Maurice Ravel: Composer or piano engineer?
- Ryszard Skarbek
- Feb 14, 2021
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 27
As Europe admired the emotional music of the Impressionists, a French composer, Maurice Ravel, remained faithful to a technique that left no room for improvisation or interpretation.
Thanks to his meticulous notation and deadly precision, he has earned the reputation of being a "perfect watchmaker." He considered himself a composer of mind, not heart, treating creativity as an intellectual exercise. Even his famous "Bolero" was made out.
Read Maurice Ravel's biography and find out about his development as a composer, his contribution to French music, and the disease he struggled with. Would it be included in the broadly understood spectrum of neurodiversity today?
Discover an important piece of classical music history and learn how cultural and societal circumstances may be crucial for creating an inimitable style.
Maurice Ravel: A short biography.
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France, and died of brain death on December 28, 1937, in Warsaw, Poland. His pieces of music include songs and piano concerts, while the best known are his orchestral compositions. Basic rhythms and refined orchestration characterize his musical style. Ravel's works demand technical skill and a great degree of bravura from instrumentalists.
Maurice came from a culturally diverse family. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was of Swiss descent, and his mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid. His hometown is located 18 km from the Spanish border, but the family moved to Paris when he was 3 months old. This all contributed to his preservation of tolerance and sensitivity to literary and regional culture.
His father was an educated and successful engineer, and his mother did not work. Pierre-Joseph required his son to learn piano, and the mother sang folk songs to him. She had a strong influence on her son's life and music.
“Throughout my childhood, I was sensitive to music. - Ravel recalled.
There is no record that Ravel received any formal education in his early years. His biographer, Roger Nichols, suggests that the boy may have been chiefly educated by his father.
In November 1889, playing music by Chopin, he passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano class run by Eugène Anthiome at the Paris Conservatoire. His musical studies were from 1889 to 1895 and again from 1897 to 1905.
He studied piano first, then harmony, and after a two-year rotation, through complex training with G. Fauré and counterpoint with A. Gédalge. It's worth noting that these studies began at the age of 14.
Interestingly, during his time at the conservatoire, Maurice was nominated to the prestigious Prix de Rome five times, though without success. After these failures, he withdrew from the conservatoire in 1905, but from that moment on, Ravel's work began to flourish.
The best-known composer who studied with Ravel was probably Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was his pupil for three months in 1907–08.
In 1914, when Germany invaded France. Maurice tried to join the French Air Force, but he was rejected due to his age and a heart problem. Hence, during World War I, Ravel served as an orchestra director in the French Army.
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 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 present, would soon degenerate, becoming isolated in banal formulas."
The league responded by banning Ravel's music from its concerts. And this was just one of many reasons why the wartime period had a drastic impact on the composer's condition. Ravel's mother died in January 1917. 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. On top of that, the war took away one of his best friends. People close to Ravel recognised that during the war, he had lost much of his physical and mental stamina.
Nonetheless, after the war, he returned to composing, although his output was much smaller. He traveled throughout Europe and the United States, performing his works and gaining popularity.
It is worth noting that in 1920, he was awarded the Legion of Honor, but Ravel declined to receive it. In 1926, he received the Order of Leopold in Belgium, and in the 1930s, the Order of Carol I in Romania, as well as the title of Commander with Star of the Order of Isabella the Catholic in Spain.
Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public.
Beginning in 1927, he toured the United States and Canada for a period of two years. There, he met George Gershwin. This meeting influenced both composers. Echoes of jazz can be heard in Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand (1930) and his Piano Concerto in G major (1931).
He performed in almost every European country, and in 1932, he undertook his final European tour with pianist Marguerite Long. This allowed him to be heard in Warsaw in March of that year, where he conducted the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.
He was also a meticulous engineer in his private life. Gifted with manual skills, he made tiny figurines from bread and carved mechanically moving dolls.
When he wrote Bolero in 1928, he was 53 years old. Neither he nor any of his friends had even suspected the tragedy to come. But already then, such a thorough and meticulous composer began to make spelling mistakes in his letters, and his handwriting became shaky and sloppy.
That same year, while vacationing at Lake Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he suddenly found himself unable to stay afloat (he had always been an excellent swimmer). In October 1932, he had a car accident in Paris. He lost several teeth and injured his face and spine.
There was no indication that his brain would be damaged as well, but his condition began to deteriorate. The aphasia and writing problems have worsened.
"I cannot, I cannot sign myself", - he told his impresario.
