Ravel Studies ed. by Deborah Mawer (review)

The recent glut of books on Ravel has no obvious external cause: the composer was born in 1875 and died in 1937, dates that do not suggest that a round-number anniversary is the reason for this upsurge of interest. Deborah Mawer’s edited volume is one of five books published since 2009, and she has previously edited The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge, 2000). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a considerable overlap of contributors to the book under review and to Peter Kaminsky’s recent edited volume Unmasking Ravel (Rochester, NY, 2011). Roger Nichols’s biography Ravel (New Haven, 2011) was recently reissued as a slightly revised paperback, and Stephen Zank’s more focused Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Woodbridge, 2009) and Michael Puri’s Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation and Desire (New York and Oxford, 2012) also show that there is real contemporary enthusiasm for the composer. Puri also contributes a fine chapter to Mawer’s book, ‘Memory, pastiche, and aestheticism in Ravel and Proust’.

Ravel encourages particular curiosity, it seems, in this age of social media, as a well-known composer whose inner life and sexual preferences, if any, are almost complete mysteries. (Nichols appears not to be hugely interested in the latter topicÇhe devotes less than a page to Ravel’s sexualityÇbut he does contribute to another fashionable research area that is explored by several authors in this book: Ravel as dandy. The clothes-loving composer took fifty-seven evening ties on his tour to the United States, all of which needed shortening (Nichols, Ravel, p. 293)). Mawer’s volume addresses recurring tropes in Ravel scholarship and reception, one being that his music is ‘artificial’; Steven Huebner quotes Ravel’s conversation with Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi in which the composer suggested that he might be ‘artificial by nature’ (p. 21)Çparadox being another recurring trope. The mechanical aesthetic at the heart of many of Ravel’s works, most obviously Bolero, and his penchant for pastiche surface in several chapters. Collaborative works featuring his music, whether created in his lifetime (L’Enfant et les sortile'ges with Colette) or afterwards (Richard Alston’s choreography of his Sonatine), are another recurring theme. The book ends with a short chapter on Ravel’s tragic final years, using medical evidence to explore the enduring mystery of his creative silence.

Steven Huebner’s opening chapter probes commonplace expressions in Ravel reception, notably the perfection of his art (‘For all their vagueness, the words “perfect’’ and “perfection’’ have agglomerated with eyebrow-raising frequency around Ravel’s music in reviews, biographies and critical studies from his day to ours’, p. 10). The chapter has an appendix, ‘a representative anthology of passages from music criticism where Ravel’s perfection comes into play’ (p. 11). This idea of perfection is linked to Stravinsky’s famous description of him as a ‘Swiss clockmaker’, a reference to Ravel’s paternal origins as well as, according to the composer’s contemporary Èmile Vuillermoz, ‘an unintended compliment: a tribute to the perfection of the artisan who effortlessly regulated the tiny cogwheels of his work’ (quoted on p. 17). Huebner suggests an interesting parallel between Ravel and his fellow lover of paradox, Charles Baudelaire: a ‘suspicion of instinct, sincerity, spontaneity, and glorification of the subject’ (pp. 19^20). Baudelaire ‘was (famously) not a nature poet’ (p. 20) who wrote in ‘Reêve parisien’ of ‘the intoxicating monotony of metal, marble and water’ (L’enivrante monotonie / Du meétal, du marbre et de l’eau). Ravel’s article ‘Finding Tunes in Factories’ (1933) moves Baudelaire’s evocation of man-made features into the twentieth century: he would have welcomed a production of his notorious Boléro (1928) set in a factory, rather than the Spanish tavern setting of its first performance. After all, Ravel’s father was an engineer, and his brother Édouard, to whom he was close, was a factory manager.

Huebner identifies another Baudelairean idea relevant to Ravel, that of the dandy, though it is...