Maurice Ravel

• 1. Introduction

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  Maurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a Basque town in France less than 20 kilometres from the Spanish border. By the time he reached his fifties, he was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. And yet the musical establishment of his own country spent years trying to freeze him out.

  His father Pierre-Joseph Ravel was an engineer and inventor. One of his creations was a circus machine called the "Whirlwind of Death," an automotive loop-the-loop that drew crowds until a fatal accident at Barnum and Bailey's Circus in 1903. His mother Marie grew up in Madrid, sang Basque folk songs to her son, and shaped his sensibility more than any teacher ever would.

  Ravel spent years at the Paris Conservatoire and was twice expelled. He entered five times for the Prix de Rome, France's most prestigious prize for young composers, and never won. The last attempt, in 1905, triggered a national scandal that toppled the Conservatoire's director. Through it all Ravel remained, in the words of his biographer Burnett James, "self-possessed, a little aloof, intellectually biased, given to mild banter."

  His best-known work, Boléro, is seventeen minutes of a single gradual crescendo with almost no harmonic development. He called it "an experiment in a very special and limited direction," was astonished it became a mass success, and privately doubted it counted as music at all. When an elderly audience member shouted "Rubbish!" at its premiere, Ravel remarked, "That old lady got the message."

  Who was this composer, and how did such a reserved, perfectionist man produce music that filled concert halls on two continents? The answers lie in a Basque childhood, a fractious conservatoire, a circle of artistic outcasts, a world war, and a deteriorating brain that could still hear music long after it could no longer write it.

• 2. Basque Roots and Early Formation

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  The family moved to Paris when Maurice was three months old, but the Basque-Spanish world his mother carried with her never left him. Marie Ravel was illegitimate and barely literate; by 19th-century conventions she had married above her station. Yet the household was a happy one, and Maurice's attachment to her was the deepest emotional bond of his life.

  Ravel senior took his sons to factories to see the latest machinery, but he was equally serious about culture. Ravel recalled in later life, "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 of formal schooling in those early years; his biographer Roger Nichols suggests the boy was chiefly educated by his father.

  At seven, Ravel began piano lessons with Henri Ghys, a friend of the composer Emmanuel Chabrier. Five years later he started studying harmony, counterpoint and composition with Charles-René, who was himself a pupil of Léo Delibes. His teacher noted that Ravel's conception of music was natural to him "and not, as in the case of so many others, the result of effort."

  His earliest surviving compositions date from this period: variations on a chorale by Schumann, variations on a theme by Grieg, and a fragment of a piano sonata. They survive only in pieces. In 1888 he met the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became a lifelong friend and one of the foremost interpreters of his work, and who connected him to Spanish musical culture. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, Ravel was struck hard by new Russian works conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and by the sound of a Javanese gamelan. Both left a lasting mark on his musical imagination, as they did on Claude Debussy, who was also present. The Ravel who would later compose Rapsodie espagnole and Chansons madécasses was already being assembled from these early encounters.

• 3. Conservatoire Wars

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  In November 1889, playing Chopin, Ravel passed the entrance examination for the Paris Conservatoire. He won the first prize in the piano competition in 1891. After that, his record at the institution was one of steady friction and eventual expulsion.

  His later teacher Gabriel Fauré understood that Ravel was, in the words of musicologist Barbara L. Kelly, "only teachable on his own terms." The conservative faculty of the 1890s did not share that understanding. Ravel was expelled in 1895, having won no further prizes. He was readmitted in 1897, studying composition with Fauré and taking private counterpoint lessons with André Gedalge. Fauré reported "a distinct gain in maturity... engaging wealth of imagination." But the Conservatoire's Director, Théodore Dubois, deplored Ravel's progressive outlook, and according to fellow student Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, he became "a marked man, against whom all weapons were good." He was expelled again in 1900.

  During his studentship he met Erik Satie, introduced by his father. Satie was then earning a living as a café pianist. Ravel was one of the first musicians to recognise his originality, and counted Satie's experiments in musical form "of inestimable value."

