The Operas of Maurice Ravel by Emily Kilpatrick (review)

Maurice Ravel’s pair of chamber operas comprises just under two hours of music, hardly comparable in scope to twenty-five full-length examples by Massenet, twelve by Gounod, and thirteen by Saint-Saëns. And yet his fascination with the art form never wavered, reflected in frank comments for a 1932 interview with the journal Candide : “Wagner’s theater is absurd; something else must be devised. . . . Perhaps the solution lies in a mixture of song and dance, based on a rapid, dramatic plot” (cited in A Ravel Reader, ed. Arbie Orenstein [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 497). Starting with Shéhérazade, for which an overture is extant, through Olympia, La Cloche engloutie, and about a dozen other ruminations, the composer contemplated setting a variety of subjects. Ultimately, only a few sketches for Cloche survive, recycled in L’enfant et les sortilèges.

Given Ravel’s limited experience with stage composition, we might assume little could be added to previous scholarship and inquire why a monograph would be dedicated to these operas-in-miniature. But any doubts are dispelled by Emily Kilpatrick’s compact, multidimensional study. L’heure espagnole (1911) and L’enfant et les sortilèges (1925) have in fact received generous treatment in recent years concurrent with the overall growth of Ravel scholarship; key sources include articles, book chapters, and the present author’s doctoral dissertation.

After taking into account the centrality of opera in the careers of fin-de-siècle French composers, Kilpatrick tackles the works separately and in tandem, illuminating Ravel’s innovative approach to text, orchestration, vocal writing, form, and motivic language. Using a broad selection of primary sources, she also corrects preconceived notions. The introduction contextualizes Ravel’s battle with the press in the wake of the scandalous premiere of Histoire naturelles, accusations of debussysme, and L’heure as a response to Pelléas et Mélisande. The next pair of chapters focuses on the hurdles Ravel faced in bringing L’heure and L’enfant to the stage. In the case of the former, begun in 1907, Opéra-Comique administrator Albert Carré was reluctant to program the opera, leading to an unprecedented intervention from the wife of a prominent politician.

Echoing the mixed reception of Histoire, concerns about Ravel’s approach to text setting and the opera’s ribald subject matter emerged. By 1911, the work was in rehearsal. Through an examination of the theater’s rehearsal and performance logs, Kilpatrick reconstructs the sequence of events leading up to the premiere. Although Ravel has often been described as aloof, she reveals his admiration for the Comique staff and a collegial association with Franc-Nohain, whose play provided source material for L’heure. Contrary to other literature, she proves that the composer was “involved at every stage of the production process” rather than appearing only in the final rehearsals (p. 26).

If his first opera was the product of a brash young composer, L’enfant represents a world-famous artist at the height of his powers. Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra Garnier, asked writer Colette to draft the scenario for a fairy ballet and to select an artist capable of setting the story to music. After several declined (including Dukas and Stravinsky), Ravel was chosen, although he did not receive a working copy of the libretto until 1918. In the interim, ballet had morphed into opera. Kilpatrick outlines the work’s creation, including the first known correspondence between composer and librettist the following year, the change of venue from Paris to Monte Carlo, and the possibility that they had regular telephone conversations about the project beyond spotty surviving correspondence. Kilpatrick then summarizes Ravel’s overall approach to collaboration and argues that his reticence may in fact stem from a natural pudeur (modesty) combined with memories of other difficult associations, chiefly the fraught relationship with Diaghilev during the...