His last correspondence is from 1934. He expressed his condolences to his friend Maurice Delange after his mother died. It took him 8 days to write 50 words. Even though he "heard the words in his head," he couldn't remember how to form them, so he searched Larousse's dictionary until he found the right phrase.
Ravel was never married and had no children.
After his death, his brother and legatee, Edouard Ravel, turned the composer's house at Montfort-l'Amaury into a museum. As of 2023, the maison-musée de Maurice Ravel remains open for guided tours.
In his later years, Edouard declared his intention to leave the bulk of Maurice's estate to the city of Paris for the endowment of a Nobel Prize in music, but evidently changed his mind.
Maurice Ravel - Composer's Brain Disease.
There are many indications that Ravel suffered from a neurodegenerative process in the frontal parts of his brain. And when he wrote "Bolero", he was probably already sick. However, the disease has never been unequivocally recognized and remains a mystery to this day.
Is it audible in his works that the left hemisphere of the brain, which is meticulous and calculating every move, is responsible for the "engineering" part of the composer's nature, stops and lets the right one speak - the sensitive, unbridled, and artistic?
Music connoisseurs say yes. They emphasize the change in style and structure that is visible in "Bolero". The spontaneity culminates in a concerto in D - jazz, with an irregular, pulsating course, frequent changes in rhythm, syncopation, and unprecedented instrumental richness.
Ravel's compositions (Bolero, piano concertos, and others).
His best-known works include "Boléro" (1928), the ballet "Daphnis et Chloe" (1911), and the piano miniature "Gaspard de la Nuit" (1908). He composed mainly piano music and chamber music for violin and piano, as well as songs and dances.
Years later, he adapted many of his miniatures for orchestra. His particular fondness for the waltz resulted in 20 orchestrations of this genre. Ravel also composed ballets and operas (most of which were in the one-act form). He wrote no symphonies or church music, and his performable body of works numbers about sixty. At the same time, he enjoyed fame as a pianist performing his own works.
Other well-known works include Myrrha (1901), Scheherazade (1903), Spanish Rhapsody, The Spanish Hour, and the choreographic poem "La Vieille" (1901). "La valse, poème choréographique," the String Quartet in F major, the Piano Concerto in G major, the Minuet in C-sharp minor, the work for voice and piano entitled "Noël des jouets," the piano miniature "Jeux d'eau", the opera "L’enfant et les sortilèges," the piano cycle "Miroirs," and the two great instrumental compositions presented on video in this article.
The first of them (and requiring special attention) is Piano Concerto in D Pour La Main Gauche (for the left hand). It was a piece commissioned by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the war.
The second one is Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess).
In his early years, he was influenced by the Romantics, particularly Emmanuel Chabrier and the modernist Erik Satie, whom he met and admired personally. Interestingly enough, Satie was earning a living as a café pianist, and Ravel was one of the first musicians who recognised Satie's originality and talent.
Above all, Ravel was a pioneer of Impressionism, simultaneously competing with Claude Debussy for the title of precursor of this musical style. When Debussy died in 1918, he was seen, in France and abroad, as the leading French composer of the era.
In the last years of his life, he became closer to Neoclassicism.
The cultural mix of his family meant that his work was inspired by Spanish music and Oriental music. And, like Debussy, his fascination with the originality of Russian music, which was popular in Paris in the early 20th century, is also evident. Ravel was fascinated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and admitted openly that his music had a lasting impression on him. The essential Spanish colouring gave Ravel a reason for virtuoso use of the modern orchestra.
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.
Instrumental Virtuosity.
According to critics, Maurice Ravel has not only explored the achievements of the Impressionists but also created his own style. His instrumentation was based on incredible clarity and finesse. Around 1900, Ravel became part of the Société des Apaches (the Hooligans), a group of young, innovative artists, considered a symbol of artistic rebellion.
He was a master of combining appropriate instruments and amplifying the artistic message. His music is characterized by the prominence of flutes, clarinets, and other woodwind instruments, as well as muted trumpets.
Many consider him a great classic in 20th-century music, an incomparable master of form, constructing all elements with exceptional precision and logic.
However, some critics believe that it is impossible to speak about art, creativity, and artistic intentions without the author's full mental and psychological faculties.
“I managed to create only one remarkable work - Bolero. Unfortunately, there is no music in it. It's just an intricate symphonic fabric”, Ravel concluded.
Is that true? Listen to the three orchestrations below and decide for yourself.
Boléro.
Concerto pour la main gauche.
Pavane pour une Infante défunte.
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