Maurice Ravel

From today’s perspective, it is hard to imagine that the composer of the ‘Boléro’ of ‘La Valse’ or ‘Ma Mère l’Oye’ and many other well-known works was successful - in the sense of numerous performances – but never undisputed as a composer. It was not only the unfortunate comparison with Claude Debussy made by the Ravel critic P. Lalo, which continued in the reception of his work, that had a lasting influence on the perception of his oeuvre. The great success his music had with the public was interpreted after 1945 as an indication of a lack of critical awareness. This reservation and the perception of his music as working more on the surface of sound and struggling less for truth also hindered a productive examination of his music after 1945.

Ravel, born in Cibourne (Basses-Pyrénées) in 1875 as the eldest son of the engineer and inventor Pierre-Joseph Ravel and his Basque-born wife Marie, cultivated a thoroughly critical, if not disdainful, attitude towards academic standards and musical institutions. This attitude had a lasting influence on his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. For example, he failed several times in the competition for the coveted Rome Prize, winning which often led to a career as a composer. The non-conformist attitude that Ravel displayed corresponded to a dandyism that he maintained throughout his life. A photograph from 1928 shows Ravel sitting in a leather fauteuil in a distinguished pose. He is dressed in a fine suit with waistcoat, a silk tie and pocket handkerchief adorn his generally dapper appearance. However, this outwardly manifested lifestyle correlated with an inner attitude. Above all, this included independence from the judgement of others, as well as a distanced social style.

Ravel’s artistic development was characterised above all by influences and experiences outside the institution of the conservatory. These included his personal encounters with Emmanuel Chabrier and Erik Satie, his intensive study of Russian music, his discovery of the literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Arthur Rimbaud and his enthusiasm for painters such as Odilon Redon and Eduard Manet. The artists’ group ‘Les Apaches’ was also an important circle for Ravel, consisting of painters, musicians, critics and writers, in which he could expose his aesthetic ideas to discussion.

As a composer, Ravel then increasingly appeared in public from 1898 onwards. The response to his music was divided. After initial failures, it was the première of the piano works ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’ and ‘Jeux d'eau’ in 1902 that first brought him recognition, and the première of his string quartet in 1904 his breakthrough. In these works, he already realised his specific musical poetics of indirectness and refraction, which he achieved through innovative procedures in the composition of harmony and tone colours and in orchestration, as well as through his examination of existing music and its formal models, which he reformulated.

Until the beginning of the First World War, Ravel continuously developed his oeuvre and differentiated his musical language. And in 1908, he also reached a large audience with his ‘Rapsodie espagnole’. Ravel's new musical direction was finally consolidated in the songs ‘Histoires naturelles’ based on poems by Jules Renard, whose novelty, however, provoked a similar scandal at the premiere on 12 January 1907 as Schönberg’s chamber symphony a year earlier and prompted the composer to found his own forum for the presentation of his and other contemporary music, the Société Musicale Indépendante.

The war years were decisive for Ravel in several respects. Both the war experiences and the death of his mother in 1917 plunged him into a deep crisis that prevented him from composing for almost three years. But when he overcame this crisis and returned to concert life, musical life in France had changed. Ravel encountered a younger generation of composers who pursued different musical attitudes and aesthetics and for whom his anti-bourgeois attitude in the spirit of dandyism was no longer comprehensible. In the 1920s, he dedicated himself to his career as a pianist and conductor and undertook extensive concert tours through Europe and America. Despite great physical strains, he composed his works that are still successful today, such as the ‘Boléro’, ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, the concerto for the left hand and the ‘Chansons madécasses’. Already during this time, a physical ailment made itself felt, which became more pronounced after a car accident in 1932. Ravel suffered from symptoms of ataxia and aphasia and this increasingly prevented him from composing, travelling or even leaving the house. Ravel died in 1937.