Perfection of the Life and the Work the Case of Maurice Ravel

WRITING in Commentary (May 1975) on the centenary of the birth of Maurice Ravel, Ned Rorem, the composer and diarist, stated, “Of those composers I most love, Ravel is the single one through whose sound I feel the man himself. … No other composer pulls quite the same trick.” So bold a declaration merits reconsideration. Rorem implies not that Ravel was a greater composer than, say, Mozart or Beethoven. Instead he implies something else, something more modest, something less objective than subjective—namely that Ravel occupies a seat of honor in his pantheon of favorite or most cherished artists. The further implication is that, in the case of Maurice Ravel, it is impossible to separate the man from his music. What might have led Rorem—what might lead any listener—to say this of a particular composer, especially of Ravel?

Were you to enroll in a music appreciation class, you might learn about Ravel a few useful snippets: that, like his older countryman Claude Debussy, he is associated with impressionism (a term, though, that fits visual art far better than music and applies more to Debussy than Ravel); that, between the two of them, Ravel’s music demonstrates greater clarity of form (a statement, in the absence of specialized technical analysis, that will probably have to be accepted on faith); and that he was a virtuoso orchestrator, responsible for the brilliant orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition, written by Modest Mussorgsky originally for solo piano. Were you to peruse a survey of music history, you might read that, aesthetically, he leaned toward classicism and that, in point of harmony, he was no avant-gardist (as was, for example, Schoenberg). You might find a more extensive consideration of influence: Ravel’s love of Mozart alongside his distaste for Beethoven, whom he sometimes mocked as le grand Sourd—the great deaf one; the influence on Ravel of such older French composers as Erik Satie, whom he first met as a boy and by whom he was impressed, or Gabriel Fauré, his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire; and Ravel’s influence on a succeeding generation of composers, including Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and other members of a school of composers known as Les Six. You might even find a comparison of one of Ravel’s works with a similar work of Debussy’s—perhaps the former’s string quartet of 1903 with the latter’s quartet of 1893. The recurrence of certain words might lead you to suspect a consensus has been reached about Ravel’s work, about its elegance or urbanity, on the one hand, despite its coldness, on the other, or apparent lack of emotion. Even with these facts and words in place, there is much unsaid, and much that is important. Who, then, was Maurice Ravel? What did he accomplish? And, with a respectful tip of the hat to Aaron Copland, what is there to listen for in Ravel?

Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, in the Basque region of the southwesternmost part of France. His father, Joseph, a fairly well-trained pianist, was an engineer. His mother, Marie, was a free-thinking Basque of limited means and little social standing. Soon after Ravel’s baptism the family moved to Paris, where his younger brother, Edouard, was born. With his early interest in engineering, Edouard gravitated toward his father, while Maurice, fascinated by the arts, gravitated toward his mother. Both parents encouraged their sons’ pursuits, and the boys would suffer no want of love, attention, or support. The brothers would remain close until Ravel’s death in 1937.

Ravel began studying piano at the age of seven. If his teachers occasionally complained about the lack of polish in his performance—even his mother wasn’t altogether successful in bribing him to practice—they recognized early on his natural ability as a composer. Both Arbie Orenstein and Roger Nichols, excellent biographers of Ravel, cite two deep influences from his teens, the first being his friendship with Ricardo Viñes, a boy his own age, with whom he developed a deep bond owing to...