnaval was performed until over sixty years later, following the publication of four numbers for his centenary in 1975. Given the almost total disappearance of his score for Les sylphides, we must be grateful for these four, made, unlike those he was replacing, with a knowledge of Nijinsky’s unique style of dancing. Unfortunately ‘Harlequin’ has not come down to us, but the second surviving number, ‘Valse allemande’, is heard either side of the third, ‘Paganini’, which was Nijinsky’s second, tiny solo, and here the taxing double tonguing on woodwind and brass would have added a touch of devilment to the staccato octaves of Schumann’s original, while Nijinsky, as he had to the previous orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazunov and Tcherepnin, performed ‘cabrioles, entrechats, pirouettes and rapid hand-claps above the head. At the end he executes a grande pirouette à la seconde, spinning gradually more slowly as he sinks into a sitting position, cross-legged on the floor.’141 For one observer the role was ‘the most uncanny and least human of all Nijinsky’s creations. For this Harlequin is the very soul of mischief – half Puck – but Puck with a sting and with a body like a wire of tempered steel.’142 Not unlike Ravel himself. Once settled in St-Jean-de-Luz in February, Ravel addressed two projects of greatly differing importance. It is quite likely that he had met Mme Alvina Alvi, a soprano from the St Petersburg Opera, during his visit to London in December, and she commissioned him to harmonize two further Hebrew melodies,

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following on the success of the one from the Chants populaires. In Deux melodies hébraïques, completed in May, the important difference is that whereas the ‘Chanson hébraïque’ was a song, the first of these two, ‘Kaddisch’, is a liturgical chant, the Magnificat of the synagogue service, but also sung by mourners after the death of a close relative. The mood is one of contained ecstasy and the tension is built out of the jarring between the melismata of the voice and the simple accompaniment with its unremitting G naturals, reminding us of the ostinato bell in ‘Le gibet’. The peak of harmonic elaboration comes at the word ‘weïmrou’ (let us all sing), where the G natural is given the Spanish treatment, squashed between F sharps and A flats, to accompany the momentarily Spanish contour of the melody. ‘L’énigme éternelle’ is, by contrast, squarely metrical. The eternal puzzle of existence resolves itself into tra-la-la’s and the harshly repetitive accompaniment underlines the futility of pursuing the topic, in line with the composer’s agnostic stance. In both songs Ravel captures the powerful element of fatalism in the Jewish soul and, of course, the essence of the Jewish musical style. But the main motive behind Ravel’s unaccustomed winter seclusion lay elsewhere. On 21 March he wrote to Casella’s wife Hélène: ‘I’m working at the Trio despite cold, tempest, storms, rain and hail,’ and four days later to Ida Godebska that ‘my Trio, whose first movement is finished, does not allow me to let it grow cold’.143 The idea of writing such a work had been in his mind for some six years. Instinctively perhaps, or by reading his history books, he knew that a Piano Trio was likely to prove troublesome; and so it proved, even in the solitude of St-Jean-de-Luz. At the end of March he visited an aunt in Geneva for concerts there and in Lyon, thereby missing Pierre Monteux’s triumphant Paris concert performance of Le sacre on 5 April; ‘When I think’, he wrote to Ida, ‘of that bunch of idiots who whistled at it less than a year ago!’144 He was back in St-Jean-de-Luz the following day and at some point around this time wrote from there to Cipa warning him, firstly, about a photograph of Nijinsky and himself ‘in a highly surprising posture’ (that is, playing piano duets), and giving notice of another project he was pursuing alongside the Trio: Between times I’m slogging away on behalf of the Pope. You know that this august personage, whose costume designs are shortly to be exhibited by Maison Redfern, has just promoted a new dance, the forlane. I’m transcribing one by Couperin. I’m going to arrange to have it danced at the Vatican by Mistinguett and Colette Willy in drag. Don’t be amazed by this return to religion. It’s the native atmosphere that’s responsible. There goes the Angelus. I must shoot off and have dinner.145

His transcription of the Couperin Forlane, from the fourth Concert royal, has survived, and is the earliest evidence of what was to become Le tombeau de Couperin.

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In May Durand published the Deux mélodies hébraïques and at some point that month Ravel returned to Paris to attend the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le rossignol at the Opéra on 26 May, his review appearing on 5 June in Comoedia illustré. Ravel profited from the 10-day interval to write what he calls ‘a critique less of the work than of those who have claimed the right to criticize it’.146 This approach allowed him to some extent to avoid committing himself over the stylistic gap between Act I and the rest: of Act I he says that ‘the inspiration and orchestration . . . are worthy of the composer of Firebird’ and, finding that gap ‘not so enormous’, wonders whether it was wise of Stravinsky to tell the critics that Act I was written five years before the other two. On the positive front, he finds that Stravinsky has actually gone beyond the novelties found in Le sacre ‘[in] this absolute contrapuntal liberty, this bold independence of themes, rhythms and harmonies, the combination of which, thanks to one of the rarest musical sensibilities, offers us such a seductive ensemble. This new conception of Stravinsky’s is closest to the recent style of Arnold Schoenberg. But the latter is harsher, more austere – to be honest, more cerebral.’147 Had he by now seen a score of Pierrot? Or was he still relying on Stravinsky’s description of the work? Or was he referring to the Three Pieces op. 11 and the Six Pieces op. 19 which had been performed at the SMI on 28 May 1913 and 9 February 1914 respectively? At all events, his approval of ‘contrapuntal liberty, this bold independence of themes, rhythms and harmonies’ gives us a pointer to the direction in which his own work was moving. As a farewell to reviewing, this final piece remains true to form in questioning the validity of much of what passed for informed criticism in the Paris press. We can only surmise why he never returned to the trade, but probably he had come to regard it as a waste of time since he was powerless to affect the bulk of the critical community, deaf or insensitive or both. Obviously the war was an inevitable interruption, but surely any paper in the 1920s would have been proud to take his reviews; as it was, his published thoughts were in future restricted to a few articles and a good many interviews. On 3 June, two days before that review appeared, Ravel accompanied Mme Alvina Alvi in the first performance of the Deux mélodies hébraïques at the SMI in the thirty-eighth and last of the Société’s concerts before the war. This also included first performances of flute sonatas by Koechlin, one of the Societé’s founders, and by Casella, who had been its secretary since 1911.148 Like Ravel’s reviews, the Société had remained true to its initial programme, giving opportunities to up-and-coming composers, many of them foreign, including Kodály, Casella, Falla, Felipe Pedrell, Joaquín Turina, Cyril Scott, Vaughan Williams, Otto Klemperer, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Glière, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Ildebrando Pizzetti. Two months earlier, on 4 April, it had put on a concert entirely of music by Granados, in which the composer appeared as pianist with Ricardo Viñes and others. By contrast, the Société nationale

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since 1910 had continued its historic mission of concentrating on French composers such as Chausson, who had studied with Franck, and Ropartz, Samazeuilh, Witkowski, Magnard and Séverac, all of whom had studied with d’Indy. It did not altogether ignore Ravel, including four of his works in these four years (most recently Viñes playing ‘Alborada’ on 25 April) but the clear water between the two societies was extensive. The SMI, apart from its task of labelling d’Indy a diehard chauvinist, incarnated Ravel’s belief that such insularity was dangerous for French music. On 7 June, two days after his review appeared excoriating the critics of Le rossignol, the London Morning Post and The Times published an equally trenchant letter from Ravel (and Comoedia a French version of it on the same date) about the Ballets russes’s forthcoming Drury Lane performances of Daphnis. These, he had learned, were not to be of my work in its original form, but a makeshift arrangement which I had accepted to write at Mr. Diaghilev’s special request, in order to facilitate production in certain minor centres. Mr. Diaghilev probably considers London as one of the aforesaid ‘minor centres’ since he is about to produce at Drury Lane, in spite of his positive word, the new version, without choir. I am deeply surprised and grieved, and I consider the proceedings as disrespectful towards the London public as well as towards the composer.149

Whereas until now Ravel had accepted Diaghilev’s volte-faces and misrepresentations, if not with equanimity, then with resignation, his decision to write now was no doubt prompted by conviction that he had a very strong case, strengthened perhaps by the fact that he and Diaghilev had already, through Edwin Evans, been in touch over changes to the ballet. In the letter to Evans of 31 May already quoted, Ravel wrote, ‘I am sending you . . . the most important cuts for Daphnis. I append several others, regarding the first performance of sections of this work in 1911’.150 While the relevance of the 1911 performance of the First Suite is not really clear, it certainly seems that the London audience was not treated to the complete ballet. Replying to Ravel’s complaint, Diaghilev tried to pretend that the chorus had proved detrimental to the ballet and that Ravel had accepted to its removal,151 but the composer demolished his arguments and ‘observed that henceforth the impresario would be bound by written agreement to include the chorus in all major productions. This apparently was done.’152 But for the moment, the London run of Daphnis continued without chorus, as Ravel indicates in a further letter to Evans of 20 July, referring to Evans’s efforts to change the impresario’s mind: ‘Your attempts, for which I am grateful, were bound to fail in the face of Diaghilev’s ill will, or rather his goodwill towards creating a precedent.’153 Ravel stayed in Paris for another few days, sending on 19 June a decidedly businesslike letter to the Symbolist painter Georges de Feure who had

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suggested they collaborate on a ballet for the Alhambra Theatre in London.154 Ravel requires that any contract should follow the lines of the one between that theatre, de Feure and Debussy for a one-act ballet Le palais du silence, signed by Debussy on 21 November 1913; for which Debussy never got further than a few sketches. Presumably Durand had told Ravel the structure of that contract, though surely not the financial details – which gave Debussy a down payment of 4,000 francs, half on delivery of the orchestral score, half after the first performance.155 Ravel, on the other hand, even before knowing how long the ballet was intended to be, was demanding no less than 15,000 francs. No more was heard of the project from Ravel’s side, though de Feure submitted two libretti, one called Les jardins d’Antinoüs and another Le masque terrible, based on Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.156 The first, set on the banks of the Nile, no doubt revived unwelcome memories of the Prix de Rome. But the second might have tempted him, given his attachment to Poe and the macabre, even though Caplet had already written the first version of his conte fantastique based on the tale. This project may have been the one referred to in his letter of 31 July to Edwin Evans, telling him that ‘a London theatre – I don’t yet know which – is going to commission a ballet from me, the scenario for which is already decided. A decision is due in a month’s time. If this comes off, it would be physically impossible for me to undertake another work for next season. I don’t know whether you should tell Diaghilev that. I’ll be guided by you. In any case, I think it would be better to wait for an approach from him.’157 It may seem surprising that Ravel, after all the setbacks over Daphnis, should even consider working for Diaghilev again. In the letter of 20 July quoted above, he describes Diaghilev as ‘[le] plus aimable et [le] plus perfide des impresarios’: every description one ever reads of this extraordinary man emphasizes that his perfidy was more than counterbalanced by his amiability, and that knowing one was being charmed did not lessen the impact of the charm. As for Ravel’s claim that he did not know which London theatre was involved, it is always possible that de Feure’s agreement with the Alhambra had foundered during the previous month. In any case Ravel had other plans for the summer, and probably beyond: further work on Zazpiak-Bat, on whatever the Papal forlane might turn into and, not least, on the Piano Trio. Over a fourth project we have only the testimony of Louise Varèse, who found among her husband’s papers the following memo: ‘1914: Midsummer Night’s Dream project: Satie, Cocteau, Gémier, Astruc, myself. Satie’s Cinq Grimaces. 4 interpolations by Florent Schmitt, Ravel, Stravinsky, myself and conducted by me. Project interrupted by war.’ Mme Varèse also notes two mentions in the March and June numbers of the journal Le mot, the second of which revealed that ‘Maître Saint-Saëns, always anxious to displease everybody and never failing to put his foot in it, now finds it clever to reply to Gémier: “One does not give Le Songe d’une Nuit d’Eté

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without the music of Mendelssohn.” ’158 Maybe, when it came to it, Ravel agreed. Satie’s Cinq grimaces were the only outcome of the project: they were published posthumously, with Milhaud’s assistance, in 1929. Ravel left for St-Jean-de-Luz around 20 June and stayed there until the end of October. On 30 June he wrote to Lucien Garban in London, wondering whether his protests about Daphnis had persuaded Diaghilev to remove it from his schedule.159 In a temperature of at least 35°C he was working on the Trio and Zazpiak-Bat, despite the rival attractions of pelota and fireworks to mark the festival on the 24th of St John the Baptist, the town’s patron saint. Other attractions involved local politics: ‘yesterday’, he had written to Ida on 23 June, ‘bonfires in front of the church and in the square. The latter, a secular affair, embellished with fireworks and at the same time as the other, to annoy the clergy.’160 On 1 July the sea-bathing establishment opened: in such temperatures, an event much nearer to Ravel’s heart than the assassination of the Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo four days earlier (in line with the entry in Kafka’s diary: ‘a.m. war declared, p.m. swimming’161). On the beach he spent hours in the company of Alexandre Benois and his family, who were among the many Russians in the town that year, including the famous Wagnerian soprano Félia Litvinne, and photographs show him at his most relaxed. The weather was warm; France was at peace; his work was proceeding, albeit fitfully; his mother was on the beach with him, in reasonable health for her 74 years; Diaghilev’s nefarious plotting had been obstructed. Then, on 1 August, France and Germany mobilized, and two days later Germany declared war on France. A letter to Delage of 4 August, in its unusual linguistic disarray, testifies to the composer’s state of mind: Mon cher vieux, write to me by return if you get this, so I can feel the presence of a friend. There are any number of people here I’m very close to. But that’s not the point . . . If you knew what I’m going through! . . . Since this morning, without a let-up, the same terrible, criminal thought . . . leaving my poor Mama would certainly mean the death of her. And then France is not counting on me to save her. . . . But all that is mere cerebration, and I feel that from hour to hour things are crumbling . . . and so as not to hear this any more, I’m working. Yes, I’m working; and with the assurance, the lucidity of a madman. But, meanwhile, depression is at work too. And suddenly there I am weeping over the sharps and flats! Of course, when I go downstairs and find myself in front of my poor Mama, I have to appear calm, if not jolly . . . shall I be able to keep it up? It’s been going on for four days now, since the call to mobilize.162

Four days later he wrote to his brother in Paris to say that he had decided to join up and asking him not to mention this in any letter their mother might

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see.163 To Cipa, who seems to have expressed surprise to find Ravel ‘hesitate’ over joining up, he wrote on 20 August quite sharply and, one might say, unkindly: ‘If you were allowed to join up, you would leave only a young wife and children who could, if necessary, survive without you.’ Even if true, this was a fairly brutal remark to make to a close friend; and ‘if you were allowed to join up’, referring presumably to Cipa’s club foot, was barely more considerate. What follows borders more closely on the hysterical than anything Ravel ever wrote: But my mother is a poor old woman unsustained by either religion or principles, whose single ideal has always been the love of her husband and children, and who would feel no shame about holding on to what she still has. A sort of monster, no? What a lot of monsters of that sort there are! As for that one, you know how much I love her. I’ve no idea how she’d respond to what I’m hiding from her, that my brother has enlisted as a driver; but I know, I’m certain of what’ll happen when she learns that she’s being deserted by both of us. She won’t even need to die of hunger. That’s why I’ve taken a second resolution, in case I come back alive. This resolution is as irrevocable as the first.164

His mother’s religious belief was certainly in doubt. But to tax her with a lack of principles might seem harsh, as might the assumption that, coming from vigorous, independent stock, she would not muster the courage to accept her sons’ enlistment. On the other hand, his warning to Edouard not to mention the possibility in an open letter suggests that she had already reacted passionately and fearfully to the news of war and that he was having a hard time consoling her. There is then the question of what his ‘second resolution’ might be. One reasonable answer might be that he had decided he would either never marry, or not marry until after her death: some evidence from the following decades exists for either position. Evidence from the whole of Ravel’s life, and equally from his music, suggests strongly that any kind of vagueness or indecision was unsettling, even mortifying to him. The day before his letter to Cipa, he wrote to Delage, ‘calm has returned with the decision to join up.’165 True to his word, he went to Bayonne to do so but his weight was two kilos below the limit and, as in 1895, he was turned down.166 Against this disappointment, on 29 August he could send a postcard to Jacques Durand to say ‘tomorrow I’m finishing the Trio.’167 Much of the power and impulsive lyricism of Daphnis is mirrored in the Trio’s pages, and sometimes even spills over, but in the first and last movements this power is well controlled within a kind of sonata form. As in the Quartet, the second theme of the first movement is repeated at pitch in the recapitulation over altered harmonies. Exactly where the first theme returns it is impossible to say (cf. ‘Noctuelles’), owing to what Richard Dowling has

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called the technique of ‘ “false” or intimated recapitulation’, operating in both this movement and the finale. This could well be, as Dowling suggests, in homage to the unexpected recapitulation over the cadenza in the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, which Ravel greatly admired, as we saw regarding the Introduction et Allegro (p. 68).168 The final statement of the two themes in reverse order in the relative major is certainly unorthodox, yet the overall effect is of an argument that reaches a conclusion acceptable to all concerned. Ravel maintains tension on a number of levels throughout. Rhythmically, the disposition of the eight quavers in one line as 3 + 2 + 3 is ‘corrected’ in another by the regular 4 + 4; harmonically, the chromatically moving triads (major, minor and augmented) are underpinned by long, deep pedals; and texturally the piano is normally on its own against or with the strings – Ravel frequently solves the problem of balance by doubling the violin and cello at a distance of two octaves and placing the right hand of the piano between them. But the strongest agent of tension in the long run is the continually fluctuating tempo. The movement contains eleven separate blocks, each at one of seven various speeds, given precise metronome markings that range from s = 80 to s = 192. Some are reached gradually, some abruptly, and all contribute to a flux that is the very antithesis of the mechanical periodicity of the clockmaker. The unusual, asymmetric rhythm of the opening is copied from Zazpiak-Bat, as we can see from one of the three surviving pages of sketches for that work,169 where the same pattern appears in double note values. It seems fairly clear that Ravel had this rhythm in mind, if nothing else, when he referred to this opening theme in his autobiographical sketch as being ‘de couleur basque’. In fact, the first five notes give the rhythm of the Basque dance the zortzico, to which Ravel appends a quaver and a crotchet, as on his dedicated programme of 1912 to Schmitt (see p. 141). Finally, ‘he knew well Charles Bordes’s Douze chansons amoureuses du pays basque français’, in which the ‘errefusa’, the ‘unsuccessful serenade’ is built on bars of 3 + 2 + 3 quavers.170 But in the high-spirited second movement a regular pulse is at the heart of the music, despite continually shifting accents, and the continuity and shape are seriously damaged by any imposed rubato or by taking the two themes at different speeds. The movement is entitled ‘Pantoum’ and Brian Newbould has shown171 that Ravel based its structure closely on that of the verse form of Malayan origin used occasionally by Verlaine and Baudelaire, whose ‘Harmonie du soir’, written in this form, Debussy had set to music twenty-five years earlier. Essentially, in a ‘pantoum’ (or ‘pantoun’, or ‘pantun’) the poet pursues two distinct ideas in continuous alternation, and if this was the point in the work where Ravel had difficulties, one can well understand why. As Newbould says, ‘Two themes are to be developed alternately, but in such a way that the two strands of development may be extricated and reassembled as separate, intelligible entities.’ Not content with this, Ravel chose to cast the

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whole movement in scherzo – trio – scherzo form, and somehow had to keep the game going while presenting new material in the trio section. He does this by setting the trio in 4/2 against the 3/4 of the scherzo, and its ‘broad, statuesque solidity . . . is the perfect backcloth against which the interwoven fortunes of the twin scherzo themes can be worked out’ (Ex. 5.5). [Assez vif]



     



 

  

    

   

 

   

   

 

   

 



pp 



















  



 

ff

 









 









 





 

   





   

 





   



 

 

 

 

    

 

   

 



 

 

 



   

 



 



    



 



  



 

  pp expressif 

    

 

   

   

 





 

 

 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

  





Example 5.5. Ravel, Piano Trio, II, figs 10–11

In his fascinating and groundbreaking article, Newbould also advances the notion that Ravel, knowing Debussy’s ‘Harmonie du soir’, may have seen in that song ‘possibilities beyond those that were compatible with the composer’s obligation to a text, and accordingly [set] out to create a wordless musical form that embodied pantoum principles but no pre-existent pantoum. Had Debussy not thus done a preliminary exercise for him, as it were, Ravel might have made his own vocal setting of an actual pantoum.’ Newbould also alerts us to the likelihood that Ravel had read Banville’s Petit traité de poésie française (1871) in which the poet, writing about the pantoum, includes a specially devised example, ‘La montagne’, each of whose two themes is presented in eleven lines; Ravel’s movement, like the first, likewise consists of eleven sections. This might seem accidental, were it not for a similar poetic concordance in the case of Boléro (see p. 302).

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Structure aside, the two melodic ideas themselves obviously derive from those of the second movement of the String Quartet, even to the contrast between A minor and F sharp major which acts as a sort of displaced dominant throughout the work. The result is exhilarating and a magnificent instance of the art that conceals art. Nonetheless we must ponder Ravel’s confession, made to Roland-Manuel towards the end of his life, that ‘without much regret he would exchange the technical knowledge of his mature work for the artless strength revealed in his youthful quartet’.172 Ravel dedicated the Trio to André Gedalge who had instructed him in the mysteries of counterpoint, and the ‘Passacaille’, even more than the ‘Pantoum’, is presented as a fitting tribute to his inspired teaching. It also points clearly the direction that Ravel’s musical style was to take in the 1920s. For Ravel, the essence of counterpoint was that, rightly administered, it enabled a composer to say a great deal with a minimum of notes. The shape of this ‘Passecaille’ is that of an arch, and the central climax is impressive without a doubt but the long descent from it even more so. Propriety is observed – the whole is built from eleven eight-bar phrases (once again, the number 11) – but imbued with a nostalgia, a sense of loss that is every whit as moving as the climax itself. Ravel’s counterpoint, exploiting the ‘pure’ intervals of the fourth and the fifth, is crucial to this restrained and beautiful passage. [Très large (q = 40)]

a Tempo





con sord.

  

  

   

p

con sord.

   









      

  









     











































p

   

Example 5.6. Ravel, Piano Trio, III, fig. 8, bars 1–4

The arch form also structures the melodic material. The first four phrases (on piano, cello, violin, piano – itself an arch) move gradually away from the exact contours of the theme, while staying close to its rhythm. These are followed by three phrases that develop it more freely. In the last four the tune seems to be returning to its original state, but never quite makes it: Example 5.6 is the nearest it comes, but it turns aside at the last bar. The penultimate statement on cello can manage only the first four bars, which it then repeats exactly, as

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though bereft of melodic energy. The piano’s final statement offers only the first bar before succumbing to near-aphasia. It has often been remarked that the steady tread of the ‘Passacaille’ contrasts well with the nervy ebullience of the ‘Pantoum’. But both, in their different ways, are driven by the notion of circularity. As Larner was the first to observe, the initial three notes of the opening piano tune in the ‘Final’ are an inversion of the motif that begins the three previous movements.173 Again there is some semblance of sonata form, and as in the first movement the recapitulation is masked, but there is no unambiguous division into eleven sections: maybe this absence together with the inverted opening are meant to signal that this final movement is different in character from the others, though it’s unclear what deeper message this might hold. The second theme consists of a series of massive piano triads whose provenance is questionable. Did Ravel intend them to refer back to the opening triads of the first movement? Or are they military trumpet-calls, as the passage at figure 7 suggests? It’s always easy to read history into a work of art, but in this case perhaps the temptation should not be resisted, given Ravel’s extreme emotional state. The autograph bears the completion date of 7 August, but a postcard to Delage of 19 August (‘I’m still finishing my Trio . . .’)174 and the one to Durand of 29 August, quoted above, both call this into question. There are other instances where Ravel ‘completes’ a work, but then his meticulous polisher’s hand begins to agitate. On the card to Delage, and again in a letter to Ida Godebska of 8 September175 he also suggests, how jokingly we can’t say, that the Trio might turn out to be an ‘œuvre posthume’. Maybe this prospect, however remote, lay behind the undeniably grand manner of this last movement, not to be found again until the Left Hand Concerto: as if to say ‘you damned Daphnis with faint praise; you turned me down for active service; well, how’s this for a legacy . . . with just three instruments!’ At the same time, there is perhaps a feeling, rare with this composer, that the movement ‘doth protest too much’. In La valse, protestation is an integral part of the score. Here the (?happy) ending is not entirely convincing – a mirror, perhaps, to the composer’s fears. In a wider artistic context, there is much to be said for Marnat’s contention that in reverting to ‘pure’ music, Ravel was reflecting his times: ‘this return to the apaisement of codified forms – stable at least up to a point – and this desire to spread the argument over a longer period . . . all show a composer moving towards neo-classicism, just as the triumphant Cubists were suddenly to simplify their puzzles and start producing figures so “classical” that people spoke sneeringly of “ingrisme”.’176 The tension between the Trio’s classical, or neo-classical, forms and its romantic content is undoubtedly responsible for much of the work’s fascination and power, as was the case, if less dramatically, with the Quartet and the Sonatine. Ultimately any dissatisfaction may just

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come down to the simple matter of sonority: for some ‘the ear tires quickly of trills, tremolos and the overall too-massive sound.’177 Trills, tremolos and all, the Trio no doubt went off to Durand some time in September. Ravel had, as he hoped, finished the work before joining up.178 Now he was left to confront the war, his mother, and a way of doing his duty by both of them.

CHAPTER VI

1914–1920

Patriotism and loss Ravel was now thirty-nine and as healthy as ever. His health, however, was not of the patent variety that commends itself to military selection boards. His height is variously recorded as 1.65m and 1.61m (5′ 5′′ and 5′ 3′′), his weight, deduced from a letter of 26 September to Roland-Manuel, as 48 kg (7s. 8lb), ‘2 kilos too light. I now have hopes of the general examination of refused applicants and if that doesn’t succeed I’ll try and wangle something when I get back to Paris. Surely they’ll finish up being seduced by the grace of my anatomy. This hope encourages me to go back to the grindstone. I’m going to start on a suite of piano pieces, having had to interrupt two works that are important but which don’t quite fit in with the current state of the world: 1) La cloche engloutie in collaboration with Gerhart Hauptmann and a symphonic poem: Wien!!!’1 The decision to abandon these two had been taken at least a month earlier, when he lamented to Ida Godebska that Wien ‘had got off to an excellent start’, but that ‘there is no way I can call it Petrograd.’2 Five or so years later it would resurface as La valse, but that is the last we hear of La cloche engloutie, an abandonment that hit Ravel hard, according to Rosenthal, with at least two acts completed in draft.3 From the letter to Cipa already quoted (p. 166), which would seem to date from the early months of 1914, it’s clear he was already thinking about the piano suite that would become Le tombeau de Couperin, but possibly at that stage he got no further than transcribing the Couperin forlane. The autograph of Le tombeau bears the starting date July 1914, but possibly Ravel didn’t decide to expand this single dance into a suite until September. For the next eighteen months he battled to be allowed to fight for his country in whatever capacity. He fancied his light weight would improve his chances of becoming a pilot or observer or, as Koechlin reported in a news sheet in December 1915, a ‘lance-bombes’.4 The idea of Ravel dropping explosives on to unsuspecting Germans beneath has a certain resonance with his innate piratical tendencies; his dandysme too may be reflected in the vision of himself floating high above the combat. For the moment, though, the authorities who had exempted him from service in 1895 remained unseduced by his physical charms, and his only

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contribution to the war effort was caring for wounded soldiers in St-Jean-deLuz. He took out his disappointment in a jaundiced account that includes one of the only two examples of anti-Semitism in all his known correspondence: A Jewish banker has given . . . I beg your pardon: advanced 10,000 francs to the town for looking after the soldiers. Then he filled the Casino with a gaggle of women, girls and young lads who have nothing to do now the golf links have closed, and they come and play with the wounded, making a mess of everything and discouraging the best intentions. Luckily there were doubts and they’ve only sent the not-too-serious cases here. But at Bayonne it’s been extremely difficult to get rid of a cloud of Red Cross ladies who have given money, but who encumber the hospitals, waxing indignant at being asked to wash the feet of the wounded, retreating behind their ignorance to avoid dealing with bandages, and grumbling because no one has supplied them with a tea room.5

Ravel’s friends, naturally, intended to keep him as far from the front line as they could. ‘By all the saints,’ he exploded to Roland-Manuel on 1 October, ‘I do know, my dear fellow, that I’m working for my country by writing music! At least, people have been saying so often enough to convince me for two months now; first of all to prevent me joining up, then to console me for my failure. I’ve not been prevented and I’m not consoled.’6 His fury was if anything made worse by the fact that Edouard had been accepted as a driver; and that there had now been no news of him for three weeks,7 so no doubt Mama’s worries on this score had to be assuaged in addition to everything else. The letter to Roland-Manuel quoted above also contains further details of the work in which he was trying, vainly, to find consolation. For some reason the sketches for Zazpiak-Bat had been left in Paris (which means he must have returned to the capital at some point after the end of June, when he was working on the project at St-Jean-de-Luz). Instead, with the two Germanic pieces stalled, he was thinking of returning to Maeterlinck’s Intérieur (‘touching result of the [Franco-Belgian] alliance’) and had actually begun two groups of piano pieces: ‘1st a French suite – no, not what you’re thinking: the Marseillaise won’t figure in it, and there’ll be a forlane and a gigue; but no tango. – 2nd a Nuit romantique, with spleen, infernal hunt, accursed nun, etc.’ No more is heard of Intérieur nor, sadly, of Nuit romantique, of which a onepage sketch is all that survives. The reference to the forlane confirms that this was the first movement to be written, but there was in fact to be no gigue. He and his mother returned to Paris that October and he would not see the Basque country again until 1921. They probably arrived in time for the first German bombardment on the 11th and for the battle of the Marne on the 14th that saved the capital. The French cabinet nevertheless departed for Bordeaux, President Raymond Poincaré urging Parisians to ‘be worthy of these

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tragic circumstances’. As in St-Jean-de-Luz, Ravel’s worthiness had to confine itself to composition and, now that planned visits to Prague and Berlin between 15 and 25 November were cancelled, concerts of the SMI temporarily in abeyance and the Apaches disbanded, there was little else for him to do except look after his mother. A postcard of 13 November to Edwin Evans explained that she had not been able to receive Evans’s sister, having taken to her bed since their return ‘no doubt because of the emotions caused by these terrible times.’8 Also in November, Ravel was taking driving lessons every day, with a view to being enlisted in the 19th squadron of the Train des Equipages (Supply department), and passed his test early in December.9 In this month he wrote the central song of the Trois chansons for unaccompanied chorus, finishing the other two the following February. For these he wrote his own texts. They indicate that in adversity Ravel had not lost his sense of humour, even if none of three stories ends happily ever after, as a good tale should.10 Words and music both breathe a sixteenth-century air, a heady perfume compounded of pastoral naïvety and worldly cynicism. The harmonic style is largely triadic, softened by many a passing ninth and seventh – often strangely prophetic of Poulenc – and melody and rhythm are closely allied to the words. ‘Nicolette’ tells of a young girl out in the fields picking flowers. She is frightened of the wolf and scornful of the young suitor, but when the fat, ugly old man offers her his money she rushes into his arms. In the third song, ‘Ronde’, the old folk utter warnings to the young to keep out of the wood, full as it is of goblins and monsters of every variety (some sparkling word-play here, in the best ‘chanson’ tradition); the monsters have all gone, reply the young – those meddling old fogeys have frightened them all away. This is the only one of the three with the slightest connection to Basque folk music, with its narrow intervals circling round one another in a modal context and its propensity for spreading the meter at cadences (as here in bar 4).11 Only the second of the set, ‘Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis’, makes any reference to the war, in its refrain ‘Mon ami z’il est à la guerre’. Ravel dedicated the songs to friends who might help him enlist: to Klingsor, who had connections with the military, to the cabinet minister Paul Painlevé who, in 1910, had been the first to persuade the French government to subsidise the aviation industry, and to Sophie Clemenceau in whose salon the minister and Ravel had probably met. Painlevé can hardly have failed to understand the double entendre in the last line of ‘Trois beaux oiseaux’, ‘emportez-le aussi!’ (take him as well!). But in all three songs Ravel overplayed his hand. He could have presented no more convincing proof of the need to keep him alive. He had hoped to welcome Stravinsky in the avenue Carnot for the New Year – he’d even set up a room with Japanese prints, Chinese toys and a mechanical nightingale, or so he claimed12 – but Stravinsky’s wife Catherine was exhausted, money was tight,13 and Diaghilev was now asking Stravinsky to

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come and see him in Rome (which he did, but not until the second week of February). In the meantime, on 28 January the SMI put on a final concert before a two-year silence, opening with the first performance of Ravel’s Trio. The programme continued with six Debussy Preludes and Dukas’s Variations, interlude et final sur un thème de Rameau, all played by Casella, the first performance of Fauré’s song cycle Le jardin clos, with the composer accompanying Claire Croiza, and ending with Saint-Saëns’s Scherzo and Marche militaire for two pianos (pianists uncredited). By any standards this was de luxe programming, featuring arguably the five most prominent French composers of the time. No doubt d’Indy and his pupils would dispute this but, apart from them, these five represented a kind of union sacrée in which personal antipathies – between Ravel and Debussy, and between Debussy and SaintSaëns – were laid aside. Not that everything went entirely smoothly. Casella, who was joined in the Trio by the violinist Gabriel Willaume and the cellist Louis Feuillard, later wrote: I had the idea of giving a benefit concert which could include this very important first performance. It took place on January 28, 1915, in the Salle Gaveau, and had to be given at 7.00 p.m., as all public transportation ceased at ten o’clock. I played the trio with two mediocre performers. Although we had had about twenty rehearsals, they managed to achieve several blunders. Nevertheless, the piece was very successful, and the proceeds of this first chamber concert to be given in Paris during the war were quite encouraging.14

Probably these blunders persuaded Ravel to rewrite the string parts in the ‘Pantoum’ for the first edition, transferring the more demanding material to the piano.15 Casella continued his efforts on Ravel’s behalf by conducting the second Daphnis suite at the Augusteo in Rome on 24 February, Ravel’s first appearance on an Italian orchestral programme, and followed this up a few days later with the first performance at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Jeux d’eau.16 In February Ravel agreed to edit Mendelssohn’s piano works for Durand. Even if Mendelssohn’s name appears nowhere in Ravel’s known correspondence, he was certainly a Mendelssohn admirer: we have already mentioned the disguised reprise in the first movement of the Violin Concerto, which he told Hélène Jourdan-Morhange was the best violin concerto of all,17 and in 1917 he shocked the young Poulenc by claiming that the Songs without Words ‘were a thousand times better than Schumann’s Carnaval’.18 His involvement with Mendelssohn formed part of a large project initiated by Durand to produce editions of major keyboard writers, to replace the German ones that the war made unavailable: Fauré was given Schumann and Debussy Chopin. Altogether Ravel’s edition comprises nine volumes, published between 1915

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and 1918, the first of which, of the Romances sans paroles, has a preface mainly concerned with comparing ten details of the main text, taken from the Breitkopf edition, with parallel passages in Heller’s, published by Brandus. This is not the place to discuss these comparisons at length, but they do give insight into Ravel’s compositional methods: for instance in op. 30 no. 2, in the sixth bar of the final major section (Ex. 6.1), he prints Breitkopf ’s tenor D flat, giving a dominant seventh, [Allegro di molto] ritard. - - - -

   

a Tempo

                     

   

  

  





     

 

  



                      



cresc.                                              

f

    

 * 

            

 



ff

 

 

                            

                           





          

sf  

           

                 



  

   

 

  



Example 6.1. Mendelssohn ed. Ravel, Song without Words, op. 30 no. 2, bars 83–92

but says of Heller’s unflattened D: ‘This may simply be an omission; but this major seventh, what’s more correctly prepared and resolved, gives the chord a particular character [un accent singulier]’ – this from a composer for whom accents singuliers were the stuff of life, and especially if they could be shown to be ‘correct’. On 7 March he celebrated his fortieth birthday, but his best present came three days later when the Conseil de Révision de la Seine pronounced him fit for military service. It would seem that he joined up immediately: in a letter to Evans of 18 March he apologises for not having had time to sort out ‘l’affaire de la Mère l’Oye’ (whatever that was), explaining that ‘the only free time I have is what I’m allowed by the 13th Regiment of Artillery, to which I’ve been assigned while I wait to be posted as a bombardier on a plane, which will happen very soon, I hope.’19 For the time being he was servicing lorries in the depot at 156 rue de Vaugirard, so was able to continue living at home. On 5 April, a postcard to Evans tells us that he is still waiting,20 as does a letter of the same date to Vaughan Williams, written from the avenue Carnot,21 which in addition grumbles that ‘I’m very busy doing not much’. From here on the biographer is faced with months of total silence. Probably Ravel continued to busy himself doing not much in Paris while the second Artois offensive was launched in May and halted in June, and while in

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September the French and British launched a massive counterattack in Champagne and Flanders. A letter from Edouard of 26 May says nothing about Maurice, other than that his letter of the 18th had arrived. Another of 17 October is more explicit: ‘I’m very surprised to see you haven’t given up the aeroplane idea. . . . at the depot, I talked about your schemes to a writer whose name escapes me. He was indignant and hoped the heads of the Air Force were sensible enough not to expose an outstanding figure in modern music to such dangers. So you see I’m not the only one who thinks your ideas are crazy.’22 A month later Maurice was still living at home with his mother, but had now been taken on as a lorry driver, still based at 156 rue de Vaugirard, though he was also finding time to talk to various influential people in the hope of getting Florent Schmitt sent back from the front.23 Another month passed, and nothing had changed: I’m still in no danger of having the croix de guerre, even though I’m living in the midst of the appalling dangers of an entrenched camp (accidents on the Métro, warfare over the card table, governments falling etc.) Added to which, if cowardice is contagious, then I’m currently very much at risk. For some days now it’s been manifesting itself in feverish activity: all our underofficers, and even some officers, are finding out all about our steam engines with the intention of being transferred as assistants. The result is, we’ll shortly have the pleasure of seeing bankers, lawyers and industrialists in dungarees, weighed down under hessian sacks. . . . As for me, I’m heading in another direction: after a year of negotiations, I’m going to join the Air Force. There have been visits and counter-visits: my heart and lungs are still good. Let’s hope the first of these will be elastic enough to find its way to my stomach at the crucial moment.24

Meanwhile the life of the arts survived as best it could. That month Ravel’s one-time champion, Romain Rolland, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, shortly before Ravel’s friend and pupil Roland-Manuel was evacuated from Gallipoli. But the Opéra remained closed until 9 December and the Société nationale did not organize another concert until 10 November 1917. There is no record of Ravel working on anything during this melancholy period (though we must assume he attended the Opéra premiere of his ballet Adélaïde on 9 February), and it was no doubt with mixed feelings of relief and apprehension that finally, on 14 March 1916, he was sent as a lorry driver to support the troops at Verdun, where the Germans had launched a heavy attack on 21 February. From this time until his temporary discharge in June 1917, the silence is broken and his numerous letters give a graphic picture of Ravel the soldier. He smashes up his lorry, is asked to contribute to a camp concert (he thought at once of ‘Surgi de la croupe’), is put in charge of petrol supplies and inquires constantly about his friends. Regularly, he reassures his mother that

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he is in no danger. But in a letter to an army officer he writes: ‘For a whole week I have been driving day and night – without lights – on unbelievable roads, often with a load double what my truck should carry. And even so I had to hurry because all this was within range of the guns. Adélaïde and I – Adélaïde is my truck – escaped the shrapnel, but the poor dear couldn’t keep going and after losing her number-plate in a danger zone where parking was forbidden, in despair she shed a wheel in a forest, where I did a Robinson Crusoe for ten days until someone came to rescue me.’25 He was strangely excited by the adventure of it all, which puzzled him, and the disruption of his ordered life left him exhausted yet eager to see more. His worst enemy, as for many soldiers, was boredom, and he spent the hours in barracks writing letters and dreaming of the music he would write on his return. The occasional break from his wartime surroundings allowed him to fall back into his habitually ironical view of himself: ‘It’s true I enjoyed myself noting down birdsong in the Bois Bourrus. Whatever I do, I’ll never be a Napoleon.’26 Among the recipients of his letters were, of course, his mother, to whom he sent a carefully edited version of his adventures, including jokes about his lorry and boasts about a two-hour chat with the chief sub-lieutenant who knew his name, and how this greatly impressed his fellow garage-hands.27 More truthful were those to Mme Fernand Dreyfus, Roland-Manuel’s mother and Ravel’s marraine de guerre (war godmother), who sent him consignments of chocolate, bouillabaisse, lobster, asparagus, mayonnaise and Easter eggs, and went regularly to see Marie Ravel. On 24 April he reported that while he was driving his lorry, ‘less than 30 metres away, I saw a shell fall to the right of the road – a magnificent black firework. Shortly afterwards, behind the lorry, a whistling and a bang. . . . My companion was not very comfortable and was glad for both our sakes that I was driving. And to think that I’ll end up by having shellshock. . . . For the moment, I can assure you, I’m enjoying it enormously. I’m still going through the period of being curious.’28 This was not vouchsafed to Maman. He was amazed at his own sangfroid and its concomitant curiosity: as he wrote to Mme Dreyfus, ‘It creates such a feeling that it becomes necessary. What will I do, what will many others do after the war?’29 For the moment, though, he was doubly inconvenienced, first by the breakdown of his lorry Adélaïde, and then by an attack of terrible lassitude. The first of these left him without transport for a month, the second left him in a quandary, as he explained to Jean Marnold: I’m tired . . . not that military tiredness, that phlegm that resembles depression, the nostalgia for higher things – I’ve had my share of that, but there’s also something else. . . . I was coming away from a consultation when I was handed your letter. The major strongly advised me against aviation. I’ve got

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cardiac hypertrophy. Oh! not much and it’s not serious, I’m told. . . . What should I do now? If I go for a medical consultation with a more efficient major, I shall be declared unfit for driving and I’ll be dumped in a desk job. You yourself can understand that I prefer to let things lie. . . . I haven’t said anything to Maman about my condition or about the consultation.’30

Cardiac hypertrophy, a thickening of the heart muscle, can cause dizziness, light-headedness, sudden unconsciousness and even death – all symptoms contra-indicated for those flying aeroplanes. In any case his carefulness was in vain, because in June he had a letter from Edouard blaming him for telling their mother that he, Maurice, was ill, and at the same time one from her complaining that she’d only found this out from friends. What’s more ‘it appears I have seriously upset Maman by telling her I was passing through a hail of bullets!’31 Given these concerns and his mediocre health, it was probably not the best moment for Ravel to have his artistic beliefs challenged. In that spring of 1916, Saint-Saëns, d’Indy and some eighty other composers, including Charpentier and Dubois, founded a Ligue nationale pour la défense de la musique française whose aim was ‘by every means to expel the enemy and then run it to earth; to prevent in future the recurrence of its baneful infiltrations.’32 This enemy, a later paragraph explains, consisted of ‘contemporary Austro-German works that have not entered the public domain’ and included films, gramophone records and even such apparently innocent objects as Viennese operettas. Ravel was asked for his cooperation. His reply of 7 June – polite but firm – can reasonably be summed up in the eighth of its fourteen paragraphs: ‘It would indeed be dangerous for French composers systematically to ignore the output of their foreign colleagues and so form a sort of national coterie: our music, currently so rich, would soon degenerate and contract into stereotypical formulae.’33 Schoenberg might be Austrian, but he was still ‘un musicien de haute valeur’, and while there were at that moment no first-rate German composers apart from Richard Strauss, there was no saying who might at any moment come forward. Admittedly this embrace of what André Gide called the ‘yeast’ of foreign influence does not tally completely with the remarks in Ravel’s lecture to the Rice Institute in Houston twelve years later (see pp. 290, 353–4). Maybe he was goaded into this stand in 1916 by other composers telling him what he and other French people should or should not listen to. He was of course, as an active participant in the war, in a relatively strong position, but we can judge the incendiary effect of his letter from the reply of the founder-president, the critic Charles Tenroc, duly noting Ravel’s admiration for Schoenberg and others and threatening that ‘the Ligue nat[ionale] will be on hand, at the crucial moment, to balance your admiration against an eventual sacrifice, which would be extremely painful for the public, of your own music.’34

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Ridiculous as such a threat appears to us now (and to Ravel then, as the manner of his quotation of it tells), the fact is that the four festivals of French music put on in Paris in 1916 and 1917 contained not a single Ravel work.35 Tenroc’s broadside does confirm Proust’s comment on the Marquis de Saint-Loup mentioning Romain Rolland and Nietzsche ‘with that independence of fighters at the front who did not have the same fear of pronouncing a German name as those further back from it’.36 Although Wagner was not specifically targeted (his works were by now in the public domain), his music does seem to have figured in the ban if we are again to believe Proust, that ‘sometimes the siren would sound like the harrowing call of a Valkyrie – the only German music that had been heard since the beginning of the war’.37 Ravel’s stance was also supported by Mme de Saint-Marceaux who in her diary a year earlier noted the existence of an anti-German faction that advocated ‘not another note of German music, not another musician from across the Rhine. This attitude revolts me. [I’m for] art and beauty, wherever they reveal themselves.’38 It was probably around this time that Ravel received the only letter among those written by his mother that has survived. Although it has been provisionally dated early March 1916, it refers to Ravel’s illness – he was not ill in March and in any case on the 7th was still at home – and in wishing him ‘une bonne fête’ she cannot therefore have been referring to his forty-first birthday but, more likely, to the Feast of St John the Baptist on 24 June. ‘Maurice chéri’, she writes, ‘don’t worry about me. I’m as well as can be but it’s you that’s worrying me. I can’t tell you how distressed I am to know you’re ill – I’m not sleeping I have nightmares do everything you have to get better as quickly as possible because I tell you I’m very distressed. Here are your pyjamas and 2 nightshirts. I wish you a happy festival with a big kiss from your mother who is thinking of you.’39 Her idiosyncratic punctuation, or lack of it, is compounded by equally individual spelling: ‘ne te préocupe pas’, ‘de te savir si malade’, ‘j’ai des cochemas’, ‘2 chemis de nuit’, ‘je te souhite une bonne fête’. It is in no way to denigrate this remarkable lady to point out, yet again, what a social gulf had been bridged by her marriage to a highly intelligent, intellectual French engineer, or to what extent it was matched by Ravel’s own compositional struggles to express (maternal) emotion through (paternal) technical means. In all likelihood she was embarrassed by her written French, still imperfect after forty years in Paris. But Ravel refused to accept this as an excuse for her not writing, and her letter, and possibly others now lost, may well have been penned as a response to his testy injunction of 26 March: ‘you don’t have to produce literature. Send me your news; tell me what you’re doing, the visits you’ve had, what’s happening to Edouard. There’s nothing complicated about it; you’ve got all the time in the world for that and then I wouldn’t find myself being a squaddy without a family – with a godmother, though, because Mme Dreyfus has adopted me as a godson.’40 Edouard, a similarly reluctant correspondent and

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without the excuse of linguistic incompetence, came off still worse. Thanking Jane Courteault in advance for a parcel of underpants, Ravel, now evacuated for medical attention to Châlons-sur-Marne, imagines that ‘they’ll arrive anyway before the linen Edouard should be sending me. As I’ve written to Mama, his neglect is really too extreme. He knows I’m ill – which Mama doesn’t – Nothing serious, general fatigue that they’re treating with injections of salt of cacodylic acid. But even so, he must guess my morale is not brilliant.’41 Here, as with his lackadaisical students in 1906, Ravel was reacting waspishly to what he felt was less than his brother’s due attention. More ominously with regard to the future, he also reports to Mme Dreyfus that he is sleeping ‘hardly at all. To begin with, that has a strange effect, then you get used to it. I’ve been let off duties. Also I’ve been given a post that’s almost entirely peaceful. With a mattress and permission to lie down on it, that would be perfect.’42 He blames the insomnia on the war and is sure that after it’s over, sleep will return. Or maybe he’s smoking too much. On 4 July, as to other correspondents, he mentions music: ‘Truly, I’ve never been so much of a composer, I brim over with inspiration, with projects of all sorts: chamber music, symphonies, ballets. . . . I tell you, there’s only one solution: the end of the war . . . or else a return to the front.’43 July passed in similar inaction, broken only by long walks, which Ravel found left him feeling more cheerful. The only sign of intellectual activity comes in a letter to Jean Marnold of 27 July, asking him ‘to find me as much information as you can on the folksongs of the Valois region’44, but no more is heard of this. In early August he was granted a brief leave and found his mother in a better state than he had feared, and ‘transformed’ by his arrival.45 Another transformation, he was assured by Alfred Cortot, was taking place in the Société nationale, with d’Indy now no more than a committee member; as a result, Cortot hoped Ravel would return to the fold. ‘So I’ve agreed. We’ll see. At least, for the moment, there can be no question of promoting the works of Weingartner or Humperdinck’46 – both of these being living German composers. By mid-August he was back in Châlons-sur-Marne, going down with dysentery on the journey; he was duly hospitalized and reduced to a diet of eggs, tomatoes and melons. No sooner was the dysentery over than he was found to have a hernia, perhaps a worsening of the one that had prevented his military service in 1895, and on 30 September he was operated on. He spent his convalescence reading two books sent him by Mme Dreyfus, Albert Thibaudet’s book on Mallarmé, and Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes, which enchanted him and set him thinking of a composition for cello and orchestra, as well as writing letters: ‘I’ve written to a whole heap of people, even to those who couldn’t care less.’ His hopes that Ma mère l’Oye was to be given at the OpéraComique were not fulfilled – it was not danced there until 1942 – and in another field, too, his wishes came to nothing: ‘I’m told Saint-Saëns has

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announced to the delighted crowds that during the war he has composed incidental music, songs, an elegy and a piece for trombone. If, instead, he’d been turning out guns, music might have been better served.’47 It would seem that respect for the artificer had, momentarily anyway, been swamped by disdain for the chauvinist. Ravel was sent back to Paris at the end of October to recuperate, and rejoined his mother, from whom he had managed to hide his spell in hospital. The only news of him before the end of the year comes from d’Indy. In 1915 the Société nationale and the SMI had merged. But things did not run smoothly and, despite efforts from people such as Cortot (see above), no concerts had resulted by the end of 1916. On 17 December there was a meeting to try and get some cooperation going, and next day d’Indy wrote to a colleague: Yesterday Fauré and I tried for an honest rapprochement between the Société nationale and the SMI. I was aiming wholeheartedly and with no ulterior motive for a union of all French composers. . . . It didn’t work at all. Ravel, Koechlin, Grovlez, Casadesus and Co. refused, in the name of their ‘Aesthetic’??? . . . ‘which cannot be the same as ours’ – I admit to finding that so funny, I’m still chuckling about it. . . . The only person who finds it sad is poor Fauré, who would like to escape from that SMI set-up.48

Three months later he relayed the same information in a letter that makes it clear Ravel was the leader of the SMI’s ‘peremptory refusal’, but also that d’Indy ‘would have liked Ravel to join us’, especially as both Debussy and Dukas had come on board.49 Whether chuckling or regretful, d’Indy should hardly have been surprised, since the whole impetus behind the SMI’s foundation six years earlier had been to counteract his own influence through the medium of the Société nationale. Ravel, though, had more important things to worry about. On his return he had found his mother seriously ill, and on 5 January 1917 she died. It is hard to overestimate the shock he suffered at her death coming, as it did, at a time when his own health was poor and his future, like that of France, uncertain. In Roland-Manuel’s words: ‘The composer’s friends found him sunk in a dumb stupor which resisted all expressions of sympathy. They had to try to distract a lost child who showed none of his feelings and whom nothing could console.’50 When considering the emotional torment he suffered, the sense of loss and probably irrational guilt together with remorse for his own decision to abandon her during the last nine months of her life, we must not forget the sheer practical upheaval his mother’s death caused him. From the adventure of war and the misery and tedium of illness he must confidently have expected to return to that entirely ordered life which he had lived with her and Edouard in the avenue Carnot since 1908. Not until 1921 was he able to establish again a

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ménage that suited him. Until then he lived as visitor, as guest, as friend, as lodger, in other people’s houses. Marie was buried on 7 January in Levallois at a civil ceremony, with Satie and Diaghilev among those present. Since Ravel had done his best to find his father a deathbed confessor, the Abbé Léonce Petit, we may perhaps assume that the civil ceremony was at Marie’s request, despite the religious promptings she had felt in Ciboure in 1911. Narbaitz even records that she was afraid of dying in Ciboure because it would be impossible to escape a priest.51 Even so, habits died hard for many of those present, as Mme de Saint-Marceaux noted in her diary: Burial of Ravel’s mother. Civil burial as cold as death. The suppression of gestures acquired in childhood is so little in our blood that most of the women filing past the tomb, without even stopping, were making the sign of the cross. The two brothers were distraught, they adored their mother. They almost had to be supported. They couldn’t remain upright. Both were in utter turmoil, incapable of reaction or self-control. A lamentable and distressing spectacle at this time when heroism displays itself as naturally as breathing.52

Despite his emotional trauma, Ravel could still focus well enough on business matters to have a meeting with Diaghilev about a possible ballet just four days after the funeral, and to send him a letter next day setting out terms in a thoroughly businesslike fashion.53 The title of the ballet was The Zoo, on a scenario by the Italian Futurist poet Francesco Cangiullo, who later described it as ‘something very amusing and original . . . which both [Diaghilev] and Massine, his premier danseur, liked very much. Who would do the scenes, the costumes, the designs? I had seen a fantastic fauna elegantly stylized by [Fortunato] Depero and gave [Diaghilev] his name. But Cocteau, who was influential and very friendly with Diaghilev, had already supplied him with the names of some Parisian designers.’54 Little more is heard of this project, although Ornella Volta finds traces of the text in the scenario for Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (the 1921 ballet jointly written by five of Les Six, to a scenario by Cocteau).55 It is presumably referred to implicitly in Ravel’s letter to Mme Dreyfus of 18 February, saying ‘Durand tells me Diaghilev was disconcerted on hearing of my departure. The excellent Serge would like to have things settled as soon as possible . . . me too!’56 and again in a letter to her of 16 March in which he says he’s ‘going to raise Diaghilev’s hopes a little.’57 But Ravel’s demands are interesting, including as they do a fee of 10,000 francs, payable half on delivery of the piano score and half of the orchestral one. Comparisons between this figure and others demanded by Ravel and Debussy around the same period yield curious results. The fees Ravel previously obtained from Durand were a good deal lower than

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Debussy’s, as Narbaitz observes: ‘On 31 August 1908, Ravel received the sum of 1,500 francs from his publisher Durand for Gaspard de la nuit, namely half of what Debussy had been paid in that same year for his Children’s Corner.’58 However, for The Zoo Ravel was asking Diaghilev for precisely the same fee as the impresario had agreed to pay Debussy for Jeux in 1912,59 and this before the advent of postwar inflation. We can therefore surmise either that Ravel was making a statement about his artistic standing, or that he was (consciously?) punishing Diaghilev for past wrongs, or, more prosaically, that with his mother’s death he was now all too aware of the hard road ahead, which money might do a little to alleviate. Maybe he was coming to realize that he and Edouard would need separate establishments in the future? He returned to Châlons on 7 February and two days later wrote to Mme Dreyfus: ‘It’s such a short time since I was writing to her, and receiving her poor letters which made me sad . . . I did not know it would happen so quickly. Now this terrible despair, the same thoughts going on and on.’60 After several days of appalling cold, with temperatures falling to below 20°C, on 21 February he left for Paris on a week’s leave, staying with Mme Dreyfus. But he was back in Châlons through the following month and grateful for the warmer weather, though he was refused permission to go to Paris either for the rehearsals of the second production of Adélaïde at the Opéra or for the planned opening night on 22 March.61 In fact this did not take place until 8 April; we do not know whether he was there. May 1917 was notable, or notorious, both for mutinies in the French army and for the premiere of Satie’s Parade at the Châtelet – an effusion of anti-Establishment art, dubbed ‘musique boche’ by an official of Ministry of the Interior, among others.62 Ravel’s health, morale and military usefulness must by now have been seen as doubtful by even the most stubborn militarists, but his temporary discharge did not come through until 1 June so, given his near-total silence about Parade both then and later, we might assume he did not attend the first run from 18–25 May. Maybe not, but Cocteau says he took Ravel to one of the rehearsals and that ‘he admitted he could not understand the mechanism of music that was not bathed, as he put it, in any sonorous fluid.’63 It is only speculation to suggest that his experiences as a soldier, in which a functioning hierarchy was a vital element, to some extent chimed with his return to work on Le tombeau, itself a deliberate tribute to the old French values. To Ravel and many others, these seemed to be in perhaps greater danger from a German military victory than they had ever been from Wagner. Whatever the new world portended by Parade, it was essentially anarchic: beneath the superficial gaiety (as one lady in the audience, overheard by Picasso, put it, ‘if I’d known it was going to be so silly, I’d have brought the children’) lay a frank, even brutal challenge to ideas of continuity, development, la grande ligne, and everything Ravel stood for. At the same time Parade is in fact, as both Mellers and Orledge have shown,64 a highly organized

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mirror structure. Can we believe that the Ravel who recognized in advance the novelty and power of Le sacre was incapable of seeing what was new and vital about Parade, even if he didn’t approve? Did its ‘childishness’ not appeal to the very heart of him? For lack of evidence, the jury is still out. Certainly we cannot assume that, because Satie was now turning against him (see pp. 205, 215), he was responding reciprocally: from his attitude to Debussy, and shortly afterwards to Les Six, we can see that such narrowmindedness was foreign to him. On being provisionally discharged he went first to stay with Mme Dreyfus and her husband Fernand near Lyons-la-Forêt in Normandy. From here on 20 June he wrote to Lucien Garban about waking in the morning with the feeling that his mother was watching over him; and more practically, to ask for Colette’s address: ‘I’ve entrusted Rouché with a commission for her, and have as yet had no reply.’65 If this was indeed the first step in the collaboration with Colette over L’Enfant et les sortilèges, it conflicts with the usual story – which will be told in due course (see pp. 196, 263ff.). On 7 July he wrote to his publisher Durand: ‘The time goes incredibly quickly when you’re working. The Tombeau de Couperin is taking shape. The ‘minuet’ and ‘rigaudon’ are finished. The rest is on the way.’66 The whole piano suite was finished in November. Finally, at some point in the summer he and Edouard left the rented flat on the avenue Carnot and its happy memories for good, and went to stay in a villa at 7 avenue Léonie in the suburb of SaintCloud with Edouard’s business associates, M. and Mme Bonnet. He also assured his publisher that ‘physically I’m well; I don’t know whether I’m getting fatter, but I’m not coughing any more.’ Distinguishing his physical from his psychological problems was a task he may not have attempted at the time. In an age before counselling, he relied on work, friends, his brother and his innate Basque determination to see him through. If, finally, he did recover from the war and his mother’s death (and Rosenthal recorded the verdict of many friends that the latter at least was a wound that never healed67), he would even so never be the same man who had gone off to war in March the previous year. Perhaps Edouard had an easier time of it: the ‘specially commissioned precision tools, individual car parts, drills and multi-pin electric plugs’ that appear on the Bonnet notepaper68 perhaps did not exhaust too much emotional capital. Composing music was a different matter. In a letter of 30 July to Mme Dreyfus, Satie exclaimed ‘How Ravel has changed! Don’t you think so? His attitude is comic in the extreme . . . and farcical! Let’s hope it’s not serious. His “militarism” is following him into civilian life, don’t you feel? It’s very odd! It distresses me greatly – greatly. Such a great artist! And a good fellow . . . all in all.’69 Ravel himself took a more nuanced view of his ‘militarism’, writing to the Gazette des classes de composition du Conservatoire on 2 June, the day after his temporary discharge, that ‘as for me, after a period of service that has been extremely active and adven-

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turous, I am absolutely exhausted, but happy that I have not left any pieces of myself behind and to have lived through moments that were worth the trouble’.70 August and September were traditionally dead months in the Parisian musical calendar, though Ravel was no doubt working on Le tombeau. In October, the soprano Jane Bathori took over the direction of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier for two years while the previous director, Jacques Copeau, was over in America, and as a send-off for him she organized a concert on the 11th including what may have been the first public performance of the Trois chansons for chorus, conducted by Aubert. An earlier, private performance, conducted by Caplet on leave from the army, had involved Koechlin, Honegger and the 18-year-old Poulenc, and was the occasion for some sight-reading errors by the latter, for which he was duly reprimanded by the older Honegger.71 Clearly Satie’s anti-Ravelian attitude had not yet percolated through to the budding members of Les Nouveaux Jeunes, later to contribute to the formation of Les Six, and among the very few press notices was Georges Auric’s, praising the songs’ ‘simplicity, lightness and genuinely exquisite poetry’.72

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

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In November, according to Ravel’s manuscript, he completed the piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin. In his autobiographical sketch he wrote: ‘The tribute is directed not so much toward the individual figure of Couperin as to the whole of French music of the eighteenth century.’ Each of the six movements is dedicated to the memory of a friend killed in the war and so the work is at least a double homage – to the civilization Ravel most admired, and to the friends who had tried to preserve its standards; possibly it is a threefold one, a farewell to the dearest friend of all. That said, we need to remember that the memorial element was a later addition since, of course, the war had not broken out when Ravel began the suite (simply referred to as ‘Suite française’) with the ‘Forlane’ in July 1914. But by the time he returned to it in June 1917, young friends had died in all too great numbers,’ beginning with Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, brothers of Marie and Jane and dedicatees of the ‘Rigaudon’, who were killed by the same shell on 12 November 1914, the day they arrived at the front. The ‘Prélude’ was dedicated to Jacques Charlot, a cousin of Jacques Durand and also the dedicatee of the second movement of Debussy’s En blanc et noir; the ‘Fugue’ to Jean Cruppi, the son of the minister and Mme Cruppi who had been so influential in getting L’heure espagnole on to the stage (on the manuscript this piece is dedicated to Sergeant Baguerion-Desormeaux, but the dedication was changed as the sergeant’s death had not been officially confirmed at the time of publication); the ‘Forlane’ to Gabriel Deluc, a painter from Bayonne, one of whose pictures can still be seen in Ravel’s house at Montfort l’Amaury; the ‘Menuet’ to Jean Dreyfus, the son of Mme Dreyfus by her second marriage (and thus halfbrother of Roland-Manuel); and the ‘Toccata’ to Joseph, Marquis de Marliave, a professional soldier with a deep interest in music, who had married the pianist Marguerite Long in 1906. A projected seventh movement, a ‘Bourrée’, exists only in a remarkably unpromising one-page sketch, which understandably fades out after 28 bars.73 Time and again in Le tombeau, the composer courts danger by putting new wine into old skins. The ‘Prélude’, in a blend of E minor and G major,74 is cast in an expanded binary form whose first section ends in an orthodox G major cadence. Working against this traditional structure, the modal and chromatic harmonies stand in clear relief and Ravel balances this tension with a final eighteen bars in which an E minor ending is plainly foreshadowed; finally he disclaims his feat with a quasi glissando and a trill. He insisted that the ornaments, here and elsewhere in the suite, should be played on the beat, but that the strongest accent should be on the initial note of the ornament with a diminuendo, even a blurring, on the notes that follow. He also wanted a little air (‘respirations’) between the phrases,75 as is shown in his autograph fingering of the following right-hand passage, added to his own printed copy,76 through the placing of the little finger on the final quaver C sharp, necessitating a lift of the hand before the phrase is repeated (Ex. 6.2):

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4 5 3 2 3 1 2 3 5  

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    

[ p]

Example 6.2. Ravel, ‘Prélude’, Le tombeau de Couperin, bars 7, 8

As with all well-constructed fugues, this one seems very easy, and indeed Ravel facilitates his task by making a marked contrast between subject and countersubject and by separating them with freely composed material. Cortot describes the effect of this movement as being of ‘timid voices of nuns at prayer, the gentle atmosphere of the cloister, an ordering of the heart, resigned peace of the spirit’.77 Harmonically the most enterprising movement is the ‘Forlane’: this being the earliest written of the six movements, it supports the view that Ravel’s harmonic palette reached an acme of sophistication and dissonance in the years immediately before the war, after which it became simpler and more straightforward – whether or not through contact with the realities of soldiering. In the ‘Forlane’ there is some indelicate jostling among the higher discords, at times producing almost bitonal effects, but again these novelties are grounded in traditional bass sequences and modal cadences in which the flattened seventh is prominent. Even so, bars 140–56 offer some of the most extraordinary harmonies that even he ever invented, and bars 149 and 150 each contain all twelve notes of the chromatic scale: Marguerite Long records that when she played this passage to the conductor Camille Chevillard, he put his hands over his ears (Ex. 6/3).78

[Allegretto]

   pp

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  

 

     

  

       

Example 6.3. Ravel, ‘Forlane’, Le tombeau de Couperin, bar 149

Ravel kept the structure of the Couperin ‘Forlane’, of rondeaux interspersed with three couplets (ABACADA); but whereas Couperin’s model is in E major with the third couplet in the minor, Ravel reversed the modes. He insisted on the many repeats in the piece being honoured and, to prevent the rondeau theme becoming too obvious, decorated it at subsequent appearances with a little imitation. Its

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final appearance, limited to the last six and a half bars, is no more than an echo of the original, and Ravel’s favourite marking sans ralentir emphasizes that this discreet allusion should not be mistaken for an access of nostalgia. In the ‘Rigaudon’ likewise, there must be no rallentando in the long, expressive tune of the central section. A major characteristic of the piece should be a contrast between this seamless melody and the deliberately unbalanced structure of the outer sections, where a ceremonial fanfare introduces, interrupts and concludes the light-hearted dance (Ravel was to repeat the idea of his beginning being his end in the finale of the G major concerto). Throughout, Ravel again asked Henriette Faure to take care over the ‘respirations’ and to be implacable in tempo. Like the ‘Forlane’, this dance is based on one by Couperin, the ‘Premier tambourin’ from his Troisième concert. The ‘Menuet’ is perhaps the locus classicus in Ravel’s output of technique put at the service of expression. Anyone who compares this ‘Menuet’ with that from the Sonatine must feel that Ravel had travelled a long way since 1905. But it may also look backwards. One thing that Saint-Saëns, his pupil Fauré and Fauré’s pupil Ravel had in common was a disengagement (to put it no more strongly) from traditional religion. This did not prevent the first two from writing vocal music for the church, among which Fauré’s Requiem holds pride of place. It is no great feat to hear in the ‘Libera me’ of that work an echo of the ‘Lacrimosa’ from the plainsong sequence ‘Dies irae’ (Liber usualis 1812; Ex. 6.4a, b).

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La - cri - mo

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sa

di - es

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            Qua re - sur - get

ex

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Example 6.4a. Plainsong Lacrimosa, Liber usualis, Tournai, Desclée, 1956, p. 1812 [Molto moderato]

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





Li

-



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me,

Do - mi - ne,

  



be - ra

 







 de





mor - te



  

æ - ter





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na

Example 6.4b. Fauré, ‘Libera me’, Requiem

Did Ravel, writing a memorial for Mme Dreyfus’s son Jean, think back, consciously or not, to the opening of that sequence, which he must have known (Ex. 6.5)? [Allegro moderato]

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pp

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

y









 







x





  

Example 6.5. Ravel, ‘Musette’ from ‘Menuet’, Le tombeau de Couperin, bars 33–40





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The concluding Toccata does not aim so high, or so deep. ‘C’est du SaintSaëns,’ said Ravel, with some truth except that Saint-Saëns rarely succeeded in balancing so nicely opposing forces of virtuosity and tenderness. On the other hand, Yvonne Lefébure recalls Ravel finding the writing on the last page clumsy and difficult, and suggesting she ‘lighten the texture a little’.79 Be that as it may, virtuosity wins in the end by converting one of the tender themes from minor to major and Ravel’s last work for piano solo finishes in a triumph of E major chords and arpeggios. The verve and even high spirits evident in much of this memorial suite shocked Roger-Ducasse among others although, as Roy Howat says, these qualities tallied ‘with the old French tradition that a posthumous tribute had no need to be sombre’. Roger-Ducasse protested that Ravel hadn’t even had the decency to include a sarabande, to which Howat again responds by noting that ‘the saraband too was once considered indecent’.80 In 1919 Ravel orchestrated four of the movements (‘Prélude’, ‘Forlane’, ‘Menuet’, ‘Rigaudon’) and, although the reordering destroys the progress from E minor to E major, by giving a primary and taxing role to the oboe he underlined the inherent pathos which some critics had not appreciated when Marguerite Long gave the first performance of the original work on 11 April 1919, even though the reception was enthusiastic. We do not know why this performance was so long delayed. Durand must have been keen for it to happen since he had paid Ravel his 6,000 franc fee in December 1917.81 Writing to Marguerite Long from the Bonnets at Saint-Cloud on 2 July 1918, the composer asked bluntly, ‘Chère amie, when do you intend to give the first performance of the Tombeau de Couperin?’82 This would seem to contradict the notion, suggested in some sources, that Ravel wanted the first performance to be delayed until the war was over. In her memoirs Mme Long remembers this letter, in which Ravel proposed a performance in St-Jean-de-Luz where she was staying, and comments, ‘but the time was not ripe; during these weeks that would in fact lead to victory the sky was covered with the darkest clouds we had seen since the Marne. After the Armistice Ravel, who was very depressed and agitated and had lost weight, had to go for a rest in Switzerland.’83 Ravel wrote to Casella on 5 November 1918 complaining of exhaustion and problems with his right lung and asking Casella to apologize to the Academia Santa Cecilia in Rome where he was due to appear;84 and the next day he wrote to Dr Raymond Geiger, who had taken over from Dr Bonniot, assuring him that he was following his prescriptions scrupulously, but that ‘I’m not sleeping much better. I cough quite well. The ganglions are doing nicely, thank you, and even prospering rather alarmingly. And I’m fed up! This morning I fell into a terrible depression.’85 The ganglions, tubercular swellings (which nowadays might be called granulomas), were affecting his right lung. Tuberculosis in its early stages typically gives rise to cough, fever and loss of weight, and its incidence often increases in wartime. No certain cure was available until the early 1940s; the only reasonably successful treatment was by rest

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and the ‘pure air’ of the mountains, or by surgical intervention. Ravel must have been far more alarmed than he admitted, and so must his friends. ‘The days went by,’ Mme Long continues, ‘and even though the work was in the public domain [it had been published on 25 May 1918], discretion had prevented any pianist from taking it on. But it was clear this situation could not continue.’ For ‘discretion’ we may read ‘unwillingness to upset Mme Long by preempting her’. The last five months had undoubtedly been some of the unhappiest of Ravel’s life. Indeed the whole year 1918 had seen him struggling to regain his mental and physical health, as the war intensified. In March, while Debussy lay dying, the German gun Big Bertha bombarded the city from 75 miles away, tram and Métro services were severely disrupted, and fuel for heating was in desperately short supply. It seems unlikely Ravel would have echoed the excitement of Vincent d’Indy, who found that ‘the complete blackout of light, even of the slightest gleam, turns the boulevards of Paris – especially Montparnasse and Raspail, which are in the direct path of the moonlight – into absolutely fantastic landscapes that have to be seen to be believed . . . while, near and far, incendiary bombs explode, and the rumbling of the defending guns goes on like an organ pedal-point.’86 Ravel had probably heard enough gunfire for one lifetime. At some point in 1918 he orchestrated ‘Alborada del gracioso’ for Diaghilev (see p. 203) and possibly in this year the first draft reached him of Colette’s libretto for what would become L’Enfant et les sortilèges. A letter from Rouché to Dukas of 14 April 1916 mentions that Colette wants Dukas to set her libretto for a ‘ballet-opera’,87 a proposition Dukas refused the same day.88 She then tried Ravel but, having heard nothing in response to her first envoi, moved on to Stravinsky, who also refused.89 This letter to Stravinsky implies that, if Ravel had indeed already written to her about a joint project (see p. 190), it may have been a different one. His only composition of this year was one of his strangest: Frontispice, published in 1919 as a piece apparently for five hands at two pianos. It was written at the request of the Italian poet Ricciotto Canudo, who lived in Paris, was a friend of Apollinaire, had founded the magazine Montjoie! in 1913 and had been the prospective librettist for Ravel’s abandoned Saint François d’Assise. Frontispice was published in 1919 in the second number of the magazine Feuillets d’art as the preface to Canudo’s poem ‘Sonate pour un jet d’eau’, which was to be part of a collection entitled S.P. 503 Le poème du Vardar, S.P. 503 being the postal sector of Canudo’s military unit. The Vardar is a valley between the Aegean Sea and Central Europe that was the scene of violent fighting from 1916 to 1918 between the Bulgarians, supporting Austria, and the Allies.90 The collection was later published by Les poètes de la renaissance du livre in 1923. Canudo’s poem is not easy to understand, but takes ‘water’ and ‘fire’ as its prime symbols (‘EAU’ and ‘FEU’ are capitalized in the first two

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lines of each stanza). Clearly it records the poet’s experience of war, including thirst and heat, but Ravel’s music, instead of basing itself on the details of the poem, seems rather to reflect the things he himself had undergone, perhaps including those ‘moments that were worth the trouble’. The obvious birdsong imitations, allotted to the fifth hand playing at the top of the keyboard, could derive from the birds he heard singing in a devastated landscape in 1916; meanwhile the five independent lines beneath, (Deborah Mawer notes the way that the numbers 5 and 3 underpin the piece91) each going its own way in blatant unconcern for the dissonances thus produced, until an accelerando and a crescendo put an end to the mayhem, offer as accurate a symbolic picture of warfare as any composer in 1918 was likely to paint. The piece ends with five unconnected bars of plain triads à la Satie, culminating in a final ppp question mark – as if to ask ‘What was the point of all that?’ If the music itself is puzzling (and with scant connection to anything Ravel had written before), the scoring for five hands has seemed equally so, until the publication of Rex Lawson’s article on the work in The Pianola Journal in 1989. ‘From late 1917 onwards, [Edwin] Evans contacted various composers with the intention of persuading them to write music directly for piano roll. . . .’ Lawson then quotes, in his own translation, a letter of 10 October 1917 to Evans from Casella, saying ‘I spoke to Ravel about it, and I asked him to speak to Delage . . . he means to send you a reply. In principle the idea appeals to him.’ Casella pursued the matter in a second letter of 24 February 1918: ‘I am about to get down to writing the five pieces for you that I have in mind for the pianola. . . . I saw Ravel in Paris – of course he hasn’t done anything yet, and he seemed a bit . . . cool, since he doesn’t think they are offering him enough money (I’m only repeating what he said to me).’ Lawson confirms that the layout of Frontispice with ‘multiple staves in descending order of pitch is the standard way of writing music for the pianola.’ This would also explain the presence of the fifth hand, otherwise highly impractical for a piece lasting a mere one and a half minutes. At the same time, these features constitute something rather less than proof, and it remains to be considered how a preface for Canudo’s poem can be reconciled with a commission organized by Evans with, presumably, the Aeolian Company, the British firm behind Evans’s venture. Whatever the truth, Frontispice remains a musical curiosity; only its polytonality gives any indication of the direction in which Ravel’s music was heading. To Marguerite Long Ravel may have been ‘the glorious and uncontested champion of French music’. However, a highly vocal minority chose to challenge this and cast doubts on his aesthetic aims. Goaded on by Satie, Cocteau and the composers of Les Six were at this time on the bandwagon of ‘anti-art’ and for many of them Ravel was a tempting target. Poulenc relates how, through the offices of his piano teacher Ricardo Viñes, he had obtained an interview with Ravel in 1917, only to suffer a ‘terrible disappointment’ [une deception

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‘effffroyable’] – Ravel, as already mentioned, claiming that ‘none of the late works of Debussy . . . that’s to say Jeux, the Etudes for piano . . . none of that was the “real” Debussy.’92 The 20-year-old Georges Auric saw a little further into the question. While admitting that Debussy’s music between the String Quartet of 1893 and Pelléas in 1902 contained masterpieces, he explained that the contagious sadness of works raised in the Debussyan climate indicates clearly enough today what a need we have to shake off this fever and have a change of air. Maurice Ravel, coming directly after Debussy, realized this. His works are imbued with an infinitely precise and supple mastery and with a refined nervosity. He is a maître worthy of deep admiration. But we were not born under the same sign. His ‘humour’ is so far from our taste for fantasy and gaiety; his ‘jeux d’eau’, ‘ondines’ and ‘miroirs’ do not correspond with that love of a superior truth which we admire in a picture by Picasso.93

In the face of such provocation Ravel kept his dignity. For a start, he knew, as Auric certainly should have done, that his style had moved on since ‘Ondine’. He was content to wait and let his music speak for him. And, sure enough, when Poulenc and Auric attended the premiere of L’Enfant et les sortilèges in 1925 they were entranced; ‘and Ravel thanked us for having been “antiravéliens”, because he’d had enough of people copying him.’94 Moreover, the arguments did not necessarily spill over into personal animosity. As already related, Cocteau took Ravel to a rehearsal of Satie’s Parade in 191795 and after Ravel’s death he explained his attitude, very similar to Ravel’s own: ‘I was unfair to Ravel and sometimes with that ferocity that comes of youth. It had to be. . . . I was fond of Ravel. But we had to be rid of musical impressionism as soon as possible. Ravel had extracted all the sparkle from that particular firework.’96 On 11 November 1918, the day of the Armistice, the tubercular ganglions on Ravel’s right lung were operated on and, as Mme Long says, in January 1919 he took his doctor’s advice and went for a rest cure to the Hôtel du Mont Blanc at Megève in Haute-Savoie, some hundred kilometres north-east of Grenoble, where he stayed through February and most of March. He spent his time walking, skiing, sunbathing and fighting the insomnia that was to plague him for the rest of his life, not helped by ‘the clocks and bells of the church and the convent, which carry on all night’.97 Many of his letters from this place of exile complain of boredom and dwell obsessively on his state of health (as well they might): ‘I’ve put on weight: one pound since last week. Which is hardly surprising as I haven’t moved for eight days, going to bed straight after dinner and even after lunch, and drinking milk between meals . . . an invalid existence!’98 But he was also determined to keep in touch with the musical life of Paris, and of course with the fate of his own music. Marnat refers to angry letters over Rhené-Bâton’s delay in giving the first performance of the orchestration

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of ‘Alborada’,99 which he eventually did with the Orchestre Pasdeloup on 17 May 1919, and on 10 February Ravel told Mme Schmitt that Marguerite Long was thinking of having an operation for appendicitis and warned, a propos Le tombeau: ‘Don’t go to this first performance, if you value your life. It’ll be a catastrophe. . .’100 The enforced rest in Megève also gave him more time than usual to reflect on the fortunes of others. Shortly after arriving, he received the sad news from Mme Casella that she and her husband were divorcing. The letter he wrote her on 19 January deserves to be quoted in full, giving as it does many insights into Ravel’s own solitary condition: Ma chère amie, As you can imagine, your letter surprised and distressed me. After so many years of perfect happiness together! . . . The moral . . . is the one I practise and that I’ve decided to maintain. We artists, we’re not made for marriage. We’re rarely normal and our life even less so. Alfredo was one of the best – just look around you –. But still it didn’t work. Is it beyond mending? And then you won’t be entirely alone. Oh! I know, nothing replaces some affections. But you still have friends, good ones, who will only love you all the more. Life is tough, isn’t it? Not a very consoling letter: forgive me, I do what I can. I’m not very cheerful . . . when I’m on my own, though when I’m in company I’m the life and soul! Physically, things are improving. I’m far from being cured, but I’m not coughing so much and I’m putting on weight. But even if I recover completely, there will always be something that’s broken . . . If only I can get back to work! Write to me from time to time as you promised and believe, dear friend, in the sincere affection of your Maurice Ravel101

Here we find one reason at least why he never married, which he would repeat later in conversations with Rosenthal; the value he placed on friendship; the strain set up between cultivating such friendship (‘I’m the life and soul’) and the solitude necessary for composing; the recognition that with his mother’s death ‘there will always be something that’s broken’; and finally the need to compose, since composing almost wholly defined to himself who he was. Ravel’s letter of 28 January 1919 to Louis Durey, who had obviously thanked him for a recommendation to Jacques Durand, urges Durey to write if he

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needs any further advice: ‘don’t worry: I’ve all the time in the world.’102 But the letter also contains the first mention of a duo for violin and cello, apparently unconnected with the memorial tribute to Debussy that the first movement was soon to become. By February his mood seems to have been lightening, to judge by five bars of music presenting the Marseillaise and the opening of the Meistersinger overture in counterpoint (Ex. 6.6). au général Prosper Vallin (pour célébrer la future alliance franco-boche)

 

       

       







 

       





  

           



etc. . . .       Maurice Ravel Mégève 8/2/19

Example 6.6. Ravel’s ‘marriage’ of Die Meistersinger with La Marseillaise

This tour de force, dated 8 February, was sent to his friend Georgette Marnold, to be forwarded to her uncle General Prosper Vallin. The accompanying letter refers to the autograph as ‘autre alliance franco-boche’, no doubt in reference to the preparations leading in due course to the Versailles Treaty, but suggests that ‘if you think this might offend your uncle’s feelings or damage his promotion prospects (if he’s thinking of becoming a Marshal), then send it back’.103 His appetite for composing began slowly to return, to judge from his letter to Jacques Rouché of 20 February,104 asking for Colette’s address in order to confirm that she still wants to collaborate, and stating that on his return to Paris in April ‘the first thing I intend to do is work on Colette’s “opéra dansé” ’. Rouché must have replied more or less by return because on 27 February Ravel wrote Colette an oft-quoted letter. It seems Colette had been complaining to Rouché about Ravel’s silence, over which he pleads poor health, but now I’m making notes – without writing any –; I’m even thinking of changes. . . . Don’t worry: not cuts; on the contrary. For instance: could the squirrel’s monologue be developed? Imagine everything a squirrel can say about the forest, and what that might become in music! Another thing: what would you think about the cup and the teapot, an old Wedgwood one – black – singing a ragtime? I confess I’m thrilled with the idea of having a ragtime sung by two blacks at the Académie Nationale de

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Musique. Note that the form – a single couplet, with refrain – perfectly fits the action of this scene: complaints, recriminations, fury, pursuit. Maybe you’ll object that you’re not an expert in black American slang. As someone who doesn’t know a word of English, I’d do the same as you: I’d get round it somehow.105

The phrase he uses for this last term, ‘je me débrouillerais’, was one of the many examples he picked up of soldier’s slang, a ‘débrouillard’ being one of those people who always finds a way out of impossible situations. In contrast, he deliberately designates the Opéra by its official title of ‘Académie nationale de musique’. On leaving Megève, Ravel returned via Annecy to Saint-Cloud, to the house in which Edouard, after his demobilization, was living with M. and Mme Bonnet, his business colleagues. He arrived just in time for the first performance of Le tombeau, which finally took place on 11 April. In February he had written to Mme Long urging haste: the pupil of a Paris piano teacher has already played the ‘Toccata’ in private and he knows that Edouard Risler is learning the whole suite. Ravel has asked him once to hold off, but cannot reasonably expect him to do so indefinitely.106 In the end, according to her, she shook off an attack of angina and rode to the rescue at the Salle Gaveau for the seventh SMI concert since the Armistice. ‘It was the first appearance in public since the war of the man who, since the recent death of Debussy, had become the uncontested and glorious champion of French music. Everyone in the audience encored their favourite movement. Finally I replayed them all.’107 . . . or, if we are to believe the

13 Ravel’s autograph of the ‘marriage’

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critic Louis Vuillemin, just the ‘Forlane’.108 Ravel then presumably settled down to thinking about the Duo and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, for which Colette’s letter of 5 March had no doubt provided encouragement: But certainly, a ragtime! And of course, blacks Wedgwood-style! Let a terrifying blast of music-hall stir up the dust of the Opéra! Go to it! I’m happy to know you’re still thinking about the ‘Divertissement pour ma fille’. My hopes of you were fading, as I’d heard you were ill. Do you know that cinema orchestras are playing your delightful tales of Mother Goose to accompany Wild West movies? If I were a composer, and Ravel, I think I’d be very pleased to discover that. And the squirrel will say whatever you want. Are you happy with the cat duet miaowed throughout? We can have acrobats. The Arithmetic number is a polka, isn’t it?109

The Paris to which Ravel returned in the spring of 1919 was more than making up for the silences and deficiencies of wartime. The Orchestres Colonne and Lamoureux, under Pierné and Lamoureux, were again separate entities, contesting Sunday afternoons with the Orchestre Pasdeloup under Rhené-Bâton and the Société des concerts du Conservatoire under Philippe Gaubert. Jane Bathori was still active at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier and there were any number of smaller venues. On 14 March the SMI had held a Debussy memorial concert in the Salle Gaveau. Fauré was still president of the Société, whose committee was made up largely of ex-Apaches: Aubert, Caplet, Casella, Roger-Ducasse, Falla, Gabriel Grovlez, Jean Huré, Inghelbrecht, Koechlin, Léon Moreau, Léo Sachs, Schmitt, Turina, and of course Ravel. Two months later, on 14 May, the Société nationale gave first performances of Fauré’s Fantaisie for piano and orchestra with Alfred Cortot, and of d’Indy’s recently completed Third Symphony, Sinfonia brevis (De bello Gallico). Meanwhile the two main opera houses continued to cater for their respective clienteles. The Opéra put on Schmitt’s ballet La tragédie de Salomé on 1 April, followed by the house premiere of Saint-Saëns’s opera Hélène on 20 June. The Opéra-Comique staged revivals of Le barbier de Séville and, on 17 June, celebrated the thousandth performance in the house of Massenet’s Manon, with the director’s wife, Marguerite Carré, in the title role and Felix Vieuille, the original Arkel in Pelléas, as the Comte des Grieux. Ravel, writing to Ida Godebska on 24 May of his intention to shut himself away and work, complained of all this activity and of that generated by his own works too: ‘So much music, Heavens above! Concerts, rehearsals, auditions. On it goes . . .’ Added to which, two days earlier he had been persuaded by Fauré to sit on the jury for the end-of-year Conservatoire piano exams, lasting from nine in the morning to half past six . . . ‘that’s the last time I do that’.110 He also announces he has ‘managed to orchestrate Chabrier’s “Menuet pompeux” for Diaghilev and that I’m finishing [the orchestration of] Le

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tombeau de Couperin.’ Clearly he had set aside his reservations about Diaghilev. Whether or not he had agreed to the impresario’s idea, never followed up, of making a ballet for Lausanne in 1916 out of Histoires naturelles,111 he now consented to participate in a ballet called Les jardins d’Aranjuez, with choreography by Massine and sets and costumes by José Maria Sert. Premiered at the Alhambra Theatre in London on 18 July, the music consisted of Fauré’s Pavane and Ravel’s orchestrations of ‘Alborada’ and the ‘Menuet pompeux’ (as mentioned above, the ‘Alborada’ orchestration was given a dry run by RhenéBaton and the Pasdeloup Orchestra on 17 May). The ballet is lightly touched on by Grigoriev,112 but only to emphasize that it was an also-ran behind Parade, La boutique fantasque and especially Falla’s Le tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat), which Massine later reckoned to be the ballet of which he was proudest.113 Ravel was not likely to be concerned over this, since he had not written his pieces to be danced to. Unlike its companion ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, ‘Alborada’ in its orchestral guise survived the composer’s scrutiny and in 1926 even received the cachet of a recording by the Berlin State Opera Orchestra under Klemperer. The piece’s Hispanicism arguably lends itself more naturally to the orchestra, and certainly Ravel had had plenty of practice in this area. The transcription stays close to the piano original; changes consist of the extension of linking passages, the most significant being six bars of dental tremolo and clarinet arpeggios between figures 25 and 26, replacing two bars of glissandi. Elsewhere Ravel occasionally complicates the harmony with new inner parts, but otherwise his invention is exercised purely in the field of orchestral colour: the strings are frequently divided (at figure 10 into as many as twenty-four parts) and are required to produce a range of effects from guitar-like pizzicati to ethereal harmonics, while the percussion section, comprising crotales, triangle, tambourine, castanets, side drum, cymbals, bass drum and xylophone, is predictably active. One feels that the solo bassoon, entrusted with the central recitative, must have been in Ravel’s mind since 1905. But in its new guise the piece was undoubtedly too close in essence to his ‘jeux d’eau’ and ‘ondines’ to find favour with the Nouveaux Jeunes. The press seems to have ignored it. His orchestration of the ‘Menuet pompeux’ is suitably ceremonious with imposing brass in the outer sections contrasting with tender woodwind and violin solos in the central one. Larner hears the arrangement as ‘affectionate’114 and it is sad that it is played so rarely. In June Ravel put the finishing touches to his orchestration of four of the movements from Le tombeau de Couperin, and Durand paid him 4,000 francs for the score in July. The suite received its concert premiere conducted by Rhené-Bâton on 28 February 1920. But still the composing machine was not functioning, and would not for another six months. On 24 July 1919, six days after the premiere of Les jardins d’Aranjuez, Covent Garden put on the British premiere, in French, of L’heure espagnole, the first performance of the opera

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outside France (Chicago and New York were to give it the following January). Ravel wrote to Ida on 2 September that it had had seventeen curtain calls and that the papers had called it the most successful opera in London for thirty years. Curiously, he also mentions that ‘Gheusi is to give it this winter’.115 Presumably Ravel was thinking of the Opéra-Comique where Gheusi had been director, with the Isola brothers, from 1914 to 1918, and would be in sole charge a second time from 1932 to 1936. But in 1919 the director, again with the Isola brothers, was Albert Carré, resuming the 15-year tenure that had ended in 1915. In fact it was Rouché who programmed L’heure espagnole at the Opéra in December 1921, when Fanny Heldy earned wild plaudits as Concepcion. Meanwhile, it appears that not everyone had appreciated the piano score of Le tombeau de Couperin, since Ravel wrote to Léon Vallas on 29 August that he was glad to find Vallas ‘approving the dedications that certain people have criticized’. They appeared to be ‘astonished that this homage to the dead should not have a funereal, or at least a morose quality’ (see p. 195). As elsewhere Ravel was at pains to downplay the memorial aspect of the suite, even to the detriment of historical accuracy, claiming that ‘the suite, completed in 1917 after my discharge, was already almost entirely composed in July 1914’. It would seem too that disobliging remarks had been passed on the composer’s own design for the title page, where a funerary urn sits on a shelf decorated with swags on either side and with a larger one beneath, enclosing the title and Ravel’s MR monogram (see p.191). ‘I amused myself ’, he explained, ‘in drawing these arabesques on the first page of my manuscript, without ulterior motive. My publisher amused himself by reproducing this fine drawing, and the engraver added to it skilful alterations which give it an awkward and pretentious allure that I was far from intending.’116 Who these complainants were we do not know. But for every Marguerite Long who saw Ravel as the standard-bearer of postwar French music, there was at least one music lover, and possibly more, who felt he was too idiosyncratic and unpredictable to be entrusted with this vital role. At this difficult time, confidence in his own contrary, piratical instincts may have been at a low ebb. Matters were not helped by the death of his aunt Louise in Geneva, where he then had to spend a week looking after his painter uncle Edouard, whom he found ‘at the mercy of heirs less concerned with his interests than with their own’.117 Certainly, although he agreed that his stay in the mountains earlier in the year had done him a lot of good, ‘it’s now my morale that has to be looked after, and I don’t know how to go about it.’118 Then he heard from Stravinsky that Falla’s mother had died, and before Falla had been able to reach her bedside from London. This news only intensified his own sorrow: ‘from that moment,’ he wrote to Falla on 19 September, ‘life is transformed. You can still feel joys and emotions, but not in the same way; rather like when you haven’t slept or have a fever. Maybe that finally settles in

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due course. As for me, I haven’t yet recovered. . . . I haven’t yet been able to get back to work, although I feel it would be through that, not through forgetting, which I don’t seek, that I should find . . . the best consolation.’119 L’oubli (forgetting) can also mean ‘oblivion’, as in Viñes’s 1905 diary entry about the Opéra ball; so it is not impossible that Ravel had, albeit only briefly, considered suicide. No letters survive from October or November 1919, and the only news of him is oblique and uncomplimentary. On 19 November Satie replied to JeanAubry’s request for an article about Ravel by saying ‘this article will perhaps not be very much to your taste. The fault lies entirely with the deplorable and outmoded aesthetic professed by our friend. It would be difficult for me to water down what my thinking dictates. I’m very fond of Ravel, but his art leaves me cold, alas!’120 This is as plain a hit against Le tombeau as could be, strangely anticipating Messiaen’s 1939 diatribe against Ravel’s posthumous imitators, whom he chastised as ‘Lazy, the craftsmen of sub-Fauré, sub-Ravel. Lazy the false Couperin maniacs, the manufacturers of rigaudons and pavanes.’121 Satie’s Premier Menuet of June 1920 might even be intended as a corrective lesson as to what a minuet could become in enlightened hands – Louis XIV’s court seen through Socialist, even Communist eyes. Ravel would not have seen the letter to Jean-Aubry, nor needed to. His own response to Socrate reflected the divergent views of the two composers clearly enough. It was probably to one of the four private performances in 1918–19 that Milhaud took Ravel, reporting some forty years later that ‘He didn’t understand it, that’s all. And he told me that he could never agree with a work which for him was so poor – in invention, poor in everything.’122 Interestingly, Ravel’s musical response, finally, was to distance himself from Satie as far as possible, by completing a work as deeply grounded in the physical world as Socrate is in the intellectual and spiritual one. To do so, he took himself off around early December to the country home in Lapras of his old friend André Ferdinand Hérold, who had obviously forgiven him for relegating his translation of Die versunkene Glocke to the ranks of might-have-beens, and he stayed there until the middle of April, with one visit to Paris in mid-February. Lapras, some 30 kilometres west of Valence, did not offer the skiing opportunities of Megève, but it was 350 kilometres from Paris, which was the important thing. After so long, though, the creative process took time to re-establish itself. On 8 December, Ravel wrote laconically to Mlle Marnold: ‘Yesterday I sent off to Durand the orchestration of the Hebrew Songs [“Kaddisch” and “L’énigme éternelle”]. Now I’m going on to something else.’123 A fortnight later he signed off to Roland-Manuel: ‘Back to Wien. It’s going well. I’ve got started at last and in top gear.’124 This was the project, abandoned in 1914, to compose his ‘Apotheosis of the Waltz’. By his own admission this went back at least to 1906, and it is tempting, as we have seen (p. 59), to relate it to an entry in Viñes’s diary from a year earlier.

