Maurice Ravel

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, a small fishing town on the Basque coast of southwestern France, a short walk across the harbor from Saint-Jean-de-Luz ^[1]. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was a Swiss engineer and inventor with a genuine enthusiasm for music and machines; his mother, Marie Delouart, came from Basque stock and had spent part of her youth in Madrid. The family moved to Paris when Maurice was only a few months old, but the Basque and Spanish songs his mother sang stayed with him, and Spanish idioms would surface in his music throughout his life ^[1][2].

The household was warm and unconventional. Pierre-Joseph encouraged both sons toward the arts rather than pressing them into commerce, and Maurice began piano lessons at age seven with Henry Ghys, adding harmony studies with Charles-Rene not long after ^[2]. He was a capable rather than prodigious pianist as a boy, more interested in how music was put together than in displaying technique. In 1889, at fourteen, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, the institution that would frame, and frustrate, the next two decades of his development ^[1].

That same year the Paris Exposition Universelle brought a Javanese gamelan and Russian orchestral music to the city. Like many young French musicians, Ravel absorbed these sounds eagerly, and echoes of gamelan sonority can be heard in his later piano writing ^[3].

Ravel's Conservatoire years were long and uneven. He won a first prize in piano in 1891 but was later dismissed from the piano class for failing to meet competition requirements, and he re-enrolled in 1897 to study composition with Gabriel Faure and counterpoint with Andre Gedalge ^[1][2]. Faure recognized an original mind and defended his pupil even when the young man's harmonic daring irritated more conservative faculty. By his mid twenties Ravel had already written pieces that remain in the repertoire, including the Pavane pour une infante defunte (1899) and the string quartet of 1902 to 1903, music of striking finish for a student ^[2].

His path to official recognition was blocked in a way that became a public scandal. Between 1900 and 1905 Ravel competed five times for the Prix de Rome, the state composition prize that opened doors in French musical life. He never won, and in 1905 he was eliminated in the preliminary round despite being an established composer, while all the finalists chosen were pupils of a single jury member, Charles Lendormy's colleague Charles Lenepveu ^[1][4]. The press erupted, the affair became known as l'affaire Ravel, and the director of the Conservatoire, Theodore Dubois, resigned; Faure was appointed in his place ^[1]. The episode fixed Ravel's public image as an independent talent wronged by the academy.

During these years he also belonged to Les Apaches, an informal circle of composers, poets, and painters who met to argue about new art and championed Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande ^[3]. Works such as Jeux d'eau (1901) for piano and the song cycle Sheherazade (1903) announced a voice that critics kept comparing to Debussy's, a comparison both men came to find tiresome. Ravel admired the older composer but insisted, accurately, that his own methods were different: tighter forms, sharper outlines, and a classical sense of proportion beneath the shimmering surface ^[2][3].

Anyone asking who was Maurice Ravel usually meets his music first through Bolero, but his achievements span nearly every genre except symphony and church music. The decade before the First World War was astonishingly productive. Miroirs (1905) and Gaspard de la nuit (1908) expanded what the piano could do, the latter written with the declared aim of surpassing the difficulty of Balakirev's Islamey ^[2]. The Rapsodie espagnole (1908) confirmed his gift for orchestral color, and the one-act comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) displayed a dry wit that ran through his personality as well as his art ^[1].

The ballet Daphnis et Chloe, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes and premiered in 1912, is often judged his orchestral masterpiece. Ravel called it a choreographic symphony, and its hour of music, scored for a huge orchestra with wordless chorus, took him roughly three years to complete ^[1][3]. Other landmark scores followed across his career: the piano trio of 1914, Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), the opera L'Enfant et les sortileges (1925) to a libretto by Colette, the Tzigane for violin (1924), and the two piano concertos completed in 1931, one of them written for the left hand alone for Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who had lost his right arm in the war ^[2][4].

