Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (review)

Since Ravel's lifetime, writers have often associated the composer with masks, fabrication, and perfectionism. An engaging new volume of essays, Unmasking Ravel, addresses this heritage of master tropes from a number of complementary angles. As the title implies, the book casts a critical eye toward stereotypes prominent within Ravel reception. It interrogates notions of Ravel's imposture, superficiality, and classicism within their originating contexts, and proffers ways of appropriating them for current analysis. But the title has a second meaning. Not only do the authors of the collection examine the masks, but many look for what lies beneath them, using close readings of musical structure to elucidate the depth, coherence, and complexity of Ravel's compositional strategies.

The book divides into three sections—"Orientations and Influences," "Analytical Case Studies," and "Interdisciplinary Perspectives"—but these categories are somewhat loose. All but the opening two chapters feature close readings of musical structure, and many of the most technical analyses rely on the critical discourse surrounding Ravel to construct their inter pretive lenses. The volume covers a representative sample of Ravel's piano, chamber, orchestral, and stage works, and utilizes a range of analytical paradigms—Schenkerian analysis being the most prominent—to create a wide variety of insights.

Stephen Huebner opens the volume with a creatively intertextual essay on Ravel and the notion of classicism, which he treats as a network of antiromantic concepts linked closely with poets whom Ravel admired or who were part of his artistic circle. Poe's emphasis on precision over impulse, Fargue's urban landscapes and found objects, Klingsor's imagination of geographical and temporal distance, and Régnier's nostalgia for an ideal past all resonate with Ravel's aesthetic predilections. Some of Huebner's connections between composer and poet are more specific than others. His reading of Ravel's affinity for Poe is especially thorough and convincing because it builds on the composer's public attributions of influence. Yet even looser comparisons of mutual interests and shared imagery situate Ravel's classicisms successfully within a poetic milieu.

Barbara Kelly takes on the formation and contingency of Ravel's public image more directly than any other author in the volume. By examining interpretations of Ravel's style and personality in writings by his contemporaries and successors, Kelly demonstrates how current stereotypes of the composer were once in a state of evolution. She explores Roland-Manuel's role in linking Ravel's music with shifting aesthetic trends and politics of the pre- and post-World War I eras, and she notes how the consensus that emerged about the composer's identity around 1938 has had an enduring effect on his legacy. One emerges from this thorough assessment of Ravel's reputation and its construction with the impression that common notions of his artificiality, trickery, and privacy were originally strategic ways of shaping his image for the public more than essential characteristics. Thus, Kelly offers a potent reminder of the power of biography and criticism with implications beyond Ravel scholarship.

If Kelly's essay sheds light on the discourse surrounding Ravel's identity, Michael Puri's exploration of Adorno's scattered writings on the composer turns a cross-section of that discourse toward productive analytical ends. As "the last true representative" of the French classical music tradition (p. 65), Adorno's Ravel has both mastered his heritage and lost faith in its continuation; he imbues his music with the fading memory of a culture passing away; he privileges musical surfaces without interiority, thus opposing traditional bourgeois values of originality, sincerity, and depth. Taking Adorno's interpretation of Ravel as a point of departure for an analysis of Valses nobles et sentimentales, Puri notes a heightened degree of reflexivity within the musical materials as the integrity of nineteenth-century waltz characters is challenged by moments of fragmentation, esotericism, and melancholy. Puri's essay is especially strong because he does not use the oddities of Valses to validate...