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Christmas brought nostalgia for ‘those wonderful Christmas Eves in the avenue Carnot’ but presumably little respite from work, since he began orchestrating the completed piano score of La valse on 31 December – things must have moved fast since the 8th. No doubt his 1914 sketches played their part. He did though find time to write to the young composer Nicolas Obouhov about orchestration (see p. 259) and to Roland-Manuel about the Debussy Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, given its first Paris performance by Marguerite Long on 7 December 1919, with Messager conducting the Lamoureux orchestra (Ravel and Messager had attended Mme de SaintMarceaux’s salon earlier in the year on 16 May when Mme Long and Samazeuilh played the latter’s recent two-piano transcription125). Ravel was right in saying ‘I don’t think the Debussy Fantaisie has been touched up’, and interesting in his confession that ‘it is indeed a ravishing work, no less for me than La damoiselle élue which revealed Debussy to me’ Feverish work on La valse continued through the early days of January 1920, but Ravel’s labours were interrupted by an incident which showed that some of his youthful touchiness remained. On 15 January his name appeared in Le journal officiel among those nominated as Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. The same day he wrote to Ida Godebska complaining of the mound of post he still had to answer, including a dossier to be filled out, ‘ “my candidacy for the Légion d’honneur having been submitted” – by whom? Hurry up to congratulate me: you won’t get another chance.’126 Clearly his refusal was instantaneous, and he adhered to it despite his friends’ protests and a number of savage comments in the press, especially from those who had accepted the decoration for bravery during the war. The guilty party seems to have been Lucien Garban, acting out of gratitude. A one-time fellow student of Ravel’s at the Conservatoire, at the outbreak of war he had been a tutor in Germany and came home with no job or immediate prospects. It was Ravel who successfully urged Jacques Durand to take him on as a proofreader. As to why Ravel refused the decoration, there is still no universally accepted answer. Roland-Manuel refers to his ‘continually repeated, Baudelairean horror of decorations’127 and we must believe him, but it seems likely that Ravel objected also because the news was sprung on him and because he had still not forgotten the affaire of 1905. He was sorry to find Durand implicated in the plot because he had already indicated to his publisher in 1910, when the same thing was proposed then, that he was not in the market for such an honour. Also he may have disliked being included in anything that could be taken for a herd: the list of Chevaliers in the Le journal officiel ran to forty-nine names (among which he was the only musician), and he was not in a position to know that these had been whittled down from 1,739.128 Such a response is supported by his comments to Roland-Manuel: ‘Have you noticed that “légionnaires” are like morphine addicts who use every tactic, even trickery, to get others to share their passion, perhaps to legitimize it in their own eyes?’129

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Rosenthal was sure Ravel refused because someone in the French government had let slip to Ravel’s mother his impending service at the front, which he felt had affected her health and hastened her death; ‘that was something I couldn’t forgive and it’s why I refused this distinction’.130 At all events he was happy to accept honours from foreign sources,131 while always refusing to stand for the Institut de France. One further clue as to Ravel’s position on this front comes from an entry in Viñes’s diary for 26 June 1906, when the two of them ‘talked again about my decoration; the outcome is that there is no reason for me not to accept, especially as I’m a foreigner’.132 From this it would appear that one could accept distinctions from foreign governments perhaps because one was not bound by their policies, but that to accept them from one’s own government entailed a restraint on one’s actions and opinions – would Ravel the légionnaire have felt able in 1925 to deliver the coded attack on France’s policy in Algiers (if that is what it was) contained in ‘Aoua!’ from the Chansons madécasses (see p. 274)? In fact, the whole scandal was unleashed simply because Ravel did not reply immediately to the relevant documents which, on his own admission, reached him at Lapras only four days before the public announcement. In Ravel’s eyes an envelope of official aspect could hardly compete for charm with an unfinished orchestral score. In the corridors of the Grande Chancellerie, which conducts business connected with the Légion d’honneur, Ravel’s refusal was not taken well. A manuscript note in their archives reads: ‘Ravel pressed his refusal to the point of rudeness because he made it necessary for a decree to be signed removing the Légion d’honneur.’133 This revocation, which left a certain amount of egg on official faces, was made public on 2 April. But it was perhaps not altogether fair to blame Ravel for the size of the scandal, which was largely due to his own eminence and to the understandable amount of press interest thus generated; certainly the Chancellerie had been precipitate in making the announcement before receiving Ravel’s dossier back from him. His main complaint over the whole business was that it was interrupting his orchestration of La valse. At some point no doubt he caught up with Henri Collet’s two Comoedia articles of 16 and 23 January 1920 launching ‘Le groupe des Six’. Otherwise his only concern was a brief correspondence he initiated with Schoenberg. On 20 December he warned Garban to expect a letter from the Austrian composer addressed to Ravel and requiring translation from German.134 On 16 January (still unaware of Garban’s role in the Légion d’honneur plot) he thanked him for the translation, adding ‘What an admirable character, finding a way, even while he’s dying of hunger [food was scarce in Vienna], to busy himself with this promotion of interesting works! I haven’t replied to him yet: I’m waiting till I have the French text of Pierrot lunaire and can see whether that can be arranged.’135 Ravel had not given up on his pre-war project of putting on the French premiere of Pierrot, but in the event it was Jean Wiéner and Milhaud who achieved this in January 1922. Probably the

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French text Ravel refers to was the translation by Benoist-Méchin intended for that performance, but not in fact used (see pp. 234–5). The exclamation mark after ‘interesting works’ undoubtedly signifies that the works in question were Ravel’s, to be performed in Vienna in the composer’s presence the following October (see pp. 218–22). He remained in Lapras and completed the orchestration of La valse on 12 April, with one short visit to Paris around 2 February – ‘don’t pass the news round’, he asked Garban, ‘because I want as few people as possible to know I’m in Paris’.136 This short visit may originally have had two motives, as explained in a letter to Misia Sert that she quotes in her memoirs: Many thanks for your reassuring letter. When all’s said and done, my anxiety is excusable: poor Daphnis has already had plenty to complain of from Diaghilev. I realize there were problems on both sides and that few works can have caused such difficulties, without it always being his fault. Now, let’s talk of Wien . . . I’m sorry, from now on it will be called La Valse. . . . First of all, forgive me, but I’m unsure whether Serge is in Paris and, as you know, he doesn’t reply to my letters. My choreographic poem will undoubtedly be finished, even orchestrated, by the end of this month, and I could play it to Diaghilev any time from then on. But it would be extremely convenient for me if he could wait until the middle of February. At that point it will be absolutely necessary for me to spend several days in Paris (2 first performances by the Pasdeloup Orchestra, and other things). So I’ll be there for about 10 days and then come straight back to work.137

In what way was Misia being reassuring about Daphnis? Diaghilev did not mount the ballet in 1920. It is always possible he had thought of doing so without a chorus, as he had in London, and that Misia had dissuaded him. But the reference remains obscure. From the context, ‘the end of this month’ must refer to January. Did he really believe he could finish the orchestration by then? Or was this merely to impress Diaghilev, through Misia, with how seriously he was taking the commission? Given that he had orchestrated the Valses nobles in a fortnight, the deadline might seem to have been achievable, but all the indications are that the orchestration of La valse was taxing even Ravel’s superlative powers. Not surprisingly, he refused an invitation to go to Brussels in February for a festival of French music.138 We possess one possible marker of his progress in a letter of 1 March to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, where he urgently asks her advice about a violin glissando: ‘Regarding glissando chromatic scales, nothing of course is easier on a single string. The problem is that, in the high treble, it gets to sound a bit thin. Is the following possible? (I’ve deliberately chosen an example where neither the first nor last note is an open string)’ (Ex. 6.7).

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





 







 

Example 6.7. Ravel, in letter to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

This might refer to any of three moments in La valse: (a) figure 27, (b) figure 29 or (c) figure 85. If he was just putting the finishing touches to pages already done, then either (a) or (b) or both would be candidates. But if he was orchestrating entirely in sequence from beginning to end, then (c) would be a more likely point for him to have reached by 1 March. The probability of (c) is increased by his insistence on haste: ‘If it doesn’t put you to too much trouble, I would be grateful for a reply by return. Letters take at least three days to reach me. I don’t like to think how long this one will take to get to you.’139 The inference here is ‘I can’t really get on until I’ve had your answer.’ If this is so, and supposing her reply reached him around 8 March, then orchestrating the 110 bars from figure 85 to the end took him no fewer than five weeks of uninterrupted work, at an average of a mere three bars a day. By this time he had been back to Paris and discussed with Rhené-Bâton the things composers do discuss with conductors before a first performance – in this case of Le tombeau de Couperin on 28 February and of the orchestral version of the Deux mélodies hébraïques in 17 April, sung by the young soprano Madeleine Grey. But despite his offer relayed to Misia in January, he did not play La valse to Diaghilev yet. Back in Lapras he wrote to Garban on 26 February that he had that morning given the piano solo version to the postman and that Diaghilev in Rome needed it as soon as possible (he told Garban not to worry about the ‘Stendhalian hieroglyphs’ on the score, which were to show Massine, who was scheduled to choreograph the work, ‘the places where the orchestra is more or less full’.140 After a few days’ packing (and, who knows, maybe even answering some of the fifty or so accumulated letters) Ravel returned finally to Paris on 16 April. The notorious playthrough of La valse to Diaghilev would seem to have happened sometime after the beginning of May, when the Ballets russes returned from visits to Rome and Milan, with final rehearsals for the premiere of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella on the 15th. Poulenc recalls how he, Stravinsky and Misia Sert were gathered in her apartment for the occasion. Ravel and Marcelle Meyer began to play: I knew Diaghilev very well at this time, and I saw his false teeth and his monocle begin to twitch. I saw that he was embarrassed, that he didn’t like it and that he was going to say ‘No’. When Ravel had finished, Diaghilev said

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something which I think is absolutely right. He said, ‘Ravel, it’s a masterpiece . . . but it’s not a ballet. . . . It’s the portrait of a ballet . . . the painting of a ballet.’ But the extraordinary thing was that Stravinsky didn’t say a word! Nothing! . . . And I had a lesson in modesty that has lasted my entire life, because Ravel quietly picked up the scores without worrying about what anyone might think and calmly took his leave.141

Three riders perhaps need to be added. First, if Diaghilev had already seen the solo piano score in Rome in early March, then he must have had a good idea of what was coming – he was no virtuoso pianist, but a perfectly capable scorereader. Maybe he nursed vain hopes that the Ravel/Meyer duo would bring out virtues he’d missed? Secondly, in a subsequent account Poulenc mentions that Diaghilev’s final words were, ‘It’s too short, too much of a résumé’142 – a purely practical objection. Thirdly, it’s not clear what Stravinsky was supposed to say! With Pulcinella currently in rehearsal or even performance, the aesthetic gulf between it and La valse was surely enough to leave anyone speechless. Anyway, arguing with Diaghilev was not generally a profitable enterprise. As Misia wrote, ‘Since he was utterly intransigent over his performances, no consideration of a commission issued – nor even of hurt pride – had the least effect on him.’143 Silence would seem to have been a sensible option. In the event, La valse was first heard in a concert performance at the Concerts Lamoureux on 12 December 1920, conducted by Camille Chevillard, and first staged in Antwerp in 1926 (see pp.281–2), three years before the generally credited premiere by Ida Rubinstein in Paris. Diaghilev has been widely abused for this rejection. For his part, Ravel refused to mend the broken friendship and had the satisfaction of seeing the ballet staged twice before Diaghilev’s death. But six years was a long time for a composer of his eminence to have to wait. Attempts to get the ballet performed in Vienna came to nothing. Even the faithful RolandManuel felt that ‘La valse is far from being one of Ravel’s best compositions.’144 The writer and musicologist André Schaeffner was among those who applauded La valse in 1920 . . . their number was small, though enthusiastic: the noise they made just about covered some scattered whistling; most of the audience was stunned and displayed no more than silent disapproval. . . . La valse shocked for a long time because of the ‘vulgarity’ of its themes . . . as for the Conservatoire and Schola Cantorum students who occasionally braved the concert hall, they held it against Ravel that, towards the end of La valse, he followed the path laid down by Le sacre, with tonal comfort ravaged – momentarily – through the independence of the brass from the woodwind and strings.145

Ravel himself described the work as ‘a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz which I saw combined with an impression of a fantastic whirling motion

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leading to death. The scene is set in an Imperial palace around 1855’,146 and at the head of the score the scenario states ‘Dancing couples can be glimpsed intermittently through the swirling clouds. As they slowly clear, we see a huge ballroom filled by a circling crowd. . . .’ The work is short (it lasts around a quarter of an hour) and there are few local details here for choreographers to get their teeth into. What’s more, little of the orchestral sumptuousness and glitter comes across in the two-piano version, which presents a far harsher and more brutal face. To take just one example, the swoony orchestral glissandos referred to earlier are taken by the second piano playing aggressive black- and white-note glissandos simultaneously. And whatever Ravel’s familiarity with the score, he was not a pianist of Meyer’s class. The piece consists essentially of two crescendos, a longer followed by a shorter, both starting from the same low sounds on divided double basses, but leading in very different directions (Ravel was never happy with the orchestration of the opening, calling it ‘muddy’,147 but his plans to rescore it for the gramophone never materialized). The music springs from the same disparity as in Le tombeau de Couperin, between the form and the material. Under the heading of form we must include the whole ethos of the Viennese waltz, its formalized cadences, its harmonizations in thirds, its portamenti, against which Ravel sets to work the chromatic elements of his harmonic style. The first crescendo ends (figures 50–4) in sweetness and light; the second is determined against any repetition of this frivolity. Whatever the work’s value as a ballet, Ravel’s technique is as impressive as ever. The tonic D major, much in evidence during the first crescendo, is subverted at both its subsequent appearances: at figure 79 by a long upward chromatic scale in the bass and at figure 94 by the bizarre dynamic fluctuations which point inevitably to a ruinous collapse of the structure. This collapse is the more powerful because the main subversive agent comes from within the ‘schmaltzy’ Viennese sound, namely the four-note up-beat figure first heard in the bar before figure 19, whose sinister intent is revealed in masterly slow motion. The final D natural satisfies the logical needs of the music without suggesting that any compromise has been reached between the opposing forces: these continue their battle in the listener’s mind long after the piece is over. It is hard to believe that the more extreme passages can have been what Ravel originally envisaged. Larner sees the work as not one, but ‘rather two paintings [of a waltz] – an impressionist and an expressionist side by side in the same frame.’ He also proposes the attractive idea that ‘Up to just over halfway through, it is Wien as Ravel might have written it when he conceived the idea in 1906.’148 Certainly it seems likely that Ravel took with him to Lapras sketches accumulated over the previous fourteen years, not to mention ideas still in his head, but we can never know at what point the destructive urge took over. If we accept Viñes’s influence with regard to the 1905 Opéra ball, this may after all have been an essential ingredient from the start.

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In addition to the tonal organization touched on above, La valse is rich in features that link Ravel’s past with his future, making the work a vital crux in his development. In his article ‘L’impression d’un tournoiement fantastique et fatale’,149 Volker Helbing quotes a paragraph from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as Emma, at the ball in the chateau and in the arms of the so-called Vicomte whom she barely knows, begins the unfamiliar steps of the waltz: They began slowly, then moved faster. They turned: everything turned round them, the lamps, the furniture, the paneling and the floor, like a disc on a spindle. And as they came near the doors, the bottom of Emma’s dress clung to his trousers; their legs entwined with each other; he lowered his eyes to hers, she raised hers to him; a lassitude took hold of her and she stopped. They moved off again; and the Vicomte, moving more swiftly, swept her off and disappeared with her to the end of the gallery where, panting, she almost fell and, for a moment, leant her head against his chest. And then, still turning, but more gently, he took her back to her place; she hid her head against the wall and put her hand over her eyes.150

Flaubert’s novel was written and published in the same decade in which the scenario of La valse is set and, even taking account of the social differences between metropolitan Vienna and provincial France (the novel bears the subtitle ‘Mœurs de Province’), this paragraph vividly evokes the dangers the waltz was seen to pose, especially for those who came to it naive and unprepared. Further evidence can be adduced from the ‘Fête polonaise’ in Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui, like La valse in D major, and whose anti-social, orgy-generating tendencies were signalled by Chabrier himself in a letter to his publisher Costallat.151 It is this dangerousness that Ravel latches on to. He had of course already broached the subject in the Valses nobles et sentimentales, though without taking it to extremes. As mentioned above (p. 126), that work may mirror the contrast between the formal waltz steps and the envisaging of Mme de Brionne’s naked, perspiring body beneath her dress. In de Régnier’s novel, all ends happily. La valse, on the other hand, could be regarded as Ravel’s Tristan in its equating of love and death – or at least sex and death. Through this transformation, the occasional quotations from the Valses nobles (I at figures 26–30 and after 97; IV at figures 7–8 and 56; VI at figure 92) can strike the ear almost as cries of nostalgia for a happier, more hopeful time. In a perceptive article on the work, George Benjamin sees its form as a mirror of existence, consisting of Birth (beginning – figure 18), Life (– figure 54), Decay (– figure 98) and Destruction (– end).152 He notes how the suite of waltzes making up the Life section conform almost entirely to the binary bar structure of the traditional waltz, but that elsewhere Ravel breaks up this structure with disruptive single bars.

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As Benjamin says, ‘Like most French music, Ravel’s is a vertical and, in essence, non-developmental language. Themes are subject to harmonization, sequential repetition, fragmentation and juxtaposition, but their innate profiles are never transformed’; in La valse there is ‘only one genuine moment of thematic combination – in other words, counterpoint’ (between figures 69 and 73). At the same time counterpoint in a more general sense underpins the whole work, in the battle mentioned above between the traditional data of the waltz and the disruptive elements Ravel throws at them. It can even be argued, as Helbing does, that Ravel’s ‘choice of models [for the waltz] was anything but representative, and derived from a very precise and very narrow viewpoint that was shaped by a particular intention.’153 Ravel’s choice of the portamento is a case in point, since it lends itself naturally to the kind of exaggeration (Helbing would say ‘Verzerrung’, distortion) that fitted Ravel’s agenda, as found around figures 27 and 29, and especially 85 (see Example 6/7 above). To Ansermet he wrote: ‘Your understanding of La valse is perfect. I’ve never been able to obtain this rhythmic suppleness in Paris.’154 By this did he mean the traditional Viennese lilt? But in an interview a few months later he actually complained, ‘they don’t play it well in Paris. They make it sound too much like a Viennese waltz.’155 Possibly this was because he had written ‘Mouvt de Valse viennoise’ at the head of the score. . . . Ansermet’s 1947 recording with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra does ease up over one or two joins in the discourse and takes a slightly slower tempo at figure 41, earlier than the first such marking at figure 46. But he takes no extravagant liberties. Whatever the nature of the nuances Ravel had in mind, his remark should not be taken as licence to vary tempi wildly, thereby preempting the tempo instability that will take hold only later, culminating in the 16-bar accelerando up to the end. The ambiguity, stridency and disturbing lack of restraint in La valse provoked at the time much sociopolitical comment – certainly it is so different from the pre-war Ravel that it was only natural to look for reasons. The composer wrote to Maurice Emmanuel: Some people discovered in it an intention of parody, even of caricature, others plainly saw a tragic allusion – end of the second Empire, state of Vienna after the war etc. . . . Tragic, yes it can be that, like any expression – pleasure, happiness – which is pushed to extremes. You should see in it only what comes from the music: a mounting volume of sound, which in the stage performance will be complemented by lighting and movement.156

Maybe we should look no further. But even if La valse had no immediate relationship with the world situation in 1920, it may well reflect thoughts about death that had occupied Ravel for some years, and that this ballet in fact failed to exorcize. It may even been heard as an attempt to deal with his anger at his mother’s death, anger being one of the recognized stages of grief. The

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conductor Eliahu Inbal is not alone in finding that here ‘[he] comes extremely close to Mahler, and even Berg, in the harmonic language, the orchestral effects, the irony. La valse is an absolutely Expressionist work’.157 Ravel had now to build for himself a new life, possibly a new musical style. The ‘pit of nothingness’ had threatened and he had traversed it for the moment, but a new awareness of powerful inner destructive forces was to remain with him.

CHAPTER VII

1920–1925

Waltzing towards a love regained B

efore leaving Lapras on 15 April 1920, Ravel wrote to Georgette Marnold asking her to ‘look for a little shack at least 30km from Paris’.1 Staying with his brother and the Bonnets at Saint-Cloud or with friends was all very well in the short term, but his nocturnal habits cannot always have fitted easily into his hosts’ routine, in the same way as they discouraged marriage. He also owned furniture which either had to be stored or accommodated by his hosts: the Directoire chairs, decorated by him, had been bought in 1912 and the following year he had acquired for 380 francs a Louis XVI chest of drawers and writing desk.2 No doubt he could have afforded an apartment in Paris, like most of his fellow composers; but probably, distrusting his own sociable instincts, he decided to leave himself at least the option of the hermit’s life that had finally produced La valse. His finances in fact had recently improved thanks to an inheritance from his painter uncle Edouard, who had just died. An unpublished letter to G. Lador, who owned a gallery in Geneva that exhibited Edouard’s paintings, clearly refers to an offer made by Lador to acquire some of these.3 Ravel returned to Paris on 16 April and his letter, dated a week later, explains that he’s only passing through Paris on his way to Normandy. After his usual complaints about overworking and not sleeping, he goes on to say that he and his brother accept Lador’s proposal in principle, though unsure whether payment, due in a year’s time, should be made in French or Swiss francs. While Mlle Marnold was hunting for his shack, he was briefly back in Paris in time to hear Madeleine Grey singing the Deux mélodies hébraïques on 17 April, in Hebrew (she took a pride in performing in a number of languages). He became a great admirer of hers, overseeing her recording of the Chansons madécasses in 1932 and recommending her to Ansermet in 1921 as having ‘a beautiful voice, fairly strong and very bright. Thanks to her, it was possible to hear Shéhérazade other than as a symphonic poem.’4 With La valse more or less out of the way (though the final version of the two-piano score was not to reach Durand until 5 July5), and no doubt smiling wryly at Satie’s observation that ‘Ravel refuses the Légion d’honneur but all his music accepts it’,6 he turned his attention to three other projects, one of which

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would not come to full fruition for a couple of years, and two of which would take rather more than that. In the spirit of France’s postwar musical revival, the musicologist Henry Prunières, who had been a pupil of Romain Rolland at the Sorbonne, founded in 1920 La revue musicale, described as a ‘revue mensuelle internationale d’art musical ancien et moderne’. As a sign of this double orientation, he commissioned ten contemporary composers to write pieces to form a musical supplement to the second number, devoted to Debussy and published in December 1920, entitled ‘Le tombeau de Claude Debussy’ in honour of the composer who had died in March 1918. Prunières’s choice of contributors (Dukas, Roussel, Satie, Schmitt, Bartók, Falla, Eugene Goossens, Malipiero, Stravinsky and Ravel) showed that the magazine was intended as a serious enterprise – and remained so for the next seventy years. The two bestknown contributions both became parts of larger compositions: Stravinsky’s is the final chorale from the Symphonies pour instruments à vent, itself dedicated to the memory of Debussy and completed on 20 November 1920, that is, some time after the chorale extract must have gone to press; Ravel’s, entitled ‘Duo pour violon et violoncelle’, is the first movement of the complete work known as the Sonata for violin and cello, not to be finished until February 1922. It will be considered in due course under that heading (see pp. 236–9). A second project, which probably gave full satisfaction to neither of the parties involved, was for Ravel to record for the Aeolian Company on their Duo-Art player piano; although it was nowhere specified in the contract signed by Ravel on 15 May 19207 that the piano music he recorded should be his own, this was clearly the intention and what, to a degree, actually came about. It has to be said that the Aeolian Company were unduly optimistic, not only over the quality of playing they might expect (had they heard his 1913 recordings for Welte-Mignon?) but especially over the quantity of Ravel’s music at issue. While claiming for themselves the right to choose the repertoire, they insisted that no piece be included that had been recorded previously (which ruled out the first two movements of the Sonatine and the Valses nobles), but that Ravel should make ten records (that is, some forty minutes’ worth of music) over the period of the next two years. He was to be paid £50 sterling per record – the equivalent of some 1,250 francs, as against the 8,000 Durand had paid him for the orchestral and two-piano scores of La valse. He was enjoined not to recommend publicly any other system than Duo-Art. There was no mention of royalties. In the event Ravel recorded in June 1922 just the Pavane pour une Infante défunte and ‘Oiseaux tristes’ – under ten minutes of music. The third project, although long in the execution, was to have an altogether happier outcome. Whether it originated from Rouché, Colette or Ravel himself (see pp. 190, 196), it was not until 1918 that the composer saw a scenario of Colette’s Ballet pour ma fille, that was to become L’Enfant et les sortilèges. He

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made some revisions to this during his stay at Megève early in 1919 but not a note of music was written until the early summer of 1920. He left Paris after the performance of the Deux mélodies hébraïques and spent the summer of 1920 with the ex-Apache Pierre Haour at St Sauveur in the chateau, La Bijeannette, that Haour rented each summer. From here he wrote to an unidentified correspondent, in all likelihood Arnold Bennett, about a possible commission to write incidental music for James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan.8 The British impresario Basil Dean intended to put on the play in London and knew that the poet had always wanted music . . . While various English composers were being considered Mme Flecker wrote from Paris proposing Maurice Ravel. Her argument that ‘a composer with a name like his will look well on the programme, whether his music be suitable or not, which very few people can tell’ did not impress me. I agreed to her suggestion with some reluctance, because Ravel knew no English, and this might make collaboration difficult. But the composer shilly-shallied too much; he was busy writing an opera; he had other compositions in mind; how much music was required? Finally, might he read the play in French?

Reasonably enough, Ravel also wanted to know what Bennett thought of Flecker’s works. The answer may have been, ‘Not a great deal’. In any case, Dean went to hear Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and was bowled over by ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’; ‘I wrote off the next day to Mme Flecker and told her that I was not going to wait any longer for Ravel’s decision. I had made up my mind. I wanted Frederick Delius.’9 The play was duly given with Delius’s music in 1923. With regard to the opera Ravel was ‘busy writing’, he makes a perhaps more honest mention of it in his letter to Bennett, saying, ‘I’ve barely begun a work that the Opéra has been waiting for since 1916.’ This could only be L’Enfant et les sortilèges. Also from La Bijeannette he wrote on 3 July to Lucien Garban at his publishers Durand that in preparing the final manuscript of the two-piano version of La valse ‘I’ve spent more time scraping out, cutting and pasting than in making the transcription.’10 This is a curious admission given the fact, already noted, that Durand had paid him 8,000 francs for the orchestral and two-piano scores as long ago as March,11 suggesting that he was having second and third thoughts about the basic material of this unduly recalcitrant work. On 18 August he sent Prunières ‘the 1st movement of the duo for violin and cello’, proving that by now at least some of the other three movements were in his mind, if not yet on paper. Twelve days later, writing to Roland-Manuel, he specifies that the piece will be in four movements, as well as giving two other bits of information: ‘So I’m working for Rouché. I can firmly assure you that

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this composition, in two parts, will be notable for a mixture of styles that will be severely criticized, which will leave Colette indifferent and about which I don’t give a d . . . The only thing I’m not working on is the piano, and I’m afraid I shan’t be provoking the enthusiasm of the Viennese by my virtuosity.’12 At this stage then L’Enfant was still destined for Rouché and the Opéra (where it was not in fact to be given until May 1939), and Ravel had committed himself to playing the piano that autumn in Vienna. By the end of August it became clear that his host Pierre Haour was seriously ill with ulceration of the larynx. Around 1 September Ravel accompanied him back to Paris and saw him into a hospital in Auteuil, returning himself to stay with his brother in Saint-Cloud. He went to see Haour every day, but the end was never in doubt and Haour succumbed on 10 September at the age of only forty. He was the first of the Apaches to die. On 21 September Ravel wrote to the Abbé Petit from Lyons-la-Forêt, where he was spending a week, about the education of Haour’s son Roger, and he kept in touch with the young man thereafter. For the next month, back in Saint-Cloud, Ravel continued work on the three following movements of the Sonata as well as on L’Enfant, and he presumably brushed up his piano technique for Vienna, where he arrived on 16 October, accompanied by Casella. His visit had official backing from the Association Française d’Expansion et d’Echanges Artistiques. Its director, Robert Brussel, had written to the French Ambassador in Vienna, Marcel Dunan, on 9 August: I had a visit from Jean Marnold who told me that Mme Paul Clemenceau, back from Vienna, had just written to him about a Ravel concert project in Vienna for October. There were to be two concerts . . . The orchestral concert would take place on 22 October, with the programme: Valses nobles et sentimentales, Ma mère l’Oye, Shéhérazade, Rapsodie espagnole, Daphnis et Chloé Second Suite. The chamber concert would take place on 25 October, with the programme: Sonatine, Poèmes de Mallarmé, Gaspard de la nuit, Histoires naturelles, Trio. Schoenberg had, apparently, taken the initiative in this enterprise and would conduct part of the orchestral concert.13

If Schoenberg had indeed taken the initiative for the whole tour, then we need to relegate the French Embassy, hitherto credited with this, to a purely administrative role (but see Berg’s letter below). In the event the two programmes were somewhat modified: Oskar Fried conducted the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in two performances of the Rapsodie espagnole at the beginning and end, enclosing the Daphnis suite and Marya Freund singing Shéhérazade and the Deux mélodies hébraïques. In the chamber concert Ravel accompanied Mme Freund in the two song cycles, but Gaspard was replaced by Jeux d’eau, ‘Le gibet’ and ‘La vallée des cloches’, all played by Casella.14 There was also an additional concert on 23 October at Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical

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Performances, in what is now the Schubertsaal, including works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and also the String Quartet, Gaspard played by Eduard Steuermann and the first performance of the two-piano version of La valse played by Ravel and Casella (hence no doubt his perceived need to practise. Did he feel that in front of Diaghilev he had not done the work justice?). In all, twelve different Ravel works were performed. Schoenberg could not be present as he was then living in Amsterdam (at the time of Ravel’s visit he was conducting Gurrelieder with the Concertgebouw Orchestra), and neither could Berg, who suffered a severe asthma attack on the evening of the 22nd.15 In a long letter to Schoenberg of 28 October, Berg recorded that Previously, I had been in frequent contact with Ravel, had – as your representative, so to speak – invited him and attended to his wishes. He wanted only to hear your music, which presented great difficulties, considering the repertory up to now. . . . Because Ravel proposed to me that he wanted to honour you and the Verein by playing his latest work with Casella on two pianos and because Mme Freund decided to sing at the very last moment, the concert grew to three hours in length, with short intermissions and unbroken interest on the part of all those present. I mention this because a friend of Ravel’s (Clemenceau) had advised me before the concert to keep it as short as possible, since Ravel is known in Paris for leaving every concert before its conclusion. But here it was just the opposite. . . . If it still was not especially successful commercially, the fault probably lies with the high price of the guest tickets (100 Kronen). There is no interest among people of wealth and society for Ravel’s music. (His own two concerts were very poorly attended in spite of the French Embassy etc.) Artistically, however, our concert proved very satisfactory. In addition to Ravel’s companions, they say those attending included Schnitzler, young [Erich Wolfgang] Korngold, Szymanowski. . . . Unfortunately Puccini didn’t come. . . . I wasn’t there. . . . While my Pieces for Clarinet were being played, my wife was driving me to the sanatorium. . . . Apparently my Pieces were pleasing enough for Ravel to be taking them along to Paris for performance.’16

. . . and indeed they opened the SMI concert on 2 June the following year. Puccini was in Vienna for the premiere there of Il Trittico on 20 October. Ravel went to see these operas, and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, but there is no evidence that he and Puccini met. While Berg found the Vienna concert artistically very satisfactory, there were some reservations elsewhere, as reported in two notices in the Neue freie Presse. One, in a manuscript French translation probably intended for Robert Brussel, noted that ‘Everything is painfully pure. No racket, no hubbub, nothing of the “chaos” that’s all the fashion at the moment . . . The music of the suite Histoires naturelles (the swan) is dry and thin . . . We hope that in future he will move in the direction of a more

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powerful beauty, towards a deeper melodic lyricism, towards a stronger and more natural union of feeling and wit.’17 This is remarkably close at some points to Julius Korngold’s review that appeared in the same paper on 30 October, and looks in fact to be no more than a vague précis of it, possibly omitting the Debussy references for home consumption. An extract from Korngold’s actual response to Ravel’s music shows the original to be rather more interestingly nuanced: Perhaps Ravel will be able to avoid Debussy’s fate of finally going round in a circle and becoming frozen inside a restricted Mannerism. We hope to see decisions from him that will lead him to a more powerful beauty, towards a deeper melodic lyricism, towards a union of stronger and more natural feeling and wit. He might think of adopting a change of direction that would replace sterile Debussyism with fruitful Ravelism.

But Erwin Stein’s letter to Schoenberg of 13 November proves that, whatever the reservations of Julius Korngold and others, on the personal front the visit was an outstanding success. ‘Ravel got on with us extremely well’, wrote Stein. At all events Ravel was in very lively form. After [Schoenberg’s] song ‘Als wir hinter dem beblümten Tore’ [no. 11 of the George-Lieder op. 15] Ravel and Casella were visibly moved; they whispered to one another and Casella said some French superlative or other to me. After the piano pieces [the first two of the Five Piano Pieces op. 23] I asked Ravel whether he liked them and whether he had understood them. Yes, he liked them very much indeed and found them totally comprehensible. To show how well he knows your music, he said you can tell from the first bar that it’s Schoenberg. No one else writes like that. And then he was bowled over by Steuermann’s playing. . . . ‘C’est un musicien.’18

Three days later Brussel wrote to Dunan thanking him for his support that had ensured ‘the success of the Ravel concerts’ (his italics). While in Vienna, Ravel gave an interview to the Neue freie Presse (as Korngold’s review did not appear until 30 October, the day Ravel left for Paris, he would probably not have read it). He praised the orchestras and singers, and the Viennese audiences for continuing to support music despite their terrible hardships, complaining only that he had not been able to hear an opera by Mozart. ‘For us’, he declared, ‘members of the young modern school, he is the greatest of composers, the composer par excellence, our god!’19 There might have been those, Satie among them, who would query his right to speak for ‘the young modern school’, but they were safely back in Paris; nor was Mozart worship as widespread in Paris as Ravel might have liked. But more interesting

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than these musings is the clear message of sympathy Ravel sends to the Austrian people. ‘May music also influence the spirit of reconciliation in every heart!’ he ended. ‘When it was, or is, a question of “anti-German currents”, Vienna and Austria are never included in that expression.’ Nor were the pacific sentiments all on one side. As Donald Harris points out, ‘the concert which judiciously balanced his music with that of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern was a most extraordinary (and lengthy) mixture of two almost diametrically opposing aesthetics. If a point needed to be made against musical vindictiveness, no better example could be found. It was clearly a concert of reconciliation’.20 Ravel and Casella stayed with Alma Mahler for the last part of the fortnight. Nearly forty years later she remembered: Casella came only for Ravel’s concert [in fact, for the two on 22 and 23 October] . . . but Ravel stayed alone with me in my little flat for three weeks [in fact, a fortnight]. He even used the place for concert rehearsals. As a guest he was remarkably interesting. Food was still so scarce in that early postwar period that we mostly ate our frugal meals by ourselves, and I had occasion to study him at leisure. He was a narcissist. He came to breakfast rouged and perfumed, and he loved the bright satin robes that he wore in the morning. He related all things to his bodily and facial charms. Though short, he was so well-proportioned, with such elegance and such elastic mobility of figure, that he seemed quite beautiful.21

We know that Ravel never presented an appearance that was less than svelte. But from there to relating ‘all things to his bodily and facial charms’ is so startling a leap that it is no surprise to find his friend and pupil Manuel Rosenthal taking issue with it. He used to spend weekends at Le Belvédère and would see Ravel at breakfast. Declaring that he absolutely never used make-up, Rosenthal remembered that he had a Japanese dressing gown – black with gold embroidery. But what was important about that? That’s how he was and one could well understand that he wanted to compensate for his lack of height (which he knew people were always thinking about) through a kind of dandyism. He liked to look stylish [il était coquet]. So what? There was no call to be shocked by it. It was merely an entertainment and he himself was entertained by it. Whenever he’d bought a new suit, a new tie, a new shirt, he would show them to his friends and say ‘Isn’t it nice?’ – At heart he would have liked to be a playboy. He wouldn’t have objected to being a strapping young fellow.22

Such ironical play with his own appearance could well have bypassed Alma completely. Was she, on some level, maybe offended that he seemed not to respond to her ‘bodily and facial charms’? In any case, her memory was

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unreliable in other matters. She concludes her narration of Ravel’s stay by claiming that ‘I induced him to accompany me to a Schoenberg concert – it was the Chamber Symphony, if I am not mistaken. Ravel was very nervous throughout the performance. “No,” he said when we got up at the end, “that isn’t music; that comes out of a laboratory!” ’23 She was mistaken. Berg explains in his letter to Schoenberg that ‘For a while we tried to prepare a four-hand performance of your Chamber Symphony. There were even two or three rehearsals, which finally convinced us that it was impossible to produce the work in such a short time.’24 Which of Ravel’s conflicting opinions of Schoenberg’s music we accept as genuine must remain a matter of individual judgment. Alma’s memories have also obscured the fact that Ravel spent the first part of his stay not with her, but with Bertha and Emil Zuckerkandl – who gave him the nickname ‘Ariel’. Bertha was an important figure in Viennese musical life (Mahler had met Alma in her salon), and Ravel always spent New Year’s Eve with her sister Sophie Clemenceau and husband Paul, the Tiger’s brother and, like Ravel’s father, an engineer. According to Bertha it was through her that ‘I asked [Ravel] whether he would be willing to allow a first-class conductor and an excellent orchestra to play his music in Vienna, and whether he would personally attend two concerts, to which he replied: “I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to counter this senseless hatred the war has left behind it. I am at your disposal.” ’ The political nature of the visit is thus incontestable. Bertha also recounts two revealing incidents, the first as related by the composer himself, when he had gone to buy a couple of small bags and signed a cheque for them. The shopowner read his name and asked: ‘ “Are you Maurice Ravel, the composer of Jeux d’eau and ‘Ondine’? Oh, what an honour for our shop! I cannot allow you to pay for these bags. Please accept them as souvenirs of Vienna!” What do you say to that? I could live in Paris for a hundred years without ever being recognized or admired in such a fashion – It’s like a fairy tale!’ At the end of Ravel’s stay the Zuckerkandls arranged a party for around a hundred people and an orchestra, and Ravel demanded Strauss waltzes – ‘he couldn’t get enough of them . . . The wine did its duty. He sang in the rollicking chorus, embracing pretty Viennese women to right and left.’25 Whether he in fact stopped off in Salzburg to visit the house where Mozart was born, as he intended, we do not know. He now came back to Saint-Cloud until the end of February and before Christmas attended two first performances in Paris. The Swedish impresario Rolf de Maré, keen to promote the young dancer Jean Börlin, had leased the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for fifteen years as a showcase for his Ballets suédois. He was rich, with an even richer grandmother, and Honegger cannot have been alone in feeling that, given a company with a capital of 25 million francs, ‘one must try and take advantage of this sort of money to do things that are worthwhile. The orchestra is stunning.’26 For his first season, de Maré had the idea of using movements of Le tombeau de Couperin (the ‘Forlane’, ‘Menuet’ and ‘Rigaudon’)

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and by the time the Ballets suédois came to an end in 1925 this tiny ballet had notched up 167 performances. Ravel does not refer to it in any of his surviving correspondence, and we must assume that if Honegger thought the orchestra, under Inghelbrecht, was ‘stunning’, then probably Ravel too was content – and he must have been more than content with the money: just the eight performances of Le tombeau in November 1920 brought him royalties of 1,242 francs 20 centimes.27 On 12 December Camille Chevillard conducted the Lamoureux Orchestra in the first performance of La valse. Again, there is no mention of this in Ravel’s correspondence, but Chevillard may very possibly have been one of those whose lack of suppleness the composer deplored. If so, he was doing no more than echoing Debussy’s problems with the same conductor nearly twenty years earlier. At the final rehearsal of the Nocturnes, Debussy’s plaintive voice had been heard from the stalls: ‘I should like that more blurred [plus flou]’. ‘Faster?’ ‘No, more blurred’. ‘Slower?’ ‘More blurred’. ‘I don’t know what you mean. Again, gentlemen!’28 If flou was not in Ravel’s musical vocabulary either, neither was he in favour of the rigidity that seems to have been a Chevillard hallmark. He may have enjoyed a more flexible performance five days later at Mme de SaintMarceaux’s salon when ‘after dinner Messager played La vida breve and Ravel’s new La valse and we spent some unforgettable hours’.29 That Messager should have been able to play the demanding piano solo version is a tribute to his technique, but that he should have been prepared, at the age of 66, to put in the practice needed for a piece whose language far surpassed anything in his own music was testimony to extraordinary open-mindedness. If Ravel was not the idol of the young, it must have been a comfort, whatever he said, that neither had he forfeited the support of all the old. Whether he was appreciated at his true worth by Mme de Saint-Marceaux is another matter. When he played the two-piano version with Jacques Février at her salon on 14 January 1921, she described it as a ‘morceau charmant, gai, nouveau’ and remarked that its composer ‘has become well-behaved [sage], he’s classic, no longer Bolshevik’. Maybe the fact that he was going grey misled her. She herself later played the two-piano version with Messager on 12 September, but unfortunately does not comment as to whether knowing the work from the inside had altered her views.30 In the meantime Georgette Marnold had been searching diligently for a shack and finally found one called ‘Le Belvédère’ in the village of Montfort l’Amaury, about fifty kilometres south-west of the capital. Enclosing rooms of Ravelian dimensions, the house looks out towards the Ile-de-France, a horizon interrupted in 1920 only by the spire of the church. Far from the distractions of Paris and a good five kilometres from the local railway station, Ravel would be sure of being able to work in peace. It was to be his home until his death seventeen years later. This seems a good point therefore at which to take stock of the life he was setting up for himself. It was effectively divided into three: Le Belvédère, Paris, and abroad.

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Madeleine Grey recalled many years later that ‘Paul Valéry used to say Ravel’s continual need for tobacco served to increase the smokescreen between him and the fools of this world.’31 ‘Le Belvédère’ was an extension of this smokescreen. One did not ‘drop in’ on Ravel (and certainly not on Sundays, which were often devoted to his brother Edouard), partly because of geographical distance, but also because he carried about with him, even without cigarettes, a self-contained air that came over to some people as coldness and indifference. The house was nothing like any he had ever lived in with his late mother – indeed, with its strange cupola, it looks like a rather unsuccessful combination of Basque villa and Chinese temple. If it was a temple, it was one dedicated primarily to work. Festive occasions there were, as we shall see, but they were unambiguously signalled by the proprietor. Ravel realized his need for company, all the more urgent after his mother’s death, and in any case had no intention of relinquishing his status in Parisian musical society, for which long absences from the capital spelt oblivion. Whether he was anxious about turning into a yesterday’s man is a moot point. His claim in Vienna to be speaking for the young, modern French school suggests it was a possibility, but on the other hand he was unequivocally delighted when members of Les Six turned against him, as when Milhaud damned La valse as ‘Saint-Saëns for the Ballets russes’.32 In this respect he found himself in agreement with Debussy and Fauré, that respect in art was

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

14 Ravel’s decoration for a chair at Le Belvédère

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dangerous. But from time to time, when not immersed in a composition, he needed the boost of Parisian activity and, it has to be said, the opportunity to do good. At least two such opportunities presented themselves around this time, both concerning young musicians from abroad. Nicolas Obouhov, born in 1892, had studied in Moscow with Maximilian Steinberg and Nicolai Tcherepnin and came to Paris in 1918. Ravel befriended him, gave him composition lessons (see p. 259) and lobbied friends to provide him with financial support: one of the first letters written from Le Belvédère, on 10 March 1921, lists the amounts of money that have been pledged by, among others, Misia Sert and Mme Paul Clemenceau.33 Yet Obouhov turned out to be anything but a Ravel clone. As Judith Kuhn records, ‘The score for his ecstatic, 2000-page Knigi zhizni (The Book of Life) for solo voice, two pianos, electronic instruments and orchestra (written between 1918 and the mid-1920s or later) is signed “Nicholas l’Illuminé” and includes markings in the composer’s blood.’34 Ravel was all for diversity, as we can see from the continually varying forms and media in which his works were presented – not for him the thirteen Nocturnes and Barcarolles of his teacher Fauré, nor even the two books of Préludes of Debussy. The second young foreign musician he helped was Alexandre Tansman, who came to Paris from Poland in 1919: ‘When I arrived in Paris, I didn’t know anybody and by chance I met Ravel and Ravel introduced me to the musical life of Paris – found me my first publishers, my first performers (Marya Freund, Golschmann, later Koussevitsky), so it was quite natural that after I had known them two months I already belonged to the avant-garde: the French one, but also the international one because Paris was an international centre.’35 Tansman goes on to describe the salons which, if not quite as powerful as they had been before the war, still lay at the heart of Parisian cultural life: First you had the salons of the Revue musicale, headed by Henry Prunières, which was a great international centre. Then there was the salon of Mme Clemenceau, where you could meet Einstein, Hoffmansthal and Stefan Zweig. The salon of the Godebskis was very interesting – they were the best friends of Ravel – and there you met Manuel de Falla, Viñes, André Gide and so on. Then very important was the salon of Roland-Manuel, every Monday: everybody was there – Milhaud, Honegger, Roussel, Schmitt, Ravel. So it was a quite different musical life from now. There was no sense of superiority, for instance, with Ravel or Schmitt or Stravinsky or Prokofiev – all musicians, known or unknown, it didn’t make any difference.

Prokofiev himself approved this democratic spirit in an article written on Ravel’s death:

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I first met Ravel in 1920 in Paris. It was at a musicale attended by Stravinsky, Ansermet and some other prominent musicians. A little man with sharp, distinctive features and a mane of hair beginning to turn grey entered the room. It was Ravel. . . . When I expressed my pleasure at the opportunity of shaking hands with as distinguished a composer as himself and called him maître . . . Ravel snatched away his hand as if I had been about to kiss it and exclaimed, ‘Oh, please do not call me maître.’ I do not doubt for a moment that Ravel was perfectly aware of his great talent, but he hated any sort of homage and did whatever he could to avoid all attempts to honour him.36

Visitors to Le Belvédère similarly found that praise for Ravel’s compositions was an excluded topic. He visited Paris therefore not to look for adulation, but to find friendship and to learn of any new trend or technique that might be useful to him. On this trail he was insatiable, often bearding orchestral musicians after rehearsals to ask whether it was possible to play this or that. From now on he would stay regularly at the Hôtel d’Athènes, opposite the Godebskis’ apartment, whenever a late concert prevented him returning to Montfort. But he had given up writing reviews and went to concerts purely for pleasure,

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15 Cartoon of Ravel by Aline Fruhauf

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while retaining the right to escape now and then for a ‘cigarette libératrice’. Often he would call on the Paul Clemenceaus on a Sunday around five o’clock, going on to the Godebskis for the evening.37 The third element in his life, travel to foreign parts, was a mixture of holidays and work. Of course he still visited friends in other parts of France, notably the Dreyfus family in Lyons-la-Forêt, and from 1921 he began to return fairly regularly to St-Jean-de-Luz. But travel otherwise was almost entirely to hear or play his own music. Despite possessing a personal timetable that seemed to intersect with the official railway one only at certain points, he obviously loved travelling, and his happy experiences in Vienna had shown him that Paris did not by any means have a monopoly of musical excellence. Not every audience, as we shall see, was as sympathetic as the Viennese. But the Ravel who had poured cold water on the restrictive ‘Ligue nationale’ in 1916 was the same Ravel who over the next dozen years of so embraced the ‘difference’ of many other European countries – even if his musical travels did not take him any further East than that. In short, throughout the 1920s Ravel lived a very full life. Was this a sign of recovery from and acceptance of his mother’s death? Or was activity rather a ploy to banish the contemplation of solitude and death? At all events, he was pleased that the ‘machine’ was working again. The first notable occasion of 1921 was the performance at the SMI on 24 January of all the Debussy memorial pieces published the previous month in the Revue musicale except, for some reason, the Stravinsky chorale. They made up the second half of the concert, which began with the Debussy Quartet. The players in the Ravel movement were Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and Maurice Maréchal, who were to premiere the whole Sonata in 1922. Three days later Ravel was in Brussels to attend the first performance at La Monnaie of L’heure espagnole, an experience he enjoyed, according to his letter of thanks to the director dated 28 February. The long delay in writing, for which he craved indulgence, was owing to his move into Le Belvédère, even though the contract for transfer of ownership, from Mme Félicité Marie Honorine Bolle, was not signed until 16 April, the price being 20,000 francs.38 ‘I’m far from being installed. I’m camped in a corner of the house, trying to energize the sloth of masons, painters, carpenters etc., and commuting between Montfort and Paris. The days race past at a desperate speed.’39 He was still thus engaged weeks later when he wrote to thank Jacques Rouché for the news that Daphnis was going to have its Opéra premiere on 20 June, and the installation was still not quite complete when he wrote to Alfred Cortot on 27 June. Through it all he was no doubt working, probably at night, on the Sonata and L’Enfant, but for the biographer he more or less vanishes from sight for some months under a cloud of brick dust. In defence of the post-war French workman it should be said that, though the house had been built as recently as 1907, it and its appurtenances were of very poor construction (‘Monsieur,’ said the plumber, ‘your

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well was stillborn’), added to which Ravel had never in his life had to deal with such practicalities. To make things worse, he insisted on extending the original four rooms to the ten or so that now exist.40 The only glimpse we have of him this March is a negative one, a letter asking Koechlin whether he would take on as a pupil the Swedish composer ‘Wiking Dalh’ (recte Viking Dahl) whose ballet Maison de fous, performed in the same Ballets suédois programme as Le tombeau, he found ‘remarquable’41 (I am grateful to Robert Orledge for confirming that Koechlin did not in fact oblige: maybe he felt with Ravel that a young composer who thought studies in counterpoint and fugue a waste of time was past praying for). Ravel himself may have gone to ground for a period, but his friend RolandManuel did not allow him to vanish altogether from the Parisian consciousness. The positions he outlines in his article in the Revue musicale of April 1921 undoubtedly owe a good deal to Ravel’s own. The composer’s ‘most implacable enemies have quite often unintentionally served him better than his most devoted acolytes’, so that Auric’s admission ‘that he is unable to be fair to Ravel’ is not taken hard; ‘ “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” is without doubt, of all his works, the one to which he attaches the greatest value’; and one hears the Ravelian voice clearly in the warning that ‘our music which, today as yesterday, is trying to defend itself against literature, the false picturesque and against a certain softness in expression, must be careful, following Max Jacob’s good advice, not to confound “stripped-down art with its sloughed off skins” [l’art dépouillé avec les dépouilles des arts]’. A quarter of a century later Mme Jourdan-Morhange mused similarly that ‘when one is rich, stripping oneself down is not a danger; we should distrust the “stripped down work” only when it is not the fruit of a controlled interior richness.’42 At the time RolandManuel’s reference to ‘l’art dépouillé’ is obviously not only to the earliest manifestations of the members of Les Six (in Poulenc’s case, the Sonata for two clarinets, the Trois mouvements perpétuels and Le bestiaire) but to Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello, just entering on its long and laboured development. It is in the nature of a ‘défense avant la lettre’. This suggests that Roland-Manuel was aware of the extent to which this Sonata, after the crucial exposition of destructive, negative elements in La valse, was a positive attempt to build a new foundation for Ravel’s art and one that was likely to draw fire from traditionalists for whom ‘a certain softness in expression [quelque mollesse dans l’expression]’ was a central, even determining quality of French music. Slowly meanwhile Ravel was moving in his global lamps, his musical boxes and his mechanical bird and began to decorate Le Belvédère in a style that veered wildly between 1920 and 1820, though chiefly in a black and white colour scheme: wallpaper, tiles, cushions. This gives a curious unity to the whole, despite the intricacy of the structure and its furnishings. The tiny garden was redesigned with dwarf trees, a fountain, steps and any number of rare and expensive plants – the whole uncannily close to the surroundings in

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which Des Esseintes immures himself in Huysmans’s A rebours. After fortyfive years in homes designed by and for other people, it was an identity statement of the ‘new’ Ravel, postwar and post-mother. We may wonder too whether Maman would have approved his lurid taste in cocktails, of which one recipe, in another hand (alas!), survives among his papers: ‘3 Bacardi Rum, 1 Citron jus, du sucre – à gout – un petit peu de crème de Cacao’, to which the writer adds ‘très forte mais merveilleuse’.43 May 1921 was in several ways an important month: Ravel moved definitively into Le Belvédère (though still without piano), Durand published the full score of La valse, and on the 11th he was permanently discharged from the army.44 In the same letter (to Georgette Marnold) he writes, ‘Have you been to hear the negroes? Their virtuosity is at times alarming.’ It has not been possible to identify beyond doubt which band he was referring to, but it may have been Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, a seven-piece black band who arrived in Paris around 1919 and set up in the Tempo Club in the rue Fontaine, from which they migrated to the Casino de Paris. They were some of the earliest exponents of the jazz that was to become the dominant craze of 1920s Paris and to provide Ravel with his final exotic stimulus. Tantalizingly, May and June saw first performances in Paris of a variety of interesting works, of which Ravel says nothing in his known correspondence. On 17 May the Ballets russes gave Prokofiev’s Chout at the less-thanfashionable Gaîté-Lyrique (Prokofiev’s diaries record that Ravel thought this ‘a work of genius’45), on the 21st the Société nationale hosted the first performance of Fauré’s Second Piano Quintet, and three days later the premieres were given at the Théâtre Michel of Poulenc’s Le gendarme incompris, Satie’s Le piège de Méduse, Milhaud’s Caramel mou and Auric’s Les pélicans: Poulenc’s squib, on a text mainly by Cocteau, also contained chunks of unadulterated Mallarmé prose, which according to Poulenc nobody recognized – though surely Ravel would have done, if he was there. In June he probably attended the premiere of Milhaud’s L’homme et son désir by the Ballets suédois, and of both halves of Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Opéra on the 10th – the first time the two had been heard in France together, even though Rouché had asked Saint-Saëns to make cuts. The critic of Le courrier musical found Paul Franz’s Enée too domineering46 and, if Ravel did attend, he probably got through several cigarettes in the course of a long evening. Possibly he was at the Théâtre du Colisée four days later for a spectacle organized by the dancer Caryathis (Elisabeth Toulemon) including an orchestral performance of Rapsodie espagnole and the premiere of Satie’s La belle excentrique; though if he was, he would have done well to avoid Satie who in correspondance was still referring to him as ‘un con’, among other things.47 The evening also included music by Granados, Auric, Poulenc, Honegger and Milhaud. And as if this were not enough culture for two months, on 18 June the Ballets suédois danced Les mariés de la tour Eiffel and on 17, 20 and 24 June

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there were three ‘concerts exceptionnels’ for twenty-seven noise-makers and orchestra given by the Bruiteurs Futuristes Italiens, conducted by Antonio Russolo (brother of Luigi) with an introductory talk by Marinetti. This premiere, we know, Ravel did attend, together with Stravinsky, Honegger, Falla, Paul Claudel, Tristan Tzara and Mondrian. But, builders and plumbers aside, the main focus of Ravel’s activities was on particular performances of his own music. On 15 June he conducted the hundredth performance of the ballet of Le tombeau at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées (the ballet had therefore been performed on average every other day since the premiere on 8 November). Five days later there was the Opéra premiere of Daphnis et Chloé, in Bakst’s modified sets, with choreography by Fokine who now took Nijinsky’s place as Daphnis (as he had already on the 1914 London tour) and with his wife Vera Fokina as Chloé instead of Karsavina. From Rouché’s point of view, this premiere, preceded on the same evening by the house premiere of Dukas’s La péri and following that of Les Troyens ten days earlier, constituted a telling response to those critics who had caused such an uproar over his staging of Malipiero’s Sette canzoni the previous summer, accusing him of neglecting French composers in favour of foreigners.48 For Ravel, it seems to have been a delightful experience, perhaps overlaying the traumas of 1912. He had written to Rouché on 16 March, ‘I agree with you entirely about Bakst’s decors and costumes. The second [scene] in particular is one of his most beautiful’,49 and the reviews were favourable. The run lasted for thirteen performances, though it was not without its stresses. Three days before the premiere, Bakst was complaining to Rouché that ‘the electrician hasn’t had time to rehearse . . . and this can have disastrous results for the ballet’s triumph – because it must triumph. . . . Your reputation cannot rest on the success of an (admirable) female virtuoso in a choreography that is valueless. In your interests, we must put together a magnificent work of choreography in which every artist of your troupe earns my sincere admiration.’50 As for Fokine, whom Rouché had been so pleased to tempt back to Paris, he left shortly afterwards, ‘unhappy with the dilettantism of the dancers and the place given to ballet.’51 Ravel congratulated Rouché on the ballet’s ‘brilliant production’52 and Rouché too must have been happy with the way things had gone, because he immediately sounded Ravel out as to the possibility of the Opéra’s mounting L’heure espagnole. Ravel expressed doubts over a mismatch between the size of the venue and the intimacy of the opera, but agreed to trust Rouché’s judgment53 and, as already noted, the production duly went ahead in December. We don’t know whether Ravel attended the premiere of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel on 18 June – possibly not, since Durey had resigned from the project largely because of his colleagues’ anti-Ravelian stance. He had also written an article on Ravel for The Chesterian, published the previous April, the last sentence of which may be read as a farewell to Les Six: ‘Younger composers

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have in him an example of devotion to [music] and of an artistic conscience that appears even in the smallest work.’ Through July and August 1921 installation at Le Belvédère continued its molto adagio progress, possibly accompanied by similarly-paced work on the Sonata, although Ravel leaves us no record of this. He was surely pleased to hear of the premier prix for piano won at the Conservatoire by Jacques Février, the son of his old friend Henri, and to be asked by Prunières to write an article and a musical tribute for a special number of the Revue musicale dedicated to his teacher Fauré. For the nature of the tribute he intended to consult Schmitt and Koechlin and would come back to Prunières in due course. He hoped there was no urgency – nor was there, the number finally appearing in October 1922.54 In accordance with his habit of helping the deserving, he encouraged Prunières to ask for a contribution from Raoul Bardac, Debussy’s stepson and one of Fauré’s earliest and best-loved pupils, whose career as a composer Ravel felt had been held back by his modest and distant manner. But whether invited or not, Bardac did not in the end contribute. During all the travails of his wartime activities, the death of his mother and his subsequent struggle to re-engage with life, it may seem strange that Ravel had made no move to return to St-Jean-de-Luz since completing the Trio there in the autumn of 1914. A letter to Marie Gaudin of 10 August 1921 explains why: my installation is far from being complete. Even so, I’ve let it all go hang so as to get back to work. It’s been nearly a year since I stopped! So I can come to Donibane [St-Jean-de-Luz] and will continue to slog away; at least I hope so, because coming back to such happy, distant times. . . . My plan is to arrive at the beginning of September, perhaps before. And my profound thanks in advance for your affectionate hospitality. Without you I should never have had the courage to return.55

Maybe this signalled, at last, acceptance of his mother’s death. His departure was slightly delayed by the sudden disappearance of the Czech servant Prohaska whom he had engaged soon after moving in. ‘She hadn’t been gone five minutes before I found out she was the chief client of all the bistrots in Montfort, which explains an intermittent nervosity that took its toll of various bits of china, and sudden bursts of hysterics that I put down to her Slavic origin.’ He also had to oversee attempts to breathe life into the stillborn well, and we learn that he was by now at least halfway through the slow movement of the Sonata: ‘suddenly the Andante of the Duo, which is blue and black at the beginning, has turned bright red towards the middle.’56 This presumably is a reference to the twelve bars between figures 4 and 6 where the dynamics reach ff and the tempo practically doubles. The letter ends with a quotation from Satie’s sarcastic ‘Eloge des critiques’, just published in the magazine Action and reported in L’éclair. The original contains the sentence:

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‘Physically the critic is of serious aspect, he’s something along the lines of the contrabassoon [dans le genre du contrebasson]).’ Whether following L’éclair or not, Ravel shortens the last word to its first three letters . . . and wonders whether Satie will be sued, as he had been by the critic Jean Poueigh for using the same expression in 1917! Maybe Ravel derived some comfort from knowing that he was not Satie’s only target. In any case, he agreed with Satie’s basic premise. Sadly, Ravel felt he had to bring an action against the errant Prohaska, because she had taken things with her, including an account book and an umbrella that Ravel confessed (shades of Satie) he was rather fond of. He also admitted to Georgette Marnold that it was illogical of him to want to go elsewhere just as work on Le Belvédère was finally coming to an end, and that he must be ‘a character in the genre of Ludwig II of Bavaria, though not as loony’57 (a reference to Ludwig’s pair of castles, Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein). Eventually, though, he did make the journey south and spent September and early October with the Gaudins at 41 rue Gambetta in St-Jean-de-Luz. Again he escapes the clutches of the biographer for this period. On 29 October, some time after his return to Montfort, he apologizes to Schmitt for having taken his card to St-Jean-de-Luz, with the intention of sending a reply, and now having brought it back again.58 We can safely assume that, with the letters piling up, Ravel preferred to work on the Sonata, with regular respite in the form of walks, sea bathing and catching up on the local gossip. The town, though, was changing fast. Rousseau-Plotto records that ‘it reached 5,372 inhabitants in 1921, 6,000 in 1923! It was attracting more and more people, becoming a rival to imperial Biarritz. At this time it was described as a “very popular seaside resort and winter sports center” (Guide bleu, 1921), and as “very important (Guide bleu, 1923)” ’, while the bilingual Guide Collins records that ‘with its safe and very smooth beach, St-Jean-de-Luz is no doubt less fashionable than Biarritz, but is preferred by those in the know’. Even Ciboure had ‘just treated itself to a high class restaurant, la Réserve.’59 But if Ravel wanted to avoid the crowds, there were sympathetic spirits to hand: in addition to the Gaudins and other old friends, Ricardo Viñes’s brother, Pepito, lived just along the rue Gambetta. Ravel may have been unaware that Stravinsky and his family were staying in Anglet, a mere twenty kilometres away just south of Bayonne, where the composer was working not only on the Three Pieces from Petrushka but starting on Mavra – given Ravel’s ultimate opinion of that score, it was probably just as well they didn’t meet. Back at Montfort in mid-October, Ravel told Ansermet that La valse was possibly to be performed in Vienna during the upcoming season.60 He continued working on the Sonata and now was ‘beginning to see daylight’ at the end of it.61 He was in Stockholm on 30 November to receive the Diploma of Honour of the Swedish Academy of Music,62 but otherwise we hear no more of him until the Opéra premiere of L’heure espagnole on 5 December, although

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presumably he went to the Colonne concert on 12 November when Pierné conducted both La valse and Chabrier’s Fête polonaise.63 Rouché had obviously been encouraged by the success of Daphnis to continue humouring the large body of chauvinists among the Opéra’s regular audience. After L’heure espagnole, he persisted with house premieres of Massenet’s Hérodiade on 22 December, and of the now-forgotten Charles Silver’s La mégère apprivoisée (based on The Taming of the Shrew) on 30 January 1922. Fortified by these and by the five-hundredth performance of Samson et Dalila on 25 February, he did then feel emboldened to premiere Verdi’s Falstaff on 3 April. For all the élan and virtuoso instrumentation of L’heure espagnole, we need to be aware of political realities and recognize that chauvinism played at least some part in the production’s sensational success. Ravel wrote to Rouché to say that his reservations over the size of the stage had not been justified,64 a point reiterated by Vuillermoz in his notice for the Revue musicale in January. Vuillermoz commented that the new production altered the balance of characters, Fabert making the very most of the role of Gonzalve, but Cousinou as Ramiro not enunciating Franc-Nohain’s text vigorously enough. Curiously, he found Fanny Heldy more ‘graceful’ and ‘chaste’ than Geneviève Vix in 1911, a judgment hardly supported by the surviving recording of Heldy’s ‘Oh! la pitoyable aventure!’, with her delicious delivery of the phrase ‘sans horloge’. For the public at large, Heldy’s blonde beauty and magnetic stage presence carried the day and the opera became a house regular, reaching its fiftieth performance there only ten years later. It did not return to the Opéra-Comique, which might have seemed its more natural home, until 1945. While audiences flocked to L’heure espagnole, the month of December elsewhere in Paris was decidedly marking the exchange of new lamps for old. On 16 December Saint-Saëns died at the age of eighty-six, but not before leaving as his final testament three woodwind sonatas, most of which, from their language, could have been written in the 1890s, if not earlier; but which continue to be played and loved in the twenty-first century. For Ravel, an admirer of Saint-Saëns’s music if not of his politics, here was a palpable hit against the notion of relentless progress that cast recidivists into outer darkness. Could not old and new lamps be allowed to blend their illumination? Some of the new lamps, it is true, gave a fairly harsh light. On 1 December Koussevitzky conducted the first performance of Honegger’s Horace victorieux, one of the composer’s grittiest scores, turned down by the Ballets suédois probably on that account. Harry Halbreich distinguishes two families of themes, but there is not much let-up in the overall atmosphere: ‘on the one hand, there are lyrical, expressionist slow passages, in which the chromaticism and wide melodic leaps recall the Second Viennese School. . . . On the other hand, there are passages of athletic, violent, fast music that is brutally rhythmic rather in the manner of The Rite of Spring.’65 If Ravel was at all worried about

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the forthcoming reaction to the ‘bright red’ passages in the Sonata, at least he was not out on his own. Then a week later Jean Wiéner organized the first of his ‘concerts salade’, in which opposites were asked to coexist: in this case the evening began with jazz from the Billy Arnold Orchestra, continued with excerpts from Le sacre du printemps (with Stravinsky pedaling and twiddling the knobs of a pianola) and ended with Milhaud’s ten-minute Sonata for flute, oboe, clarinet and piano, written in Rio de Janeiro in 1918 – jazz was putting in a bid for respectability and Stravinsky was plugging his Pleyela rolls (Le sacre took up nine), as advertised at the back of the Revue musicale. Ravel went round afterwards and congratulated Wiéner warmly. But for Ravel himself the year ended less than warmly: ‘there’s no more anthracite in Montfort. My study, which so far had escaped the damp, won’t be habitable after tomorrow. That’ll be excellent for the piano. And the people who envy me living far away from the city!’66 His first Christmas in Le Belvédère was in all probability a cold, wet one. The year 1922, even if not particularly rich in compositions, is one of the best documented of Ravel’s career, showing that his removal to Montfort had done nothing to remove him from French musical life – if anything, the opposite. But he must have had mixed feelings, given his long-standing interest in the work, when Pierrot lunaire was premiered in Paris, not at ‘his’ SMI, but by

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

16 Ravel the virtuoso, cartoon by Jean Godebski

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Wiéner at the Salle Gaveau, with Milhaud conducting and Marya Freund reciting. Such was the success of this concert performance, preceded by twenty-five rehearsals, that they gave it twice more in Paris in the following months.67 Unfortunately we have no verbal evidence in detail of Ravel’s reaction, merely a blanket approval of Pierrot and Wiéner’s activities in general, published in a joint letter with Roussel, Caplet and Roland-Manuel in the 1 April 1923 number of Le courrier musical, in response to the critic Louis Vuillemin’s castigation of Wiéner as a ‘musical dadaist’. We can’t tell therefore whether he agreed with Roger Désormière over the difficult split between the revolutionary musical language and ‘the superannuated stage of human sensibility it portrays’,68 or with Boris de Schloezer that its most important feature was the independence of the various lines, in a kind of counterpoint that he called ‘Tristan multiplied by The Art of Fugue’.69 But, more importantly, the impact of Pierrot is plainly evident in some of the Ravel works that were to come; which makes it all the more strange that the work was not programmed at the SMI until December 1927, when Schoenberg himself directed it, again with Marya Freund as reciter. Could Ravel have felt resentment at being pipped to the post? On 24 January he wrote to thank the Stockholm Music Academy for honouring him with their diploma. This was the first of several awards he accepted from foreign institutions, proving that he was quite happy in being thus recognized. He was considerably less happy about the progress of the Sonata (‘The duo was finished. Then I realized that the scherzo was much too developed, and what’s more lousy. I’m starting it all over again’) and of plans to put on La valse where it might appear most at home: ‘Still no news from the Vienna Opera, for which, as you perhaps know, the first production of La valse is reserved. Mme Gustav Mahler and various others are putting every effort into getting a result. When I think of the millions of crowns such a production would cost, I go dizzy and no longer bank on it.’70 His fears were justified. ‘The producer, a German whose name I can no longer remember and who had understood the work’s meaning perfectly, could not stay’71 and the first production of the work in Vienna did not come about until 1929. Also of concern was the news that L’heure espagnole at the Opéra had been taken off. ‘What’s going on? Is it a flop?’72 Of course he knew perfectly well it wasn’t, but was putting pressure on Laloy, the Opéra secretary, to do the same to Rouché. For Ravel this was a matter of financial as well as artistic concern, now that the heavy bills for renovating Le Belvédère were coming in. On the credit side, he had received a commission from Koussevitzky to orchestrate Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition – what the relationship was between this and the stalling in January of L’Enfant et les sortilèges at the end of the Arithmetic scene can only be guessed at.73 In the above letter to Calvocoressi he explained that the hoped-for original piano score of Pictures could not be obtained; did Calvo have one, and if so could he borrow it? Ravel underlines the

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words ‘édition originale de Moussorgsky’, but what he must eventually have used was the edition published in 1886 after the composer’s death, put together by Rimsky-Korsakov and including a number of reworkings, errors and misreadings. Ravel, starting with ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, would finish that tableau on 1 May.74 Koussevitsky’s no doubt welcome cheque was for 10,000 francs.75 Ravel admitted he hated making travel plans a long time in advance. Another letter of 3 February, to Roland-Manuel, testifies that this disinclination had its points. ‘No more news’, he writes, ‘from Lyon or Marseilles. In principle, the concert for the latter is fixed for 17 March, for the former at the end of April.’76 In the event both dates were changed, the Marseilles one brought forward to 16/18 February, the Lyon one postponed to 3 May, then changed to the 4th, then the 7th, then at short notice brought back again to the 3rd.77 The Marseilles concert, Ravel’s first public appearance in the city, included the String Quartet and the composer accompanying Madeleine Grey in the Histoires naturelles, Deux mélodies hébraïques and Shéhérazade. Writing to Mlle Marnold on 23 February, he says nothing about the concert but complains bitterly that on Friday 17th he was not able to see the 1919 German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, because the Marseilles authorities ‘had forbidden the showing – no one knew why. Then next day the ban was lifted. I was recompensed yesterday in Paris where they put on the film just for me . . . and for the first time I saw real cinema.’78 Stuckenschmidt writes that ‘in his compositions of that time there are experiments in musical montage that sound as revolutionary and shocking as some of the ghostly sequences in the film’,79 and a month later Durand was being told it was a something he had to see.80 Clearly La valse had not exorcised Ravel’s interest in death. At last, around 20 March, he could write ‘fin’ to the Sonata for violin and cello. Whether the first performance at the SMI on 6 April was already scheduled, we do not know. But it speaks volumes for the goodwill of Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and Maurice Maréchal that they were willing to work to such a tight schedule for a piece bristling with difficulties. Now, nearly two years after Ravel had signed the contract with the Aeolian Company, they were proceeding with the recording project. Calvocoressi, living in a flat in Chelsea and earning a precarious living as a critic, acted as intermediary between him and the director Alfred Mead. Writing to Calvo on 24 March, Ravel informs him that he’s at Le Belvédère till the end of the month when he has to go to Paris to supervise rehearsals of the Sonata, and continues with self-protective irony: It doesn’t seem much, this machine for two instruments: it’s the result of nearly a year and a half ’s slogging. In that time Marius – that is, Darius – Milhaud would have managed to produce four symphonies, five quartets, and several dramatic settings of Paul Claudel. You can reassure M. Mead: I’m

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busy working on five piano pieces (I’m only counting the Sonatine as two), am trying to find a better pianist than myself for the other five, and will come and deliver everything in June.81

He then goes on to explain why he’s not asking Viñes (see p. 102). Passing over for the moment his self-deprecating comments on the Sonata, we may well wonder at his decidedly cavalier interpretation of the Aeolian contract. This stipulated that none of the repertoire he would be offering should have appeared on a roll before – and yet he is talking of (presumably) the first two movements of the Sonatine, recorded for Welte-Mignon in 1912 or 1913 (his performance of the last movement was, as noted earlier, always a hit-and-miss affair).82 Maybe the company had agreed to waive this clause, but the possibility must remain that Ravel was not being entirely straightforward. Also what he was offering was a long way short of the ten records agreed to. And finally nothing in the contract suggests that Ravel was at liberty to farm out performances to any other pianist. For these he chose Robert Casadesus, a 23-year-old who had won his premier prix in 1913. There is still some argument over who, in the end, played what (see p. 241), but Ravel’s sensitivities over the deliberate monotony of ‘Le gibet’ find an echo in his remarks over the Sonata, another ‘difficult’ work in both senses. It was as though he was challenging the postwar audience, newly drunk on dancing, jazz, cinema and sport, to extend this sudden freedom to the vocabulary of music. He was not given to expressing satisfaction with his own works, least of all before they had been performed in public, but his apparent coolness towards this Sonata (as the Duo was finally entitled) may well have been a mark of his expectation that it would not be widely understood. Like many of his works of this decade, it undoubtedly grated on the sensibilities of those who had not followed him beyond Daphnis, while too openly professing a dedication to craftsmanship to please the avant-garde. But there were enough members of the audience between these two positions because, if we are to trust Poulenc’s memory,83 the last movement was encored. Ravel himself said some six years later: ‘I think this sonata marks a turningpoint in my career. The music is stripped down to the bone. The allure of harmony is rejected and increasingly there is a return to emphasis on melody.’84 This emphasis shows itself not just in the melodiousness of the tunes or in their large number (though both characteristics are notable) but, as in Daphnis, in the close relationships they have with each other. The nearest Ravel comes to convention is to make use of pizzicato in the scherzo, following his String Quartet and Trio as well as the Debussy Quartet. The first movement does retain some semblance of sonata form, but there is no tension between keys: tension comes from the graded simplicities of the counterpoint, both rhythmic and harmonic. The modal opening to the slow movement harks back

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17 Ravel and friend, cartoon by Jean Godebski

to prewar Ravel, but a hee-hawing phrase at the centre of the movement (the ‘red’ passage) seems determined to destroy any feeling of mode or key. The finale is a dance and for the cello’s opening tune Ravel insisted the player bounce the bow ‘like a mechanical rabbit’ (Ex. 7.1).85 Vif, avec entrain (q = 152)

 

ten. 

         p



            

Example 7.1. Ravel, Sonata for violin and cello, opening of IV

Themes appear from earlier movements – notably the opening of the first and the hee-hawing from the third one – but the rabbit has the last word. For some unknown reason Ravel did not attend the first performance on 6 April, but did attend the Revue musicale concert on 8 April 1922 at which Bartók

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played his Suite op. 14, the two Burlesques op. 8 and, with the Hungarian-born violinist Jelly d’Aranyi, his First Violin Sonata. Ravel had hoped that Bartók would be there on the 6th to hear his Sonata; it is not clear whether he was but, as he and d’Arányi had arrived in Paris two days earlier, it must be regarded as likely. After the concert on the 8th, Prunières gave a dinner attended by Bartók, Ravel, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Szymanowski and d’Arányi after which she and Bartók played the Sonata again. Prunières told Bartók he must come back the next year and Poulenc invited him to lunch with Satie and Auric.86 Ravel told Cipa the Bartók Sonata was ‘splendide’, and was delighted that Cipa had had the courage to admit he didn’t like Ravel’s, ‘because that proves to me – as I suspected – that it’s not out of friendship or snobbery that you like my other works. And I prefer this spontaneous impression to that vouchsafed to me in a letter from a fine society lady, after congratulating me on my “modesty”: she finds my work “original” and “witty”, which is what she had already said about my Trio.’87 Every now and then he would still complain about low morale. But his letters in general give evidence of his familiar caustic humour and even of high spirits. Word had apparently gone round that he had pronounced the first performance of the Sonata to be a massacre, even though he wasn’t there. ‘And everybody knows my opinion,’ he told Jourdan-Morhange, ‘even you and no doubt Maréchal. I don’t imagine this revelation has depressed either of you too much. I also learnt that I am going off to Africa and am about to get married. I don’t know which of these comes first.’ He went on to apologize that the second performance of the Sonata on 16 May, by popular request, had caught him by surprise and that he wouldn’t be able to attend this new ‘massacre’.88 As mentioned above, he played at the concert in Lyon on 3 May and the following day had a meeting with Koussevitsky, no doubt to show him ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’. Despite his apologies to Jourdan-Morhange, he did in fact attend the second performance of the Sonata on the 16th, when the SMI programme also contained the first performance of Delage’s piano piece Schumann . . . in which quotations from that composer are woven into the music. The letter Ravel wrote to Delage three days later was not calculated to console: I wasn’t able to say to you the other evening – to some extent your fault for running away – all I thought about Schumann. First of all, I like it a lot and it comes off perfectly. But that’s not the point at issue. You can’t go on writing like this. It would take too long to explain to you here a heap of things you must have realized as well as I. Even so you must find a way out of an impasse. If I did so, it was not, as you think, thanks to my natural gifts. Before I finished my Quartet – which is far from being perfect – I knew less than you. Are you willing to work? There’s still time.’89

Paring down his own technique in the Sonata would seem to have made Ravel even less sympathetic to Delage’s piece. But Delage was indeed willing to

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work, as the sharply delineated Sept hai-kaïs written the following year amply testify. Ravel was involved with other composers’ music on four further occasions over the coming weeks. Szymanowski’s Three Myths for violin and piano, written in 1915, were given their first Paris performance at a Revue musicale concert on 20 May and Ravel asked Hélène Casella to find him a score.90 Then there was posthumous contact with Debussy in the form of a request from Jean Jobert, who had bought out Debussy’s old publisher Eugène Fromont, for orchestrations of two Debussy piano pieces, Danse (originally published in 1891 as Tarantelle styrienne, and ‘Sarabande’ from Pour le piano, published in 1901.91 Ravel completed these at the end of the year. Then on 3 June the Ballets russes put on Stravinsky’s Mavra, which Ravel felt was a failure92 – an opinion that reached the composer and soured their friendship. Finally on 20 June, after serving on a Conservatoire jury and having supper with Jourdan-Morhange, he went to an all-Fauré concert in the large amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, given under the patronage of the president of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand. Meanwhile Ravel had no doubt been practising for the Aeolian recording sessions in London. He, Robert and Gaby Casadesus were due to arrive there on 29 June, with the first recording session set for the following day. The level of Ravel’s organization can be gauged from his letter to Roland-Manuel of 9 June: ‘Heavens! I haven’t got Casadesus’s address. . . . We must also fix a day for putting the finishing touches to Gaspard de la nuit. And then can you tell me whether an army identity card and an out-of-date passport are enough to get into an Allied country?’93 But arrive they did, as Gaby Casadesus recalled nearly 70 years later: We reached Charing Cross and our hotel, where an invitation was waiting for us from the singer Mme Alvar, who was organizing a dinner in Ravel’s honour. After dinner there was a private concert. Ravel played his Sonatine. One could tell he was tense, slightly stiff. Obviously he was suffering from nerves. . . . Then Mme Alvar sang Ravel songs accompanied by him. For his part, Robert played the ‘Forlane’ and ‘Toccata’ [from Le tombeau]. It was that same evening we heard the first performance [in England] of the Duo for violin and cello. . . . The violinist was Jelly d’Aranyi, then aged just 18, with a marvellous cellist, a splendid lad, called Kindler. . . . Ravel was delighted with this performance. Later in the evening he took us with the players into the study and asked d’Aranyi to play him some gipsy folk music. D’Aranyi, being Hungarian, didn’t need to be asked twice and played passionately for at least two hours without stopping. She was sensational and Ravel was mad with joy. When very late, we got back to our hotel, Ravel excitedly told us that, once back in France, he was going to rush straight to Montfort l’Amaury to work in peace. And very shortly afterwards Tzigane was born, which he dedicated to Jelly d’Aranyi.94

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Obviously, with a memory at seventy years’ distance, a biographer has to exercise some caution. For a start, in June 1922 d’Aranyi was 29 and the Dutch cellist Hans Kindler 30 – that is, a good deal older than either Gaby or Robert. But at least this excerpt, taken together with Ravel’s letter of 9 June, suggests that originally Robert may have been scheduled to record the whole of Gaspard, not just ‘Le gibet’, and both the ‘Forlane’ and the ‘Toccata’, not just the latter. This would certainly have come nearer to fulfilling the Aeolian Company’s contractual requirements. Whether ‘the finishing touches’ to Gaspard never materialized, or whether the company simply changed their mind, we cannot know. Where Gaby was undoubtedly telling the truth was in quoting Ravel to the effect that Robert’s name ‘will not appear [on the rolls], but I will recompense you for this work’. And, she goes on, ‘in fact he proved to be very generous. I must admit that my husband accepted this “deal” for the money because, while he liked playing Ravel, the appearance of his interpretation on rolls did not interest him in the least. These recordings were in their infancy and one could not imagine the importance this invention would later have for a musician’s career.’95 None of this alters the fact that for some fifty years music lovers bought Casadesus’s rolls thinking them to be Ravel’s. One can only assume that the composer’s embarrassment at having signed an impossible contract got the better of his moral judgment. Certainly it was utterly unlike him to take credit for anyone else’s work, and there is no evidence that he ever did so before or afterwards. These recordings were by no means the first to be made of Ravel’s music, and we might be tempted to consider the possibility that one of the reasons he undertook them, with Casadesus firmly on the right track, was to displace earlier versions that he felt did not do his work justice. But for the piano music, the most notable of these were the rolls of Pavane pour une Infante défunte made by Rudolf Ganz in 1913, of Jeux d’eau by Robert Schmitz and Benno Moiseiwitsch in 1919, and the acoustic discs made by Moiseiwitsch and Cortot of Jeux d’eau in 1917 and 1920. Jeux d’eau did not figure in these 1922 sessions, rather surprisingly since Ravel very much approved Casadesus’s interpretation. However, even if Ravel was not laying down ‘authentic’ restitutions of particular works, he was at least, with Casadesus’s invaluable assistance, making more general points, especially over a very restricted use of rubato as opposed to the generous application favoured by Schmitz and Cortot, whatever their undoubted digital dexterity.96 He stayed in London for some three weeks, attending and taking part in concerts of his music arranged by Georges Jean-Aubry, who was now editing the magazine The Chesterian for Chester’s, the publishing house. These included the British premiere of the Sonata for violin and cello by André Mangeot and May Mukle on 4 July and his own performance three days later of ‘Oiseaux tristes’, ‘La vallée des cloches’ and the Sonatine at Countess Rothermere’s. On 10 July The Morning Post published an interview with him in which he set out his own position and that of Western European music, as

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he saw it. Whereas in his last interview, in Vienna in October 1920, he seemed anxious to praise the Viennese, here he delivered judgments more objectively, which makes them worth considering in some detail: M. Ravel labels himself as an anti-Debussyist, while he places Debussy as the great creative influence in modern French music. Gounod and Chabrier, with Liszt, he said, were the sources from which the main stream of French music was derived. He would not describe Debussy as an impressionist, for impressionism was a term borrowed from a sister art, which had very little application to music. Debussy had shown a négligence de la forme; he had achieved through intellectual perception what Chopin had done from inspiration or intuition. In a masterpiece like the Après-midi d’un Faune, where he achieved perfection, it was impossible to say how it had been built up. M. Ravel said that he followed Debussy in the ideal of economy of material, but he was at odds with him in his respect for forms. Indeed, in his view of melody, the melodic line, as distinct from the thème développé, he looked upon himself as a Mozartian. He was now engaged on writing a Fantaisie Lyrique, which would be a mixture of every style from the music-hall to the purest lyricism. He believed that opera in the old sense was dead, and the future lay in the direction indicated by Le coq d’or. . . . While we might be moving again to a social internationalism, music was becoming more and more national. Vaughan Williams, for instance, was a composer leagues removed from the influences of the French school, and Schoenberg, ‘one of the greatest figures of the time’, as a German followed a line of development which had hardly reacted at all on the essentially Latin nature of French music. Only at second hand through Stravinsky had the French school felt this new force. Nor did he think that there was anything analogous in France to the movement in England for drawing inspiration and material from folk-song. French music had always been more subject to literary influences; music in France had never been a popular art. As for the Parisians, they had recovered from the musical apathy into which they had fallen after the war, when they applauded Ambroise Thomas and Schoenberg indiscriminately. ‘At that time,’ M. Ravel said, ‘I was near despair. Now that we have likes and dislikes, we are alive again. Enfin, on commence à se battre [at last, we’re starting to fight].97

If we pass over his rejection of the title ‘Impressionist’ for Debussy, in which he was merely anticipating the views of Debussy scholars over the next fifty years or so, we are left with four topics that repay closer study: form (or lack of); opera and its future; nationalism, with or without folk song; and the need for discrimination, even prejudice. His remarks about Debussy and form are not altogether clear. Of course, the whole text has been worked into continuous prose by the interviewer, but his

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honest caveat that ‘one wishes one could take down his conversation verbatim’ may increase rather than diminish confidence in the accuracy of his reporting. On the face of it Ravel might seem to be regarding the imperceptibility of L’après-midi’s form as a fault; only he also describes the work as ‘perfection’ and wanted it played at his funeral as the only piece he knew that was entirely free of ‘trucs’, those little dodges composers use to tidy over awkward moments.98 Is he saying that what can succeed in a ten-minute work will not carry a longer one? Certainly one could argue for hours over the difference between Debussy’s ‘intellectual perception’ and Chopin’s ‘inspiration or intuition’. His melodic allegiance to Mozart is sufficiently attested elsewhere, but his choice of Le coq d’or as pointing a path for contemporary opera is rather more surprising. Since he was deeply involved with L’Enfant et les sortilèges at the time, it is natural to look for links between the two works. Orenstein’s observation that an ‘aura of make-believe enchantment’99 is found in both is undoubtedly true. But beyond that it is helpful to consider Ravel’s experience of the Rimsky opera on stage, which came entirely from Diaghilev’s Paris production in May 1914. This was designed, as Taruskin says, with the singers seated in rows at the sides of the stage, accompanying the movements of dancers and mimes, who enacted the plot according to the conventions of ballet d’action (choreography by Fokin[e]). With colourful sets and costumes by Natal’ya Goncharova in the style of primitive Russian broadside prints (lubki), this production delightfully enhanced the cartoonish aspect of the opera. . . . It also set an important precedent for Stravinsky, whose opera The Nightingale, not to mention such later stage works as Renard, The Wedding and Pulcinella, to a greater or lesser extent embodies the same split between singing and movement. It was an important stage in the modernist dismantling of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Wagnerian ‘total art work’.100

If Ravel did not go so far in splitting singing and movement, dancing is nonetheless an important element in his opera, as is a ‘cartoonish aspect’. He may also have taken from Le coq d’or the notion of an opera that would subvert authority. Rimsky’s work figures a stupid czar who recognizes only his own wishes as law, and not surprisingly it initially ran into trouble with the Russian censors following the country’s recent defeat in the war against Japan. In Ravel’s work, the Child does finally accept Maman’s authority, but only when he can experience it as embodied in love. Ravel’s ‘stupid czar’, as we have seen, is the Opéra itself, on whose imposing stage the spectacle of ‘two Negroes singing ragtime’ might do something to drag it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. The genre itself might likewise graduate from being an ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’, in Dr Johnson’s well-known phrase, to an art form that could actually make people think and even change their minds.

