Ravel by Roger Nichols (review)

Roger Nichols’s biography of Ravel is a revision and amplification of his original 1977 volume on the composer—a cyclical return within his own scholarly output, musically speaking. It therefore seems a fitting moment to review his career. Spanning four decades and devoted predominantly to French music, Nichols’s work has been remarkable for its volume and variety: a monograph on Parisian life and music between the wars (The Harlequin Years (London, 2002)), multiple critical biographies (two of Debussy, two of Ravel, and one of Messiaen), an eminently useful series that compiles utterances and remembrances of individual composers (Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Mendelssohn), interviews with significant historical figures (Madeleine Milhaud), editions of composers’ letters and correspondence (Debussy and Saint-Saëns), critical editions of musical scores (notably Ravel’s piano music and Duparc’s songs for Peters), and translations of important monographs by other authors from French into English (Jean-Michel Nectoux on Fauré, Harry Halbreich on Honegger), in addition to many radio broadcasts, liner notes, and book reviews. As impressive as these writings have been, the new biography of Ravel is surely his magnum opus.

In Ravel, Nichols weaves a multitude of facts and perspectives into an account whose coverage of the composer’s life and work is so comprehensive that it must now be considered the authoritative biography of Ravel. We should still consult other biographies, of course, for each is valuable in its own right: Roland-Manuel’s 1938 volume, irreplaceable for its intimacy with its subject; Arbie Orenstein’s 1975 study (as well as its subsequent revised editions) for the efficiency of its narrative and enduring usefulness of its appendices; and Marcel Marnat’s 1986 work for its laudable attempt to situate this music within the seemingly limitless panorama of European culture at the fin de siècle. But Nichols’s Ravel is the most up-to-date and satisfying for the balance it strikes between a conservative focus on the composer and a more liberal admission of relevant context.

The book is divided into nine chapters, a postlude, and several appendices, including an excellent chronology of the composer’s life. The nine chapters lay out his life in roughly equal portions: most span a densely lived three years, with the notable exceptions of his callow youth (1875–1902), mid-life military service (1914–20), and gradual decline (1928–37), all periods of lesser artistic productivity. The Ravel that emerges from this scrupulous investigation is generous, open-minded, curious, principled, honest to the point of bluntness, modest but aware of his own worth, and something of a tinkerer; in his most popular piece, the Boléro, Nichols finds that ‘Ravel’s interest, as so often, was in being homo faber—in kicking notes around and seeing what could be made of them’ (p. 302). But Nichols also wishes to avoid endorsing the time-worn and rather dismissive interpretation of Ravel as a mechanical engineer of notes, a composer supposedly too constrained in his poetics to take a risk. Consequently he introduces the notion of Ravel as ‘pirate’, which shifts attention away from the ‘skill and control of the clockmaker’ to emphasize instead his ‘daring and aggression’, particularly in his musical choices (p. 348).

Ravel relies most strongly on the composer’s correspondence—and justifiably so, since it is a biography and the correspondence is illuminating in many respects—but it also draws on many other sources. Examples of recent Ravel scholarship in French that may be less well known to Anglophone readers include Étienne Rousseau-Plotto’s account of Ravel’s life in the Basque country and Philippe Rodriguez’s work on the Apaches, the artistic coterie to which Ravel belonged. Equally helpful is Nichols’s consistent citation of reviews for important premieres, whose placement immediately after the discussion of each work not only enlivens the narrative with other voices but also continually reorients our historical understanding of Ravel’s contemporary listeners. Indeed, his decision to include reviews of premieres in places other than Paris—Great...