Renowned for its eclectic, individual style and rebellious
nature, Ravel's music is the product of scrupulous craftsmanship.
Ravel was born in the Pyrenees but brought up in Pans. He began
piano lessons at the age of seven and entered the Pans
Conservatoire in 1889. As a child he was easily distracted from
his studies, and his mother resorted to offering him bribes for
each hour of work completed. A tutor's nightmare, he refused to
obey musical conventions in his compositions and took mischievous
delight in hunting down similar examples m the works of
established masters.
One of the most important events of his formative years was his
attendance at the Pans World Exhibition of 1889. There he
responded with great excitement to his first contact with oriental
harmonies, performances on the Javanese gamelan. He also attended
many concerts of Russian music. Rimsky-Korsakov was an immediate
favourite, and later in life Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an exhibition established the work in the
orchestral repertoire.
Ravel left the Conservatoire in 1895 but returned two
years
later to study with
Faure, whose sympathetic and liberal-minded encouragement did
much to develop his style. This is seen in the lyrical String quartet in
F major
(1903), whose silky and charming character
emulates Faure's own style. Despite the success of this work.
Ravel could not satisfy the Conservatoire authorities when it came
to harmony exercises. In 1905, after he failed to pass the first
stage in the coveted Prix de Rome competition, the press
took up his cause and a heated debate ensued. The furore was so
great that Theodore Dubois, Director of the Conservatoire,
resigned his post to be replaced by Faure. The only person who
appeared indifferent to these events was Ravel himself: he was
happily yachting in Holland at the time.
In 1908 he completed a three-part work for piano, Gaspard
de la nuit, in
which the dazzling, virtuosic writing serves to remind the
listener of Ravel's lifelong admiration for Liszt. The following
year he began his most ambitious stage work - the ballet
Daphnis ct Chloe. It contains some of his most remarkable and
beautiful music and was highly successful both in the theatre and
as an orchestral piece in the concert hall.
The outbreak of World War I had a profound effect on Ravel. He
clearly believed that he had a duty to serve his country, and
although he was classified unfit for military service, he managed
to secure a job as a driver in the motor transport corps. He fell
dangerously ill in 1916 and returned to Paris only to find his
mother on her death bed. After her funeral he went into a deep
depression: he had never married, and she was the only focus of
his love. However, he was soon composing again and, in common with
several French artists during this period, turned his attentions
to reviving past national glories. This is most clearly
demonstrated in Le tombeau de Couperin, a suite based on Baroque dance
forms. Each of the work's six movements is dedicated to a victim
of the war and written in a beautifully clear and pure style that
has ensured lasting popularity with concert audiences.
With the death of Debussy in 1918, Ravel became generally
recognized as the leading light of French music, although he
continued to view the establishment with suspicion and tried to
minimize his contact with it. The last 17 years of his life were
dogged by gradually worsening ill health, which adversely affected
the quantity, but not the quality, of his output. Despite
suffering increasingly from insomnia and nervous debility, he
travelled extensively to receive warm welcomes in both Europe and the United States. In 1924 he wrote his short
opera L'enfant et les sortileges, followed in 1928 by his
best-known work, Bolero, exciting yet more scandal in the
Paris press. It was conceived as a musical joke and consists of a
single theme repeated with increasing intensity and density of
orchestration. His final works, the two piano concertos, both
composed in 1931, mark the end of his creative career. Both pieces
overflow with Ravelian drive and panache, although the Piano concerto for left
hand, written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein,
who had lost his arm m the war, is considerably more serious in
outlook.
The year 1932 marks the beginning of Ravel's tragic final
period, during which he gradually succumbed to a progressively
incapacitating illness. With his death, French music lost one of
its dazzling innovators in terms both of his development of
pianistic technique and his colourful orchestral writing.