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Ravel’s remarks about folk song are less contentious. Understandably, he had little time for the French folkish efforts of d’Indy and the Schola Cantorum. His own pieces based on folk tunes were, with the single exception of the ‘Chanson française’ from the Chants populaires, exercises in exoticism, whether Greek, Spanish, Italian, Scottish or Hebrew (or, if we count the two vanished Chants populaires, Flemish or Russian). It was as if to say, ‘my music is quite French enough without that’. As for his pleasure at finding Paris again a hothouse of bias and dispute, this was rather more than his piratical side at last reasserting itself after his mother’s death. Tension lies at the heart of his music, whether in the technical detail of modality clashing with octatonicism, or more generally in the deliberate mismatching of form and content, as in Valses nobles and La valse. A society in which everyone agreed with everyone else was dead. In saying ‘on commence à se battre’ he might possibly have been thinking of André Caplet’s French premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces with the Pasdeloup Orchestra on 22 April, which was greeted with animal noises and one woman shouting, ‘It’s a disgrace to subject war widows to stuff like this!’101 (The pieces were not heard again in the city until 1957.) Finally, in calling Schoenberg ‘one of the greatest figures of the time’ he would seem to give the lie to Alma Mahler’s recollection (see p. 222). He arrived back in Montfort on 24 July 1922 and two days later wrote to Jean-Aubry asking him to thank the novelist Joseph Conrad for the gift of cigarettes – ‘the sort of thing one does not forget’.102 Aubry had just translated Conrad’s Within the Tides, and another friend Ravel and the novelist had in common was the singer Louise Alvar Harding, with whom Ravel was often to stay during his London visits and whom he accompanied on tour. In early August he began to feel lonely and depressed at Le Belvédère and went to stay with Mme Dreyfus at Lyons-la-Forêt. It was here, during August and September, that he completed his Berceuse sur le nom de Fauré and his orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition. There was to be no visit to the Basque country this year. The tiny Berceuse, for violin and piano, was dedicated to Roland-Manuel’s son Claude who had been born on 20 June. It was one of seven pieces commissioned by Henry Prunières from Fauré’s pupils for the 1 October special number of the Revue musicale devoted to the 78-year-old composer. But Ravel failed to write the promised article on Fauré’s songs; instead Roland-Manuel went out to Montfort and interviewed him on the subject. The musical supplement also included piano pieces by Aubert, Enesco, Koechlin, Paul Ladmirault and Schmitt, as well as a reduction of the Poème symphonique written for the occasion by Roger-Ducasse. ‘When Prunières was first casting around for a theme on which the musical contributions might be based, he asked Ravel to find a theme in Fauré’s output to serve as the basis for a set of variations; but when, in September 1921, Fauré himself was let into the secret, he suggested a theme made up of two leitmotifs from Prométhée:

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“Pandora” and “Punishment of Prometheus”.’103 With its three descending fourths, it might have suited Ravel perfectly, but in the end the decision was made to follow the idea adopted for the Haydn celebrations of 1909 and use a musical transliteration of the name Gabriel Fauré: GABDBEE FAGDE (Ex. 7/2).

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Example 7.2a. Fauré, theme based on material from Prométhée; Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, A Musical Life, p. 427

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Example 7.2b. Theme of Fauré tribute

As Nectoux points out, this idea in fact goes back before 1909 to the collaborative string quartet written in Fauré’s honour around 1900, including a movement each by Ravel, Raoul Bardac, Ladmirault and Roger-Ducasse, in which the four movements were in the keys of F, A, G and D. Ravel’s F major contribution was almost certainly an early version of the Quartet we know, while Roger-Ducasse later incorporated his D major finale, with its FAGD motto, into his First String Quartet. For the 1922 tributes, five of the composers followed the pattern of 1909 in using the clef allemande, in which ‘h’ signifies B natural; but for some reason, Ravel and Schmitt preferred the clef anglaise which retains the alphabetical order, so that B natural is signified by the ‘i’ of ‘Gabriel’. Pleasant though the Berceuse is, and typical of its composer in its descending fourths and bitonal crunches, it possesses little of the concentrated grace and contrapuntal skill that distinguished the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn. As befits a Berceuse, the dynamics never rise above piano, and the contrasts are largely harmonic, between the modality of the first 16 bars and the chromaticism of the following 26 (including two reappearances of versions of the theme in the piano) – a pattern then repeated with different proportions of 22 bars (incorporating a varied reprise) + 8 bars. With regard to Pictures, we may regret that Koussevitsky did not wait to commission Ravel’s orchestration until Musorgsky’s original piano score was published in 1931. It would have been good, for example, to have ‘Bydlo’ beginning with the composer’s fortissimo rather than with Rimsky’s pianissimo and crescendo. That said, for most listeners Ravel intuited enough of

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Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

18 Opening bars of the Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré, given to the pianist Youra Guller ‘to send her to sleep’

Musorgsky’s roughness through Rimsky’s reworking for his version to counter charges of Sheherezadean glitz. Marnat claims that he took some ideas from the orchestration of the work by the Slovenian-born conductor Leo Funtek (who finished his version in this same year of 1922 while living in Finland) on the supposition that Koussevitsky may have sent it to Ravel. But from Marnat’s description there would seem to be more differences than similarities between the two. At all events, familiarity, initially through Koussevitsky’s promotion and then through disc, has made Ravel’s the prime version out of the twentyfive or so available, so that great efforts are needed to hear ‘Il vecchio castello’ as other than a saxophone solo, or the ‘Ballet des poussins dans leurs coques’ as other than chirpings on woodwind, harp and high strings. After completing his orchestration in September, Ravel travelled to Amsterdam where Mengelberg conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra in La valse, Rapsodie espagnole and Shéhérazade as part of a festival of French music. This was so successful that Ravel had to accompany Claire Croiza in a more or less impromptu recital of his songs. As always when he arrived at a major foreign city, journalists were quick to seek his opinions, and on this occasion he was particularly forthcoming. Having demolished any notion that La valse was inspired by the current situation in Austria or indeed referred to anything but itself, he had a quick swipe at Diaghilev: asked whether ballet had a future, he replied ‘No, ballet is now on the decline, and the Ballets russes aren’t as good as they used to be. But it does have a future if there’s a return to the

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18th century.’ And he went on to declare that ‘it’s the cinema that has the brightest future. Music can work with it in useful ways. Honegger has tried something along these lines in synchronizing movement on the screen with music.’104 While his support for the cinema was to be validated by history, his mention of Honegger may at first seem puzzling since that composer’s first film score, for Raymond Bernard’s Les misérables, was not written until 1933. However, in 1922 Honegger was in discussions with the film director Abel Gance over music for La roue which, said Honegger, ‘will be an event in the cinema world. It’s already grossed two million in America.’ This never came about, but it is possible that music for it was the basis of Pacific 231.105 Le courrier musical (1 October 1922) mentions that Honegger was working on the film and that he was using a ‘ciné-pupitre Charles Delacommune’. Ravel acknowledges Satie’s spiritual influence on Les Six, but taxes him with a lack of sincerity. This does not contradict his view that ‘sincerity may be a reason, it can never be an excuse’. For him, sincerity was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Satie’s persistent and all-encompassing jokiness could not disguise what Ravel regarded undoubtedly as a lack of technique, and probably as an amateurish attitude towards a task best left to professionals. His final comment of note on his contemporaries was that Schoenberg was, on the contrary, a sincere composer, but that his music would not influence young French composers, ‘because it has too few affinities with the French spirit’.106 In this he was proved right, at least in the immediate term. The interview finishes with his surprising statement that he is still working in a ‘fantasy for piano and orchestra based on Le grand Meaulnes’, a project born of his reading of AlainFournier’s novel in October 1916, but which he had not mentioned in the meantime. On 1 October the Revue musicale published the homages to Fauré and also Ravel’s dictated article on Fauré’s songs. One assumes he authorized the published version, and certainly it seems to stand as one of the key texts for establishing what he felt music was all about, but it has to be noted that, according to both Roger-Ducasse and Rosenthal, it was actually written by Roland-Manuel (as the lecture published by the Rice Institute in Houston was to be six years later).107 Here we must confine ourselves to three points. Firstly, music must sound natural: of Clair de lune he says, ‘this masterpiece seems to appear in a single gesture, there seems to be no searching involved.’ Secondly, this does not rule out danger or surprise: of Le secret, ‘exceptional, ambiguous resolutions and modulations to distant keys that bring us back to the main one along unknown paths, these are the sorts of perilous games that Fauré was master of from the beginning.’ And thirdly, there should be no reliance on formulae: in general Fauré ‘disdains the facile procedure that consists of moving abruptly from psalmody to lyrical effusion, an artifice that Massenet is not alone in cherishing’ – to which Orenstein appends a useful explanatory note that ‘Massenet’s expedient of repeating several low notes which suddenly

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rise to a dramatic high note may also be seen in the early songs of Debussy (“De fleurs” from Proses lyriques) and Ravel (Un grand sommeil noir and Si morne!).’108 In general though, according to Rosenthal, Ravel had no great love for Fauré’s music because of its continuously floating tonalities.109 On 19 October Koussevitsky conducted the first performance of Pictures at an Exhibition at the Opéra, to great acclaim. Predictably, Roland-Manuel’s review in the Revue musicale was laudatory, congratulating Ravel on disguising Musorgsky’s compositional inadequacies and on producing an orchestration that did not sound anything like that of Daphnis.110 Ravel then traveled to Milan, for the first performances there on 1 November of the Berceuse and the Sonata for violin and cello, together with Gaspard and the Introduction et Allegro, and went on to Venice, followed by three days in Stresa. On his return to Montfort on 20 November he began to orchestrate the two Debussy piano pieces requested by Jobert (see note 91). Probably he did not attend Proust’s funeral at St Pierre de Chaillot on the 22nd, when the entry of the coffin, with full military retinue since Proust was an Officier de la Légion d’honneur, was accompanied rather curiously by the Pavane pour une Infante défunte.111 Regarding Ravel’s orchestration of Debussy’s Sarabande, Marnat complains that Ravel has broken up what he hears as Debussy’s long, continuous lines into ‘broken stumps scattered over different orchestral combinations’.112 This appears to assume that Ravel was trying to reproduce Debussy’s own style of orchestration, which he admitted was impossible. In orchestrating the piece à la Ravel, he was throwing new, brighter light on it, almost in cinematographic fashion through a series of short takes from different angles. We are, of course, all entitled either to like the result or not (see Inghelbrecht’s response, p. 277). Over Danse, Marnat makes the fair point that Ravel here orchestrates à la Chabrier; and since both Ravel and Debussy were unreserved admirers of the Auvergnat master, it is hard to imagine the piece’s composer complaining. Certainly the pp espressivo passage for oboe and strings starting at bar 180 would do credit to any of the three. In December, after delays due to his trips abroad, at least some central heating equipment had reached Le Belvédère, although on 17th ‘the radiators have been in the garden for four days. Heaven knows when they’ll be installed!’113 Better news came from Richard Strauss in Vienna, telling him that Ma mère l’Oye was to be played in the Redoutensaal in January. Worse news was that the Staatsoper was not, after all, going to put on La valse this season and that they could not therefore expect Ravel to reserve the premiere for them indefinitely. Nor did he. Ravel’s claim that in Paris now ‘on commence à se débattre’ can be to some extent substantiated by the capital’s musical life around the start of 1923. On the conservative side, Haydn’s ‘Oxford’ Symphony (no. 92), introduced at the Concerts Pasdeloup by Inghelbrecht, is found by reviewers ‘rather old hat’ but ‘with charming moments’, and Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto is dubbed

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‘exquis’. Pierné’s ballet Cydalise et le chèvre-pied, premiered at the Opéra on 15 January, is hailed by the editor of Le courrier musical as ‘something healthy to settle weakened stomachs and perverted taste buds, devoid of seasoning with choucroute, kakebroë or tortilleras, helped along simply with a pinch of French salt and washed down with white wine’. In the modern corner, René Brancour, reviewing La valse in Le ménestrel, misses the fresh spontaneity of The Blue Danube, but the first French performance of Webern’s Five Pieces for string quartet at the Concerts Wiéner on 14 December is surprisingly well received in most quarters, if not all (see p. 250). The pace of Ravel’s life through 1922 suggests that, despite persistent insomnia, his morale was now fairly well re-established. His complaint, in a letter of 10 January 1923 to Jean Françaix’s father, that ‘during the past five months I haven’t stopped travelling or remained at home for eight days in a row’, needs to be interpreted with caution: most of August and September found him at Lyons-la-Forêt chez Mme Dreyfus which, if not precisely home, was a near substitute. Anyway, his schedule did not shrink noticeably in 1923. Alfred Françaix had sent Ravel one of the 10-year-old Jean’s earliest compositions and, with his habitual interest in the young, Ravel responded, if belatedly, with practical advice. The most important thing was curiosity; musicianship must be developed before embarking on technical studies; he should study a polyphonic instrument such as the piano; and he must continue his academic studies, because ‘today, more than ever, a musician should not be only a musician’. Finally, he must have courage to pursue this ‘delightful’ career [carrière ‘d’agrément’].114 Maybe here Ravel had been thinking of the hours of slogging put into the Sonata for violin and cello. If so, there was worse to come. But first, on 12 January, he had the honour of attending the first ever allRavel piano recital, given at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées by the 18-yearold Henriette Faure, the elder sister of the future French Prime Minister Edgar Faure. Even if she was never to have a huge career, her 1959 recording of Miroirs and Le tombeau de Couperin shows that she had considerable talent and dexterity.115 But for Ravel talent and dexterity were not enough. She later recalled rehearsing the Valses nobles with him: ‘he got up, stood near the piano and put me through a torture that half a century has not allowed me to forget, stopping me continually, picking me up on the smallest detail, for a breath, a silence, a pedalling, an inflexion . . . and behind all that, like a clock at the end of a corridor, his inexorable 123123. . . . It was exhausting, one had to integrate fantasy with rigour and produce dreaminess or elegance within an extreme of rhythm and precision. This martyrdom lasted nearly two and a half hours.’116 Ravel can’t have been too displeased, as on 10 November in mid-rehearsals he had given her a signed photo of himself dedicated ‘à ma charmante et parfaite interprète’.117 At the end of January he found himself on the committee of the newlyformed French section of the International Society for Contemporary Music

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which had been founded in Salzburg the previous year by a group of composers including Bartók, Kodály, Webern and Milhaud. Milhaud was currently in the USA and Poulenc sent him a list of participants in the French section that included all the great and good as well as Erik Satie – or as Poulenc put it, ‘Quelle jolie salade n’est-ce pas.’ Emile Vuillermoz did not want Milhaud on the executive committee at any price because ‘you’re giving an anti-Ravel talk in America. Ravel, determined to do the fine thing, has demanded you be one of the 15 chosen ones.’118 Needless to say, Satie had his own views about the enterprise. ‘Vuillermoz has created, on the International Committee, a Milhaud incident. Koechlin and I responded to him: but he’s reserving the right to ask you a number of questions about your anti-French-music attitude in America. . . . Yes. A strange thing: Ravel shook me by the hand (of his own accord) and stood up to Vuillermoz (if only to appear ‘chic’). Yes. . . . I shan’t be able to remain on this Committee: they’re too fat-headed.’119 The talk in question was one Milhaud gave in New York on Satie and Les Six, from which, rightly or wrongly, rumours of his anti-Ravelian stance had crossed the Atlantic. Less contentiously, on 30 January 1923 Ravel stood as Maurice Delage’s witness at his civil marriage in the Mairie of the sixteenth arrondissement to Nelly Guérin-Desjardins, an occasion with a happy outcome – as Ravel said, ‘What a pair! [Ça, c’est un ménage!] They’re never apart for a moment! If I had a wife, she would have to be like that with me . . . [confidentially] but I could never stand it!’120 The weeks following were given up to overseeing some painting and, finally, the installation of central heating in Le Belvédère, before he went off for a concert in Pau and then a week’s holiday in St-Jean-de-Luz, staying with the Gaudins in the rue Gambetta. The end of March found Ravel in facetious mood. His note to Lucien Garban that ‘Grovlez tells me his Heure espagnole is finished and handed in to the publisher’ intimates that Durand had accepted Ravel’s suggestion that Grovlez be commissioned to reduce the large orchestra for that opera. But the letter goes on: ‘He would like me to suggest to Durand an edition of the Rapsodie [espagnole]. Perhaps that could form a pair with the catch-all transcription for two or 197 instruments? Anyway, I’ll suggest it.’121 Whether Ravel was after all unhappy with Grovlez’s involvement (had he even seen the reduced version?) or whether he had been in two minds over preparing it himself, is unclear. Durand issued a piano-conductor score and parts of Grovlez’s arrangement in 1924. Ravel found more aggressive public utterance in response to an article in Le courrier musical on 1 January 1923 by Louis Vuillemin, condemning what he called Wiéner’s ‘concerts métèques’, that is concerts of ‘dago’ music (maybe Webern’s Five Pieces had been the last straw), and the involvement of ‘musical Dadaists’ and ‘cosmopolitan mugs’. Ravel’s icily polite reply, written together with Roussel, Caplet and Roland-Manuel and published in the magazine’s 1 April number, expresses surprise at and total disagreement with Vuillemin’s

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article, accepting that the music at issue may invite discussion but emphasizing that it cannot in any sense be said to lack interest. The last paragraph is the iciest: ‘They take the opportunity of expressing the wish that patriotism should be wary of wandering on to a terrain where there is nothing to conquer, but everything to lose’: which, from four anciens combattants, should have been enough to freeze Vuillemin into silence. Unwisely he chose to reply, suggesting that the four composers had been poisoned by the gas emanating from these noxious products – unwisely, because Caplet had indeed been gassed in the trenches and would die of the effects in April 1925. Since finishing the Sonata for violin and cello in February 1922, Ravel had completed nothing original except the 72 bars of the Berceuse. The notice on the voice and piano autograph of L’Enfant et les sortilèges, ‘Divers lieux, 1920–25’, suggests he might have been working on this, but in his London interview for the Morning Post in April 1923 (see p. 252) he insists that he has written nothing for a year. In an interview for L’intransigeant on 28 January he had mentioned an ongoing piano piece, but this never came to anything.122 Possibly the new paths outlined by the Sonata were leading to uncertain territory that called for careful prospecting. At some point in the spring of 1923 he was making sketches for a violin sonata, though there is no way of knowing what links, if any, it had with the one he would finish four years later. At all events, he wrote only two works between September 1922 and finishing L’Enfant in the early months of 1925, the tiny song Ronsard à son âme and Tzigane, and both address particular technical and aesthetic issues that diverge from the searching objectivity of the Sonata of 1920–22. Like Peer Gynt, Ravel was ‘going round about’ in aiming for stylistic goals that he would attain most notably in the Chansons madécasses and the Violin Sonata. Intermittent work on the opera left him time to travel and in 1923 he made journeys to Italy, to London twice, to Switzerland, Brussels, again to St-Jeande-Luz, and to Amsterdam. The Italian visit was, by his own admission, botched. It is likely concerts were involved (Orenstein reasonably suggests that the ‘Ferrieri’ referred to in a letter to Lucien Garban of 31 March may have been an impresario123), but he resented being rushed around the country, with only a few days in Rome and a few hours in Naples. He was then in London on 12 April and on the 14th conducted Ma mère and La valse at the Queen’s Hall (a fee of £50 had been agreed the previous August124). Of Ravel the ‘virtuoso’ pianist, enough has been said to show that he was never happy in the part. Ravel the conductor seems to have gone down slightly better: while showing a parallel stiffness in technique, he was at least clear and unfussy. The Times reported on 16 April that ‘His baton is not the magician’s wand of the virtuoso conductor. He just stood there beating time and keeping watch, getting everything into its right place . . . Ma mère l’Oye has never sounded so simple and childlike; the introduction to La valse, with its flitting scraps of waltz rhythm on bassoons and deep-toned instruments, had

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an unusual clarity, and both pieces were immensely enjoyed.’125 The remark about the clarity at the start of La valse must have pleased him particularly, given that, as noted above, he was never content with the orchestration of this passage. He wrote to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, ‘according to the papers I am, if not a great conductor, at least a good one. That’s more than I bargained for’.126 He found less favour with Sir Henry Wood who, for a rehearsal of Ma mère l’Oye, led the composer exactly at ten o’clock . . . to the rostrum where he received a great welcome. He opened his score, turned several pages and then back to the first. At this he gazed for some seconds. He then turned to me in the Grand Circle. ‘How many pupitres (desks) of first violins are there?’ ‘Eight, sir.’ A long silence. Then (very slowly): ‘I will take only five pupitres.’ Ravel turned over more pages. ‘How many pupitres are there of second violins?’ ‘Eight, sir.’ ‘I will take only five pupitres.’ This went on for some time because he asked the same question about the violas, ’cellos and basses. The orchestra behaved like angels; not a muscle was moved, not a sound uttered. But the first note they played was at 10.23 by my watch. And, I may add, I had a concerto and a symphony to rehearse [SaintSaëns’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Lev Pouishnoff, and Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony].127

It may have been of some small comfort to Sir Henry to read in the Morning Post of 18 April that Ravel approved the seating arrangements of the orchestra with ‘the violins placed together and the harps well to the front on the left’ and to be reminded that the non-anglophone composer ‘had found an admirable interpreter amongst the ’cellists’, without whom the concerto and symphony might have found themselves in yet graver danger. When the interviewer asked Ravel about his work, ‘he laughed. For a year he had written nothing. Why, he did not know. “Je m’ennuie,” with another laugh and a shrug of the shoulders that contained a world of meaning in so fastidious a craftsman, so careful an artist. . . . It is clear that M. Ravel, as a sensible man, only creates when the desire to do so becomes too imperious to resist.’128 From London he travelled to Brussels for a chamber concert on the 26th, and here too he had a great success – as a pianist. We learn of his last journey this summer from a postcard of 31 May to Louise Harding’s young daughter Sigrid: ‘I’ve come to Switzerland to cure the chill brought on by your scent-spray. Forbidden till now to do anything whatever, especially writing. Things are going better.’129 Obviously the scent-spray

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is a joke. But the ban on writing? Had the cafard descended once more? ‘Je m’ennuie’ could indeed have ‘contained a world of meaning’. The answer might be to ‘go West’. On 15 May he wrote to Roland-Manuel: ‘Then as to a possible tour of the United States: “If I’d been Cambronne, I’d have said the word [merde] to the Americans”: they find my pretentions too exalted. But they’re going to make me a counter-proposal.’130 On 12 June the British impresario Rudolph Mayer dangled before him the possibility of ‘a first class engagement as guest conductor in America to conduct the big orchestras there’.131 But Ravel’s reluctance is spelt out clearly in response to a similar invitation from Robert Schmitz: ‘you’ll forgive my hesitation: I haven’t yet given up hope of getting back to work and, flattering though success might be, it doesn’t seem to me to be worth the loss of 3 or 4 months.’132 Into this period of marking time intruded three untimely reminders that other composers were not similarly afflicted. At the Opéra on 1 June, L’heure espagnole was given as a curtain-raiser for the premiere of Roussel’s operaballet Padmâvatî. The general view of musicians was summed up by André Caplet in a letter to Roussel, claiming that in Padmâvatî ‘the music utterly dominates the story and the production, both in the acting and the décor.’133 Satie refused to attend, calling the evening a ‘rasoirerie’ (a great yawn): not only was Ravel now beyond the pale but Roussel, Satie’s revered teacher though he was, had unwisely used as his librettist Louis Laloy, another of Satie’s foes.134 Then on 13 June 1923 at the Gaîté-Lyrique the Ballets russes presented Stravinsky’s Les noces. At this moment Ravel was having foot trouble and, as he told Roland-Manuel, didn’t get to see the ballet until the 21st: ‘I heard Les noces last Thursday, doped up by Desjardins who injected cocaine into my foot. You were right: it’s a splendid work. I even think it’s Stravinsky’s masterpiece so far, and the production is also one of the masterpieces of the Russian season. I have to thank you: maybe, without your urging, I would have missed out on this great pleasure.’135 He wrote to congratulate Stravinsky on the 26th, regretting that he hadn’t been able to hear the work more often and stressing the damage this outing had done to his foot – no doubt meant to impress on Stravinsky, after Mavra, the extent to which he was willing to sacrifice his health in his colleague’s cause.136 He was echoing the general view of the capital, which welcomed Les noces ‘with enthusiasm and a certain sense of relief that Mavra could now be seen as an aberration and perhaps quietly forgotten’.137 Anyway, Stravinsky took the proffered olive branch in the right way, asking him to ‘keep in touch and write (in general!) a bit more frequently to your old friend’, and regretting only that ‘you didn’t also hear it in the early days when they played it so well’.138 Unfortunately, the Ravel-Stravinsky correspondence seems to have ended there. Ravel’s ailment, whatever it was, meant too that he had to miss the premiere on 25 June of Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro in the Princesse de Polignac’s

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salon. This was, in its smaller way, as much of a success as Les noces, and didn’t receive an encore only because the performers, including Wanda Landowska on the harpsichord and Viñes among those working the marionettes, took umbrage that the Princesse had not asked them to join the ‘quality’ dinner before the performance.139 The fact that Ravel was on close terms with all three composers (in Falla’s case, very close – his inability to get to see Ravel during this June clearly pained both parties140) can have done nothing to ease his frustration at the drying up of his creative faculties. Then at the end of June he crushed two fingers in the legs of a folding chair and the middle finger of his left hand was still numb in early August, at a time when he was at last, ‘after a year and a half of inactivity’, planning to resume work.141 No wonder he complained to Mme Casella of being depressed.142 His natural reaction to this these days was to head for the Basque country, which he did on 3 September.143 He was also no doubt intrigued to hear L’heure espagnole at the Casino municipal in Biarritz the following evening. The critic of the Gazette de Biarritz was not wholeheartedly in favour, finding Ravel ‘sometimes too clever, so that his magnificent, prodigious, complex technique suffocates the spontaneous simplicity of inspiration’, but realizing that the music nevertheless ‘did great honour to the new French music.’144 It is not clear how long the composer stayed in St-Jean-de-Luz, but he was still there on the 19th to receive Père José Antonio Donostia, a Capuchin monk whom he had met in Paris in 1920 and recommended to study counterpoint and fugue with Eugène Cools.145 A letter to Durand of 8 September 1923 concerned a request from Sonia Pavlov of the Opéra-Comique either to write a ballet for her or, ‘if I didn’t have time, which is the case, to try and adapt some of my Spanish works to the libretto (the subject is inspired by the Pavane pour une Infante défunte). I think I’ve found the way, with ten newly-composed bars at the most, to do this little job à la Diaghilev, which will bring together the Pavane, the Alborada and the Rapsodie espagnole. Of course, this olla podrida [pot-pourri] wouldn’t be published.’146 The ballet, set in Madrid around 1670, was to be called Le portrait de l’Infante (José Bruyr refers to it as L’Infante à la rose147). The material, which came up for sale at a Paris auction in 1977, involves three actors, Donia Mariana, Antonio and The King’s Dwarf, and is divided into six scenes with music both old and new, as Ravel describes. In the event he composed eleven new pages of piano music, almost all for the third scene which itself comprises three dances: ‘Danse de séduction’, ‘Danse des grenades et des oranges’, and ‘Danse de la guitare et de la rose blanche’, the latter incorporating three pages of the ‘Habanera of Sites auriculaires and Rapsodie espagnole’. The fourth scene consists of two dances, ‘Danse grotesque: Fandango’ and ‘Danse du châle et de l’éventail’, the latter taken entirely from ‘Alborada’. Scenes 5 and 6 were set to extracts from the Pavane. Although Bruyr says the ballet was

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orchestrated, no other score of the new material has been found and there is no evidence that the ballet was ever produced.148 Ravel was back at Montfort by 9 October, when he wrote to Mme Casella saying that he had asked Koussevitsky to reserve a place for her for the concert on the 11th at which ‘I hope they’re going to play the new work by Delage: I’ll be going just for that.’149 In fact Koussevitsky did not play any Delage until 8 November, when he conducted his Ouverture pour un ballet de l’avenir and Trois poèmes.150 But any plans Ravel had to get back to work were interrupted by conducting engagements in Amsterdam, The Hague and Haarlem, and a visit to London, again staying with Mme Alvar in Holland Park, for two allRavel concerts on 16 and 18 October at the Queen’s Hall. Reviewing the first, the critic of The Times (17 October) thought the Introduction et Allegro, with harpist Gwendolen Mason, went down best, and his illuminating account of the occasion also sheds light on how Ravel was currently viewed in Britain: M. Ravel’s charm is something elfish and inscrutable . . . he conducts with a wrist as steady and supple and with as much economy of unnecessary emotions as a man might practise with his razor . . . he plays the piano in the low-pitched tone of ordinary conversation, as if he were telling you the common sense of the matter. Besides all this he writes music, and is thought to have made some fame with it. It is no music of the passions; it yearns after no infinite; it takes a simple delight in the curious variety of things and the whimsicalities of persons on this good brown earth, as an interested spectator, not as a maenad or a moralist. It is grotesquely detached and vividly true.

The day before, an interview with Ravel was published in The Star. The opening paragraphs of this constitute a warning over taking this sort of material as gospel, containing as they do three untruths in a row: ‘I haven’t composed a note for two years’ (even if we ignore the Berceuse, he was putting the finishing touches to the Sonata in February 1922); ‘I’m thinking about a lyrical operatic fantasy’ (he had already started on this at least by 1920); and ‘next year I am going right away by invitation to conduct the orchestras in the New World’ (no, negotiations had already failed). But he was undoubtedly telling the truth as he saw it in praising the modern English school and insisting that ‘the best jazz is written by good musicians’. As a final compliment to his interviewer, he wrote out the three opening bars of a tune from La valse (figure 9, bars 4–6) – for violas in the alto clef, probably that symbol’s unique appearance in any British newspaper of the twentieth century.151 Then, at last, he was able to return to Montfort and start wrestling with the recalcitrant Muse, relying on Baudelaire’s dictum that ‘inspiration is undoubtedly the sister of daily labour’.152 Work was interrupted only by a single visit to Rotterdam to conduct, for which he left on 16 November.153 Otherwise

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Marcelle Gerar was informed on 25 November that he would not be coming to the all-Ravel programme on 6 December as ‘I have resolved not to leave Montfort the entire winter’,154 and Mme Casella on 29 December that ‘I don’t know when I’ll be coming to Paris. I’m working.’155 This work may have included L’Enfant et les sortilèges, and certainly he was continuing from earlier sketches of the Violin Sonata, since Hélène JourdanMorhange quotes a letter of 1923 saying, ‘It won’t be difficult and you won’t sprain anything! You mustn’t be cross with me, my dear . . . I’m working. . . . The trouble your wretched sonata has given me! (I’m not cross with you either!)’156 The remark about sprain may have been prompted by early signs of the rheumatism that put an early end to Jourdan-Morhange’s career and prevented her from ever playing the sonata. But Ravel’s own troubles with it were far from over, and announcements in The Times (17 October 1923 and 6 February 1924) that the work would be played at the Aeolian Hall on 16 January and then, being unfinished in February, by Jelly d’Aranyi on 26 April, both proved to be wildly premature. He must have found more immediate consolation in two less challenging projects, both of which he completed in January. During the previous autumn Henry Prunières approached nine composers (Fauré, Dukas, Roussel, Aubert, Caplet, Honegger, Delage, Roland-Manuel and Ravel) for settings of Ronsard, the 400th anniversary of whose birth he wanted to celebrate with a special number of the Revue musicale on 1 May 1924. Ravel chose Ronsard’s reworking of the Emperor Hadrian’s famous ‘Animula vagula blandula’, and the only problem was that, after he had finished his song, Fauré then chose the same poem and got as far as making sketches. Gustave Samazeuilh records that ‘When I told Ravel, he was not at all happy about it and offered to withdraw in his teacher’s favour.’157 Fauré’s reaction was to abandon his sketch and destroy it. As Jean-Michel Nectoux says, ‘the considerable beauty of Ravel’s song is some compensation for the regret we must feel when we realize that Fauré surely saw this as his “last will and testament” in the field of song.’158 Under two minutes in length, Ronsard à son âme appears to be the simplest song Ravel ever wrote, even if he told Falla that he had ‘put as much energy into it as though it were destined for me’.159 The piano part consists mostly of bare fifths for the right hand alone, suggested maybe by the opening of L’Enfant (Ravel declared it was his favourite among his own songs because he could play it and hold a cigarette at the same time). The vocal setting is syllabic with no melismata or large intervals. Ronsard’s desire to infuse the French language with the spirit of the classics is matched in Ravel’s setting, also retrospective in its almost Palestrinian regulation of consonance and dissonance. For the most part voice and piano work against each other rhythmically, but the ensuing tensions are resolved at various speeds and by upward or downward movement of either of the two strands of the counterpoint.

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[Simplice ( = 60)]

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foi - ble - let - te,

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froid ro - yau

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morts.

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Example 7.3. Ravel, Ronsard à son âme, bars 16–26

In lines 4–6 of the twelve-line poem, the frequency of the dissonances increases, not through any arbitrary scheme of ‘wrong’ notes but through the overlapping imitation in both piano and voice of the guiding phrase of the song, played complete by the piano in bars 7–10 of Ex. 7.3. As in so much of the music of Ravel’s ‘style dépouillé’, emotion has not been discarded, but concentrated. The effect of the singer’s unique low C sharp on the final words, ‘je dors’, crowned instantly by a harmonic halo of perfect fifths, draws its evocative power from the contrast with the narrow intervals and chaste counterpoint that precede it. This moving song is indeed ‘classical’ in the sense that Gide described, but equally it belongs to its own time: Ravel may well have ‘borrowed’ the stacked-up fifths in the final bar from the ending of Milhaud’s Catalogue de fleurs, premiered at the Conservatoire in 1922; just as Milhaud would seem to have ‘borrowed’ them from the opening of Daphnis – and then extended them from seven notes to ten. It’s hard to say what this nexus implies, if anything. The bass of A natural common to all three passages might imply deliberate homage between the two composers. Was Ravel saying, ‘Thanks, Darius, for showing that this trope can be an ending as well as a beginning’? The second small task Ravel undertook to set the wheels in motion again was to arrange the piano part of the ‘Chanson hébraïque’ of the 1910 Chants populaires for small orchestra – a slightly unusual combination of flute, two bassoons, side drum, bass drum, harp and strings. Otherwise there is nothing remarkable about the setting, which features the composer’s favourite double bass harmonics, this time pizzicato. What is remarkable, as already mentioned, is that this version (now in the Robert Owen Lehman archive in the Morgan Library) has never been published, Durand producing instead an instrumentation by Delage in 1957.

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Following the departure of the over-excitable Prohaska in 1921 after only a few weeks as Ravel’s housekeeper, her role had been taken first of all by one called Marie-Thérèse and then finally, around 1924, by Mme Reveleau. As far as she was able, Mme Reveleau seems to have taken the place of Ravel’s mother, at least to the extent of managing the domestic side of his life with calm and devoted efficiency, which she did to the end of his life. When not on his travels, Ravel could now entertain, if not lavishly, then at least in the knowledge that the soup would not be burnt or the napkins crumpled. On the Sundays that were not devoted to Edouard, Ravel’s friends would gather at Montfort and he would entertain, brewing highly individual cocktails. ‘The new friends’, wrote RolandManuel, ‘mingled with the old Apaches in an atmosphere of discreet gaiety. An unwritten law banned serious topics and aesthetic discussions.’160 Héle`ne Jourdan-Morhange, Madeleine Grey, Germaine Tailleferre, Arthur Honegger, Maurice Delage, Luc-Albert Moreau, Hélène Casella and Manuel Rosenthal were among the many friends to visit Le Belvédère on these occasions. After lunch a walk in the forest of Rambouillet was de rigueur and towards evening the party would arrive at the large Café du Relais in Rambouillet itself and the discussion would grow more animated; finally, back to Le Belvédère for a late supper cooked by Mme Reveleau, with whom Ravel would conduct furious arguments on a basis of the deepest mutual esteem.161 Although concerned to maintain his privacy, Ravel was no recluse. The local curé regularly referred to this agnostic as ‘my best parishioner’, and Rosenthal later recalled that ‘when Hitler came to power, at the moment when so many Germans had to leave their country, many of them came to Montfort l’Amaury to Ravel’s house. I found out – not from him of course, but from his housekeeper Mme Reveleau – that not only did he never refuse a request for help, but he handed over generously as much as he could find, and well beyond his means.’162 Like Anatole France and many other French intellectuals, Ravel combined a lack of religious belief with a decidedly leftish brand of politics (Léon Blum had been one of the Apaches and remained a close friend) and a sympathy for the underdog. Calvocoressi remembered his reactions to the death sentence passed in 1910 on an anarchist and pimp called Liabeuf: Ravel was among the most eager to secure a reprieve. He would have liked me to sign the petition. He was, he told me, against the death penalty always. Quite apart from that, he averred that Liabeuf had been the victim of a trumped-up charge simply because he was an anarchist, and the blind fury that had led him to avenge his honour by shooting his accusers was understandable. After Liabeuf ’s execution, Ravel was so upset that for a few days he shut himself up in his home, refusing to see anybody.163

Apart from working and giving parties, he also used Le Belvédère for teaching, even if on a fairly informal basis. The ironically named ‘classe de

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Ravel’ or ‘école de Montfort’ consisted basically of Roland-Manuel and Maurice Delage, joined in the mid-1920s by Manuel Rosenthal. Other composers to benefit from his advice were Nicolas Obouhov and Lennox Berkeley. After Ravel’s death Roland-Manuel remembered: Ravel did not regard friendship as a contract for the distribution of praise and in the course of the master/pupil relationship which we soon adopted his frankness sometimes took on a tone of asperity. Today I can bless this harshness but more than once I found it hard to take . . . He would encourage me, as a consolation, to make an analysis of works which, old-fashioned as they were, stood in my eyes as the abomination of desolation; for example, he gave me as a model the dream of des Grieux from Manon.164

Writing to Obouhov in 1919, Ravel says: ‘For the moment I suggest an excellent exercise: listen closely, without looking at the score, to a straightforward, classical work after you have made a close study of the piano transcription. Try to reproduce the orchestration you have heard and then compare yours with that of the composer.’165 A similarly refreshing lack of mystique informed all Ravel’s teaching, which was squarely based on the imitation of good models. ‘If you have nothing to say, you cannot do better, while waiting for the ultimate silence, than repeat what has been well said. If you do have something to say, that something will never be more clearly seen than in your unwitting infidelity to the model.’166 Ravel regarded ‘inspiration’ as a too loosely formed concept and liked to quote the Baudelaire prescription mentioned above (p. 255). While Ravel’s standards were extreme, he realized that their unattainability was the whole point. He also did not waste time insisting on them to people who could not understand; so that, in retrospect, Rosenthal could feel flattered at the fate of his first offering in which his enthusiasm had not extended to the calligraphy. Ravel tore it up – slowly – and dropped it in the waste-paper basket.167 Such behaviour is laudable as long as a teacher applies the same standards to himself; and in the course of 1924 Ravel undoubtedly filled his waste paper basket many times over with rejected ideas for L’Enfant et les sortilèges and for the Violin Sonata which ‘a fit of depression had made me abandon’.168 The breakthrough, however, came in neither of these works, but precisely through an exercise in imitation. The first sign of renewed creative life comes in a letter to Garban of 10 March: ‘It would be extremely kind of you to send me Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies as soon as possible. There are quite a few that I’ve forgotten.’169 Three days later, a letter to Jelly d’Aranyi explains: ‘Will you have a chance of coming to Paris in two or three weeks? If so, I should like to consult you about Tzigane, which I’m writing specially for you and which will be dedicated to you. It will replace the Sonata, temporarily abandoned, on the London programme. This Tzigane is to be a highly virtuoso piece. Certain passages could be brilliantly effective, provided it’s possible to play them, which I’m not

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always sure about.’170 This is not entirely easy to reconcile with his admission to Roland-Manuel, twelve days later, that ‘practically nothing of Tzigane is yet written down. Even so I’m sure it’ll be finished in time.’171 The most likely explanation is that he had sketched out various virtuoso gypsy figurations, but had not yet begun to string them together into a coherent piece. At least the impetus of that night in July 1922 seemed to be carrying him through. On 18 March 1924 Paul Paray had conducted the Lamoureux Orchestra in Ravel’s orchestrations of the Debussy Sarabande and Danse in the Salle Gaveau, and we must assume Ravel attended. But otherwise it was head down for Tzigane. As late as 14 April, with the London concert due on the 26th, ‘I’m being driven mad by this damned violin piece . . . which still isn’t finished.’172 We learn of its final arrival from one of Ravel’s letters to Casadesus: ‘I hope Tzigane reached you safely and that your uncle [Marius Casadesus] will be able, at such short notice, to get this acrobatic piece into shape. To console him, tell him that Jelly d’Aranyi had only four days for that.’173 Marius Casadesus was due to play the work on 18 May in Barcelona, so should have had the luxury of at least a week to learn it in. No doubt elated at having at last finished a substantial work, Ravel now went on tour for over a month. He reached London on 21 April and the all-Ravel concert, including Tzigane, Histoires naturelles and the first performance (plus encore) of Ronsard à son âme sung by Marcelle Gerar, duly took place on the 26th. Ravel himself accompanied the song and the Shéhérazade cycle, but wisely left Tzigane to Henri Gil-Marchex. The impact of Tzigane, which adopts the slow/fast (lassú/friss) form of the csárdás, is unashamedly physical. In imitating the gypsy style – harmonics, trills, appoggiaturas, double-stopping, octaves, intervals of the augmented second, accelerandos, hesitations and passages in high positions on the lower strings – Ravel left a lot of himself behind, but as pastiche it is undeniably brilliant. While composing it, as well as perusing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, he had Hélène Jourdan-Morhange play him the 24 Caprices of Paganini, and this crash course in violin writing may well have contributed to the compositional delay. Ravel celebrated the double premiere by attending the fashionable reception that followed dressed in his usual impeccable clothes and red carpetslippers. D’Aranyi’s unshakeable technical control prompted him to say to her afterwards that ‘if I had known, I would have made it more difficult; I thought I had written something very difficult, but you have proved the contrary’.174 A version for violin and orchestra occupied him that summer and d’Aranyi played it in Paris on 30 November. It was when rehearsing for this performance that she introduced at one point what she termed a ‘glissando with trills’. Ravel confided to a friend, ‘I don’t know what she’s doing, but I like it.’175 Probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music. Two days after the first performance the critic of The Times (possibly the same who had noticed the concerts in October) wrote: ‘To hear a whole programme of Ravel’s works is like watching some midget or pygmy doing clever, but very small,

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things within a limited scope. Moreover, the almost reptilian cold-bloodedness, which one suspects of having been consciously cultivated, of most of M. Ravel’s music is almost repulsive when heard in bulk; even its beauties are like the markings on snakes and lizards.’176 The young Henri Sauguet, after attending a Paris performance of Tzigane that October, wrote to Poulenc: ‘[It] is certainly the most artificial thing Ravel has ever put his name to. It’s poor stuff and pretty unattractive. The artistic credo that lies behind this music is so antiquated, I’m amazed anyone believes in it any more. Huge success, naturally, with the ladies in pince-nez and the gentlemen behind large stomachs. . . . Increasingly I realize that Ravel does not like the music of today. He must like it as little as we like what he’s now producing.’177 Ravel could not have been unaware that many of the younger musicians shared these views, as, for different reasons, did Satie, and Bartók, who resented foreigners tinkering with the Hungarian folk style.178 Ravel’s visible reaction was to commend them for their independence and plain speaking. But, in reality, were his sentiments likely to be that different from the one expressed in a letter to Jean-Aubry of 18 July 1919? ‘The thing that’s worrying me: how hard it is to get back! [ce que c’est dûr à revenir]’ – to ‘get back to work, obviously, but ‘revenir’ could also be taken in the sense of ‘recovering my place in French music’.179 During the five working days Ravel spent in London, he conducted the Introduction et Allegro for a recording by Columbia, with the flautist Robert Murcie, the clarinettist Haydn Draper and again with harpist Gwendolen Mason (on Urania SP 4209; Music and Arts CD703). It is a fluent performance, the only surprise being the tempo of the first twelve bars, which is more than twice as slow as marked. He left London on the 27th and travelled directly to Madrid for a concert on 5 May, at the invitation of the Madrid Philharmonic Society. The city delighted him. ‘Lunch is around 2pm, dinner between 9 and 10.30. You go to bed when you feel like it. . . . I wanted to see the Prado straight away. I shall go back there.’ 180 A reporter was waiting for him and the results were published in ABC de Madrid on 1 May.181 Following the expected remarks about his Basque parentage and the superiority of Ribera, Velázquez, El Greco and Goya, his likes and dislikes generally run true to form, but with a few striking variations and additions. ‘Schoenberg is Viennese and Jewish, and therefore he is less cold, less cerebral, less abstract than a purely German composer such as Reger.’ He likes the difficult Milhaud of Protée and the Cinq études for piano and orchestra, and only ‘the earlier Verdi, the composer of La forza del destino and Un ballo in maschera. Later on, he becomes excessively vulgar, and frankly I think it’s bad when in order to be up-to-date, he begins to imitate Wagner. . . . Tchaikovsky is the least Russian of the Russians, and for this reason the least interesting to us. Musorgsky is far superior to him.’ Of himself he says he has ‘the virtues and defects of French artists. We neither want nor do we know how to produce colossal works; we

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are always somewhat cerebral, but within these limits we very often reach perfection . . . Art is meant to correct Nature’s imperfections. Art is a beautiful lie. The most interesting thing in art is to overcome difficulties.’ And of his own works, ‘I have a predilection for my Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, which obviously will never be a popular work, since in it I transposed the literary procedures of Mallarmé, whom I personally consider France’s greatest poet. In the Sonata [for violin and cello], which is a truly symphonic work for two instruments, I achieve new and interesting effects. In the final movement of this piece I imitate a rondo by Mozart.’ Unfortunately he does not say which one: Roland-Manuel cites the finale of ‘a Mozart piano sonata (F major, 1786)’,182 interpreted by Marnat as being K. 332. But this dates from 1778. A more plausible candidate might be the Rondo K. 494 of 1786, incorporated and extended in the Piano Sonata K. 533 of 1788. Overall, the forthcoming nature of Ravel’s replies suggests that, in this land he had visited so often in his music, he felt very much chez lui. After the concert on 5 May 1924, at which he conducted La valse and the two Debussy orchestrations, Ravel went straight to St-Jean-de-Luz and stayed there with the Gaudins for just over a week: this was his last visit to the Basque country until 1927. On the 16th he took the train to Barcelona for a Festival Ravel at which he again accompanied Marcelle Gerar in Ronsard, Sur l’herbe and Shéhérazade, while Robert and Marius Casadesus and Maurice Maréchal between them performed Gaspard, the Berceuse, Tzigane, the Sonata and the Trio. These all-Ravel programmes were increasingly becoming the norm, now that he had written enough contrasting works to form a balanced recital; and no doubt promoters reckoned, with reason, that such programmes stood a better chance than mixed ones of enticing the composer away from Le Belvédère. From Barcelona he travelled via Paris to Brussels where he was accompanying the soprano Germaine Sanderson on the 22nd, and then finally he returned to Montfort. Since one of the autographs of Tzigane bears the indications ‘Paris – London, avril – mai 1924’, it is possible that, in addition to changes made during rehearsals, he made further final ones at this juncture. He does not seem to have been tempted by the Prague premiere of L’heure espagnole on 6 June, but he did hear Robert Casadesus’s all-Ravel piano recital on the 11th at the Salle Pleyel, which was also broadcast via the Eiffel Tower. Understandably, Casadesus treasured the postscript to Ravel’s letter of 18 June, wondering: ‘Did I tell you, the other evening, that Jeux d’eau (among other things) had never been played so well?’183 If we can presume that Casadesus’s interpretation did not change radically over the next thirty years, then Ravel was happy not only with an opening tempo of s = 160 and above instead of the marked s = 144, but with a straightforward, if technically brilliant, performance that has since been criticized by some as mechanical and unfeeling. However, some critics have felt that, over these decades, Casadesus’s interpretations did become more perfunctory, less nuanced.

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July was spent orchestrating Tzigane for a concert in October, but also on a return to L’Enfant et les sortilèges after a long period when it seems to have been as absent from his work desk as it was from his correspondence. Sometime around June the work had been recommissioned by Raoul Gunsbourg for the Monte Carlo Opera. No explanation has ever been found as to why Rouché and the Opéra faded out of the picture. Did Ravel, despite his protestations, in fact feel that that stage had been too large for L’heure espagnole and would be equally so for L’Enfant? Or did Rouché get tired of waiting? If so, why did Ravel not turn to the Opéra-Comique where Albert Carré, who had (eventually) produced L’heure in 1911, was again artistic director from 1919 to 1925? Maybe Gunsbourg made the composer a financial offer he could not refuse? Or maybe his enthusiasm over the success of L’heure at Monte Carlo, noted by Ravel in Petit monégasque (21 March 1925), was enough? Whatever the reason, L’Enfant now rose decisively to the top of Ravel’s agenda, with a deadline of 31 December. On 29 August he told Georgette Marnold, ‘I’m labouring hard and producing not much’,184 while workmen all around him were building an extension to Le Belvédère, including the balcony on which he would later be photographed. The cost (6,785.04 francs) was about a third of the 20,000 francs he had originally paid for the house. A month later Theodor Szántó, who had sent him a score to comment on, is informed that ‘I’m not leaving the engine-room except to eat something, or walk several kilometres through the forest when I feel my head’s about to burst. Of course, I haven’t left Montfort all summer.’185 On 15 October Samuel Dushkin and Beveridge Webster gave the first SMI performance of Tzigane in another all-Ravel programme, with Webster playing the luthéal, a short-lived keyboard attachment created by the Belgian George Cloetens. It had four stops, including one that produced a sound like a cimbalom, giving nine different combinations in all; these were indicated on the original printed score of the luthéal version, but not of course in the edition for piano, where some passages are in different registers. Ravel used the instrument again in L’Enfant, but no other composer followed his example. (The luthéal used by Dushkin and Webster on this occasion is now in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels.) Whether or not the excitement of turning the pages for Webster proved too much for him, on 17 October Ravel came down with ’flu for three weeks (notionally extended to five in his correspondence, according to usual practice), leaving him desperately short of time. To Koechlin he vented his fury on the critic Jean-Richard Bloch, who had had the temerity to attack Le sacre and complain that ‘love, tenderness and poetic reverie’ had been expunged from modern music: ‘it’s incoherent babbling, no more fatuous than so much of the rest. Haven’t the ears of the critics marked me down for a long time now as the most perfect example of insensibility and dryness? It’s totally unimportant.’186 But at least the ‘flu had passed by the time of Fauré’s funeral at the Madeleine

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on 8 November, which Ravel attended together with the rest of France’s musical elite. He also made an exception for Koechlin, travelling to his country house as Villers-sur-mer on the Normandy coast for a concert on 20 November in which Jean Fournier played the cello part in Ravel’s Sonata and Ravel accompanied Jane Bathori in some of his songs, even if she ‘knows my songs better than I do, as she could sing them to her own accompaniment, which is more than I could.’187 A 1929 recording does indeed exist of Bathori singing and playing three of the Histoires naturelles (COL D15179; reissued on Marston 51009-2.) Before the end of the year he also had to attend rehearsals for the orchestral version of Tzigane, finally performed on 30 November, although he intended to miss the concert itself, go to a festival in Strasbourg on 12 December and conduct La valse at the Châtelet on the 21st. Otherwise ‘I’m seeing nobody except my frogs, my negroes, my shepherdesses and various insects’188 – with the result that, as Ravel put it, ‘the Child came to term on the appointed day’. . . or very shortly after.189 The relief must have been tremendous. The well had not run dry or been reduced definitively to an intermittent trickle. But the strain surely told, and he later admitted that for three months around January 1925 ‘I was sleeping three to five hours a night, with one sleepless night a week (more or less).’190 Certainly no letters from him have survived from January or February, nor is there any mention of his fiftieth birthday on 7 March. The next we hear of Ravel is in Monte Carlo on 16 March for rehearsals of L’Enfant et les sortilèges, with the premiere scheduled for the 21st. His letter to Durand of the 16th is nothing short of ecstatic: the orchestra is marvellous, the conductor Victor de Sabata of a kind ‘I had never come across before’, and Mlle Gauley, playing the Child, looks like a 6-year-old and has a ravishing voice.191 He does not mention to Durand the complaint he confides the same day to Colette about mistakes in the orchestral parts (for which, strangely, he blames himself), nor does he refer in either letter to his quarrel with Diaghilev over the dancers the impresario was contracted to make available – Diaghilev complained that the piano scores for the dance episodes had arrived late and that Ravel’s music was ‘very complicated’192 and at the performance on 26 March ‘five of the ten dancers in the first-act pastorale failed to appear . . . ’. 193 Ravel also makes of Colette the astonishing request, five days before the premiere, ‘if you have a few moments, send Durand a second couplet for the well-known aria “Toi, le cœur de la rose”, which awaits only upon you before being circulated by our publishers.’194 Either she did not oblige, or else the ‘second couplet’ is the three lines beginning ‘Tu ne m’as laissé . . .’. But the latter is hard to credit: surely the nine bars from figure 73 could never have seemed long enough to Ravel, even if they do end, like the final version, on an E flat triad? During the seven years in which the opera had been taking shape, the collaboration between Ravel and Colette was a one-sided affair: for months, or

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Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

19 The only known page of Colette’s autograph of L’Enfant et les sortilèges

years, she heard nothing and would suddenly receive a detailed request – concerning the cats’ duet, for example, ‘whether I saw anything against replacing “mouaô” by “mouain” . . . or perhaps it was the other way round’.195 This occasionally broken silence was all the more disconcerting because from his letter of 27 February 1919 (see pp. 200–1) Ravel had appeared primed for creativity, and subversion. In the event she was enraptured by the way he brought her world to life. Roland-Manuel states: ‘One would look in vain for two more original spirits. One would be hard put to it to find two more incompatible.’196 It is difficult to agree totally with this, as both of them shared a number of attitudes: a distaste for the grandiose, a corresponding pleasure in doing the unexpected (and preferably shocking), a delight in their own technical virtuosity, and above all a profound love for their mothers, a love that lies at the centre of this joint masterpiece. The first of the two scenes is set in a room in an old-fashioned house in Normandy. The Child of the title, a boy six or seven years old, is facing his homework with distaste. His mother enters, full of motherly encouragement,

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and he sticks his tongue out at her. She scolds him and leaves him to ponder on his rudeness, whereupon he takes his revenge on every animate and inanimate object within his reach. Then, as he is about to sink exhausted into an armchair, it comes to life, ‘hobbling along like an enormous toad’. Other objects follow suit and they sing of the tortures they have suffered at the hands of the little monster, who has kicked holes in the armchair, pulled the pendulum out of the clock, spilt the kettle on the fire and reduced both wallpaper and storybook to tatters. (Had Colette taken a cue from André Devambez’s 1913 children’s book Auguste a mauvais caractère?) Finally, his beloved Princess from the storybook is dragged underground by an unseen force and the Child, alone again, sings a heartbroken lament (see Ex. 7.5). But his spirit returns and he gives his maths book a kick. Out jumps Arithmetic, surrounded by numbers who all sing and dance frantically (’two taps run into a reservoir’, etc.), dragging the Child with them until he falls over, his head spinning. It is more than possible that Arithmetic’s wildly inaccurate sums – ‘four and four are eighteen, eleven and six are twenty-five’ – derive from Alice’s ‘four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!’197 His patter finds ancestry in many an Offenbach operetta, but Gerald Larner also identifies a likely source in the duet ‘Après vous avoir saturé’ in Chabrier’s Une éducation manquée, where Pausanias enumerates – ‘l’iconographie, l’hydrothérapie, la mythologie, la métallurgie’ etc – all the subjects he has taught the young Gontran.198 (This was the point, as already mentioned, where Ravel abandoned the work in the summer of 1920.) As Arithmetic and his chorus disappear, a black cat crawls out from under a chair and joins his white girlfriend in a passionate duet, before the walls of the house dissolve to disclose the moonlit garden. In the second scene, the denizens of the garden pursue their complaints against the Child. Gradually it fills with animals and insects; ‘un paradis de tendresse’. The Child, lonely and afraid, calls out ‘Maman!’ At once the animals turn on him in fury, but in the mêlée a squirrel is injured. The Child, though his own hand is bleeding, ties up its wounded paw with a ribbon. Overcome with amazement, the animals gently lead him back to the house as they try to imitate the strange human noise that had been the signal for the fight. Lights come on in the house as the animals sing of his kindness; finally he calls ‘Maman!’ and the curtain falls. ‘The emphasis is on melody,’ wrote Ravel, ‘allied to a subject which I chose to treat in the spirit of American musical comedy. Mme Colette’s libretto allowed this freedom in treating the magical story. The vocal line is the important thing. Even though the orchestra does not reject virtuosity, it is none the less of secondary importance.’199 By ‘the spirit of American musical comedy’ Ravel presumably meant that it was to be a number opera in which the characterization of each number, helped by the selective use of a large orchestra,

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was more important than homogeneity of style or of musical material. Certainly the individual pastiches are marvellously done, as we should expect, but inside a framework that is strong enough to accommodate them. In particular the Child, who is on stage throughout, is the character with whom the audience identifies. To this end Maman is seen only as giant hands and skirt, and at the Child’s first entry his vocal line is given an adult quality by being pitched below the orchestra. Through the various pastiches we are continually aware of the terror and amazement that these antics cause him and, instinctively, that Maman is the ultimate consolation. The descending fourth set to her name, seen through the perspective of its frequency in all Ravel’s music, takes on the aspect of a cipher for the only being who ever enjoyed his total love, and its return at the end, pianissimo on full orchestra as the lights come on in the house, is one of the great dramatic strokes in all opera. All of Ravel’s fancies have their turn: the courtly, eighteenth-century dance of the two chairs (decorated with Spanish rhythms), the ragtime for the Wedgwood teapot (’How’s your mug?’ ‘Rotten’); the foxtrot for the Chinese cup (’ça-oh-ra . . . Caskara, harakiri’); the miaowed cats’ duet which so upset the Opéra-Comique audience at the Paris premiere in 1926 and indeed, according to Rosenthal, right up to the end of Ravel’s life;200 the Nightingale who, as the garden is revealed, sings major sevenths foreshadowing the style oiseau of Messiaen. The danger was that such a compilation of vignettes would become less than the sum of its parts. That this is emphatically not the case must stand as one of the highest achievements of Ravel’s composing career. The opera is indeed marked off from L’heure espagnole by the insistence on melody, as opposed to the declamation that is a feature of the earlier work. What Ravel did take from the past were passages from the sketches of La cloche engloutie: he told Rosenthal that these come in the garden scene (though Rosenthal was mistaken in saying there is a corresponding garden scene in Hauptmann’s play201) and Roland-Manuel notes that they are specifically the music for the Tree and for the Frogs,202 whose ‘Côâc, kékékékékékek’ Hauptmann had used for Nickelmann, ‘an elemental spirit’. This jokiness, together with things like the Frog’s childishly scatological ‘la cacacage’, might seem to lend weight to Colette’s description of her text as a ‘conte inoffensif ’. But a number of commentators have found in it more challenging elements. The Freudian psychologist Melanie Klein saw the Child’s attacks on coupled objects in the story (two chairs, teacup and teapot etc) as transferred from attacks on his parents, even though the Father is absent. Arithmetic can be interpreted as Father-as-Judge, while the Garden symbolizes Mother and the hostile animals within it the aggressive aspect of the ‘bad Mother’.203 Debbie Hindle identifies the Child’s basic problem to be that, while claiming to be ‘free’, he feels a parallel urge to renounce love: ‘je n’aime personne’ he shouts

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and Ravel, as in Histoires naturelles, suppresses the mute ‘e’s to give the phrase more punch. Does the story, as she suggests, ‘illustrate the inevitable tension between passion, imagination and conformity, the “freedom” of childhood versus the responsibilities of adulthood, or the preoccupations of the writer, artist or musician versus more conventional modes’?204 Given Ravel’s perennial stance as the ironical outsider, it seems more than likely. He had rejected Colette’s title Ballet pour ma fille on the reasonable grounds that he didn’t have a daughter, but the balletic element is a further binding agent for the ensemble: the dance lies behind almost everything except the music for the Princesse and the final fugue. Other structural elements are less obvious. In a fascinating article, Marie-Pierre Lassus identifies the continual contrast in Colette’s text between ‘la parole agressive’ and ‘la parole tendre’, the former relying on ‘spirants’ such as ‘s’, ‘f ’ and ‘v’ (‘J’ai pas envie de faire ma page’), the latter on plosives and voiced spirants such as ‘r’, ‘d’, ‘m’, ‘b’, ‘l’ and consonantal ‘y’ (‘Regarde donc ce qu’ils reflétaient, mes beaux yeux tout miroitants de larmes!’). She points out further how Ravel picks up on these distinctions through rhythm and timbre, although both Roland-Manuel and Rosenthal insist that Ravel himself contributed a great deal to the details of the libretto.205 It would certainly seem likely that he changed the cup’s provenance from Limoges to China to provide him with a readier target for caricature. On a broader scale it should be noted that the whole opera moves from the aggressive to the tender, symbolized by the writing for first violins – almost absent from the first part of the work, where wind, brass and percussion and lower strings are to the fore, they come into their own in the ‘magic garden’, reaching their apotheosis in the final cadence.206 The falling fourth of this cadence can be called the generating interval behind the whole opera. It not only says ‘Maman’ (as possibly in the Sonatine), but characterizes the Princess and the female Cat, as well as being mocked by Arithmetic. It also plays a crucial role in emphasising the circularity of the opera (essentially the Child’s journey from love through aggression and back to love again). The two high oboes that open the opera are, it seems, going aimlessly over the same ground (as the Child does with his homework), but in fact their progress is far from aimless. They play the same paragraph three times and begin a fourth time, and each beginning marks a dramatic moment: the start of the opera, the rise of the curtain, the first words of the Child and the entrance of Maman. But their function does not end there. As they return for the final page of the score, their original E minor cast is now absorbed into G major: cruelty and unhappiness have been transformed by love. For most composers this would be enough. But Ravel compounds the message through the descending fourth. The unstable harmonization of its first appearance at Maman’s entry is now stabilized by means of a dominant – tonic progression in the bass (Ex. 7.4). Unwittingly, we have been waiting through the whole opera for that tonic G!

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

 4 

 

 4 

 

p





269

[Andante (q = 56)]

  

4



4



  

pp Ma  

 

  













  

- man!





Example 7.4. Ravel, L’Enfant et les sortilèges, fig. 3, bars 3–4; fig. 154, bars 3–4

As a further refinement, the fugal theme itself is closely related to the outline of the oboes wandering above it; and beyond that, Colette’s final word ‘Maman’ recalls the cries of dying soldiers on the battlefield in her book La chambre éclairée – for Ravel, as for them, ‘the magic word’ that summed up a life of love.207 The two emotional climaxes of the opera stand at the centre and at the end. The Child’s song of love and anguish to his departed Princess (Ex. 7.5) could hardly be simpler, L'ENFANT, seul et désolé à mi-voix

Andante (q = 63)



   

pp





    





Toi,



    



   



  



  



  



        



 

le cœur de la

     

     

ro

-









      



se,





Toi, le par - fum du lys blanc,

         

     





     

           

pp sostenuto



 

Toi,

  











    





tes mains et ta cou - ron

  

  

  

  





  



ne, Tes yeux bleus

  

     

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et tes jo - yaux...

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Example 7.5. Ravel, L’Enfant et les sortilèges, fig. 73

and its simplicity is felt even more strongly in the context of the opera as a whole, where so far the prevailing harmonic climate has been chromatic and often bitonal. Here, exceptionally, Ravel admitted tapping into French operatic

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tradition by basing the ‘aria’ on Manon’s ‘Adieu, notre petite table!’ from Massenet’s opera, while modestly opining that ‘c’est mieux chez Massenet!’208 Lassus again identifies the way the vowels are extended through sonorous consonants (‘œur’, ‘oze’), and argues persuasively that here ‘the Child finds singing difficult, so overwhelmed is he by emotion that it tightens his throat, preventing him from moving away from the B flat that is the tune’s main axis.’209 Of the aria’s fifty-eight notes, this B flat provides no fewer than twenty-four: Ravel was not the only unbelieving French composer to pastiche plainsong when it suited him (see Exx. 6.4 and 6.5, p. 194). The Monte-Carlo production was hailed in nearly all quarters as a resounding success. Especially pleasing for the composer must have been the reactions of some of Les Six. Risking the ailing Satie’s displeasure, Auric praised Ravel’s ‘plume magistrale’ and Honegger thought the Cats’ duet ‘le morceau le plus étonnant’.210 Having overcome his initial doubts about L’heure espagnole being given on the vast stage of the Opéra, in 1930 Ravel would ask Rouché for L’Enfant to be staged there too: ‘I’ve withdrawn L’Enfant et les sortilèges from the Opéra-Comique. Would you like to take it? The precedent of L’heure espagnole persuades me that it would be far better looked after with you, and less forlorn’211 – from which we may deduce that the Opéra-Comique had made no dramatic improvements to the staging of L’Enfant over the previous four years. The Opéra run finally came about in May 1939, with Rouché producing. More understandably, Ravel’s brother, on seeing Disney’s Snow White a few months after his brother’s death, said: ‘This is the way L’Enfant should be presented’,212 an opinion echoed by Luigi Dallapiccola, who saw it as proof that Ravel’s opera was at least fifteen years ahead of its time.213 For those who, after a Glyndebourne performance of L’Enfant, have witnessed middle-aged men in evening dress and floods of tears, it is simply not possible to write this opera off as mere nostalgic infantilism, unworthy of ‘serious’ consideration, evidence of ‘a talent wasted on a piece for ladies [en ouvrage de dames]’.214 As to whether the opera was meant to carry a moral, perhaps we should not press the point. It may appear to show Ravel in his role of ‘best parishioner’ if not of practising Christian, but at the same time we should remember that while he was in Monte-Carlo for the premiere, Diaghilev greeted him in hopes of reviving their friendship. ‘But surely you know,’ said Ravel, ‘that we don’t speak to each other any more.’215 All the efforts of Diaghilev’s friends were needed to prevent him challenging Ravel to a duel. Four years later, tired of being fobbed off with what he called ‘musiquette’, Diaghilev asked a mutual friend to try for a reconciliation, but died before anything could be done. The great impresario knew that whatever it was, with its frogs, its ragtime and its English taken from fashionable nurseries, L’Enfant et les sortilèges was not ‘musiquette’.

CHAPTER VIII

1925–1928

Jazz, America and the joy of monotony T

he Revue musicale celebrated Ravel’s fiftieth birthday on 7 March 1925 with a special number devoted to his music (issue of 1 April), including contributions from Casella, Klingsor, Roland-Manuel and Vuillermoz among others, as well as a brief extract from L’Enfant in piano score (from figure 129). The general tone is understandably one of praise and celebration, but more negative comments about Ravel’s music are quoted and then refuted: over Rapsodie espagnole, Jacques Rivière’s complaint that the search for immediate effects precludes unity and Pierre Lalo’s that the work, like most of Ravel’s, suffers from ‘la petitesse de l’esprit’, while André Cœuroy quotes from a review that mirrors the comments noted earlier from the critic of The Times: ‘Ravel? . . . Very quiet trills on muted strings . . . flute . . . horn . . . side drum . . . wind machine . . . stopped brass . . . double bass glissandi . . . Crumbs . . . Marie, brush the tablecloth.’1 Elsewhere we find a host of more positive and interesting views. Ravel plays with conventional forms like a cat with a mouse; his simplicity is like that of La Fontaine, ‘the fruit of hard labour’; he likes to work with resistant material; he is a dangerous model for the young, notably in his pushing of instruments to extremes; and in any case, as an orchestrator he is the end of a line – all the young are now following Stravinsky. Here too, Vuillermoz is among the first to promote what became the accepted doctrine for French conductors, that whereas with Debussy’s orchestral music you have to do a lot of balancing and nuancing, with Ravel’s it’s enough to follow the instructions on the packet. Sometime in the early spring of 1925 Ravel received a commission from Mrs Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for a song cycle accompanied, ‘if possible’, by flute, cello and piano. Intentionally or not, the ‘if possible’ was a clever touch, putting him on his mettle. He accepted, choosing three poems (nos. 5, 8 and 12) from a 1787 collection, Chansons madécasses, that Evariste Parny claimed to have translated from the Madagascan. Calvocoressi states that for Ravel ‘a promise to deliver was absolutely binding’,2 and some instances support this, not least his efforts over L’Enfant. Even so, as with Daphnis, punctilio was powerless to produce the Chansons madécasses on time. Having announced his intention to start work on the cycle on 21 April,3 by 14 May he claimed to have written only

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a few bars of what would be the central song, ‘Aoua!’ . . . and this with a rehearsal set for the 18th.4 He had already complained to Garban of suffering ‘an overwhelming attack of idleness. I feel as if I have aged ten years.’5 This feeling of inertia, hardly surprising given the intense effort of finishing the opera, lasted to some degree until the end of the year. The only other commission on the stocks must have taken him all of five minutes to fulfil. For an organ recital at the Trocadéro on 30 April, Marcel Dupré asked six composers, Widor, Dukas, Pierné, Rabaud, Honegger and Ravel, to provide six themes on which he would then improvise to produce what Charles Tenroc called ‘une symphonie soudaine’.6 Ravel’s theme was published with others in the May number of Le monde musical (Ex. 8.1). Andante



  

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p

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

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







 

 





Example 8.1. Ravel, theme for improvisation by Marcel Dupré

In his review Tenroc mentions only the passacaglia by Widor and the fugue by Pierné that formed the bulk of the fourth and final movement. The symphony ended with a mélange of all six themes. If Ravel’s did receive individual treatment, might its languorous, Dorian contour have lent itself perhaps to an oboe solo over strings and voix céleste? There were, as always, projects occupying the hinterland of Ravel’s mind. Zazpiak-Bat would seem finally to have been abandoned, as would La cloche engloutie, René Chalupt stating in the April 1925 Revue musicale with some confidence that its ‘essential Germanness finally wore down [Ravel’s] utterly Latin spirit’. But he announced that the composer was still working on a piano concerto based on Le grand Meaulnes.7 There was also an anonymous notice in Le courrier musical that ‘M. Ravel has in progress a work for voice and small orchestra. The poem is by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.’8 Nothing more was heard of this, and indeed Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859) would have been a surprising choice of poet in the context of his others. Following Valéry’s dictum that ‘one judges an artist by the character of what he refuses’,9 we must suppose that Ravel was not in general attracted by the poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century: in his known songs there is a 65-year gap between the 1787 publication of the Chansons madécasses by Parny (1753–1814) and the 1852 publication of the Chansons écossaises, including ‘Chanson du rouet’, by Leconte de Lisle (1818–94). Ignoring Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Gautier and

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Baudelaire, and conducting only brief alliances with Marot and Ronsard, Ravel overwhelmingly favoured the poets of his own day. The only other possible project had been mentioned in an interview a year earlier with Georges Jean-Aubry in which Ravel suggested that, after finishing his opera, ‘I shall perhaps start composing a symphonic poem without a subject, where the whole interest will be in the rhythm.’10 It is tempting to link this with the side drum in Boléro, which may therefore not have been quite the work of desperation it has always been painted. On 27 May Ravel went over to London to meet Mrs Coolidge, who heard the completed ‘Aoua!’ sung by Jane Bathori. As became customary from now on during his London visits, the composer stayed with the soprano Louise Alvar Harding at 14 Holland Park. Many years later her son Charles remembered Ravel playing jazz on two pianos with the English popular singer and pianist Peggy Cochrane and, even more vividly, his cobra-skin tie with the back of its head visible.11 For the next two months Ravel more or less disappears from view. But he attended the premiere of Auric’s ballet Les matelots, given by the Ballets russes on 17 June when, as Jourdan-Morhange records, he wanted to go and congratulate the composer. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘you would go and congratulate Auric after the dreadful article he’s just written about you?’ ‘Why should I not go and congratulate Auric?’ he replied, with a steady gaze. ‘I like his ballet. So he’s rude about Ravel? Well, he’s got good reason to be rude about Ravel; if he wasn’t rude about Ravel, he’d be writing Ravel, and there’s quite enough of that!’12

It may be taken as read that he did not attend Satie’s funeral on 6 July, at which, according to Poulenc’s friend Raymonde Linossier, ‘only the smart, leisured, homosexual set was well represented’ and ‘Cocteau sobbed rather noisily.’13 On 31 July Ravel wrote to Calvocoressi that he was facing a mountain of work, identified by Orenstein as the remaining two Chansons madécasses, further work on the Violin Sonata for Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, begun two years earlier, and an operetta on a text by Mayrargues, with Maud Loty in the leading role.14 Nothing more was heard of this last project, which might have been suggested by Colette since Loty had starred in four ‘Claudine’ films in 1917. He was also correcting proofs of the orchestral score of L’Enfant. As in the previous year, there was no visit to the Basque country, so there was no escaping the Montfort Gala on 23 August in which the promised participation of ‘Chœurs des Dames et Demoiselles de Montfort’ no doubt made him glad to get away the following day for a week with the Delages to Saint-Quay-Portrieux on the north Brittany coast, where they had all been in 1905.

