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Maurice Ravel: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a small Basque town near the Spanish border, into a family that bridged the gap between engineering precision and artistic freedom. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was a successful engineer and inventor who created an early internal combustion engine and a notorious circus ride called the Whirlwind of Death, while his mother, Marie Delouart, was a Basque woman who had grown up in Madrid and was barely literate. This union of a well-educated engineer and an illegitimate, free-thinking woman created a household where mechanical curiosity and folk songs coexisted, shaping Ravel's unique perspective from infancy. The family moved to Paris three months after his birth, where a younger son, Édouard, was born, but Maurice remained particularly devoted to his mother, whose Basque-Spanish heritage became a profound influence on his life and music. He recalled that throughout his childhood he was sensitive to music, and his father, much better educated in this art than most amateurs, knew how to develop his taste and stimulate his 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, who delighted in taking his sons to factories to see the latest mechanical devices.
The Conservatoire Scandal
Ravel's relationship with the Paris Conservatoire was defined by a series of conflicts that turned his artistic struggles into a national scandal. He applied for entry in November 1889 and passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano class run by Eugène Anthiome, winning the first prize in the Conservatoire's piano competition in 1891, but otherwise he did not stand out as a student. In 1891 he progressed to the classes of Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot for piano and Émile Pessard for harmony, making solid but unspectacular progress. He was expelled in 1895, having won no more prizes, and despite being readmitted in 1897 to study composition with Gabriel Fauré, he was expelled again in 1900. The Director, Théodore Dubois, deplored the young man's musically and politically progressive outlook, and according to a fellow student, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, he was a marked man, against whom all weapons were good. In 1905, at the age of thirty, Ravel competed for the Prix de Rome for the last time and was eliminated in the first round, which even critics unsympathetic to his music denounced as unjustifiable. The press's indignation grew when it emerged that the senior professor at the Conservatoire, Charles Lenepveu, was on the jury, and only his students were selected for the final round. This incident, known as l'affaire Ravel, became a national scandal, leading to the early retirement of Dubois and his replacement by Fauré, appointed by the government to carry out a radical reorganisation of the Conservatoire.
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a small Basque town near the Spanish border. His family moved to Paris three months after his birth, where his younger brother Édouard was also born.
Why was Maurice Ravel expelled from the Paris Conservatoire?
Maurice Ravel was expelled from the Paris Conservatoire in 1895 and again in 1900 after winning no more prizes and holding a musically and politically progressive outlook. The Director, Théodore Dubois, deplored his views, and a national scandal known as l'affaire Ravel erupted when Ravel was eliminated from the Prix de Rome competition in 1905.
What was the name of the informal group Maurice Ravel joined around 1900?
Around 1900 Maurice Ravel joined an informal group known as Les Apaches, or The Hooligans, which included innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians. The group met regularly until the beginning of the First World War and included members such as Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla.
How did Maurice Ravel serve during the First World War?
Maurice Ravel tried to join the French Air Force but was rejected due to his age and a minor heart complaint. He eventually joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, driving munitions at night under heavy German bombardment.
What is the significance of the work Boléro by Maurice Ravel?
Boléro was conceived as a symphonic poem without a subject where the whole interest lies in the rhythm and lasts seventeen minutes. Maurice Ravel stated that the work was one long, very gradual crescendo with no contrasts and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of the execution.
When and how did Maurice Ravel die?
Maurice Ravel died on the 28th of December 1937, at the age of 62, following a coma after surgery for a cerebral condition. He was interred next to his parents in a granite tomb at Levallois-Perret cemetery on the 30th of December 1937.
Around 1900 Ravel and a number of innovative young artists, poets, critics and musicians joined together in an informal group known as Les Apaches, or The Hooligans, a name coined by his friend Ricardo Viñes to represent their status as artistic outcasts. They met regularly until the beginning of the First World War, and members stimulated one another with intellectual argument and performances of their works. The membership of the group was fluid, and at various times included Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla as well as their French friends. Among the enthusiasms of the Apaches was the music of Claude Debussy, who was twelve years Ravel's senior. Ravel had known Debussy slightly since the 1890s, and their friendship, though never close, continued for more than ten years. In 1902 André Messager conducted the premiere of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique, which divided musical opinion. Dubois unavailingly forbade Conservatoire students to attend, and the conductor's friend and former teacher Camille Saint-Saëns was prominent among those who detested the piece. The Apaches were loud in their support, and Ravel attended all fourteen performances of the first run. Debussy was widely held to be an Impressionist composer, a label he intensely disliked, and many music lovers began to apply the same term to Ravel, and the works of the two composers were frequently taken as part of a single genre. Ravel thought that Debussy was indeed an Impressionist but that he himself was not, and he wrote that Debussy's genius was obviously one of great individuality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution, expressing itself freely, yet always faithful to French tradition. The two composers ceased to be on friendly terms in the middle of the first decade of the 1900s, for musical and possibly personal reasons, and their admirers began to form factions, with adherents of one composer denigrating the other.
