General Biography on Ravel

Program Note:

So let’s start in 1913, not the year our composer was born, nor the year he died. Nineteen-thirteen was a significant year in music history, particularly noted for the emergence of radical trends, styles, and the emergence to fame of a few specific composers in Europe. The defining moment of 1913 took place on the 29th of May when Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring debuted to tumultuous reception at the brand new Theater-des-Champs-Elysees in Paris. Fists literally flew, and the dancers needed extra cues to stay in time as noise from the audience began to drown out the music. Many composers were present at the premiere, including our Mystery Master seated in a quiet corner at the back of the hall. He had correctly predicted that the Rite of Spring would create a furor at its premiere, for he had been in constant contact with Stravinsky that spring. Wonderfully experimental ideas were circulating, and our master put pen to paper with a series of evocative songs. This most cosmopolitan of composers selected three poems in French by a popular symbolist writer. These Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé would be his last major works before the Great War began to unravel the tense fabric of European society.

Despite the promise of his growing career, and despite the fact that he was turning forty in 1913, our composer got caught up in the general call to arms, volunteering for active duty in any way he could be useful. He narrowly escaped death on several occasions. Many of his closest friends and male relatives were not so fortunate. More than all other losses, however, it would be the passing of his mother in 1917 that undermined our friend’s confidence, his morale, and his creative voice. She had been a constant presence in his life. Among the most important formative influences, our composer would recall his mother singing folksongs, in particular the Spanish folksongs that she remembered from her youth. A piano composition, “Alborada del Gracioso”, from Miroirs, from 1905 pays homage to that tradition.

Despite the Spanish element in his heritage, our composer would spend only brief vacations in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Basque regions of the northeast. He had been sent very early to live and study at one of the great European conservatories. Despite showing prodigious ability as a teenager, his years at conservatory proceeded from one failure to the next. Standards were very high, of course. Each year ended with exams, and prizes were awarded to the top three students in each of many areas. Failure to earn one of the prizes in three consecutive years meant expulsion. Many students didn’t make the cut, and our Mystery Master is perhaps the most successful composer to be kicked out of conservatory. And not just once, but three separate times!! In July 1895, the 20-year-old student was dismissed from the harmony course after his third mediocre year; later that month, this accomplished pianist who played Schumann, Mozart, Chopin and more with occasional brilliance, was forced out of the Conservatory’s piano program. The irony here is that this dejected pianist would go on to compose some of the most amazing and difficult works in the whole repertory, typified in “Scarbo,” from Gaspard de la Nuit.

In the 1890s, such virtuosity was not a regular part of our composer’s language. Still, he had not given up on a career in music. The failure in the piano exams forced the decision upon him: he would focus more on composition than performance. In 1898 he was back roaming the halls of the Paris Conservatory, a student in the composition class of Gabriel Fauré. Fauré represented a more progressive side of the establishment and he welcomed “free-thinking” and a certain degree of rule-breaking. But even the support of his famous teacher was not enough to protect our Mystery Master from an even more spectacular failure than before. He applied no less than five times for the prestigious Rome Prize, and he was passed over all five times. Certainly professional rivalries and personal biases factored in, but once again our hero was ingloriously shown the door for the third and final time.

Now out on his own, he took up with several cohorts to form the “Apaches,” a group of poets, painters, critics, philosophers, and musicians all united in their devotion to the avant-garde. It was through such non-institutional ways that our composer would mature, discover camaraderie and inspiration, and refine his compositional style. His star continued to rise in both salon and small concert settings. By the time war burst upon Europe in mid 1914, he was widely regarded as the brightest composer of his generation—at least within his native land.

As mentioned earlier, the Great War took an immense toll on him—emotionally speaking. From 1920 until his death in 1937, our composer wrote relatively few works (though he did create a brilliant Concerto for the Left Hand Alone in honor of a wounded pianist and friend). Their quality is uniformly high, but he was distracted by other activities, including tours of Europe and an extended visit to the United States and Canada. He also battled recurring illness and insomnia that sapped his strength. The 1920s were a magical time of experimentation in music, and our Mystery Master—extremely intelligent, erudite, and detail oriented—took ample time to listen and reflect before formulating his own compositions. Jazz was booming, art music moved between poles of Dadaist hijinks and non-Western influences to the earliest glimmerings of electronics and music drawn from sounds of everyday life. In the midst of all this activity, between 1928 and 1930, our composer wrote a traditional three-movement Piano Concerto in G. The first and last movements sparkle with the luster of their era, but the middle movement offers one of the purest solo themes in the whole repertory. Its tender lyricism hearkens back over 30 years, all the way back to a simple Pavane pour une infante défunte he had written as a student. That pavane remains one of his most well-known compositions. Chances are good that if you took piano lessons at any point in your life, you tried playing this lovely piano miniature.

By now, you either know or are probably closing in on the identity of our Mystery Master, the son of a Swiss-French inventor and a Spanish mother. On the outside appears the meticulousness of his father: our hero was a fastidious dresser, interested in fashion and style, extremely detailed and organized, and attracted by mechanical novelties as his father had been. But on the inside—the side he let few people see—he never lost touch with his mother’s Spanish flair. The single most famous work he composed treads the Iberian plains. It took root in 1927 when a famous Russian ballerina, Ida Rubinstein, commissioned a new ballet. Our Mystery Master first considered making an arrangement of works by a famous Spanish composer, but after a tour in the U.S. and further reflection, he decided an entirely new, original ballet was needed. It all started with a simple melody.

Originally called “Fandango,” our composer finally settled on the title “Bolero.” The conception of Bolero was unprecedented: repeating a main theme for 15 minutes, increasing from pianissimo to fortissimo and gradually adding instruments of the full orchestra. It is not a subtle device and our composer himself admitted it to be the simplest form he could imagine. Its impact helped make the reputation in America of our master—partly because he argued very publicly with Arturo Toscanini about tempo after a performance that Toscanini had given. This work was already extremely well-known when it took on cult status in 1980 for accompanying the climactic scene of Blake Edwards’ movie “Ten” starring Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Or perhaps you know it from the record-setting routine of Torvill and Dean at the 1984 Winter Olympics. Its popular appeal helped rejuvenate interest in the composer’s works, which still deserve wider recognition. For all his failures in academics, there are few composers so gifted in orchestration, imagination, and virtuosity as Maurice Ravel.

(c) Jason Stell