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It is unlikely he attended the Swedish premiere of L’heure espagnole in Stockholm on 24 September, given his Scandinavian tour a few months later, but he would certainly have been at the first Paris performance that month of ‘Aoua!’, given again by Bathori as part of two evenings of Coolidge chamber music commissions at the Hôtel Majestic. Arthur Hoérée, noticing the song in the Revue musicale and relishing its ‘parfum sauvage’, claimed that Ravel made the piano sound like none ever heard before.15 Only thirteen years later, after Ravel’s death, did Hoérée mention the scandal that the song provoked. In Morocco, a rebel chieftain, Abd-el-Krim, had been leading an insurrection against the French rulers since 1921 and in 1925 hostilities were at a peak. ‘When the song’s success led to calls for an encore, one of the audience got up, said a few words to Jane Bathori, then to a totally flabbergasted Ravel, and finally shouted out: “Monsieur Léon Moreau is leaving, not wishing to hear such words a second time while we are fighting in Morocco!” This song . . . was a hymn to liberty, against slavery and colonization, and Ravel was also perhaps making a vicious reference to American negrophobia.’16 (Tempting though it is to point to the wild success of Josephine Baker in Paris as a counter-example of France’s racial liberalism, sober chronology has to insist that she didn’t reach the city until 22 September.) Léon Moreau, a minor composer who, as noted above, had partnered Ravel in the four-hand playthrough of his cantata Alcyone in 1902 (see p. 47) and who was currently a member of the SMI committee, no doubt felt these achievements, together with his own 1899 Prix de Rome, gave him musical as well as political rights to object. Whether or not Ravel was ‘flabbergasted’ [éberlué] as Hoérée supposed, he later tried to defuse the situation by pointing out that Parny’s 1787 text referred rather to the American War of Independence. But it cannot be that such a politically aware man, of strong Leftist sympathies, was a total innocent here; once more, this was the piratical troublemaker at his exercise. Progress with the other two songs was slow. On 19 December he explained to Mrs Coolidge that, in addition to the tasks noted above, he was also now directing rehearsals for the Paris premiere of L’Enfant, scheduled for 23 January (eventually staged on 1 February), after which he was off on a two-month tour; ‘when I get back – around April – I fully intend to return to work.’17 A final picture of Ravel at fifty shows him as keen on the exotic as ever. At some point in 1925 the rich Japanese art lover Jirohatchi Satsuma organized a recital by Sakichi Kineya IV on the shamisen, a traditional three-stringed instrument played with a plectrum. As Philippe Rodriguez writes, ‘Sakichi played, wearing a red cloak, in front of a gilded screen. Ravel and Delage were captivated by this concert . . . After part of the night had been spent with several ex-Apaches discussing and listening to music, and as the first rays of dawn begin to peep through, Satsuma asked Ravel: “Maurice, how is it you know how to describe the dawn scene?” “Because I see it in my dreams”, he

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replied.’ To which Delage added later, in conversation with Jean Gallois, ‘the most beautiful dawn scene of all time was written by Ravel who used to stay in bed until 11 a.m.’.18 Whether or not because of the nine days’ delay in staging the Paris premiere of L’Enfant, Ravel, far from being deeply implicated in rehearsals as he had assured Mrs Coolidge, by his own admission attended only one before having to leave for his northern tour, which began with a concert in Hamburg on 28 January.19 Meanwhile his only engagement in Paris seems to have been to sit on a Conservatoire jury. Eugène Gigout’s death on 9 December 1925 had left the post of organ professor at the Conservatoire vacant. In his memoirs Marcel Dupré wrote that ‘I am forever grateful to Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, Gabriel Pierné and Alfred Bruneau, who campaigned, along with Widor, in my favor. . . . I was with several friends in the courtyard of the old Conservatoire when suddenly I noticed Ravel leaving. He had been serving that day on a jury holding examinations. To my great surprise, he came straight towards me. “Set your mind at ease, Dupré. We are for you, and you will be elected.” ’20 Although Dupré commissioned the themes for his improvised symphony from four of the composers listed above at least nine months before the post became vacant, and not after, it is not impossible that he was aware of Gigout’s failing health . . . Following the Hamburg concert on the 28th, when the String Quartet received an ovation, Ravel travelled to Copenhagen where the Quartet was given again and he played the Sonatine and accompanied Mme Alvar in some of his songs. Three days later, on 2 February 1926, he paid Mozart the compliment of breaking an unwritten rule not to conduct other composers’ music, and directed the master’s Symphony no. 40 together with some of his own works. Meanwhile in Paris, on 1 February, Albert Wolff conducted the French premiere of L’Enfant.21 Writing to Ravel on 23 February, Roland-Manuel denied the composer’s claim that the opera had received a ‘slap’. From this we must assume that details of some of the sharper reviews had reached Ravel. Roland-Manuel had to admit that not everyone liked the opera, in particular Messager, ‘the man in all the world best qualified to understand you, and who is deaf to your music [qui ne vous entend pas]’.22 Messager’s review was indeed wounding, the more so from someone who, as we have seen, had taken the trouble to learn the piano solo version of La valse, and who had furthermore played through the vocal score of the opera on 13 January with Mme de Saint-Marceaux (after which she reckoned that ‘on the orchestra it would be something charming like L’heure espagnole’).23 Messager disagreed: ‘As a virtuoso, there’s no one to touch [Ravel] . . . But don’t ask him for emotion, still less tenderness, he refuses to make what he thinks of as a concession to bourgeois sentimentality . . . What does it matter whether Ravel is more or less successful with his cat and frog imitations? A grain of poetry would in general be more to our taste.’24 On the

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other hand, says Roland-Manuel, Vuillermoz was complimentary, and the rumour was going round that Jean Marnold had ‘slapped Rouché’s face for the subconscious reason that Rouché had refused to stage L’Enfant’ – the nearest thing to a solution of the puzzle already mentioned. Like L’heure espagnole, L’Enfant always asks the question, ‘What else to put on the bill?’ But one may question the wisdom of choosing Rossini’s Barber of Seville to precede it; and still more an absurdly long break after the first part of L’Enfant, with house lights brought up for a change of scenery in full view of the audience, brutally interrupting the transition into the garden, and leaving the field clear for those booing the ‘Cats’ Duet’.25 Ravel got to see the Opéra-Comique production, which ran for twenty-one evenings, after he returned to France on 18 March, and wrote with some asperity to Mme Alvar that ‘I was so satisfied with the production that, two days later, I spent the whole day changing everything; but it’s still not right.’26 All in all, he might have done better to follow up a letter from Colette of the previous year, telling him that ‘Henri de Rothschild would take L’Enfant et les sortilèges to open his new theatre [Théâtre Pigalle], pairing it with the La Princesse d’Elide, on 1 March 1926; he would stage it magnificently.’27 Molière’s 1664 comédie-ballet, with Lully’s music, telling how the successful suitor for the Princess’s hand wins by pretending to be insensible to her charms, might have made an interesting parallel with the equally pretended insensibility of L’Enfant. But unfortunately Rothschild was asking for exclusive rights in Paris, which Ravel was probably not willing to grant. On 4 February 1926, he left Copenhagen for Oslo. It was here that he stated, one imagines not wholly out of politeness, that ‘I have never till this day written a work that was not influenced by Grieg.’28 Here too he learnt of Gedalge’s death on the 5th. Although there is no documentary evidence that the two remained in touch after Ravel’s student days, he was always grateful to his teacher ‘for the most valuable elements of my technique’,29 not a few of which are on display in the Trio, dedicated to Gedalge. From Oslo Ravel went on to conclude his Scandinavian tour in Stockholm, where the Copenhagen programme was repeated on 11 February, the evening of the Brussels premiere of L’Enfant. He then left for a stay of ten days or so in London, followed by visits to Glasgow and Edinburgh; in all three cities he was joined by the 20-year-old French violinist Zino Francescatti, playing Tzigane and the Berceuse. His tour ended with a visit to Brussels where a special performance of L’Enfant was put on at La Monnaie on 4 March and he was decorated by the King of the Belgians as ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre de Léopold’. On his return to Montfort, he could look back on an extremely successful tour (‘how restful the Scandinavian countries seemed to me, compared with Paris!’30) and forward to work on the remaining two Chansons madécasses, and the unnamed operetta ‘the first note of which is not yet written and which should be done at the start of next season’, and for which, out of professional

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duty, he was listening to all the hit operettas. Then would come the Violin Sonata. Less welcome was the prospect of ‘going soon to Milan for the final rehearsals of L’Enfant et les sortileges’,31 but in the event this production did not materialize. The opera’s Italian premiere was in Florence in 1939 and it did not reach La Scala until 1948, when it was conducted again by de Sabata. Amid all the success, Ravel’s ability to upset people showed no signs of waning. Whereas in Brussels, the ‘audience wait for the end of each scene and then applaud enthusiastically’, in Paris ‘they whistle, applaud, miaow and shout insults with no letup.’32 On the personal front too, an old enmity was revived. On 13 March Inghelbrecht wrote to Vuillermoz: Saw our Maurice (in Copenhagen) shortly after L’Enfant et les sortilèges, which (in Paris) seems to me to have been a flop. He was accompanied by a singer [Mme Alvar] with money but no voice – that’s how it goes these days – who was paying for the tour, but who had no influence on the press or the public, who weren’t impressed despite a waistcoat that, my dear, came into fashion no more than three weeks ago. . . . You know that this little swine Maurice conducted a concert of his works here into which – charming homage – he slipped the two Debussy pieces he’s orchestrated: the ‘Sarabande’, whose orchestration doesn’t sound like Debussy or a Sarabande, and a very poor ‘Danse’ . . . which he finds charming, he with his nice open laugh!33

Ravel obviously would never have seen this letter, which possibly says less about him than about Inghelbrecht’s aggressive character. Its only interest now lies in the evidence it provides that Ravel’s successes could always be portrayed as flops by those with enough determination, and how even such a fine musician as Inghel could assume that in his two transcriptions Ravel was even trying to make his orchestra sound like Debussy’s. In fact, Ravel always acknowledged that Debussy’s orchestration defied imitators.34 Intending to spend only two days of March in Paris, he ended up spending two weeks,35 so would seem to have returned to Montfort around the 18th. The last fortnight of the month and the whole of April were given up to the Chansons madécasses. He completed these only a week or so before their first performance at the American Academy in Rome on 8 May, and it was around this time that Robert Schmitz made the first serious overtures to Ravel about the possibility of an American tour.36 Ravel was also having the telephone installed (89 Montfort l’Amaury), ‘despite its drawbacks, to avoid going to Paris’.37 He didn’t travel to Rome but did attend the performance of the Chansons madécasses in Brussels on 16 May, and then directed rehearsals for the first Paris performance on 13 June. The ensemble again included Jane Bathori, with Casella as pianist and Hans Kindler as cellist, but now with flautist Urbain Bauduin after Louis Fleury’s sudden death the day before.

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Chronology apart, ‘Aoua!’ deserves separate treatment from the other songs in the cycle since it is a uniquely terrifying display of dissonant violence in Ravel’s output. The story of the white men’s treachery and defeat appealed to Ravel’s liberal instincts and he forgot his policy of dépouillement in striving to give them expression.

Andante ( = 60)

Flute

Cello

Voice

   

 

  

  





ff

 



  

ff





  













ff









 

 

  





 

 







  





 







 









Fl. Vc.

V.

  

  







 

 

  



Pf.









  

















 

 

 









 







   

   







           















Mé - fi - ez– vous des blancs, ha - bi - tans du ri -va

        





   

b 

 3    









  







 















b    





 



 



  







Aoua!





 









Piano







Aoua!

 

  

pizz. 

ff

  







b 

Example 8.2. Ravel, opening of ‘Aoua!’







-



    



 

-

    









 

 





















-

  

   ge.

 

 

 

 



 

  



 

 

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The two initial shouts, a Ravel addition, and the brooding atmosphere of the following bars belong not to fairyland but to the real, nasty world. The bitonality with which Ravel had been concerned in most of his works since 1920 here achieves a homogeneous texture and atmosphere, to the point that the listener is no longer aware of the technical means. For all its aggressive tone, ‘Aoua!’ is as carefully constructed as any other of Ravel’s works. For instance, by the end of Ex. 8.2 all twelve notes have been sounded except the C natural; Ravel holds this in reserve as a bass for what is possibly the dramatic crux of the piece – the natives gave the white men land and asked for kind treatment, the white men promised, nevertheless. . . . Throughout, Ravel emphasised the ‘independence of line’,38 but in ‘Aoua!’ the effect is of several minds contributing similar thoughts. The final message – one that may have been the last straw for M. Moreau – is not only of sadness at the cruelty and stupidity of mankind, but of what he must have heard as treachery: the white men are driven off. In the surrounding songs all is gentleness and love. The ‘element of eroticism’,39 almost unique in Ravel’s mature work, is brought out by highlighting of key words and by suggestion. Ravel’s technique at times approaches the naïve: the lover, accompanied by solo cello, waits for his mistress, Nahandove; the piano enters, ‘elle vient’. As Nahandove rests in his arms the poetry becomes explicit (‘the movement of your breast is so strong and sweet under my hand’). There are no high notes or outbursts of arpeggios. Melody and harmony remain static, telling of the constancy of love while contrary rhythms convey its bodily expression. Tellingly and truthfully, the tempo not only accelerates up to but also continues at the faster pace after the emotional and physical climax. Throughout the song the name ‘Nahandove’, arch-shaped like the song and its subject, resounds as a symbol of love. ‘It is pleasant lying under a leafy tree during the heat of the day. . . .’ Voluptuous in the first song, declamatory in the second, the vocal style in the third is restrained, conversational in tone. The master taking his ease issues casual instructions to his serving-women, to dance for him and finally to get his meal. Ravel conjures up an atmosphere of improvisation with pairs of lines (flute and cello, flute and voice, voice and piano) opposed to each other in rhythm and often in key as well. As in the first song he deliberately makes the vocal line melodically monotonous, circling round the same groups of notes within the range of a perfect fifth; a background of physical indolence against which the isolated major sevenths show up like fleeting desires (Ex. 8.3):

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280

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[Lento]    



4 4







pp









   

   





           

             

   



 

sous un

ar - bre touf - fu,

   

 

 

p 







Tan dis que je me re - pose i - ci







 











  



oc - cu -pez

mon





 









o - reil - le

 

   







par vos ac - cens

 













pro - lon - gés;

  

Example 8.3. Ravel, ‘Il est doux’, bars 15–19

The full ensemble is heard for just six bars, prompted by the noun ‘baiser’, and the song ends with a passage that stirs our awareness of nature very much in the manner of another D flat major epilogue, that to ‘Le grillon’ in Histoires naturelles. At first sight it is a little puzzling that Ravel chose female interpreters for this cycle. In the first and third songs the narrator is plainly a man, while the second would seem to gain in ferocity from a male voice. Or did Ravel feel a need to objectivize such powerful feelings? He claimed, with typically ironic insouciance, that it was simply that no baritone had offered to sing it!40 But Gerald Larner may well be right in suggesting that ‘there was probably no more significance in his choice of soloists than that singers he knew and trusted were women.’41 Certainly he recognized Madeleine Grey as the ‘perfect interpreter’42 of these songs in which, with rare self-satisfaction, he felt he had achieved his aims.43 As to the authenticity of his exoticism, there is some evidence that Malagasy music may have been an influence: Richard S. James notes that among its features are the Lydian mode with sharpened fourth, thirds, sometimes in parallel, and occasional bitonality.44 Arthur Hoérée, who was present at the two premieres, also recognized the sound of an Arab drum, the ‘darabuka’, in the third song.45 With the throwaway ending of this song peace is ostensibly restored. But the listener is nonetheless left with the distasteful thought that this casual domination by the white master has been made possible only by the preceding show of brutality. In the meantime Ravel had abandoned the operetta,46 leaving the Violin Sonata as the only work on the stocks. Some of the troubles he had with this were observed by the young Manuel Rosenthal, whom he now took on as a composition pupil. In handing over the areas of counterpoint and fugue to Jean Huré47 he was observing the same distinction between technique and artistry that were present, in his own case, in the teachings of Gedalge and

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Fauré respectively.48 His struggles with the Violin Sonata gave Rosenthal an early insight into the making of an artist: Once when I came for my lesson, I saw the fire burning. Among the ashes I could see still a piece of manuscript paper. I asked him what it was. ‘That’s a good lesson for you’, he said. ‘Sometimes you think I’m too harsh with you, too stern, too critical. Well, I have just destroyed the finale of the Sonata for violin and piano. You know it, I’ve shown it to you.’ I said, ‘But the finale was really charming, a wonderful piece of music.’ He said, ‘I know. I liked it very much. But it didn’t fit the Sonata. It was not the right kind of finale for the first and second movements. So I have destroyed it and composed another finale which is not so good, but it’s a good finale.’49

In this we may hear the voice of Edgar Allan Poe, saying of the climax in The Raven that ‘had I been able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas, I should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect.’50 The remainder of 1926 was relatively quiet. On 1 June the Revue musicale sponsored an all-Ravel programme at the Salle Gaveau, two days later he went to the Opéra with Mme Casella, and almost certainly he returned there on the 11th for the premiere of Roger-Ducasse’s ballet Orphée, in which Ida Rubinstein danced the title role. After the performance of the Chansons madécasses on 13 June, for the third year in a row Ravel renounced the pleasures of the Basque country for Montfort and work on the Violin Sonata, accompanied by the purring of his two new Siamese kittens.51 One unwelcome distraction was a phone call from the Delages, asking him to come up to Brittany and lift their depression, Maurice Delage having recently lost his father. ‘Of course it’s not Saint-Jean, but at least there’s the sea,’ he wrote to Marie Gaudin on 31 August, changing trains at Rennes on his way north. Another letter throws light on what must, for Ravel, have been the high point of the last six months of the year. Written from Le Belvédère on 28 July, it concerns what we now know to be the real stage premiere of La valse, over two years before it was taken up by Ida Rubinstein. Ravel’s letter is addressed to Sonia Korty, who had danced in Diaghilev’s corps de ballet for a couple of seasons and was now hoping to choreograph La valse for a performance in Antwerp: I’m going to cause you considerable distress, forgive me: La valse must not be staged. I would prefer to wait, I would prefer that it should never be given on stage. You know I’ve been waiting a long time: Diaghilev didn’t understand anything of what I was after; indeed that’s his only excuse. It is absolutely necessary to have a large stage, and a crowd. It would have been perfect in Vienna, but the producer, a German whose name I can no longer remember and who had perfectly grasped this work’s meaning, couldn’t stay. At the

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Opéra it would have been better still, since the auditorium itself would have been an extension of the décor. Except that Rouché has no more idea than Diaghilev of what it’s about. No [eighteenth-century] cotillions, no entractes, no story: you have to think of La valse as a kind of tragedy (I mean it in the Greek sense, naturally, and am not asking anyone to tear their entrails out). In concert performance listeners can imagine any number of things; mostly they screw up; but at least no one is encouraging them to do so.52

Despite this dampening intervention, La valse was in fact staged at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp on 2 October 1926, choreographed by Korty and conducted by the chief conductor of the Royal Flemish Opera, Julius B. Schrey. It was given eight times in the season, and one imagines that Ravel attended, especially as he mentions the production in his autobiographical sketch. In assessing Ravel’s character, biographers have to grapple with, among other puzzles, what initially may seem a strange combination of modesty and self-assertiveness. The above letter to Korty is one of many such that lay down the law in no uncertain terms. But at the same time he never touted his works around. All through the 1920s and until the organization ceased operations in 1935, he remained the guiding light of the SMI. But the ‘Festival Ravel’ the organization gave on 15 October 1926 (Chansons madécasses, fragments of L’Enfant, the Sonata for violin and cello, Le tombeau – played by the 22-year-old Vlado Perlemuter – and the Trio) provided the first outing there of Ravel’s music for exactly two years. Meanwhile not a note of his was heard at the Société nationale between 8 March 1924 and 21 April 1928. But he was firmly of the opinion that his music should make its way relying on its own merits, even if, like any composer, he enjoyed the plaudits when they came his way. Where he no longer saw those merits in a work of his, he was determined to keep it under wraps. Rumours, for instance, of a ‘second version’ of his orchestration of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’ seem to be unfounded. Many years later Manuel Rosenthal remembered ‘meeting Ravel at the end of 1926, absolutely furious, coming out of Eschig’s office on the rue de Rome. And when I asked him why he was so upset, he replied: “I’ve just had a shouting match with them, because I’m refusing to let them play the orchestration of ‘Une barque’ billed in Wolff ’s concert on 30 October.” ’53 Whether Albert Wolff in fact went ahead and played the original 1906 version is unclear. On 12 November Ravel left Montfort for Switzerland and on 20 November was in Berne, from where he wrote to his cousin Alfred Perrin that he would be going on to Basle on the 24th, and then on to Geneva the next day for an all-Ravel concert on the 26th.54 In the middle of this Swiss tour, he made a journey south to Lyon for a performance of Shéhérazade with Madeleine Grey on 21 November. Surprisingly, on his return from Switzerland in early

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December, Ravel did not head straight for Montfort, but spent a good deal of time in Paris where, as he told Mme Casella, ‘I didn’t haunt concert halls much. I found I was very busy; I wasted a lot of time and lost the habit of sleeping.’55 He was similarly cryptic in a letter of 18 January 1927 to Robert Schmitz and his wife in the USA: ‘as you can easily imagine how I spent my time in Paris, I hope you’ll excuse my silence’. This enigma aside, the letter contains fully five pieces of interesting information. Schmitz has asked whether he would record a piano roll for Welte-Mignon, but Ravel explains that he is still contracted to Aeolian Duo-Art. Since the original 1920 contract had expired in 1922, he must have signed a further contract, indicating that Aeolian were not too unhappy about the unorthodox arrangements with Casadesus. As for the Piano Concerto, ‘I discovered that Le grand Meaulnes had nothing to do with the piano; it will become, if Euterpe [the Muse of music] permits, a fantasy for cello. Also my Sonata for piano and violin, which is far from being finished, must be so for 30 May, the date fixed for the first performance in Paris. And I have in mind a full-scale opera which could have far-reaching consequences.’ The last piece of information concerns further news of Ravel’s upcoming tour of the USA. Schmitz has clearly been hoping to bring over not only Ravel but a new orchestral work. As none is scheduled for the current year, ‘You should count only on the conductor. If you think that will be sufficient, I hereby confirm that, for the 1927–1928 season, I give you the exclusive right to negotiate with organizations for a series of ten concerts, with a guaranteed payment of ten thousand dollars (10,000).’56 Even if the franc had by now recovered from its collapse in 1926 to stability at around 25 to the dollar, 250,000 francs was still a large sum and showed Ravel to be well aware of his international status, whatever the Société nationale might think. The cello work based on Alain-Fournier’s novel was never completed and perhaps never begun. The ‘full-scale opera’ was probably Jeanne d’Arc, based on the book by Joseph Delteil, which Ravel was still pondering in the 1930s, but for which again no sketches have survived. The two completed works from the early months of 1927 were the Violin Sonata, in time for 30 May, and, in February, a tiny song, Rêves, on a text by Léon-Paul Fargue. It treats of the world of the memory as expressed in dreams: disjointed visions of a child playing round marble statues, a voice calling, faces gentle with love, and the noise of departing trains. Again Ravel employs his two styles, evoking the past with modal counterpoint and the aggressive bustle of the station with an ostinato bass and a highly realistic hooter. In fact the whole of the text could be regarded as ‘real’ until the piano epilogue where Ravel appropriately uses bitonality (D minor over a ‘blue’ dominant seventh on C sharp) to suggest the dual plane of the dream world. But in a penetrating article, Peter Kaminsky presents the opening bars, where the piano’s F major is answered by the voice’s D minor, as already ambivalent: ‘the diatonic collection, together with the

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ambiguity of tonal focus, suggest the simultaneously real and dream-like state expressed in verse one’. He also feels that Ravel’s decision to link verse three and the epilogue by use of the sustaining pedal suggests that memory itself – here the memory of the train station – becomes a catalyst for crossing the boundary from the provisionally real state of the opening to the dream state at the end. ‘(The analogy of any fantasy featuring different worlds on either side of some border – Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are two of many examples that could be cited – is both obvious and consistent with Ravel’s lifelong attraction to themes of fantasy and childhood.)’57 On 24 February Ravel went to the Opéra for the premiere of Les burgraves by Léo Sachs, who provided most of the money for the SMI, but whose pretensions to being a composer were not generally upheld: his opera was withdrawn after two performances. More rewarding was Milhaud’s Les malheurs d’Orphée, with Marguerite Bériza singing Eurydice in a performance she herself sponsored the following afternoon. It was a work Ravel greatly admired, and over which he had a further opportunity to speak his mind when Pierre Lalo roundly condemned it: ‘the [13-piece] orchestra of Malheurs d’Orphée is always very carefully balanced. M. Lalo, describing it as awful, compares it with Stravinsky’s instrumental combinations in Les noces. Please note that Les noces appeared while M. Lalo was away on sabbatical. Now that the work is famous and accepted, he can approve it without compunction, and also without danger. He lays down his bet after the ball has dropped: it’s safer.’58 These combative sentiments, for which Milhaud was duly grateful,59 were published in an interview with Roland-Manuel in Les nouvelles littéraires on 2 April, after Ravel had travelled to Edinburgh for a performance of the Trio on 27 February and accompanied Bathori in the first performance of Rêves at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on 19 March. Although the interview is entitled ‘Maurice Ravel et la Jeune Musique Française’, it is in fact an extended demolition of Lalo, of his style, which ‘possesses the kind of slowness that gives a remarkable impression of majesty’, and of his judgment in which ‘the gift of prophecy is certainly not the one that marks him out among his colleagues’. Ravel had, after more than a quarter of a century, finally tired of what he regarded as Lalo’s incompetent sniping and was happy to speak out in defence of someone else’s music, as over Debussy’s Images in 1913. On 6 May 1927, L’Enfant was given its German premiere in Leipzig, under the highly appropriate title of Das Zauberwort (the ‘magic word’ being ‘Maman’), and next day Philippe Gaubert conducted the Conservatoire Orchestra in the first French recording of La valse. As well as putting the finishing touches to the Violin Sonata, Ravel contributed a tiny opening ‘Fanfare’ to a joint ballet, L’éventail de Jeanne, involving ten composers and

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dedicated to Mme Jeanne Dubost, for the ballet class she ran for the ‘petits rats’ of the Opéra, and in recognition of her Wednesday salon, to which she regularly invited foreign artists passing through Paris. These included not only Vladimir Horowitz, but a supposed ‘Red Indian chief who sang at the top of his voice and jumped all over the place’.60 Sadly, he turned out to be from England. Ravel’s partly bitonal ‘Fanfare’, lasting less than ninety seconds, provides a suitably light-hearted introduction to the work, a kind of pendant to Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, with which it shares three members of Les Six (Auric, Milhaud and Poulenc), while Ibert’s ‘Valse’ contains a brief, naughty reminiscence of Ravel’s more substantial ballet. Ravel also engaged his diplomatic skills in reconciling Maison Durand, to whom four of the composers including Ravel himself were contracted, to publication of the ballet by Heugel. But when Rouché encouraged the participants to expand their orchestrations in view of the Opéra’s enormous space, Ravel refused: ‘I shan’t make any changes to my 13-piece orchestra, and you’ll be surprised to find that it will fill the Opéra perfectly well.’ Everyone was duly surprised.61 The first performance of the Violin Sonata, complete with its new finale, took place as advertised on 30 May. Sadly, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange was by now incapacitated by rheumatism, so Ravel turned to his old friend Georges Enesco. A few hours before the concert, the 11-year-old Yehudi Menuhin was present at a remarkable scene: ‘Enesco and Ravel were to perform that evening, at Durand & Fils, Ravel’s Sonata – Durand, the editors, had a quaint, rather delightful habit of having to listen to every work before they decided whether they would publish it. And so Enesco and Ravel rehearsed the work, and Enesco went through it twice, the first time he looked at the music, and the second time he played it from memory. . . . And Durand graciously decided to publish it.’62 Enough has been said of Ravel’s taste for the exotic, in music, in food, in objets d’art, for his attraction to jazz to cause us no surprise. In the middle movement of this sonata, entitled ‘Blues’, he borrows all the expected techniques – glissandi, insistently discordant intervals, complex ornaments and, as in Tzigane, high positions, to imitate the characteristically husky tone of the African voice (Ex. 8.4). [Moderato]



  



  

   3   



 





  















 



  

[gliss]

on A string







 













  3



 



on D string





       

3

[gliss]

Example 8.4. Ravel, Second Violin Sonata, II, fig. 2, bars 2–10

 

 

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Carine Perret finds detailed borrowings here from Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Black Bottom Stomp’.63 Beyond this Ravel gives evidence of sympathy with the experience from which this kind of music was born. As in ‘Aoua!’, underneath the snapping ferocity of the rhythms, which he insisted must be implacable, we may sense a tenderness that Ravel had rarely allowed to rise to the surface. Did his sympathy with African music stem from their shared repression of feeling? Or rather from their use of music as a safe outlet? The ‘Blues’ is certainly more than a musical postcard in the manner of Tzigane. Ravel’s problems with the last movement are particularly interesting in that they focus attention on the two types of music to which he was being increasingly drawn: 1) a style of diatonic/modal lyricism, to which he had always been faithful, and which reaches an affecting climax at the end of the first movement, and 2) a new style based on propulsive rhythms, where harmony and melody are in some cases secondary and where we may often sense forces of obsession and destruction, as in La valse. While there is nothing destructive about the ‘Perpetuum mobile’, the unceasing semiquavers of the violin do distract from the piano’s review of previous material and finally the effect is more of a tour de force than of a rounded summary. Incidentally, it has been claimed that Enesco loathed the ‘Blues’ movement, but although we know that he alone had played through the original finale, we do not know what he thought of its replacement.64 The two styles mentioned above remain incompatible but, unlike the first movement, the finale provides barely a spark of contact or even of awareness between them. Clearly this cool disjunction, with little if anything remaining of the ‘charm’ of the movement’s predecessor, was deliberate. But what Ravel intended to ‘say’ by it is hard to guess. He remained mostly at home or in Paris through June and July, and it was around this time that the young Vlado Perlemuter began to visit Le Belvédère to be coached by the composer in his piano music. Ravel attended the Dubost soirée for the premiere of L’éventail de Jeanne on 16 June, then travelled to London towards the end of the month – ostensibly to give the first British performance of the Sonata with Jelly d’Aranyi, but the absence of any traceable newspaper notice must cast doubt on whether this in fact took place. The Times of 21 October refers to a performance three days earlier by d’Aranyi and Myra Hess at the St John’s Institute, Westminster, of ‘Ravel’s new sonata for violin and pianoforte’, commenting that ‘the deliberate lack of relationship between the two parts in many places sounds merely perverse’.65 Further testimony came many years later from Howard Ferguson: ‘when Myra Hess and Jelly d’Aranyi gave the first English performance of the Sonata I turned pages! And Jelly remarked sweetly of Princess Helena Victoria, who was in the audience at Mrs Saxton Noble’s, “I hope they’ve remembered to order an ambulance for the dear Princess after the Ravel”.’66 Possibly Ravel came to London to record further piano rolls? At all events, the International String Quartet, led by André Mangeot, took the opportunity

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of playing him a recording they had just made of his String Quartet, filling seven sides of four 12-inch 78rpm records, with Kathleen Long adding the Sonatine on three further sides. The occasion was recalled by Mangeot in his article ‘The Ravel String Quartet’ in the September issue of the new British magazine The Gramophone. Remembering Ravel ‘in his early student days at the Paris Conservatoire when I was still wearing short knickers and he side whiskers and light waistcoats. . . . I felt I had some good reasons for knowing the “style” of his music’. But Mangeot was unhappy with the first two sets of discs, so asked Ravel to come and listen to the second one. ‘He heard them in a little cubicle at the Aeolian Hall, which was soon thick with cigarette smoke. I had the score with me, and as the records were played he marked it wherever there was an effect or a tempo that he wanted altered. It was very interesting. He is most precise – he knows exactly what he wants – how, in his mind, that quartet, every bar of it, ought to sound.’ They made a third recording in accordance with Ravel’s instructions and Mangeot took the result to Montfort on or before 18 July, when Ravel wrote an enthusiastic

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

20 Ravel’s letter to André Mangeot, 18 July 1927

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endorsement: ‘I am entirely satisfied both from the point of view of sonority and from that of tempi and nuances’, adding to Mangeot that ‘it will constitute a real document for posterity to consult.’67 Although the sound may sound thin by modern standards, it’s an affectionate performance, with the second theme of the first movement taken appreciably slower than the opening one and the starts of phrases carefully ‘placed’, but without loss of momentum. Writing to the soprano Marcelle Gerar on 12 July, Ravel complained of problems with his teeth and made the first mention we have of the sculptor Léon Leyritz, who was to play such an important role during the composer’s last years.68 Then on 20 July, two days after listening to Mangeot’s disc, he gave an interview at Montfort to the New York Times critic Olin Downes, preparing the American public for his forthcoming visit to the USA, for which plans were obviously now well advanced. Downes, then at the beginning of his distinguished thirty-year career with the paper, was patently charmed by his subject, who said ‘the most monstrous things, in phrases that cut so swiftly that seconds flew by before the full and awful import of the words sank into a slower brain. . . . A humming bird would have been maladroit in his company! M. Ravel grinned behind his lips, shot quick glances, which took in everything, guyed the millennium and roasted the universe.’69 The talk ranged from the new sonata (it took him three years to take out the notes that were unnecessary) to jazz, to Poe, to Mallarmé (‘not merely the greatest French poet, but the only French poet, since he made the French language, not designed for poetry, poetical’), to Debussy, the recent Stravinsky, Bloch, Sibelius, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams (‘a real artist, who only realized his richness when he learned to be English!’). In his final paragraph Downes argued that ‘it is something to be as secure, as imperturbable, as consistent in direction as Ravel has proved to be’. He was not to know that below the apparent security and imperturbability lay a sea of doubts and self-questionings; he was nearer the mark in writing that Ravel ‘has said little, worked, and followed his destiny’. No new Ravel work was to appear until Boléro, well over a year later. Until then, the composing machine was given a well-earned rest – writing to Mme Casella on 22 July, he complained that ‘for 2 months I’ve been all over the place: Paris, London, Fontainebleau, Houdan, very little at Montfort, just long enough to see the pile of unanswered letters prospering and my two new Siamese kittens pining away.’70 As a promise of repose to his creative self, he rented the second storey of 9 rue Tourasse in St-Jean-de-Luz from 1 August to 26 September, his first visit to the côte Basque for four years. The machine, though, found it hard to switch off entirely: ‘although I got here on 1 August,’ he wrote to Mme Dreyfus on the 12th, ‘I haven’t yet done much work.’71 On 7 September he answered Prunières’s request for information to give the Americans in advance of his tour by saying, ‘You can add, if it

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might please them, that I like jazz, far more than grand opera’,72 which perhaps didn’t bode well for Jeanne d’Arc. On 16 September he was visited again by Père Donostia, the Capuchin monk who had come to see him four years earlier, and a week later Ravel made a return visit to his monastery of Lekaroz, in the far north of Navarre, in company with various Basque notables. Père Donostia played two of his own piano pieces and Ravel his Sonatine. The last musical events we know of were a performance on 21 September of ‘Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis’ by the Schola Cantorum de St-Jean-de-Luz under their conductor, Charles Lebout, who was to direct them in all three Chansons two years later (see p. 308), and a concert given with Samazeuilh and Madeleine Grey in which the Wagnerian soprano Marcelle Bunlet also sang ‘Kaddisch’ and, at Ravel’s insistence, gave voice to some of Brünnhilde’s warlike whoops from Die Walküre. Otherwise Ravel spent time with friends, watched games of pelota and corridas in Bayonne and San Sebastián with Edmond Gaudin, bathed in the sea, and went for walks. Altogether it was a delightful time of ‘farniente’, as he admitted to Leyritz, who was working on a bust of the composer and looking after the kittens at Le Belvédère.73 Ravel was back there, as planned, on 26 September, since he had to be in Amsterdam on 1 October for a concert. He returned to Montfort on the 4th, and on the 18th conducted the Conservatoire Orchestra in La valse for the inaugural concert of Gustave Lyon’s new Salle Pleyel on the rue Rochechouart, Stravinsky performing the same office for his Firebird suite. This event necessitated postponing until 26 October a visit to London to record discs for the firm of Brunswick. How he reconciled this with his commitments to Aeolian is not clear. At any rate the recordings were never issued.74 It was around this time that Delteil learnt of Ravel’s plans to set his Jeanne d’Arc to music; and Ravel also had in mind to orchestrate Debussy’s piano duet suite Epigraphes antiques, a project later taken over by Ernest Ansermet.75 Amid all this activity, Ravel’s health was again giving cause for concern. To Mme Alvar he can confide jokingly that ‘I’m as cosseted as anyone could be: to the point that the cook is so touched by the severity of my diet, she adds a drop of milk to my morning tapioca!’76 To his old fellow student Theodor Szántó some weeks later he is less jolly: ‘I’m fairly worn out and am having to follow an energetic regime – injections of cytocerum, pituitary and adrenal extracts etc – to allow me to sail at the end of the month.’77 He might well have been worrying whether the American tour could in fact go ahead, having to tell Prunières on 6 December that he could not come to the Schoenberg concert at the SMI on the 15th, containing the Suite op. 29, the Five Piano Pieces op. 23, the Four Songs op. 6 and Pierrot Lunaire, with Marya Freund, Eduard Steuermann, and Schoenberg himself conducting – a concert that he had undoubtedly helped to promote and organize. ‘I am’, he wrote, ‘in a state of extreme exhaustion . . . and the doctors are ordering me to abandon the diet I’d been given, to eat as much as possible, and rest so as to be in a fit state to sail on the 28th.’78 What’s more,

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the new regime was so complicated, he couldn’t keep track of it – hardly reassuring before a three-month foreign tour.79 Meanwhile, of course, details of the music had to be decided. Ravel’s letter to Bernard Laberge of Bogue-Laberge Management gave a list of the orchestral works to be performed (nothing surprising, apart from Mozart’s Symphony no. 40, which had obviously not collapsed under him in Scandinavia) and of the piano pieces he was prepared to play, namely: Menuet antique

‘Habanera’ Pavane pour une Infante défunte Sonatine (all three movements) ‘Prélude’, ‘Forlane’, ‘Menuet’ and Rigaudon’ from Le tombeau de Couperin ‘Oiseaux tristes’ and ‘La vallée des cloches’ from Miroirs Prélude [the 1913 sight-reading piece] Laberge was adjured to keep in mind the advance of $1,000, and not to forget ‘the very important matter of the tobacco; tell me, when you’ve found out, if I shall be certain of finding it everywhere in the USA or, as Robert Schmitz has assured me, if it can be sent on to me from France’.80 The Parisian arts weekly Chantecler gave a banquet in Ravel’s honour on 16 December, which he may or may not have attended – probably it would have seemed discourteous to Schoenberg to be seen at a banquet after missing his concert the previous evening. Milhaud, apologizing to Ravel for also not attending the banquet, no doubt voiced the wishes of his many friends when he hoped that ‘your concert tour in America won’t exhaust you too much.’81 Whether thanks to his injections or despite them, Ravel sailed from Le Havre on the S.S. France on 28 December and docked in New York on 4 January 1928.82 The moving spirit behind the tour was Robert Schmitz, a fine pianist who had known Debussy and was the founder-president of the Pro Musica Society, which aimed to strengthen America’s musical links with Europe and with France in particular. Initially a minimum of $10,000 was agreed for a twomonth tour with an average of two concerts a week,83 although Schmitz encouragingly wrote that ‘You might even make more. There are fifteen Pro Musica Societies in the United States; we can count on $5,000 from them.’ (The contract with Bogue-Laberge in fact guarantees only $8,000.84) The Mason and Hamlin Piano Company also paid Ravel $5,000 for the exclusive use of their pianos.85 He was involved on three fronts directly, and one indirectly: as composer, obviously, as conductor and as pianist, but also as provider of a written introduction, an English translation of which was delivered by various speakers during the tour. As with the 1922 article on Fauré’s songs, the original French text, which has never been found, was written by Roland-Manuel. The English translation was published later by the Rice Institute.86

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Beginning with his reception by Mrs Thomas Edison on 7 January and the ecstatic acclaim the following evening by an audience of 3,500 people at Koussevitzky’s Ravel concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it became clear that the composer was not going to have to struggle in order to be noticed. Alexandre Tansman was in the box with him when the whole audience stood at the end of the concert: ‘he had tears in his eyes. He said, “This would never happen to me in Europe”.’87 (Indeed Gaby Casadesus felt that America confirmed Ravel’s status, even for the French.88) Concert halls, theatres and (for the chamber recitals) often hotel ballrooms were regularly packed out. Not that every work was greeted with enthusiasm. La valse and Daphnis were generally known and appreciated, even if the Vienna-after-theWar syndrome was in evidence among the critics for the former, and the Sonatine much loved. But, surprisingly, even such a major centre as Chicago heard Le tombeau de Couperin and Shéhérazade for the first time when Ravel conducted them there on 20 January, one critic fearing that the cycle ‘will not prove easy of American digestion’.89 Opinions varied too about Ravel’s way with La valse, Albert Goldberg noting that the Chicago orchestra’s regular conductor, Frederick Stock, provided a ‘more effective delivery, with much more variety of tempo and nuance than Mr Ravel seems to consider necessary for its interpretation’.90 The word ‘irony’ was bandied about fairly freely, even if this did not always save Histoires naturelles from charges of de haut en bas jokiness. But the main butt of the critics’ wrath was the Violin Sonata, introduced to the continent in the Gallo Theater, New York on 15 January by the composer and Joseph Szigeti (Ravel had to make do with less prestigious fiddlers after that). It has to be said that his attempts, both in the ‘Blues’, in interviews, and in his pre-concert lecture, to persuade the Americans to take jazz seriously were a total failure (for further consideration of the ideas expressed in his lecture, see Chapter 10). ‘The composer is carrying coals to Newcastle when he presents a jazz sonata in America’ was one of the kinder responses to ‘a most difficult composition which took all of the endurance of both performers and audience to get through.’91 Szigeti’s endurance was indeed tested, as recorded by the violinist Harry Adaskin who was turning Ravel’s pages: ‘The first movement was simply glorious, and so was the second. . . . Ravel played extremely well and Szigeti was wonderful’. But then Ravel launched into the Finale like a rocket: You can imagine my horror. . . . Szigeti plunged into the thing at a speed that was utterly inhuman. Not far from the finish I heard this terrible squawk – I knew what it was right away. He got the violin bow stuck in between two or three strings and tried to pull it out and they wouldn’t yield . . . finally he got the bow out of the strings and finished the piece. And as we got into the artists’ room, Szigeti said to me: ‘He never did this in rehearsal!’92

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But, such disasters aside, the clear message from the critics was that in the USA jazz knew its place, and so much the better. The public were not so sure, and the Chicago audience on 18 January was delighted when the ‘Blues’ was repeated after the Sonata as an encore. Between the concerts on 8 and 13 January, Ravel traveled to Toronto to hear the Hart House String Quartet, of which Adaskin was second violin, in rehearsals of his String Quartet for the New York concert on the 15th. In his hotel room they played through the whole work, after which he said simply, ‘That’s not how I conceived the Quartet.’ ‘Well,’ recalled Adaskin, ‘we were a little stunned by that, naturally. . . . We said, “Well, tell us, Maître, how did you conceive it? Can you give us any help in this matter?” “No,” he said, “you play it with such conviction that I wouldn’t dream of touching it. Just leave it the way it is. Let’s go and have lunch.” ’93 Laudable as this openness might be in accepting that the work had its own life beyond him, such complaisance from Ravel was rare, if not unique. Adaskin’s Quartet had been awarded a greater compliment than perhaps they knew. Ravel as conductor also came in for a mixed press – not entirely unjustly, according to Tansman, who went to Ravel’s second concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 January, when he conducted Rapsodie espagnole ‘and he really was not at home at all. Fortunately they had already played it under Koussevitsky. But he didn’t realize, and when I went backstage, he said, “I’m sorry you didn’t come yesterday, it was still better.” ’94 But both the Chicago and Cleveland orchestras did him the honour of a fanfare, or ‘Tusch’, after their concerts, and H.T. Parker was only one of several critics who responded more favourably to Ravel’s individual technique: He swings a longish stick; with it beats the measured, frugal movement, unfailingly clear and precise. The guiding wand of few conductors, or composer-conductors, traverses so narrow an arc. Of his left hand he makes little use. Oftenest, it lifts an admonitory forefinger, upturned or outthrust when it would emphasize a salient detail, assure a vivid transition. Monsieur Ravel’s body moves more conspicuously than his arms, bending eagerly forward when he would gain a sweep of tone; relaxing at the knees and stooping when he would impose other unities and ardors.95

Over Ravel the pianist, though, there was a fairly universal view that while he was more or less acceptable as an accompanist, he did his solo works no favours. Three brief extracts, in descending order of generosity, may be cited as characteristic: ‘His playing was polished, infinitely whimsical, yet remote and preoccupied, as though he were gazing with wonder upon what he had done and puzzling vaguely whether he could ever do it again’; ‘a fidgety little man seated at the piano, struggling with notes of a composition long since submerged in his consciousness’; ‘Only a supreme ironist would consent to

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play his own beautiful music in public as badly as Ravel plays it. He plays even worse than Johannes Brahms did in his declining years, and Brahms set a mark for all bad pianists to shoot at. However, it is a tradition that composers play badly and no one can complain that Ravel does not respect it.’96 A final indication of the variability of Ravel’s pianism is that at a recording session with Duo-Art in New York on 26 February he put on to disc ‘La vallée des cloches’, Menuet antique and the ‘Rigaudon’ from Le tombeau,97 but only the first of these was ever issued. Probably Ravel was more concerned with the standing ovations than with the critics’ sniping. For one thing, by the time the reviews appeared he was usually elsewhere. The overall impression indeed is of happiness on both sides: everyone was charmed by his modesty and beautiful manners, and not less by his occasional outspokenness; and Ravel, sleeping seven to nine hours on the long-distance trains, was a quite different being from the invalid of early December. He wrote to Mme Dreyfus on 4 April on the way to New Orleans that ‘I’ve never felt better than during this crazy tour. I’ve finally discovered the reason: it’s that I’ve never lived such a rational life [une vie aussi raisonnable].’98 Crazy, yes: between arriving in New York on 4 January and leaving on 21 April he covered something over 18,000 miles (two thirds of the circumference of the equator). But, if not reasonable, then certainly rational, in that every journey had a defined purpose and that in fulfilling, however inadequately, his roles as a performer, he was free of the self-induced pressure to be creative. From this it is not far to arguing that his insomnia and nervous troubles derived at least in part from his hermit-like existence in Le Belvédère and from his regular need to prove himself to the ever-vigilant critics of the French capital. ‘This would never happen to me in Europe.’ Far from exhausting him then, the tour invigorated him, even if he was pleased to find Cleveland devoid of interest so he could have a break.99 He had met Mary Pickford, Fritz Kreisler, Bartók and Gershwin, seen Gershwin’s musical Funny Face (Ravel’s suggestion to Nadia Boulanger that she give Gershwin lessons was not followed up100), been to hear jazz between trains in Omaha, visited the Ford factory in Detroit (‘as splendid as [the film] Metropolis’, he wrote to Edouard101) and made a pilgrimage to the house of Edgar Allan Poe. Even on the boat home he gave a recital with the soprano Nina Kochitz, who was to record ‘Kaddisch’ in 1929. Various worries had proved unfounded: that he would be without his Caporal cigarettes, which were duly sent through diplomatic channels; without enough food, as the Americans’ warmth of heart was not matched by their appetite and ‘tout le monde sait que je suis carnivore’; or not with the latest fashion – Mme Schmitz recalled that, as well as twenty pairs of pyjamas, he had brought evening ties all half an inch too long, and so she had set to work with a pair of scissors. There were fifty-seven of them.102 On arriving at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle ‘he was interested in two things – getting his bright blue suspenders shortened and

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playing ‘Tea for Two’, Rhapsody in Blue, ‘My Blue Heaven’ and other jazz tunes’.103 And there was always the fact that instead of the guaranteed $8,000, he had in fact brought home, together with several cases full of American gadgets, the sum of $9,863.52.104 Now though, on his return to Le Havre on 27 April, the presence of his brother and a handful of friends reminded him that the holiday from France was over. A further reminder awaited him at Le Belvédère where the mountain of post included a letter from Ida Rubinstein asking him to orchestrate six pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia for the beginning of the Opéra’s 1928–9 season, to form a ballet for her to be choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska.105 Although some twenty years earlier he had told Falla that Albéniz’s work was ‘so suited to the piano that he did not see how it could be orchestrated’,106 Ravel now began to sketch an orchestration of ‘Rondeña’. In the same month (8 June) the SMI mounted a Ravel Festival at the Salle Gaveau, at which Ravel accompanied Madeleine Grey in various songs and Claude Lévy in the Violin Sonata, but did not venture on any solo piano music. Two days after that he hosted a party at Le Belvédère when Leyritz presented his bust of the composer to his subject in the presence of some forty guests, including the Godebskis, Delage, Ibert, Fargue, Hélène Casella, Rosenthal, Jane Bathori, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Tansman and Marcelle Gerar. It was not a solemn occasion. The imposing figures of Honegger and Roland-Manuel appeared behind waiters’ aprons, Ravel did a dance en travesti and the party ended at 4 a.m. in Versailles after a night of ear-splitting jazz and aesthetic debate. The composer’s vie de chez lui was back at full strength.107 By the end of June the first cloud had appeared on the horizon. Ravel had taken Albéniz’s piano suite down to St-Jean-de-Luz, in a car driven by Joaquín Nin, who had a villa there and whom he’d known since 1903. Here Ida Rubinstein was to join him and perhaps talk through a few choreographic ideas. But at Arcachon, on the way south, Ravel learnt from Nin that the rights to orchestrate Albéniz’s work belonged to the Spanish conductor Enrique Arbós, who had played in a string quartet with Albéniz and had for a time been assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Arbós had in fact already finished his orchestrations, for the ballet Triana to be danced by La Argentina at the Opéra-Comique the following May. Ravel was disappointed and furious, shouting, ‘Who is this Arbós?’108 (a curious question, considering that his friend Viñes had played some of Arbós’s chamber music back in the 1890s . . .109). When he had calmed down, he wrote to Albéniz’s widow, explaining that the six pieces were scheduled for the Opéra season, but admitting ‘I have every reason to fear you will refuse me the authorization I need to have from you, which I would feel to be within your rights.’110 It was, and she did. Arbós then seemed to break the impasse by offering to waive his rights, but Ravel would have none of it. There was silence on the subject for a week or so,

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before one morning Ravel tapped out a theme on the piano with one finger and asked Samazeuilh, ‘Don’t you think this tune has a certain insistence?’111 Then on 10 August, still in St-Jean-de-Luz, he announced to Robert Casadesus that the new piece was called Fandango,112 and three days later Durand wrote to the composer to say how pleased he was that Ravel was not ‘stuck with “recomposing” music by Albéniz’.113 Nin later recalled getting a letter in which Ravel said ‘he was working on a rather unusual piece: “no form properly speaking, no development, no modulation, or hardly any; a theme in the style of Padilla” (the extremely vulgar composer of Valencia Ex. 8.5), “rhythm and orchestration”. It was Boléro!’114

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Example 8.5. José Padilla, Valencia

On the afternoon of 6 October Ravel and Roland-Manuel went to the offices of the Aeolian Company to record what was to be published ten years later as the ‘Esquisse autobiographique’, already referred to a number of times. Henri Dubois, the director of the company, wanted Ravel to write commentaries on a group of his piano works that he would choose to be included in the package of piano rolls: ‘Habanera’, Jeux d’eau, ‘Oiseaux tristes’, Gaspard de la nuit and the seventh Valse noble (it is not known who the pianists were: conceivably Ravel’s own 1922 roll may have been used for ‘Oiseaux tristes’). Ravel, as ever hating to talk about himself, would only consider doing so in interview format, which Dubois refused. So Roland-Manuel rewrote the interview in his own words; the composer was supposed to edit these, but never did.115 By that day Boléro was still not finished, with just nine days to go until Durand’s deadline of 15 October, if parts were to be ready for Rubinstein’s premiere on 22 November. But Ravel just made it,116 as he needed to, because he now left for England where he was to play in a concert at the Aeolian Hall on the 19th and be made an Honorary Doctor of Music at Oxford University on the 23rd. For the London chamber concert he accompanied five of his easier songs and conducted the Introduction et Allegro, but left the piano parts of the Trio, the Violin Sonata and the Chansons madécasses (receiving their first performance in England) in the capable hands of the pianist Gordon Bryan. Bryan later

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gave Ravel’s biographer Norman Demuth an account of the visit and of the following ceremony in Oxford: Although the concert itself was a real ‘occasion’, with the French ambassador in the front row and a great many people unable to get in at all, we had the constant anxiety lest Ravel should somehow be mislaid en route and perhaps not turn up at all. He was so easily diverted from the main object in hand, and had no idea of punctuality whatever; he loved sitting indefinitely chatting after a meal, hated going to bed and equally hated getting up – Lennox Berkeley and his cousin Claude, both of them equally at home in French and English, were always on hand to prod him gently in the right direction, and between the lot of us we managed to get him to rehearsals, lunches and numerous parties, more or less on time, though it was all extremely exhausting. [At Oxford he] was greatly interested in the details of the dignified ceremony, and incidentally in the gay pink silk robe which had to be hired for the occasion, and which he would have rejoiced to take back to Paris with him. We had quite a job to adjust its considerable length to his diminutive stature.117

Sir Lennox Berkeley recalled that ‘there was quite a lot of fiddling around with safety pins’,118 and Charles Alvar-Harding, Mme Alvar’s son, later wrote that ‘his morning coat was set off by a waistcoat of so original a design that even the politest dons blinked a little. . . . Finally Ravel was escorted in by two immense men also resplendent in scarlet and white. Looking extraordinarily minute with so gigantic a bodyguard, he walked to the stage in the middle of the round theatre and made his speech partly in Latin and partly in broken English.’119 The Oxford Times (26 October) recorded that ‘M. Ravel was accorded a most enthusiastic reception,’ and that ‘after the ceremony [he] went to the Town Hall, where he took part in a programme of his own works’. The programme was that already given at the Aeolian Hall. Ravel was also presented with a booklet, with his name inscribed in gold on a white cover, proclaiming that ‘WE, Musicians of Oxford, whose privilege it was to share in the welcome accorded to M. Maurice Ravel by the University when he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Music (honoris causa) venture to express our earnest hope that he will commemorate the event by giving to us and to posterity the benefit and delight of another string quartet.’ Among the signatories to this, unfortunately unfulfilled, request were several of the great and good of that and later times: the Professor of Music, Sir Hugh Allen, Paul Benecke (grandson of Mendelssohn and Fellow of Magdalen), Reginald Jacques (conductor of the Bach Choir of London, 1931–60), Ernest Walker (music historian and Director of Music at Balliol), William Harris (organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, 1933–61), Walter Hussey (Dean of Chichester, 1955–77 and patron of the arts), Margaret Deneke (Oxford’s musical éminence grise into the 1960s) and the impresario

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Lilian Baylis.120 The Times of London observed that the recital in the Town Hall ‘aroused a great deal of interest in musical Oxford, whose taste is, generally speaking, conservative and Teutonic’.121 On the train back to London’s Paddington station, a journey less soporific than its American counterparts, the opening theme came to Ravel of what would become the first movement of the G major Piano Concerto. In London, Bryan continues his story after Ravel’s lunch at the Royal College of Music, when the students’ orchestra, conducted by Dr. (now Sir) Adrian Boult, played the second series of excerpts from Daphnis et Chloé. It was a magnificent performance, which we all heard from the gallery at the back, and when Ravel walked up the crowded hall, he had a tremendous ovation from the students. He appeared not to notice this, but mounted the rostrum and, instead of bowing, he bent over the score, discussing some detail of it with the conductor, and then walked back, animatedly engaged in conversation. The students were disappointed that he did not speak to them, but the only words of English that he possessed at that time were three – ‘one, two, pencil’ – often displayed for the benefit of inquirers, and spoken with a marked American accent. He said he had been taught these with great care, when he had been conducting the American orchestras.122

He returned to Montfort at the end of October, but his travelling was far from over – to the point that we may ask whether it was becoming a substitute for creative work (depending on whether we think Boléro qualifies under that heading). On 6 November he left for a tour of Spain with Madeleine Grey and the violinist Claude Lévy and visited nine cities in eighteen days, although the subsequent Portuguese leg of the tour was cancelled. Even so this meant that he missed the Paris premiere of Boléro on 22 November. Falla was closely involved with the arrangements, which no doubt gave him some uneasy hours, and had probably been a moving spirit behind the tour from the time of his last stay in Paris between February and April.123 Ravel then had a few days back home, during which he took Lennox Berkeley to the nightclub ‘Le bœuf sur le toit’,124 and before that just managed to change into evening clothes for the last of the four performances of Boléro on 4 December: ‘an excellent performance, but picturesque, which was not what was required’.125 Boléro was placed last on the ballet programme, after Honegger’s orchestration of pieces by Bach, Les noces d’Amour et de Psyché, and Milhaud’s orchestration of waltzes by Schubert and Liszt, La bien-aimée. Sir Francis Rose recalled, ‘this new venture was the talk of Paris. . . . Everyone was excited and it was whispered that the money would run out before the extravagant curtain for the stage had been made.’126 But Rubinstein’s purse was deep. Diaghilev rushed back from Manchester to discover whether her production

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posed any sort of threat to his standing, and was not pleased to find firstly that he had a job getting a seat, and secondly that ‘all our people were there’, including Misia Sert, the Comte de Beaumont, the Princesse Edmond de Polignac and Stravinsky.127 He took his habitual revenge by disseminating caustic remarks. The designer Alexandre Benois, as a renegade from Diaghilev’s team, came in for his share of these, his decors dismissed as ‘dull and colourless, the same as 30 years ago, only worse’.128 The one for Boléro was, according to one account, ‘a hovel on the Paralelo [a street in Madrid]: on a table, in the center of a vast room, a woman was dancing, while the men all crowded round her, wild with desire.’129 The critic Henri de Curzon remembered the scenario rather differently: a badly lit tavern; along the walls, in the shadows, drinkers at tables, talking among themselves; in the centre a large table, on which a dancer is trying out a step. With a certain dignity to begin with, this step grows firmer, repeats a rhythm. . . . The drinkers pay no attention but . . . little by little, the obsessiveness of the rhythm takes hold of them; they get up, they approach and surround the table, they go wild around the dancer . . . who finishes in an apotheosis.130

Many years later, the dancer Billy Chappell remembered being one of the men who were ‘all sitting round, beating out the rhythms on the table, and getting up on the table and getting off the table and sitting down on our feet. And there was a terrible moment when everybody got up on the table and I sat down – and I was bang in the middle of the front! I was so terrified that, when the curtain fell, I absolutely flew off the stage, found a cupboard full of very old-looking costumes and hid.’ He found Rubinstein ruthless and frightening, ‘but she was a woman of great style. Dotty style, but great style – you couldn’t dismiss it.’131 The critics on this occasion did not, Prunières commenting that Rubinstein, in collaboration with Benois, ‘created a picture in the manner of Goya’, and complaining that, with Sauguet’s David, it was ‘the only [work] . . . that was not sacrificed to the tyrannical empire of classical ballet. . . . Let [Rubinstein] conform to the rules of her own choreography and abandon once and for all classical dancing for free-style dancing.’132 Again, as in Les noces, Nijinska’s choreography looked many years ahead, as well as accommodating Rubinstein’s shortcomings – Chappell comments, ‘to get up on your points when you’ve never done it in your life (and she must have been in her late forties in those days), you can’t do it’.133 The ballet’s success took Ravel and his musical friends totally by surprise (sales of the abridged piano solo version, made by Lucien Garban posing as ‘Roger Branga’, had reached 50,000 by the time of Ravel’s death134). True, it may be no very striking commentary on the human condition, but it achieves its

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limited aims simply and forcefully. Boléro consists of one long crescendo, articulated by a double melody each of whose limbs is repeated. Both are eighteen bars long and each has a distinct character: the first diatonic, the second diatonic with strong chromatic inflexions. Ravel repeats this AABB pattern four times at an ever-increasing volume. Finally he precipitates a climax by cutting out the repeat of each limb, reducing the material to AB and, just as B moves to an apparently inevitable cadence, switching from C major to E major. For the only time in the work the music briefly develops before rhythm and orchestral colour take over again. If this simple plan succeeds, it is due partly to Ravel’s masterly orchestration (though he was disappointed by the effect of the oboe d’amore), partly to the ingenious syncopations within the tune itself that make the repeats just about bearable. They operate over an inflexible tonic – dominant pattern in the bass, and it is typical of Ravel’s skill that he recognized how much repetition the progression could bear and finished the work with a decorated (?poisoned) plagal cadence (Ex. 8.6).

 

     

 

   

Example 8.6. Ravel, Boléro, final cadence (basic harmony)

Like any piece of music, Boléro owed something to the past. The passage in ‘harmonics’ (after figure 8) may well have been inspired by one in the slow, ‘Egyptian’ movement of Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto, a work that was long on Ravel’s piano.135 And in calling it ‘a piece for orchestra without music’, was Ravel thinking of the repetitive character of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture, or of Chabrier’s description of España as ‘a piece in F major, that’s all’?136 Spanish audiences and composers have tended to look askance at both España and Boléro; both contain more of their composers than of any truly Spanish qualities. Certainly Boléro is in the line of mechanical, moto perpetuo works, something Ravel tacitly admitted in wanting the scene set in a factory (Larner notes ‘a striking parallel between the relentlessly repeated thythmic patterns in Boléro and the industrial ostinatos in the Fabrika – ‘Factory’ – section of Prokofiev’s ballet Le pas d’acier’,137 which Ravel had seen on 7 June 1927 at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt). It was not however given along these lines until 31 December 1941, again at the Opéra but with

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Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

21 Ravel conducting Boléro, drawing by Luc-Albert Moreau

choreography by Serge Lifar, and with sets by Ravel’s friend Léon Leyritz; these downplayed Spanishness in favour of Arab and Moorish elements, including a factory which, according to Leyritz, ‘is there to underline the mechanical side of the music’s construction’.138 This ‘mechanicalism’ meant that, in conducting Boléro, Ravel’s characteristic stiffness was, for once, an advantage. As to tempo, one has to mention the famous occasion on 4 May 1930 when Toscanini conducted the piece at the Opéra at the start of the New York Philharmonic tour and was taken to task by the composer, on grounds that remain in dispute. The general view follows Ravel’s letter to Ida Godebska of 8 May, in which he says, ‘if I’ve been seen at the Opéra, it was because I knew that Toscanini was taking Boléro at a ridiculous speed and wanted to tell him so, which has upset everybody’.139 It’s clear from this that rumours of Toscanini’s tempo had reached Ravel before the concert; or, if we follow René Chalupt in his edition of Ravel’s letters, before the rehearsal. Moreover, Chalupt accuses Toscanini not of adopting an excessive tempo from the start, but of making a marked acceleration, against which Ravel expostulated, but which the conductor maintained at the concert. Chalupt agrees though with Tansman, who was present at the confrontation,

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that Toscanini claimed his tempo ‘was the only way to save the work’.140 This version, that Toscanini was trying to make the piece ‘supportable’, fits with that of Pedro de Freitas Branco to whom Ravel later confided that the whole point of Boléro was that it should be ‘insupportable’.141 Serge Lifar too claimed that he was with Ravel in the wings after the triumphant performance and that as Toscanini came off stage towards them, ‘Ravel merely pulled an imposing old-fashioned watch out of his pocket. . . . “A minute and a half too fast” was all he deigned to say. Then he turned on his heel and walked with dignity out of the theatre. Toscanini and Ravel never met again.’142 Maybe they didn’t, but why would they need to? Lifar’s mythmaking tendencies should be treated with caution. According to Chalupt, Ravel eventually gave way to the extent of saying to Toscanini, ‘You, but nobody else!’ (though exactly what he might have been permitting is not clear), while there can be no disputing Ravel’s letter to the conductor of 9 September in which he denies that any ‘affaire’ took place! There is no mention of any collision of wills, merely an explanation that, if he did not stand to acknowledge the applause, it was because he feels such ovations ‘should be addressed only to the interpreter or the work, or both’.143 If we take Toscanini’s recording with the NBC Symphony Orchestra of 21 January 1939 as representative of his performances, then it might not have been so much the basic tempo that Ravel objected to (mostly, at around [ = 76, within reach of his marking) as the persistent rhythmic fluctuations, and especially the rallentandos applied with increasing grossness to the climax of the tune (reaching up to the high D flats).144 Even so, the discrepancy in overall duration (Toscanini’s 13.56 as against Ravel’s 16.08) does something to confirm Lifar’s memoir. To Furtwängler, Ravel made the paradoxical observation that playing Boléro fast made it seem longer, playing it slowly, shorter.145 What Boléro ‘means’ has been much discussed. That its tempo is half that of a real bolero, Ravel acknowledged, and thought of no importance.146 The contention that the heart of the work is ‘the repetitive obsession that opens out on to notions of death, madness, destruction and annihilation, as if the composer had had an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world’147 may appeal to some, and was to some extent anticipated by the 1934 film Bolero in which the arrogant dancer Raoul de Barre, played by George Raft, overtaxes his weak heart by performing the dance with Helen (Carole Lombard) and dies immediately afterwards in his dressing room (the less said about the treatment of Ravel’s score – death by a thousand cuts – the better). Others may interpret it in sexual terms, and it is pertinent to observe that the fandango, which Boléro was originally, was described by Sir John Hawkins as being danced with ‘a variety of the most indecent gesticulations that can be conceived’, and that when Casanova saw it danced in Madrid in 1767 he felt that ‘Everything is represented, from the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of

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love’,148 even though the dancing couples do not actually embrace (Ravel’s library at Le Belvédère still contains a bound three-volume set of Casanova’s writings149). Then there are all the dismissive lines, many of them spoken by Ravel himself. When an old lady at the premiere yelled ‘Rubbish!’, he replied, ‘She got the message!’ When Ansermet found the piece very good, he responded, ‘I really can’t think why.’ To Honegger he said, ‘I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.’ When the conductor Paul Paray took him to the casino at Monte Carlo and asked if he’d like a go, he answered, ‘I wrote Boléro and won. I’ll stick there’150, and on the eve of his death, listening to the work on the radio for the last time, he burst out laughing, saying ‘Ah! When I think what a good joke I played on the musical world!’151 Knowing Ravel’s reluctance to divulge his innermost secrets, and with the example of La valse before us, it would be unwise either to take him at his word or to invent scenarios of sentiment. Two pieces of evidence point rather in the familiar direction of a technical challenge. In the already quoted interview with Jean-Aubry, printed in the Christian Science Monitor on 17 May 1924, he stated that he would next address Colette’s text for L’Enfant, ‘and then I shall perhaps start composing a symphonic poem without a subject, where the whole interest will be in the rhythm.’ In view of this, any claim that it presents as evidence of his final brain disease becomes less tenable.152 A more arguable case can be made for linking Boléro with Ravel’s favourite text, Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, which we know was in his mind at the time he wrote the work.153 With the exception of the opening four bars, each statement of the tune is sixteen bars long with a two-bar ‘till-ready’, that is eighteen bars; there are eighteen statements of the tune up to the abrupt change into E major, at which point symmetry is abandoned. Poe’s The Raven, his chosen exemplar, has eighteen stanzas; furthermore Poe writes, ‘I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain – the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.’154 It is not unreasonable, on these two pieces of evidence, to surmise that Ravel’s interest, as so often, was in being homo faber – in kicking notes around and seeing what could be made of them. As so often again, this exercise stretched not only the compass of the orchestral repertoire (the structure of Boléro had no predecessors and, despite the many pieces of ‘process music’ that live in its shadow, could never be repeated), but also the techniques of the instrumentalists. The work is the side-drummer’s Everest, while the trombone solo defeated the whole section of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, so that the dance-band trombonist Miff Mole had to be called in to show how it could be done (though the lesson seemed to have been lost by 1939, when the solo trombonist in the recording mentioned above makes a hash of his descent from the high D flats). The French trombonist Léo Arnaud-Vauchant, who

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relates that story, also tells of going to see Ravel at Montfort at least twice. The first time was when the work was still at the sketch stage, and written in D major (another link with La valse and Chabrier’s ‘Fête polonaise’); ArnaudVauchant explained to Ravel that the trombone solo, and especially the slides, would be much less difficult if he brought the piece down into C major, which he duly did.155 In due course, ‘I played the Boléro without glissando, using only the 1st and 2nd positions for the first half of the solo, then adding the 3rd, 4th, 5th and finally the 6th. When I pointed out to him that he had not written anything for the 7th, he laughed and said, “Don’t tell anyone!” ’156

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CHAPTER IX

1928–1937

Two concertos and a long farewell The public orator of Oxford University, pleading the difficulty of saying anything illuminating in Latin about the art of music, had spoken of Ravel as one ‘who persuades all learned men that Pan is not dead’,1 a remark of tragic irony. Although death for Ravel was still nine years away, it was already casting its shadow. Insomnia had returned after his American tour and now his natural resilience was increasingly unable to hold out against it. He suffered from fatigue and his friends noticed that he was acquiring a far-away look in the eye2 – an eye that for over fifty years had missed very little. Despite these problems, or maybe to alleviate them, he continued his travels over the next six months. Two days after attending the last night of Boléro, he sat on the ISCM jury in Geneva, then spent five or six days in St-Jean-de-Luz, and it was here that, in addition to plans for an opera on Joseph Delteil’s Jeanne d’Arc, he may have had his first serious thoughts of writing a piano concerto. He had published nothing for piano solo since Le tombeau de Couperin, and although the instrument had figured in the majority of his works, no new keyboard techniques had become apparent. Indeed the whole ethos of ‘technique’, with its overtones of illusion and wizardry, seemed now to interest Ravel far less. Maybe subconsciously his piano writing was belatedly coming to terms with his own deficiencies as a performer. At any rate, for all his vaunted unwillingness to be a performing animal, he had for some time toyed with the idea of writing a concerto for himself to play. In the course of 1929 he addressed the task with some determination, together with a work called Dédale VI, which he termed ‘an outsider’. In the meantime he was in London during much of January 1929, giving an interview to Calvocoressi, published in the Daily Telegraph on the 12th, and on the 16th taking part in a concert of his music at the Aeolian Hall in the presence of the French ambassador. Calvocoressi begins his interview by taxing Ravel with having ‘created something of a sensation’ during his October 1928 visit, ‘by describing Berlioz as “a composer of great genius, but deficient in musicianship” ’. Ravel gets out of it as best he can, but feels bound nonetheless to retort that ‘there are a few striking harmonies in Berlioz’s music; but as often as not what I feel about them is that they’ve happened by accident.’

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Musorgsky’s ‘alleged incorrections’ are of a quite different order. Ravel goes on to note anti-romantic tendencies in France and Germany – no bad thing for France, since ‘French romanticism was always rather artificial and deliberate, and had no deep roots in the French mentality and outlook’; while even Schoenberg, ‘do what he may . . . remains romantic’. On the other hand, ‘in France there is a certain danger of the anti-romantic tendency leading to an excess of simplicity – to fragility and lack of substance’. He concludes by confirming that he is at work on Jeanne d’Arc (Calvo calls it ‘a musical play’) and on a piano concerto, which was to prove that simplicity and substance could, in the right hands, profitably coexist.3 A ’flu virus he had picked up in Malaga in mid-November continued to trouble him during this London visit. No doubt he was exaggerating in his letter to Mme Casella of 13 February when he claimed to have spent the whole trip in bed,4 but he should have been cheered by his reception on 24 January, when he was the guest of honour at the Anglo-French Luncheon Club, presided over by Sir Hugh Allen who, as Professor of Music at Oxford, had promoted his doctorate. ‘While M. Ravel is the accepted musical leader and representative of a great country’, he said, I have never succeeded in getting him to make a proper speech. The first attempt resulted in not one word, the second resulted in five words, the third in seven, and today it is my hope that he will attain double figures.’ (Laughter.) M. Ravel fulfilled this hope. In a short reply in French he said that as he had neither the gift of speech nor the gift of song, he could merely say, ‘Thank you very much.’ ‘Bravo!’ shouted Mr Mark Hambourg, ‘a full dozen words.’ Later, however, Sir Hugh announced that M. Ravel had spoken exactly 21 words. He congratulated him on this record, and expressed the hope that next time he would manage 50 or even 100. . . .5

Two days earlier Ravel wrote that he was still suffering from the ‘Spanish cold’ and he now postponed a visit to Vienna and returned to Montfort.6 Once recovered, he started to travel again in early 1929, as we learn from the letter to Mme Casella quoted above, in which he writes of ‘another little outing Paris–Vienna–Geneva–Vienna–Paris and I’m shutting myself up with the Concerto and Jeanne d’Arc.’7 The first Vienna visit, in February, was to conduct Boléro and La valse for Ida Rubinstein and her company. Any complaints about Ravel’s stiffness on the rostrum were tempered by Willi Reich’s recollection that he ‘had never seen a man live his music so intensely, beneath a placid exterior.’8 The second visit was for the Viennese premiere of L’Enfant (Das Zauberwort) on 14 March, in a triple bill with Korngold’s Der Ring des Polykrates and ending with Ma mere l’Oye.9 It was on this occasion that heard the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, the philosopher’s brother, who had lost his right arm in the First World War. Wittgenstein was playing music written for him by Richard

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Strauss – either the Parergon zur Symphonia domestica or the Panathanäenzug (or perhaps both). At all events Ravel could not have known either score, and so could not have formed an accurate opinion of Wittgenstein’s interpretation: hence the troubles that were to attend the concerto Wittgenstein now commissioned from him. The thought of competing with Strauss on such specific technical terrain was no doubt hard to resist. Meanwhile, between these two visits to Vienna, he agreed to replace Messager, who had died on 24 February, on the Conseil supérieur de l’enseignement du Conservatoire, effectively the institution’s governing body – no doubt a welcome, if somewhat retarded, acknowledgment from his alma mater.10 Supreme technician though he was, Ravel was not gifted with perfect foresight. Like many composers, he left his share of unfinished projects: La cloche engloutie, Zazpiak-Bat, Le grand Meaulnes and Saint François d’Assise had all by now been definitively abandoned. Jeanne d’Arc, however, was still on the work table. The most detailed account of it is given by Hélène JourdanMorhange: For many years all he talked about with his friends was the future of Jeanne d’Arc, based on Joseph Delteil. Even if the music was not written, the plan of the work had been outlined. . . . When I expressed surprise that Delteil’s novel could satisfy his refined tastes, he replied: ‘It’s just that I want to get across Jeanne’s rustic simplicity, the rough aspect of the warrior.’ He was to write the libretto himself – ‘and Delteil inspires me with that images d’Epinal atmosphere that I want my opera-oratorio to have’. He envisaged the crowds, like ancient choruses, massed in triangles on each side of the stage and commenting on the action. The film Metropolis – the success of the day – had struck him forcibly by the novelty of the movements in the crowd scenes. He wanted to show the opposition between Jeanne-the-girl and Jeanne-thesoldier, and even talked of using two singers to play the two characters. The idea of incorporating distant strains of the English Tipperary and the Marseillaise and Madelon during the attack on Orléans satisfied his penchant for mystification: anachronisms in the manner of Bernard Shaw, whose Joan of Arc had won him over. (In fact I had the impression that Shaw’s influence was surreptitiously taking over from Delteil’s.)

