Maurice Ravel was among the most significant and influential composers of the early twentieth century.
Even though he’s sometimes linked with Claude Debussy as an exemplar of musical impressionism, Ravel possessed an independent voice that grew out of his love of a broad variety of styles.
He was, quite simply, a composer whose interests and influences could sometimes be surprising.
1. Name a modern musical genre, and Ravel was probably a formative part of it
It’s impossible to identify Maurice Ravel with any particular school of composition, except perhaps to say that there can be few composers in history whose music has embraced and synthesised so many different influences. His music is so distinctive in sound, and yet every label that you care to put on him barely covers 20 percent of his work.
Sure, he was an Impressionist at times (as in his Daphnis et Chloe, or Miroirs), but he was also the exact opposite in that his music could be neo-Classical or more specifically neo-Baroque (Le Tombeau de Couperin). He composed several different works inspired by the Viennese waltz (La Valse, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales), and yet he became one of the first composers to include jazz and blues in his music (the Piano Concerto, the Second Violin Sonata). Boléro was a clear predecessor of modern minimalism, and Tzigane found its influence in folk traditions. Then there was the music of Asia and the Orient that so influenced his harmonies (the Piano Trio, Chansons Madecasses). And all that’s before we even get to his lifelong love of the music of Spain (Rapsodie Espagnole, Alborada del Gracioso). Ravel simply synthesised them all into his own unique musical voice.
2. He was quintessentially French, and yet very Spanish
Ravel was born near the Spanish border, at Ciboure on the outskirts of Hendaye, at the absolute extreme south-western corner of France, literally within walking distance of Spain. His Basque mother used to sing him Spanish folksongs in the cradle and even later in life he too thought of himself as Basque. He spoke fluent Spanish — so much so that Manuel de Falla, a native Spaniard himself, described him as being more Spanish than the Spanish. De Falla later wrote: “The Rapsodie Espagnole by Ravel surprised me because of its Spanish character. But how was I to account for the subtle and genuine Spanish-ness of Ravel, knowing that the only link he had with my country was to have been born near the border? The mystery was soon explained: Ravel’s was a Spain he had felt in an idealized way through his mother. She was a lady of exquisite conversation. She spoke fluent Spanish, which I enjoyed so much when she evoked the years of her youth, spent in Madrid. Then I understood with what fascination her son must have listened to those memories.”
3. He was notoriously self-critical
In the history of music, probably only Brahms could rival Ravel as a self-critic. Among the most loved of all of Ravel’s works are the sublime Pavane pour une infante defunte, and the notorious Boléro, but Ravel himself didn’t think much of either of them. He described himself has having been in "rather poor form" when he wrote the Pavane, resulting “an inconclusive and conventional work.” As for Boléro, he famously described it as “15 minutes of orchestration without music.” A possibly apocryphal story tells of how a woman at Boléro’s premiere in 1928 shouted out that Ravel had gone mad — and Ravel himself agreed with her! But just as with Brahms, the result of Ravel’s self-criticism is that the standard of the music in his final catalogue — those works that survived his savage editorial eye — is consistently of the highest quality.
4. He loved writing virtuoso showpieces
Ravel loved writing music that was so technically challenging that it bordered on unplayable. His piano work Gaspard de la Nuit is one example, famous for its finger-busting demands on the performer, all of which were entirely deliberate. At the time, the Russian composer Balakirev’s Islamey was regarded as the most difficult work to play in the entire piano repertoire, so Ravel set himself the challenge of beating it in the frightening complexity of the "Scarbo" movement, that he called a veritable “orchestral transcription for the piano.” It’s one of the reasons why the completion of a complete cycle of Ravel’s piano music is regarded as the Everest for French pianists. And his works for strings are sometimes just as challenging. Composing Tzigane for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi, he referred to it as a “virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian rhapsody.” When the virtuoso d’Aranyi delivered a stunning premiere, surmounting its prodigious technical difficulties with apparent ease, Ravel is reported to have said, “If I’d known, I would have made the music still more difficult!”
5. He was a great orchestrator of his own and others’ music
One of Ravel’s earliest influences was the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and in 1889, he actually heard Rimsky-Korsakov conducting at the Paris Expo. Just like Rimsky-Korsakov, in his later years Ravel was hailed as a master orchestrator. Who but Ravel could imagine starting a Piano Concerto with a whip-crack! He frequently turned his own piano works into magnificent orchestral showpieces, as, for instance, with his Mother Goose Suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin and Miroirs. But it wasn’t just his own piano music that he transformed into orchestral technicolour. Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition remains the yardstick for orchestration of piano music in general, and his orchestral version of that iconic Russian work is now so universally accepted, that often it’s not even named as Ravel’s orchestration, despite several versions by other composers being available.
6. He loved jazz and blues
If you’d frequented the nightclubs of Paris during the 1920s and heard the great bluesman W.C. Handy introducing Parisian audiences to the popular music of the American south, you would have frequently crossed paths with Ravel and his companion, the classical violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, who premiered several of his works. They weren’t exactly the typical jazz and blues fans you might expect but they were both passionate about American popular music, and quite keen on each other too. Apparently, Hélène rejected Ravel’s proposal of marriage, so he wrote her his Second Violin Sonata instead, inspired by the blues that they both loved. Meanwhile his famous Piano Concerto is filled with jazz — as might be expected from a composer who once asked George Gershwin to teach him!
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