The War Years
When Germany invaded France in 1914, Ravel tried to join the French Air Force, considering his small stature and light weight ideal for an aviator, but was rejected because of his age and a minor heart complaint. While waiting to be enlisted, Ravel composed Trois Chansons, his only work for a cappella choir, setting his own texts in the tradition of French 16th-century chansons. He dedicated the three songs to people who might help him to enlist. After several unsuccessful attempts to enlist, Ravel finally joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, when he was forty. Stravinsky expressed admiration for his friend's courage, noting that at his age and with his name he could have had an easier place, or done nothing. Some of Ravel's duties put him in mortal danger, driving munitions at night under heavy German bombardment. At the same time his peace of mind was undermined by his mother's failing health, and his own health also deteriorated; he suffered from insomnia and digestive problems, underwent a bowel operation following amoebic dysentery in September 1916, and had frostbite in his feet the following winter. During the war the Ligue Nationale pour la Defense de la Musique Française was formed by Saint-Saëns, Dubois, d'Indy and others, campaigning for a ban on the performance of contemporary German music. Ravel declined to join, telling the committee of the league in 1916 that it would be dangerous for French composers to ignore systematically the productions of their foreign colleagues, and thus form themselves into a sort of national coterie. His mother died in January 1917, and he fell into a horrible despair, compounding the distress he felt at the suffering endured by the people of his country during the war. He composed few works in the war years, but the most substantial of his wartime works is Le tombeau de Couperin, composed between 1914 and 1917, a suite that celebrates the tradition of François Couperin and where each movement is dedicated to a friend of Ravel's who died in the war.
The Master of Orchestration
During his lifetime it was above all as a master of orchestration that Ravel was famous, and he minutely studied the ability of each orchestral instrument to determine its potential, putting its individual colour and timbre to maximum use. The critic Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote that in reality he was, with Stravinsky, the one man in the world who best knows the weight of a trombone-note, the harmonics of a cello or a pp tam-tam in the relationships of one orchestral group to another. For all Ravel's orchestral mastery, only four of his works were conceived as concert works for symphony orchestra: Rapsodie espagnole, La valse and the two concertos. All the other orchestral works were written either for the stage, as in Daphnis et Chloé, or as a reworking of piano pieces. In the 1920s, Ravel frequently divided his upper strings, having them play in six to eight parts while the woodwind are required to play with extreme agility. His writing for the brass ranges from softly muted to triple-forte outbursts at climactic points. In the 1930s he tended to simplify his orchestral textures, and the lighter tone of the G major Piano Concerto follows the models of Mozart and Saint-Saëns, alongside use of jazz-like themes. The most popular of Ravel's orchestral works, Boléro, was conceived several years before its completion, and in 1924 he said that he was contemplating a symphonic poem without a subject, where the whole interest will be in the rhythm. Ravel made orchestral versions of piano works by Schumann, Chabrier, Debussy and Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, and his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's suite remains the best known, producing an orchestral sound wholly unlike his own.
The Bolero Experiment
The last composition Ravel completed in the 1920s, Boléro, became his most famous work, yet he was astonished, and not wholly pleased, that it became a mass success. He was commissioned to provide a score for Ida Rubinstein's ballet company, and having been unable to secure the rights to orchestrate Albéniz's Iberia, he decided on an experiment in a very special and limited direction, a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music. Ravel continued that the work was one long, very gradual crescendo, with no contrasts and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of the execution, and the themes were altogether impersonal. When one elderly member of the audience at the Opéra shouted Rubbish! at the premiere, he remarked, That old lady got the message! The work was popularised by the conductor Arturo Toscanini and has been recorded several hundred times. Ravel commented to Arthur Honegger, one of Les Six, I've written only one masterpiece , Boléro. Unfortunately there's no music in it. The piece was conceived as a symphonic poem without a subject, where the whole interest will be in the rhythm, and it stands as a testament to his willingness to experiment with musical form, as repetition takes the place of development. Despite his initial ambivalence, the work has become one of the most recognizable pieces in the classical repertoire, proving that Ravel's ability to craft a perfect balance between pure intellect and emotion could create a phenomenon that transcended his own expectations.
The Final Decline
In October 1932 Ravel suffered a blow to the head in a taxi accident, an injury that was not thought serious at the time but which may have exacerbated an existing cerebral condition. As early as 1927 close friends had been concerned at Ravel's growing absent-mindedness, and within a year of the accident he started to experience symptoms suggesting aphasia. Before the accident he had begun work on music for a film, Don Quixote, but he was unable to meet the production schedule, and Jacques Ibert wrote most of the score. Ravel completed three songs for baritone and orchestra intended for the film, which were published as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, but he composed no more after this. The exact nature of his illness is unknown, and experts have ruled out the possibility of a tumour, and have variously suggested frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease and Creutzfeld, Jakob disease. In 1937 Ravel began to suffer pain from his condition, and was examined by Clovis Vincent, a well-known Paris neurosurgeon. Vincent advised surgical treatment, and Ravel's brother Édouard accepted this advice, as the patient was in no state to express a considered view. After the operation there seemed to be an improvement in his condition, but it was short-lived, and he soon lapsed into a coma. He died on the 28th of December 1937, at the age of 62. On the 30th of December 1937 Ravel was interred next to his parents in a granite tomb at Levallois-Perret cemetery, in north-west Paris. He was an atheist and there was no religious ceremony, marking the end of a life that had been defined by a relentless pursuit of perfection and a unique voice in the world of music.