Ravel even got as far as vouchsafing to Jourdan-Morhange the scenes the work would comprise: Jeanne with her sheep – The Court – Meeting with the King – Siege of Orleans – Capture of Orleans – Trial before the French priests and British functionaries (sarcastic music, he said) – then The Stake – Jeanne’s Death – and . . . Entry into Heaven. One of Ravel’s main intentions was not to show the Eternal Father on stage: ‘I can’t lumber him with a great beard,’ he said

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laughing, and he decided that Jeanne would be on the right of Christ, who ‘had not been aware of the abuses being committed down below’. Beams of light would show that Jeanne was in Heaven, while trumpets (those of Fra Angelico) would announce her arrival. Ravel dreamt of creating a ‘grand opera’ in the style of Meyerbeer (his latest craze). . . . Perfectionist that he was, he thought it would take him ten years to complete.11

Jourdan-Morhange’s initial puzzlement is easy to understand: Delteil’s novel reads, certainly nowadays, as extravagantly sentimental and at the opposite extreme from Ravel’s habitually ironic stance. There is also something slightly paradoxical in the avowedly left-wing, agnostic composer tackling the life of a saint espoused by the far right, never mind returning to a romanticism that ‘had no deep roots in the French mentality and outlook’. Two parallel interests suggest themselves in the projects now in hand, both designed to counter his images as a ‘petit maître’, an unfeeling technician, a prisoner of the apocalyptic and bizarre. First, two works for piano and orchestra unambiguously entitled ‘concertos’ – evidence, possibly, of a desire to rejoin the mainstream after Boléro and most of his other post-Tombeau works, and even of a nationalist spirit, by filling a notable lacuna in French music after Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Concerto of 1896 (Poulenc, it is true, was happy to play the solo part of his Concert champêtre of 1928 on the piano, but he wrote it very much with Wanda Landowska and the harpsichord in mind). And second, an opera, or ‘operaoratorio’, that would address the time-honoured theme of a public/private dichotomy – as with Philip II and Othello torn between institutional power and matrimonial misery. This dualism had in the past often led Ravel to engage in the apocalyptic, pitting ‘this’ (the ceremonial frame of ‘Le gibet’, La valse and Boléro) against ‘that’ (the tortured, destructive impulses that threaten them). But in Jeanne d’Arc, any such impulses would be at least softened by the fact that every audience would know the story (and by concluding with ‘L’entrée au ciel’, not mentioned by Delteil, the non-believing composer was perhaps stating on his own account that death was not the end). What Delteil does include though, at the close of Jeanne’s first vision of St Catherine and St Margaret, is their cry: ‘Jeanne, Jeanne, prends garde, Dieu t’aime à la folie!’ (Joan, Joan, beware, God loves you to the point of madness!’).12 This does point to Ravel’s interest in extreme emotional states, as in Concepcion’s nymphomania or the Child’s tantrums. Whether or not we choose to categorize such madness as apocalyptic, it was one that in Joan’s case changed the course of European history. A subject for ‘un grand opéra’ indeed. But not a note of the music survives. From the beginning of April until early September 1929, Ravel remained either at Montfort or in Paris. May was a fairly typical month at this time. On the 15th he attended the dress rehearsal at the Opéra of Ibert’s Persée et Andromède and Roland-Manuel’s ballet L’écran des jeunes filles, and the next

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day conducted Boléro with the Straram Orchestra. On the 29th he may, with some misgivings, have gone to see the first of sixteen performances at the Opéra-Comique by La Argentina of Triana, billed as a ‘fantaisie chorégraphique sévillane’ – extracts from Albéniz’s Iberia orchestrated by Arbós. The following evening it is unlikely he would have missed the Paris premiere of Varèse’s Amériques at the Concerts Poulet. The premiere of Intégrales on 23 April had been a fairly calm affair, but Amériques, with an ondes martenot replacing the unprocurable siren ‘like those of the New York Fire Department’, produced a truly Parisian scandale, between ‘shocked voices . . . startled into cries of rage’ and ‘the most profound emotion it has been one’s lot to feel for these many, many years’. The Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara ‘had to be given four stitches for the wounds he received that night’.13 Ravel certainly was present at Rubinstein’s staging of La valse at the Opéra on 23 May. The programme credits him as conductor, but elsewhere that function is ascribed to Gustave Cloez.14 With Rubinstein again dancing to Nijinska’s choreography, as in Boléro, on the stage for which the composer thought La valse ideally suited (see pp. 281–2), the evening ought to have been a great success. But its seven performances drew some sharp criticism, especially from André Levinson, who described the production as ‘geometric’, ‘accented’, ‘brutal’, and ‘garish’. In the words of Deborah Mawer, ‘Rubinstein and especially Nijinska disregarded Ravel’s artistic intentions in the music and scenario in favour of a frivolous divertissement. The choreographic approach was also at odds with Benois’s grand, romantic hall of marble with short flights of steps, crystal chandeliers and voluminous drapes of blue velvet.’15 Presumably Ravel sought solace in composing, since he telegraphed Koussevitsky from Montfort on 2 July, saying he was prevented by urgent work from attending the gala soirée organized to mark the end of the conductor’s European tour. At some point that month he went down to St-Jean-de-Luz, because a card to Mme Dreyfus of 26 July was posted from there, indicating that he was just leaving, presumably for Montfort.16 On 21 August he writes to her again from Montfort to say he’s ‘gestating . . . finally, I’ve got to the vomiting stage’, but does not mention the death of Diaghilev two days earlier in Venice, news of which may well not yet have reached him.17 On 8 September he made a second, longer visit to St-Jean-de-Luz for what he called ‘the grand festival MR’, due to take place on the 11th. There has been some confusion over this, sown by Chalupt.18 There were in fact two Ravel concerts on that date, one in the casino at Biarritz, which Ravel attended, and a choral and vocal one in St-Jean-de-Luz, featuring the soprano Claire Croiza in the last two Shéhérazade songs and ‘D’Anne jouant de l’espinette’, and the local Schola Cantorum in all three Ravel choral Chansons. Unfortunately we have no details for the Biarritz concert beyond an interview with Ravel in which he refers to it as ‘mon festival’ and looks forward to the interpretations of ‘très grands artistes’, but probably Robert Casadesus was involved, since he had

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played in a concert at the casino only two nights before.19 The unfortunate incident related by Chalupt took place over a third Ravel concert, in St-Jean-de-Luz on 24 October. The two organizers had, according to Jourdan-Morhange, been ingratiating themselves with the composer for some months.20 Then, having obtained the services of Casadesus and the singer Marcelle Gerar, they ran off with the takings immediately the concert was over.21 The composer paid the artists out of his own pocket. Chalupt tells us that Ravel afterwards found some consolation in going every day to the Bar Basque – not for the drinks, but for the travelling salesmen who came to sell toys.22 In interview given in Biarritz Ravel admitted that ‘when I’m working I don’t like to be disturbed, and when Biarritz invited me I was in the middle of a concerto for piano and orchestra’.23 His simultaneous work on the two concertos means that here, as often, it is impossible to know which one he is referring to, though the more likely candidate is the D major since this, unlike the G major, was a commission with an impending deadline of the end of June 1930.24 He planned to stay in St-Jean-de-Luz until 15 October and perhaps longer; by 3 October proof corrections of Boléro and Pictures at an Exhibition were out of the way, and he was back to the concerto, or concertos. On 17 November he attended, as we would expect, a performance at the Opéra-Comique of Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui in a new, re-ordered version produced by the house’s recent director Albert Carré. The run of twenty-seven performances had started on 6 November, so Ravel’s absence until the 17th suggests that he may have stayed in St-Jean-de-Luz for the early part of the month. It was in any case the first production of the work in Paris since the initial Opéra-Comique run of May 1887 – if one can use the term ‘run’ for the three performances before the theatre was destroyed by fire. The conflagration would explain why Ravel had never heard the opera before, although it was ‘a work I could play by heart from one end to the other’. This admission comes in a letter of 4 December to the composer’s daughter-in-law, Mme Bretton Chabrier in which he mentions ‘the orchestration of genius’, but in which ‘I couldn’t help thinking of modifications that would double the impact’, and he suggests that, for no fee or royalties, he might start by revising the ‘Fête polonaise’.25 No more is heard of the idea. Also in November 1929, Ravel agreed to form with Gabriel Pierné and Reynaldo Hahn a musical committee, a true committee of experts . . . with the aim of following closely the work of the [recording] engineers and to help them with criticisms and suggestions . . . a close cooperation between the makers of the discs and the artists whose role is to create and interpret the music. . . . Being curious about everything and passionately concerned with the exploration of sound phenomena, Ravel’s interest was caught by the progress of recorded music and he followed it with a wide-ranging sympathy. The politeness and simplicity of his manner

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immediately won him the confidence and deference of the recording engineers and technicians, who were astonished at the infallible accuracy of his ear and profited from his excellent advice.26

Thus were born the Grands Prix du Disque. Ravel sat on the jury every year from 1931 to 1935, except 1934. On 20 December, he wrote to Koussevitsky,27 who had sent him a contract for the hitherto uncontracted G major Concerto. This document demands delivery by 20 September 1930, permanent possession of the manuscript, and the rights not only to the premiere but to exclusive performances during the orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary season of 1930–31, with no royalties or costs payable, but a fee of $3,000, half on signature, half on delivery.28 Ravel’s reply knocks on the head any notion that he was some head-in-the-clouds visionary. ‘But, my dear friend, it is impossible for me to sign this contract!’ (Note the impatient ‘but’ . . .) ‘As soon as my Concerto is finished, I’ll be taking it, as I told you, to the five continents of the world. All that I could promise you is to keep for you the 1st performance “in the Vorld” [sic]. You’ll surely agree that I can’t postpone my tour for 2 or rather 3 years, nor that my publisher would accept this.’ When in doubt, blame the publisher! For Ravel to be thinking on such a grandiose scale shows what an impact his American tour had made on him: the unfamiliar sights, the cheering crowds, the nights of uninterrupted sleep on long-distance trains. But the tour, when it came in the early months of 1932, was confined to Europe. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 (of which Ravel, intent on his concertos, says nothing whatever) meant that official French financial support would not stretch further, while America had other things on her mind. For Ravel, the new decade began with two recordings and two performances of Boléro, the recordings possibly aimed at putting the tempo question beyond dispute. On Wednesday, 8 January, Piero Coppola recorded the piece with the imposingly named Grand Orchestre Symphonique du Gramophone in the Salle Pleyel in Ravel’s presence. The two men were friends but Ravel ‘did not trust me over Boléro, because “the scalded cat is afraid of the cold water” ’ – a clear reference to Coppola sharing Toscanini’s nationality. ‘All went well until the final section when, despite myself, I urged the tempo on very slightly; Ravel leapt up and tugged at my jacket: “Don’t go so fast”, he shouted and we had to start again.’29 This time the composer was happy. The very next day Ravel himself recorded Boléro with the Lamoureux Orchestra, after Albert Wolff had rehearsed them under his direction. He spoilt the excellent first take by throwing his baton down on the score too soon after the last chord, but the second and final take was equally good.30 Contrary to this report, Marnat states that ‘in the early 1960s Albert Wolff revealed that the recording made by Ravel was defective, so he volunteered to replace the exhausted composer.’31 Whatever the truth of the matter, the tempi of the two

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recordings are close, Coppola’s lasting 15.48, Ravel’s 16.07. In the seventh and eighth bars of figure 14 Coppola makes quite a marked rallentando to emphasize the climactic D flats, presumably sanctioned by Ravel, though not followed in his own recording. The trombone soloists from figure 10 insert glissandi in the same places in both. Ravel then gave two performances with the Lamoureux orchestra on 11 and 12 January, on the 11th giving the first performance of his orchestration of Menuet antique (which Wolff had recorded on the 9th) and on the 12th also conducting ‘Alborada’. The five days thus became a kind of gala de danses. Marnat reasonably presumes that Ravel was referring to the 11 January concert when, in a 1933 interview, he remembered that ‘the first performance was broadcast. And I had the happy surprise next day, walking past a building site, of hearing three workmen whistling the Boléro!’32 In his last known letter of the decade, Ravel had told Mme Casella that, as well as the two concertos, he was considering a work called Dédale VI which, as mentioned above, he termed an ‘outsider’. Elsewhere he refers to it as Icare and as Dédale 39, which explains his further remark to Mme Casella that ‘as to the number attached to this last piece, I’m still less decided than Giraudoux about the one for his Amphitryon.’33 The play Amphitryon 38 had been premiered in Paris only a few weeks previously, on 8 November, and Ravel’s joke refers to Giraudoux’s explanation of the figure as his rough guess at the number of stagings the story had had since Plautus. Rather less amusing for someone of Ravel’s mental constitution might have been Giraudoux’s lines, ‘I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.’ During the first three months of 1930 he continued to bury himself in work on the concertos, and possibly on the ‘outsider’, though not even sketches for this survive. He does not break cover until 25 March, when he informs Marcelle Gerar that ‘to celebrate my reconciliation with the C[oncerts] C[olonne] I’m conducting Boléro a week on Sunday and accompanying the Madécasses.’34 There is no documentation of any quarrel with Pierné and his Concerts Colonne, so the reference is probably no more than another mild joke, referring to the fact Ravel had chosen the rival Lamoureux Orchestra for the Boléro recording. Toscanini’s performance on 4 May and the ripples it provoked seem to have been the only other major interruptions to composing, although Ravel was due to be taken by Paul Painlevé to visit the Clemenceaus on 12 May. The D major Concerto was still far from done and Ravel felt he had to deprive himself of Ida Godebska’s invitation to meet Falla in Paris.35 The great occasion of the summer was the second Grand Festival Maurice Ravel, celebrated in Ciboure and Biarritz on Sunday, 24 August. There were no financial worries this time, since not only was the organizer, Charles Mapou, the respectable president of the commune’s events committee, but the artists were giving their services free for the benefit of the local poor and for a war memorial. The quai de Ciboure was to be renamed the quai Maurice Ravel, a plaque placed on the house where he was born, a pelota match played in the

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square and, in the evening, a concert given in Biarritz. The local press was full of the occasion, though occasionally its enthusiasm got the better of it, as when the Courrier de Bayonne announced ‘the eminent young maître [Ravel was fifty-five], who proceeds with such surefootedness towards long-lasting glory and the honours of the Institut.’36 The placing of the plaque at 11 a.m. was not distinguished by the composer’s presence: Gaby Casadesus recalled him taking her and her husband by the arm and saying, ‘Let’s go for a snifter. I don’t want to be silly enough to watch my plaque being fixed.’37 But the pelota match that followed at 11.30 was a quite different matter. Preceded by a choral rendering of a Basque national hymn, the ‘Tree of Guernica’, it saw the star player Léon Dongaitz and his sixteenyear-old son Frédéric pitted against MM. Haitze and Titi d’Usteritz. It was a tight match, the Dongaitzes winning by 40 points to 37 thanks to a masterstroke by Léon, after which the mayor of Ciboure gave the composer a medal inscribed ‘La commune de Ciboure à son enfant, Maurice Ravel’.38 After lunch, Ravel and Jacques Thibaud spent the afternoon at the latter’s villa before setting off, with the cream of Cibourian society, for the concert in Biarritz before an audience of three hundred. As Rousseau-Plotto suggests, the inclusion of the ‘Forlane’ and ‘Rigaudon’ from Le tombeau, dedicated to Gabriel Deluc and to Pierre and Pascal Gaudin respectively, must surely have meant that members of their families were present. Ravel had turned down the invitation to play ‘Alborada’ for Mlle Lamballe, ‘première danseuse de l’Opéra de Paris’, even though she was dancing only the first section up to bar 70, ‘the point where people clap prematurely’.39 This piece and ‘Rigaudon’, likewise choreographed, were duly played by a Mlle Mordant. The programme finally consisted of ‘Laideronnette’ and ‘Le jardin féerique’ (Casadesus, Ravel); ‘Alborada’; Chansons madécasses (Madeleine Grey, Philippe Gaubert, a M. Barouk, Ravel); Jeux d’eau, ‘Forlane’, ‘Toccata’ (Casadesus); Deux mélodies hébraïques, ‘Air de Concepcion’ (Grey, Ravel); interval; ‘Rigaudon’; Violin Sonata (Thibaud, Ravel). Finally, after the concert, came a dinner dance, including coupe de consommé Maurice Ravel and timbale de sole Jacques Thibaud. Writing to thank M. Mapou on 24 September, Ravel called the occasion ‘surely the most touching of my entire career’.40 But even some twenty years after the premiere of L’heure espagnole, Concepcion’s aria as sung by Madeleine Grey could still fall on stony ground. ‘If M. Ravel,’ wrote the critic of the Courrier de Bayonne, ‘whose melodic ideas are shortwinded, took a quarter of the trouble in prolonging them as he does in decking them out, how good it would be! We admire his virtuosity in managing his task so deftly, but the public at large gets out of breath running after ideas that vanish as soon as introduced . . . What a pity! With a bit more to it, this Spanish hour would . . . make a triumphant French Barber of Seville.’ The reviewer of the Gazette de Bayonne wrote a little more warmly, but felt obliged to say that ‘Maurice Ravel is more gifted than inspired.’ He noted that ‘the young girls didn’t talk too

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loudly and seemed to be almost as happy as they were at the dancing’.41 What Ravel really felt about it all, we shall probably never know. But we have at least a clue in his letter to Léon Leyritz of 5 September, written back in Montfort: ‘the festivities went well – the game of pelota in particular was splendid . . . but it’s lost me ten days.’42 Now he felt he needed to contact Toscanini before the Boléro ‘affaire’ got out of hand, and sent the letter referred to above,43 using Mme Casella as intermediary. Otherwise, he remained deep in the concertos. ‘Since my return, I’ve rushed back to work without respite, or almost: half an hour for each meal; an hour to cover six kilometres at the end of the day; five to six hours’ sleep. I’m finishing the orchestration of the Concerto for Left Hand. I’ve got three months for the one I’m to take through the five continents. Providing I survive!’44 An earlier letter to Mme Casella sounds a more dangerous note: ‘I’m working more and more and sleeping less and less.’45 We cannot then be surprised to read a few months later that in early November ‘they had to forbid me to do any work, or anything else but sleep.’46 He had abandoned the ‘vie raisonnable’ of the American tour and was paying the price. It seems, though, that by then he had finished the Left Hand Concerto, since both surviving manuscripts are signed and dated ‘1930’, so it was probably in October that Wittgenstein came to visit him at Le Belvédère at his invitation. Ravel outlined the orchestra’s role and then did his best to play the solo part with both hands. Many years later Wittgenstein remembered that it was an awkward occasion, claiming that Ravel was not a very good pianist, that in any case it always took him time to appreciate ‘a difficult work’, and ‘only much later, after I’d studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realize what a great work it was’.47 This last statement was, to put it as politely as possible, disingenuous. For the moment, though, he took a copy away, while Ravel was left to try and regain his health, and to explain to anxious promoters that the G major Concerto would not now be ready for the current season. The year thus ended badly, redeemed only by Leyritz’s decoration in the most up-to-date, art deco style of a flat at 16bis rue Chevallier in Levallois, the house occupied by Edouard and the Bonnets. Much has been made of the decor, which was indeed very striking, and in which Ravel certainly took an interest – the letter to Leyritz quoted above mentions the stools for the bar (provided, Chalupt assures us, ‘far more out of dandyism than out of a taste for alcohol’48), for his study magnifying stained glass windows, specially commissioned from Germany (’to hide this odious landscape of the industrial suburbs’49) and cork on the walls, à la Proust. But why did Ravel suddenly need a flat in Paris? It must be that Edouard and the Bonnets, and maybe others, were becoming worried about his physical and mental health. Le Belvédère was (and is) all very charming and original, but was Ravel cut out for the solitary life? Mme Reveleau was clearly a ‘treasure’ on the practical front but, according to the

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mores of the time, could not and would not aspire to be a friend, let alone a counsellor. For Poulenc some years later, facing the same need for solitariness without loneliness, the answer was often a smart hotel, where he was comfortable, had no responsibilities and as much or as little company as he wished. Ravel, who had not been brought up with money, would probably have regarded such a thing as self-indulgent. As it was, the cork-lined study must have seemed an inviting solution. On 17 January 1931 the Société nationale programmed a Ravel work for the first time in three years, but even then Jeux d’eau was merely a last-minute replacement for a work by Migot; the same Jeux d’eau, with the Menuet antique, would finally break a still longer silence in March 1936. But if that bastion of tradition was loath to promote him, things were happier on the orchestral front: after his Boléro recording with the Orchestre Lamoureux and his ‘reconciliation’ with the Concerts Colonne, in February Ravel conducted the recently formed Orchestre Symphonique de Paris in Le tombeau and Boléro, while entrusting the performance of the complete Daphnis to Monteux. In a letter to Mme Casella he referred to this last as ‘un peu longuette’ – whether as a criticism of the music or the rendition, is not clear.50 The former would certainly make sense, given his move towards concision in the 1920s. But now on the composing front, ‘I’m still working fairly gently. Mustn’t push anything.’51 His response to the French premiere of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, conducted by the composer at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 24 February, is noted below. One would assume he was not wholly sympathetic to the view of Robert Brussel in Le Figaro, who wrote that the music’s effect ‘seems to work not only through its violent impact on the physique, but also on those more elevated regions of the being not much attended to by the music of our time’.52 Even if Ravel was guilty of such inattention, he can hardly have been unmoved by the sheer skill of the fugal writing in the central movement (which displays a cold, strenuous beauty not unlike that of the ‘Fugue’ in Le tombeau), and he was certainly impressed by the power of the bass ostinato in the final one – the Boléro technique transported to ‘more elevated regions’. After a brief visit to Brussels, where he attended a concert of his music in aid of war wounded, Ravel was back at Montfort by the middle of March, but finding the return to work difficult. The interview he gave that month to a Dutch journalist though, is one of his most interesting. To begin with, he says he has ‘just’ finished the concerto for Wittgenstein. Since the piano part was in a good enough state for him to play it through to the pianist in October, we must assume that the following five months had been devoted to orchestration, since he also says, ‘I have unfortunately had to interrupt work on my new piano concerto’, that is, the G major. This was ‘working gently’ indeed. He gives a succinct account of the concerto (see below) and again mentions the world tour on which he intends to take it, including Java! As for jazz, even though there are refined elements of it in this concerto, ‘the influence of jazz is

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declining. Gypsy music has returned to Paris, as well as the whirlings of the waltz, to which I have often paid homage.’ In the wake of the Paris premiere of the Symphony of Psalms, the interviewer naturally wanted Ravel’s opinions on Stravinsky’s postwar works. Ravel’s answer was honest as usual: ‘I was deeply impressed by the Symphony of Psalms: the expansion at the end is mighty, almost supernatural. Without doubt the Symphony of Psalms is a successful Oedipus rex. But I like Oedipus rex much more than the numerous arid stylistic exercises the Russian composer gave us before that!’ (Ravel unsurprisingly interprets Brussel’s ‘elevated regions of the being’ as the ‘supernatural’; and his distaste for Mavra and the Concerto for piano and wind was no secret). The interview ends with a blast against the deformed noises emanating from the radios of the day. But before that, the interviewer solicits Ravel’s views on how to conduct Boléro. Bearing in mind his emollient letter to Toscanini of the previous September, we might have expected a measured response. Instead: I have to say that Boléro is rarely conducted as I think it should be. Mengelberg speeds up and slows down excessively. Toscanini takes it twice as fast as it should be and slows the tempo down at the end, which is not marked anywhere. No: Boléro should be played at a constant speed from beginning to end, in the plaintive, monotonous style of Arabo-Spanish melodies. When I told Toscanini that he was taking too many liberties, he replied: ’If I don’t play it my way, it will fall flat.’ Virtuosos are incorrigible, lost in their dream worlds as though composers didn’t exist.53

From this it would seem likely that Ravel’s olive branch had been spurned and that, in what was to be the last affaire of his life, he was determined to stand up and be counted. Marguerite Long provides an amusing sidelight on the ‘Boléro problem’: The performance of Boléro worried major conductors over a long period because of the tempo demanded by Ravel. Mengelberg, who interpreted it magnificently, was unwilling to conduct it in front of Ravel [see above]. I remember Clemens Krauss’s anxiety in Vienna, at the concert when I played the Concerto [2 February 1932]; he was conducting Boléro and, knowing Ravel was there, he was so afraid of playing it too fast that he ended up playing it too slowly. Ravel himself seemed very upset. I laughingly said to him: ‘That’s fair, it avenges the others for your demands.’54

By now, though, despite such vicissitudes, Boléro was on its way to being the most frequently played and recorded French piece of the twentieth century (Honegger later showed that the 2,000 copies of the 1929 piano solo version had all been sold by the end of the year55). The significant royalties meant he

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could resist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s heartfelt request, mirroring that of the Oxford students in 1928, for a second String Quartet, to grace a concert she was planning for Paris in November. She was offering $1,200, but such a deadline would have been beyond him even without the concerto to finish. On 23 June Ida Rubinstein opened her new season at the Opéra with the premiere of Honegger’s Amphion and revivals of La princesse cygne, to music by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Boléro. Two days later she added a new production of La valse by Fokine, with different costumes and revised sets by Benois.56 According to Michael de Cossart, ‘Rumour had it that Ravel himself took a hand in their design and began by getting rid of the original gold lamé tunics, which he did not like. There is no doubt that he preferred the new production to Nijinska’s original attempt: the dancing and the décors had given little suggestion of place and not much sense of time. It was, in other words, too intangible for a Ravel who would not live to see the abstract ballets of later years.’57 From Paris the production moved to London, and Ravel with it, this time as conductor of both his ballets. Although he gave the 7th and the 8th as the dates of the two performances to his hostess Mme Alvar, in fact the first night was the 8th. The Musical Times critic William McNaught joined in the generally enthusiastic tone of the reviews: In the whole course of a spectacular season we have seen nothing so lavishly beautiful as the ball-room in which this ballet was danced and the crinolined ladies and military gentlemen . . . who danced it. There was an artistic parallel between the sumptuous treatment of the waltz on the stage and Ravel’s well-known orchestral elaboration, and the result was a unified creation, single and complete, and too strong in its impersonal quality to be affected by what any individual dancer did, or wore.58

Ravel would surely have been happy with that; less so with Raoul Brunel’s question over the Paris production as to ‘whether Ravel’s score gains from being used in . . . a ballet’,59 which came uncomfortably close to Diaghilev’s original reaction a decade earlier. While in London, Ravel gave another interview to his old friend Calvocoressi, now permanently installed there. The G major Concerto has to be finished by November so that he can play it on a tour that is still planned to take in not only Europe but North and South America, Japan . . . and Java – but not Russia, because ‘artists engaged in that country are compelled by law to spend in it the fees which they receive, and that would mean my having to purchase, say, furs and ikons for which I should have no use’. He gives details of the two concertos, and has more to say about Boléro, almost as if the work’s obsessive quality was beginning to get to him: I am particularly desirous that there should be no misunderstanding about this work. It constitutes an experiment in a very special and limited direction,

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and should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. . . . There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except the plan and the manner of execution . . . . the orchestral writing is simple and straightforward throughout, without the slightest attempt at virtuosity. . . . It is perhaps because of these peculiarities that no single composer likes the Boléro – and from their point of view they are quite right. I have carried out what I intended, and it is for listeners to take it or leave it.60

The tone is unmistakably confrontational, even militant. No doubt the Toscanini episode was partly responsible, but the remark that composers as a body are, from their own point of view, right not to like the piece, shows he was well aware of the gauntlet he had thrown down. Motivic development, that hallowed guarantee of musical value, had been shown to be an optional extra. At the same time it was an experiment ‘in a very special and limited direction’ (for which read ‘inimitable’). As for being what it is and no more, we confront once more his determined position that, just as La valse is not a picture of Vienna after the war, so Boléro is neither a lament for, nor a celebration of, the increasing mechanization of everyday life. The question, of course, remains whether any composers have prescriptive rights over the meaning of their music. If ‘it is for listeners to take it or leave it’, then equally, if they do ‘take’ it, are they free to do so on their own terms? The day after the interview with Calvo, Ravel gave another one to a correspondent of a Basque newspaper La petite Gironde. Although after the composer’s death his brother questioned its authenticity, François Lesure later found among Ravel’s papers a typed copy with autograph corrections. As this does not include the heading ‘My memories of being a lazy child’, that was probably added by a subeditor and derives from the first part of the article, already referred to in Chapter I. The second part of the text is more revealing of the mature Ravel. He disagrees with Mallarmé that Poe was deliberately clouding the waters in his ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, and is convinced that he ‘indeed wrote his poem The Raven in the way he described’. He relishes his ‘everlasting desire to renew myself ’ and claims ‘I have never written “like Ravel”. When I have created a new way of expressing myself, I then leave it to others.’ The composer still struggling with the G major Concerto declares himself: ‘The truth is that one never controls oneself enough. . . . What people sometimes refer to as my insensitivity is simply a scruple not to write any old thing’ – on which grounds poor Massenet takes a beating: ‘He truly wrote down everything that came into his head, the result being that he kept on repeating the same thing: what he thought were discoveries were no more than reminiscences.’61 In an ideal world, there would be no limit to the ‘découvertes’ a composer might make. In the real one, the more a composer finds, the harder it may be

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to find the next. This may be some explanation for Ravel now going to ground over the summer and autumn, with not even a visit to the Basque country. A concerto for the left hand at least brought its own novelty with it; one for two hands risked reminiscence to a dangerous degree. A couple of interviews provided the only known respite. To José Bruyr he conceded that Delteil’s Jeanne d’Arc was in bad taste, but that it nevertheless gave him the opportunity to do something new – with reservations: ‘one can’t ask French choruses to take part in the action. It’s not like Brussels’ – and intriguingly mentions a projected operetta with Bousquet, ‘the subject of which is delightful, with a touch of Pirandello. But there too I’d have to produce something that wasn’t Messager . . . or Offenbach or Chabrier.’ He repeats his admiration for the Symphony of Psalms, which he has passed on to the composer but, as often when talking about Stravinsky, he can’t resist a little dig: ‘Les noces is like Le sacre, without the smudges.’ He ends with a telling resumé of the life he has made for himself: ‘And now, what am I going to do? Have a rest, perhaps while I tour the world. Because here I work a lot and I’m hardly sleeping two hours a night. Of course there are precise limits to human resistance. But the whole pleasure of life consists in taking an ever closer hold of perfection, in rendering a little better the secret frisson of life.’62 From the second interview, with Pierre Leroi, published a fortnight later, we learn that Ravel has a particular affection for the Chansons madécasses, Boléro and the Violin Sonata, that a composer must be able to ‘forget’ a work once it is finished (the String Quartet and the piano version of Valses nobles prove he did not always obey his own precepts), that he has been thinking about a symphony for years, that he would like to die ‘gently lulled in the tender, voluptuous embraces of that “unique miracle in the whole of music”, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ . . . and that at long last the G major Concerto is finished.63 Modern marketing would undoubtedly dictate that two eagerly awaited concertos by the same composer be premiered at dates reasonably far apart. But in 1932 nobody seems to have thought it strange that Wittgenstein should play the D major Concerto in Vienna on 5 January and Marguerite Long the G major in Paris on the 14th. This contiguity was no doubt offset by the different venues, and maybe more so by the two works’ different natures. Perhaps surprisingly, Ravel said far less about the Left Hand Concerto than about its companion, in a single interview followed by a single article. In the interview with Calvo quoted above, he said: The Concerto for the left hand is in one movement, and very different [from the G major]. It contains a good many jazz effects, and the writing is not so light. In a work of this kind it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands. For the same reason I resorted to a style which is much nearer to that of the more solemn kind of

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traditional Concerto. A special feature is that after a first part in this traditional style, a sudden change occurs and the jazz music begins. Only later does it become evident that this jazz music is really built on the same theme as the opening part.64

We should probably be cautious in analysing these words too closely, given that they are translated from the French and that English was not Calvo’s native language, but possibly the word ‘resorted’ indicates Ravel was moved by the nature of his instrumental resources to operate somewhat outside his natural comfort zone. The word ‘solemn’ too may well be a translation of ‘solennel’, which carries the meanings not only of ‘grave’ but of ‘ceremonial’, even ‘official’. As for the phrase ‘only later does it become evident’, we may think back to Debussy’s complaint over Histoires naturelles about Ravel’s penchant for making flowers burst out of chairs: ‘Aha!’ says Ravel, ‘you thought I’d lost the plot!’ The article dates from eighteen months later, in preparation for the Paris premiere in January 1933, given by Wittgenstein and the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, with Ravel conducting. He points out the difficulty of writing for the left hand alone and says, ‘attempts to resolve it are in any case fairly rare, and the best known of them, Saint-Saëns’s Six études pour la main gauche, owing to its brevity and sectionalization, sidesteps the most formidable aspect of the question, which is to sustain interest in an extended work with such limited means. But the fear of difficulty is never as keen as the pleasure of confronting it and, if possible, overcoming it.’65 A further difficulty was that in trying to write a more solemn (or ceremonial) kind of traditional concerto, he needed to avoid the examples of Brahms, whose ‘principle about a symphonic concerto was wrong, and the critic who said he had written a “concerto against the piano” was right.’66 Nor could Tchaikovsky, Liszt or Rachmaninov offer helpful models, while the input of other left-hand works he studied, by Alkan, Czerny, Théodore Lack and Scriabin, was confined to detail. The ceremonial model Ravel chose was a sarabande, disguised by moving the barline one beat forward (see Ex. 9/1 below) – just possibly he took his cue from the ‘Bourrée’ and ‘Gigue’ in Saint-Saëns’s set. The overall structure, as explained above, consists then of an eighteenthcentury dance followed by a twentieth-century one, conforming to the description ‘musae mixtatiae’ that Ravel wrote on the cover page of the autograph of the orchestral part in piano reduction. Tension is already produced in the two contrasting themes of the orchestral introduction: an expansive, dotted one, and a sneering motif whose F naturals and B flats grate against the emerging D major tonality. Furthermore the expansive theme is never heard as a continuous whole. Either it is developed into something different (orchestral fanfares at figure 7, new themes at figure 14) or it is heard only in part (reprise at figure 46). Thus the work seems to

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possess a vast potential for a kind of dramatic lyricism that Ravel had not given voice to since Daphnis: for Pierre Boulez, it suggests that he was at last emerging from the ‘thinness’ of most of his oeuvre of the 1920s.67 It is also worth noting that, in the words of Dominique Merlet who later had the opportunity to play Ravel’s own piano, the instrument ‘has a magnificent breadth of sound. It’s not the little Erard with the tinkly treble that we’re used to.’68 But this lyricism is nonetheless continually suppressed by other material which is either malevolent or quasi-banal – indeed the reincarnation of the sneering motif as a passage of jazz (figure 28) manages to be both. Alfred Cortot incurred Ravel’s displeasure by arranging the concerto for two hands, and in fact premiered it thus a few days before the composer’s death, but Jacques Février, Ravel’s favourite interpreter of the work, confirmed that, apart from several leaps, the writing lies better for one hand than for two, with the left thumb naturally placed for playing the melody line.69 The only necessity is that the hand should be a large one, and for this reason Marguerite Long was unable to play it, much though she wanted to. Ravel’s genius at matching idea with medium is nowhere more clearly shown than in the nature of the expansive theme (Ex. 9.1). [Lento] ( = 44)

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Example 9.1. Ravel, Concerto for left hand, fig. 4, bars 2–7

The revamped sarabande rhythm leaves a hiatus on the second beat during which the pianist has time to accompany himself, and a few bars later Ravel develops this accompaniment through the arpeggio figuration which is frequently in evidence throughout. When at figure 46 piano and orchestra join in rediscovering the theme, its dramatic character is further underlined by the natural division: piano and bass instruments versus the rest. It is something we have been waiting for since we first heard the theme. The initial upward sweep of the melody also derives from the formation of the left hand. As the left thumb moves rightwards across the body, tension reinforces the tune until it reaches its apogee on C sharp in bar 3 of Ex. 9.1. This is also the first climax of the melody, which Ravel further emphasizes with the G sharp (sharpened fourth) and with the wide spread of an eleventh. In the face of this concerto, any thought that Ravel was played out after L’Enfant is patently absurd and would have been more widely recognized as

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such in 1932 had the work been in the hands of a sensitive performer. This Wittgenstein was not. Dubbed ‘the string breaker’ by his teacher Leschetizky, he commissioned concertos also from Strauss and Prokofiev, which offended him respectively by their thick scoring and modern idiom, as well as Britten’s Diversions, which he liked, even though he ‘proved thoroughly tiresome’ in the lead-up to the work’s premiere.70 Despite his professed admiration for Ravel’s concerto, he still felt obliged to make certain ‘improvements’. When Ravel expostulated, Wittgenstein affirmed: ‘Performers must not be slaves.’ To which Ravel replied: ‘Performers are slaves.’71 Orenstein records that in a letter to Wittgenstein of 7 March 1932, ‘Ravel spoke of “infringement”, and asked for a formal commitment to play his work henceforth strictly as written.’ Wittgenstein responded ten days later that this was ‘completely out of the question. No self-respecting artist could accept such a condition. . . . I have in no way changed the essence of your work. I have only changed the instrumentation. In the meanwhile, I have refused to play in Paris, as I cannot accept impossible conditions.’72 The claim that he had ‘only changed the instrumentation’, coupled with his expressed desire to be ‘put in the spotlight’, seems to indicate that he had reduced the scoring in certain passages, which for Ravel would have been insult enough. (Marguerite Long reports a confrontation in Vienna between Wittgenstein’s ‘I am an old hand as a pianist and it doesn’t sound right’ and Ravel’s predictable ‘I am an old hand as an orchestrator and it does sound right.’73) A recording of the Concerto he made around the age of seventy confirms not only the worst reports of Wittgenstein’s playing but the inaccuracy of his claim to have left the piano part alone. His emendations to this, vapid arpeggios and all, leave the printed page and the Ravelian style far behind. Marguerite Long remembered that Ravel initially opposed Wittgenstein coming to play the work in Paris, but some rapprochement must have been made by the time of the Paris premiere on 17 January 1933, in which both took part. For Ravel one of the most galling aspects must have been that the contract gave Wittgenstein exclusive rights in the concerto for six years, until 1936. So it was not until 19 March 1937, a mere nine months before the composer’s death, that his favourite interpreter Jacques Février, the son of his old friend and fellow student Henri, could perform the concerto as written, with Charles Munch conducting. In the recording they made on 8 October 1942, Février’s playing is notable for its relaxed lyricism. As that of the only pianist who studied the work with Ravel, his interpretation demands a hearing, especially by those who persist in imagining ‘Nazi jackboots’. Ravel’s troubles with the other concerto were of a different order. In her chapter on this work74 Marguerite Long says that Ravel promised her a concerto ‘ending pianissimo with trills’, but also that at some stage Ravel had intended to play it himself, as we have already seen. Whatever the exact chronology of Ravel’s vacillations, he wore himself out practising Chopin and

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Liszt studies and was only slowly brought to realize by his friends that one’s mid-fifties are not the ideal age at which to embark on a career as virtuoso. But certainly he was still the credited soloist when the European tour, to which the Association Française d’Expansion et d’Echanges Artistiques (AFEEA) donated no less than 35,000 francs, was being planned. In the event the dates were as follows, beginning four days after the world premiere, given by Marguerite Long with the Lamoureux Orchestra in the Salle Pleyel on 14 January 1932: January 18 19 21 22 February 2 14 18 25 March 11

Antwerp Liège Brussels Brussels Vienna Bucharest Prague London Warsaw

March 15 21 April 5 6 7 9 11 18

L’vov Berlin Haarlem Rotterdam Amsterdam The Hague Arnhem Budapest

The concerts included La valse, Boléro, Pavane pour une Infante défunte and Le tombeau de Couperin. For the opening concert in Antwerp Ravel conducted not only Boléro and the concerto but Haydn’s Symphony no. 102 and the Meistersinger overture; and Long also played three movements from Le tombeau.75 But for the most part his conducting seems to have been confined to the Concerto. Doubts over his playing had begun to surface officially towards the end of November, with reasons of health being cited, but Marguerite Long remembered that as early as 11 November ‘Ravel telephoned me from Montfort l’Amaury to say he was coming over at once with his manuscript.’76 On 26 November René Dommange, the managing director of Durand, in his role as President of the Association of Music Publishers, wrote to Robert Brussel of the AFEEA to say that Vienna and Berlin were reluctant to have Ravel replaced as soloist. By 21 December the question had escalated into a full-blown diplomatic incident. If the Viennese, with whom Ravel had built excellent relations over the previous decade, were finally willing for Long to play the solo part, Wilhelm Furtwängler, at the head of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, was not. M. François-Ponchet, the French Ambassador in Berlin, wrote to Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister: M. Furtwängler is determined to see M. Ravel perform his Concerto in person. It is in the hope that our compatriot will be in a condition to do so in 1933, since his health prevents him doing so at the moment, that the 1932 concert has been postponed. The Philharmonic will not now be able to reverse this decision since M. Furtwängler had twice changed the agreed date

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to meet M. Ravel’s wishes and the evening [initially fixed, of 20 March] was subsequently allocated irrevocably to M. Hindemith. But it goes without saying that if, in 1933, M. Ravel is not, as we hope, well enough to play the Concerto himself, it will nonetheless be performed somehow, and preferably under the baton of the composer.77

The fact that Furtwängler intended to delay the concert by a year and, perhaps worse, had given the date to Hindemith without telling the French, provoked Dommange to write to Brussel on 30 December: ‘I trust that someone will kindly tell M. Furtwängler that he should not count on the cooperation of the French publicity machine if he intends to come and seek applause in Paris, after treating our greatest composer in such a cavalier fashion.’ But in the end it all blew over and, as the list above records, the Berlin concert was postponed only by a day. From these dates it is not always clear whether Ravel and Mme Long remained on tour between engagements (Ravel seems to have given up correspondence almost entirely during 1932; maybe he was already finding writing difficult?). Long says they came back to Paris briefly after the Brussels concert in order to give a second French performance with the Pasdeloup Orchestra,78 but they left for Poland the day after the London concert on 25 February even though the Warsaw one was not scheduled for another fortnight.79 Neither of them was likely to get rich on the proceeds, to judge by a letter from Dommange to Brussel of 19 April stating that the two of them would share a fee of $150 for the final concert in Budapest.80 On the artistic front, though, there was much to be pleased about. For the Paris premiere the Salle Pleyel was full to bursting and the critics mostly enthusiastic. Florent Schmitt welcomed ‘this mythical concerto that we had heard mentioned for so many years that we had ended up not believing in it. I should say straight away that it is a delightful and charming work, a hundred miles away from all those boléros, past, present and future, a work worthy of the composer of Daphnis, ‘Scarbo’ and Valses nobles, a work, in fact, full of music and music that is authentically back-to-Ravel.’ If the composer was hurt by the implied criticism of his output of the 1920s, at least he knew he was not alone – Schmitt being no respecter of persons in regularly saying exactly what he felt (had Ravel heard the story of Schmitt arriving at the concert hall towards the end of Boléro and saying, ‘It’s all right, I only come for the modulation’?81) But his review abounds in those epithets that traditionally spelt out French critical sympathy: ‘délicieuse’, ‘chantante’, ‘piquantes’, ‘plaisante’, ‘exquises’ . . . and who would say him nay? Schmitt joined some of his colleagues though in having a few doubts, in his case about the central Adagio. After pointing out that the opening tune (Ex. 9.2b) owes much to the that of the Marguerite movement (Ex. 9.2a) in Liszt’s Faust Symphony (and wondering, with his usual offbeat humour, whether this might be ‘une attention délicate envers Mme Long’),

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[Andante suave]

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dolce egualmente

Example 9.2a. Liszt, Faust Symphony, II (Gretchen), bars 15–19

Adagio assai ( = 76)

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espressivo

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Example 9.2b. Ravel, Concerto in G, opening of II

he confesses that for him ‘the melodic line, despite its implacable calmness, does not attain the grandeur of a Fauré adagio – in particular that of the Second Cello Sonata where, you might say, there is nothing except the tune, the bass and a sketchy middle part, but in which you would never dream of lamenting the absence of all extrinsic ornament, since the ideas, in their hieratic nudity, penetrate and move you so deeply.’ Whether Ravel was actually aiming for hieratic nudity remains open to question; and at least Schmitt describes the piano’s sextuplets over the cor anglais as ‘fragiles et séraphiques’.82 Altogether less laudatory was the reaction of Messiaen, in an interview of October 1931 with José Bruyr (Nigel Simeone makes the point that Messiaen can only have seen proofs at the time): ‘I think it’s inconceivable Ravel could really have taken the Largo [sic] of his new concerto seriously, this Largo which turns a phrase reminiscent of Fauré on a bad day into Massenet. A return to classicism? Always that same old refrain?’83 But perhaps the criticism that hit Ravel hardest came from Emile Vuillermoz, his one-time fellow Apache and student in Fauré’s class, who reckoned the Concerto benefited from the recent flop of Milhaud’s ponderous opera Maximilien.84 Inevitably the European tour produced reservations about Ravel’s conducting, but the reviewer for the Bucharest paper Lupta claimed that he ‘conducts better than Stravinsky, or Rimsky-Korsakov, whom we saw during the Russian concerts at the Paris Opéra handing the baton over to Nikisch with

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feelings of relief ’.85 The French ministry in Bucharest reported home that the concert was a success, with the Queen being present, and that the composer was received in audience by the King who awarded him the decoration of Bene Merenti – a reception that nearly did not take place, as Ravel had squirrelled the invitation into one of his pockets, and the King had to telephone in person . . .86 The Amsterdam concert was likewise graced with royal presence in the persons of Princess Juliana and the Prince Consort and, as in Bucharest and many other places, the finale was encored. On the musical front the distinguished Romanian scholar Constantin Bra˘iloiu, in the course of a long review, noted that Ravel ‘has never recognized limits of incompatibility between the things of yesterday and those of tomorrow’, which might have had some bearing at least on Messiaen’s derogatory judgment.87 Bra˘iloiu’s comment was also echoed in various articles questioning whether the work could truly be called a concerto. The reviewer for Nation belge opted rather for ‘fantaisie burlesque’,88 implicitly followed by ‘V.J.’ in the Prague paper Europe centrale who felt the work went back to ‘Alborada’ in ‘these vertiginous glissandi, these repeated notes and the whole of this bouncing, elastic, nervous music with its alternations of savagery and feline gentleness’.89 But Maurice Brillant, writing in L’Aube, disagreed: ‘It’s not a matter (as it sometimes is . . .) of a concerto that is camouflaged, ashamed of itself; no, [it’s] a true concerto, appearing with its face uncovered, and in which the composer has had the affectation [coquetterie] of observing all the rules of the game.’90 Once again, Ravel had been enjoying himself decanting new wine into old bottles. For the London concert on 25 February Ravel as usual stayed with the Hardings in Holland Park. The critic of The Times was, slightly, kinder than Messiaen about the Adagio, where Ravel ‘almost seems to be growing staid and even a little sentimental, and to rouse himself with difficulty to throw off quips and cranks and wanton wiles again in the finale.’91 One of the most trenchant reviews came, not surprisingly, from Constant Lambert: For some years past M. Maurice Ravel has been occupied with a series of pastiches, brilliant in execution but a little unsatisfactory in aim. It was a relief to find at Thursday’s Royal Philharmonic concert that his new Concerto did not represent the stylization of any particular aspect of music, but was an honest effort to write a work that would stand or fall on its own merits, and which could be listened to without the dubious advantages of preconceived literary associations. It is a pleasant and unpretentious little work, more of a concertino than a concerto, and with little of the richness and power that the composer once showed us in Daphnis and the Piano Trio. The work is concise, but we do not feel that its concision represents any great concentration of musical thought; it seems more likely that the composer had frankly not a great deal to say and was too intelligent to attempt to disguise

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the fact. At a first hearing the lyrical slow movement makes the deepest impression. It may be that Ravel with subtle cynicism wished to show us that he could do as good a pastiche of emotion as of technique, but I for one prefer to take this movement at its face value as a charming and touching piece of music. The first movement is a little scrappy and rather too theatrical in orchestral colour. The finale is one of those rattling perpetuum mobiles at which the composer especially excels. Like so much French music, the concerto is in painfully good taste throughout. On one occasion in his life Ravel forgot to be an apostle of French good taste and produced the rich and vigorous Daphnis and Chloë, undoubtedly his finest work. This pagan debauch, though, he has more than compensated for by a steady treatment of hock and soda water.92

To put this review into context, we should remember that Lambert had already written The Rio Grande (1929) and Walton Belshazzar’s Feast (1931), with the latter’s Symphony and Vaughan Williams’s Fourth to come. In Britain, with unemployment rising to 2.7 million, elegant neoclassicism was no longer the plat du jour. At some point in early January 1932, before leaving for Belgium, Ravel had entertained a Viennese interviewer in his new two-room apartment in Levallois. Most of the contents follow the usual paths, but Ravel ends with a rather sharp aperçu on his compatriots, ending with a delicate compliment to his interlocutor: Until the World War, my dear countrymen did not care for music, nor were they interested in it. But since then, they’re obviously becoming more musical from day to day. I believe we must thank the radio for that. The frugal French bourgeois never went to concerts, and consequently never heard good music: but now it is available within his own four walls. In this way he has been able to get to know music, gradually understanding it, and has grown to like it so much, that at last he buys tickets for hard cash, attends concerts, and has become an enthusiastic music lover. You, in Vienna, didn’t need the radio for that.93

Ravel is careful not to state his previously quoted opinion on the lamentable distortion to which broadcast music was still subjected. The interview he gave in London shortly before the concerto premiere there is historically uncontentious and artistically more interesting. After all his insistence that La valse and Boléro were pieces of music to be listened to on their own terms, he now claims ‘it was a factory which inspired my Boléro’. He foresees ‘rows of typewriters, lathes and saws’ on the concert platform (and he was not wrong), though he disputes that such a thing can be called ‘art’. But his most startling notion is that ‘in these days of cacophony it might be quite an original idea for the orchestra to start, say, in C major, and then, through a

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series of discords the instruments should divide, some going up a semitone at every three or four bars, while others go down in the same way, eventually ending in perfect harmony in C major two octaves apart. He said: “It’s just an idea but it might be rather fun working it out and certainly a novel way of resolving harmony from discord.’’ ’ (Ravel does not seem to have pursued this in any known sketch.) And in fact, if the movement were to be in major chords, as he might appear to suggest, then the two streams would also meet on F sharp (G flat) major when only an octave apart.94 In an interview for the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf, Ravel claimed that after all his hard work on the concerto he was treating the tour as a rest.95 This was not Mme Long’s experience: I began then to become closely acquainted with Ravel’s legendary absentmindedness. His good humour and cheerful character made a pleasant contrast with the sometimes catastrophic consequences of his mistakes; combined with the exhaustion of train journeys, concerts, receptions and the anxieties Ravel the conductor put me through, these incidents tired me out and I really thought I should return from this tour in a state of collapse! On every trip, the same scenes repeated themselves: he lost his luggage, his watch, his train ticket, mine, kept his letters in his pocket, mine too. . . . I’d say to him, ‘We’re collecting memories’, and we’d both laugh. Our departures were indescribable; I wondered every time how we were going to catch the train. I’d find him in a mass of scores, and photos that the poor man hadn’t managed to sign, all his things higgledy-piggledy, mixed up with wreaths, ribbons and programmes he was determined to take back to dear brother Edouard. Never did he leave Paris without forgetting his patent leather shoes, as though some malevolent Scarbo hid them from him every time.96

To Manuel Rosenthal, Ravel spoke of Mme Long ‘like a little boy who has been saddled with a governess’.97 And there were occasional problems with the concerts themselves. Whether or not some high Berlin official had had words with Furtwängler, the maestro took compliance to the point of not rehearsing the Philharmonic Orchestra in the concerto at all in case he should offend against the composer’s wishes. ‘So, at the Sunday rehearsal, it was absolutely frightful and we saw Furtwängler deeply distressed. . . . But the gods were with us and the next day everything went marvellously, in front of a large audience including, of course, our ambassador François-Ponchet whose untiring helpfulness allowed Ravel once again to smoke his indispensable Gauloises, without which he was a mere shadow of himself.’98 The lowest moment of the tour would undoubtedly have had nothing to do with the G major Concerto: in Vienna for his concert on 2 February, he also heard the Left Hand Concerto for the first time, played by Wittgenstein, and was able to judge how far this performance diverged from his ideal.

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It seems likely, though no confirmation appears in the press, that Ravel mostly confined himself to conducting the G major Concerto, leaving other items to Pedro de Freitas Branco. At least this can be deduced from letters of Freitas Branco to his brother of 12 October and 27 November 1931: ‘The Ravel concert is definitely fixed for 19 January and it’s possible it will be given again at Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels. . . . unbelievable as it may seem, a few days ago I had the official invitation to conduct in the famous Festival with Ravel in the Salle Pleyel with the Lamoureux Orchestra on 14 January.’ He also throws light on Paris concert arrangements of the day: ‘The only restriction concerns the fee: “As you know, it is impossible for us to offer you a fee on this occasion, and Monsieur Ravel has begged me to ask you whether you would be good enough to accept an honorarium of 2,000 francs” – Well, as we know, these days, apart from stars of the first rank, any musician who wants to conduct or play in one of the major Parisian orchestral concerts has to pay between 6 and 20 thousand francs . . . and even that is an opportunity. That’s why I regard this invitation as a special event.’99 A further letter of 20 August mentions ‘a very interesting idea of a tour with the Ravel Concerto, in Italy, Spain and northern Europe. . . . I’ve had an invitation from Mme Long – because Ravel, who has accompanied her until now, has had enough – maybe he’s tired of . . . difficulties as a conductor!’100 This tour does not appear to have taken place, and clearly Freitas Branco was unaware of Ravel’s incipient health problems. In structure the G major concerto follows the classical pattern of a first movement in sonata form, a cantabile middle movement and a festive finale. It is more than possible that Scarlatti’s Sonatas and Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto fed into the outer movements of the work101 and Samazeuilh further suggests that they are based on music for a Basque fête from the unfinished ZazpiakBat and finds the central Adagio incongruous.102 The opening theme of the first movement (Ex. 9.3) does indeed have a popular flavour (JourdanMorhange hears echoes of the txistu, a Basque flute with three finger-holes, played with the left hand alone103– or probably an earlier type, the xirula),

Allegramente

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

        

p



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

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                          



Example 9.3. Ravel, Concerto in G, opening of 1st movement



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and the presence of blue minor thirds against major triads is no proof to the contrary: Ravel was quite capable of grafting such ideas onto a pre-established compositional outline. Whether the Adagio really is incongruous is disputable. His admitted model, the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, served him for purely aesthetic purposes; the craft was laborious, ‘bar by bar’, and the result an unexampled success in the handling of simple, diatonic ideas which give off not the faintest scent of pastiche. The fireworks and wit of the finale do not invite analysis; nonetheless it is constructed as carefully as its predecessors, both thematically and tonally. The opening call to attention appears twice in G, three times in other keys, and finally in G to round off the whole concerto. Ravel decorates his solid structure with the bright colours of jazz and bitonality, and in the central section the energy is such that we no longer have ‘a “development” in the classic sense, but a “hunt” (chasse), the three themes chasing one another so frenetically that the fun and games very nearly turn to panic’.104 In other words, we find again the tension between control and anarchy that informs both La valse and Boléro. All that the movement perhaps lacks is length. Maybe though, this is merely a judgment based on that very self-indulgence which Ravel had denied himself in the first movement, and on our experience of the comfortably predictable rondos of earlier masters. Or could Ravel have been guilty of low cunning? As at the first performance in the Salle Pleyel on 14 January 1932, this last movement has regularly provoked calls for an encore. Ravel craftily ends with the opening trumpet figure, firmly in the home key, as we first heard it. Subconsciously, we imagine the movement starting all over again – hence our furious applause, and our satisfaction when the bis is granted. In an interview published on 5 May 1932, Ravel pronounced himself moderately satisfied with the concerto, which ‘seems to me to be one of the works in which I have got close to achieving the content and the forms I was looking for, in which I’ve been most successful in establishing the control of my will’. At the same time he was careful to preface this by saying ‘one never realizes exactly what one wishes.’105 Ravel returned to France in April, and in May he went down for one of his longest stays in St-Jean-de-Luz, returning to Paris only in the middle of September, when he wrote from Levallois to Jane Bathori that he had been ‘deep in a work that I should never have taken on and which has made me lose three months to no purpose.’106 This was a commission from a film company to write songs for a Don Quichotte, directed by the Austrian film-maker Georg Pabst and shot in Haute-Provence with Chaliapin playing the Don and the English music-hall star George Robey as Sancho Panza. Although an unidentified newspaper cutting cited by Marcel Marnat gives June 1928 as the date of the commission, Rousseau-Plotto’s dating of June 1932 seems far more likely.107 He also offers a number of reasons why Ravel might have been tempted by the project:

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he liked the image of Cervantes’s hero, he was interested in the cinema and he was acquainted with Chaliapin, who had just built a house in St-Jean-deLuz. Chaliapin had created the role of Don Quixote in Massenet’s opera in Monte Carlo in 1910, and gave a magisterial interpretation of the ‘knight of the doleful countenance’ to the point of identifying with him totally. Ravel liked Massenet’s music. And we may note also that the texts suggested for these three songs were by Paul Morand, a friend of Ravel and someone fond of sea bathing and part of the cosmopolitan society of the Basque coast.108

Originally outlining the need for two songs, the contract of June 1932 finally settled on three, specified in detail: ‘a serenade (around two minutes long); then a heroic song (another two minutes); finally a comic song (about one and a half minutes)’. Ravel was given a deadline of 15 August and Chaliapin’s range: from B flat below the stave to E flat above, ‘and M. Chaliapin prefers that you don’t put too much emphasis on the high C, D, E [flat]’. But by 15 August no songs had arrived at the film company’s door. Instead, on the 26th, a letter from Ravel asked that they ‘find a composer capable of improvising in a few days three songs, as short and Spanish as may be.’ He returned therewith the advance of 5,000 francs on his fee of 20,000. The company then asked for at least just one song by 15 September, to which Ravel replied, ‘I hope to give you the romantic song (Guajira) around 15 September, and the other two by the end of October.’ However, the letter to Jane Bathori quoted above shows that by 15 September Ravel had in fact abandoned the whole project; not surprisingly since on 2 September the company had cancelled the contract, telling him they had approached another composer.109 Possibly they had in fact approached four others: Jacques Ibert, Manuel de Falla, Darius Milhaud and Marcel Delannoy. But the absence of any relevant songs in the catalogues of Falla and Milhaud suggests that these had been no more than approaches. Ultimately, songs and incidental music for the film were provided by Jacques Ibert. As one of Ravel’s younger contemporaries, he revered the master and, until his wife put her foot down,110 was one of Ravel’s regular companions on his long nocturnal rambles through Paris. He was therefore deeply embarrassed when he realized that he had been chosen as Ravel’s replacement – even if the latter had been dilatory, he felt the producers should have allowed him a little more leeway. Still, there was no ill-feeling between the two, the film was made with four songs by Ibert (the first to a poem by Ronsard, the other three by Alexandre Arnoux who also wrote the film dialogue), and Chaliapin duly sang the title role. But to say that he sang Ibert’s songs would only be partly true – his 1933 recording of them, wilful and inaccurate in every particular, is a stage performance rather than a concert rendering and makes us feel it was providential he never sang the songs Ravel eventually did write, given that composer’s belief that performers are slaves.

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Ravel’s accepting attitude towards Ibert did not, however, extend to the film company, and on 26 November he sued them for 75,000 francs of damages, plus interest. At this point, tantalizingly, the trail goes cold, although one possible reason is suggested later (see p. 332). He had the pleasure of attending a festival of his music in San Sebastián, on the Basque coast, on 28 August 1932, but on the other hand it was during these months that the first truly worrying signs of mental disorder became apparent. The earliest extant symptom of this is to be found in Ravel’s 1927 autograph endorsement of Mangeot’s recording of the Quartet, where something strange has happened to both the words ‘quatuor’ (? ‘quattuor’) and ‘enregistré’. According to Marguerite Long, these were not the only symptoms his friends had begun to notice: there were also ‘the episodes of forgetfulness it is usual to treat indulgently in the case of great men, but whose repetition becomes surprising, the slowing down of gestures normally made with alacrity, the periods of extreme lassitude during which Ravel, with his usual good humour, spoke of “senile decay, cerebral anaemia and amnesia” ’.111 Rousseau-Plotto recounts three incidents from the summer of 1932, the first directly from Edmond Gaudin’s son: it was at a corrida in San Sebastián to which Edmond Gaudin had taken him. He, the great Caporal smoker, began to hunt mechanically for something in his pockets, but was unable to explain what he was after. Then a few moments later, when Edmond took out a cigarette for himself, Ravel immediately grabbed it. On another occasion Ravel was bathing in the bay and was some way out from the beach. Suddenly he realized he couldn’t get back. After a time some of his friends, being anxious, came out to find him. This experienced swimmer admitted to his rescuers: ‘I can no longer swim.’ Finally, while he was enjoying himself in the shallows skimming pebbles with his great friend Marie Gaudin, he clumsily threw one into her face and might well have injured her.112

On his return from St-Jean-de-Luz in September Ravel tried to pick up the threads of Jeanne d’Arc and to embark on a ballet for Ida Rubinstein called Morgiane, one of five ballets she commissioned at this time.113 In an interview of the following year, Ravel referred to this as ‘a thing [une machine] that is part pantomime, part ballet. . . . It’s the story of Ali Baba, but as there was no dancing in the famous cave, we’ve had to invent the character of a lewd merchant who’s very fond of voluptuous dances [danses plastiques]. It’ll be very ‘grand guignol’: the blood will flow from start to finish.’114 Rosenthal remembers seeing eleven pages of sketches on the composer’s piano, consisting simply of a melodic line with figured bass.115 What part Rubinstein was intended to take in the ‘danses plastiques’ is unknown. But she was now in her late forties and critics were regularly pointing out that, while she was impressive when motionless, her dancing made great calls on their charity. So perhaps it was as well that the project faded out, with not a note of the score now surviving.

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As Ravel was coming back from the theatre on the night of Saturday, 8 October, his taxi was in violent collision with another at the intersection between the rue d’Amsterdam and the rue d’Athènes. L’écho de Paris reported that he was ‘thrown against the windows of the taxi and his head cut in several places by splinters of glass, especially his nose and the top of his head’.116 According to Le Figaro, he also complained of bruises on his chest. After preliminary attention at a nearby chemist, he was taken to a clinic on the rue Blomet where he was seen by Professor Desjardins.117 Desjardins’s report of 25 October notes wounds to the right eyebrow and chin, both needing stitches, and a superficial one to the left chin. There was also disruption of the nasal cartilage and some blood loss in the area of the right lung (hemothorax).118 Although Desjardins reckoned that Ravel would have recovered completely within a month, we cannot know from this distance what effect this accident had on the long-term deterioration in Ravel’s mental health. In the short term he was without a doubt badly shaken, and three months later could write to Falla that although ‘the accident was not very serious – bruising of the thorax and some wounds to the face – I’m still incapable of doing anything except sleep and eat. Its other legacy is an animal terror of taxis, which I use only as a last resort.’119 A month later he can still write to his cousin Alfred Perrin, ‘this stupid accident was all it needed to knock me out for three months. It’s only in the last few days that I’ve been able to get back to work, and that with difficulty.’120 The French of this last quotation begins ‘il a suffit . . .’ for ‘suffi’, and elsewhere in the letter he writes ‘attrité’ for ‘attristé’. Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, remembering that the accident also broke several of his teeth, wrote that Professor Clovis Vincent, who was later to operate on him, was quite sure it had no effect on his brain. ‘Even so,’ she goes on, ‘the illness got worse from month to month from that day on. Ravel tried everything . . . electricity, physiotherapy, acupuncture, psychotherapy, all his friends had a certain cure to suggest, and Ravel, in despair, put himself through the most unlikely regimes.’121 Quite possibly it was his physical and mental state that prevented him from pursuing his suit against the film company, added to the fact that the organizers had in the meantime run off with the money. Understandably in the circumstances, the final months of 1932 contained nothing more exciting than a visit to Basle in December for a concert of his music. At some point during the year he took part in the recording of Chansons madécasses with Madeleine Grey – a signed photo is addressed ‘to Madeleine Grey, perfect interpreter of the Madécasses . . . among others’ – and was therefore distressed when her engagement to sing them at the Florence Festival was cancelled by the Fascist authorities because she was Jewish.122 These were the years when ‘the Jewish question’ began to loom large on the European scene and various journalists supposed that Ravel himself was Jewish, apparently because he had set Jewish texts or because Maurice was a common Jewish forename. He had already written in 1928 to the journalist

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Léo-Pol Morin denying that he was, but ‘I should add that if I were, I should not disguise it, it’s just that I like to get the facts straight.’123 As to Maurice being a Jewish name, Ravel merely expressed surprise that the journalists had not seized on his parents being called Joseph and Marie.124 His first important commitment of 1933 was the first French performance of the Left Hand Concerto, in which he conducted Wittgenstein and the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. How faithful Wittgenstein remained to the score must remain a matter of conjecture. At any rate the work was a success, Henry Prunières applauding Ravel’s decision to let down his emotional guard ‘instead of accrediting the legend that his brain alone invented these admirable fantasmagorias of sound. From the opening bars, we are plunged into a world to which Ravel has but rarely introduced us.’125 One of the few sour notes was struck by Suzanne Demarquez in Le courrier musical, whose only comment about the soloist was that ‘M. Paul Wittgenstein possesses unusual force.’126 The work was demanded by Monte Carlo but Ravel, pleading ill health, handed the baton to Paul Paray, although he made the journey to hear the concert, which suggests he cannot have been all that unhappy with what Wittgenstein was doing. But as the Great Depression took hold in Europe, there was no talk of touring this concerto on the lines of the G major. On 12 February he conducted Marguerite Long in ‘her’ concerto and Boléro, with Manuel Rosenthal contributing Ma mère l’Oye, La valse and excerpts from Daphnis, and Ravel later conducted the amateur orchestra of the Paris Telephone Company in La valse. He also sat on the jury for the Grand Prix du Disque. In a letter of 6 April to the American composer David Diamond he writes, ‘I’ve just finished Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, and am starting on Morgiane, a devil of a shock!’127 Orenstein is surely right in interpreting this as the shock ‘of going from the chivalrous Don Quixote to a den of thieves’.128 It may seem surprising that after the problems with the film company Ravel still went ahead with composing the three songs. But it could simply have been that, once started on them, he became hooked. In his fragile mental state, it may have been the pressures of money and a deadline that he found impossible to manage. To sing the Don Quichotte songs, Ravel chose the young Basque baritone Martial Singher, born in Biarritz, who had made his Opéra debut in 1930 as Athanael in Massenet’s Thaïs. In 1965 Singher recalled that ‘Ravel gave me the manuscript of the songs . . . some time in the late spring of 1933 [sic]. . . . Very soon (November?) I was called upon to record the songs for “La Voix de son Maître”, and the songs were performed directly with orchestra, before being published or performed with the piano arrangement, for that recording.’129 But in a subsequent letter to Jean-Michel Nectoux in 1980, Singher recalled, almost certainly with greater accuracy, that he had met Ravel and been given the songs only six months before the recording, in other words in the spring of 1934 (shortly after the premiere on 23 February of the film Bolero). ‘Ravel was

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present at the recording session. . . . But as the Opéra was pushing my incipient career to the extent of four or five heavy new roles each season [in 1934 these included Wolfram in Tannhäuser and Gunther in Reyer’s Sigurd] I had started to study the songs only a short time before the recording and, when the time came, wasn’t absolutely in control of them. . . . Coppola, Lucien Garban . . . and Ravel helped me with advice. Ravel didn’t say much. But he listened with concentration, detecting a wrong note in the orchestra or querying a nuance.’130 This recording session took place on 20 November 1934 and the world premiere, with the Colonne orchestra conducted by Paray, on 1 December. No date is known for the songs’ first performance with piano. Ravel must surely have had an orchestration in mind from the time the songs were commissioned for the film. So even though Rosenthal recalls that the idea of one was hatched by him in collaboration with Lucien Garban, it may simply have accorded with Ravel’s own unexpressed wishes. Rosenthal claimed that by now the act of writing was becoming impossibly difficult for Ravel. His plan was to ‘orchestrate [the songs] in front of him and, as he is still perfectly capable of reading what I write, he’ll guide me according to his intentions’. Ravel accepted and Rosenthal claims to have found the exercise extremely instructive: ‘at a certain point he directed my attention to the trumpet part and said: “Ah no! you’re putting down a note that a single trumpet shouldn’t play. There’s only one trumpet in the orchestra we’re planning and it shouldn’t play a third or a seventh: only a tonic or a dominant, otherwise you’ll break through the overall harmony too roughly”. . . . That’s how the orchestration of the three Don Quichotte songs was done: not at his dictation, but under his supervision.’131 However Rosenthal’s memory in this case would seem to be at fault over the precise work, if not over the advice in general, since the manuscript of the orchestrated songs is without question in Ravel’s own hand. We may doubt whether he made a copy of Rosenthal’s original, since this would surely have been just as difficult for him as writing the orchestration direct from the piano score. At all events Rosenthal confirmed that the use of the vibraphone in the central song was Ravel’s idea.132 So, although he had fulminated against the three months’ work on the songs for Don Quichotte as spent to no purpose, the seed did not fall on stony ground (incidentally, why was Ibert given different texts – maybe Morand refused to have his lines set by anyone except Ravel?). The songs portray the noble lunatic as lover, holy warrior and drinker, and Ravel with typical fastidiousness chose three distinct types of dance rhythm to illustrate these facets. The first, ‘Chanson romanesque’, is the guajira or quajira mentioned above, a Spanish dance with alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4; according to the Breton baritone Yvon le Marc’hadour who was present at rehearsal, Ravel was unaware that he had conformed to a known type, and was delighted when it was pointed out to him by the conductor Freitas Branco, to the extent of jumping up and down with excitement.133 The harmonic progressions and the graceful curve of the

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melody recall Chabrier with a simplicity of means that has nothing in common with the style depouillé of the 1920s. The Don claims that if his mistress were to be distressed by the earth’s spinning, or by the overabundance of stars in the sky, these matters would receive instant attention; likewise, if his clearance of the sky proved too thorough. But if she were to suggest that his blood belonged more to himself than to her, he would pale at her reproach and die blessing her. Ravel does not point up in the vocal line the extravagance of the knight’s language, but shares the serious view of the Don himself, leaving the dance rhythm in the piano part to suggest a reality at odds with his fantasizing. The song ends with the apostrophe ‘O Dulcinée’, as blind love overwhelms the verbal conceits. For the ‘Chanson épique’ Ravel chose the 5/4 of the Basque zortzico, already adapted at the start of the Piano Trio. Don Quixote prays to St Michael and St George to bless his sword and his mistress, and again the tone is unambiguously sincere. The chordal accompaniment and modal inflections recall not so much Chabrier as Fauré, and Ravel produces several harmonic surprises worthy of his teacher (Ex. 9.4).

[Molto moderato ( = 66)]

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- reille À Vous, Ma- done au

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Example 9.4. Ravel, ‘Chanson épique’, bars 22–8

Even the final ‘Amen’, matching the ‘O Dulcinée’ of the first song, is given a simple but ingenious harmonic twist to go with its vibraphonic colouring (as an unbeliever, Ravel could regard this word as more than the ritual platitude so often penned by fugally inclined Christians). When Singher chose this one

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to be dedicated to him, Ravel replied that ‘of course, I had chosen the right one!’134 The final ‘Chanson à boire’ celebrates one of the only real attributes of the Don, and Ravel accentuates this realism both by the cumulative, insistent crossrhythms of the jota and by a strictly strophic setting of the two verses. The style is popular and earthy, stopping just short of a vulgarity which, as Bernac insists, the singer must never fall into.135 Like the ‘Habanera’ of nearly forty years earlier, the song circles in the Spanish manner round the dominant of the minor key, duly transformed into the major for the choruses. The longueurs and exaggerations characteristic of drunkards are built into the music, together with a nobly suppressed hiccup from the piano, and in place of an apostrophe or ‘Amen’ Ravel rounds off the song with a grimace, as final comment on the knight’s pursuit of pleasure. The last four years of Ravel’s life were a long fight against the mental fog that was descending with only a very occasional respite, and he completed no more works. Although able to conduct Boléro and the G major Concerto with Marguerite Long at the Casino du Havre on 23 May 1933,136 in August he had to explain to his old friend Marie Gaudin that he would not be coming down to St-Jean-de-Luz as usual because absolute rest was being prescribed.137 He writes optimistically of the proposed performances of Morgiane at the Opéra the following March and of his returning from Le Touquet, where he had been staying with his new friends Jacques and Françoise Meyer, to work at Montfort ‘as soon as I feel less hazy’, but the overall sense is of him whistling to keep his

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

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spirits up. A draft of the above letter also contains writing exercises that show his co-ordination beginning to fail. Pasteur Vallery-Radot, the same doctor who had attended Debussy in his last years, continued to recommend rest and mountain air, but this treatment was no more effective than it had been in 1919. In context, the various interviews and articles from this period bring a lump to the throat: so many ideas locked away inside that unresponsive body. . . . In the article ‘Finding Tunes in Factories’, he writes, not entirely accurately, ‘Beethoven composed a symphony based on the life of Napoleon; why should not a modern composer base a similar work on the life of a great captain of industry? . . . The airplane . . . what a theme for a symphony it would make!’138 But Dédale 39, alias Icare, ‘which as you can guess is an airplane and an airplane in C’, would never fly.139 The following month an interview for Excelsior finds him still planning. First, Jeanne d’Arc: ‘I’m not yet working on this piece. I’ve been meditating, dreaming about it for a long time. Certainly this project engages my interest more and more, but I’m elaborating it slowly, caressing it gently.’ Then Morgiane: ‘but will I have the strength to do it? I feel tired. An attack of nervous depression.’ And finally, ‘I also want to start work on Franc-Nohain’s Le chapeau chinois, with a sort of operetta orchestra. Jeanne d’Arc will only come after this.’140 Franc-Nohain’s one-act play, premiered at the Odéon on 1 April 1930, may well have been envisaged as providing a pair for L’heure espagnole, since it too has a cast of one female and four males. The ridiculous story would at least have given Ravel a chance to show off his mastery of chinoiserie and bell noises; he might also have felt in tune with one of the final couplets: ‘if one thought carefully before marriage, one would never marry’.141 In November 1933 he again managed to conduct Boléro and Marguerite Long in the G major Concerto. It was his last public performance. What an effort this must have cost him is clear from Valentine Hugo’s account of meeting him that same month: André Breton and Paul Eluard had asked me to do everything I could to persuade Ravel to come to the offices of the review Minotaure on the rue Boétie so that Dr Lotte Wolff could take a print of his hands. They wanted to use the print, with those of other artists, to illustrate an article called ‘Psychic Revelations of the Hand’ which was to appear in the review at the beginning of 1934. . . . His brother told me he accepted with delight and asked if, on the day in question, he could bring Maurice to my studio and leave him with me for a couple of hours; at the end of that time Maurice would have to go on to the boulevard Delessert, and Edouard carefully gave me the address. He asked me not to keep him longer than two hours and not to forget the address Maurice had to go to, as he himself would probably not remember it.

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About half-past three Ravel arrived, smiling, alert and happy . . . and he began to talk about his operatic project on the subject of Delteil’s Jeanne d’Arc. Some time previously he had asked [my ex-husband] Jean Hugo to do the decor and the costumes when his major work was put on at the Opéra. I myself was to be in charge of the making of the costumes, some of which he wanted to be very simple and some very sumptuous. He told me his outline, the captivating story of an extraordinary, innocent child of eighteen whose feet were firmly on the ground, but whose head was lost in the heavens. And then suddenly he said: ‘Valentine, I’ll never write my Jeanne d’Arc. It’s there in my head, I can hear it, but I’ll never write it down, it’s the end, I can’t write my music down any more.’ And he tried to explain, with a calm, terrifying despair, the fearful shadow that imprisoned all his ideas in his head. . . . We took a taxi and in the cab he confided to me the emotion he felt at the prospect of meeting Breton and Eluard in a few minutes’ time. He had been more passionately interested in the Surrealist movement than he had let on and he would have liked to know the protagonists better. He said to me in a weary voice, ‘Now it’s too late.’142

In this same month of November 1933 Ravel’s last article was published, headed ‘The aspirations of the under-25s’.143 If he could no longer write music or engage with Surrealism, his critical faculties were still as sharp as ever. Music critics don’t generally look closely enough at the music they’re reviewing; labelling groups is dangerous (Les Six are clearly in his mind, though unidentified); the violence of postwar gestures was too often calculated; after demolition, now comes rebuilding; while the aims of these composers are sometimes mysterious, ‘we can nevertheless recognize in their works a desire for clarity, cleanness, openness, a love of life and light, a kind of interior gaiety and a valuable generosity. Their techniques don’t follow any party line’; but the world of the 1930s is a hard place in which to make a living – money is tight, chamber music has tiny audiences, the ‘talkies’ aren’t interested in serious composers and the radio looks the best bet for the future; despite which the optimism of the young is admirable. Though his comment about the film industry may reflect his own recent experiences rather than the facts (Milhaud, Honegger and Auric were all writing excellent music for the medium at this time), his identification of ‘a love of life and light’ and ‘a generosity’ looks forward to the ideals of the group ‘La Jeune France’ of 1936. The name Messiaen does not appear anywhere in Ravel’s writings or interviews, but he must have heard some performances of Messiaen’s music at the SMI, the Société nationale and elsewhere, following that of the Préludes at the Concerts Durand in January 1930, because Rosenthal records that he didn’t appreciate it at all, remarking caustically ‘Ça fait moderne!’144 Despite this, his reference to ‘un amour de la vie et de la

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lumière’ would seem to be deliberate and particular; and it would be typical of him that, if he had indeed read the 1933 interview with Messiaen including his diatribe against the slow movement of the G major Concerto, he did not hold it against him. On 30 January 1934 Pasteur Vallery-Radot wrote to Jourdan-Morhange: ‘If you see Ravel’s brother, tell him (without frightening him too much, as he seems to me extremely easily upset) that I’m very worried about his brother. I’ve examined him a number of times to make sure I don’t miss a lesion of any kind: there isn’t one; but he presents with a state of intellectual fatigue that’s very distressing. It’s absolutely vital – and be insistent about this with Maurice Ravel – that he has complete rest for many weeks, and for that he would do best to stay with friends in the Midi or go to the mountains.’145 Ravel duly went off to Mont Pélerin above Vevey on Lake Geneva and later Edouard remembered that the date was 6 February, the day of the serious political riots in Paris, so that they had to make a long detour to get to the station.146 From Switzerland Ravel gave his brother brief details of his treatment at Mon Repos, a clinic run by nuns: ‘every evening they prepare my hot bath with fir milk in order to make me sleep. In the mornings, after breakfast, a hot shower.’147 To Marie Gaudin he wrote that ‘Thanks to the invigorating mountain air I’m beginning to write more or less’, and asked her to ‘write to me from time to time: I’ll try and reply even though it takes me days of torture to do so: I began this letter over a week ago.’148 The last but one letter in his handwriting, dated 22 March, was one of condolence to Maurice Delage on the death of his mother a week earlier. When Delage visited him on 30 March and expressed surprise at the delay, Ravel gave the same explanation: ‘It took me a week to write using Larousse.’149 The last letter in his hand dates from the following day. From here on, all his letters were typed, and signed with an increasingly unsteady hand. At the end of April he came back from Switzerland to a clinic in RueilMalmaison and then to Montfort, but, according to Edouard, in no way improved. On 10 May he received the American composer Evangelina Lehman at Montfort, but asked Vuillermoz to excuse him from the meeting of the jury of the Grand Prix du Disque on the 15th.150 In June he rather surprisingly accepted the Directorship of the American Conservatoire at Fontainebleau,151 a sign that he had not abandoned hope of recovery, but he never took up the post and most probably it was no more than an encouraging gesture on the part of the Casadesus family, who had founded the institution. There was no visit to the Basque country this year and the next we hear of him is at the recording of the Don Quichotte songs on 20 November and their first public performance on 1 December. On 17 February 1935 the Pasdeloup Orchestra conducted by Coppola gave what was to be the last of Ravel’s premieres, the orchestral version of Ronsard à son âme, again sung by Martial Singher. This certainly was dictated to

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Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

23 One of Ravel’s last handwritten letters, 1 April 1934, to Marie Gaudin

Rosenthal and Garban, Rosenthal intuiting that Ravel wanted a tam-tam stroke on the final chord; and when he wrote it down, Ravel said ‘Ah! It couldn’t be anything else!’152 The song was recorded with Don Quichotte at the session on 20 November. Ravel was to live on for nearly another three years and the problem for his friends was how to make his life even remotely tolerable. Old acquaintances such as the Delages, Roland-Manuels and Marguerite Long, his pupil Manuel Rosenthal, and newer acquaintances such as the Jacques Meyers and his Montfort neighbours, the playwright Jacques de Zogheb and his wife and son, and of course his brother Edouard shared the task between them. Ravel now was finding it difficult to remember anyone outside his closest circle, attendance at concerts attracted well-wishers wanting autographs that he could not write, and he could no longer compose – or only in his head. Distraction seemed the kindest answer. Immediately after the concert on 17 February, as a present for his sixtieth birthday on 7 March, Ida Rubinstein funded a

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holiday for him with the young sculptor Léon Leyritz that took the two of them from St-Jean-de-Luz along the north coast of Spain to Bilbao and Santander, then down to Madrid, where they went to the Escorial and the Goya chapel, then on to Algeciras and across the straits to Tangier. From here they travelled south to Marrakesh, where they stayed for three weeks at the Hôtel Maimounia. On 6 March Leyritz wrote joyfully to Nelly Delage: ‘obviously the journey has been rather long and tiring, but despite the activity here, it’s amazingly peaceful and calm, which is certainly beneficial. There’s no trouble finding his comb, and the buttons on his sleeves do themselves up by magic. The result of all that is that he’s in the middle of writing to his brother! All by himself! Slowly, it’s true; but it’s a fact.’153 Unfortunately, the letter, if completed, has not been found. From Marrakesh they travelled north on 10 March for a few days at Fez, and it was here that Boris Masslow, the director of Fine Arts, showing the visitors round the castle that housed the Embassy with its wonderful gardens, and possibly having been briefed in efficient diplomatic fashion about Morgiane, said to Ravel, ‘ “What a setting, dear maître, to inspire you to write an Arab work!” To which Ravel replied smartly: “If I wrote something Arab, it would be much more Arab than all that!” ’ ‘If ’ is the crucial word: Leyritz had already reported to Jourdan-Morhange a few days earlier that Ravel had hummed to him some tunes for Morgiane, but, as mentioned above, not even a single sketch for the work survives.154 Someone capable of the above retort was obviously not intellectually void, but it comes as no surprise that, according to the account that JourdanMorhange later had from Leyritz, One of the parties in Fez that Ravel enjoyed most was undoubtedly ‘the cats’ party’: a reception given in his honour by some young European doctors, in a beautiful Arab house in which the animals were more numerous than the humans. Twelve cats had tyrannized Ravel with their caresses; one on his knees, another in his arms, a third on his shoulders; he said, ‘You see, they know that I love them!’ Twenty or thirty turtle doves were cooing around them and Ravel in his ecstasy would have spent the entire night speaking ‘cat’ and ‘turtle dove’ if the gentlemen of the party hadn’t been slightly jealous.155

Even if Ravel’s lifelong passion for cats and birds plays a part in this story, the melancholy truth cannot be ignored: they do not demand any closely reasoned verbal response. The two travellers returned to Spain and went to the royal palace, the Alcazar, and to a bullfight in Seville, where Ravel the night-owl later enjoyed the canto jondo of Nina de Los Peines at 2 a.m. From here their journey north took them through Córdoba, Madrid, Burgos, Vitoria, Roncesvalles, and

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finally down to Pamplona where, in the Hôtel de la Perla, Ravel was given a sumptuous bedroom whose woodwork was carved with lyres: it had been slept in by Sarasate.156 They were back in Paris on 20 March. Gaby Casadesus remembered that Ravel came back looking well and having put on weight. But at the same time ‘his gaze was absolutely empty.’157 Exactly two months later, he attended the funeral of Paul Dukas at Père Lachaise. The two men had never been close. The only mention of Dukas in Ravel’s correspondence is an unfortunate one: after Pierre Lalo had praised Dukas’s opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue and castigated Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole in his review of 24 March 1908 in Le temps, Ravel wrote to Cipa Godebski that ‘my music is not like that of Paul Dukas. Heavens above, I do know that my talents are not those of a Jew!’158 This almost unique anti-Semitic outburst can be excused only on grounds of momentary irritation with Lalo’s persistent hostility. If it nowadays seems unpardonably offensive, against it must be set Ravel’s many explicit acts of support for Jews, especially in the 1930s, as in the case of Madeleine Grey (p. 332). Conversely, there is only one passing mention of Ravel in the 660 pages of Dukas’s collected writings on music. Ravel’s friend Samazeuilh reported to the lawyer Paul Poujaud that there were a lot of people at Dukas’s cremation, but that ‘so few of those present were his friends and understood him.’159 Even so, Dukas, who was as good as silent for the last twenty years of his life rather than publish something he felt to be unworthy of him, must have earned Ravel’s respect at least. At any rate, it was at this ceremony that he confided to Charles Koechlin, ‘I’ve noted down a theme, so I can still write music.’160 In August he made the last of his twenty-three known visits to St-Jean-deLuz, again accompanied by Leyritz. He could still walk and climb as well as ever and Leyritz took him once more up the 670-metre-high La Rhune (in

Rights were not granted to include this illustration in electronic media. Please refer to print publication.