  The final rupture with the institution came in 1905. Ravel, by then thirty, entered the Prix de Rome for the fifth time. He was eliminated in the first round. Even critics unsympathetic to his music, including his persistent adversary Pierre Lalo, condemned the decision as unjustifiable. The scandal deepened when it emerged that the senior Conservatoire professor Charles Lenepveu sat on the jury, and that only his own students reached the final round. L'affaire Ravel became a national story, leading to Dubois's early retirement and his replacement by Fauré, who was appointed by the government to carry out a radical reorganisation. Ravel's expulsions had inadvertently reshaped the institution that expelled him.

• 4. Les Apaches and Debussy

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  Around 1900 Ravel joined an informal circle of innovative artists, poets, critics and musicians. Viñes gave the group its name: Les Apaches, meaning "The Hooligans," reflecting their status as artistic outcasts. They met regularly until the First World War. At various times the group included Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla alongside their French friends.

  Among the group's shared enthusiasms was the music of Debussy. Ravel, twelve years Debussy's junior, had known him slightly since the 1890s. When André Messager conducted the premiere of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique in 1902, Dubois forbade Conservatoire students to attend. The Apaches went anyway. The first run consisted of fourteen performances, and Ravel attended every one.

  Both composers were labelled Impressionists, a term both rejected. Ravel thought Debussy was indeed an Impressionist, but that he himself was not. He wrote of Debussy: "His genius was obviously one of great individuality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution, expressing itself freely, yet always faithful to French tradition. For Debussy, the musician and the man, I have had profound admiration, but by nature I am different from Debussy... I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of his symbolism."

  By the middle of the decade the friendship had cooled into estrangement. Their admirers formed rival factions. Ravel's critic Lalo wrote that where Debussy was "all sensitivity," Ravel was "all insensitivity, borrowing without hesitation not only technique but the sensitivity of other people." Ravel's response was characteristically dry: "It's probably better for us, after all, to be on frigid terms for illogical reasons." Nichols suggests one additional source of tension. In 1904 Debussy left his wife and went to live with the singer Emma Bardac. Ravel, together with his friend Misia Edwards and the opera star Lucienne Bréval, contributed to a modest regular income for the deserted Lilly Debussy. This act of solidarity may have rankled with her husband.

• 5. War, Loss and the Post-War World

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  When Germany invaded France in 1914 Ravel tried to join the French Air Force. He considered his small stature and light weight ideal for an aviator, but was rejected on grounds of age and a minor heart complaint. While waiting to enlist, he composed Trois Chansons, his only work for a cappella choir, and dedicated each of the three songs to a person he hoped might help him get a posting.

  He finally joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, at the age of forty. Stravinsky expressed admiration for his 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 direct danger, driving munitions at night under German bombardment. He suffered insomnia and digestive problems, underwent a bowel operation following amoebic dysentery in September 1916, and had frostbite in his feet the following winter.

  When Saint-Saëns, Dubois and d'Indy formed the Ligue Nationale pour la Defense de la Musique Française and campaigned for a ban on contemporary German music, Ravel declined to join. He told the league's committee in 1916: "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: our musical art, which is so rich at the present time, would soon degenerate, becoming isolated in banal formulas." The league responded by banning his music from its concerts.

  His mother died in January 1917. Ravel fell into what he called a "horrible despair." His most substantial wartime work, Le tombeau de Couperin, was composed between 1914 and 1917. It is a suite celebrating the tradition of the 18th-century French composer François Couperin, with each movement dedicated to a friend of Ravel's who had died in the war.

  After Debussy died in 1918, Ravel was generally seen in France and abroad as the leading French composer of the era. Fauré wrote to him: "I am happier than you can imagine about the solid position which you occupy and which you have acquired so brilliantly and so rapidly. It is a source of joy and pride for your old professor." Ravel was offered the Legion of Honour in 1920 and declined. Satie, who had turned against him, commented, "Ravel refuses the Légion d'honneur, but all his music accepts it."

