String Quartet in F Major (Quatuor à cordes en fa majeur) by Maurice Ravel (review)

For decades Maurice Ravel's only string quartet has been one of the most frequently performed pieces in the entire chamber music repertory. As a consequence, negative academic evaluations of the composer from the time it was composed have lost none of their irony. When he completed the quartet in April 1903, Ravel had twice failed to win the final round of the annual Prix de Rome competition. He went on to fail a third time soon afterwards in 1903, and then a couple of years later he was even eliminated from the preliminary round of that competition, causing a scandale that resonated widely in the French artistic community. In January 1903 Ravel entered the first movement of the quartet for the internal composition prize of the Conservatoire, where it also failed to impress. Soon afterwards he was even required to withdraw from that venerable institution. But at least the modern flank of French music proved supportive. Just before the premiere of the quartet on 5 March 1904 at a concert of the Société nationale, Debussy advised Ravel not 'to touch a thing' in the work, confident that it would do well. He was right, as the critical response to the first performance was generally positive, if not very copious. Jean Marnold wryly noted in the Mercure de France that there were few musicians able to write a quartet of similar calibre at the French Institut or among the Conservatoire teaching staff—or anywhere else for that matter. On a more negative note, the critic Pierre Lalo heard it as merely derivative of Debussy, a wrong-headed remark that surely irked the young Ravel as he sought to establish his own voice against the overwhelming and admired presence of the composer of Pelléas et Mé lisande.

Research on Ravel has blossomed in the last twenty years, including the production of critical editions within a complicated legal regime where the composer has slipped in and out of copyright protection. Access to primary source material has not been without problems, not least because of Ravel's labyrinthine inheritance, today harvested by the daughter by first marriage of Georgette Taverne, the second wife of the husband of the masseuse employed by the composer's brother Édouard. (Gentle reader, did you follow that?) The legacy included hundreds of autograph pages, many of which Mme Taverne allowed the pioneering American Ravel scholar Arbie Orenstein to consult, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France to photograph, in the 1960s. The autograph of the string quartet was among this material and its microfilm served Roger Nichols for the present Urtext published by Edition Peters. And this in the nick of time, for by a twist in French law this microfilm as well as several others held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France will no longer be consultable until the year 2022, whereas certain of the later works such as Bolero, La Valse, and the two piano concertos have fallen into the public domain. As it happens, many of the physical documents, possibly including the quartet, have appeared on the autograph market in recent years, but their current location remains shrouded in mystery. At this writing there are efforts afoot to have the entire Ravel documentary legacy repatriated to French public collections on the legal reasoning that at the composer's death they were actually in his house at Monfort l'Amaury, which Édouard Ravel eventually did bequeath to the State instead of to his masseuse. If the furniture and books were deemed part of the bequest, so (one might argue) should be material objects such as autograph scores.

An example of the flurry of research activity around Ravel is the fact that Roger Nichols's editorial work on the quartet has been preceded by another recent Urtext edited by Juliette Appold and published by Bärenreiter-Verlag in 2008. This publication goes unacknowledged by Nichols. Both editions sensibly use the...