24 Dedication in Basque to Marie Gaudin: ‘Marienzat, ene amodiorik handiana’ (To Marie, my fondest love)

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Basque, Larrun) to the south of St-Jean-de-Luz; covered with dolmens, stone circles and other Neolithic monuments, it holds a sacred place in Basque mythology. They also went on another short tour of local towns by car, down to Bilbao and Burgos, and back via Pamplona, Roncesvalles and St-Jean-Piedde-Port. But after the scare of three years earlier he would no longer try to swim. Rousseau-Plotto dates to this final stay an anecdote from Jane Courteault: ‘When they were walking along the sea-front, he was trying desperately to remember the name of the great Russian singer whose two villas could be seen on the pointe Sainte-Barbe. She suggested to him a mnemonic technique: “Il ne chante pas comme un chat, ni comme une lapine; vous vous souviendrez que c’est Chaliapine [He sings neither like a cat nor like a female rabbit; that way you’ll remember he’s called Chaliapin].” Ravel replied: “With you, I shall recover.” ’161 But his mind continued to deteriorate through 1936 and in February he consulted Dr Alajouanine at the Salpétrière Hospital. When his orchestration of Chabrier’s Menuet pompeux was given its first concert performance by the Pasdeloup Orchestra on 21 March, he acknowledged the ovation in only the most distant manner. During April and May he spent some time at a pension in Lausanne, apparently under the eye of a doctor. He could still do his bird imitations and according to the patronne was now sleeping better and had a good appetite, but as usual was having trouble remembering names.162 On 17 June he signed a typed letter to André Dezarrois, the secretary of the Fondation américaine pour la pensée et l’art français, explaining that he was unable to sit on a jury to decide who should win the foundation’s annual composition prize, but recommending Emile Passani. Practical as ever, he cited not only Passani’s musical abilities but also his financial situation: Passani was currently chef du chant with the French National Radio Orchestra, but also treading the hard road of a budding solo pianist.163 During 1937, his last year of life, Ravel walked alone in the forest of Rambouillet, stayed with friends or with his brother in the flat in Levallois, or sat in the little house at Montfort, ‘waiting’.164 But he also went frequently to concerts, and to the end lost nothing of his critical faculty. This year, Wittgenstein’s exclusive rights to the Left Hand Concerto expired, and at last Ravel could hear the work played by Jacques Février as he had envisaged it, under the baton of Charles Munch. He coached Février and heard the performance on 19 March. Henri Dutilleux attended the final rehearsal and remembers Florent Schmitt embracing Ravel in the interval and saying, ‘Ah! Maurice, after what you’re giving us, how can I go on composing?’165 Two months later, Ravel’s views on some other performances were solicited by Madeleine Grey: He was terribly demanding to work with, because his scores left nothing to chance. . . . I’d put his Don Quichotte à Dulcinée into my annual recital, even

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though it was written for a man’s voice. So I wanted to have the composer’s opinion and, with Poulenc as my accompanist, went to sing the three songs to him. When I’d finished, I asked if he had any observations to make. At first it seemed as though he did not have, but then, as though coming out of a dream, he pointed with his index finger to a bar at the end of the ‘Chanson à boire’ where I’d made a slight rallentando that was not in the score. Given his condition, Poulenc and I were both astonished.166

The composer’s last known letter, typed as ever, but signed by him, was dated 29 October 1937, and expressed to Ernest Ansermet the hope that Février could play the Concerto under Ansermet’s baton, indicating that he approved Février’s interpretation.167 But this did not happen in Ravel’s lifetime. In November he attended his last concert, Inghel conducting the French National Radio Orchestra in Daphnis et Chloé. Clearly he was now desperately unhappy and the question arose, should an operation be attempted? The crucial difficulty was that no doctor claimed to know for certain what the problem was. Was there a tumour, or was it a degenerative disease such as was thought to have afflicted his father? The celebrated neurologist Thierry de Martel thought nothing could or should be done. But Manuel Rosenthal who, together with Edouard Ravel, Delage and Roland-Manuel, was bearing the burden of Ravel’s anguish, agreed with them that Ravel’s lucid awareness of his condition argued for intervention, a course advocated by Professor Clovis Vincent, on the chance that a tumour might be found and removed. Testimonies vary as to whether Ravel knew what was now planned. Marguerite Long claimed that ‘many of us could testify that our friend would have rejected the idea of an operation and that he preferred the worst afflictions to the danger of dying. When they shaved his beautiful silver hair, he was still begging to be taken back home and a nurse, present at this show of despair, could not hold back her tears.’168 However Rosenthal recalls that when, ‘so as not to alarm him, he was assured that he was merely going to have another X-ray, it was at that moment that he said: “No, I know quite well they’re going to cut my head off.” ’169 Then there’s Roland-Manuel’s testimony that ‘I can still see Ravel, the evening before the operation, with a turban of white bandages, laughing at the unexpected resemblance we found to Lawrence of Arabia’.170 There is some confusion, understandable after some years, over the events and precise dates involved. The most measured and accurate account probably comes from Erik Baeck: We can conclude that the doctors had eliminated the diagnosis of a cerebral tumour . . . that it was decided with [Ravel’s] consent to operate, that he was operated on without [general] anaesthetic on Friday, 17 December, that Dr Vincent made a right frontal incision, and that he tried unsuccessfully

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to reinflate the right hemisphere with the help of an intra-ventricular injection of serum. After the operation, Ravel recovered consciousness, but two days later fell into a progressive coma (probably owing to intercranial bleeding).171

He died at 3.30 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 December. Delage, alone, was with him. The funeral, a civil ceremony, took place at midday the following Thursday in the sixteenth division of the cemetery in Levallois Perret, where he was laid to rest next to his parents and where Edouard, to whom he left all his possessions,172 would follow him in 1960. But even in death Ravel managed to be at the centre of an official dispute. René Bizet reported that the composer’s corpse ‘had to suffer indignity at the hands of undertakers who were on strike and refused to bury his coffin. Without intervention from the authorities who, according to the gruesome formula, had it declared an “urgent corpse”, the body of one of the most illustrious composers of our time would have remained lying on a bed in the clinic.’173 Among those present at the funeral, noted in Le temps of 31 December, were, together with Edouard as chief mourner, Jacques Rouché, Reynaldo Hahn, Philippe Gaubert, Poulenc, Inghelbrecht, Samazeuilh, Rhené-Baˆton, Aubert, Robert Brussel and Maurice Yvain. Stravinsky, Viñes, Milhaud, Casadesus and the two faithful sisters, Marie Gaudin and Jane Courteault, were also there, as was Lennox Berkeley, living in Paris at the time. Among those unavoidably absent was Falla, who wrote to Roland-Manuel some months later in considerable distress: If I had been in Paris, I would perhaps have been able to prevent his burial taking place in that fashion; I would have reminded those who were responsible for the funeral that I was present when his father was dying, and that Ravel asked me most urgently to tell our friend the Abbé Petit, saying he did not want his father to die without any religious rites. Unfortunately, when we arrived, it was too late, but there is no doubt that, if Ravel at the time showed such insistence that his father should die as a Christian, he would have asked for himself what he passionately desired for his father, something for which I was the chief witness.174

While Falla’s regret is understandable, it has to be said that nothing in the thirty years since Marie Ravel was dressed up for Mass in Ciboure had given the slightest indication that her elder son had wavered in his agnosticism. If Falla had attended, he would probably have agreed with Stravinsky’s verdict: ‘lugubrious spectacles, these civil burials, at which everything is banished except protocol.’175 Narbaitz claims that ‘as a prayer, there was only the Pavane pour une Infante défunte’.176 But since no other known source mentions this and he gives no

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details about who played it by the graveside on that bitterly cold day, doubts must remain. Perhaps the nearest thing to a prayer was the address by the Minister of Education Jean Zay. Bizet referred to it as a ‘pauvre oraison’, while Pierre Lucas in L’âge nouveau, noting how few members of officialdom were present, called the speech ‘an improvisation . . . a few phrases scattered here and there. Their drift reached us on the breeze. . . . Technique . . . inspiration . . . France . . . civilization; the rest was lost in noise from the street, broken by the whistle of a suburban train. Imagine what our Eastern neighbours would do for the funeral of a Richard Strauss.’177 In fact Zay’s address, as published in the 1938 commemorative issue of the Revue musicale, was very far from an improvisation, nor did it include any of the four words mentioned by Lucas, whose account reads like that of a journalist who has been kept well to the back of the crowd. Zay’s speech was probably no better and no worse than such things usually are. He might have caused alarm by his statement early on that ‘to speak of Ravel . . . will eternally be to speak of delicate, delightful things and to proclaim, above any contrary challenge, the pure sovereignty of intelligence.’ But he rescued himself later by stating that ‘with Ravel there is feeling and passion’, and later still by attempting a synthesis: ‘his grandeur comes precisely from this perpetual vigilance of the intelligence, this constant presence of the spirit that measures, explores, points out, analyses, understands and, if need be, smiles.’178 At the same time there was to be no state funeral, as there had been for Saint-Saëns and Fauré, for someone who had spurned the Légion d’honneur. Instead, Ravel’s death was marked by concerts all over Paris, including the Opéra and the radio. Sauguet wrote that on the evening of the funeral Ravel’s body should have been taken straight to the Panthéon. More practically, ‘fortyfive municipal councillors – half of those assembled – proposed that the Administration give the name Maurice-Joseph Ravel to a Paris street’,179 (an avenue Maurice Ravel was duly instituted in the 12th arrondissement in the far Eastern corner of the city, leading somewhat provocatively into an avenue Vincent d’Indy . . .) while in Britain Maurice Ravel clubs were founded in Glasgow and London, the latter including Lady Gordon Duff, Virginia Woolf, Lord and Lady Londonderry and Mr Anthony Eden. But perhaps the acknowledgment that Ravel would have appreciated most came from an orchestral player the night after his death. Rosenthal relates: For more than a year I had been agitating to get L’Enfant et les sortilèges performed again, putting it to Ravel that, at the Opéra-Comique in 1926, his work had been badly received because of clumsiness (the auditorium lights going up and the music interrupted between the two halves, not to mention spectators booing the foxtrot and the cats’ duet). He then said: ‘Yes, it would be good if people could finally hear my music in silence’. . . . I had the idea of putting it on for the end-of-year festivities, in the final concert given by the

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Orchestre national in 1937, on 28 December. As the devil would have it, that same evening the world learnt of Ravel’s death. In the afternoon, I had been to see him in the clinic, and came back in tears to give the news to the orchestra, chorus and soloists. . . . And that was when, as I was leaving the stage, a double-bass player said to me on my way past: ‘I understand why you are weeping for your maître, but take comfort in this: he, at least, is not leaving any rubbish behind.’180

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CHAPTER X

Postlude: The pirate and the clockmaker

I

n Ravel’s lifetime his pudeur, his reticence and sense of delicacy, regularly led critics to decry his music as cold, impersonal, uninvolved, even the beauties of which ‘are like the markings on snakes and lizards’.1 Seventy or more years after his death such pudeur can seem even more curious to a world where the most intimate of personal details are revealed on blogs and websites. But if we can agree that a desire for privacy is not a crime against the social order, it becomes easier to accept it as a bulwark guarding the most important thing in Ravel’s life: his composing. However, probably it was more than that. In a sense he has been his own worst enemy, since the technical expertise of his music has too often misled listeners as to the emotional turmoil that lies beneath. Perhaps the skill and control of the clockmaker has too effectively concealed the daring and aggression of the pirate. But even so, his pudeur was not consistently maintained: there was no question of his being embarrassed by the plaudits in America, even if they surprised him, and long before that, as we have seen, he stood up for himself vis-à-vis Debussy, as the founder of the new French pianism. We could perhaps apply to him Degas’s aphorism, ‘I should like to be distinguished and unknown’ (je voudrais être illustre et inconnu). Ravel himself referred to his reticence as part of his Basque heritage,2 but this may have been merely a cover story. Although Manuel Rosenthal expressly denied that he was timid,3 in which various encounters with Toscanini, Wittgenstein and others bear him out, there is abundant testimony that Ravel was a more tortured soul than might appear from the smart waistcoats and lurid ties (were these further forms of camouflage?): ‘He never spoke of death and was afraid of it’4 his heart was ‘loving, simple, gentle and tormented’;5 he was inhabited by a ‘latent melancholy [and] anguish’.6 If we add in to this the ‘childish terror’ as well as the curiosity he experienced as a boy faced with a toy duck made by Vaucanson7 (were the toys at Montfort merely a sign of his ‘childishness’ and of an inherited fascination with engineering, or actually a form of exorcism?), the murderous ant-lions he kept in a tank (to Tailleferre’s horror), his vision of buses as engines of death, and the little-noted fact that all three pieces in Gaspard de la nuit tell of loss,8 then we can appreciate that in

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order to function at all as a composer Ravel may have needed formal and stylistic supports of unusual strength. It is surely no accident that his most overt self-abandonment to underlying terrors was channelled through the resilient and widely-accepted tropes of the waltz. His small stature further encouraged facile dismissal. Whereas Napoleon, Stravinsky and Picasso overcame this by visible force of character, Ravel’s attempts at sartorial brilliance, not to say eccentricity, received a mixed press. He was undoubtedly sensitive about his lack of inches and we can still feel his pain when he was introduced to Gustave Lyon, the proprietor of the Salle Pleyel, who quipped, ‘Oh! I was told to expect a maître and I can see only fifty centimetres [cinquante centimètres].’9 Ravel never forgave him. Another ground for dismissal as a serious artist, and one not unconnected with his stature, has been his decision not to put away childish things but to embrace them and extract from them as much as he possibly could. One of the most damning indictments has come from Robert Craft, who wrote of Ravel’s ‘failure to evolve’ and of his ‘inability to emerge from the emotional world of his childhood’.10 This not only fails to acknowledge works such as La valse or the second of the Chansons madécasses, but ignores the plain fact that, far from being hamstrung by ‘failure’ or ‘inability’, Ravel deliberately chose to cultivate the world of childhood for the emotional riches it contained – Baudelaire’s ‘green paradise of childhood loves’.11 Schiller’s celebrated essay ‘On naïve and sentimental poetry’ offers a reasoned defence: We are touched not because we look down upon the child from the height of our strength and perfection, but rather because we look upward from the limitation of our condition, which is inseparable from the determination which we have attained, to the unlimited determinacy of the child and to its pure innocence; and our emotion at such a moment is too transparently mixed with a certain melancholy for its source to be mistaken. In the child, disposition and determination are represented; in us, that fulfilment which forever remains far short of those. The child is therefore a lively representation to us of the ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined; hence we are in no sense moved by the notion of its poverty and limitation, but rather by the opposite: the notion of its pure and free strength, its integrity, its eternality. To a moral and sensitive person a child will be a sacred object on this account.12

This says it all. It also helps explain the underlying melancholy beneath much of Ravel’s music and marries with his well-known declaration that ‘my objective . . . is technical perfection. I can strive unceasingly to this end, since I am certain of never being able to attain it.’13 That this certainty was a less than comfortable one is attested by Rosenthal:

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It was not until Ravel was writing L’Enfant that I fully understood the life of a creator. He finished the work in Monte Carlo, just days before the opening. When it was finally completed he said to me, ‘You know, at night when I was walking along the shore, wondering whether something should be in B flat or B major or how to choose a chord or manage a melodic line, I said to myself, “Oh, I’m tired of this! I’d like to be finished with it, just sitting in a café at last, enjoying an aperitif, looking at the sea.” And when I was finally through and could sit in a café having my aperitif, the taste of it was bitter! I was longing for the time I’d spent walking at night, thinking, should it be B flat or B major!’14

As we’ve seen, he was rarely happier than on his American tour, when composing was not an option. But, in the same way that Schiller regarded the child as a sacred object, for Ravel being a composer was a kind of priesthood, involving discipline and sacrifice. Ironically, this might seem to bring him close to the ideals of Vincent d’Indy (which he otherwise abhorred), as embodied in the opening sentence of that master’s address to the Schola Cantorum in 1900: ‘L’art n’est pas un métier’.15 By métier, d’Indy meant a profession, a way of earning a living. But for Ravel, métier in a musical context meant ‘craft’, ‘technique’, so he would undoubtedly have wanted to nuance d’Indy’s bald declaration by saying, ‘Yes, art is a métier, but not only that. The métier is the necessary but not sufficient means to a greater end.’ Or as RolandManuel expressed it in the lecture delivered for Ravel during his American tour, any established laws of composition ‘are dealing only with the obvious and superficial part of the work of art without ever reaching those infinitely minute roots of the artist’s sensitiveness and personal reaction’.16 One of the most obvious sacrifices Ravel made was that of any close companion, whether male or female. He never seems to have made open avowal of any brand of sexuality. As it is, we have David Diamond’s evidence of Ravel’s demonstrative affections towards him on the one hand,17 Jacques Durand’s invitation to a female brothel and Ravel’s armfuls of Viennese girls on the other. There were rumours that at one point he proposed to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, who laughed. On the other hand, he explained to Mme Casella that composers and marriage did not go well together18 and he had the examples of Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Debussy to support him: Debussy had indeed written, at a time when his first marriage may already have been foundering, ‘we shall never realize the extent to which music is a woman, which perhaps explains the frequent chastity of men of genius.’19 There could well be something in David Lamaze’s theory that Ravel was long in love with Misia Sert. Lamaze’s researches have proved that, Viñes’s affections for his Maria not being reciprocated, the pianist remained a bachelor to the end.20 Was Ravel in similar case? Was the young sculptor Léon Leyritz more than a cat-minder and travelling companion? Or was Ravel bisexual? A deleted paragraph from Stravinsky’s Memories and Commentaries apparently dealt with

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Ravel’s impotence21 and a nurse who attended his final hospitalization recalled in 1952 seeing unambiguous evidence from a Bordet-Wasserman test that he had at some time contracted syphilis.22 Either of these, or suspected tuberculosis, might have been a valid reason for avoiding marriage. Whatever the truth, we can confidently state that, in both life and music, he was driven by the need to reconcile opposites. In his life this manifested itself in the division between bouts of socializing, at home or in Paris, and periods of hermetically sealed composition; in his music, between tradition and innovation, between knowing the rules and knowing how to break them. The lifestyle division was no different from that of most composers, for whom long stretches of uninterrupted time are vital (and, in the modern world, increasingly hard to achieve). The divisions within Ravel’s music itself are much more interesting, and go to the very heart of its beauty and power. Vladimir Jankélévitch, one of the most acute observers of Ravel’s music, wrote of its ‘revolutionary aspect’ (côté insurrectionnel)23 – what has already been identified as its piratical nature – while the clash between such provocation and the demands of tradition has been found also in his handwriting, elegant, supremely legible, but like no other, and demonstrating ‘a somewhat excessive amour-propre’ in its ‘long upward extensions and very marked Js’24 (notably in ‘Je’). As to his correspondence, enough has been quoted to give an idea of its often quirky humour, but translation does not register his use, even in the most intimate letters, of grammatically correct but old-fashioned subjunctives, already shunned by many writers of his time. And neither translations nor originals betray the time these letters took to compose. Rosenthal remembered asking for an introduction to the Belgian conductor Désiré Defauw: ‘It took him three quarters of an hour to write four lines, which effectively said, “I should be grateful if you would see my pupil.” First of all, how to begin? “Mon cher ami?” No, he’s not really a friend. But “Monsieur Defauw” or “Cher Monsieur” aren’t right either. What would he make of either of those?” ’25 Composing music was, at the very least, an equally laborious process. A primitive version of the Musette for the ‘Menuet’ of Le tombeau shows how unpromising his initial ideas could be and how far he then had to travel (Ex. 10).26

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10(a): Ravel, 'Menuet', Le tombeau de Couperin, early sketch for Musette

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10 (b) Ravel, 'Menuet', Le tombeau de Couperin, intermediate sketch for Musette (see Ex. 6.5 for final version)

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The ‘Forlane’ from that suite has already shown us Ravel putting new wine into old bottles (Roland-Manuel writes of ‘danger versus discipline’ and of Apollinaire’s ‘order versus adventure’27), but while a certain fizz was all to the good, abetted by very sudden crescendos,28 he was in general not after outright explosions: as he explained to Rosenthal, if he wanted more air, he didn’t need to break a window, because he knew how to open it.29 You learnt your technique (how to open a window) by studying that of other composers – a policy he took from Massenet30 – and by working extremely hard. There was no mystique: ‘I trace horizontals and verticals, then, as a painter would say, I splash around [je patauge].’31 As with the Piano Trio, structures often preceded themes, with harmonies added like so much paprika or mustard,32 and he was ever aware of Poe’s advice that ‘when writing a sonnet, you must always have line 14 in mind’.33 This sort of discipline has not necessarily engendered respect through the latter part of the twentieth century. For many of his contemporaries, though, he was an exemplary model: Koechlin wrote a laudatory article entitled ‘Ravel et ses luttes’ (Ravel and his struggles)34 and RogerDucasse, admitting to Nadia Boulanger that he found the construction of La mer’s outer movements perplexing, reckoned that Ravel ages less quickly because, whether one likes it or not, while a work may impress through the splendour of its ideas (see the Schumann Piano Quintet!), it evades death through the perfection of its form. If the Parthenon, broken, mutilated, partly demolished, lives in the eyes and mind of mankind for ever, it owes that to its form, since everything that corresponds to content [des idées] – friezes, metopes, bas-reliefs, statues – all that has disappeared. What a magnificent lesson for a composition class.35

Boulanger would hardly have disagreed. She liked to tell the story of how, finding that Ravel had scribbled down some contrapuntal exercises, she expressed surprise. ‘From time to time,’ he replied, ‘one has to clean out the house [il faut nettoyer la maison]’.36 This was perhaps all the more necessary because the house was well stocked with music old and especially new.37 His music library, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, does not extend back before Bach (the ‘48’, The Art of Fugue, The Musical Offering) and some Rameau operas, although his record collection did include excerpts from Lully’s Alceste and Cadmus et Hermione.37 There is some Mozart, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann, a good deal of Liszt, a full score of Meyerbeer’s Le prophète and a piano reduction of Chabrier’s España, with fingering. But mostly the music is that of his contemporaries, including no fewer than twenty-five scores by Debussy and a collection of Stravinsky works from 1910 to 1928.38 Of these composers, Bach was never a favourite, Schubert useful for the Valses nobles, and Meyerbeer a better orchestrator than Wagner.39 About

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Schumann, he seems to have had mixed feelings, admiring Paradise and the Peri40 but at other times championing Mendelssohn against him.41 Otherwise he, like Debussy, loved Weber and found Beethoven hard going: the Missa solemnis was ‘the musical equivalent of St Sulpice’,42 and in 1927 he refused to contribute to a Beethoven monument in Paris until the city had put up one for Mozart.43 Not surprisingly, he had no time for Offenbach. More surprisingly, he admired the first movement of the Franck Violin Sonata, showing that he did not hold the pater seraphicus responsible for all that was later done in his name.44 His relationship with Debussy the man consisted, as we have seen, of a brief friendship followed by a longer alienation. As for Debussy’s music, he admired most of it up to the orchestral Images, although he had ideas of how the orchestration of La mer might be improved. But he never spoke unprompted of the late Debussy45 and, when he was prompted, as by the young Poulenc, shocked him, as already mentioned, by saying that ‘Jeux, the piano Etudes . . . all that was not the “good” Debussy’.46 Curiously, he lumped Debussy and Poulenc together as practitioners of ‘the stuttering style’ (le style bègue),47 too reliant for his liking on immediate repetitions of material (although he himself was not immune: see the opening of the ‘Prélude’ of Le tombeau where five of the first 13 bars are repetitions). For Fauré and his music he had, Rosenthal assures us, the utmost respect but, like Saint-Saëns, he was not happy with the passages of floating tonality to which Fauré became increasingly addicted, where he seems to be wandering off by himself before eventually rejoining the main path.48 Moments of tonal obfuscation in Ravel are few and far between, with the Mallarmé songs accounting for a largish proportion. But the differences between Fauré and Ravel, of both age and style, meant that they were never engaged in serious competition. With Stravinsky and Ravel it was a different matter. Rosenthal, looking back from the 1990s, reckoned that Ravel cultivated a garden of his own, to which Stravinsky had no access, in which the only thing that mattered was perfection of form, of technique. Stravinsky preferred Debussy because there, precisely, nothing was foreseeable – even if it was not always ‘perfect’. Which did not prevent him from being a touch jealous, maybe, of Ravel’s infallibility. For as long as Stravinsky lived in France, you could say there was a sort of competition between those two great men. At that time, no foreigner counted for us as much as those two. . . . They were the twin poles.49

. . . a judgment upheld by Prokofiev who regarded the young native French composers as ‘pure mush. The only one in France who knows what he’s doing is Ravel. All the rest are hopeless.’50 Ravel’s own view of Les Six was more charitable. The text of the Houston (Rice Institute) lecture, which he must certainly have approved, labels Milhaud

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as ‘probably the most important of our younger French composers’51 and claims that in his opera Les malheurs d’Orphée, a work Ravel particularly admired,52 ‘his occasional use of polytonality is so intricately interwoven with lyric and poetic elements as to be scarcely distinguishable, while his acknowledged artistic personality reappears clothed with a certain clarity of melodic design altogether Gallic in character.’53 This latter remark is made in the context of the inevitable interactions between individuality and tradition with which any creative artists must engage, while the reference to polytonality expresses Ravel’s belief that Milhaud, like Schoenberg (and maybe like Ravel himself), has suffered from inordinate critical attention to his technique at the expense of its results. As for Honegger, whose ‘musical education [was] received at the hands of French teachers on French soil’, his music nonetheless ‘remains true to his racial consciousness – that is to say, the German consciousness, for he was born of German-Swiss parentage’; and this consciousness ‘is expansive, while our French consciousness is one of reserve’. Ravel’s opposition to the Ligue nationale in 1916 shows that he was against barriers in art; at the same time, whereas absorption of foreign influences could be beneficial, there was also a danger they could be used, ‘either through imitation or plagiarism, to conceal absence or weakness of personality.’54 This position, it has to be said, is slightly at odds with the one he promulgated in his teaching, according to which ‘absence or weakness of personality’ would inevitably be revealed by the imitation of models . . . How close such imitation should be was obviously a matter of taste. Ravel himself never stayed as close to any original as Satie did in his Sonatine bureaucratique to the Clementi Sonatina op. 36 no. 1. Indeed, two passages of the Houston lecture suggest that Ravel may have been taken too literally on this front. Of Satie, the text says that ‘while he himself may, perhaps, never have wrought out of his own discoveries a single complete work of art, nevertheless we have today many such works which might not have come into existence if Satie had never lived’; and of Schoenberg, more specifically, that ‘I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.’55 Probably Ravel regarded it as unavoidable that he himself would be taken as a model, though he certainly did nothing to encourage it. His friend Samazeuilh recorded that ‘like Claude Debussy, he was not happy either with fulsome publicity or with the fine phrases of certain overenthusiastic supporters. He feared the consequences of their excessive zeal and preferred to entrust himself – as he often told me – to the verdict of time, that sole true arbiter of values.’56 Opinions have differed over how great his impact has been. Looking back on the 1920s some forty years later, Virgil Thomson could write, ‘Debussy was dead, Ravel no longer an influence.’57 But when Henri Dutilleux arrived at the

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Paris Conservatoire in 1933, he found the Ravel style well and truly entrenched, and it survives (to his slight dismay) in some early works of his own such as the Flute Sonatina and Oboe Sonata.58 In 1939, as already noted, Messiaen was inveighing against the lazy ‘manufacturers of rigaudons and pavanes’,59 and it was probably his teaching as much as anything that helped erase, or at least reduce, the influence of ‘le style Ravel’ at the Conservatoire during the later 1940s. The Houston text warns that the deeper meanings of music take time to be understood, and maybe this is especially true of Ravel’s. For the moment, we may note that it still does not elicit total acceptance. George Benjamin admits that I love it in German music when you get the feeling of structures bursting out of their bounds and going into territory you could never imagine from the beginning of the piece – you find that in Beethoven, and in Brahms and Wagner also, but you don’t find that in Ravel. He remains basically within his borders once he’s set them up; to do otherwise would probably be contrary to his character, but I find that problematic.60

Pierre Boulez similarly feels that After the war, the second period is, for me, much less attractive, although very attractive from outside. He tends to be too much self-restricted, he doesn’t want to go out of himself. After the Trio you don’t find the same deep feeling as before, but more a kind of stylistic game, which is absolutely extraordinary. Only in the second song of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée does he go back to something very genuine.61

If the man and his music reflect each other, then we should recognize that, like some of his music, Ravel the man had the capacity not merely to confuse people, but to antagonize and alienate them. Sauguet found him unwelcoming,62 Diaghilev touchy (Ravel had his reasons), and Inghelbrecht, it would seem, hypocritical. A certain wry amusement can be gained by reading the references to Ravel in Inghel’s various books of reminiscence, not one of which lacks a barb of some kind: thus, in Diabolus in musica, a compliment to the effect that Ravel’s music is so superbly constructed that it can hardly ever be ruined in performance, is given a twist by the rider ‘even when conducted by him’.63 One of the bitterest tirades is found in an anonymous article, the cutting undated but presumably from 1920 or shortly after, which begins by designating him ‘founder, president, committee and major shareholder of “Ravelism”, an ungrateful offshoot of Debussyism’, and ends by affirming that ‘small in stature, but immense in the opinion he has of himself and in the unaccustomed expansion of his chords of the ninth, M. Maurice Ravel has done

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more for his reputation by refusing the Légion d’honneur twice than by writing all his “showers of pearls”.’64 As a member of the artistic community, Ravel to some extent escaped the hierarchies of class distinction. If his engineer father qualified as a bourgeois, his illegitimate, fish-handling mother most certainly did not, and it is quite possible that the coolness between Ravel and Reynaldo Hahn stemmed from Hahn’s mother Elena Maria Echenagucia and her family who, though long resident in Caracas, came from Basque stock (Etxenaguzia) at the opposite extreme of the social scale. On the other hand, Ravel never knew financial hardship, his annual income from sales and performances of his music in the 1920s rising on average from 30,000 francs to 110,000 before falling to 80,000 in the summer of 1929.65 (Comparative prices over time are notoriously hard to establish, but a ratio of 1 franc in 1929 = 0.75€ in 2010 might not be too far wrong.) As Christian Goubault observes, ‘not a princely income’, even with the addition of fees for playing and conducting, but very far from penury. After the American tour and the success of Boléro, he could fairly be accounted rich. At no time however did he ‘act rich’ or assume any kind of social importance. He took the Leftist newspaper Le populaire and, consonant with his refusal of the Légion d’honneur, resisted Pierné’s attempts to interest him in standing for the Institut.66 Rosenthal also recalled that, following M. Bonnet’s death, Edouard married his widow who was decidedly ‘peuple’, but that Ravel never treated her as less than a lady, always buying her an expensive present when he went on tour.67 And for all his dandyish ways, nothing would prevent him from going to Paris to join in the communal junketings on 14 July.68 Ultimately, trying to pin Ravel down is about as futile as trying to catch Scarbo in a bucket: he is always one step in front – or to the side. It could not be related of many 50-year-old geniuses, as the young Charles Harding did, that when staying in Holland Park, he ‘spent a good part of his time with me playing another destructive game called “water war”. Protected by mackintoshes, we hurled at each other sponges heavy with water. Ravel is a terribly bad shot, so that the patience of my parents was sadly tried when they saw huge splotches of water on the walls. However, we found a very suitable excuse by saying that we were merely enacting “Jeux d’eau”.’69 As to the music, such problems as persist can perhaps be expressed in two statements that resume points made earlier: firstly, in Hélène JourdanMorhange’s observation that Ravel’s continuing aim was to compose ‘against the successes he has achieved, abandoning the hope of being immediately understood by the public, and even by musicians’,70 thus following Debussy’s adjuration to himself, ‘toujours plus haut’ (ever higher); and secondly, in an aperçu from a Swiss reviewer in the Journal de Genève, that ‘he possesses the difficult art of not saying everything’. The reviewer also pertinently quotes Voltaire, that ‘if you want to bore the reader, tell him everything.’71 Rarely has there been music so bereft of longueurs. As a result, we as listeners need to

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concentrate on it and not be content with a ‘warm bath’ approach. True, this is not made easier by the sheer beauty of Ravel’s surfaces – a beauty which, during the serialist ‘terror’ of the 1950s and beyond, when a Puritan greyness ruled, was frequently regarded as reprehensible pandering to smug, self-indulgent bourgeois instincts. And if this beauty conceals disturbing depths, the same is true of Mozart. Ravel would have wished for no higher praise.

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Source abbreviations

AN BnF Mus CH CMR ERP GL HHS IRHMES MM MRFam OB

OL ORR PN RdM ReM ReM38

RIMF RoM 1914 RoM 1938

Archives nationales, Paris Music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris René Chalupt, Ravel au miroir de ses lettres (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1956) Cahiers Maurice Ravel Etienne Rousseau-Plotto, Ravel, portraits basques (Anglet: Séguier, 2004) Gerald Larner, Maurice Ravel (London: Phaidon, 1996) H.H. Stuckenschmidt, Ravel: Variations on his life and work, trans. Samuel R. Rosenbaum (London: Calder and Boyars, 1969) Cahiers de l’Institut de Recherches d’Histoire Musicale des Etats de Savoie, 4 (Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1997) Marcel Marnat, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Fayard, 1986, rev. 1995) Emile Vuillermoz et al., Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers (Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1939) [Orenstein Biography] Arbie Orenstein, Ravel, Man and Musician (New York and London: Columbia UP, 1975; repr. New York: Dover, 1991) [Orenstein Letters] Maurice Ravel, Lettres, Ecrits, Entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1989); translated as A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) Pierre Narbaitz, Maurice Ravel: Un orfèvre basque (Anglet [Côte Basque]: Académie internationale Maurice Ravel, 1975) Revue de musicologie La revue musicale La revue musicale 19/187 (December 1938 [special Ravel number]), including the ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ (Autobiographical sketch) Revue internationale de musique française Roland-Manuel, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Durand, 1914) Roland-Manuel, [A la gloire de] Ravel (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle revue critique, 1938); translated as

SOURCE ABBREVIATIONS

RoM 1947 RoMDram Ros Souv RRem

359

Maurice Ravel, trans. Cynthia Jolly (London: Dobson, 1947; repr. New York: Dover, 1972) Roland-Manuel, Maurice Ravel et son oeuvre dramatique (Paris: Les editions musicales de la librairie de France, 1928) Marcel Marnat (ed.), Ravel: Souvenirs de Manuel Rosenthal, recueillis par Marcel Marnat (Paris: Hazan, 1995) Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Faber, 1987)

Letters quoted from Claude Debussy, Correspondance, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) are cited by date and letter number: that is, 1901/23 indicates letter no. 23 of 1901

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Notes

Chapter I: 1875–1902 1. Source untraced 2. Ramuz, Souvenirs sur Igor Strawinsky (Lausanne: Editions de l’Aire, 1978), p. 55 3. Philippe Morant, ‘Les ancêtres paternels de Maurice Ravel’, IRHMES, pp. 107–37. I am grateful to Marie-Ange Mayoussier for a complimentary copy of this source. 4. Letter to Maurice Delage of 20 August 1906; OL, p. 87. The letters, but not the interviews or articles, in the English translation (ORR) sensibly bear the same numbers, providing a useful means of reference to both sources. For interviews and articles, see page numbering under the respective rubrics OL and ORR. 5. Cercle d’études ferneysiennes, Académie Candide, Ferney-Voltaire: pages d’histoire (Annecy: Gardet, 1984/1990); quoted in Morant, ‘Les ancêtres paternels’, pp. 113–14 6. Morant, ‘Les ancêtres paternels, p. 110 7. OL, letter 1 8. Interview in La Presse de Bayonne, 8 September 1933; quoted in PN, p. 11 9. RoM 1947, p. 14 n2. This translation has occasionally been modified. 10. Ibid. p. 13 11. HHS, p. 3 12. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’, ReM38; reprinted in OL, pp. 43–47; ORR, pp. 29–37 13. José Bruyr, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Plon, 1950), p. 3; MM, p. 19 14. GL, p. 14 15. RoM 1947, p. 13 n1; for the diagram and a description of the mechanism, see Max de Nansouty, Chemins de fer automobiles (Paris: Boivin et Cie, ?1913), pp. 11–12 16. Maurice Delage, MRFam, p. 109 17. ERP, p. 25 18. Ibid. p. 26 19. Ibid. p. 28 20. Ibid. p. 31 21. PN, p. 87 22. ERP, p. 25 23. MM, p. 22; PN, p. 88 24. ERP, p. 32 25. Printed in the society’s rubric in all editions of the Annuaire des artistes; a longer version of this quotation is given in Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 47. 26. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 27. RoM 1938, p. 27 28. MM, p. 28 29. GL, p. 23 30. Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005) 31. Danièle Pistone, ‘Les conditions historiques de l’exotisme musical français’, RIMF, 6 (L’exotisme musical français, November 1981), p. 15.

NOTES to pp. 10–24

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32. André Schaeffner, Variations sur la musique (Paris: Fayard, 1998), p. 287 33. Ricardo Viñes, Journal entries for 28 April and 26 May 1897, in Nina Gubisch (ed.), ‘Le journal inédit de Ricardo Viñes’, RIMF, 1/2 (June 1980), p. 192 34. Quoted in Fauser, Musical Encounters, p. 45 35. Schaeffner, Variations sur la musique, p. 289 36. ‘Il faut prendre le jazz au sérieux’, The Musical Digest, 13/3 (March 1928), pp. 49, 51; OL, p. 327; ORR, pp. 390–92 37. AN, classification AJ37, piece 292 38. Ibid. piece 293 39. Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 14 40. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 601, 1278009-14; letters of 27 November 1912 and 26 September 1914 41. OB, pp. 15–16 42. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 183–4 43. AN, classification AJ37, piece 293 44. Ibid. piece 294 45. ‘R.B.’, ‘Des souvenirs d’enfance et d’adolescence [de Viñes]’, ReM38, p. 165. 46. Madeleine Goss, Bolero: the life of Maurice Ravel (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1945), p. 21 47. Quoted by José Bruyr, ‘Maurice Ravel’, Revue internationale de musique, 1/1 (March/April 1938), p. 91. 48. RoM 1914, p. 8 49. Vincent d’Indy, Emmanuel Chabrier et Paul Dukas (Paris: Heugel, 1920), p. 8; quoted in Roger Delage, Emmanuel Chabrier (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 268 50. Jean Françaix, De la musique et des musiciens (Paris: Fondation Polignac, 1999), pp. 171–2. I am grateful to Roy Howat for alerting me to this quotation. 51. Gustave Mouchet, as reported in Le Guide musical (January/February 1938), p. 58; fully translated in RRem, pp. 9–10 52. OB, p. 16 53. Lesure, Claude Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 129 54. Orenstein, preface to Sérénade grotesque (Paris: Salabert, 1975) 55. Paul Landormy, La musique française après Debussy (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 106 56. Lionel Carley, Delius: The Paris Years (London: Triad Press, 1975), p. 56 57. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 186 58. Rebecca West, 1900 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 101 59. Raymond Rudorff, Belle Epoque: Paris in the Nineties (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), p. 159 60. RoM 1947, p. 25; RRem, p. 10 61. Louis Aubert, ‘Souvenir’, ReM38, pp. 206–7; RRem, pp. 10–11 62. ‘Le dandy’ (Le peintre et la vie moderne), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968) p. 560 63. Manuel Rosenthal, in conversation with the author 64. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 192 65. Ibid. p. 186; RRem, p. 4 66. Orenstein, ‘Some unpublished music and letters by Maurice Ravel’, Music Forum, 3 (1973), pp. 292–5 67. Archives de Paris, DR 1 553–1895; OB, p. 71n; ERP, p. 117 68. Letter to Ida Godebska of 22 December 1919; CH, p. 167 69. HHS, p. 23 70. OB, p. 71n 71. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 190–1; RRem, p. 6 72. Jann Pasler, ‘A Sociology of the Apaches: “Sacred Battalion” for Pelléas’, in Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, ed. Barbara L. Kelly and Kerry Murphy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 158 73. I am grateful to Jonathan Stone of Christie’s, London, for showing me this material. 74. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 188 75. Anne Massenet, Jules Massenet en toutes lettres (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 2001), p. 158 76. Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Plon, 1949), p. 17

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NOTES to pp. 24–36

77. Roger-Ducasse, ‘L’enseignement de Gabriel Fauré’, in Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Les publications techniques et artistiques, 1946), p. 16; quoted in Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, A Musical Life, trans. Roger Nichols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 263 78. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 190; RRem, p. 6 79. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 192–3, describing the author as ‘General Bell’ 80. MM, p. 60 81. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 191 82. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 83. MM, p. 67 84. Darius Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1973), p. 32 85. Catalogue of sale at International Autograph Auctions Ltd, Heathrow (12 June 2010), lot 672 86. MM, p. 73 87. GL, p. 52 88. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 215 89. Quoted in GL, p. 53 90. AN, classification AJ37, piece 296 91. Goss, Bolero, p. 50 92. See n74 93. RoMDram, p. 48 94. OL, letter 3 95. Catalogue J.-E. Raux, sale of 26 June 2000 (Paris: Salle Drouot), item 34 96. Robert Orledge, Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works (Luxembourg: Harwood, 1989/1995), p. 8 97. Letter of 15 June 1899; Catalogue Raux, item 33 98. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 99. MM, pp. 91–2 100. Ibid. p. 92 101. Ibid. p. 93 (Mercure de France, July 1899) 102. Marnat, ‘Ravel/Albéniz: une mise et six donnes’, CMR, 6 (1998), p. 9 103. OL, letter 2 104. Michel Delahaye, ‘Neuf lettres de Maurice Ravel à Marguerite Baugnies de Saint-Marceaux’, RIMF, 24 (Maurice Ravel hier et aujourd’hui, November 1987), p. 15 105. ‘Le dandy’, p. 559 106. Marie Aynié, ‘Avoir le courage de son opinion: se dire Dreyfusard dans la France de l’Affaire Dreyfus’, missiontice.ac-besancon.fr/hg/SPIP/IMG/doc_Dreyfus.doc (accessed 31 December 2008) 107. MM, p. 81 108. Idem 109. RoMDram, p. 49 110. Revue musicale de la SIM, 15 February 1912; OL, p. 295; ORR, p. 340 111. Charles Oulmont, ‘Souvenir’, ReM38, p. 209; RRem, p. 84 112. Michael de Cossart, Une Américaine à Paris (Paris: Plon, 1979), p. 64 113. Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel (Paris: Julliard, 1971), p. 120. The published English translation (Olive Senior-Ellis; London: Dent, 1973, p. 79) loses some of the force of the original phrase. 114. Henriette Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel (Paris: ATP, 1978), p. 95 115. BnF Mus, ms. 23594 116. Sylviane Falcinelli, ‘A l’écoute d’un texte’, L’Avant-scène opéra, 52 (Dialogues des Carmélites, May 1983), p. 90 117. AN, classification AJ37, piece 297 118. OL, letter 5 119. AN, classification AJ37, piece 297 120. Ibid, piece 256 121. Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, trans. William Ashbrook and Margaret G. Cobb (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 99 n1 122. Erik Satie, Correspondance presque complète, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 1156 123. de Cossart, Une Américaine à Paris, pp. 74–5

NOTES to pp. 36–49

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

363

Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 197–8 OL, letter 6 Debussy, Correspondance, 1901/23, n1 Ibid. p. 2226; catalogue of Sotheby’s, London; sale of 3 December 2008, item 26 Interview in Berlingske Tidende (30 January 1926); OL p. 351; ORR p. 440 RoM 1914, p. 11 OL, letter 7 Caplet/Debussy/Ravel: Prix de Rome Cantatas (Paris Sorbonne Orchestra and Chorus/ Jacques Grimbert), Naxos: Marco Polo 8.223755 (1995) Debussy, Correspondance, 1901/23 and 1901/41 OL, letter 6 Sotheby’s, London; sale of 7 December 2004, item 113 Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 70 Vlado Perlemuter and Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel according to Ravel, trans. Frances Tanner (London: Kahn & Averill, 1990), pp. 6–7 GL, p. 69 Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 95 Gaby Casadesus, in conversation with the author Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 199 (entry for 5 April 1902) RoM 1938, p. 48 OL, letter 29 Manuel Cornejo and Dimitra Diamantopoulou, ‘Maurice Ravel et Pierre Lalo: une lettre oubliée de Maurice Ravel au directeur du Temps (avril-mai 1907)’, CMR 12 (2009), p. 25 ‘Esquisse autobiographique’

Chapter II: 1902–1905 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Jacques-Emile Blanche, ‘Souvenir de Ravel’, ReM38, p. 186 Ibid. p. 187 M.D. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery (London: Faber, 1933), p. 46 Private communication to the author Ibid. p. 61 Rodriguez, e-mail to the author with article, 2 March 2009 Delage, MRFam, p. 98 Ibid. p. 128 Inghelbrecht, ‘Ravel et les russes’, ReM38, p. 119 Heures de Paris, 4 January 1938 Delage, MRFam, p. 134 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 198–9 BnF Mus, ms. 23595 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 199 I am grateful to Dr Edward Blakeman for this information. Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, pp. 121–2 Marcel Marnat, ‘Affronts, outrages, avanies: le Prix de Rome’, CMR, 4 (1989), p. 12 Hugh Macdonald, ‘The prose libretto’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 1/2 (July 1989), pp. 155–66 Marcel Marnat, sleeve note to Ravel: Cantates de Rome (Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse/Michel Plasson) EMI 7243 5 57032 2 (2000) Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 62 Michel Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel dans les ventes et collections publiques et privées’, CMR, 10 (2007), p. 76 Paul Ladmirault, ‘Ravel’, ReM38, p. 214 Debussy, Correspondance, 1903/14 Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 103–4 See n18 Michel Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel dans les ventes et collections publiques et privées’, CMR, 8 (2004), p. 97

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NOTES to pp. 50–63

27. OL, letter 12 28. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, p. 48 29. René Chalupt, ‘Maurice Ravel et les prétextes littéraires de sa musique’, ReM 6/6 (April 1925 [special Ravel number]), p. 72 30. Déodat de Séverac, Ecrits sur la musique, ed. Pierre Guillot (Liège: Mardaga, 1993), p. 28 31. Pasler, ‘A sociology of the Apaches’, p. 157 32. Delage, MRFam, p. 101 33. Calvocoressi, ‘Témoignage’, ReM 20/188 (January/February 1939), pp. 16–17 34. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, ed. A.M. Macdonald (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1977), p. 807 35. Debussy, Correspondance, 1904/24 36. Jürgen Braun, Die Thematik in den Kammermusikwerken von Maurice Ravel (Regensburg: Bosse, 1966), p. 85ff. 37. I am grateful to Gerard McBurney for sending a copy of his script for a BBC Radio 3 programme on this work. 38. ERP, p. 279 39. Le temps, 19 April 1904 40. Mercure de France, 50/172 (April 1904), p. 251 41. Klingsor, Schéhérazade (Paris: Société de Mercure de France, 1903) 42. OL, letter 180 43. This observation comes from Jean-Michel Nectoux (private communication to the author). 44. See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford UP, 1933), pp. 332ff., and Moreau’s paintings, passim 45. GL, pp. 75–6 46. Letter to Jean-Aubry of 12 November 1907; collection Eric van Lauwe 47. Vuillermoz, MRFam, pp. 65–6 48. Rorem, note to Ravel: Shéhérazade (Heather Harper / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez), CBS Masterworks, M39023 (1984). 49. Ravel, film directed by Niv Fichman and Larry Weinstein (Toronto: Rhombus Media, 1987) 50. ERP, p. 65 51. In conversation with the author. 52. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 201 53. Ibid. p. 202 54. Georges Léon, Ravel (Paris: Seghers, 1947), p. 37 55. For a description of the house see Bennett, Journals, vol. I (London: Cassell, 1932), p. 294 56. MM, p. 160 57. Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, p. 86 n19 58. Misia Sert, Two or Three Muses, trans. Moura Budberg (London: Museum Press, 1953), p. 37 59. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 203 60. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, p. 66 61. Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 203 62. Idem 63. David Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, www.lebookedition.com (2008), p. 45 64. Ibid. p. 46 65. Michel Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à la famille Gaudin de Saint-Jean-de-Luz [I]’ CMR, 9 (2006), p. 25 66. Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 50 and n94 67. AN, classification AJ37, piece 299 68. Maurice Ravel, Catalogue of Ravel Exposition (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1975), p. 72 69. John R. Clevenger, ‘Achille at the Conservatoire, 1872–1884’, Cahiers Debussy, 19 (1995), pp. 6–8 70. Sophie Brès, ‘La scandale Ravel de 1905’, RIMF, 14 (Les musiciens français à Rome, June 1984), p. 43 71. Marnat, ‘Affronts, outrages’, p. 17 72. Le matin, 21 June; Marnat, ‘Affronts, ouvrages’, p. 17 73. Deborah Priest (ed. and trans.), Louis Laloy (1874–1944) on Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 239–40

NOTES to pp. 63–75

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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Courrier de l’orchestre, 42 (1 June 1905), p. 10 Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, pp. 267–8 Marnat, ‘Affronts, outrages’, p. 20 Ros Souv, p. 137 Letter from Ravel to Jane Courteault, 24 April 1905, CMR, 11 (2008), p. 74

Chapter III: 1905–1908 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

OL, letter 7 CH, p. 37 OL, letter 19 Hérold, ‘Souvenirs’, ReM38, p. 198 Albert Birch, ‘The Modern Development of the Harp’, in Musical Instruments, ed. Anthony Baines (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 195 Idem OL, letter 16 Birch, ‘The Modern Development of the Harp, p. 195 OL, letter 80 OL, letter 20 OL, letter 22 Letter to Mme Jean Cruppi; OL, letter 24 CH, p. 49 Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, p. 76 Nigel Simeone, ‘Mother Goose and Other Golden Eggs: Durand Editions of Ravel as Reflected in the Firm’s Printing Records’, Brio, 35/2 (1998), p. 61 Calvocoressi, ‘When Ravel composed to order’, Music & Letters, 22/1 (January 1941); MM, p. 39 n8 MM, p. 40 Perlemuter and Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel d’après Ravel, p. 17 OB, p. 49 n4 In conversation with the author I am grateful for this information to Roy Howat, who studied with Février. In conversation with the author Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 86 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 203 Ibid. p. 204 See also Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, notes 3, 28 and 60 to the present Chapter 2 André Beucler, Poet of Paris, trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955), pp. 49–66 Vuillermoz, MRFam, p. 32 Ibid. p. 34 RoM 1938, p. 65 Howat, ‘En route for L’Isle joyeuse: the restoration of a triptych’, Cahiers Debussy, 19 (1995), pp. 49–50 Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, pp. 71–2 Ibid. p. 24. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, p. 66 Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984), p. 158 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 203 Roger Delage, ‘Ravel and Chabrier’, Musical Quarterly, 60/4 (October 1974), p. 550 MM, p. 183 n40 I am grateful to Arbie Orenstein for the text of this letter in his possession. Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 74 Christiane Le Bordays, ‘L’Espagne ravélienne’, CMR, 2 (1986), pp. 44–5 MM, p. 595 Ravel d’après Ravel, 30; Dean Elder, Pianists at play (Evanston: The Instrumentalist Company, 1982), p. 75 (I am grateful to Roy Howat for this last reference.) Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 210

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

NOTES to pp. 75–90

Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, pp. 75–6 Fargue, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Domat, 1949), p. 12 Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, pp. 79–80 OL, p. 44 n17 Le courrier musical, 1 July 1906; MM, p. 187 Le mercure musical, 1 February 1906; La nouvelle revue, 1 June 1906; quoted in Christian Goubault, La critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984), p. 402 Le temps, 30 January 1906. OL, letter 27 Le mercure musical, 1 February 1906 Ros Souv, p. 80 Letter to Ida Godebska; CH, p. 54. Re the songs see CMR, 13 (2010), pp. 149–92 OL, letter 28 Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [I]’, p. 27 Letter of 7 February 1906; OL, letter 30 Letter of 19 July 1906; OL, letter 33 RoM 1947, p. 43 OB, p. 210 RoM 1947, p. 43 Manuel Rosenthal, Satie, Ravel, Poulenc (Madras and New York: Hanuman Books, 1987), pp. 74–5 OL, letter 31 Gustave Samazeuilh, ‘Maurice Ravel en Pays Basque’, ReM38, p. 202 Letter to the author, 10 November 1974 Delage, MRFam, p. 107; Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 100 RoM 1914, p. 48 Archives Roland-Manuel, catalogue for sale of 7 July 2006. I am grateful to Robert Orledge for details of these items. Letter to Misia Edwards of 19 July 1906; OL, letter 33 Letter of 1 July 1906; CH, p. 52 Jean-Michel Nectoux, ‘Gabriel Fauré au Conservatoire de Paris: une philosophie de l’enseignement’, Le Conservatoire de Paris, 1795–1995, ed. Anne Bongrain and Yves Gérard (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1996), p. 220 Letter of 28 July 1906; OL, letter 34 Postcard of 18 October 1906; OL, letter 36 Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 238 (from Viñes’s diary) ‘Esquisse autobiographique’; Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 239 Postcard to Ida Godebska, 18 October 1906, in OL, letter 36 Martin Cooper, French Music (London: Oxford UP, 1961), pp. 38–9 Le temps, 19 March 1907 Cornejo and Diamantopoulou, ‘Maurice Ravel et Pierre Lalo’, p. 25 MM, p. 197 Unpublished text, ‘Maurice Ravel’, Ostinato rigore, 24 (Maurice Ravel, 2005), p. 19 HHS, p. 96 Deane, ‘Renard, Ravel and the Histoires naturelles’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 1/2 (1964), pp. 177–87 Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘La sérénade interrompue’, ReM38, p. 151 Renard, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), entry for 11 November 1887 Deane, ‘Renard, Ravel’, p. 186 Bathori, ‘Souvenir’, ReM38, p. 180; Linda Laurent, ‘Jane Bathori, interprète de Ravel’, CMR, 2 (1986), p. 64 Bernac, The Interpretation of French Song (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 257 Debussy, Correspondance, 1907/15 Louis Guitard, ‘Entretien avec Louis Aubert’, La table ronde, 165 (October 1961), pp. 141–5 Vuillermoz, MRFam, pp. 59–60 Le mercure musical, 15 February 1907 Camille Mauclair, La religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1924), pp. 271, 233

NOTES to pp. 90–103

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

367

Baudelaire, ‘Le dandy’, p. 560 Louis Laloy, La musique retrouvée, 1902–1927 (Paris: Plon, 1928), p. 166 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 207 Ravel’s setting appears as no. 20. Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp. 98–9 Debussy, Correspondance, 1907/33 Le mercure musical, 15 June 1907 Gubisch, Le journal de Ricardo Viñes [provisional title] (Montreal: Presses universitaires de Montréal, forthcoming), entry for 29 May 1907 François Lesure, ‘Ravel et Debussy’, CMR, 5 (1992), p. 29 ‘Sous la musique, que faut-il mettre?’, Musica (March 1911); Monsieur Croche, pp. 206–7 OL, letter 40 Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: his life and mind, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), pp. 88, 90 n2 Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [I]’, p. 29 Gubisch, Le journal de Ricardo Viñes, entry for 29 May 1907 CH, pp. 61–2 OB, p. 54 n15 I am grateful to Philippe Rodriguez for these details. Falla, ‘Notes sur Ravel’, ReM, 189 (March 1939), pp. 81–6; Jean Roy, ‘Correspondance adressé par Maurice Ravel à Manuel de Falla’, CMR, 3 (1987), p. 7 Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford UP, 1964), p. 88 Ursula Vaughan Williams, RVW: A biography (London: Oxford UP, 1964), p. 79 OB, p. 58 Ibid. pp. 79–80 Idem Henri Dutilleux, in conversation with the author ‘Chapter of musical autobiography’; quoted in Kennedy, The Works of RWV, p. 86 Ursula Vaughan Williams, RVW, p. 81 Ibid. p. 82 OL, p. 46 Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy et son temps (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), pp. 276–7 Calvocoressi, Art moderne, 29 March 1908 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, ed. Stéphane Audel (Paris: La Palatine, 1963), pp. 183–4 Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 483 La grande revue, 10 June 1908; Priest, Louis Laloy, p. 255

Chapter IV: 1908–1911 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

OL, letter 46; see also n6 regarding Chrysis and Fiammette. OL, letter 49 Debussy, Correspondance, 1908/31 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 527 Debussy, Correspondance, 1908/31 Interview in Candide, 5 May 1932; OL, p. 372; ORR, p. 497 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, pp. 189, 193 Charles Timbrell, ‘An interview with Paul Loyonnet’, Journal of the American Liszt Society, 19 (1986), pp. 112–21 Letter of 2 September 1908; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 33 Gil-Marchex, ‘La technique du piano’, ReM 6/6 (April 1925 [special Ravel number]), p. 44 Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 61 Letter of 24 Mar 1922; OL, letter 191 Fargue, Maurice Ravel, p. 52 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel (Paris: Seuil, 1956), p. 87 Dominique Merlet, ‘Conseils pour interpréter Ravel’, in La lettre du musicien: Piano, 20 (hors-série annuel 2006/2007), p. 90 Finding the Key: Selected writings of Alexander Goehr, ed. Derrick Puffett (London: Faber, 1998), p. 52

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

NOTES to pp. 103–112

Perlemuter and Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel according to Ravel, p. 35 Aimard, note to Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit, Warner 2564 62160–2 (2005) Gil-Marchex, ‘Les concertos de Ravel’, ReM38, p. 89 Letter of 17 July 1908; CH, p. 69 OL, letter 53 In conversation with the author Letter of 17 July 1908; CH, p. 69 Jean Godebski, ‘Mon Ravel’, ed. Jean Mycinski, RIMF, 24 (November 1987), pp. 52–3 OL, letter 55 Gubisch, Le journal de Ricardo Viñes, entry for 13 October 1908 OL, letter 57 Gubisch, Le journal de Ricardo Viñes, entry for 31 October 1908 Quoted in Christian Goubault, La critique musicale, p. 403 Laloy, La grande revue, 10 June 1911; in Priest, Louis Laloy, p. 257 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 211; entry for 30 January 1909 Lesure, Claude Debussy, p. 239 n16; but see CMR, 13 (2010), pp. 10–12 Revue musicale de la SIM, 6 (15 January 1910 [special ‘Hommage à Haydn’ number]) Letter of 16 July 1909; Jean-Michel Nectoux (ed.), Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré: Correspondance (1862–1920) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), p. 95 OL, letter 53 Letters of 3 September 1908 and 27 January 1909; BnF Mus (Vm Bob. 23423), LAS Ravel 117 and 121 OL, letter 58 OL, letter 60. CH, p. 78; letter to Marnold of 27 January 1909 Albert Carré, Souvenirs de théâtre (Paris: Plon, 1950), p. 340 OL, letter 60 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 206 Philippe Rodriguez, ‘La Bande à Ravel: Georges Jean-Aubry, infatigable passeur des Arts’, CMR, 8 (2004), p. 124 ORR, letter 61 n2 Ursula Vaughan Williams, RVW, p. 86 Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 66 Buckle, Diaghilev, p. 154 Letter to Mme de Saint-Marceaux of 27 June 1909; OL, letter 64 Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring (London: Cape, 2000), p. 131 OL, letter 65 OL, letter 66 Article in Le courrier musical, 13 (1 January 1910); OL, pp. 291–3; ORR, pp. 335–7 Roy Howat, The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009), p. 63 BnF Mus, ms. 17653 MM, p. 286 and n23 BnF Mus, LA Ravel 107 I am grateful to Roy Howat for this information. Odile Vivier, Varèse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 13–14 Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, vol. III, ed. Robert Craft (London: Faber, 1985), p. 15 Jaime Pahissa, Manuel de Falla: His Life and Works, trans. Jean Wagstaff (London: Museum Press, 1954), p. 75 Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 120 See also Jean-Michel Nectoux, ‘Ravel/Fauré et les débuts de la Société Musicale Indépendante’, RdM, 61/2 (1975), pp. 295–318 Charles Koechlin, Traité de l’orchestration, vol. I (Paris: Eschig, 1954), p. 53 Letter of 16 January 1909; OL, letter 59 Orledge, Charles Koechlin, p. 26 Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 120 Manuel Cornejo and Dimitra Diamantopoulou, ‘Deux épisodes méconnus de la première saison de la Société Musicale Indépendante’, CMR, 12 (2009), pp. 92–9 Michel Duchesneau, ‘Maurice Ravel et la SMI,’ RdM, 80/2 (1994), p. 261

NOTES to pp. 112–125

369

69. Jacques Durand, Quelques souvenirs d’un éditeur de musique, vol. II (Paris: Durand, 1925), p. 39 70. Mimie Godebska Blacque-Belair, ‘Quelques souvenirs intimes sur Ravel’, ReM38, pp. 189, 191; RRem, p. 21 71. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 72. For a more detailed analysis of Ravel’s debt to gamelan technique, see Patrick Revol’s three articles in L’éducation musicale, ‘Maurice Ravel, Laideronnette Impératrice des Pagodes’, December 2000/February 2001 73. RoM 1938, p. 244; RRem, p. 193 74. Manuel de Falla, On Music and Musicians, ed. Federico Sopeña, trans. D. Urman and J.M. Thomson (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1979), p. 96 75. Letter from de’ Paoli to the author, 10 November 1974 76. ‘Quelques souvenirs intimes’, ReM38, 191; RRem, p. 21 77. RH Souv, p. 12 78. In conversation with the author 79. Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 35–68; see in particular pp. 46–54 80. Bennett, Journals, vol. I, p. 369 81. OL, letter 74 82. OL, letter 75 83. OL, letter 78 84. OL, letter 76 85. OL, letter 75 86. CH, p. 88 87. OL, letter 77 88. HHS, p. 105 89. D.-E. Inghelbrecht, Mouvement contraire (Paris: Domat, 1947), pp. 247–8 90. Le temps, 31 August; Guide musical, 19–26 June; in Philippe Rodriguez, Maurice Delage (Geneva: Editions Papillon, 2001), p. 47 91. Walsh, Stravinsky, pp. 142–3 92. Marnat, ‘Ravel et Stravinsky’, CMR, 5 (1992), p. 36 93. Jann Pasler, ‘Stravinsky and the Apaches’, Musical Times, 123 (1982), p. 403 94. Marnat, ‘Ravel et Stravinsky’, pp. 42–3 95. Satie, Correspondance, p. 144 96. Michel Duchesneau, L’avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939 (Liège: Mardaga, 1997), p. 307 97. Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie (Paris: Editions d’Aujourd’hui, 1975), p. 33 98. Satie, Correspondance, p. 144 99. Ibid. p. 145 100. Ibid. p. 146 101. Ibid. p. 147 (letter of 4 March) 102. Alan Gillmor, Erik Satie (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 144 103. I am grateful to David Kimbell for sending me extracts from The Scotsman. 104. Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel’ (CMR, 8), p. 110 105. Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, p. 347 106. Ibid. pp. 348–53 107. Debussy, Monsieur Croche, p. 207 108. In OL, pp. 293–4; ORR, pp. 338–9 109. OL, letter 80 110. Henry J. Wood, My Life of Music (London: Gollancz, 1946), p 247 111. Bennett, Journals, vol. II, p. 4 112. ORR, pp. 409–10 113. OL, letter 82 114. Guide du concert, 22 April 1911, in Goubault, La critique musicale, p. 405 115. La grande revue, 25 April 1911, Goubault, La critique musicale, p. 405 116. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 117. Aubert, ‘Souvenir’, ReM38, p. 207 118. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 119. Howat, The Art of French Piano Music, p. 251

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NOTES to pp. 126–139

370

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120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

Henri de Régnier, Les rencontres de M. Bréot (Paris: Mercure de France, 1946), pp. 15–16 Ibid. 272–3 ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ Perlemuter and Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel d’après Ravel, p. 42 Mme Anne Bessand-Massenet, e-mail of 14 June 2006 to the author Emily Kilpatrick, ‘The Carbonne Copy: Tracing the première of L’Heure espagnole’, RdM, 95/1 (2009), pp. 108–11 CH, p. 60 Interview published 17 May 1911, in OL, pp. 339–40; ORR, pp. 411–13 Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous (Geneva: Milieu du Monde, 1945), p. 162 Durand, Quelques souvenirs, vol. II, p. 12 Mme Bessand-Massenet, e-mail of 14 June 2006 to the author Review of 1 July 1911, La nouvelle revue française Le temps, 28 May 1911 Revue musicale de la SIM, 7 (15 June 1911) Le Figaro, 20 May 1911; reprinted in Opinions musicales de Gabriel Fauré, ed. P.-B. Gheusi (Paris: Rieder, 1930), p. 117 MRFam, p. 73 Chroniques des arts et de la curiosité, 3 June 1911, p. 172; in Goubault, La critique musicale, p. 405 La grande revue, 10 June 1911 Koechlin, ‘Maurice Ravel’, ed. François Lesure, CMR, 1 (1985), p. 53 Letter to Pierre Bernac of 24 June 1944; Francis Poulenc, Correspondance, ed Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 553–4 RoMDram, p. 49 Letter to Raoul d’Harcourt of 27 July 1911; Harcourt, ‘Quelques souvenirs sur Ravel’, ReM38, p. 229 Huebner, ‘Laughter: In Ravel’s time’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18/3 (2006), pp. 225–246 Sotheby’s, London; sale of 3 December 2008, item 71 Huebner, ‘Laughter: In Ravel’s time’, p. 237 Ros Souv, p. 26 In conversation with the author

Chapter V: 1911–1914 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Marnat, ‘Ravel et Stravinsky’, pp. 43–4 Details of this stay taken from ERP, pp. 75ff.; PN, pp. 98ff. ERP, p. 80 Reproduced in Archives Roland-Manuel, (Paris: T. Bodin, catalogue for sale of 24 March 2000), p. 35 PN, p. 101 OL, letter 164, n7 ERP, p. 85 Idem Samazeuilh, ‘Ravel en Pays Basque’, ReM38, pp. 200–3 Erik Satie, Correspondance, p. 159 Roland-Manuel, MRFam, pp. 142–3; extended in RRem, pp. 141–4 Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [I]’, p. 37 RoM 1914, p. 26 OL, letter 90 Comoedia, 2 February 1912; MM, p. 327 Erik Satie, Correspondance, p. 165 OL, letter 95 Kennedy, The Works of RWV, p. 101 OL, pp. 294–7; ORR, pp. 340–3 Idem RoM 1947, p. 66 Caroline Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 12

NOTES to pp. 139–149

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

371

OL, pp. 297–9; ORR, pp. 344–8 OL, pp. 300–01; ORR, pp. 349–52 Issue of 1 October 1911 Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 138; for discussion of Adélaïde see Chapter 4, pp. 129–48 Robert Brussel, Revue musicale de la SIM, 15 May 1912 GL, p. 127 Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 136 Ibid. p. 128 Ibid. p. 127 Musica, February 1912 Le théâtre, 2 (September 1912) RoM 1947, p. 66 Letter of 23 April; Andrew Thomson, Vincent d’Indy and his World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 175. BnF Mus, Cons. Rés. 4o 2723 Orenstein, ‘Some unpublished music and letters’, p. 328 See OL, p. 490 n22; ORR, p. 36 n22 for discussion. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, p. 79 ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ Lifar, Diaghilev (London: Putnam, 1940), p. 265 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets russes (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), p. 8; Simon Morrison, ‘The Origins of Daphnis et Chloé (1912)’, 19th-Century Music, 28/1 (Summer 2004), p. 52 MM, p. 337 Morrison, ‘The Origins of Daphnis’, p. 57 S.L. Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929, trans. Vera Bowen (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 76; Buckle, Diaghilev, p. 220 Letter of 3 May 1910; OL, letter 74 Rosenthal, in conversation with the author Ibid.; RRem, p. 44 Durand, Quelques souvenirs, vol. II, p. 16 Letter undated; probably of December 1920 or January 1921; Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 96 RoM 1947, p. 68 Tamara Karsavina, Theatre Street (London: Constable, 1948), pp. 238–9 Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master, ed. Anatole Chujoy, trans. Vitale Fokine (London: Constable, 1961), p. 199 John Drummond, Speaking of Diaghilev (London: Faber, 1997), p. 57 MRFam, p. 148; RRem, p. 144 Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 102 Sert, Two or Three Muses, p. 22. I am grateful to David Lamaze for drawing attention to this link. Le temps, 11 June 1912 La liberté, 11 June 1912 Le ménestrel, 15 June 1912 Le Figaro, 9 June 1912 Revue musicale de la SIM, 15 June 1912 ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ Morrison, ‘The Origins of Daphnis’, pp. 61–63 Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries (London: Pelican, 1962), p. 43 Cocteau, ‘Ravel et nous’, ReM38, p. 205 Simon Morrison, ‘Consuming the Exotic: Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe’, in Lawrence Kramer (ed.), Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 203–4 Howat, The Art of French Piano Music, p. 132 OL, letter 95 OL, letter 94

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372

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

NOTES to pp. 149–159

ERP, p. 92 Ibid. 93 OL, letter 96 Schaeffner, Variations sur la musique, p. 190 Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 187 OL, pp. 302–05; ORR, pp. 353–7 OL, pp. 305–08; ORR, pp. 358–61 OL, letter 97 Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, vol. II, p. 278 n13 Vie parisienne, 15 February 1913 Comoedia illustré, 5 February 1913; OL, pp. 308–11; ORR, pp. 362–5 OL, pp. 311–13; ORR, pp. 366–8 Debussy to Robert Godet, 18 January 1913, Correspondance, 1913/16 Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie (Paris: Denoël, 1962), p. 56 Richard Taruskin, note to Musorgsky: Khovanshchina (Claudio Abbado/Vienna State Opera Chorus and Orchestra) DG 429 758–2 (1990), p. 32 A. Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘The “Kovanshchina” of M.P. Musorgsky and S.P. Diaghilev’, Russkaya molva, 23 March 1913, reprinted in Muzïka, 123 (30 March 1913), pp. 230–2 Maurice Ravel, ‘The “Paris” version of Khovanshchina’, Muzïka, 129 (14 May 1913), pp. 338–42. I am grateful to Stephen Walsh for sending me these two articles. Schaeffner, Variations sur la musique, p. 293 In the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Frederick Koch Collection (GEN MSS 601), FRKF 3, box 185, folder 1527; 40pp Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 199 Letter to Mme Casella of 2 April 1913; CH, p. 97 Delahaye, ‘La gestation des Trois Mallarmé (printemps-été 1913)’ CMR, 6 (1998), p. 74 Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, pp. 227–8 OL, letter 99 Pierre Boulez, Relevés d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 241 OL, letter 101 Delahaye, ‘Symbolisme et Impressionnisme dans “Soupir” . . .’, CMR, 4 (1989), p. 35 Robert Gronquist, ‘Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,’ Musical Quarterly, 64/4 (October 1978), pp. 507–23 Ibid. p. 514 18 March 1915; OB, p. 68 ‘Le piano bien orchestré’, La lettre du musicien: Piano, 20 (hors-série annuel 2006/2007), p. 65. Paul Bertrand, Le monde de la musique (Geneva: La Palatine, 1947), p. 24 Roger-Ducasse, undated letter; Lettres à Nadia Boulanger, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999), p. 37 Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 114 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 175 Letter of 5 May 1913; Eric Walter White, Stravinsky (London: Faber, 1966), p. 549 Letter of 28 March 1913; OL, p. 98 Stravinsky, Poetics of music (London: Oxford UP, 1947), pp. 18–19 Comoedia illustré, 5 June 1913; OL, pp. 313–5; ORR, pp. 369–71 Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 211 Quoted by Taruskin, note to Khovanshchina, p. 31 OL, letter 102 OL, letter 103 OL, letter 105 OL, letter 107 Debussy, Correspondance, 1913/127 Ibid. 1913/129 ERP, p. 96 Alexande Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britnieva (London: Putnam, 1941), p. 366; RRem, p. 145 ERP, p. 100 Samazeuilh, ‘Ravel en Pays Basque’, ReM38, p. 202

NOTES to pp. 159–175

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

373

Orenstein, ‘Some unpublished music and letters’, p. 328, Plate XII Interview of 1 May 1924; ORR, p. 433 Debussy, Correspondance, 1913/185 Bennett, Journals, vol. II, p. 75 (entry for 15 December) OL, letter 110 Arnold Bax, Farewell My Youth (London: Longmans, Green, 1943), p. 58; Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered (London: Faber, 1987), p. 222 OL, pp. 315–7; ORR, pp. 372–5 Comoedia illustré, 20 January 1914; OL, pp. 317–9; ORR, pp. 376–9 CH, p. 105 L’Echo musical, 2 (February 1914), p. 21. I am grateful to Philippe Rodriguez for this reference. Letter to Viñes of 2 January 1914; Correspondance, p. 197 Comoedia, 19 January 1914; Comoedia illustré, 5 February 1914; Philippe Rodriguez, Maurice Delage, p. 54 OL, letter 109 MRDram, p. 48 Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, p. 100 Buckle, Nijinsky (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 403 Cyril W. Beaumont, The Diaghilev Ballet in London (London: Putnam, 1945), p. 79 In the Morgan Library and Museum (Robert Owen Lehmann Collection) Daily Telegraph, 17 March 1914 Buckle, Nijinsky, p. 152 Geoffrey Whitworth, The Art of Nijinsky (London: Chatto & Windus, 1913), p. 47; Buckle, Nijinsky, p. 218 OL, letter 111; CH, p. 103 OL, letter 112 CH, p. 106 Letter to Edwin Evans of 31 May 1914; OL, p. 584 n1; ORR, p. 382 n1 OL, pp. 320–2; ORR, pp. 380–3 Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time, ed and trans. Spencer Norton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), p. 92 OL, letter 113 Catalogue of Christie’s, London; sale of 16 October 1985, item 196 Comoedia, 18 June OB, p. 70 Christie’s catalogue (16 October 1985), item 198 OL, letter 114 Debussy, Correspondance, 1913/204 OL, letter 114 n3 Christie’s catalogue (16 October 1985), item 199 Louise Varèse, A Looking-Glass Diary (London: Eulenburg, 1975), pp. 116–17 OL, letter 115 ERP, p. 108 I am grateful to Ingrid Grimes for this story. OL, letter 117 OL, letter 118 OL, letter 119 Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 122 Letter to Roland-Manuel of 26 September 1914; OL, p. 119 OL, letter 120; ERP, p. 116 Richard Dowling, Preface to Ravel: Piano Trio (Boca Raton: Masters Music Publications, 2007) Orenstein, ‘Some unpublished music and letters’, p. 328 HHS, pp. 182–3 Newbould, ‘Ravel’s “Pantoum” ’, Musical Times, 116 (March 1975), pp. 228–31 RoM 1947, p. 75 GL, p. 151 Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 122

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NOTES to pp. 175–186

374

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

175. CH, p. 115 176. MM, p. 394 177. Mark DeVoto, ‘Harmony in the chamber music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 107 178. RoM 1947, p. 76 Chapter VI: 1914–1920 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

OL, letter 121 Letter of 21 August 1914; CH, p. 118 Ros Souv, p. 25 Gazette des classes de composition du Conservatoire, 1, p. 16; quoted in Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, p. 20 Letter to Ida Gobebska of 8 September 1914; CH, p. 116 OL, letter 122 Letter to Schmitt of 3 October 1914; CH, p. 120 Christie’s catalogue (16 October 1985), item 200 Unpublished diary of Pierre Haour, entries of 1 and 3 December 1914 (I am grateful to Philippe Rodriguez for this information.) Emily Kilpatrick, ‘The Language of Enchantment: Childhood and Fairytale in the Music of Maurice Ravel’, PhD thesis (University of Adelaide, 2008), p. 213 For a collection of over 1000 Basque folk songs, see R.M. de Azkue, Cancionero popular vasco (Bilbao: Biblioteca de la gran enciclopedia vasca, 1968), 2 vols. I am grateful to Geoff Warren for lending me these volumes. Letter to Stravinsky of 2 January 1915; OL, letter 125 Letter from Stravinsky to Ravel, 10 January 1915; OL, letter 126 Casella, Music in My Time, p. 122 See n166 to Chapter 5 Casella, Music in My Time, p. 124 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 78 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 175 Christie’s catalogue (16 October 1985), item 201 Ibid. item 202 OL, letter 127 BnF Mus, LA Ravel (Edouard) 59 Letter to Marnold of 13 November 1915; CH, p. 121 Letter of 14 December 1915; Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 134 Letter to Major A. Blondel of 27 May 1916; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 91 Letter to Marnold of 27 July 1916; CH, p. 139 Letter of 19 March 1916; OL, letter 130 Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 156 Letter of 10 May 1916; Ibid. item 159 Letter of 25 May; CH, pp. 129–30 Letter of 19 June. 1916; Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 165 Complete text in OL, pp. 527–8; ORR, pp. 170–1 OL, letter 136 OL, letter 138 Christian Goubault, Maurice Ravel: le jardin féerique (Paris: Minerve, 2004), p. 39 Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. III, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1954), p. 754 Proust, A la recherche, p. 777 Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Journal, 1894–1927, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 2007), p. 847 (entry for 19 February 1915) OL, letter 129 BnF Mus, LA Ravel 201 Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [I]’, p. 41 Letter of 19 June 1916; Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 165 Letter of 4 July; Ibid. item 168

NOTES to pp. 186–196

375

44. OL, letter 140 45. Letter to Marie Gaudin of 30 August; Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [I]’, p. 50 46. Letter to Marnold of 16 August 1916; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 18 47. Letter to Marnold of 7 October 1916; CH, p. 143 48. Letter to Auguste Sérieyx of 18 December 1916;Vincent d’Indy, Ma vie, ed. Marie d’Indy (Paris: Séguier, 2001), p. 761 49. Letter to Octave Maus of 18 March 1917; Ibid. p. 763 50. RoM 1947, p. 80 51. PN, p. 130 52. Saint-Marceaux, Journal, pp. 925–6 (entry for 7 January 1917) 53. OL, letter 143 54. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, p. 428 n18 55. Satie, Correspondance, p. 874 56. Archives musicales de Roland-Manuel (Paris: Castaing, catalogue for sale of 14 May 1986), item 50 57. Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 189a 58. Denis Herlin, ‘The heights and depths of an artist, or Debussy and money’, in Contextualizing Debussy, ed. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (New York: Oxford UP, due to be published in 2012). I am grateful to Denis Herlin for allowing me to see this chapter before its publication. 59. Debussy, Correspondance, 1912/55 60. OL, letter 144 61. Letter to Marnold, 12 March 1917; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 25 62. Letter from Satie to Cocteau of 16 August 1917; Correspondance, p. 297 63. Cocteau, ‘Ravel et nous’, pp. 204–5 64. Wilfrid Mellers, ‘Erik Satie and the “Problem” of Contemporary Music’, Music & Letters, 23/3 (July 1942); Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambidge: Cambridge UP, 1990), especially p. 173 65. Arbie Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Lucien Garban [I]’, CMR, 7 (2000), p. 66 66. CH, p. 150 67. In conversation with the author 68. Heading on letter from Ravel to unknown correspondent of 15 September 1932; information from Philippe Rodriguez 69. Satie, Correspondance, p. 293 70. Caroline Potter, e-mail to the author, 22 March 2007 71. Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 144 72. Le courrier musical, 1 November 1917 73. In the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (Robert Owen Lehmann Collection) 74. Howat, The Art of French Piano Music, p. 176 75. Henriette Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 88 76. In the Musée Maurice Ravel, Montfort l’Amaury 77. Alfred Cortot, La musique française de piano (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), p. 289 78. Long, At the piano with Ravel, ed Pierre Laumonier, trans. Olive Senior-Ellis (London: Dent, 1973), pp. 95–6 79. I am grateful to Malcolm Binns for this information. 80. Howat, private communication to the author; Roger-Ducasse, Lettres à son ami André Lambinet, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Liège: Mardaga, 2001), p. 120 81. BnF Mus, Dossier Ravel, Vm. dos. 6, piece 75 82. CH, p. 152 83. Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, pp. 141–2 84. OL, letter 147 85. CH, pp. 153–4 86. Letter to Octave Maus of March 1918; Thomson, D’Indy and his World, pp. 192–3 87. Nichols, The Harlequin Years, p. 91 88. BnF, LAS Dukas (Paul) 10. I am grateful to Emily Kilpatrick for this reference. 89. Goubault, Maurice Ravel, p. 284

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376

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90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

NOTES to pp. 196–210

MM, p. 438 Mawer, ‘Musical objects and machines’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, pp. 52–3 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, pp. 173–5 Le Gaulois, 18 May 1919 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 177 Cocteau, ‘Ravel et nous’, p. 204 ‘Maurice Ravel salué par Jean Cocteau’, in Cocteau et al., De la musique encore et toujours (Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1946), p. 14 Letter to Mme Casella of 25 July 1921; Jean Roy, ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à Hélène Kahn-Casella et à Alfredo Casella’, CMR, 1 (1985), p. 84 Postcard to Mlle Marnold of 8 February 1919; CH, p. 161 MM, p. 437 CH, pp. 163–4 OL, letter 150 OL, letter 152 Michel Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel dans les ventes publiques et privées’, CMR, 6 (1998), pp. 18–19 OL, letter 153 OL, letter 154 Letter of 23 February 1919; CH, pp. 164–5 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 142 MM, p. 456 OL, letter 155 OL, letter 157 Lifar, ‘Maurice Ravel et le Ballet’, ReM38, p. 79 n1 Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, p. 153 Buckle, Diaghilev, p. 358 GL, p. 168 OL, letter 158 Letter in Lisa Cox sale catalogue 56 (October 2007), item 82 (translation from catalogue) Letter to Marie Gaudin of 30 Aug 1919; Michel Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à la famille Gaudin de Saint-Jean-de-Luz [II]’, CMR, 10 (2007), p. 15 Letter to RVW of 18 September 1919; OL, letter 159 OL, letter 160 Satie, Correspondance, p. 382 ‘Contre la paresse’, La page musicale, 17 March 1939, p. 1 BBC interview, 24 October 1957 OL, letter 161 Letter of 22 December 1919; CH, p. 167 Saint-Marceaux, Journal, p. 1034 (entry for 16 May 1919) OL, letter 164 RoM 1947, p. 84 Marnat, ‘Ravel et sa Légion d’honneur’, CMR, 7 (2000), p. 13 OL, letter 166 Ros Souv, p. 139 Maurice Ravel (Exposition 1975), pp. 234, 246, 254, 256 Gubisch, ‘Le journal de Viñes’, p. 205 Marnat, ‘Ravel et sa Légion d’honneur’, CMR, 7 (2000), p. 18 Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Lucien Garban [II]’, CMR, 8 (2004), p. 21 Idem Letter of 29 January; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Ravel à Garban [II]’, p. 25 Sert, Two or Three Muses, pp. 130–1 Séverac, Ecrits sur la musique, p. 36 OL, letter 167 Orenstein, ‘Le correspondance de Ravel à Garban [II]’, p. 26 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 179 Poulenc, ‘La musique et les Ballets russes’, in Histoire de la musique, vol. II, dir. RolandManuel, (Paris: Encyclopédie de la Pléïade, 1963), pp. 985–91

NOTES to pp. 210–224

377

143. Sert, Two or Three Muses, p. 131 144. RoM 1947, pp. 85–6 145. André Schaeffner, Essais de musicologie et autres fantaisies (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980), p. 331 146. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 147. Ros Souv, p. 71 148. GL, p. 173 149. In Individualität in der Musik, ed. Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Christian Thorau and Michael Polth (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2002), pp. 175–200 150. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1923), p. 97 151. Emmanuel Chabrier, Correspondance, ed. Roger Delage (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), p. 248 (letter of 10 September 1884) 152. Benjamin, ‘Last dance’, Musical Times, 135 (July 1994), pp. 432–5 153. Helbing, ‘L’impression d’un tournoiement fantastique et fatale’, p. 198 154. Letter of 20 October 1921; OL, letter 182 155. Interview of 30 September 1922; OL, pp. 345–6; ORR, pp. 423–5 156. Letter of 14 October 1922; OL, letter 206 157. Jean Branger, ‘Ravel et la valse’, Ostinato rigore, 24 (Maurice Ravel, 2005), p. 160 Chapter VII: 1920–1925 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Letter of 25 March 1920; CH, p. 169 Elisabeth Wahl, brochure, ‘Maurice Ravel à Montfort l’Amaury’, Yvelines, 1987 Lisa Cox sale catalogue 51 (March 2006), item 92 Letter of 18 July 1921; OL, letter 180 Letter to Garban of 3 July 1920; OL, letter 170 Le coq, May 1920 OL, pp. 398–9; ORR, pp. 524–5 OL, letter 169 Basil Dean, Seven Ages: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 144–5. I am grateful to Winton Dean for sending me the relevant pages of his father’s autobiography. OL, letter 170 BnF Mus, Dossier Ravel, Rés Vm. dos. 6, piece 75 OL, letter 172 BnF, Fonds Montpensier: Maurice Ravel, Tournées Walter Szmolyan, ‘Maurice Ravel in Wien’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 30/3 (March 1975), p. 92 OL, letter 172 n3 Donald Harris, ‘Ravel visits the Verein; Alban Berg’s Report’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 3/1 (March 1979), pp. 78–9 BnF, Fonds Montpensier H.H. Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg (London: Calder, 1959), p. 246 Interview of 28 October 1920; OL, pp. 343–4; ORR, pp. 419–20 Harris, ‘Ravel visits the Verein’, p. 75 Alma Mahler Werfel, And the Bridge is Love, with E. B. Ashton (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 147 Manuel Rosenthal, Entretiens avec Rémy Stricker (1985); quoted in MM, p. 490 RRem, p. 147 Harris, ‘Ravel visits the Verein’, p. 79 Bertha Zuckerkandl, Österreichische Intime Errinerungen, 1892–1942 (Vienna: Amalthea, 1981), pp. 143–6. I am grateful to David Soames of Decorum Books for sending me this extract. Harry Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, trans. Roger Nichols (Portland: Amadeus, 1999), p. 67 BnF Mus, Dossier Ravel, Vm. dos. 6, piece 35 Laloy, La musique retrouvée, p. 93 Saint-Marceaux, Journal, p. 1093 (entry for 17 December 1920) Ibid. pp. 1095 and 1120 (entries for 14 January and 12 September 1921) RRem, p. 164

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NOTES to pp. 224–237

32. Le courrier musical, 24 November 1921; reprinted in Darius Milhaud, Notes sur la musique, ed. Jeremy Drake (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 67 33. OL, letter 175 34. Judith Kuhn, ‘Nicolas Obouhow’, The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 856 35. In conversation with the author 36. Prokofiev, Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences, ed. S. Shlifshteyn, trans. Rose Prokofieva (Moscow: Foreign Publishing House, 1964), p. 108 37. Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 48 38. Jean Roy, ‘Chronologie de Maurice Ravel’, CMR, 1 (1985), p. 21 39. OL, letter 174 40. Roy, ‘Chronologie de Maurice Ravel’, p. 22 41. Letter of 18 March 1921; OL, letter 177 42. Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 102 43. BnF Mus, Dossier Ravel, Rés. Vm. dos. 6, piece 339 44. Letter of December 1905 to Georgette Marnold; CH, pp. 176–7 45. Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923: Behind the Mask, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber, 2008), p. 604 46. Le courrier musical, 15 June 1921 47. Letter to Auric, 22 September 1920; Correspondance, p. 426 48. Nichols, The Harlequin Years, pp. 72–3 49. Maurice Ravel (Exposition 1975), item 160 50. Letter of 17 June 1921; Maurice Ravel (Exposition 1975), item 158 51. Dominique Garban, Jacques Rouché, l’homme qui sauva l’Opéra de Paris (Paris: Somogy, 2007), p. 189 52. Letter of 30 June 1921; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 164 53. Letter of 30 June 1921; OL, letter 184 n2 54. Letter of 18 July 1921; OL, letter 179 55. OL, letter 181 56. Letter to Roland-Manuel of 20 August 1921; CH, pp. 180–1 57. Letter of 24 August 1921; ERP, p. 145 58. CH, p. 184 59. ERP, pp. 145–6 60. Letter of 20 Octobert 1921; CH, p. 184 61. Letter to Roland-Manuel of 29 October 1921; CH, p. 186 62. Maurice Ravel (Exposition 1975), item 234 63. Saint-Marceaux, Journal, p. 1125 n2 (entry for 12 November 1921) 64. Letter of 8 December 1921; OL, letter 184 65. Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, p. 374 66. Letter to Mlle Marnold of 11 December 1921; CH, p. 189 67. Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse, p. 109 68. Le courrier musical, 1 February 1922 69. ReM, 3/5 (1 March 1922), p. 269 70. Letter to Calvocoressi of 3 February 1922; OL, letter 188 71. Letter to Korty of 28 July 1926; Eric Baeck and Hedwige Baeck-Schilders, ‘La création mondiale du ballet La valse de Maurice Ravel à Anvers’, RdM 89/2 (2003), pp. 365–71 72. Letter to Laloy of 25 January 1922; reproduced in Priest, Louis Laloy, plate 10 73. RoM 1947, p. 88 74. Letter to Koussevitsky; OL, letter 196 75. Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 94 76. OL, letter 189 77. Letter to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange; CH, p. 191 78. Idem 79. HHS, p. 195 80. Letter of 23 March 1922; OL, letter 190 81. OL, letter 191 82. In conversation with the author 83. Francis Poulenc, A bâtons rompus, ed. Lucie Kayas (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), p. 121 84. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’

NOTES to pp. 238–254

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

379

Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 186 Letter from Bartók to his mother, 15 April 1922; quoted in MM, p. 549 Letter to Cipa Godebski of 11 April 1922; OL, letter 194 Letter to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange of 9 May 1922; CH, p. 192 OL, letter 198 Szymanowski, ‘Maurice Ravel’ (introduction), CMR, 2 (1986), p. 41 Letter to Jobert of 8 June 1922; OL, letter 199 Interview in Le guide du concert, 18 (16 October 1931); OL, pp. 365–9; ORR, pp. 479–84 Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 142 Gaby Casadesus, Mes noces musicales (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1989), p. 20 Ibid. Schmitz on Bellaphon 690 07 005; Cortot on Biddulph LHW 014–15 ORR, pp. 421–2 Rosenthal, in conversation with the author ORR, p. 422 Richard Taruskin, ‘The Golden Cockerel’, The New Grove Book of Operas, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 267 Le courrier musical, 1 May 1922 CH, p. 195 Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, p. 427 De Telegraaf, 30 September 1922; OL, pp. 345–6; ORR, pp. 423–5 Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, p. 94 OL, pp. 345–6; ORR, pp. 423–5 Roger-Ducasse, Lettres à Nadia Boulanger, p. 70; Ros Souv, pp. 54–5 OL, p. 585; ORR, p. 388 n7 Ros Souv, pp. 54–5 ReM, 4/2 (December 1922), pp. 165–6 Mina Curtiss, Other People’s Letters (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 182 MM, p. 545 Letter to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange; CH, p. 198 Letter to Alfred Françaix of 10 January 1923; OL, letter 210 Pathé DTX 292. I am grateful to Charles Timbrell for sending me a copy of this recording. Faure, Mon maître Maurice Ravel, p. 20 Ibid. p. 11 Letter of 30 January 1923; Poulenc, Correspondance, pp. 188–9 Letter to Milhaud of 28 January; Satie, Correspondance, p. 521; cf also note on pp. 995–6 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 23 Letter of 31 March 1923; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Ravel à Garban [II]’, pp. 32, 44 Marnat, ‘L’image publique de Maurice Ravel (1920–1937)’, CMR, 3 (1987), p. 29 Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Ravel à Garban [II]’, p. 44 BnF Mus, Vm. micr. 846 OB, p. 87 OL, letter 218; autograph reproduced in Rollo Myers, Ravel, Life and Works (London: Duckworth, 1971), pp. 64–5 Henry Wood, My life of music, pp. 97–8 ORR, pp. 426–7 Postcard in the Taylorian Library, Oxford. I am grateful to Catherine Hilliard for sending me a copy of this card. Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 143; CH, p. 199 OL, letter 220 Ibid. n2 Robert Bernard, Albert Roussel (Paris: La Colombe, 1948), p. 80 n1 Letter to Diaghilev of 1 June 1923; Correspondance, p. 539 Letter of 26 June 1923; OL, letter 223 n1 OL, letter 223 Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 366 Letter to Ravel, 14 July 1923; OL, letter 224 de Cossart, Une Américaine à Paris, p. 166

