Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel ranks among the foremost and most impactful composers active during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Though often paired with Claude Debussy as a leading figure of musical impressionism and despite certain superficial similarities between their scores, Ravel maintained a distinctive idiom rooted in his deep affinity for an eclectic range of influences, among them the French Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Spanish folk traditions, and American jazz and blues. His output, though smaller than that of many peers, stands out for its refined elegance and lyrical abundance, each piece marked by painstaking and refined construction. No one has surpassed his exceptional skill as an orchestrator.

Born to a mother of Basque descent whose background fostered his enduring interest in Spanish music and to a Swiss father who worked as an inventor and engineer and likely instilled his dedication to exactitude and careful workmanship, Ravel entered the Paris Conservatory at fourteen. He studied there from 1889 to 1895 and again from 1897 to 1903, with Gabriel Fauré serving as his chief composition instructor. One of the great frustrations of his career was repeated failure to secure the Prix de Rome, a setback traceable to friction between the institution’s conservative leadership and Ravel’s independent outlook, which aligned him with the French avant-garde exemplified by Debussy and drew him toward non-French sources such as Wagner, the Russian nationalists, and Balinese gamelan. By then he had already gained recognition through compositions including the String Quartet and the piano works Pavane pour une infante défunte, Jeux d'eau, and the Sonatine; the 1905 Prix de Rome rejection provoked such outrage that the Conservatory director was compelled to step down.

Ravel voiced ongoing respect for Debussy’s music across his lifetime, yet their personal ties cooled under the strain of growing professional rivalry once Ravel’s stature increased in the century’s first ten years. During that same period he formed a close association with Igor Stravinsky, the pair acquainting themselves with each other’s music while Stravinsky resided in Paris and jointly preparing arrangements for Sergey Diaghilev.

From 1909 to 1912 Ravel created Daphnis et Chloé for Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes; this score became his most expansive and ambitious project and is broadly regarded as his crowning achievement. He supplied Diaghilev with a further ballet, La Valse, which the impresario declined yet which later emerged as one of Ravel’s most frequently performed orchestral pieces. After serving as an ambulance driver in the First World War and losing his mother in 1917, his productivity briefly declined. In 1925 the Monte Carlo Opera gave the first performance of the large-scale “lyric fantasy” L’enfant et les sortilèges, written in collaboration with the writer Colette.

American jazz and blues exerted an ever-stronger pull on the composer. A highly successful North American tour in 1928 brought an introduction to George Gershwin and further immersion in jazz idioms, influences audible in several major late scores such as the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 and the Piano Concerto in G.

Paradoxically, Ravel, once dismissed by segments of the French musical establishment in his youth for modernist leanings, later drew criticism from Satie and the members of Les Six as retrograde and emblematic of entrenched convention. An automobile accident in 1932 initiated a physical deterioration that brought memory impairment and loss of speech; he died in 1937 after undergoing brain surgery.

Despite bequeathing one of the most substantial and consequential oeuvres among early-twentieth-century composers—an oeuvre embracing nearly every genre save the symphony and liturgical music—Ravel is most commonly identified with an orchestration of another composer’s music and with a work he himself ranked among his lesser efforts. His orchestral version of Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition has enjoyed enormous popularity among audiences, and the royalties from it rendered Ravel wealthy. Boléro, a fifteen-minute Spanish dance built on a single theme restated through changing instrumental colors, has been derided for its unrelenting repetition yet remains a concert favorite and one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable and frequently played orchestral compositions.