1875–1937 · France
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor, one of the leading figures of musical impressionism alongside Claude Debussy. He wrote Boléro, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé and a series of virtuoso piano cycles, from the early Jeux d'eau to the fiendishly difficult Gaspard de la nuit. His music is prized for its clarity of form, precision and pianistic brilliance.
On 7 March 1875, in the town of Ciboure, the future composer Maurice Ravel was born, the son of the engineer Joseph Ravel and Marie Delouart. Marie came from a modest Basque family, while his father was a passionate music lover thought to have instilled this love of music in his son.
In 1882 the future composer began piano lessons with Henri Ghys, and from 1887 he studied harmony with Charles-René. His musical education thus began well before he entered the Conservatoire.
In 1889 Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying in the piano department. He received considerable support from his teacher Charles de Bériot, a well-known pianist of the time. Ravel's interest in improvisation and in composing his own music awoke after he encountered the work of Erik Satie, one of the earliest impressionist musicians, and met the composer and pianist Ricardo Viñes in person. Years later, despite a complicated personal relationship with Satie, Ravel repeatedly acknowledged how much he owed him in his own work.
In his final year at the Conservatoire, Ravel joined the class of the major French composer Gabriel Fauré. On Fauré's suggestion he wrote a set of pieces on Spanish themes — Habanera, Pavane pour une infante défunte and Menuet antique. After his years at the Conservatoire, between 1900 and 1914, Ravel wrote a large part of his output.
Ravel's music was at first not recognised in academic musical circles. He entered the Prix de Rome competition in 1901, 1902 and 1903 but never won it: in the second and third of these years, the prize went to students of Professor Charles Lenepveu. In 1904 he deliberately abstained from entering, in order to gather his strength for one last attempt — the final year in which, given the age limit, he could still compete for the prize.
In 1905, by now a widely known and frequently performed musician in Paris, Ravel entered the competition one last time on Fauré's advice. He was refused admission on a formal pretext, though the real reason was the jury's irritation with his innovative, impressionist music — his well-known Jeux d'eau had already been performed many times by then. The refusal caused an outcry in musical and press circles: it emerged that every finalist that year had studied with the very same professor, Charles Lenepveu, which gave the scandal a whiff of corruption.
The affair, which the press dubbed l'affaire Ravel, led to the resignation of the Conservatoire's long-serving director, Théodore Dubois, who was replaced by Gabriel Fauré. For Ravel himself the episode turned into a victory of another kind: public attention to him grew sharply, his works began to sell and to be performed widely, and he broke definitively with the Conservatoire and the academic establishment.
After 1905 Ravel was firmly established as the second leading figure of musical impressionism alongside Claude Debussy, a composer he had always admired. During these years he met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, for whom he wrote the score for Michel Fokine's ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), with Vaslav Nijinsky in the leading role. Ravel's music was later used in the Diaghilev company's ballet Las Meninas, choreographed by Léonide Massine (1916), and the ballet that followed, La Valse, went on after its premiere to be performed as an independent concert piece.
When war broke out with Germany, Ravel, despite being in good health, could not be accepted into any branch of the armed forces because his height and weight fell below military standards. For three months he pulled every string he had, and in October 1914 he was finally accepted as a volunteer driver in an automobile unit, serving for a little over three years — first with the infantry, then with an air squadron. In early 1918, his health seriously undermined by his service, he was discharged on medical grounds.
After the war, emotion came to the fore in Ravel's music: he turned away from opera towards instrumental works and wrote the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin. This was the height of the composer's fame, though the popularity itself weighed on him — he left Paris for the small town of Montfort-l'Amaury, without, however, giving up composing. As a performer of his own works, both at the piano and on the podium, Ravel found audiences in Italy, Holland and England, and at the request of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky he orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition — a version that in time became no less popular than the original piano score.
One of Ravel's best-known works, Boléro, grew out of an idea by the ballerina Ida Rubinstein: the composer combined classical orchestral tradition with the rhythms of Spanish music, with the strict sequence of its sections and the development of a single theme conveying the dance spirit of Spanish music. The ballerina Anna Pavlova added Boléro to her own repertoire. In 1925 Ravel completed another innovative work, L'enfant et les sortilèges, which he himself described as an opera-ballet.
In 1928 Ravel made a four-month tour of the United States and Canada, appearing with success as a pianist and conductor. He owed much of this tour to Serge Koussevitzky, who had been actively promoting his music in America. Among the most memorable impressions of the trip was a personal meeting with George Gershwin. Ravel's growing interest in jazz and blues during his time in the US later surfaced in his own works as well — notably the first movement of the Piano Concerto in G major and the second movement of the Second Violin Sonata.
In 1929 Ravel was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the University of Oxford. In 1932 he set out on another tour of Europe, this time with the pianist Marguerite Long, and around the same time began work on the ballet Jeanne d'Arc — work that was cut short by a car accident.
From 1933 Ravel suffered from a serious neurological illness, possibly connected to the head injury he sustained in that accident. His last composition was Trois chansons, written for the first sound film of Don Quixote, for the Russian singer F. I. Chaliapin. Ravel died in Paris on 28 December 1937, not long after a brain operation intended to treat his aphasia ended in failure; he is buried in the cemetery of the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret.
Ravel is remembered above all as a master orchestrator and a composer who combined the clarity of classical form with vivid Spanish colour. The Spanish strand runs through his output from the early Habanera and Pavane pour une infante défunte to the late Boléro, where it is the strict sequence of sections and the development of a single theme that carries the whole piece. Working with other composers' music mattered almost as much to him: his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition became, in time, no less popular with audiences than the original piano score. Ravel's later fascination with jazz and blues, which took hold during his 1928 tour of the United States, also left its mark on his music — though the scores on the site come mainly from his earlier, Spanish-inflected impressionist years.
dana-piano.kz holds scores for many of Ravel's works, all pitched at the upper-intermediate level. Pianists will find the suite Ma mère l'Oye, the fiendishly demanding Gaspard de la nuit, Jeux d'eau, Alborada del gracioso, Menuet antique, and arrangements of La Valse for piano four hands and for two pianos. There are also scores and transcriptions of the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, a piano transcription of the chamber work Introduction et Allegro, the song cycle Histoires naturelles, and a vocal score of the opera L'heure espagnole.
The catalogue is not limited to piano transcriptions: it includes the Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré for violin and piano, a piece for clarinet and piano, the songs Chanson espagnole, Chanson française and Chanson hébraïque for voice and piano, and an orchestral score of Alborada del gracioso. The catalogue also includes a small collection of folk-song arrangements, Chants populaires, with the same Spanish colouring that can be heard in other works by Ravel.
For players new to Ravel, it makes sense to start with the more compact pieces — Menuet antique, a single movement from Ma mère l'Oye, or the transcription of L'heure espagnole — before moving on to the technically demanding Gaspard de la nuit or the full score of Daphnis et Chloé, which asks even experienced pianists for a carefully judged balance of sound.