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NOTES to pp. 254–264

140. Letter from Ravel to Falla of 26 June 1923; Falla to Ravel, 1 July 1923; OL, letter 222 and n. 141. Letter to Coppola of 4 August 1923; OL, letter 225 142. Letter of 2 August; Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 92 143. Letter of late August to Marie Gaudin; Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [II]’, p. 32 144. ERP, p. 152 145. ERP, p. 156 146. OL, letter 226 147. Bruyr, Maurice Ravel, p. 220 148. I am grateful to the late Jean Touzelet for showing me notes he had taken from this score. 149. Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 93 150. Rodriguez, Maurice Delage, pp. 73–5 151. OL, pp. 347–8; ORR, pp. 428–30 152. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Du travail journalier et de l’inspiration’ (Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs), Œuvres complètes, p. 267 153. Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [II]’, p. 33 154. OL, letter 227 155. Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 93 156. Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, pp. 190–1 157. Gustave Samazeuilh, Musiciens de mon temps (Paris: Daubin, 1947), p. 430 158. Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, p. 460 159. Letter of 25 January 1924; Roy, ‘Correspondance adressée par Ravel à Falla’, p. 16 160. RoM 1947, p. 90 161. Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 30 162. Ros Souv, pp. 14–15 163. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, pp. 80–1 164. MRFam, p. 143 165. OL, letter 162 166. Roland-Manuel, MRFam, p. 145 167. In conversation with the author 168. Letter to Mimie Godebska of 28 February 1924; OL, letter 233 169. OL, letter 234 170. OL, letter 235 171. OL, letter 236 172. Letter to Jean Jobert; OL, letter 237 173. Letter of 12 May; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel aux Casadesus’, CMR, 1 (1985), p. 126 174. Interview with Jean-Aubry, Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 1924 175. Joseph MacLeod, The Sisters d’Aranyi (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 147 176. Quoted, with other anti-raveliana, in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), p. 138 177. Letter of 16 October 1924; Poulenc, Correspondance, p. 241 178. David Sanson, Maurice Ravel (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005), p. 81 179. Sotheby’s, London; sale of 9/10 May 1985, item 190 180. Letter to Marie Gaudin of 30 April 1924; Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin’, p. 37 181. OL, pp. 431–5 182. RoM 1947, p. 89 183. OL, letter 241 184. OL, letter 243 185. Letter of 27 September 1924; OL, letter 244 186. Letter to Koechlin of 21 October 1924; OL, letter 245 187. Idem 188. Letter to Marcelle Gerar of 21 November 1924; OL, letter 247 189. CH, p. 211; but see letter to Garban, 10 February 1925, CMR, 8 (2002), p. 62 190. Letter to Calvocoressi; OL, letter 254 191. OL, letter 249

NOTES to pp. 264–275

381

192. Letter to René Léon of 15 March 1925, Archives de la Société des Bains de Mer, Monte Carlo; quoted in Paul Druilhe, ‘Les grandes creations de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo: L’Enfant et les sortilèges de Maurice Ravel’, Annales monégasques, 9 (1985), p. 16 193. Letter from Gunsbourg to Léon, 27 March 1925; CMR, 13 (2010), p. 62 194. OL, letter 250 195. MRFam, p. 121 196. RoM 1947, p. 93 197. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (Chapter 2, ‘The Pool of Tears’) 198. GL, p. 185 199. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 200. In conversation with the author 201. Ros Souv, p. 28 202. RoM 1947, p. 44 203. Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), pp. 229ff. 204. Debbie Hindle, ‘L’enfant et les sortilèges revisited’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81 (2000), p. 1194 205. Marie-Pierre Lassus, ‘Ravel l’enchanteur: structure poétique et structure musicale dans L’enfant et les sortilèges’, Analyse musicale, 26 (February 1992), pp. 43, 45; MRDram, pp. 133–4; Ros Souv, p. 165 206. See also Emily Kilpatrick, ‘Enchantments and illusions: recasting the creation of L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), pp. 42–7 207. Colette, La chambre éclairée; Œuvres, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 4 vols, 1984–2001), p. 915 208. Ros Souv, p. 31 209. Lassus, p. 45 210. Les nouvelles littéraires, 11 April 1925; Musique et théâtre, 15 April 1925; both reprinted in L’Avant-scène Opéra, 127 (January 1990), pp. 73–4 211. Letter of 20 September 1930; BnF Mus, LA Ravel 166 212. Goss, Bolero, p. 197 213. Dallapiccola, Selected writings, vol. I, trans. and ed. Rudy Shakelford (London: Toccata, 1987), p. 124 214. Tenroc in Le courrier musical, 15 February 1926 215. Rosenthal, in conversation with the author Chapter VIII: 1925–1928 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

André Cœuroy, La musique française moderne (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1922), p. 34 Calvocoressi, ‘When Ravel composed to order’, p. 58 Letter to Lucien Garban; OL, letter 251 Letter to Garban; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Ravel à Garban [II]’, p. 65 OL, letter 251 Le courrier musical, 15 May 1925 Chalupt, ‘Maurice Ravel et les prétextes littéraires de sa musique’, pp. 71, 73 Le courrier musical, 15 May 1925; a similar notice appeared in The Chesterian, 6, (1924–5), p. 190 A favourite saying of Nadia Boulanger, also related to the author by Henri Dutilleux Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 1924 In conversation with the author Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 99 Letter from Raymonde Linossier to Poulenc, 6 July 1925; Satie Remembered, ed. Robert Orledge (London: Faber, 1995), p. 218 OL, letter 254 n3 ReM, 6/11 (October 1925), pp. 243–4 Hoérée, ‘L’œuvre vocale’, ReM38, p. 104 OL, letter 259 Rodriguez, Maurice Delage, p. 62, incorporating Satsuma unpublished memoirs

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382

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NOTES to pp. 275–286

19. OL, pp. 350–1; ORR, pp. 439–41 20. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, ed. Ralph Kneeream (New York: Belwin Mills, 2/1978), pp. 96, 121. I am grateful to Dame Gillian Weir for sending me these pages. 21. OL, pp. 350–1; ORR, pp. 439–41 22. OL, letter 264 23. Saint-Marceaux, Journal, p. 1208 24. Le Figaro, 4 February 1926; reprinted in L’Avant-scène Opéra, 127 (January 1990), p. 73 25. Ros Souv, p. 191 26. Letter to Mme Alvar of 31 March 1926; OL, letter 266 27. Undated letter, BnF Mus, Vm. micr. 846 28. David Monrad-Johansen, Edvard Grieg, his life, music and influence, trans. Madge Robertson (New York: Tudor, 1945), p. 149 29. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 30. Letter to Mme Alvar of 31 March 1926, OL, letter 266 31. Letter to Robert Casadesus of 20 March 1926; OL, letter 265 32. Letter to Mme Alvar; OL, letter 266 33. Letter of 13 March; MM, p. 546 34. Rosenthal, in conversation with the author 35. Letter to Jane Courteault of 29 March 1926; Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Ravel à la famille Gaudin [II], p. 48 36. Goss, Bolero, p. 217 37. Letter to Madoux-Frank of 23 April 1926; OL, letter 268 38. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 39. Idem 40. Martial Singher, letter to Orenstein of 3 September 1965; ORR, Appendix A, p. 507 41. GL, p. 193 42. Inscription on photo, back cover of Nichols, Ravel (London: Dent, 1977) 43. Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 147 44. James, ‘Ravel’s Chansons madécasses: ethnic fantasy or ethnic borrowing?’, Musical Quarterly, 74/3 (1990), pp. 360–84 45. Hoérée, Maurice Ravel au XXe siècle (Paris: Comité national des commémorations musicales, 1976), pp. 43–4 46. Letter to Alexander L. Steinert of 28 May 1926; OL, letter 271 47. Letter to Jean Huré of 4 May 1926; OL, letter 269 48. ‘Esquisse autobiographique’ 49. Rosenthal, in conversation with the author; RRem, pp. 61–2 50. ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 487 51. Letter to Mme Casella of 14 August 1926; Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 99 52. Baeck and Baeck-Schilders, ‘La création mondiale du ballet La valse de Maurice Ravel à Anvers’, p. 369 53. Rosenthal in conversation with Marnat, 27 April 1994; Marnat, letter to the author of 28 April 2003 54. OL, letter 273 55. Letter of 6 January 1927; Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 100 56. OL, letter 274 57. Kaminsky, ‘Of children, princesses, dreams and isomorphisms’, Music Analysis 19/1 (2000), pp. 47, 49 58. OL, pp. 351–4; ORR, pp. 444–7 59. OL, letter 276 60. Roger Nichols, Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud (London: Faber, 1996), p. 81 61. Bertrand, Le monde de la musique, pp. 22–3 62. Yehudi Menuhin, in conversation with the author 63. Perret, ‘L’adoption du jazz par Darius Milhaud et Maurice Ravel’, RdM, 89/2 (2003), pp. 336–9 64. Ros Souv, pp. 56, 109 65. I am grateful to Nick Morgan for sending me this cutting. 66. Letter of 18 June 1993 to the author

NOTES to pp. 288–295

383

67. The Gramophone, September 1927, pp. 138–9; Michel Delahaye, ‘Discographie’, CMR, 6 (1998), pp. 86–7 68. CH, p. 220 69. Interview published 7 August 1927, OL, pp. 354–7; ORR, pp. 448–53 70. Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 101 71. Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 193 72. OL, letter 279 73. ERP, pp. 172–81 74. OL, letter 282 n1, referring to letter to Mme Alvar of 14 October. I am grateful to Denis Hall for further confirmation, in a letter of 28 October 2006 75. MRDram, pp. 156, 166 76. Letter to Mme Alvar of 27 October 1927; OL, letter 282 77. ERP, p. 181; OL, letter 284 78. OL, letter 285 79. Letter to Mme Dreyfus of 14 December 1927; Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 194 80. Letter of 11 November 1927; OL, letter 283 81. Letter to Ravel of late December 1927; OL, letter 287 82. OL, letter 289 83. Letter to Schmitz of 29 May 1926; Goss, Bolero, p. 219 84. BnF, Fonds Montpensier 85. Goss, Bolero, p. 218 86. Long, At the Piano with Maurice Ravel, pp. 64–76 87. Tansman, in conversation with the author 88. Fichman and Weinstein, Ravel (film) 89. Karleton Hackett, Chicago Evening Post, 21 January 1928; reprinted in Norman Vance Dunfee, Maurice Ravel in America – 1928, DMA diss. (Kansas City: University of Missouri, 1976), p. 88 90. Musical America, 4 February 1928; Dunfee, Maurice Ravel in America, p. 89 91. Ina Gillespie, Houston Chronicle, 7 April; Ibid. p. 99 92. Fichman and Weinstein, Ravel (film) 93. Idem 94. Tansman, in conversation with the author 95. ‘A Concert with Many a New Sensation’, Boston Evening Transcript, 13 January 1928; Dunfee, Maurice Ravel in America, pp. 73–5 96. Samuel Chotzinoff, ‘Music’, New York World, 27 February 1928; Albert Goldberg, ‘Ravel conducts’, Musical America, 4 February 1928; Glen Dillard Gunn, ‘Ravel Lionized in Great Recital Here’, Chicago Herald and Examiner, 20 January 1928 (Gunn had studied with Reinecke at the Leipzig Conservatory); Dunfee, Maurice Ravel in America, pp. 124, 89, 82–3 97. Musical Courier, 19 April; Dunfee, Maurice Ravel in America, p. 161 98. OL, letter 298 99. Letter to Annie Courteault, 27 January 1928; Michel Delahaye, ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à la famille Gaudin de Saint-Jean-de-Luz [III]’, CMR, 11 (2008), p. 18 100. Letter to Boulanger of 8 March 1928; OL, letter 297 101. Postcard of 29 March 1928; BnF Mus, Vm. micr. 860 102. Goss, Bolero, pp. 229, 221 103. Marie Dunbar, ‘Maurice Ravel, Napoleon of Music World, plays popular numbers; Praises US airs’, Seattle Post Intelligencer, 13 February 1928; BnF, Fonds Montpensier 104. Bogue-Laberge Management, 18 April 1928; BnF, Fonds Montpensier 105. Letter of 25 April 1928; Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel dans les ventes publiques et privées’, CMR, 8 (2004), p. 97 106. Pahissa, Manuel de Falla, p. 48 107. Marcelle Gerar, ‘L’Impromptu de Montfort’, René Kerdyk, ‘L’Impromptu du Belvédère’, ReM38, pp. 182–5, 224–5 108. Nin, ‘Comment est né le Boléro de Ravel’, ReM38, pp. 211–13 109. Robert F. Waters, Déodat de Séverac, Musical Identity in Fin de Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 191 110. Letter to Mme Albéniz of 27 June 1928; OL, letter 300

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384

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111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

NOTES to pp. 295–303

Samazeuilh, ‘Ravel en Pays Basque’, ReM38, p. 201 OL, letter 301 OL, letter 302 Nin, ‘Comment est né le Boléro de Ravel’, ReM38, p. 213 Roland-Manuel, ‘Une esquisse autobiographique de Ravel (Introduction)’, ReM38, pp. 17–18 Letter to Roger Haour, 4 December 1928; OL, letter 305 Norman Demuth, Ravel (London: Dent, 1956), pp. 40–1 Sir Lennox Berkeley, in conversation with the author Harding, ‘Maurice Ravel Away from his Music’, Musical Courier, 20 May 1933 BnF Mus, Rés. Vm. dos. 6, pie`ce 34; re a second Quartet, see L’Etoile Belge, 8 March 1926 24 October 1928 Demuth, Ravel, pp. 40–1 I am grateful to Chris Collins for this information. Tony Scotland, Lennox and Freda (London: Michael Russell, 2010); information from Tamara Talbot Rice, Tamara: Memoirs of St Petersburg, Paris, Oxford and Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth Talbot Rice (London: John Murray, 1996) Letter to Roger Haour, 4 December 1928; OL, letter 305 Francis Rose, Saying Life (London: Cassell, 1961), p. 110 Michael de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1987), p. 129 Lifar, Histoire du ballet russe (Paris: Nagel, 1950), p. 239 CH, p. 237 Henri de Curzon, ‘Le Boléro’, ReM38, p. 210 In conversation with the author ReM, 10/3 (January 1929), p. 244; de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, pp. 132, 142 In conversation with the author Simeone, ‘Mother Goose and other golden eggs . . .’, p. 60 Ros Souv, pp. 59–60 Francis Poulenc, Emmanuel Chabrier (Geneva: La Palatine, 1961), p. 70 GL, p. 202; see also Ravel’s letter to Roland-Manuel, 4 October 1928; OL, letter 303 See Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 235 OL, letter 316 Tansman, in conversation with the author Anna Telles, ‘Pedro de Freitas Branco et Ravel: une analyse critique de quelques enregistrements’, Ostinato rigore, 24 (Maurice Ravel, 2005) p. 249 Lifar, Ma vie, trans. James Holman Mason (London: Hutchinson, 1970), p. 135 OL, letter 318 Music and Arts CD 898, disc 3 Paul Bertrand, ‘Impressions de Berlin’, Le ménestrel, 47 (1930), pp. 489–90 Nin, ‘Comment est né le Boléro de Ravel’, ReM38, p. 213 Serge Gut, ‘Le phénomène répétitif chez Maurice Ravel . . .’, International Review of the Aesthetics of Sociology and Music, 21 (June 1990), pp. 29–46 Hawkins, A general history of the Science and practice of Music (London, 1776); Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, quoted by David Hamill, David Hamill’s Music, ‘Fandango’, www.music.hamill.co.uk/music.php Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 35 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 166; Jane Bathori, ‘Les musiciens que j’ai connus’, Recorded Sound, 1/6 (1963), p. 150; Honegger, Incantation aux fossiles (Lausanne: Editions d’Ouchy, 1948), pp. 91–2; Edmond Maurat, Souvenirs musicaux et littéraires (Université de Saint-Etienne: Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine, 1977), p. 127; RRem, pp. 47–51 Ros Souv, p. 191 John Whitfield, ‘Brain disease shaped Boléro’, Nature News (www.nature.com); see Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 219 n18 See New York Times interview of 6 January 1928; ORR, pp. 454–5 Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, p. 485 Extract from unidentified French television programme, shown to the author by Jean Touzelet Michel Laplace, ‘Ravel et le nouveau trombone’, Brass Bulletin, 47 (1984), pp. 34–38

NOTES to pp. 304–313

385

Chapter IX: 1928–1937 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

‘Qui doctis omnibus persuadet Pana non esse mortuum’; full text in Demuth, Ravel, p. 205 RoM 1947, p. 100 ORR, pp. 461–4 Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 102 The Scotsman, 25 January 1929. I am grateful to Professor David Kimbell for sending me this cutting. Letter to Joséphine ?, 22 January 1929; Delahaye, ‘Documents Ravel dans les ventes et collections publiques’, CMR, 9 (2006), p. 84 Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 102 Reich, ‘In memoriam’, ReM38, p. 275 Walter Szmolyan, ‘Maurice Ravel in Wien’, p. 99 Le Figaro, 7 March 1929 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, pp. 235–7 Joseph Delteil, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Grasset, 1925) Fernand Ouellette, Edgard Varèse, trans. Derek Coltman (London, Calder & Boyars, 1973), pp. 99,100 Stéphane Wolff, Un demi-siècle d’Opéra-Comique (Paris: Bonne, 1953), p. 335 Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, pp. 160–1; Mawer quotes Jane Pritchard, ‘La Valse’, in Bremser (ed.), International Dictionary of Ballet, II, pp. 1454–6, at p. 1455 Archives Roland-Manuel (2000), item 195 Maurice Ravel, Lettres à Roland-Manuel et à sa famille, ed. Jean Roy (Quimper: Calligrammes, 1986), p. 161 CH, p. 241 ERP, pp. 192–4 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, pp. 20–21 MM, pp. 645 n9 and 459 n7 CH, p. 258 ERP, p. 193 Letter to Ida Godebska of 8 May 1930; OL, letter 316 OL, letter 312 Michel Delahaye, ‘Maurice Ravel et les Grands Prix du disque’, CMR, 7 (2000), p. 105 OL, letter 313 Ibid. n1 Piero Coppola, Dix-sept ans de musique à Paris, ed. Alain Pâris (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), p. 107 ‘Evariste’, L’Edition musicale vivante, January 1930, p. 15; OL, p. 410; ORR, p. 535 MM, p. 636 n14 Presse du Sud Ouest, 8/9 July 1933; Marnat, ‘L’image publique’, p. 40 CH, p. 241 Arbie Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Marcelle Gerar’, CMR, 6 (1998), p. 46. Letter to Ida Godebska of 8 May 1930; CH, pp. 244–5 ERP, p. 200 Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel aux Casadesus’, p. 134 ERP, pp. 202–3 Letter to Robert Casadesus of 1 August 1930; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel aux Casadesus’, p. 135 OL, letter 319 ERP, pp. 207–8 CH, p. 246 Letter of 9 September 1930; OL, letter 318 Letter to Charles Mapou, 24 September 1930; OL, letter 319 Letter of 19 September 1930; Orenstein, ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel aux Casadesus’, p. 105 Letter to Mme Madoux-Frank of 5 February 1931; OL, letter 321 OB, p. 101 n11, quoting Stelio Dubbiosi, ‘The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel’, PhD diss. (New York University School of Education, 1967), p. 132

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386

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

NOTES to pp. 313–329

CH, p. 246 OL, pp. 365–9/ORR, pp. 479–84 Letter of 17 March 1931; Roy, ‘Lettres de Ravel aux Casella’, p. 106 Letter to Mme Casella of 4 February 1931; Ibid. p. 105 Review of 2 March 1931; Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 504 De Telegraaf, 31 March 1931; OL, pp. 360–3; ORR, pp. 472–5 Long, 16pp. manuscript memoirs, ‘Auteurs et interprètes’, pp. 8–9; Paris: Médiathèque Mahler, Archives Marguerite Long Arthur Honegger, Je suis compositeur (Paris: Editions du Conquistador, 1951), p. 51 See Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 163 de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, p. 157 Review of 1 August 1931, ibid. L’Œuvre, 28 June 1931; Mawer, The Ballets of Maurice Ravel, p. 165 Daily Telegraph, 11 July 1931; OL, pp. 363–5; ORR, pp. 476–8 Musical, 4 (June 1987), pp. 10–13; ORR, pp. 393–5 Le guide du concert, 16 October 1931; OL, pp. 365–9; ORR, pp. 479–84 Excelsior, 30 October 1931; OL, pp. 369–71; ORR, pp. 485–6 Daily Telegraph, 11 July 1931; OL, pp. 363–5; ORR, pp. 476–8 Le journal, 14 January 1933; OL, pp. 328–9; ORR, pp. 396–7 De Telegraaf, 6 April 1932; ORR, pp. 492–5 In conversation with the author Merlet, ‘Conseils pour interpréter Ravel’, p. 89 In conversation with the author Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten (London: Faber, 1992), p. 163 Long, At the piano with Ravel, p. 59 OL, p. 594; ORR, p. 597 Long, At the piano with Ravel, p. 59 Ibid. Chapter 5 Programme sold by Sotheby’s, London; sale of 17 May 1991, item 400 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 60 Letter of 21 December 1931; BnF, Fonds Montpensier Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 63 ORR, pp. 490–1 BnF, Fonds Montpensier Rosenthal, in conversation with the author Le temps, 30 January 1932 José Bruyr, L’écran des musiciens, vol. II (Paris: Corti, 1933), p. 128; Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005), p. 387 n36 Christian Science Monitor, 13 February 1932 Review of 16 February 1932 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 67 Calendarul, 17 February 1932 23 January 1932 20 February 1932 5 April 1932 26 February 1932 Sunday Referee, 28 February 1932 Neue Freie Presse, 3 February 1932, signed C.B.L.; ORR, pp. 487–9 Evening Standard (also in part in The Star), both dated 24 February 1932; ORR, pp. 490–1 6 April 1932; ORR, pp. 492–5 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, pp. 63–4 Ros Souv, p. 51 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 71 Telles, ‘Pedro de Freitas Branco et Ravel’, p.245 Ibid. p. 246 Burnett James, Ravel (London: Omnibus, 1987), p. 127 Samazeuilh, ‘Ravel en pays basque’, ReM38, p. 202 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 171 Christine Prost, ‘Maurice Ravel: Le Concerto en Sol’, Analyse musicale, 11 (1988), p. 81

NOTES to pp. 329–342

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

387

‘Maurice Ravel entre deux trains’, Candide, 5 May 1932; OL, pp. 371–3; ORR, pp. 496–8. Letter of 15 September 1932; OL, letter 325 ERP, p. 218; Marnat, ‘L’image publique’, p. 38 ERP, p. 218 Marnat, ‘L’image public’, pp. 38–9 Mme Ibert, in conversation with the author Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 173 ERP, pp. 222–3 de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, p. 163 La Presse du Sud Ouest, 8/9 July 1933; Marnat, ‘L’image publique’, p. 40 Ros Souv, p. 178; Orenstein, ‘Maurice Ravel’s creative process’, Musical Quarterly, 53/4 (October 1967) p. 474 10 October 1932; Marnat, ‘L’image publique’, p. 36 Le Figaro, 10 October 1932 Report in full in Bernard Mercier, ‘La maladie neurologique de Ravel’, CMR, 5 (1992), pp. 20–21 Letter of 6 January 1933; OL, letter 327 Letter of 7 February 1933; OL, letter 328 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 243 Letters to Guido Gatti, 5 January 1933; and Madeleine Grey, 8 February 1933; OL, letters 326 and 329 Letter to Léo Morin of 3 June 1928, published in La Patrie, 12 January 1929 Interview in Neue Freie Presse, 3 February 1932, Signed ‘C.B.L’; ORR, p. 488. ReM, 14/133 (February 1933), p. 128 Le courrier musical, 1 February 1933 OL, letter 330 Ibid, n5 Letter to Arbie Orenstein of 5 September 1965; OL, pp. 380–2; ORR, pp. 506–8 Nectoux, note to Ravel et ses interprètes (Archival recordings), EMI 2912163 (1987) Ros Souv, pp. 180–1 Rosenthal, in conversation with the author Marc’hadour, in conversation with the author Letter to Arbie Orenstein; OL, p. 381; ORR, p. 507 Bernac, The Interpretation of French Song, p. 268 I am grateful to Philippe Rodriguez for this information. Letter to Marie Gaudin of 2 August 1933; OL, letter 331 New Britain, 9 August 1933; ORR, pp. 398–400 Letter to Falla of 6 March 1930; unpublished letter to Rosenthal; ORR, p. 469 n4 24 September 1933; OL, pp. 373–6; ORR, pp. 499–501 La petite illustration, 6 September 1930 ‘Trois souvenirs sur Ravel’, ReM, 210 (January 1952), pp. 143–6; RRem, pp. 171–3 Excelsior, 28 November 1933; OL, pp. 331–3; ORR, pp. 401–3 Ros Souv, p. 175 OL, letter 333 Marnat, ‘L’image publique’, p. 49 Letter of March 1934; OL, letter 334 Letter of 12 March, 1934; OL, letter 335 CH, pp. 251–2 Delahaye, ‘Maurice Ravel et les Grands Prix du disque’, p. 105 Excelsior, 29 June 1934 Ros Souv, p. 182 OL, letter 338 Letter to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange of 9 March 1935; OL, letter 339 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 228 Ibid. p. 230 Fichman and Weinstein, Ravel (film) Letter of 26 March 1908; OL, letter 49 Letter of 20 May 1935; Bénédicte Palaux-Simonnet, Paul Dukas (Geneva: Papillon, 2001), p. 116

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NOTES to pp. 342–352

388

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160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180.

PN, p. 46 ERP, p. 230 Letter from Mlle René Perret to Nelly Delage, 4 May 1936; OL, letter 340 OL, letter 341 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 244 Henri Dutilleux, Music Falsa, 8 August 2003 Unpublished interview with Mme Grey for Le guide musical, sent by her to the author OL, letter 344 Long, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, p. 117 Ros Souv, pp. 189–90 RoM 1938, p. 190 Erik Baeck, ‘La mort de Maurice Ravel’, CMR, 11 (2008), p. 62 Roy, ‘Chronologie de Maurice Ravel’, p. 22 n 1; document of 5 February 1938 Candide, 6 January 1938 Letter of 17 Aprril 1938, Archives musicales de Roland-Manuel (1986), item 90 Letter to Samuel Dushkin of 4 January 1938; Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, vol. II, p. 310 PN, p. 50 Lucas, L’âge nouveau (March 1938), p. 352 Jean Zay, ‘Discours aux obsèques de Ravel’, ReM38, pp. 24–8 Paris-Midi, 1 January 1938 Ros Souv, pp. 191–2

Chapter X: Postlude 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The Times, 28 April 1924; quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, p. 138 Jacques de Zogheb, MRFam, p. 172 Ros Souv, p. 164 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 45 Fargue, MRFam, p. 160 CH, p. 265 Delage, MRFam, p. 110 Sanson, Maurice Ravel, p. 109 Bertrand, Le monde de la musique, p. 23 Robert Craft, ‘The Nostalgic Kingdom of Maurice Ravel’, in Current Convictions, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), pp. 184–195; originally printed in The New York Review of Books, 1 May 1975 ‘Mœsta et errabunda’ (Les fleurs du mal), Œuvres complètes, p. 80 Friedrich von Schiller, Naïve and sentimental poetry: On the sublime, trans. Julius E. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 87 OL, p. 47; ORR, p. 41 Rosenthal, Satie, Ravel, Poulenc, pp. 55–6 ‘Une école de musique répondant aux besoins modernes’ (Paris: Aux bureaux d’édition de la Schola, 2 November 1900), p. 1 OL, p. 49; ORR, p. 41 Benjamin Ivry, Maurice Ravel: A Life (New York: Welcome Rain, 2000), pp. 151–2 OL, letter 150 Gil Blas, 28 June 1903; reprinted in Monsieur Croche p. 192 Lamaze, Le cœur de l’horloge, p. 163 Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), p. 261 Madeleine Grey, Mémoires d’une chanteuse française, ed. Gérard Zwang (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), p. 119 n132 Jankélévitch, ‘La Sérénade intérrompue’, ReM38, p. 149 Martine Jore, ‘Portrait graphologique’, Musical, 4 (June 1987), p. 117 Ros Souv, pp. 120–1 OB, p. 211 for original and intermediate versions RoM 1947, pp. 20, 23 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 216

NOTES to pp. 352–356

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

389

Rosenthal, RRem, p. 63 RoM 1947, p. 24 CH, p. 267 HHS, p. 255 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 216 Charles Koechlin, ‘Ravel et ses luttes’, ReM38, pp. 216–21 Letter of 31 May 1946; Roger-Ducasse, Lettres à Nadia Boulanger, p.135 I am grateful to Anthony Powers for this story. Jean-Michel Nectoux, ‘Maurice Ravel et sa bibliothèque musicale’, Fontes artis musicae, 24/4 (1977), pp. 199–206 Catalogue compiled by Bruno Sebald, OL, pp. 470–5; ORR, pp. 602–11 Gringoire, 14 January 1938 Ros Souv, p. 9 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 78 Koechlin, ‘Ravel et ses luttes’, p. 217 Ros Souv, p. 7 Ibid. p. 21 Ibid. p. 75 Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, p. 175 Ros Souv, p. 80 Ibid. pp. 54–5 Ibid. p. 41 Nicolas Nabokov, Old friends and new music (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), p. 112 OL, p. 42 Ibid. p. 446 Ibid. p. 43 Ibid. p. 44 Ibid. p. 47 Samazeuilh, Musiciens de mon temps, p. 207 Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), p. 152 In conversation with the author ‘Contre la paresse’, La page musicale, 17 March 1939 In Roger Nichols, ‘Ravel and the twentieth century’, The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, p. 241 Ibid. p. 242 Sauguet, La musique, ma vie (Paris: Séguier, 1990), pp. 125–6, 303 Inghelbrecht, Diabolus in musica (Paris: Etienne Chiron, 1933), p. 186 BnF, Fonds Montpensier Goubault, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Minerve, 2004), p. 182 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 37 In conversation with the author Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 163 ‘Maurice Ravel away from his music’, Musical Courier, 20 May 1933 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, p. 163 ‘Festival Ravel au Grand Théâtre’, Journal de Genève, review of 2 March 1929

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Ravel chronology

1832

19 September: Pierre-Joseph Ravel b. Versoix

1840

24 March: Marie Delouart b. Ciboure

1857

Pierre-Joseph obtains French passport

?1872

goes to Spain to work on railways

1873

3 April: marries Marie Delouart in Montmartre; at 41 rue Lepic, 18e

1875

7 March: Joseph Maurice Ravel b. 12 quai de la Nivelle, Ciboure (now 27 quai Maurice Ravel) at 11pm; 13th, baptised in St Vincent’s church; June: family moves to Paris, 40 rue des Martyrs, 9e

1878

13 June: Edouard Ravel b. Paris

1880

family moves to 29 rue de Laval, 9e (now rue Victor-Massé)

1882

31 May: Ravel has first piano lesson with Henry Ghys

1886

family moves to 73 rue Pigalle, 9e, 5th floor

1887

Ravel studies harmony with Charles-René

1888

November: Ravel meets Ricardo Viñes at cours Schaller, 5 rue Geoffroy-Marie

1889

piano lessons with Emile Descombes; attends cours Schaller 6 May: Fourth Paris International Exhibition opens; hears Russian and Eastern music 2 June: plays excerpt from Moscheles Third Piano Concerto at Salle Erard – first public performance 4 November: plays excerpt from Chopin concerto as test for Paris Conservatoire; enters Anthiôme’s preparatory class

1890

10 July: wins second prize for piano

1891

8 July: wins first prize for piano November: enters piano class of de Bériot and harmony class of Pessard

1893

8 February: with Viñes, plays Chabrier’s Trois valses romantiques to the composer July: competes for harmony prize, unsuccessfully Papa introduces him to Debussy and Satie Sérénade grotesque, Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer

1894

17 January: plays Schumann Fantasie Spring: meets Grieg 16 July: competes for harmony prize, unsuccessfully 22 December: premiere of Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

1895

July: competes for piano and harmony prizes, unsuccessfully: leaves Conservatoire 6 August: Un grand sommeil noir November: ‘Habanera’; Menuet antique (Enoch, 1898) piano lessons with Santiago Riéra; exempted from military service

1896

family leaves rue Pigalle for 15 rue Lagrange, 5e; Ravel arranges Chansons corses; performances on 24 January and 10 February

RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

391

10 October: Fauré takes over Massenet’s chair at Conservatoire December: Sainte; ‘D’Anne jouant de l’espinette’ 1897

Begins to study counterpoint and orchestration privately with Gedalge April: First Violin Sonata Autumn: offered music professorship in Tunisia; refused in December December: ‘Entre cloches’

1898

28 January: enters Fauré’s composition class 5 March: Marthe Dron and Viñes play Sites auriculaires, SNM 18 April: Viñes plays Menuet antique, Salle Erard 2 June: Chanson du rouet 20 August: engaged as pianist at casino in Granville on Normandy coast November: Si morne!; Ouverture de Shéhérazade (both published by Salabert, 1975); La Parade, for Isadora Duncan; Menuet antique published; meets Jane Bathori at Conservatoire Concerts rehearsal; Olympia project (E.T.A. Hoffmann)

1899

family moves to 7 rue Eugène-Fromentin, 9e Pavane pour une Infante défunte 27 May: conducts SNM orchestra in Shéhérazade (Salle du Nouveau Théâtre) July: enters fugue competition, result not submitted 10 December: ‘D’Anne qui me jecta de la neige’

1900

January: Callirhoé, preparatory cantata for Prix de Rome; 27th: accompanies M. HardyThé in Epigrammes de Clément Marot, SNM May: enters preliminary round of Prix de Rome without success July: has to leave Fauré’s class due to lack of prizes; Paris Métro opens 9 December: Chevillard conducts premiere of first two Debussy Nocturnes Ravel introduces Satie to Viñes

1901

January: Ravel returns to Fauré’s class as auditeur; competes for composition prize with Prelude and Fugue (lost), unsuccessfully; family moves to 40bis rue de Douai, 9e 24 March: Ravel in Monte Carlo chez ‘un type qui possède un yacht’ 8 April: transcribing Nocturnes with Raoul Bardac 4 May: enters Prix de Rome for second time 29 June: gains Second Grand Prix (Myrrha), performance 28 June July: family moves from rue de Douai to 19 boulevard Pereire, 17e 11 November: Jeux d’eau

1902

January: Sémiramis, preparatory cantata for Prix de Rome; 7th: Taffanel conducts Sémiramis 30 April: premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande 8 May: enters Prix de Rome for third time (Alcyone) July: doesn’t receive a prize September–October: in St-Jean-de-Luz Autumn-Winter: begins String Quartet (slow movement conclusion completed by December) 10 December: premiere of Ravel/Bardac/Garban arrangement of Debussy Nocturnes

1903

January: first movement of Quartet submitted for composition prize, unsuccessfully. Finally leaves Conservatoire; 10th: Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot performed by Hardy-Thé and Viñes, SNM (Salle Erard) April: finishes String Quartet; 21st: Debussy and Viñes play Ravel/Bardac/Garban arrangement of Debussy Nocturnes May: enters Prix de Rome for fourth time (Alyssa) July: doesn’t receive a prize; Manteau de fleurs; Shéhérazade (songs); begins Sonatine October: Sits on SNM committee

1904

20 February: ‘Quel galant’, ‘Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques’ 5 March: String Quartet performed by Heymann Quartet, SNM (Salle de la Schola Cantorum) 17 May: Premiere of Shéhérazade, Jane Hatto, cond. Alfred Cortot, SNM 16 June: introduced to Godebskis by Viñes; Bonnard present

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392

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RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

1905

28 January: invited by Misia Edwards to Opéra ball, with Viñes, Grovlez, Bonnard, Cipa Godebski 14 April: crash of ‘Le tourbillon de la mort’ 6 May: enters Prix de Rome for fifth and last time; disqualified – L’affaire Ravel May: Introduction et Allegro; ‘Une barque’ finished 4 June – c. 25 July: cruise on yacht Aimée 9 August: completes Sonatine; begins ‘Symphony’; in Morgat, Brittany by 23rd, remains in Brittany until mid-September 3 September: arrives Portrieux 15 October: Premiere of La mer, Concerts Lamoureux [late 1905:] Miroirs completed; Sonatine completed; Noël des jouets; family moves to 11 rue Chevallier, Levallois (now rue Louis Rouquier)

1906

6 January: Viñes plays Miroirs, SNM (Salle Erard) 26 April: Ravel conducts Bathori in the premiere of the orchestral version of Noël des jouets, SNM (Salle Erard) 1–2 July: on counterpoint jury of Conservatoire c. 15 August: at Hermance on Lake Geneva with father; plans to stay until 20 September October: finishing orchestration of ‘Une barque’ December: Histoires naturelles (Durand, 1907); completes Cinq melodies populaires grecques (Durand, 1906); Miroirs published; Fauré appoints Ravel to committee of SNM

1907

12 January: Bathori and Ravel premiere Histoires naturelles, SNM (Salle Erard) 3 February: Premiere of ‘Une barque’ (orchestral version), Orchestra Colonne; 22nd: premiere of Introduction et Allegro March: Vocalise-Etude April: Les grands vents venus d’outremer; writing L’heure espagnole 22 May: Marnold hosts dinner for Ravel, Strauss and Roman Rolland, followed by Pelléas; 28th: banquet for Russian composers chez Ecorcheville, guests include Rimsky-Korsakov 6 June: Sur l’herbe; 8th: Les grands vents and Sainte (published 1907) premiered by Hélène Luquiens and Ravel 6 July: playthrough of L’heure espagnole to Albert Carré July–August: with Delage in Brittany c. 20 August: plans to go to Godebskis at Valvins 15 October: completes vocal score of L’heure espagnole October: begins Rapsodie espagnole, completes version for 2 pianos 13 December: Vaughan Williams meets Ravel for the first time

1908

20 January: Carré refuses L’heure 1 February: Ravel completes orchestral score of Rapsodie espagnole 15 March: Rapsodie espagnole performed, Concerts Colonne (Théâtre du Châtelet) 17 April: Fromont contract for two-piano version of Debussy Nocturnes May–September: Gaspard de la nuit (Durand, 1909) 3 June: chez Godebski (Valvins), correcting proofs of Rapsodie espagnole 2 September: Gaspard just completed; 20th: at Valvins; ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’ October: Varèse, Petit, Marnold attend private premiere of Gaspard by Viñes chez Ravel; 13th: death of Pierre-Joseph Ravel; 15th: civil burial at Levallois; family moves to 4 avenue Carnot, 17e; 30th: Durand assures Ravel of 500fr per month for La cloche engloutie 22 December: vocal score of L’heure just published

1909

9 January: Viñes premieres Gaspard de la nuit, SNM (Salle Erard); 14th: SMI founded chez Marnold 25 April: arrives London for first foreign concert, stays with Vaughan Williams 5 May: back in Paris 27 June: week spent on Daphnis libretto August: orchestrates Pavane 12 September: Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn finished (published in La revue musicale de la SIM); Tripatos (Salabert, 1975) October: orchestrating L’heure espagnole; (re-)transcribes Debussy Nocturnes for two pianos (Fromont, 1909) [Autumn:] writing Ma mère l’Oye; begins Daphnis et Chloé

RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

393

1910

7 January: premiere of Antar in Monte Carlo 12 February: Antar performed by Concerts Colonne, cond. Pierné (Odéon Théâtre) 10 April: chez Godebski (Valvins); Ma mère l’Oye gone to copyist; 20th: Ma mere l’Oye premiered (SMI); Chants populaires 1 May: completes piano version of Daphnis (Durand) 19 December: Chants populaires performed by Marie Olénine d’Alheim; [1910:] transcribes Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune for piano duet

1911

16 January: Ravel plays Satie piano music at SMI; sends to Satie score of Ma mère l’Oye with dedication January–February: concerts in London, Newcastle and Edinburgh 11 March: Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn performed by Ennemond Trillat (SNM) Before 11 April: orchestrates Satie Le fils des étoiles 2 April: First Daphnis Suite performed at Concerts Colonne, cond. Pierné; 24th: Ravel and Aubert play two-piano transcription of Debussy Nocturnes 9 May: Louis Aubert premieres Valses nobles et sentimentales, SMI; 19th: premiere of L’heure espagnole (Opéra-Comique) 13 June: Ravel attends premiere of Petrushka 15 July: to Ciboure 1 September: in St-Jean-de-Luz, corrections to Shéhérazade finished; orchestrating Ma mere l’Oye 15 October: returns to Paris; 21st: Satie introduces Roland-Manuel to Ravel

1912

29 January: Ballet premiere of Ma mere l’Oye (Théâtre des Arts) 10 February: Satie invited to Ma mère l’Oye by Ravel; 29th: Ravel plays piano in French premiere of Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, SMI (Salle Gaveau) March: orchestrates Valses nobles as ballet Adélaïde 5 April: Daphnis orchestration completed; 22th: Adélaïde premiered (Théâtre du Châtelet) 8 June: Ballets russes premiere of Daphnis et Chloé, cond. Pierre Monteux; 10th: second and last performance (last evening of season before London) Summer: goes to Valvins and Basque country for rest 15 October: returns to Paris

1913

February: article in defence of Debussy Images (Cahiers d’aujourd’hui) 17 March–April: arrives with his mother at Clarens; works with Stravinsky on Khovanshchina 2 April: inauguration of Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; ‘Soupir’ May: ‘Placet futile’; 10th: Pénélope (Fauré) premiere at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; 15th: premiere of Jeux; 22th: Boris Godunov premiere (Russian version); 29th: premiere of Le sacre du printemps 5 June: Khovanshchina performance, Ballets russes (Théâtre des Champs-Elysées) Mid-July–mid-October: in St-Jean-de-Luz August: ‘Surgi de la croupe’ 6 November: final performance of Boris Godunov; 17th: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées goes bankrupt 10 December: Alfredo Casella premieres Ravel’s A la manière de . . ., SMI, together with his own A la manière de . . . pieces; 13th: London trip; concert at Bechstein Hall; 16th: to London Music Club, Classical Concert Society, performances of Daphnis; Prélude; A la manière de . . .; reorchestrating Noël des jouets Sometime in 1913 records Sonatine and Valses nobles for Welte-Mignon

1914

14 January: Bathori sings Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous and Stravinsky’s Poèmes de la lyrique japonaise, cond. Inghelbrecht, SMI Ravel orchestrates Les Sylphides, Carnaval February: Roland-Manuel finishes Ravel biography. Ravel working on Trio, Zazpiak-Bat, La cloche engloutie, Saint François d’Assise (’oratorio tragique’); 14th: in St-Jean-de-Luz 2 March: Les Sylphides performed in London by Nijinsky; 21st: Ravel working on Trio in Saint-Jean-de-Luz; end of the month: to Geneva, staying with aunt, concerts in Geneva, Lyon 3 April – 7 August [?]: Trio; 6 April: back to St-Jean-de-Luz from Geneva May: Deux mélodies hébraïques

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394

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RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

3 June: Deux mélodies hébraïques premiered by Alvina-Alvi and Ravel, SMI (Salle Malakoff); 7th: Daphnis performed by Ballets russes, Drury Lane (without chorus); c. 20th: to St-Jean-de-Luz; stays till end October; 30th: working on Trio, Zazpiak-Bat July: begins Le tombeau de Couperin at St-Jean-de-Luz 3 August: Germany declares war on France; 29th: Ravel finishes Trio September: caring for wounded soldiers in St-Jean-de-Luz; refused by Army; 26th: La cloche and Wien put aside; writes that he is ‘going to begin [sic] a suite of piano pieces’ October: leaves St-Jean-de-Luz (no return until 1921) December: ‘Trois beaux oiseaux’; 6th: Opéra-Comique reopens A la manière . . . and Noël des jouets (orchestral version) published (Mathot) 1915

28 January: Trio premiered by Casella, Willaume and Feuillard, SMI February: ‘Nicolette’, ‘Ronde’; begins editing Mendelssohn piano works 10 March: passed as fit for military service by Conseil de Révision de la Seine; enlists in 13th Artillery Regiment as truck mechanic December: Deux mélodies hébraïques published (Durand)

1916

14 March: departs for front near Verdun as lorry driver 18 April: Festival Erik Satie/Maurice Ravel, Salle Huyghens 6 September: sent to Châlons-sur Marne with dysentery; 30th: operation for hernia end of October: returns to Paris to convalesce 17 December: abortive meeting between SNM and SMI Trois chansons pour chœur mixte sans accompagnement published (Durand)

1917

5 January: Marie Ravel dies; 12th: Cangiullo ballet project, Le Zoo; Ravel convalescent 7 February: returns to Châlons-sur Marne; temporary discharge; 21st: back in Paris 8 April: Opéra premiere of Adélaïde; Ravel refused permission to attend 4 May: first French army mutiny; 18th: premiere of Parade 1 June: temporary discharge; ‘suspect right lung, loss of weight’; stays with Dreyfus family at Lyons-la-Forêt [June:] Maurice and Edouard Ravel move to 7 avenue Léonie, Saint-Cloud 7 July: at Lyons-la-Forêt; ‘Menuet’ and ‘Rigaudon’ (Le tombeau) completed 11 October: performance of Trois chansons, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier November: completes Le tombeau de Couperin (Durand, 1918) [November:] completes edition of Mendelssohn piano works

1918

9 March: Trio performed at SNM (Ancien Conservatoire); 25th: Debussy dies June: Frontispice (published by Les Feuillets d’Art, 1919) 5 November: ill, problems with right lung; 11th: operated on for tubercular ganglions [November:] orchestrates ‘Alborada del gracioso’ (Eschig, 1923)

1919

January–early March: holiday at Megève, Haute-Savoie April: orchestrates Chabrier’s Menuet pompeux (Enoch, 1937); 11th: Marguerite Long premieres Le tombeau de Couperin 17 May: ‘Alborada’ orchestration premiereed at Concerts Pasdeloup, cond. Rhené-Baˆton June: Ravel orchestrates four movements of Le tombeau 18 July: Ballet russes perform Menuet pompeux, London; Menuet pompeux, ’Alborada del gracioso’ and Fauré Pavane as Les jardins d’Aranjuez, cond Ansermet; 24th: British premiere of L’heure (Covent Garden) August: spends a week in Geneva following the death of his aunt December: holiday in Lapras till 15 April: orchestrates Deux mélodies hébraïques; begins La valse; 31st: begins orchestration of La valse

1920

15 January: Journal officiel announces Légion d’honneur; Ravel refuses; 16th: Collet’s first article in Comoedia on Les Six; 23rd: Collet’s second article February: Ravel completes piano solo and two-piano scores of La valse; 28th: orchestral version of Le tombeau performed at Concerts Pasdeloup, cond. Rhené-Baton 2 April: Légion d’honneur formally revoked; 12th: La valse orchestration finished; 15th: Ravel leaves Lapras; 16th: returns briefly to Paris (Saint-Cloud); then chez Haour at Saint-Sauveur until 1 September; 17th: Madeleine Grey sings Deux mélodies hébraïques at Concerts Pasdeloup, cond. Rhené-Baˆton [April:] Ravel begins Sonata for violin and cello

RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

395

[?May:] performance of La valse for Diaghilev chez Misia Sert 5 July: two-piano score of La valse to Durand August: begins L’Enfant et les sortilèges; 18th: sends Prunières first movement of Sonata for violin and cello 1 September: returns from Saint-Sauveur to Saint-Cloud; Pierre Haour ill; 10th: Haour dies; 17th: Ravel goes to Lyons-la-Forêt for a week 20 October: in Vienna with Casella 8 November: Ballet version of Le tombeau performed by Ballets suédois, cond. Inghelbrecht 1 December: first movement of Sonata for violin and cello published in Revue musicale; 12th: premiere of La valse, Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Chevillard; Ravel meets Prokofiev 1921

24 January: Revue musicale Debussy memorial pieces performed (SMI), including first movement of Sonata for violin and cello; 27th: Brussels premiere of L’heure February: starts work on remaining movements of Sonata for violin and cello 16 April: buys Le Belvédère (Montfort l’Amaury) for 20,000 francs May: moves definitively into Le Belvédère; orchestral score of La valse published (Durand); 11th: permanently discharged from army 15 June: Ravel conducts hundredth performance of Le tombeau ballet at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; 20th: Opéra premiere of Daphnis, starring Fokine and Fokina, cond. Gaubert early September: St-Jean-de-Luz 10 October: back at ‘Le Belvédère’ 5 December: Opéra premiere of L’heure espagnole with Fanny Heldy as Concepcion, cond. Gaubert

1922

16 January: Paris premiere of Pierrot lunaire, Freund, Wiéner, Milhaud 17 March: chamber concert in Marseille, Ravel present; c. 20th: Sonata for violin and cello completed 6 April: Sonata for violin and cello premiered by Jourdan-Morhange and Maréchal, SMI (Salle Pleyel) 1 May: Musorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, ‘Great Gate of Kiev’ orchestrated; 3rd: concert in Lyon 30 June: Aeolian recording session July: concerts in London; genesis of Tzigane; records Pavane ‘Oiseaux tristes’; 4th: British premiere of Sonata for violin and cello (Mangeot and Mukle); 24th: Ravel back at Montfort l’Amaury 10 August: at Lyons-la-Forêt, stays till 20 September. No visit to Côte Basque this year September: Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré; completes orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition at Lyons-la-Forêt end of September – 1 October: at contemporary French music festival in Amsterdam; La valse, cond. Mengelberg; 29th: at work on Le Grand Meaulnes for piano and orchestra 1 October: Revue musicale published Berceuse and other Fauré testimonials, together with Ravel’s article on Fauré songs; 19th: premiere of Pictures at an Exhibition orchestration (Opéra), cond. Koussevitzky; 30th: Ravel in Milan 1 November: still in Milan; Italian premiere of Berceuse and Sonata for violin and cello; then in Venice, Stresa; 20th: back at Montfort, orchestrates Debussy’s Sarabande December: orchestrates Debussy’s Danse; both published by Jobert, 1923; 13th: Berceuse premiere, at Fauré concert

1923:

end of January: on French committee of International Society for Contemporary Music 23 February: leaves for Basque country; 24th: concert in Pau 4 March: leaves St-Jean-de-Luz; 6th: plays Ma mère l’Oye with Casadesus, accompanies Madeleine Grey, conducts Introduction et Allegro (Salle Gaveau); 18th: performance of Sarabande and Danse, Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Paray (Salle Gaveau) [March:] Ravel begins Sonata for violin and piano 2 April: leaves for Italy; 8th: in Rome; 12th: in London; 14th: conducts Ma mère l’Oye and La valse in Queen’s Hall; in London until c. 24th, when he goes to Brussels; 26th: Festival Ravel 1 June: Premiere of Roussel’s Padmâvatî, preceded by L’heure espagnole; 21st: attends Les noces

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396

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RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

probably sometime in this year Mme Reveleau arrives at Le Belvédère 3 September: arrives St-Jean-de-Luz October: conducting in Amsterdam, The Hague, Haarlem; then back in London (staying in Holland Park); 18th: conducts second Maurice Ravel concert in Queen’s Hall 12 November: back at Montfort; 16th: leaves for Rotterdam, conducting Winter: begins Ronsard à son âme; orchestrates Hebrew Chant populaire 1924

at some point in 1924, contract signed with Gunsbourg for L’Enfant: January: Ronsard à son âme and orchestration of Hebrew Chant populaire completed 11 February: private premieres of Ronsard à son âme chez Durand, then chez Marcelle Gerar; 18th: premiere of Ravel’s orchestrations of Debussy’s Sarabande and Danse, Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Paray (Salle Gaveau) 21 April: arrives London, remains until 27th; 26th: Festival Ravel: Ronsard à son âme (Gerar and Ravel), Tzigane (d’Aranyi, Gil-Marchex); conducts recording of Introduction et Allegro; 28th: travels directly to Madrid (first visit to Spain) 5 May: conducts his Debussy transcriptions in Madrid; 7th: Gerar gives French premiere of Ronsard à son âme, SMI (Salle Gaveau); 9th: Ravel in St-Jean-de-Luz; 16th: leaves St-Jeande-Luz (last visit till 1 August 1927) for Barcelona; 18th: Festival Ravel in Barcelona; 20th: at concert of Orfeo Catala; then leaves and passes through Paris at midnight on the 21st, on the way to Brussels; 22nd: accompanies Germaine Sanderson in Ronsard à son âme July: orchestrates Tzigane (Durand); resumes work on L’Enfant et les sortilèges for Monte Carlo 15 October: Dushkin and Webster premiere Tzigane at SMI (Salle Gaveau); 8th: Fauré’s funeral at the Madeleine; 30th: premiere of Tzigane orchestration, d’Aranyi, cond. Pierné 21 December: conducts La valse at Théâtre du Châtelet, Concerts Colonne; delivers L’Enfant to Gunsbourg by the end of the year, or shortly after

1925

16 March: L’Enfant rehearsals in Monte Carlo; 20th: dress rehearsal; 21st: premiere April: Special Ravel number of the Revue musicale; 27th: leaves for London; performance of ‘Aoua!’ July: appointed Associate Member of Belgian Académie des Beaux-Arts, in place of Fauré; 31st: planning operetta Summer: corrects proofs of orchestral score of L’Enfant et les sortilèges; no visit this year to St-Jean-de-Luz 24 August: to seaside, St-Quay-Portrieux, stays with the Delages; 31st: leaves for Montfort November: three days in Lorraine

1926

January–March: Concerts in Germany, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, Belgium, with Francescatti; 28th: concert in Hamburg; 29th: arrives Copenhagen 1 February: Paris premiere of L’Enfant et les sortilèges, preceded by The Barber of Seville (Opéra-Comique); 2nd: Copenhagen, Ravel conducts Mozart Symphony no. 40; 4th: leaves Copenhagen for Oslo; 11th: conducts in Stockholm; Brussels premiere of L’Enfant; 14th: to London; 24th: to Glasgow, Edinburgh; accompanies Francescatti early March: back in Paris; 18th: returns to Montfort April: completes Chansons madécasses (Durand); 23rd: telephone installed in Le Belvédère (89 Montfort l’Amaury) 4 May: takes on Rosenthal as pupil; 8th: Chansons madécasses premiere in Rome 13 June: Chansons madécasses performance, Salle Erard Summer: stays in Montfort, working on Violin Sonata 31 August: has been to Delages at Saint-Quay-Portrieux 2 October: first staging of La valse, Antwerp; 15th: Festival Ravel, SMI 12 November: leaves Montfort for Switzerland; 19th: Lausanne, Festival Ravel; 20th: in Berne, arriving 21st in Lyon for Shéhérazade with Grey; 25th: in Geneva for all-Ravel concert on 26th; leaving c. 28th early December: returns to Montfort with a cold!

1927

18 January: arrangements for American tour February: Rêves; 27th: in Edinburgh for performance of Trio 19 March: Rêves performed by Bathori and Ravel, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier May: completes Violin Sonata; ‘Fanfare’ for L’éventail de Jeanne; 24th: Ravel leaves Montfort for Paris; 30th: Violin Sonata performed by Enesco and Ravel, Concerts Durand (Salle Erard)

RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

397

June: Quartet recorded by International String Quartet; 1st: premieres Violin Sonata with Claude Lévy, SMI (Salle Gaveau); 16th: L’éventail performance chez Dubost 1 August: in St-Jean-de-Luz until 26 September, at 9 rue Tourasse with piano 1 October: in Amsterdam; 2nd: concert at Concertgebouw; 4th: back in Montfort; 14th: records in London for Brunswick; 18th: new Salle Pleyel inaugurated: Ravel conducts La valse, Stravinsky Firebird 15 December: Pierrot performed by Freund, cond. Schoenberg, SMI (Salle Pleyel); 16th: Chantecler banquet in Ravel’s honour; 28th: Ravel sails from Le Havre on S.S. France 1928

4 January: disembarks at New York for American tour 21 April: sails at midnight from New York on S.S. Paris; 27th: arrives Le Havre Early summer: sketches orchestration of Albéniz ‘Rondeña’ 8 June: Festival Ravel, SMI (Salle Gaveau), Ravel present; 10th: ‘L’Impromptu de Montfort’ end of June – 15 July: Ravel at 9 rue Tourasse, St-Jean-de-Luz July–October: Boléro (Fandango): (Durand, 1929) 6 October: rendezvous at Aeolian Company with Roland-Manuel: Esquisse autobiographique; 15th: finishes Boléro; to London for concert at Aeolian Hall on 19th; 23rd: to Oxford for honorary D. Mus. 6 November: leaves for concerts in Spain with Madeleine Grey and Claude Lévy; nine cities in 18 days; most of concerts in Portugal cancelled 4 December: attends last perf of Boléro that evening; 6th: leaves for ISCM jury in Geneva; then 5 or 6 days in St-Jean-de-Luz

1929

January: spends first week in bed with cold; 12th: in London 9 February: L’heure premiere at La Scala, Milan; end of the month: also to Austria and Switzerland; travels from Paris to Vienna (conducts Boléro and La valse), to Geneva, back to Vienna (conducts Boléro and La valse), back to Paris 4 March: Premiere of L’Eventail de Jeanne at Opéra; published by Heugel; 7th: replaces Messager on Conseil supérieur de l’enseignement du Conservatoire; 14th: Vienna premiere of L’Enfant [March–April:] concerts in England, Switzerland, Austria; begins two piano concertos; orchestrates Menuet antique 23 May: Ida Rubinstein production of La valse, Opéra July: visit to St-Jean-de-Luz; 26th leaves St-Jean-de-Luz; inauguration of Conservatoire américain at Fontainebleau, Festival Ravel 19 August: Diaghilev dies 8 September: leaves Paris for St-Jean-de-Luz; 11th: Ravel festival in Biarritz [late October:] returns to Montfort [?December:] begins Left Hand Concerto; 20th: at work on both concertos; ideas for Jeanne d’Arc; Boléro published (Durand)

1930

8 January: Coppola records Boléro in Ravel’s presence, and 9th: Ravel records Boléro, both with Orchestre Lamoureux; 11th–12th: conducts Orchestre Lamoureux in premiere of Menuet antique; Menuet antique recorded by Orchestre Lamoureux, cond. Wolff 6 April: conducts Boléro, accompanies Chansons madécasses (Madeleine Grey), Concerts Colonne 4 May: Toscanini conducts Boléro at Opéra at start of NYPO tour 21 August: Ravel arrives St-Jean-de-Luz; 24th: inauguration of Quai Maurice Ravel at Ciboure; c. 30: back at Montfort, completes Left Hand Concerto 19 September: US premiere of L’Enfant in San Francisco; 24th: finishing orchestration of Left Hand Concerto December: Leyritz decorates apartment for Ravel, 16bis de la rue Chevallier, Levallois

1931

completes G major Concerto (Durand, 1932) 24 February: attends French premiere of Symphony of Psalms, cond. Stravinsky March: present at Ravel concert in Brussels; meets Respighi; Delage drives him to Monte Carlo for a rest 25 June: La valse performed by Ballets Rubinstein 8 July: same production in London. Ravel conducts La valse and Boléro; 9th: returns to Montfort

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398

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RAVEL CHRONOLOGY

November: under doctor’s orders to rest; injections of serum; Left Hand Concerto published (Durand); 11th: G major Concerto delivered to Marguerite Long 1932

5 January: Wittgenstein premieres Left Hand Concerto, Vienna; 14th: Long premieres G major Concerto, Concerts Lamoureux, cond. Ravel January–May: Long and Ravel tour G major Concerto 25 February: British premiere of G major Concerto, Marguerite Long and RPO (Queen’s Hall) May: rests in Basque country, sketches Morgiane, begins Don Quichotte à Dulcinée; 21st: Calvet Quartet play String Quartet: last Ravel music at SMI 16–17 August: arrives in St-Jean-de-Luz; 28th: Festival Ravel at St-Sébastien 8 October: taxi accident

1933

17 January: Paris premiere of Left Hand Concerto, Wittgenstein and Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, cond. Ravel 12 February: Ravel and Rosenthal conduct all-Ravel programme at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées 6 April: finished Don Quichotte (Durand, 1934); beginning Morgiane 23 May: conducts Boléro and G major Conc (Long) at Casino du Havre Summer: health takes turn for the worse; at Le Touquet chez Meyer November: conducts Boléro and G major Concerto: last public performance

1934

6 February: leaves for Swiss clinic at Mont Pélerin above Vevey; orchestrates Don Quichotte (Durand) 23 February: Paramount release film Bolero (Lombard, Raft) 30 March: Delages join him at Vevey April: to Rueil-Malmaison clinic at end of month 1 December: Don Quichotte performed by Singher, Orchestre Colonne, cond. Paray

1935

13 February: Vienna premiere of L’heure; 17th: premiere of Ronsard orchestration, Singher, Orchestre Pasdeloup, cond. Coppola February–March: tour of Spain and N Africa with Leyritz 7 March: sixtieth birthday 20 May: attends Dukas’s funeral August: final visit to St-Jean-de-Luz; second tour of Spain with Leyritz

1936

health deteriorates further February: consults Dr Alajouanine at Salpêtrière 21 March: concert premiere of Menuet pompeux, Orchestre Pasdeloup, cond. Wolff April–May: in Lausanne

1937

March: coaches Février in Left Hand Concerto for 19th concert with Munch November: attends last concert: Daphnis, Orchestre national, cond. Inghelbrecht; consults Dr Thierry de Martel, who refuses to operate 17 December: brain operation performed by Dr Clovis Vincent; Ravel recovers temporarily; 19th: falls into coma; 28th: Ravel dies at 3.30am; 30th: funeral; buried in Levallois cemetery with family

1939

2 May: Florence premiere of L’Enfant 17 May: Opéra premiere of L’Enfant

1941

29 December: Boléro performed at Opéra, choreography by Lifar, decor by Leyritz

1960

5 April: death of Edouard Ravel

Catalogue of works

In each case the three dates are those of composition/first public performance/publication. I BALLETS AND OPERAS L’heure espagnole (comédie musicale in one act) Ma mère l’Oye (Ballet: see also II and III) Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs (Ballet, based on Valses nobles et sentimentales: also II and III) Daphnis et Chloé (Choreographic symphony in one act and three parts) Le tombeau de Couperin (Ballet: see also IIand III) La valse (Choreographic poem: see also II) L’Enfant et les sortilèges (fantaisie lyrique in two parts) ‘Fanfare’ (Ravel’s contribution to L’éventail de Jeanne) Boléro (Ballet: see also II)

1907–9/1911/1911 1911/1912/1912 1912/1912/1912 1909–12/1912/1913 1919/1920/1919 1919–20/1929/1921 1920–5/1925/1925 1927/1929/1929 1928/1928/1929

II ORCHESTRAL WORKS AND CONCERTOS Ouverture de Shéhérazade ‘Une barque sur l’océan’ (see also III) Rapsodie espagnole Pavane pour une Infante défunte (see also III) Ma mère l’Oye (see also I and III) Valses nobles et sentimentales ‘Alborada del gracioso’ (see also III) Le tombeau de Couperin (see also I and III) La valse (see also I) Tzigane (see also IV) Boléro (see also I) Menuet antique (see also III) Concerto pour la main gauche Concerto pour piano et orchestre

1898/1898/1975 1906/1907/1950 1907–8/1908/1908 1910/1911/1910 1911/?/1912 1912/1914/1912 1918/1919/1923 1919/1920/1919 1919–20/1920/1921 1924/1924/1924 1928/1930/1929 1929/1930/1930 1929–30/1932/1931 1929–31/1932/1932

III PIANO MUSIC (for solo piano, unless otherwise indicated) Sérénade grotesque Menuet antique (see also II) Sites auriculaires (two pianos) La parade Pavane pour une Infante défunte (see also II) Jeux d’eau Sonatine Menuet

c. 1893/1975/1975 1895/1898/1898 1895–7/1898/1975 c.1898/?/2008 1899/1902/1900 1901/1902/1902 1903–5/1906/1905 1904/?/2008

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400

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CATALOGUE OF WORKS

Miroirs Noctuelles Oiseaux tristes Une barque sur l’océan (see also II) Alborada del gracioso (see also II) La vallée des cloches Gaspard de la nuit Ondine Le gibet Scarbo Ma mère l’oye (see also I and II) (piano duet) Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant Petit Poucet Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête Le jardin féerique Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn Valses nobles et sentimentales (see also I and II) Prélude A la manière de . . . Borodine Chabrier Le tombeau de Couperin (see also I and II) Prélude Fugue Forlane Rigaudon Menuet Toccata Frontispice (two pianos, five hands)

1904–5/1906/1906

1908/1909/1909

1908–10/1910/1910

1909/1911/1909 1911/1911/1911 1913/1913/1913 1913/1913/1914 1914–17/1919/1918

1918/?/1919 and 1975

IV CHAMBER MUSIC Sonate pour piano et violon Quatuor (String Quartet) Introduction et Allegro (for harp accompanied by string quartet, flute and clarinet) Trio (for violin, cello and piano) Sonate pour violon et violoncelle Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré (for violin and piano) Tzigane – Rapsodie de concert (for violin and piano, with or without luthéal attachment; see also II) Sonate pour violon et piano

1897/1975/1975 1902–3/1904/1904 1905/1907/1906 1914/1915/1915 1920–2/1922/1922 1922/1922/1922 1924/1924/1924 1923–7/1927/1927

V SONGS AND CHORAL MUSIC (songs for voice and piano, unless otherwise indicated) Ballade de la Reine morte d’aimer (Roland de Marès) Un grand sommeil noir (Paul Verlaine) Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit (Verlaine) Chansons corses (chorus and ensemble) Sainte (Stéphane Mallarmé) Chanson du rouet (Leconte de Lisle) Si morne! (Emile Verhaeren) Epigrammes de Clément Marot D’Anne qui me jecta de la neige D’Anne jouant de l’espinette

1893/1975/1975 1895/?/1953 1894–5/?/unpub. 1895/1896/unpub. 1896/1907/1907 1898/1975/1975 1898/1975/1975 1896–9/1900/1900

CATALOGUE OF WORKS

Callirhoé (Euge`ne Adénis, cantata fragment for Prix de Rome) Myrrha (Fernand Beissier: entry for the Prix de Rome) Sémiramis (cantata fragment for Prix de Rome) Alcyone (Eugène and Edouard Adénis: entry for the Prix de Rome) Alyssa (Marguerite Coiffier: entry for the Prix de Rome) (all three of these entries are written for three soloists and orchestra) Manteau de fleurs (Paul Gravollet) Shéhérazade (Tristan Klingsor) (for voice and orchestra) (for voice and piano) Asie La fluˆte enchantée L’indifférent Cinq mélodies populaires grecques 1904–6/1905–6/1906 Chanson de la mariée Là-bas, vers l’église Quel galant m’est comparable Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques Tout gai (nos. 1 and 5 orch. by Ravel;nos. 2, 3 and 4 by Manuel Rosenthal) Noël des jouets (Ravel) Histoires naturelles (Jules Renard) La paon Le grillon Le cygne Le martin-pêcheur La pintade Vocalise-Etude en forme de Habanera Les grands vents venus d’outremer (Henri de Régnier) Sur l’herbe (Paul Verlaine) Tripatos Chants populaires Chanson espagnole Chanson française Chanson italienne Chanson hébraïque (orch. 1923–4) Chanson écossaise Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (for voice, piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, string quartet and piano) (for voice and piano) Soupir Placet futile Surgi de la croupe et du bond Deux mélodies hébraïques Kaddisch L’énigme éternelle Trois chansons pour chœur mixte sans accompagnement (Ravel) Nicolette Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis Ronde Ronsard à son âme (for voice and orchestra, by Rosenthal) Chansons madécasses (Evariste Parny) (for voice, flute, cello and piano)

401

1900/unperf./unpub. 1901/1901/1990 1902/1902/unpub. 1902/1902/1990 1903/1903/1990 1903/?/1906 1903/1904/1914 1903/?/1904

1905/1906/1914 orch. 1906; re-orch. 1913 1906/1907/1907

1907/?/1909 1907/1907/1907 1907/1907/1907 1909/?/1938 and 1975 1910/1910/1911

1910/1910/1975 1913/1914/1914 1913/?/1914

1914/1914/1915 1914–15/1917/1916

1923–4/1924/1924 1934/1935/unpub. 1925–6/1926/1926

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

402

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

CATALOGUE OF WORKS

Nahandove Aoua! Il est doux . . . Rêves (Léon-Paul Fargue) Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (Paul Morand) (voice and orchestra) Chanson romanesque Chanson épique Chanson à boire

1927/1927/1927 1932–3/?/1934 1932–3/1934/1934

VI ORCHESTRATIONS AND EDITIONS OF OTHER COMPOSERS’ WORKS Delius: Margot la Rouge (opera in one act). Vocal score made by Ravel in 1902 Debussy: Nocturnes, transcribed for two pianos Debussy: Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune, transcribed for piano duet Rimsky-Korsakov: fragments of Antar, re-orchestrated by Ravel Satie: Preludes to Fils des étoiles, orchestrated by Ravel, lost Musorgsky: fragments of the opera Khovanshchina, orchestrated by Ravel Schumann: Carnaval, four movements orchestrated by Ravel (remainder lost) Chopin: Les Sylphides, piano music orchestrated by Ravel (one page extant) Mendelssohn: Complete works for piano and both piano concertos edited by Ravel (Durand) Chabrier: Menuet pompeux, orchestrated by Ravel Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition orchestrated by Ravel Debussy: Sarabande and Danse, orchestrated by Ravel

1909/1911/1909 1910/?/1910 1910/1910/unpub. 1911/? 1913/1913/unpub. ?1914/?1975/1975 1914/1975/unpub. 1915–17 1919/1919/1937 1922/1922/1929 1922/1923/1923

VII OTHER MAJOR PROJECTS: NOTIONAL, ABANDONED OR INCOMPLETE Olympia, opera on story ‘Der Sandmann’ by E.T.A. Hoffmann Symphony La cloche engloutie, opera on novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, libretto by André Ferdinand Hérold Zazpiak-Bat, piano concerto on Basque themes Saint François d'Assise, oratorio on text by Ricciotto Canudo A Midsummer Night's Dream, collaboration with Varèse and others Le grand Meaulnes, concerto, variously for piano or cello and orchestra, inspired by Alain-Fournier's novel Le Zoo, ballet on scenario by Francesco Cangiullo unnamed operetta on a libretto by Mayrargues Jeanne d'Arc, oratorio based on novel by Joseph Delteil Icare/Dédale 39, orchestral work unnamed operetta on libretto by Fernand Bousquet Le chapeau chinois, operetta on play by Franc-Nohain Morgiane, opera based on A Thousand and One Nights

1898 1905 1906–?1914 1906–? 1908 1914 1916–? 1918 1925 1929– 1930 1931 1933 1933–

Select bibliography

1. 2. 3. 4.

On Ravel in general On specific works by Ravel (in chronological order of works) On related subjects and people On Ravel’s final illness (in chronological order)

1. On Ravel in general Ackere, Jules van. Maurice Ravel. Brussels: Elsevier, 1957 Anon. ‘The New French School’, The Scotsman, 23 January 1911 — ‘M. Maurice Ravel: Noted Composer’s Brief Speech’, The Scotsman, 25 January 1929 Archives Roland-Manuel. Catalogue of sale, 24 March 2000. Paris: Thierry Bodin Bathori, Jane. ‘Les musiciens que j’ai connus’, Recorded Sound, 1/6 (1963), pp. 149–51 Bernier, René. ‘Un entretien avec Maurice Ravel’, Voix, 5 (1 April 1931) Beucler, André. Poet of Paris: Twenty Years with Léon-Paul Fargue, trans Geoffrey Sainsbury. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955 Brès, Sophie. ‘Le scandale Ravel de 1905’, Revue internationale de musique française, 14 (Les musiciens français à Rome, June 1984), pp. 41–50 Brody, Elaine. ‘Viñes in Paris: New Light on Twentieth-Century Performance Practice’, in Edward H. Clinkscale and Claire Brook (eds), A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein. Maesteg: Pendragon Press, 1977, pp. 45–62 Bruyr, José. Maurice Ravel. Paris: Plon, 1950 Cahiers Maurice Ravel, nos 1–13 (1985–) Calvocoressi, M. D. ‘Maurice Ravel’, Musical Times, 54 (1913), pp. 785–87 — ‘When Ravel composed to order’, Music & Letters, 22/1 (January 1941), pp. 54–59 — ‘Ravel’s letters to Calvocoressi’, Musical Quarterly, 27, January 1941, 1–19 Catalogue de l’œuvre de Maurice Ravel. Paris: Fondation Maurice Ravel, 1954 Chalupt, René, and Marcelle Gerar (eds). Ravel au miroir de ses lettres. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1956 Cocteau, Jean. ‘Maurice Ravel’, in De la musique avant toute chose. Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1929, p. 20 Coeuroy, André. ‘Maurice Ravel’, in La musique française moderne. Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1922, pp. 33–38 Cornejo, Manuel, and Dimitra Diamantopoulou. ‘Maurice Ravel et Pierre Lalo, une lettre oubliée de Maurice Ravel’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 12 (2009), pp. 22–43 Darrobers, Jean-Noël. ‘Les ancêtres maternels de Maurice Ravel’. Cahiers de l’IRHMES, 4 (1997), pp. 139–55 Delage, Roger. ‘Ravel and Chabrier’, Musical Quarterly, 61/4 (October 1975), pp. 546–52 Delahaye, Michel. ‘Neuf lettres de Maurice Ravel à Marguerite Baugnies de Saint-Marceaux’, RIMF, 24 (Maurice Ravel hier et aujourd’hui, November 1987), pp. 10–37 — ‘Symbolisme et Impressionnisme dans “Soupir” . . .’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 4 (1989), pp. 30–58 — ‘La gestation des Trois Mallarmé (printemps-été 1913)’ Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 6 (1998), pp. 67–80 — ‘Maurice Ravel et les Grands Prix du disque’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 7 (2000), pp. 103–111 — ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à la famille Gaudin de Saint-Jean-de-Luz’ (3 parts), Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 9 (2006), pp. 13–58; 10 (2007), pp. 13–58; 11 (2008), pp. 6–55

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Demuth, Norman. Ravel. London: Dent, 1947 Devaise, Georges. ‘Raveliana’, Gringoire, 14 January 1938 Dunfee, Norman. Maurice Ravel in America – 1928. DMA diss. Kansas City: University of Missouri, 1980 Dutilleux, Henri. ‘L’ombre d’un géant’, Le monde de la musique, 103 (September 1987), pp. 108–10 Falla, Manuel de. ‘Notes sur Ravel’, trans. Roland-Manuel, Revue muiscale, 189 (March 1939), pp. 81–6 Fargue, Léon-Paul. Maurice Ravel. Paris: Domat, 1949 Faure, Henriette. Mon maître Maurice Ravel. Paris: ATP, 1978 Février, Jacques, ‘Les exigences de Ravel’, Revue internationale de musique, 1/5 (April 1939), pp. 893–4 Fichman, Niv and Larry Weinstein (directors). Ravel (film). Toronto: Rhombus Media, 1987 Gallois, Jean. ‘Ravel et nous’, Diapason, 195 (March 1975), pp. 12–15 Goss, Madeleine. Bolero: The Life of Maurice Ravel. New York: Henry Holt, 1940 Goubault, Christian. Maurice Ravel: le jardin féerique. Paris: Minerve, 2004 Gubisch, Nina. ‘Le journal inédit de Ricardo Viñes’, RIMF 1/2 (June 1980), pp. 154–248 — Le journal de Ricardo Viñes [provisional title]. Montreal: Presses universitaires de Montréal, forthcoming (2010) Harding, Charles. ‘Maurice Ravel Away from his Music’, Musical Courier, 20 May 1933 Harris, Donald. ‘Ravel visits the Verein: Alban Berg’s Report’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 3/1 (March 1979), pp. 75–82 Holloway, Robin. ‘Artificial by nature’ and ‘Ravel’s struggles’, On Music: Essays and Diversions. Brinkworth: Claridge Press, 2003, pp. 271–6 Hopkins, G.W. ‘(Joseph) Maurice Ravel’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. XV. London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 609–21 Hugo, Valentine. ‘Trois souvenirs sur Ravel’, Revue musicale, 210 (January 1952), pp. 137–46 Ivry, Benjamin. Maurice Ravel: A Life. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000 James, Burnett. Ravel. London: Omnibus, 1987 Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Ravel. Paris: Seuil, 1956. English edition: trans. Margaret Crosland. London: Calder, 1959 Jean-Aubry, Georges. ‘Maurice Ravel on His New Works’, Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 1924 — ‘Maurice Ravel’, The Chesterian, 19 (1938), pp. 65–9 Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène. Ravel et nous. Geneva: Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1945 Kaminsky, Peter. ‘Of children, princesses, dreams and isomorphisms: text-music transformations in Ravel’s vocal works’, Music Analysis, 19/1 (2000), pp. 29–67 Kelly, Barbara L. ‘Ravel, (Joseph) Maurice’, in Deane L. Root (ed.), Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com Klingsor, Tristan. ‘Maurice Ravel’, in De la musique avant toute chose. Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1929, p. 21 Koechlin, Charles. ‘Maurice Ravel’, ed. François Lesure, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 1 (1985), pp. 43–58 Lalo, Pierre. De Rameau à Ravel. Paris: Albin Michel, 1947, pp. 196–201 Lamaze, David. Le Coeur de l’horloge: une dédicace cachée dans la musique de Ravel. Available online via www.thebookedition.com (2008) Larner, Gerald. Maurice Ravel. London: Phaidon, 1996 Le Bordays, Christiane. ‘L’Espagne ravélienne’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 2 (1986), pp. 44–61 Léon, Georges. Maurice Ravel. Paris: Seghers, 1964 Lesure, François. ‘ “L’Affaire” Debussy-Ravel – lettres inédites’, in Anna Amalie Abert and Wilhelm Pfannkuch (eds), Festschrift Friedrich Blume. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963, pp. 231–4 — ‘Ravel et Debussy’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 5 (1992), pp. 27–33 Long, Marguerite, Au piano avec Maurice Ravel, Paris, Julliard, 1971. English edition: At the piano with Ravel, trans. Olive Senior-Ellis. London: Dent, 1973 Machabey, Armand. Maurice Ravel. Paris: Richard-Masse, 1947 Marnat, Marcel. Maurice Ravel. Paris: Fayard, 1986, rev. 1995 — ‘L’image publique de Maurice Ravel (1920–1937)’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 3 (1987), pp. 27–52 — ‘Affronts, outrages, avanies: le Prix de Rome’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 4 (1989), pp. 11–29 — ‘Ravel et Stravinsky’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 5 (1992), pp. 35–53 — ‘Ravel/Albéniz: une mise et six donnes’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 6 (1998), pp. 7–12 — ‘Ravel et sa Légion d’honneur’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 7 (2000), pp. 13–18

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405

— (ed.) Ravel: Souvenirs de Manuel Rosenthal, recueillis par Marcel Marnat. Paris: Hazan, 1995 Maurice Ravel: Catalogue de l’exposition Ravel, ed. François Lesure and Jean-Michel Nectoux. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1975 Maurice Ravel, 1875–1975. Paris: SACEM, 1975 Maurice Ravel au XXe Siècle: Table Ronde Internationale, 13 November 1975, ed. Danièle Pistone. Paris: Comité national des commémorations musicales, 1976. Mawer, Deborah. The Ballets of Maurice Ravel. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006 — (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ravel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 Merlet, Dominique. ‘Conseils pour interpréter Ravel’, La lettre du musicien: Piano, 20 (hors-série annuel, 2006/2007), pp. 89–91 Morant, Philippe. ‘Les ancêtres paternels de Maurice Ravel, ou Chronique d’une famille savoyard’, Cahier de l’IHRMES, 3 (1997), pp. 107–137 Myers, Rollo. Ravel. London: Duckworth, 1960 Narbaitz, Pierre. Maurice Ravel: Un orfèvre basque, Maurice Ravel. Anglet [Côte Basque]: Académie internationale Maurice Ravel, 1975. Nectoux, Jean-Michel. ‘Ravel/Fauré et les débuts de la Société Musicale Indépendante’, Revue de musicologie, 61/2 (1975), pp. 295–318 — ‘Maurice Ravel et sa bibliothèque musicale’, Fontes Artis Musicae, 24 (1977), pp. 199–206 Nichols, Roger. Ravel. London: Dent, 1977 — (ed.) Ravel Remembered. London: Faber, 1987 Onnen, Frank. Maurice Ravel. Stockholm: Continental Book Co., 1947 Orenstein, Arbie. ‘Maurice Ravel’s Creative Process’, Musical Quarterly, 53/4 (October 1967), pp. 467–81 — ‘Some Unpublished Music and Letters by Maurice Ravel’, Music Forum, 3 (1973), pp. 291–334 — Ravel, Man and Musician, New York, Columbia University Press, 1975, rev. 1991 — ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel aux Casadesus’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 1 (1985), pp. 112–40 — Maurice Ravel: Lettres, Ecrits, Entretiens. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. English edition: A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, translations by Dennis Collins. New York: Columbia UP, 1990 — ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Marcelle Gerar’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 6 (1998), pp. 21–48 — ‘La correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Lucien Garban’ (2 parts), Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 7 (2000), pp. 19–68; 8 (2004), pp. 9–89 Pasler, Jann. ‘Stravinsky and the Apaches’, Musical Times, 123 (1982), pp. 403–07 Perlemuter, Vlado, and Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. Ravel d’après Ravel. Lausanne: Editions du Cervin, 1957; 5/1970. Augmented re-edition: Ravel d’après Ravel, suivi de Rencontres avec Vlado Perlemuter, ed. Jean Roy. Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1989. English edition (from the above 1970 volume): Ravel according to Ravel, trans. Frances Tanner, ed. Harold Taylor. London: Kahn & Averill, 1990 Perret, Carine. ‘L’adoption du jazz par Darius Milhaud et Maurice Ravel’, Revue de musicologie, 89/2 (2003), pp. 336–9 Petit, Pierre. Ravel. Paris: Hachette, 1970 Pistone, Daniele. ‘Les conditions historiques de l’exotisme musical français’, RIMF, 6 (L’exotisme musical français, November 1981), pp. 11–22 Poulenc, Francis. ‘Le Cœur de Maurice Ravel’, La nouvelle revue française, 1 January 1941, pp. 237–40 Prunières, Henry. ‘Maurice Ravel’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung, 74/1 (1 January 1934), pp. 8–13 — ‘Maurice Ravel à travers sa correspondance’, Revue musicale, 188 (January/February 1939), pp. 1–7 — ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel et documents inédits’, Revue de musicologie, 38 (July 1956), pp. 49–53 ‘Ravel’. Musical (Revue du Théâtre musical de Paris Châtelet), June 1987 Revue musicale, La (ReM), 6/6 (April 1925) and 19/187 (December 1938): Special Ravel numbers; articles cited individually in endnotes) Roland-Manuel. Maurice Ravel et son œuvre. Paris: Durand, 1914 — ‘Maurice Ravel’, Revue musicale, 2 (1921), pp. 1–21 — ‘Maurice Ravel et la jeune musique française’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 2 April 1927, pp. 1–2

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406

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— Maurice Ravel et son œuvre dramatique. Paris: Les Editions Musicales de la Librairie de France, 1928 — [A la gloire de] Ravel. Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1938 — ‘Maurice Ravel a` travers sa correspondance’, Revue Musicale, 188, January-February 1939, 1–7 — ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel et documents inédits’, Revue de musicologie, 38, July 1956, 49–53 Rosenthal, Manuel. Satie, Ravel, Poulenc. Madras and New York: Hanuman Books, 1987 — Musique adorable. Colombes: Editions Hexacorde, 1994 Rousseau-Plotto, Etienne. Ravel: portraits basques. Anglet: Atlantica-Séguier, 2004 Roy, Jean. ‘Lettres de Maurice Ravel à Hélène Kahn-Casella et à Alfredo Casella’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 1 (1985), pp. 59–111 — ‘Chronologie de Maurice Ravel’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 1 (1985), pp. 9–18; 10 photos of Le Belvédère, pp. 21–26 — ‘Correspondance adressée par Maurice Ravel à Manuel de Falla’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 3 (1987), pp. 7–25 — (ed.) Maurice Ravel: Lettres à Roland-Manuel et à sa famille. Quimper: Calligrammes, 1986 Sanson, David. Maurice Ravel. Arles: Actes Sud, 2005 Simeone, Nigel. ‘Mother Goose and Other Golden Eggs: Durand Editions of Ravel as Reflected in the Firm’s Printing Records’, Brio, 35/2 (1998), pp. 58–79 Souillard, Christine. Ravel. Paris: Editions Jean-Paul Gisserot, 1998 Stuckenschmidt, Hans-Heinz. Maurice Ravel: Variationen über Person und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966. English edition: Maurice Ravel: Variations on his Life and Work, trans Samuel R. Rosenbaum. London: Calder and Boyars, 1969 Szymanowski, Karol. ‘Maurice Ravel’ (introduction of 1925), Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 2 (1986), pp. 41–3 Szmolyan, Walter. ‘Maurice Ravel in Wien’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 30/3 (March 1975), pp. 89–104 Telles, Anna. ‘Pedro de Freitas Branco et Ravel: une analyse critique de quelques enregistrements’, Ostinato rigore, 24 (Maurice Ravel, 2005), pp. 243–260 Vuillermoz, Emile. ‘Ravel à l’honneur’, Candide, 30 August 1930 — et al. Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers. Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1939 Wahl, Elisabeth. Maurice Ravel à Montfort-L’Amaury. Versailles: Comité départementale du tourisme des Yvelines, 1987 2. On specific works by Ravel Lalo, Pierre. ‘Concert à la Société nationale de musique: M. Ravel’, Le Temps, 13 June 1899 Marnold, Jean. ‘Un Quatuor de Maurice Ravel’, Mercure de France, April 1904, pp. 249–51 — ‘Shéhérazade’, Mercure de France, July 1904, pp. 241–3 — ‘Le Scandale du Prix de Rome,’ Mercure de France, 1 June 1905, pp. 466–9; 15 June, pp.155–8; 1 July, pp. 178–80 Lalo, Pierre. ‘Le Concours du Prix de Rome en 1905: Le cas de M. Ravel’, Le Temps, 11 July 1905 Marnold, Jean. ‘Miroirs’, Mercure musical, 1 February 1906, pp. 121–2 Carraud, Gaston. ‘Une Barque sur l’océan’, La Liberté, 5 February 1907 Timbrell, Charles. ‘Ravel’s Miroirs with Perlemuter’, The Piano Quarterly, 3 (Fall 1980), pp. 50–2 Boutarel, Amédée. ‘Concerts Colonne’ [‘Une Barque’], Le Ménestrel, 9 February 1907 Laloy, Louis. ‘Le Mois – Concerts, Société nationale – Histoires naturelles de Jules Renard, par Maurice Ravel’, Mercure Musical et Bulletin de la SIM, 3 (15 February 1907), pp. 155–7 Calvocoressi, M. D. ‘Les “Histoires naturelles” de M. Ravel et l’imitation Debussyste’, La Grande Revue, 10 May 1907, pp. 508–15 Deane, Basil. ‘Renard, Ravel and the “Histoires naturelles” ’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 1/2 (1964), pp. 177–87 Carraud, Gaston. ‘La Rapsodie espagnole’, La Liberté, 17 March 1908 — ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, La Liberté, 12 January 1909 Laloy, Louis, ‘Société nationale – Gaspard de la nuit’, La Grande Revue, 13 (25 January 1909), pp. 395–6 Bizet, René. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, L’Intransigeant, 17 May 1911 Fauré, Gabriel. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, Le Figaro, 20 May 1911; reprinted in Opinions musicales de Gabriel Fauré, ed. P.-B. Gheusi. Paris: Rieder, 1930, pp. 116–17

