Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro, in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit, is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé require skilful balance in performance.
Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.
Life and career
Early years
Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, from the Spanish border. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border. His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid. In 19th-century terms, Joseph had married beneath his status – Marie was illegitimate and barely literate – but the marriage was a happy one. Some of Joseph's inventions were successful, including an early internal combustion engine and a notorious circus machine, the "Whirlwind of Death", an automotive loop-the-loop that was a major attraction until a fatal accident at Barnum and Bailey's Circus in 1903.Both Ravel's parents were Roman Catholics; Marie was also something of a free-thinker, a trait inherited by her elder son. He was baptised in the Ciboure parish church six days after he was born. The family moved to Paris three months later, and there a younger son, Édouard, was born. Maurice was particularly devoted to their mother; her Basque-Spanish heritage was a strong influence on his life and music. Among his earliest memories were folk songs she sang to him. The household was not rich, but the family was comfortable, and the two boys had happy childhoods.
Ravel senior delighted in taking his sons to factories to see the latest mechanical devices, but he also had a keen interest in music and culture in general. In later life, Ravel recalled, "Throughout my childhood I was sensitive to music. My father, much better educated in this art than most amateurs are, knew how to develop my taste and to stimulate my enthusiasm at an early age." There is no record that Ravel received any formal general schooling in his early years; his biographer Roger Nichols suggests that the boy may have been chiefly educated by his father.
When he was seven, Ravel started piano lessons with Henri Ghys, a friend of Emmanuel Chabrier; five years later, in 1887, he began studying harmony, counterpoint and composition with Charles-René, a pupil of Léo Delibes. Without being anything of a child prodigy, he was a highly musical boy. Charles-René found that Ravel's conception of music was natural to him "and not, as in the case of so many others, the result of effort". Ravel's earliest known compositions date from this period: variations on a chorale by Schumann, variations on a theme by Grieg and a single movement of a piano sonata. They survive only in fragmentary form.
In 1888 Ravel met the young pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became not only a lifelong friend, but also one of the foremost interpreters of his works, and an important link between Ravel and Spanish music. The two shared an appreciation of Wagner, Russian music, and the writings of Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, Ravel was much struck by the new Russian works conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This music had a lasting effect on both Ravel and his older contemporary Claude Debussy, as did the exotic sound of the Javanese gamelan, also heard during the Exposition.
Émile Decombes took over as Ravel's piano teacher in 1889; in the same year Ravel gave his earliest public performance. Aged fourteen, he took part in a concert at the Salle Érard along with other pupils of Decombes, including Reynaldo Hahn and Alfred Cortot.
Paris Conservatoire
With the encouragement of his parents, Ravel applied for entry to France's most important musical college, the Conservatoire de Paris. In November 1889, playing music by Chopin, he passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano class run by Eugène Anthiome. Ravel won the first prize in the Conservatoire's piano competition in 1891, but otherwise he did not stand out as a student. Nevertheless, these years were a time of considerable advance in his development as a composer. The musicologist Arbie Orenstein writes that for Ravel the 1890s were a period "of immense growth... from adolescence to maturity".In 1891 Ravel progressed to the classes of Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot, for piano, and Émile Pessard, for harmony. He made solid, unspectacular progress, with particular encouragement from Bériot but, in the words of the musicologist Barbara L. Kelly, he "was only teachable on his own terms". His later teacher Gabriel Fauré understood this, but it was not generally acceptable to the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire of the 1890s. Ravel was expelled in 1895, having won no more prizes. His earliest works to survive in full are from these student days: Sérénade grotesque, for piano, and "Ballade de la Reine morte d'aimer", a mélodie setting a poem by Roland de Marès.
Ravel was never so assiduous a student of the piano as his colleagues such as Viñes and Cortot were. It was plain that as a pianist he would never match them, and his overriding ambition was to be a composer. From this point he concentrated on composition. His works from the period include the songs "Un grand sommeil noir" and "D'Anne jouant de l'espinette" to words by Paul Verlaine and Clément Marot, and the piano pieces Menuet antique and Habanera, the latter eventually incorporated into the Rapsodie espagnole. At around this time, Joseph Ravel introduced his son to Erik Satie, who was earning a living as a café pianist. Ravel was one of the first musicians – Debussy was another – who recognised Satie's originality and talent. Satie's constant experiments in musical form were an inspiration to Ravel, who counted them "of inestimable value".
In 1897 Ravel was readmitted to the Conservatoire, studying composition with Fauré, and taking private lessons in counterpoint with André Gedalge. Both these teachers, particularly Fauré, regarded him highly and were key influences on his development as a composer. As Ravel's course progressed, Fauré reported "a distinct gain in maturity... engaging wealth of imagination". Ravel's standing at the Conservatoire was nevertheless undermined by the hostility of the Director, Théodore Dubois, who deplored the young man's musically and politically progressive outlook. Consequently, according to a fellow student, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, he was "a marked man, against whom all weapons were good". He wrote some substantial works while studying with Fauré, including the overture Shéhérazade and a single movement violin sonata, but he won no prizes, and therefore was expelled again in 1900. As a former student he was allowed to attend Fauré's classes as a non-participating "auditeur" until finally abandoning the Conservatoire in 1903.
In May 1897 Ravel conducted the first performance of the Shéhérazade overture, which had a mixed reception, with boos mingling with applause from the audience, and unflattering reviews from the critics. One described the piece as "a jolting debut: a clumsy plagiarism of the Russian School" and called Ravel a "mediocrely gifted debutant... who will perhaps become something if not someone in about ten years, if he works hard". Another critic, Pierre Lalo, thought that Ravel showed talent, but was too indebted to Debussy and should instead emulate Beethoven. Over the succeeding decades Lalo became Ravel's most implacable critic. In 1899 Ravel composed his first piece to become widely known, though it made little impact initially: Pavane pour une infante défunte. It was originally a solo piano work, commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac.
From the start of his career, Ravel appeared calmly indifferent to blame or praise. Those who knew him well believed that this was no pose but wholly genuine. The only opinion of his music that he truly valued was his own, perfectionist and severely self-critical. At twenty years of age he was, in the words of the biographer Burnett James, "self-possessed, a little aloof, intellectually biased, given to mild banter". He dressed like a dandy and was meticulous about his appearance and demeanour. Orenstein comments that, short in stature, light in frame and bony in features, Ravel had the "appearance of a well-dressed jockey", whose large head seemed suitably matched to his formidable intellect. During the late 1890s and into the early years of the next century, Ravel was bearded in the fashion of the day; from his mid-thirties he was clean-shaven.