Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel was born on 7 March 1875 at Ciboure in the Basque Country, near Saint-Jean-de-Luz. His father, Joseph, was a Swiss engineer and passionate inventor who designed an engine and one of the first steam automobiles; his mother, Marie Delouart, was Basque. A few months after his birth the family moved to Paris. All his life Ravel kept a deep attachment to the Basque Country and to Spain, which his mother evoked for him in songs, and a taste for precision mechanisms inherited from his father.

He began piano at seven, then studied harmony. In 1889 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he became friends with the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, who would premiere many of his works. At the 1889 Exposition Universelle he discovered the Javanese gamelan and Russian music. In 1897 he joined Gabriel Fauré’s composition class, where his talent was recognised. He composed the Pavane for a Dead Princess (1899), a great success, then Jeux d’eau (1901), a sparkling piano piece imitating the sound of fountains.

Ravel competed five times for the Prix de Rome without ever winning it. In 1905, already a recognised composer, he was eliminated in the preliminary round. The scandal, known as “the Ravel affair”, was enormous: the press denounced the injustice, and the director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, had to resign. He was replaced by Fauré. Ravel kept composing: the String Quartet (1903), Miroirs (1905), the Rapsodie espagnole (1908) and Gaspard de la nuit (1908), whose Scarbo is one of the most difficult pieces in the piano repertoire.

Ravel was a perfectionist, compared by Stravinsky to a Swiss watchmaker for the precision of his writing. He was also a genius of the orchestra. In 1910 he composed for two children of friends Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), a suite of pieces for piano four hands inspired by Perrault’s tales: Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Laideronnette, Beauty and the Beast, the Fairy Garden. In 1912 Daphnis et Chloé, commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, contains a famous sunrise.

During the First World War Ravel, too short and too light to be a soldier, became a military truck driver near Verdun; he nicknamed his truck “Adélaïde”. His mother’s death in 1917 devastated him. He composed Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), a homage to eighteenth-century French music, each piece dedicated to a friend killed in the war. In 1921 he settled at Le Belvédère, a small house at Montfort-l’Amaury that he decorated whimsically and filled with automata and mechanical toys.

In 1922 he orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a dazzling version that made the work famous worldwide. In 1925 he premiered L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, to a libretto by Colette: a naughty child sees the furniture, objects and animals he has mistreated come to life to take revenge. In 1928 he made a triumphant tour of the United States, where he met George Gershwin and discovered jazz in Harlem. That same year he composed Boléro, a seventeen-minute crescendo in which the same rhythm and melody repeat while changing instruments. It became his most famous work, which he himself called “a piece without music”.

In 1931 he composed two piano concertos: the joyful, jazz-influenced Concerto in G, and the Concerto for the Left Hand, written for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war. In 1932 a taxi accident worsened a neurological illness that gradually deprived him of the ability to write and speak while his mind remained intact. He said: “I still have so much music in my head.” He died in Paris on 28 December 1937 after brain surgery.