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407

Vuillemin, Louis. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, Comoedia, 20 May 1911 Carraud, Gaston. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, La Liberté, 21 May 1911 Lalo, Pierre. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, Le Temps, 28 May 1911 Laloy, Louis. ‘L’Heure espagnole’, La grande revue, 10 June 1911 Vuillermoz, Emile, ‘Les Théâtres – L’Heure espagnole – Thérèse – Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien’, Revue musicale de la SIM, 7 (15 June 1911), pp. 65–70 Chantavoine, Jean, ‘L’Heure espagnole’, La Revue Hebdomadaire, 20 (24 June 1911), pp. 579–80 Anon., ‘L’Heure espagnole’, The Times, 25 July 1919 ‘L’Heure espagnole’, L’Avant-Scène Opéra, 127 (January 1990), pp. 84–113 Huebner, Steven. ‘Laughter: In Ravel’s time’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18/3 (2006), pp. 225–46 Kilpatrick, Emily. ‘The Carbonne Copy: Tracing the première of L’Heure espagnole’, RdM, 95/1 (2009), pp. 97–135 Bizet, René. ‘Ma Mère l’Oye’, L’Intransigeant, 28 January 1912 Revol, Patrick. ‘Maurice Ravel: “Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes” ’ (3 articles), L’éducation musicale, December 2000/February 2001 Carraud, Gaston. ‘Daphnis et Chloé’, La Liberté, 11 June 1912 Lalo, Pierre. ‘Daphnis et Chloé’, Le Temps, 11 June 1912 Vuillemin, Louis. ‘Daphnis et Chloé’, La Lanterne, 21 June 1912 Fokine, Mikhail. Memoirs of a Ballet Master, ed. Anatole Chujoy, trans. Vitale Fokine. London: Constable, 1961 Chailley, Jacques. ‘Une première version inconnue de “Daphnis et Chloé” de Maurice Ravel’, in Mélanges Raymond Lebègue. Paris: Nozet, 1969, pp. 371–5 Cohen-Lévinas, Danielle. ‘Daphnis et Chloé, ou la danse du simulacre’, Musical, 4 (June 1987), pp. 88–95 Morrison, Simon. ‘Consuming the Exotic’, in Lawrence Kramer (ed.), Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 201–25 — ‘The Origins of Daphnis et Chloé (1912)’, 19th-Century Music, 28/1 (Summer 2004) pp. 50–76 Boulez, Pierre. ‘Trajectoires: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg’, Contrepoints, 6 (1949), pp. 122–42; reprinted in Relevés d’apprenti. Paris: Seuil, 1966, pp. 241–64 Gronquist, Robert. ‘Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé’, Musical Quarterly, 64/4 (1978), pp. 507–23 Delahaye, Michel. ‘Symbolisme et impressionisme dans “Soupir”, premier des Trois poèmes de Mallarmé de Maurice Ravel’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 4 (1988–9), pp. 31–58 Newbould, Brian, ‘Ravel’s “Pantoum” ’, Musical Times, 116 (March 1975), pp. 228–31 Roy, Jean. ‘Frontispice’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 1 (1985), pp. 141–4 Lawson, Rex. ‘Maurice Ravel: Frontispice for Pianola’, The Pianola Journal, 2 (1989), pp. 36–8 Benjamin, George. ‘Last dance’, Musical Times, 135 (July 1994), pp. 432–5 Helbing, Volker. ‘L’impression d’un tournoiement fantastique et fatale; Aneignung und Verzerrung in Ravels La Valse’, in Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Christian Thoran, Michael Polth (eds), Individualität in der Musik. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2002, pp. 175–200 Baeck, Eric and Hedwige Baek-Schilders, ‘La création mondiale du ballet La valse de Maurice Ravel à Anvers’, Revue de musicologie, 89/2 (2003) pp. 365–71 Branger, Jean-Christophe. ‘Ravel et la valse’, Ostinato rigore, 24 (Maurice Ravel, 2005), pp. 145–160 Prunières, Henry. ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges à l’Opéra de Monte Carlo’, Revue musicale 6/6 (April 1925), pp. 105–9 Auric, Georges. ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 11 April 1925 Honegger, Arthur. ‘Théâtres de musique: L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Musique et Théâtre, 3 (15 April 1925), p. 5 Roland-Manuel. ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Revue Pleyel, February 1926 Vuillermoz, Emile. ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Excelsior, 3 February 1926 Roland-Manuel. ‘Théâtre de l’opéra-comique – L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Le Ménestrel, 5 February 1926, pp. 60–1 Marnold, Jean. ‘Opéra-Comique: L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, Mercure de France, 186 (15 March 1926), pp. 701–4 Klein, Melanie. ‘Infantile anxiety-situations as reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse’, in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921–1945. London: The Hogarth Press, 1948 Orenstein, Arbie. ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges: Correspondance inédite de Ravel et Colette’, RdM, 52/2 (1966), pp. 215–20 Milner, Christiane. ‘Mélanie Klein et les sortilèges de Colette’, Cahiers Colette, 5 (1981), pp. 36–44

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— Perfect Pitch. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988 Stravinsky, Igor. Chroniques de ma vie, 2 vols. Paris: Les Editions Denoël et Steel, 1935–6; repr. 1962 — Poétique musicale. Paris: J.B. Janin, 1945 — Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, 3 vols. London: Faber, 1982–5 — and Robert Craft. Memories and Commentaries. London: Faber, 1960 Stravinsky, Vera and Robert Craft. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978 Stuckenschmidt, Hans-Heinz. Arnold Schoenberg. London: Calder, 1959 Talbot Rice, Tamara. Tamara: Memoirs of St Petersburg, Paris, Oxford and Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth Talbot Rice. London: John Murray, 1996 Templier, Pierre-Daniel. Erik Satie. Plan de la Tour: Editions d’aujourd’hui, 1975 Thomson, Andrew. Vincent d’Indy and his World. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996 Timbrell, Charles. ‘An interview with Paul Loyonnet’, Journal of the American Liszt Society, 19 (1986), pp. 112–21 Vallas, Léon. Claude Debussy et son temps. Paris: Albin Michel, 1958 Vaughan Williams, Ursula, RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford UP, 1964 Varèse, Louise. A Looking-Glass Diary. London: Eulenburg, 1975 Vivier, Odile. Varèse. Paris: Seuil, 1973 Walsh, Stephen. Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring. London: Cape, 2000 Waters, Robert F. Déodat de Séverac: Musical Identity in Fin de Siècle France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008 Werfel, Alma Mahler. And the Bridge is Love. London: Hutchinson, 1959 Whitworth, Geoffrey. The Art of Nijinsky. London: Chatto & Windus, 1913 Wolff, Stéphane. Un Demi-siècle d’Opéra-Comique (1900–1950). Paris: Bonne, 1953 — L’Opéra au Palais Garnier (1875–1962). Metz: Imprimerie Maisonneuve, 1962; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1983 Wood, Sir Henry. My life of music. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938/1946 Zuckerkandl, Bertha. Österreichische Intime Erinnerungen 1892–1942. Vienna: Amalthea, 1981 4. On Ravel’s final illness (in chronological order) Alajouanine, Théophile. ‘Aphasia and artistic realisation’, Brain, 71/3 (September 1948), pp. 229–41 Kerner, D. ‘Ravels Tod. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 7. Marz 1975’, Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, 117/14 (4 April 1975), pp. 591–6 Cytowic, R. E. ‘Aphasia in Maurice Ravel’, Los Angeles Neurological Society Bulletin, 41 (1976), pp. 109–14 Dalessio, D. J. ‘Maurice Ravel and Alzheimer’s Disease’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 252 (28 December 1984), pp. 3412–13 — ‘Maurice Ravel and Alzheimer’s Disease’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 253 (24–31 May 1985), pp. 2961–2 Wainapel, S. F. ‘To the Editor’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 253 (24–31 May 1985), p. 2962 Amaducci, L. A. and A. Marini, ‘The Ravel D Major Piano Concerto: For the Left Hand or From the Right Brain?’, Neurology, 35, suppl. 1 (1985), pp. 262–3 Henson, R.A. ‘Maurice Ravel’s illness: a tragedy of lost creativity’, British Medical Journal, 296 (4 June 1988), pp. 1585–8 Mahieux, F. and A. Laurent. ‘Les dernières années de Maurice Ravel: hypothèse diagnostique’, in Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale. Paris: Editions techniques, 1988, pp. 23–4 O’Shea, John. Music and Medicine. London: Dent, 1990, pp. 201–9 Mercier, Bernard. Biographie médicale de Maurice Ravel. MD Thesis, Medical Faculty of Bobigny, University of Paris, 1991 — ‘La maladie neurologique de Ravel’, Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 5 (1990–2), pp. 13–26 Sergent, Justine. ‘Music, the brain and Ravel’, Trends in Neuroscience, 16/5 (May 1993), pp. 168–72

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— ‘De la musique au cerveau par l’intermédiaire de Maurice Ravel’, Médecine/Sciences, 9 (1993), pp. 50–8 Baeck, Erik. ‘La mort de Maurice Ravel’, Revue belge de musicologie, 51 (1997), pp. 187–93; reprinted in Cahiers Maurice Ravel, 11 (2008), pp. 56–62 Cybulska, E. ‘Bolero unravelled. A case of musical perseveration’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 21 (1997), pp. 576–7 Baeck, Erik, ‘La maladie neurologique de Maurice Ravel’, Histoire des sciences médicales, 32 (1998), pp. 123–8 — ‘Was Maurice Ravel’s illness a corticobasal degeneration?’, Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery, 98/1 (February 1996), pp. 57–61 Alonso, R. J., and R. M. Pascuzzi. ‘Ravel’s neurological illness’, Seminars in Neurology, 19, Supplement 1 (1999), pp. 53–7 Dubb, A. ‘Musicians’ maladies – of what did they die? Maurice Ravel (1872 [sic] – 1937)’, Adler Museum Bulletin, 25/2 (July 1999), pp. 25–6 Weinstein, Larry. Ravel’s Brain (film). Toronto/Paris: Rhombus Media and Ideal Audience, 2000 Baeck, Erik. ‘Casuspositic met kritische analyse van Maurice Ravels neurologische ziekte’, Verhandelingen Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van Belgie, 63 (2001), pp. 543–60 Ruiz, E. ‘Las amusias. El caso de Ravel y Shelabin’, in Montañes, P. (ed), Cerebro, Arte y Creatividad. Bogotà: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001, pp. 102–12 Amaducci, L., E. Grassi and F. Boller. ‘Maurice Ravel and right-hemisphere musical creativity: influence of disease on his last musical works?’, European Journal of Neurology, 9/1 (January 2002), pp. 75–82 Marins, Elza Marques. ‘Maurice Ravel and right hemisphere creativity’, European Journal of Neurology, 9/3 (May 2002), pp. 320–1 Baeck, Erik, ‘Maurice Ravel and right hemisphere creativity’, European Journal of Neurology, 9/3 (May 2002), p. 321 Grassi, Enrico and François Boller. ‘Maurice Ravel and right hemisphere activity – Reply’, European Journal of Neurology, 9/3 (May 2002), pp. 321–2 Otte, Andreas, Kurt Audenaert and Karina Otte. ‘Did Maurice Ravel have a whiplash syndrome?’, Medical Science Monitor, 9/5 (May 2003), LE9 Warren, Jason. ‘Maurice Ravel’s amusia’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 96/6 (June 2003), pp. 284–7 Otte, Andreas, Pieter de Bondt, Christophe van de Wiele, Kurt Audenaert and Rudi A. Dierckx. ‘The exceptional brain of Maurice Ravel’, Medical Science Monitor, 9/6 (June 2003), RA133–8 Baeck, Erik. ‘The Terminal Illness and Last Compositions of Maurice Ravel’, in Julien Bogousslavsky and François Boller (eds), Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, vol. XIX (Basle: Karger, 2005), pp. 132–40 — ‘The longstanding medical fascination with “le cas Ravel”’, in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 187–208

Index

Abd-el-Krim 274 Adam, Adolphe: Giselle 146 Adaskin, Harry 291, 292 Adénis, Edouard 45, 400 Adénis, Eugène 45, 400 Aeolian Company 197, 216, 236, 237, 240, 241, 283, 289, 295, 395, 397 Aimard, Pierre-Laurent 103, 113 Alain-Fournier [Henri Alban-Fournier] 186, 247 Le grand Meaulnes 186, 247, 272, 283, 306 Alajouanine, Théophile 343, 398 Albéniz, Isaac 28, 30, 294–5, 308, 397 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain 147 Alkan, Charles-Valentin 319 Allen, Hugh 296, 305 Alvar, Louise (Alvar Harding, Louise) 240, 244, 255, 273, 275, 276, 277, 289, 296, 316 Alvar Harding, Charles 296, 356 Alvar Harding, Sigrid 252 Alvi, Alvina 165, 167 American Conservatoire, Fontainebleau 339 Amsterdam 67, 219, 251, 255, 289, 322, 325, 327 Concertgebouw Orchestra 219, 246 Amyot, Jacques 142 Anchochury, Elisabeth 134 Anchochury, Isabelle 133, 134 Anglet 232 Ansermet, Ernest 55, 213, 215, 226, 232, 289, 302, 344 Anthiôme, Eugène 11, 12 Antwerp 210, 281, 282, 322, 328, 396 Apaches, Les 43–4, 51, 57, 59, 72, 108, 114, 115, 145, 158, 164, 179, 202, 218, 258, 274 Apollinaire, Guillaume 196, 352

Aranyi, Jelly d’ 239, 240, 241, 256, 259, 260, 286, 396 Arbós, Enrique 294, 308 Arnaud-Vauchant, Léo 302–3 Arnoux, Alexandre 330 Association Française d’Expansion et d’Echanges Artistiques (AFEEA) 218, 322 Astruc, Gabriel 91, 110, 150, 157, 161, 169 Aubert, Louis 17, 89, 111, 114, 124, 125, 143, 145, 161, 191, 202, 212, 244, 256, 284, 312, 345 Aubry, Pierre 51 Aulnoy, Comtesse d’ [Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville] 113 Auric, Georges 191, 198, 228, 229, 239, 270, 285, 338 Les matelots 273 Bach, Johann Sebastian 48, 297, 352 Baeck, Erik 344 Baguerion-Désormeaux, Sergeant 202 Baker, Josephine 274 Bakst, Léon 142, 144, 230 Balakirev, Mily 10, 25, 43, 103, 139, 141 Ballets russes 109, 118, 141, 168, 209, 224, 229, 240, 246, 253, 273, 393, 394 Ballets suédois 222–3, 228, 229, 233, 395 Banville, Théodore de: Petit traité de poésie française 173 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée 18, 25 Barcelona 260, 262, 396 Bardac, Emma 58 Bardac, Raoul 36, 37, 47, 52, 124, 231, 245 Bartók, Béla 216, 238–9, 250, 261, 293 String Quartet no. 1: 158 Bathori, Jane 51, 80, 90, 99, 108, 139, 156, 163, 191, 202, 264, 273, 274, 277, 284, 294, 329, 330 Baudelaire, Charles 11, 17, 18, 32, 114, 172, 206, 255, 259, 273, 349

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

414

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Bauduin, Urbain 277 Bavouzet, Jean-Efflam 156 Bax, Arnold 161 Bayonne 4, 171, 178, 192, 232, 289 Beaumont, Cyril 165 Beaumont, Etienne de 298 Beethoven, Ludwig van 10, 14, 30, 43, 52, 79, 90, 95, 96, 163, 337, 353, 355 Beissier, Fernand 38 Bellemare, General Carrey de (‘General Bell’): L’Empire, c’est la paix 25 Benecke, Paul 296 Bénédictus, Edouard 43 Bénédictus, Mme 68 Benjamin, George 212–3, 355 Bennett, Arnold 115, 123, 161, 217 Benois, Alexandre 109, 142, 159, 170, 298, 308, 316 Benoist-Méchin, Jacques 208 Berg, Alban 214, 218, 219, 221, 222, Bériot, Charles de 12, 13, 14, 16 Bériot, Charles-Auguste 12 Berkeley, Lennox 259, 296, 297, 345 Berlioz, Hector 7, 62, 157, 304 Benvenuto Cellini 157 La damnation de Faust 104 Les Troyens 229 Bertrand, Aloysius 74, 100–101 Gaspard de la nuit 23, 74, 100 Biarritz 4, 232, 254, 308–9, 311–12, 333, 397 Billac, Gracieuse (‘Gachoucha’, Ravel’s great-aunt) 7, 133 Bizet, Georges Carmen 74 Les pêcheurs de Perles 8 Bizet, René 345, 346 Blanche, Jacques-Emile 16, 42 Bloch, Ernest 288 Bloch, Jean-Richard 263 Blum, Léon 160, 258 Bogue-Laberge Management 290 Bolero (film) 301, 398 Bolle, Félicité Marie Honorine 227 Bonnard, Pierre 58, 59, 67 Bonnet, M. et Mme A. 190, 195, 201, 215, 313, 356 Bonniot, Edmond 154, 159, 195 Bordes, Charles 47, 172 Borodin, Alexander 10, 95 Petite suite 148 Prince Igor 91 String Quartet no. 2: 148 Symphony no. 2: 29, 44 Boston Symphony Orchestra 291, 292, 294,

Boulanger, Lili 139, 157 Boulanger, Nadia 26, 157, 293, 352 Boulez, Pierre 57, 154, 320, 355 Boult, Adrian 297 Bouyer, Raymond 78 Brahms, Johannes 42, 95, 139, 293, 319, 355 Bra˘iloiu, Constantin 325 Brancour, René 249 Brès, Sophie 62 Bréval, Lucienne 58 Bréville, Pierre de 27, 30, 47, 161 Briand, Aristide 322 Brillant, Maurice 325 Bruiteurs Futuristes Italiens 230 Bruneau, Alfred 8, 275 Brunswick (record company) 289, 397 Brussel, Robert 146, 218, 219, 220, 314, 315, 322, 323, 345 Brussels 162, 208, 227, 251, 252, 262, 263, 276, 277, 318, 322, 323, 328, 395, 396, 397 Bruyr, José 39, 46, 111, 254, 318, 324 Bryan, Gordon 295–6, 297 Bucharest 35, 322, 324, 325 Bull, John 119 Butt, Alfred 164 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (film) 236 Callot, Jacques 100 Calvocoressi, Michel D [‘Calvo’] 41, 43, 51, 59, 63, 69, 71, 79, 85, 92, 94, 95, 97, 102, 105, 115, 116, 118, 120, 132, 141, 154, 158, 161, 164, 235, 236, 258, 271, 273, 304, 305, 316, 317, 318, 319 Canudo, Ricciotto 114, 164, 196, 197 Caplet, André 38, 43, 111, 120, 139, 169, 191, 202, 235, 244, 250, 251, 253, 256 Carraud, Gaston 74, 117, 138, 145, 146, 152 Carré, Marguerite 202 Carré, Albert 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 107, 108, 118, 128, 162, 202, 204, 263, 309 Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass 284 Casabon, Pierre 6 Casadesus family 23, 339 Casadesus, Francis 187 Casadesus, Gaby 40, 75, 240, 291, 312, 342 Casadesus, Henri 23 Casadesus, Marius 260, 262 Casadesus, Robert 128, 237, 240, 241, 260, 262, 283, 295, 308, 309, 312, 345

INDEX

Casanova, Giacomo 301, 302 Casella, Alfredo 117, 123, 148 (parodies), 161, 167, 180, 195, 197, 199, 202, 218, 219, 220, 221, 271, 277 orchestration of Balakirev: Islamey 139 Casella, Hélène 154, 166, 199 (divorce from Casella), 240, 254, 255, 256, 258, 281, 283, 288, 294, 305, 311, 323, 314, 350 Castéra, René de 57 Cazalis, Henri 35 Cervantes, Miguel de 98, 330 Cesbron-Viseur, Suzanne 56 Chabrier, Emmanuel 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 24, 33, 42, 58, 86, 90, 118, 140, 148–9, 242, 248, 318, 335, funeral 16 statue in Ambert 140 visit from Ravel and Satie 14 À la musique 45 Bourrée fantasque 15, 16, 74 Une éducation manquée 150, 266 España 74, 97, 299, 352 L’étoile 131 Gwendoline 8, 31 ‘Menuet pompeux’ 20, Ravel’s orchestration 202, 343 Dix pie`ces pittoresques 20–21, 52 Le roi malgré lui 8, 131, 212, 309; ‘Fête polonaise’ 212, 233, 303 La Sulamite 25, 45 Trois valses romantiques 14 Chadeigne, Marcel Chaliapin, Feodor 91, 92, 157, 158, 329, 330, 343 Chalupt, René 50, 272, 300, 301, 308–9, 313 Chambon, Marius 23 Chantavoine, Jean 106 Chappell, Billy 298 Charles-René 9, 390 Charlot, Jacques 192 Charpentier, Gustave 85, 139, 184 Impressions d’Italie Louise 45 Chausson, Ernest 24, 28, 29, 31, 58, 168 String Quartet 154 Chevillard, Camille 56, 57, 193, 210, 223 Chicago 204, 291, 292 Chopin, Frédéric 9, 11, 14, 36, 39, 109, 137, 164, 165, 180, 242, 243, 321, 352 Ballade no. 4: 13 Les sylphides orchestrated by Ravel 164–4

415

Ciboure 4, 6, 7, 133–4, 159, 188, 232, 311–12, 345, 390, 393, 397 Clarens 150, 152, 153, 157, 160, 393 Clemenceau, Georges 6, 219 Clemenceau, Paul 227, 311 Clemenceau, Sophie (Mme Paul Clemenceau) 179, 218, 222, 225, 227, 311 Clementi, Muzio 354 Cliquet-Pleyel, Henri 163 Cloetens, George 263 Clustine, Ivan 139 Cocteau, Jean 58, 147, 169, 188, 189, 197, 198, 229, 273 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 31, 42, 140, 166, 179, 190, 196, 200, 202, 216, 218, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 273, 276, 302 Ballet pour ma fille 217, 268 Collet, Henri 207 Colonne, Edouard 8, 82 Conrad, Joseph 244 Within the Tides 244 Coolidge, Elizabeth Sprague 271, 273, 274, 275, 316 Cools, Eugène 254 Cooper, Martin 86 Coppola, Piero 310, 311, 334, 339, 397, 398 Cornet, Charles 118 see also Tenroc, Charles Cortot, Alfred 17, 21, 56, 160, 186, 187, 193, 202, 227, 241, 320 Cossart, Michael de 316 Couperin, François 43, 117, 166, 192, 194, 205 Concert Royal no. 4, Forlane 166 Cours Schaller (piano teaching course) 11 Courteault, Jane (née Gaudin) 49, 60, 82, 85, 93, 186, 343, 345 Cousinou, Robert 233 ‘Covielle’ [Albert Borel-Rogat] 62, 64 Craft, Robert 349 Croiza, Claire 180, 246, 308 Croze, Austin de 22 Cruppi, Jean 192 Cruppi, Mme 99, 128, 192 Cubi y Soler, Mariano: La phrénologie régénérée 23 Cui, César 10 Czerny, Carl 319 Dallapiccola, Luigi 270 Dandyism 17–18 David, Félicien Le desert 110 Dean, Basil 217

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416

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Deane, Basil 88–9 Debussy, Claude 8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 54, 58, 67, 69, 73, 79, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 99–100, 106, 107, 108, 109, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 136, 137, 139, 151–2, 154, 157, 159, 161, 169, 172, 173, 180, 187, 188, 189, 190, 198, 200, 201, 206, 220, 223, 224, 227, 231, 240, 242, 243, 248, 271, 277, 288, 290, 319, 337, 348, 350, 352, 353, 354, 356, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 402 death 196 later works criticized by Ravel 157 memorial concerts at SMI 202 (1912), 227 (1921) opinion of Ravel’s Histoires naturelles 89 opinion of Ravel’s String Quartet 52, 53 orchestration of Satie’s Gymnopédies 120 relations with Ravel 38, 44, 99–100, 117 ‘Le tombeau de Claude Debussy’ (memorial pieces) 216, 237 Chansons de Bilitis 54 La chute de la maison Usher 18 La Damoiselle élue 19 ‘Dans le jardin’ 50 Danse (Tarantelle styrienne) 240 Danses sacrée et profane 67 Le diable dans le beffroi 18 D’un cahier d’esquisses 59, 73, 77, 112 En blanc et noir 192 L’Enfant prodigue 44 Epigraphes antiques 289 Estampes: ‘Soirée dans Grenade’ 96 Etudes 157, 198, 353 Fantaisie 206 Images for orchestra 152, 284, 352, 353 Images for piano 78 L’isle joyeuse 59 Jeux 144, 157, 189, 198, 353 La mer 74, 78, 353, 392 Masques 59 Nocturnes 36–7, 47, 99, 106, 124–5, 223, 391, 392, 393, 402 Nuits blanches 54 Le palais du silence 169 Pelléas et Mélisande 18, 36, 43, 45, 46, 54, 58, 63, 85, 93, 104, 108, 122, 123, 129, 130, 156, 157, 198, 202 Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire 18, ‘Harmonie du soir’: 172 Trois poèmes de Mallarmé 159 Pour le piano 41, ‘Sarabande’: 240

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune 106, 116, 124, 141, 144, 242, 243, 318, 390, 393, 402 Préludes 75, 117, 152, 157, 180, 225 Proses lyriques 20, 25, 54 ‘De fleurs’ 20, 24 Rêverie 25 Rodrigue et Chimène String Quartet 46, 237 Debussy, Lilly 58 Defauw, Désiré 351 Degas, Edgar 15, 348 Delage, Maurice 4, 43, 57, 58, 59, 66, 68, 69, 83, 84, 94, 108, 115, 118, 135, 145, 150, 163, 164, 170, 171, 175, 197, 239, 250, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 273, 274–5, 281, 294, 339, 340, 341, 344, 345 Conté par la mer 110–11, 118 Quatre poèmes hindous 135–6, 163, 164, 393 Schumann 239 Delahaye, Michel 32, 153, 154, 155 Delannoy, Marcel 330 Delibes, Léo 9 Delius, Frederick 16, 26, 109, 217 Hassan 217 Margot la Rouge 45, 47, 402 A Village Romeo and Juliet 217 Delouart, Marie see Ravel, Marie Delouart, Sabine 4, 6 Delteil, Joseph 283, 289, 304, 306, 307, 318, 338 Deluc, Gabriel 192, 312 Demets, Eugène 40, 44, 79, 108, 123 Demuth, Norman 296 Deneke, Margaret 296 Desbordes-Valmore, Marcelline 272 Descombes, Emile 9, 11 Desjardins, Abel 253, 332 Désormière, Roger 235 Destinn, Emmy 93 Dezarrois, André 343 Diaghilev, Sergei 58, 85, 91, 92, 109, 116, 132, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 179, 188, 189, 196, 202, 203, 208, 209, 210, 219, 243, 246, 254, 264, 270, 281, 282, 297, 298, 308, 316, 355 Diamond, David 333, 350 Disney, Walt 270 Dommange, René 322, 323 Donaldson, Walter: My Blue Heaven 294 Dongaitz, Frédéric 312

INDEX

Dongaitz, Léon 312 Donostia, Père José Antonio 254, 289 Dowling, Richard 171 Downes, Olin 288 Draper, Haydn 261 Drésa, Jacques 136, 140 Dreyfus, Alfred 27, 32, 51 Dreyfus, Fernand 190 Dreyfus, Mme Fernand (mother of Roland-Manuel and Ravel’s marraine de guerre) 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 227, 244, 249, 288, 293, 308 Dreyfus, Jean 192, 194 Dron, Marthe 27, 391 Droz, Mme 99 Drummond, John 144 Dubois, Henri 295 Dubois, Théodore 35, 36, 46, 47, 61, 63–4, 184 Dubost, Jeanne 284–5, 286 Duff, Lady Gordon 346 Dukas, Paul 31, 46, 85, 107, 111, 121, 123, 139, 157, 180, 187, 196, 216, 230, 256, 272, 275, 342 Dumas, Mme Alexandre 31 Dumesnil, Maurice 120 Dunan, Marcel 218, 220 Duncan, Isadora 36, 391 Duparc, Henri 19, 47 Dupré, Marcel 272, 275 Durand (publisher) 79, 99, 100, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 116, 117, 123, 133, 144, 150, 151, 152, 158, 167, 169, 176, 180, 188, 189, 195, 203, 205, 215, 216, 217, 229, 250, 257, 285, 322, 338 Durand, Auguste 69 Durand, Emile: Traité complet d’harmonie théorique et pratique 62 Durand, Jacques 96, 130, 171, 175, 190, 192, 199, 206, 236, 254, 264, 295,350 Durey, Louis 199, 230 Durony, Geneviève 113 Dushkin, Samuel 263 Dutilleux, Henri 343, 354–5 Eames, Emma 12 Echenagucia, Elena Maria (Reynaldo Hahn’s mother) 356 Ecole Niedermeyer 23 Ecorcheville, Jules 106, 109, 123, 392 Eden, Anthony 346 Edison, Mrs Thomas 291

417

Edwards, Alfred 58, 66 Edwards, Misia 58, 59, 66, 69, 74, 82, 88, 109, 144 see also Sert, Misia Eiffel, Gustave 4 El Greco 261 Elgar, Edward 95 Eluard, Paul 337, 338 Enesco, Georges 26, 244, 285, 286 Engel, Emile 26 Erard (instrument maker) 40, 67, 75, 320 Erlanger, Camille: La sorcière 149–50 Eschig, Max (publisher) 282 Espagnat, Georges d’ 43 Evans, Edwin 108, 168, 169, 179, 181, 197 Exposition universelle (1889) see Paris International Exhibition (1889) Fabert, Henri 233 Falla, Manuel de 43, 94, 105, 111, 114, 162, 167, 202, 203, 204, 216, 225, 230, 253, 254, 256, 294, 297, 311, 328, 330, 332, 345 El retablo de Maese Pedro 253–4 Le tricorne 203 La vida breve 161, 162 Fanelli, Ernst 139 Fargue, Léon-Paul 25, 43, 58, 72, 102, 283, 294 Faure, Edgar 249 Faure, Henriette 33, 39, 71, 75, 77, 101, 194, 249 Fauré, Gabriel 8, 23–24, 31, 35, 42, 45, 46, 50, 61, 63–4, 65, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 106, 109, 111, 120, 121, 122, 130, 137, 156, 157, 180, 187, 194, 202, 203, 205, 224, 225, 231, 240, 244–5, 247–8, 256, 281, 290, 324, 335, 346, 350, 353, as Ravel’s composition teacher 26–30, 36, 44 funeral 263–4 Barcarolle no. 6: 26 Cello Sonata no. 2: 324 La chanson d’Eve 112 Dolly 86, 151 Fantaisie 202 Le jardin clos 180 Le parfum impérissable 26 Pénélope 157, 393 Piano Quintet no. 2: 229 Prison 19, 26 Requiem 194 Soir 26 Fauser, Annegret 9 Feix, Mme 5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

418

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Ferguson, Howard 286 Feuillard, Louis 180, 394 Feure, Georges de 168–9 Février, Jacques 71, 223, 231, 320, 321, 343, 344, 398 Février, Henri 84 Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 212 Flaxland (publisher) 69 Flecker, James Elroy 217 Fleury, Louis 277 Fokina, Vera 230, 395 Fokine, Michel 109, 116, 124, 142, 143, 144, 230, 243, 316, 395 Fontaine, Lucien 58 Fournier, Jean 264 Franc-Nohain [Maurice-Etienne Legrand] 93, 128, 233, 337 Françaix, Alfred 249 Françaix, Jean 14, 249 Francescatti, Zino 276, 396 Franck, César 26, 29, 43, 110, 120, 138, 139, 150, 168, 353 Les éolides 25 Violin Sonata 353 Freitas Branco, Pedro de 301, 328, 334 Freund, Marya 154, 218, 219, 225, 235, 289 Fried, Oskar 218 Fromont, Eugène 37, 100, 106, 124, 240 Funtek, Leo 246 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 301, 322, 323, 327 Gachoucha (Ravel’s great-aunt) see Billac, Gracieuse Ganche, Edouard 109 Ganem, Chekry 109 Garban, Lucien 36, 37, 38, 43, 47, 124, 157, 170, 190, 206, 207, 208, 209, 217, 250, 251, 259, 272, 334, 340 as ‘Roger Branga’ 298 Garden, Mary 93, 104, 117 Garnier, Charles 8 Gaubert, Philippe 202, 284, 312, 345 Gaudin family 5, 7, 232, 250, 262 Gaudin, Edmond 289, 331, Gaudin, Jane 47, 49 see also Courteault, Jane Gaudin, Marie 133, 136, 192, 231, 281, 336, 339, 342, 345 Gaudin, Pascal 192, 312 Gaudin, Pierre 192, 312 Gauthier-Villars, Henry 84 see also Willy Gautier, Théophile 25, 272 Gedalge, André 25 (as Ravel’s counterpoint teacher), 35, 163, 174 (dedication of Ravel’s Trio), 276 (death)

Geiger, Raymond 195 Geneva 1, 56, 162, 215, Gerar, Marcelle 55, 56, 256, 260, 262, 288, 294, 309, 311, 396 Gershwin, George 293 Rhapsody in Blue 294 Ghéon, Henri 130 Gheusi, Pierre-Barthélemy 204 Ghys, Henry 9, 12, 14, 22, 23, 390 Gide, André 58, 70, 184, 225, 257 Gigout, Eugène 275 Gil-Marchex, Henri 101, 260, 396 Gillmor, Alan 120 Giraudoux, Jean 311 Glazunov, Alexander 10, 25, 92, 165 Glière, Reinhold 167 Glinka, Mikhail 10, 91 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 150 Godebska, Ida (wife of Cipa Godbeski) 58, 59, 67, 68, 69, 84, 85, 93, 94, 99, 104, 166, 170, 175, 177, 202, 204, 206, 300, 311 Godebska, Mimie (sister of Jean Godebski) 58, 104, 112, 114 Godebski, Cipa 58, 59, 60, 94, 99, 100, 104, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 123, 148, 159, 161, 166, 171, 177, 225, 226, 227, 239, 294, 342 Godebski, Jean 58, 104, 105, 112, 234, 238 Goldberg, Albert 291 Goldenstein, Mlle (pupil) 21 Golschmann, Vladimir 225 ‘Gomez de Riquet’ (fictitious member of Les Apaches) 44 Goossens, Eugene 216 Goss, Madeleine 28 Goubault, Christian 356 Gounod, Charles 12, 46, 148, 242 Goya, Francisco 98, 261 Granados, Enrique 167, 229 Grand Prix du Disque 310, 333, 339 Gravollet, Paul 50, 401 Grey, Madeleine 55, 209, 205, 224, 236, 258, 280, 282, 289, 294, 297, 312, 332, 342, 343 Grieg, Edvard Hagerup 8, 13, 15, 16, 118, 276, 390 meets Ravel 16 Grigoriev, Serge 143, 164, 203, Grosfort, Anne-Caroline (Ravel’s paternal grandmother) 2, 3, 6 Grovlez, Gabriel 59, 71, 80, 136, 187, 202, 250, 392 Gubisch, Nina 27 Guérin-Desjardins, Nelly 260 Guéritte, Tony 108

INDEX

Guiraud, Ernest 24, 25 Guller, Youra 246 Gunsbourg, Raoul 263 Haarlem 255, 322, 396 Hague, The 255, 322, 396 Hahn, Reynaldo 21, 93, 107, 109, 123, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 309, 345, 356 Haitze (pelota player) 312 Halbreich, Harry 233 Halévy, Frommental 38 Hals, Frans 66 Hambourg, Mark 305 Haour, Pierre 217, 218 Harper, Heather 57 Harris, Donald 221 Harris, William 296 Hart House String Quartet 292 Hatto, Jane 46, 56 Hauptmann, Gerhart 82, 177, 267 Die versunkene Glocke 82 Hawkins, John 301 Haydn, Joseph 106, 123, 245 Symphony no. 92: 248 Symphony no. 102: 322 Heldy, Fanny 204, 233, 395 Hendaye 4 Henry, Emile 17 Herlin, Denis 37 Hermance 1, 85, 392 Hérold, André Ferdinand 67, 82, 205 Hess, Myra 286 Hettich, A.L. 91 Heugel (publisher) 285 Heymann Quartet 52, 391 Hindemith, Paul 323 Hitler, Adolf 258 Hoérée, Arthur 274, 280 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm 32, 391 Der Sandmann 32 Honegger, Arthur 25, 191, 222, 223, 229, 230, 233, 247, 256, 258, 272, 294, 297, 302, 315, 316, 338, 354 Horowitz, Vladimir 285 Howat, Roy 125, 195 Huebner, Steven 132 Hugo, Jean 338 Hugo, Valentine 337, 338 Hugo, Victor 37, 272 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk 12 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 186 Hänsel und Gretel 8 Huré, Jean 111, 202, 280 Hussey, Walter 296 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 229

419

Ibert, Jacques 25, 104, 285, 294, 330–31, 334 Persée et Andromède 307 Indy, Vincent d’ 8, 29, 31, 42, 43, 47, 85, 92, 94, 95, 96, 107, 110, 111, 118, 120, 121, 123, 138, 139, 141, 148, 157, 168, 180, 184, 186, 187, 196, 244, 346, 350 De bello Gallico 202 Fervaal 150 Inghelbrecht, Désiré-Emile [‘Inghel’] 43, 68, 108, 117, 123, 161, 164, 202, 223, 248, 277, 344, 345, 355 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) 249, 304, 397 International String Quartet 286, 397 Isola, Emile and Vincent 204 Jacques, Reginald 296 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 351 Jean-Aubry, Georges 56, 108, 120, 205, 241, 244, 261, 273, 302 Jehin, Léon 110 Jemain, Joseph 47 Jobert, Jean 240, 248 Joncières, Léonce de 23 Joubert, Abbé Joseph 149 Les maîtres contemporains de l’orgue 149 Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène 39, 129, 180, 208, 209, 227, 228, 236, 239, 240, 252, 256, 258, 260, 273, 285, 294, 306–7, 309, 328, 332, 339, 341, 350, 356 Juliana, Princess 325 Jullien, Adolphe 10 Jurgenson (publisher) 10, 116 Kafka, Franz 170 Kahn, Micheline 91 Kalisch, Alfred 161 Kaminsky, Peter 283 Kandinsky, Wassily: Du spirituel dans l’art 155 Karsavina, Tamara 118, 144, 145, 230 Kindler, Hans 240, 241, 277 Kineya, Sakichi 274 Kiriac, Dumitru 35 Klein, Melanie 267 Klemperer, Otto 119, 167, 203 Klingsor, Tristan [Léon Leclère] 43, 44, 54, 57, 104, 179, 271 Knosp, Gaston 163, 164 Kodály, Zoltán 119, 125, 167, 250 Koechlin, Charles 25, 26, 29, 87, 111, 112, 118, 125, 131, 163, 167, 177, 187, 191, 202, 228, 231, 244, 250, 263, 264, 342, 352

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

420

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 219, 305 Korngold, Julius 220 Korty, Sonia 281, 292 Koussevitzky, Serge 225, 233, 235, 236, 239, 245, 246, 248, 255, 291, 292, 308, 310 Krauss, Clemens 315 Kreisler, Fritz 293 Kunc, Aymé 46 Laberge, Bernard 290 Lack, Théodore 319 Lacombe-Olivier, Marie-Suzanne 46 Lador, G. 215 Laffitte, Léon 46 Lalo, Edouard 8 (Le roi d’Ys), 31, 38, Lalo, Pierre 27, 30, 40–41, 54, 63, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87, 98, 117, 118, 124, 130, 138, 145, 146, 152, 271, 284, 342 Laloy, Louis 90, 97, 106, 127, 131, 137, 235, 253 Lamartine, Alphonse de 141, 272 Lamaze, David 350 Lamballe, Lucienne 312 Lambert, Constant 325–6 Lamoureux, Charles 8 Landormy, Paul 16, 150 Landowska, Wanda 126, 254, 307 Laparra, Raoul 49, 50 La habanera 49 Laprade, Pierre 66 Lapras see Ravel, Maurice Larner, Gerald 9, 27, 39, 140, 175, 203, 211, 266, 280, 299 Lassus, Marie-Pierre 268, 270 Lausanne 203, 343, 398 Lawson, Rex 197 Le Havre 66, 94, 290, 294, 336, 397, 398 Lebout, Charles 289 Leclercq, Julien: Physionomie 23 Leconte de Lisle, Charles-Marie René: Chansons écossaises 272 Lee, Victor 3 Lefébure, Yvonne 195 Lehman, Evangelina 339 Leleu, Jeanne 113 Lemaire, Fernand 12 Lenepveu, Charles 46, 61, 63, 64 Léon, Paul 87 Leoni, Franco: Francesca da Rimini 161–2 Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie 113 Leroi, Pierre 318 Leroux, Xavier 61, 66 Lestang, Paule de 71, 80 Levallois-Perret 9, 71, 80, 94, 104, 105, 313, 329, 392

cemetery 105, 188, 345, 398 Ravel’s flat at 16bis rue Chevallier 313, 326, 343, 397 Lévy, Claude 294, 297, 397 Lewis, C.S.: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 284 Leyritz, Léon 288, 300, 313, 341, 342, 350 bust of Ravel 289, 294 decoration of Ravel’s flat 313 Liabeuf, Jean-Jacques 258 Liadov, Anatole 175 Lifar, Serge 300, 301 Ligue nationale pour la défense de la musique française 184, 227, 354 Linossier, Raymonde 273 Liszt, Franz 12, 22, 39, 72, 74, 77, 103, 138, 242, 259, 260, 297, 319, 322, 352 Faust Symphony 323–4 Hungarian Rhapsodies 259, 260 Die Ideale defended by Ravel 138 Litvinne, Félia 91, 170 Lloyd-Jones, David 158 Lombard, Carole 301 Lombard, Jean 18, 25 London: Aeolian Hall 256, 287, 296, 304, 397 Alhambra Theatre 169, 203 Anglo-French Luncheon Club 305 Bechstein Hall 161, 393 Covent Garden (Royal Opera) 203, 304 London Music Club 161 Palace Theatre 164, 165 St John’s Institute, Westminster 286 Société des concerts français de Londres 108, 120 Londonderry, Lord and Lady 346 Long, Kathleen 287 Long, Marguerite 33, 78, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204, 315, 318, 320, 321, 322, 323, 327, 328, 331, 333, 336, 337, 340, 344, 394, 398 Longus 142 Loty, Maud 273 Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings 229 Louÿs, Pierre 31, 121 Lully, Jean-Baptiste Alceste 352 Cadmus et Hermione 352 La Princesse d’Elide 276 Thésée 151 luthéal 263 Lyon 47, 71, 80, 163, 166, 236, 239, 393, 395, 396 Lyon, Gustave 27, 289, 349 Lyons-la-Forêt 190, 218, 227, 244, 249, 394, 395

INDEX

McBurney, Gerard 52 Madrid 4, 5, 254, 261, 298, 301, 341, 396 Maeterlinck, Maurice 18, 84, 123, 148, 178 Mahler, Alma 221, 222, 235, 244 Mahler, Gustav 214, 222 Maison du Lied, Moscow 116 Malaga 305 Malibran, Maria 12 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 167, 216, 230 Mallarmé, Geneviève 24, 154 Mallarmé, Stéphane 17, 24, 25, 33, 58, 92, 122, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 186, 229, 262, 288, 327, 353, 400, 401 Mangeot, André 241, 286, 287, 288, 331, 395 Mapou, Charles 311, 312 Marc’hadour, Yvon le 334 Maré, Rolf de 222 Maréchal, Maurice 227, 236, 239, 262, 395 Marès, Roland de 16, 400 Mariés de la tour Eiffel, Les 188, 229, 230, 285 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 230 Marliave, Joseph de 192 Marnat, Marcel 7, 27, 28, 30, 46, 58, 74, 110, 133, 143, 175, 310, 311, 329 Marnold, Georgette 200, 205, 215, 223, 229, 232, 236, 263, 198, 246, 248, 262 Marnold, Jean 54, 59, 63, 67, 79, 82, 92, 93, 101, 107, 112, 183, 186, 218, 276 Marot, Clément 32–3, 121, 140, 273, 400 Marseillaise, La, parody by Ravel incorporating Die Meistersinger 200, 201 Marseilles 236, 395 Martel, Thierry de 344, 398 Marty, Georges 46, 59 Mascagni, Pietro: Cavalleria rusticana 8 Mason, Gwendolen 255, 261 Mason and Hamlin (instrument makers) 290 Massenet, Jules 14, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26, 34, 35, 38, 45, 46, 49, 54, 71, 85, 128, 162, 247, 270, 317, 324, 330, 352 Cendrillon 130 Le cid 8 Hérodiade 233 Manon 162, 202, 259, 270 La navarraise 8 Thaïs 8, 333 Thérèse 130 Werther 8, 15 Massine, Léonide 188, 203, 209 Les jardins d’Aranjuez 203 Masslow, Boris 341

421

Mata Hari 110 Mathot, A. Zunz (publisher) 111, 112, 394 Matsa, Pericles 51 Mauclair, Camille 78, 90, 152 Maus, Octave 141 Mawer, Deborah 115, 140, 197, 308 Mead, Alfred 236 Mendelssohn, Felix 11, 48, 95, 118, 170, 180–1, 296, 353 edition of the piano works by Ravel 180 Midsummer Night’s Dream 169–70 Songs without words 180–1 Violin Concerto 68, 172, 180 Mengelberg, Willem 246, 315 Menuhin, Yehudi 285 Merlet, Dominique 320 Messager, André 31, 36, 42, 92, 139, 158, 206, 223, 275, 306, 318 La basoche 8 Les deux pigeons 8 Messiaen, Olivier 74, 103, 131, 205, 267, 324, 325, 338, 339, 355 Metropolis (film) 293, 306 Meunier, Antonine 32 Meyer, Françoise 336 Meyer, Jacques 336, 340 Meyer, Marcelle 209, 210, 211 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 307, 352 Milhaud, Darius 25, 154, 170, 205, 207, 224, 225, 229, 234, 235, 236, 250, 257, 261, 284, 285, 288, 290, 297, 324, 330, 338, 345, 353, 354, 395 Millerand, Alexandre 240 Miomandre, Francis de 141 Misia see Edwards, Misia; Sert, Misia ‘Miss’ (Miss Hatchell, English governess to Godebski children) 104–5 Molard, William 16 Mole, Miff [Irving Milfred Mole] 302 Mondrian, Piet 230 Monet, Claude 31 Monte Carlo 37, 110, 263, 264, 270, 302, 330, 333, 350, 391, 393, 396, 397 Montesquiou, Robert de 23 Monteux, Pierre 166, 314 Monteverdi, Claudio 63, 67 Orfeo 67 Montfort l’Amaury 9, 87, 192, 223, 226, 227, 231, 232, 234, 240, 244, 248, 255, 256, 258, 259, 262, 263, 273, 276, 277, 281, 282, 283, 287, 288, 289. 297, 303, 305, 307, 308, 313, 314, 322, 336, 339, 340, 343, 348, 395, 396, 397 Chœur des Dames et Demoiselles de Montfort 283

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422

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Moore, George 106 Morand, Paul 330 Morant, Philippe 1, 3 Moreau, Gustave 54 Moreau, Léon 47, 202, 274, 279 Moreau, Luc-Albert 258, 300 Morrison, Simon 143, 147 Morton, Jelly Roll: ‘Black Bottom Stomp’ 286 Moscheles, Ignaz: Piano Concerto no. 3: 11 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 14, 43, 95, 96, 132, 220, 222, 243, 262, 275, 290, 352, 353, 357, 396 Clarinet Quintet 329 Così fan tutte Don Giovanni 46 Piano Concerto in D minor 248–9 Piano sonata in F major 262 Symphony no. 40 in G minor, conducted by Ravel 275, 290 Mukle, May 241, 395 Munch, Charles 321, 343, 398 Muratore, Lucien 157 Murcie, Robert 261 Musorgsky, Modest 10, 62, 117, 261, 305 Boris Godunov 30, 92, 157, 158, 161, 393 Khovanschina 152–3, 158 The Nursery 23, 90 Pictures at an Exhibition 89, 235–6, 245–6, 248, 395 The Wedding 131–2 Musset, Alfred de 272 Mustel, Victor 23 Narbaitz, Pierre 5, 6, 7, 134, 188, 189, 345 Natanson, Matylda 58 Natanson, Thadée 58 Nectoux, Jean-Michel 122, 245, 256, 333 New York 204, 206, 290, 291, 293, 308, 397 Gallo Theatre 291, 292 New York Philharmonic Orchestra 300 Newbould, Brian 172, 173 Nijinska, Bronislava 294, 298, 308, 316 Nijinsky, Vaslav 118, 141, 142, 143, 145, 164–5, 166, 230 Nikisch, Arthur 91, 324 Nin, Joaquín 294, 295 Nouvel, Walter 85 Oberdoerffer, Paul 25–6 Obouhov, Nicolas 206, 225, 259 Offenbach, Jacques 7, 266, 318, 353 La vie parisienne 163 Olénine d’Alheim, Marie 23, 116, 393 Orenstein, Arbie 15, 18, 32, 116, 159, 243, 247, 251, 273, 321, 333

Orledge, Robert 111, 189, 228 Oxford 304, 305, 316, 397 see also Ravel, Maurice Pabst, Georg 329 Padilla, José 295 Valencia 295 Pahissa, Jaime 111 Painlevé, Paul 179, 311 Paladilhe, Emile 8, 36, 46, 62, 63, 64 Paoli, Domenico de’ 84, 114 Paray, Paul 260, 302, 333, 334, 395, 396, 398 Paris: Concerts Hasselmans 117, 123 Conservatoire 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36, 44, 45, 47, 61, 63, 65, 69, 84, 110, 113, 156, 190 202, 206, 210, 213, 231, 240, 257, 275, 284, 287, 289, 306, 339, 355, 390, 391, 392, 394, 397 Exhibition of the Théâtre de la Musique 27 Grand Orchestre Symphonique du Gramophone 310 Institut de France 35, 45, 50, 63, 139, 207, 312, 356 International Exhibition (1889) 10, 52–3, 113 Opéra 8, 11, 23, 31, 45, 46, 59, 82, 116, 117, 118, 136, 139, 150, 158, 162, 164, 167, 182, 189, 201, 202, 204, 205, 211, 217, 218, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 243, 248, 249, 253, 254, 263, 270, 281, 282, 284, 285, 294, 299, 300, 307, 308, 309, 312, 316, 324, 333, 334, 336, 338, 346, 392, 394, 395, 397, 398 Opéra-Comique 15, 45, 49, 91, 93, 99, 104, 107, 108, 115, 125, 128, 131, 146, 149, 161, 162, 186, 202, 204, 233, 263, 267, 270, 276, 294, 308, 309, 393, 394, 396 Orchestre Colonne (Concerts Colonne) 90, 106, 109, 117, 123, 152, 202, 233, 311, 314, 334, 392, 393, 396, 397, 398 Orchestre Lamoureux (Concerts Lamoureux) 34, 137, 202, 206, 210, 223, 260, 310, 311, 314, 328, 392, 395, 396, 397, 398 Orchestre national 347, 398 Orchestre Pasdeloup 199, 202, 203, 208, 244, 248, 323, 339, 343, 394, 398 Orchestre de la Société des concerts du Conservatoire 45, 202

INDEX

Orchestre Straram 308 Orchestre Symphonique de Paris 314, 319, 333, 398 Salle Aeolian 60 Salle Erard 11, 28, 163, 390, 391, 392, 396 Salle Gaveau 104, 120, 180, 201, 202, 235, 260, 281, 294, 393, 395, 396, 397 Salle Huyghens 394 Salle Malakoff 394 Salle du Nouveau Théâtre 391 Salle Pleyel 111, 262, 289, 310, 322, 323, 328, 329, 349, 395, 397 Schola Cantorum 47, 87, 110, 111, 116, 210, 244, 350, 391 Sorbonne 80, 216, 240 Théâtre des Arts 115, 117, 136, 150, 393 Théâtre de la Bodinière 22 Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens 51 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées 157, 161, 222, 230, 249, 314, 393, 395, 398 Théâtre du Châtelet 93, 133, 189, 264, 392, 393, 396 Théâtre du Colisée 229 Théâtre de la Gaîté-Lyrique 229, 253 Théâtre Michel 229 Théâtre de l’Odéon 93, 99, 109, 110, 337, 393 Théâtre Pigalle 276 Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt 299 Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier 191, 202, 284, 394, 396 Parker, Henry Taylor 292 Parny, Evariste 271, 272, 274 Pasdeloup, Jules 8 Passani, Emile 343 Pavlov, Sonia 254 Pedrell, Felipe 167 Périer, Jean 93, 129 Perlemuter, Vlado 71, 75, 103, 127, 128, 282, 286 Pernot, Hubert 51 Perrault, Charles 113 Perret, Carine 286 Perrin, Alfred (cousin) 3, 282, 332 Pessard, Emile 12, 14, 15, 16, 20 Petit, Abbé Léonce 43, 105, 188, 218 Picasso, Pablo 189, 198, 349 Pickford, Mary 293 Pierné, Gabriel 90, 109, 117, 118, 123, 202, 233, 272, 275, 309, 311, 356 Cydalise et le chèvre-pied 249 Pistone, Danièle 10 Pizzetti, Ildebrando 167 Plançon, Pol 11, 12 Pleyel (instrument maker) 27, 67 Pleyela piano rolls 234

423

Poe, Edgar Allan 11, 13, 18, 19, 97, 100, 102, 169, 281, 288, 293, 302, 317, 352 Polignac, Princesse de (Winnaretta Singer) 30, 31, 33, 253–4, 298 Poincaré, Raymond 178 Pons, Charles 130 Pougin, Arthur 145–6 Pouishnoff, Lev 252 Poulenc, Francis 31, 79, 83, 90, 97, 131, 157, 179, 180, 191, 197–8, 209–10 (on private performance of La valse), 228, 229, 237, 239, 250, 261, 273, 285, 307, 314, 344, 345, 353 Prix de Rome 18, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 82, 83, 87, 113, 120, 157, 169, 274, 400 Prohaska (Ravel’s Czech servant) 231, 232, 258 Prokofiev, Sergei 225, 229, 321, 353, 395 Chout 229 Le pas d’acier 299 Proust, Marcel 30, 185, 313 funeral 248 Prunières, Henry 216, 217, 225, 231, 239, 244, 256, 288, 289, 298, 333 Puccini, Giacomo 49, 116, 172, 219 Purcell, Henry 119 Rachmaninov, Sergei 319 Raft, George 301 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 43, 151, 352 Dardanus 31 Randal, Mlle (driver of ‘Le Tourbillon de la mort’) 60–1 Ravachol [François Claudius Koenigstein] 17 Ravel, provenance of surname 3 Ravel, Amé [Aimé](paternal grandfather), 1–2, 3, 6 Ravel, Edouard (brother) 7, 9, 13, 14, 21, 60, 82, 105, 134, 135, 171, 178, 182, 184, 185–6, 187, 189, 190, 201, 204, 224, 258, 293, 313, 327, 337, 339, 340, 344, 345, 356, 390, 394, 398 Ravel, Edouard (uncle) 215 Ravel, Marie (née Delouart; mother) 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 11, 105, 133–4, 183, 185, 187, 390, 394 death and funeral 187–8 letter to Ravel 185 marriage to Pierre-Joseph Ravel 5–6, 160 and religion 134, 171 special bond with Maurice 8

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424

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Ravel, Maurice LIFE: addresses in Paris 9, 23, 33, 36, 39, 115 American tour 289–94 in Amsterdam 66, 68, 246, 251, 255, 289, 325, 327, 395, 396, 397 in Barcelona 262, 396 Basque rhythms 141, 144, 177 Basque origins 4–6 in Basque country 134, 160, 254, 262, 288–9, 342–3, 393, 395, 398 in Berlin 322, 327 in Biarritz 254, 308–9, 311 birth in Ciboure 7 in Brittany 69, 94, 273, 392 in Brussels 227, 262, 276, 314 buys ‘Le Belvédère’ at Montfort l’Amaury 223, 227 in Châlons-sur-Marne 186, 189, 394 character and attitudes 16–17 in Ciboure 134, 311–2, 393, 397 cigarettes and smoking 186, 227, 229, 256, 287, 293, 331 cinema, enthusiasm for 236, 247, 330 in Clarens 153, 393 collision in taxi 332 as conductor 29, 251–2, 275, 290, 322, 324 in Copenhagen 275–6, 277 as critic 137–8, 139, 149–52, 161–3, 167 cruise on the yacht Aimée through Holland and Germany 66–7 death 345 driving lessons 179 early education 9 early evidence of composing 15 in Edinburgh 120, 121, 276, 284, 393, 396 alleged encounters with prostitutes 117 first public concert 11 and foundation of the SMI 111–12 funeral 345–6 in Geneva 166, 204, 282, 304, 339, 392, 393, 394, 396, 397 in Glasgow 276, 396 in Granville 31 handprints 336, 337 handwriting 45, 323, 334, 337, 339, 351 ill health 183–4, 186, 195–6, 198 see also neurological disorder impotence, alleged 350–1 insomnia 104, 186, 198, 249, 293, 304 at La Grangette, (Godebski country house at Valvins) 58, 104, 105, 112, 116, 148, 159 in Lapras 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 225, 304

Légion d’honneur refused 206–7, 215, 346, 356, 394 at Lekaroz monastery 289 in London 108–9, 161–2, 164, 165, 204, 240–2, 244, 251–2, 255, 260, 261, 273, 276, 286, 289, 295–7, 305, 322, 323, 325–7, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397 in Lyon 166, 236, 239, 282 in Madrid 261–2 in Marseilles 236 in Megève 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 217, 304 military service in World War One 177–9, 182–4, 190 as lorry driver 182–3 in Montfort l’Amaury see Montfort l’Amaury in Naples 251 neurological disorder 302, 332, 344–5 in Newcastle 120, 393 in North Africa 341 in Oslo 286 in Oxford 295–7 as pelota fan 159, 170, 289, 311–2, 313 as pianist 9, 12, 14, 25, 112, 292–3 and politics 5, 27, 32, 274, 356 recordings 33, 161, 216, 236–7, 240, 241, 261, 286–8, 289, 293, 310–11, 332, 333–4, 349 393, 395, 396 and religion 134, 345 in Rome 251 in Rueil-Malmaison clinic 339, 398 in St-Jean-de-Luz see St-Jean-de-Luz sexuality 350 studies at Paris Conservatoire 11, 12, 13, 14, 26 Swiss ancestry 1–2 syphilis 351 as teacher 80, 258–9 in Venice 248 in Vienna 218–22, 305–6, 321, 322, 326, 395, 397 windmills, enthusiasm for 66 WORKS: 1. completed works À la manière de . . . Borodin 148, 161, 393, 394, 400 À la manière de . . . Chabrier 148–9, 161, 393, 394, 400 Adélaïde (ballet version of Valses nobles et sentimentales) 127, 139–41, 145, 182, 189, 393, 394, 399 Alcyone 45–6, 274, 391, 400 Alyssa 48–9, 391, 400 Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer 15, 390, 400

INDEX

Berceuse sur le nom de Fauré 244–5, 246, 248, 251, 255, 262, 276, 395, 400 Boléro 5, 18, 97, 173, 273, 288, 295, 297–303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310–11 (Ravel’s recording), 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 322, 323, 326, 329, 333, 336, 337, 356, 397, 398, 399 Callirhoé 33, 34, 35, 44, 391, 400 Trois chansons pour chœur mixte 179, 289, 394, 401 Chansons corses 22–3, 390, 400 Chansons madécasses 18, 92, 122, 140, 148, 207, 215, 251, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278–80, 281, 282, 286, 295, 311, 312, 318, 332, 349, 354, 396, 397, 401 ‘Aoua!’ 273, 274, 278–9 Chants populaires 116, 166, 244, 257, 393, 401 Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit 18, 93, 400 Concerto for the left hand 175, 306, 309, 311, 313, 314, 318–21, 327, 333, 343–4, 397, 398, 399 Concerto for piano and orchestra 84, 159, 194, 297, 304, 305, 309, 310, 311, 313, 315, 316, 317, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328–9, 333, 336, 337, 339, 397, 398, 399 Daphnis et Chloé 20, 35, 66, 85, 105, 109, 110 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 127, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141–8, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158, 168, 169, 170, 171, 180, 208, 218, 227, 230, 233, 237, 248, 257, 271, 291, 297, 314, 320, 323, 325, 326, 333, 344, 392, 393, 394, 395, 398, 399 Don Quichotte à Dulcinée 5, 122, 329, 333–6, 339, 340, 343–4, 355, 398, 401 L’Enfant et les sortilèges 18, 22, 71, 82, 127, 132, 190, 196, 198, 202, 217, 218, 227, 235, 243, 251, 256, 259, 263, 264–70, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 282, 284, 302, 305, 320, 346, 350, 396, 399 Deux Epigrammes de Clément Marot 24, 33, 120, 121, 140, 391, 400 L’ éventail de Jeanne (Fanfare) 284–5, 286, 396, 397, 399 Fandango (original title for Boléro) 5, 295, 301, 397 Frontispice 196–7, 394, 400 Gaspard de la nuit 23, 100–4, 106, 125, 138, 160, 189, 218, 219, 240, 241, 248, 262, 295, 348, 392, 400

425

Le gibet 26, 92, 100, 101, 102, 106, 166, 218, 237, 241, 307 Ondine 28, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 198, 203, 222 Scarbo 16, 22, 100, 103, 104, 106, 113, 127, 323 Un grand sommeil noir 19, 21, 24, 28, 92, 93, 101, 248, 390, 400 Histoires naturelles 18, 54, 55, 85–90, 91, 92, 100, 106, 108–9, 115, 120, 121, 122, 129, 139, 158, 163, 203, 218, 219–20, 236, 260, 264, 268, 280, 291, 319, 392, 401 Introduction et Allegro 67–8, 70 71, 79, 91, 152, 172, 248, 255, 261, 295, 392, 395, 396, 400 Jeux d’eau 21, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 51, 60, 62, 73, 74, 79, 80, 85, 101, 126, 180, 198, 203, 218, 222, 241, 262, 295, 312, 314, 356, 391, 393, 399 L’heure espagnole 28, 32, 59, 91, 93–4, 96, 99, 100, 107, 108, 109, 118, 123, 125, 128–32, 136, 140, 146, 150, 162, 192, 203, 204, 227, 230, 232, 233, 235, 250, 253, 254, 262, 263, 267, 270, 274, 275, 276, 312, 337, 392, 393, 394, 395, 397, 398, 399 Ma mère l’Oye 10, 96, 100, 104, 112–15, 123, 135, 136, 145, 157, 160, 181, 186, 218, 248, 251, 252, 305, 333, 392, 393, 395, 399, 400 Manteau de fleurs 50, 391, 401 Deux mélodies hébraïques 122, 165–6, 167, 209, 215, 217, 218, 236, 312, 393, 394, 401 Cinq mélodies populaires grecques 51, 79, 108, 150, 401 Menuet (1904) 20, 399 Menuet antique 20, 23, 24, 28, 30, 46, 290, 293, 311, 314, 399 Menuet sur le nom de Haydn 106–7, 109, 123, 400 Miroirs 27, 57, 71–9, 80, 82, 85, 106, 198, 249, 290, 392, 399 Alborada del gracioso 16, 74, 75, 78, 89, 94, 168, 196, 199, 203, 254, 311, 312, 325, 394 Une barque sur l’océan 71, 74, 78, 85, 90, 101, 203, 282, 392, 399 Noctuelles 30, 71, 72, 171 Oiseaux tristes 59, 71, 73, 101, 216, 241, 290, 295, 394, 395 La vallée des cloches 72, 76, 77, 101, 218, 241, 290, 293, 391 Myrrha 37, 38, 44, 48, 391, 400

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426

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

RAVEL, MAURICE, WORKS (cont.) Noël des jouets 71, 80, 163, 392, 393, 394, 401 La Parade 32, 391, 399 Pavane pour une Infante défunte 33, 40, 44, 51, 60, 62, 94, 109, 116, 120, 123, 203, 216, 241, 248, 254, 290, 322, 345, 391, 392, 399 Piano Trio see Trio Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé 122, 149, 153, 154–6, 160, 163, 218, 262, 353, 393, 401 Prélude 156–7, 192, 290, 393, 400 Quartet see String Quartet Quatuor see String Quartet Rapsodie espagnole 21, 27, 28, 94, 96–8, 99, 104, 110, 111, 218, 229, 246, 250, 254, 271, 292, 342, 392, 399, 400 Rêves 122, 283, 284, 396 401 Ronsard à son âme 122, 251, 256–7, 260, 262, 339–40, 401 Sainte 24, 94, 391, 392, 400 Sémiramis 44–5, 391 Sérénade grotesque 5, 15, 20, 390, 399 Shéhérazade overture 29, 30, 32, 35, 40, 84, 139, 391, 399 Shéhérazade song cycle 46, 50, 51, 54–7, 58, 61, 85, 104, 110, 158, 215, 218, 236, 246, 260, 262, 282, 291, 308, 391, 393, 396, 401 Si morne 28, 248, 391, 400 Sites auriculaires 21, 27, 28, 67, 75, 96, 254, 391, 399 Entre cloches 27, 28, 101, 391 Habanera 21, 22, 23, 27, 31, 40, 75, 96, 254, 336, 390 Sonata for violin and cello 216 (‘Duo’), 218, 227, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237–9, 241, 248, 249, 251, 255, 262, 264, 282, 394, 395, 400 Sonata for violin and piano [no. 1] (1897) 25–6, 391, 400 Sonata for violin and piano [no. 2] (1923–7) 256, 259, 273, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285–6, 288, 291, 292, 294, 295, 312, 318, 395, 396, 397, 400 Sonatine 51, 57, 58, 69, 70–1, 79, 80, 94, 107, 108, 161, 175, 194, 216, 218, 237, 240, 241, 268, 275, 287, 289, 290, 291, 391, 392, 393, 399 String Quartet 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 68, 71, 79, 91, 110, 114, 120, 171, 174, 175, 219, 236, 237, 245, 286–8, 292, 318, 331, 391, 397, 398, 401 Sur l’herbe 56, 92–3, 113, 262, 392, 401 Theme for improvisation by Marcel

Dupré 272 Le tombeau de Couperin 20, 107, 125, 166, 177, 189, 190, 191, 192–5, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 209, 211, 222, 223, 228, 230, 240, 249, 282, 290, 291, 293, 304, 312, 314, 322, 351, 353, 394, 395, 399, 400 Trio 36, 100, 141, 160, 166, 169, 171–6, 180, 218, 231, 237, 239, 262, 276, 282, 284, 295, 325, 335, 352, 355, 393, 394, 396, 400 Tripatos 106, 392, 401 Tzigane 240, 251, 259–61, 262, 263, 264, 276, 285, 286, 395, 396, 399, 400 La valse 59, 82, 92, 97, 125, 175, 177, 206, 207, 208, 209–14, 215, 216, 217, 223, 224, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 236, 244, 246, 248, 249, 251, 252, 255, 262, 264, 275, 281–2, 284, 286, 289, 291, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 317, 322, 326, 329, 333, 349, 394, 395, 396, 397, 399 Valses nobles et sentimentales 18, 104, 110, 123, 125–8, 132, 134, 138, 139, 148, 161, 208, 212, 216, 218, 244, 249, 318, 323, 352, 393, 399, 400; see also Adélaïde Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera 91, 392, 401 Wien (early version and early title for La valse) 59, 178, 205, 208, 211, 394; see also La valse 2. arrangements, orchestrations and editions of music by others Chabrier: Menuet pompeux, orchestration 202, 203, 343, 394, 395, 402 Chopin: Les sylphides, orchestration 164–5, 393, 402 Debussy: Danse, orchestration 240, 248, 260, 262, 277, 395, 396, 402 Debussy: Nocturnes, arr. for two pianos i. with Bardac and Garban 36–7, 47, 99, 106; ii. revised, by Ravel 124–5, 391, 392, 393, 402 Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, arr. for piano duet 106, 116, 393, 402 Debussy: Sarabande, orchestration 240, 248, 260, 262, 277, 395, 396, 402 Mendelssohn: complete piano works and piano concertos, edition 180–1, 394, 402 Musorgsky: Khovanshchina, orchestration of fragments (with Stravinsky) 152, 153, 158, 393, 402

INDEX

Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, orchestration 89, 235–6, 245–6, 248, 309, 395, 402 Rimsky-Korsakov: Antar (fragments), orchestration 109–10, 393, 402 Satie: Le fils des étoiles, preludes, orchestration 118, 123, 393, 402 Schumann: Carnaval, orchestration 164–5, 180, 393, 402 3. Other projects: notional, abandoned or incomplete Le chapeau chinois 337 La cloche engloutie 67, 82–5, 100, 105, 107, 148, 177, 267, 272, 306, 392, 393, 402 Le grand Meaulnes 247, 272, 283, 306, 395 Icare/Dédale 39: 311, 337 Jeanne d’Arc 283, 289, 304, 305, 306–7, 318, 331, 337, 338, 397 A Midsummer Night’s Dream incidental music, with Schmitt, Stravinsky and Varèse 169–70 Morgiane 331, 333, 336, 337, 341, 398 Olympia 29, 32, 131, 391 operetta on a text by Mayrargues 273, 276–7, 280, 406 operetta with Fernand Bousquet 318 orchestration of Albéniz: Iberia 294–5 orchestration of Debussy: Epigraphes antiques 289 Saint François d’Assise 100, 164, 196, 306, 393 Second String Quartet 296, 316 Symphony 100 Zazpiak-Bat 83, 134, 141, 148, 158, 159–60, 169, 170, 172, 178, 272, 306, 328, 393, 394 Le Zoo 188, 189, 394 Ravel, Pierre-Joseph (father) 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, 26, 80, 84, 93, 105, 134, 160, 390, 392 automobile (1868) 3–4 automobile engine (1903) 48 death and funeral 105 introduces Ravel and his brother to Debussy and Satie 15 marriage 5–6 studies violin at the Geneva Conservatoire 3 ‘Tourbillon de la mort, Le’ [The Whirlwind of Death] 60, 64, 80, 82, 392 Ravex, Amé see Ravel, Amé Reber, Henri: Traité d’harmonie 62 Redon, Odilon 22

427

Reger, Max 261 Régnier, Henri de 23, 25, 39, 92, 121, 126, 140, 212 ‘Fête d’eau’ 39 Les rencontres de M. de Bréot 126 Reich, Willi 305 Rembrandt van Rijn 67, 100 Renard, Jules 25, 85, 87, 89, 122 Reveleau, Mme 258, 313 Reyer, Ernst, 8, 46, 64, 334 Rhené-Bâton [René-Emmanuel Baton] 47, 198, 202, 203, 209, 345 Ribera, José de 261 Rice Institute, Houston 184, 290, 247, 290, 353 Riéra, Santiago 13, 22 Rimbaud, Arthur 23 Rimsky-Korsakov, Andrei 153 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nadezhda 153 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai 25, 54, 62, 92, 95, 109, 110, 118, 152–3, 158, 165, 236, 245–6, 316, 324 Antar 10, 109 Le coq d’or 242, 243 Russian Easter Festival Overture 299 Scheherazade 60, 144, 147, 153 Risler, Edouard 201 Rivière, Jacques 45, 271 Robey, George 329 Rodriguez, Philippe 43, 274, Roger, Thérèse 20 Roger-Ducasse, Jean 26, 111, 152, 195, 202, 244, 245, 247, 281, 352 Roland-Manuel 3, 14, 15, 16, 19, 32, 38, 73, 84, 114, 131, 133, 138, 141, 145, 155, 157, 159, 174, 177, 178, 182, 183, 187, 192, 205, 206, 210, 217, 225, 228, 235, 236, 240, 244, 247, 248, 250, 253, 256, 258, 259, 260, 262, 265, 267, 268, 271, 275, 276, 284, 290, 294, 295, 340, 344, 345, 350, 352, 393, 397 first impressions of Ravel 135–6 L’écran des jeunes filles 307 Rolland, Romain 63, 92, 93, 182, 1 85, 216 Rome 33, 36, 139, 180, 195, 209, 210, 395, 396 American Academy 277 Ronsard, Pierre de 24, 256, 273, 330 Rosenthal, Manuel 57, 64, 71, 79, 114, 115, 132, 144, 177, 190, 199, 207, 221, 247, 248, 258, 259, 267, 268, 280, 281, 282, 294, 327, 331, 333, 334, 338,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

428

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

ROSENTHAL, MANUEL (cont.) 340, 344, 346, 348, 349, 351, 352, 353, 356 Rossini, Gioachino: Barber of Seville 202, 276 Rothermere, Countess 241 Rothschild, Henri de 276 Rouché, Jacques 115, 117, 136, 141, 145, 149, 150, 164, 190, 196, 200, 204, 216, 218, 227, 229, 230, 233, 235, 263, 270, 276, 282, 285, 345 Roussel, Albert 47, 85, 92, 152, 216, 225, 235, 250, 256 Padmâvatî 253, 395 Rousset, Denis Gabriel (great-great grandfather, clockmaker) 1 Rousso-Plotto, Etienne 4, 5, 6, 7, 53, 57, 133, 232, 312, 329, 331, 343 Roux, Saint-Pol [Paul-Pierre Roux] 18, 25 Rubinstein, Ida 210, 281, 294, 295, 297, 298, 305, 308, 316, 331, 340 Russolo, Antonio 230 Sabata, Victor de 264, 277 Sabatier, Antoine 18 Sachs, Léo 202, 284 Les burgraves 284 St-Jean-de-Luz 4, 5, 39, 42, 47, 52, 53, 60, 82, 84, 133, 134, 148, 153, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 170, 178, 179, 195, 227, 231, 232, 250, 251, 254, 262, 288, 298, 294, 295, 304, 308, 309, 329, 330, 331, 336, 341, 342, 391, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398 Schola Cantorum 289, 308 Saint-Marceaux, Marguerite de 30, 31, 32, 36, 59, 185, 188, 223, 275 Saint-Saëns, Camille 14, 46, 64, 69, 86, 88, 106, 120, 138, 157, 169, 180, 184, 186–7, 194, 195, 224, 229, 233, 319, 346, 350, 353, Ascanio 8 Le carnaval des animaux 86, 88 Six études pour la main gauche 319 Hélène 202 Piano Concerto no. 4: 252 Piano Concerto no. 5: 299, 307 Samson et Dalila 8 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 100 Salzedo, Carlos 71 Samazeuilh, Gustave 84, 159, 160, 168, 206, 256, 289, 295, 328, 342, 345, 354 Sanderson, Germaine 262, 396 San Sebastián 289, 331 Sargent, John Singer 31 Satie, Conrad 120

Satie, Erik 9, 10, 15, 17, 36, 67, 118, 119, 120, 123, 125, 135, 137, 163, 164, 169. 188, 191, 197, 205, 215, 216, 220, 231–2, 239, 247, 250, 253, 261, 270, 354, 390, 391, 393, 394, 402 funeral 273 relations with Ravel 119–20, 229 La belle excentrique 229 Chapitres tournés en tous sens 163 Cinq grimaces 169, 170 Le fils des étoiles 123 Gnossiennes 10 Gymnopédies 15 Trois mélodies 16 Premier menuet 205 Parade 137, 189–90, 198, 203, 394 Le piège de Méduse 239 Prélude de la porte héroïque du ciel 24 Sarabandes 15, 19 Socrate 205 Vexations 15 Satsuma, Jirohatchi 274 Sauguet, Henri 261, 298, 346, 355 Scarlatti, Domenico 74, 135, 159, 328 Schaeffner, André 210 Schloezer, Boris de 235 Schmitt, Florent 26, 36, 39, 43, 44, 49, 92, 94, 108, 111, 139, 141, 145, 149, 152, 155, 160, 163, 169, 172, 182, 199, 216, 225, 231, 232, 244, 245, 323, 324, 343 La tragédie de Salomé 202 Schmitz, Germaine 293 Schmitz, Robert 154, 241, 253, 277, 283, 290 Schoenberg, Arnold 154, 160, 167, 184, 207, 218–9, 220, 221, 222, 235, 242, 244, 247, 261, 289, 290, 305, 354, 397 Chamber Symphony op. 9: 222 George-Lieder op. 15: 220 Gurrelieder 219 Three piano pieces op. 11: 154 Five piano pieces op. 23: 220, 289 Pierrot lunaire 154, 164, 167, 207, 234–5, 289, 395, 395, 397 Suite op. 29: 289 Schoenewerk (publisher) 69 Schrey, Julius B. 282 Schubert, Franz 125–6, 140, 252, 297, 352 Valses nobles 125–6 Schumann, Robert 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 25, 43, 164, 165, 180, 352–3 Scriabin, Alexander 155, 319 Séguy, Emile-Allain 43 Selva, Blanche 47

INDEX

Sert, José Maria 203 Sert, Misia 144, 145, 208, 209, 210, 225, 298, 350 Séverac, Déodat de 43, 78–9, 168 Le cœur du moulin 107 En Languedoc 78–9 Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar 77–8 Sibelius, Jean 288 Simeone, Nigel 324 Simpson, Mrs James 121 Singher, Martial 333, 335, 339 Sinzig, Ferdinand 75 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (film) 270 Société musicale indépendante (SMI) 112–3, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 137, 139, 154, 161, 163–4, 167, 168, 179, 180, 187, 201, 202, 219, 227, 234, 235, 236, 239, 263, 274, 282, 284, 289, 294 Société nationale de musique (SNM) 7, 15, 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 40, 44, 47, 51, 52, 56, 78, 80, 87, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 123, 125, 138, 150, 167–8, 182, 186, 187, 202, 229, 282, 283, 314, 338 Sokolov, Nicolai 165 Sordes, Paul 43, 44, 59 Stein, Erwin 220 Steinberg, Maximilian 225 Steinway and Sons 75 Steuermann, Eduard 219, 220, 289 Stock, Frederick 291 Strauss, Johann II: The Blue Danube 249 Strauss, Richard 93, 107, 108, 138, 161, 184, 219, 222, 248, 306, 321, 346 Feuersnot 107, 108 Die Frau ohne Schatten 219 Salome 117 Stravinsky, Catherine 157, 179 Stravinsky, Igor 1, 70, 110, 118, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 179–80, 196, 204, 209, 210, 216, 225, 226, 227, 230, 232, 234, 239, 240, 242, 243, 253, 271, 284, 288, 289, 298, 314, 315, 318, 324, 345, 349, 350, 352, 353 collaboration with Ravel on Khovanshchina 152–3, 157, 158, 393, 402 first meeting with Ravel 118 scores in Ravel’s library 352 Concerto for piano and wind instruments 315 The Firebird 110, 118, 289, 397

429

Mavra 232, 240, 253, 315 Les noces 253, 254, 284, 298, 318, 395 Oedipus Rex 315 Petrushka 40, 133, 146, 232, 393 Pulcinella 209 Renard 31 Le rossignol 167, 243 Le sacre du printemps 144, 149, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 167, 190, 210, 234, 263, 318, 393 Symphonies pour instruments à vent (chorale) 216, 227 Symphony of Psalms 314, 315, 318, 397 Three Japanese Lyrics 153, 154, 155, 163, 393 Stravinsky, Theodore 157 Stuckenschmidt, Hans-Heinz 88, 117, 236 Szántó, Theodor 263, 289 Szigeti, Joseph 291 Szymanowski, Karol 219, 239, 240 Taffanel, Paul 45, 391 Tailleferre, Germaine 258, 346 Taneyev, Sergei 165 Tansman, Alexandre 225, 291, 292, 294, 300 Taruskin, Richard 152, 153, 243 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 10, 95, 96, 261, 319 Tcherepnin, Alexander 165 Tcherepnin, Nicolai 225 Narcisse et Echo 143 Tchernicheva, Lubov 147 Tenroc, Charles [Charles Cornet] 118, 184, 185, 272 Teyte, Maggie 104 Thibaud, Jacques 159, 312 Thibaudet, Albert 186 Thomas, Ambroise 23, 24 Thomson, Virgil 354 Tiersot, Julien 113 Toscanini, Arturo 300, 301, 310, 311, 313, 315, 317, 348 dispute with Ravel over tempo of Boléro 300–301 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 58, 86, 96 Trouhanova, Natasha 139, 140, 141 Turina, Joaquín 167, 202 Tzara, Tristan [Samuel Rosenstock] 230, 308 Udine, Jean d’ 124 United States Patent and Trademark Office 82 Usteritz, Titi d’ 312 Vaillant, Auguste 17

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

430

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43x

INDEX

Valéry, Paul 58, 224, 272 Vallas, Léon 1, 75, 83, 204 Vallery-Radot, Pasteur 337, 339 Vallin, General Prosper 200, 201 Valvins 58, 94, 104, 159, 392, 393 Varèse, Edgard 110, 169, 392 Amériques 308 Varèse, Louise 169 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 94–6, 108–9, 119, 137, 149, 154, 167, 181, 242, 288, 326 ‘Chansons anciennes anglaises’ 154 Norfolk Rhapsodies 94 On Wenlock Edge 119, 137, 393 studies with Ravel 94–6 Velázquez, Diego 67, 261 Venice 308, 395 Verdi, Giuseppe 261 Un ballo in maschera 261 Falstaff 8, 233 La forza del destino 261 Otello 8 Rigoletto 8 La traviata 8, 140 Verlaine, Paul 18, 19 Versoix 1, 2, 3, 390 Vincent, Clovis 332, 344, 398 Viñes, Ricardo 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 80, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 120, 138, 162, 163, 167, 168, 197, 205, 207, 211, 225, 232, 237, 254, 294, 345, 350, 390, 391, 392 description of Ravel’s character 22 first meeting with Ravel 11 Vix, Geneviève 59, 233 Volta, Ornella 188 Voltaire 356 Vuillard, Edouard 58, 109 Vuillemin, Louis 111, 202, 235, 250, 251 Vuillermoz, Emile 26, 43, 51, 56, 57, 72, 111, 112, 130, 146, 149, 164, 233, 250, 271, 276, 277, 324, 339

Wagner, Richard 8, 10, 12, 14, 24, 43, 49, 90, 118, 132, 138, 139, 150, 158, 162, 163, 185, 189, 261, 352, 355 Lohengrin 8 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg overture 200, 201, 322 Parsifal 162–3 Tristan und Isolde 16, 24, 58, 158, 163, 212, 235 Die Walküre 8 Walker, Ernest 296 Walton, William: Belshazzar’s Feast 326 Weber, Carl Maria von 14, 353 Webern, Anton 219, 221, 249, 250 Webster, Beveridge 263 Welte-Mignon 161, 216, 237, 283, 393 West, Rebecca 16 Whitman, Walt 121 Widor, Charles-Marie 46, 61, 107, 123, 272, 275 Wiéner, Jean 207, 234, 235, 249, 250, 395 Wilde, Oscar 44, 56 Wilkinson, Joseph 3 Willaume, Gabriel 180, 394 Willaume String Quartet 120 Willaume-Lambert, Léontine 120 Willy [Henri Gauthier-Villars] 31, 42, 84, 124, 166 Witkowski, Georges-Martin 47, 168 Wittgenstein, Paul 305–6, 313, 314, 318, 319, 321, 327, 333, 343, 348 Wolff, Albert 275, 282, 310, 311, 397, 398 Wolff, Lotte 337 Wood, Henry 123, 252 Woolf, Virginia 346 Youmans, Vincent: Tea for Two 294 Yvain, Maurice 345 Zola, Emile 27, 32 Zuckerkandl, Bertha 222 Zuckerkandl, Emil 222