• 6. Bolero and the American Zenith

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  In May 1921 Ravel moved to Le Belvédère, a small house on the fringe of Montfort-l'Amaury, 50 kilometres west of Paris. Looked after by his housekeeper Mme Revelot, he lived there for the rest of his life, composing and gardening when he was not performing abroad.

  His touring schedule expanded considerably through the 1920s. After two months of planning, he made a four-month tour of North America in 1928. His fee was a guaranteed minimum of $10,000 and a constant supply of Gauloises cigarettes. He visited twenty-five cities and appeared with most of the leading orchestras in Canada and the United States. At an all-Ravel programme conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in New York, the entire audience rose and applauded as the composer took his seat. Ravel was touched, and observed, "You know, this doesn't happen to me in Paris."

  The last work he completed during that decade was Boléro. He had been commissioned to write a score for the ballet company of Ida Rubinstein, and having been unable to secure the rights to orchestrate Albéniz's Iberia, he settled on what he described as "an experiment in a very special and limited direction... a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music." He continued: "There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except the plan and the manner of the execution. The themes are altogether impersonal." He was astonished, and not wholly pleased, by its mass success. The work was popularised by the conductor Arturo Toscanini and has been recorded several hundred times. Ravel told Arthur Honegger, one of Les Six, "I've written only one masterpiece - Boléro. Unfortunately there's no music in it."

• 7. The Two Concertos

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  At the start of the 1930s Ravel was working simultaneously on two piano concertos. He completed the Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand first. It had been commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the First World War. The challenge stimulated Ravel: "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." Because his own left-hand technique was not equal to the piece, he demonstrated it for Wittgenstein using both hands.

  Wittgenstein was initially disappointed by the work, but after long study he became fascinated by it. He premiered it in Vienna in January 1932 to immediate acclaim, and performed it in Paris with Ravel conducting the following year. The critic Henry Prunières wrote: "From the opening measures, we are plunged into a world in which Ravel has but rarely introduced us."

  The Piano Concerto in G major was completed a year later. At its January 1932 premiere there was high praise for the soloist Marguerite Long and for Ravel's score, though not for his conducting. Long, the dedicatee, played the concerto in more than twenty European cities with the composer on the podium. The lighter tone of the G major concerto follows the models of Mozart and Saint-Saëns alongside jazz-like themes. Critics Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor singled out the slow movement as "one of the most beautiful tunes Ravel ever invented," suggesting the composer "can truly be said to join hands with Mozart." The two concertos were the last complete large-scale works Ravel would write.

• 8. Illness and Silence

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  In October 1932 Ravel suffered a blow to the head in a taxi accident. The injury was not thought serious at the time, but a 1988 study in the British Medical Journal by the neurologist R. A. Henson concluded that it may have worsened an existing cerebral condition. Close friends had been concerned about his growing absent-mindedness as early as 1927, and within a year of the accident he began to show symptoms suggesting aphasia.

  Before the accident he had started writing music for a 1933 film, Don Quixote, but he failed to meet the production schedule. He did complete three songs for baritone and orchestra intended for the film, published as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. The manuscript score is in Ravel's hand, though Lucien Garban and Manuel Rosenthal helped with transcription. These were his final compositions.

  The exact nature of his illness remained unknown to his physicians and remains disputed today. Experts have ruled out a tumour, and have variously proposed frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Though no longer able to write music or perform, Ravel remained physically and socially active until his last months. Henson noted that he preserved most or all of his auditory imagery, and could still hear music in his head.

  In 1937 he came under the care of Clovis Vincent, a well-known Paris neurosurgeon, who advised surgery. Vincent expected to find ventriculomegaly from hydrocephalus that an operation might prevent from progressing. Ravel's brother Édouard accepted the advice on his behalf. After surgery there was a brief apparent improvement, then a relapse into a coma. Ravel died on the 28th of December 1937, at the age of 62. On the 30th of December he was interred next to his parents in a granite tomb at Levallois-Perret cemetery in north-west Paris. He was an atheist; there was no religious ceremony. His house at Le Belvédère was later turned into a museum by his brother and, as of 2025, remains open for guided tours.