Ravel was also the great orchestrator of his age. His 1922 arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, commissioned by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, effectively replaced the piano original in public affection ^[4]. And in 1928 came Bolero, a fifteen-minute orchestral crescendo built from a single insistent theme over an unchanging snare-drum rhythm. Ravel regarded it as an experiment in orchestration without music in the conventional sense, and he was bemused when it became one of the most famous compositions on earth ^[1][5]. Among Maurice Ravel facts that surprise newcomers: his complete catalogue is small, roughly sixty works, because he polished each piece until, in his own view, it could not be improved ^[2].

Ravel was a small, dapper, intensely private man, barely five feet three inches tall, known for immaculate dress and a collector's delight in mechanical toys, miniatures, and curios ^[1][6]. He never married and had no documented romantic relationships, and biographers have generally concluded that his deepest attachments were to his mother, whose death in 1917 devastated him, and to a close circle of friends ^[2][6]. He was a devoted friend, a generous mentor to younger composers, and famously fond of cats and of Gauloises cigarettes.

In 1921 he bought Le Belvedere, a small house at Montfort-l'Amaury west of Paris, and filled it with the ornaments and mechanical objects he loved. There he composed most of his late works, walking in the forest at night and working slowly at a piano cluttered with knickknacks. The house is preserved today as a museum administered under the French national heritage system ^[6].

During the First World War Ravel, though underweight and over age, insisted on serving and became a truck driver near the Verdun front in 1916, an experience that damaged his health ^[1][2]. He also took a principled stand at home: when a nationalist group sought to ban German and Austrian music from French concerts, he refused to join, arguing that art should not be conscripted. Le Tombeau de Couperin, finished in 1917, carries a dedication in each movement to a friend killed in the war ^[2].

In the 1920s Ravel became an international figure. He toured widely as conductor and pianist of his own music, and a four-month tour of North America in 1928 brought sold-out concerts, a meeting with George Gershwin, and exposure to jazz, whose inflections color both late piano concertos ^[1][4]. That same year Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate of music. He turned down the Legion d'honneur in 1920, a refusal consistent with his lifelong suspicion of official honors after the Prix de Rome affair ^[2].

From about 1927 friends noticed lapses in his memory and coordination, and a taxi accident in Paris in October 1932 seemed to accelerate the decline. Over the following years Ravel progressively lost the ability to write, to sign his name, and finally to set down the music he said he could still hear in his head. The condition, never diagnosed with certainty, is now often discussed as a form of frontotemporal degeneration or aphasia, possibly aggravated by the accident ^[1][7]. His last completed works were the three songs of Don Quichotte a Dulcinee (1932 to 1933), written for a film project about Cervantes's knight.

In December 1937 he underwent exploratory brain surgery in Paris performed by the neurosurgeon Clovis Vincent. He briefly regained consciousness but declined into a coma and died on December 28, 1937, at age 62 ^[1][7]. He was buried beside his parents at the cemetery of Levallois-Perret on the edge of Paris, with Igor Stravinsky among the mourners ^[2].

Any Maurice Ravel biography must reckon with a paradox: a composer of famously reticent character who wrote some of the most immediately seductive music ever put on paper. Stravinsky's much-repeated description of him as a Swiss watchmaker caught something real, an exactness of craft in which every note is load-bearing, though it undersold the emotional force beneath the polish ^[2][5]. Ravel's own teaching, given informally to a handful of pupils including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Manuel Rosenthal, stressed the same values: model yourself on the masters, and if you have anything of your own to say it will survive the imitation ^[3].

His influence runs in several directions at once. Orchestrators and film composers still study his scores as textbooks of instrumental color. Jazz musicians from the swing era onward absorbed his harmony, and pianists rank Gaspard de la nuit among the summits of the repertoire. Bolero alone generated royalties that made his estate one of the most lucrative in music, and the work's copyright history became a long-running legal saga in France ^[5].

Among Maurice Ravel achievements, perhaps the most durable is the demonstration that modern music could be rigorous and popular at the same time. Daphnis et Chloe, the G major piano concerto, and the Mother Goose suite appear on concert programs every season worldwide, and his birthplace region marks his memory with a museum in Ciboure and festivals along the Basque coast ^[1][6]. Nearly a century after his death, his sixty-odd works are played more often than the complete outputs of many far more prolific contemporaries.