Rehabilitating Ravel

Maurice Ravel was one of God’s Angry Little Men: a slight, gnomish figure with a vast talent, and—when he was young—a doting mother and really bad manners. The combination of a genuinely superior intelligence and insufferable arrogance made him a natural target for any kind of abuse. Even now, when he has been dead for more than thirty years, he is under the most cruel and insensitive attack in France, where the musical leftists claim he was a man of no originality and substance.

H. H. Stuckenschmidt, the aging German musicologist who was one of the most articulate champions of Schoenberg early on, has written a strong book attempting to restore Ravel to a position in history commensurate with his accomplishment. Since Ravel’s aesthetic was almost always concerned with some kind of voluptuous loveliness, it is hard to think of his work as “advanced" in the ordinary sense of the word. At the same time, his contributions to technique and style during the first years of the twentieth century were much larger than one would suspect, taking the music for granted.

It was Ravel’s misfortune to be thirteen years younger than Debussy and to be constantly compared with the older man. The fact is that they were different in temperament and frequently different in sound. But between 1901, the year of Jeux d’eau, and 1912, the year of Daphnis et Chloe, the two composers briefly found their styles alike in point of sonority. A few years later, Debussy was to die horribly after executing the somber En Blanc et noir and the relatively austere late sonatas. Ravel was to take an altogether different path, affecting neoclassicism in Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Trio, and the left-hand concerto, all of which make sense in terms of his evolution. Some odd pieces (the violin sonata, Les Chansons madecasses, and the G Major piano concerto) do not follow a straight line from his other works.

by H. H. Stuckenschmidt translated by Samuel R. Rosenbaum (Chilton, $6.50)

Ravel was fond of claiming an exaggerated debt to older composers— notably Gounod and Chabrier, who had been powers in France when he was growing up, and Satie, a heretic, who was, in his old age, a Bolshevik, trying to raise money for Lenin and to set up a soviet in Paris. In the brilliance of his orchestration and the harmonic coloring of some of his fake Spanish pieces, Ravel was influenced by Chabrier. Gounod must have been introduced as smoke screen to conceal Ravel’s debt to Debussy, which was already clear in his dissonant and tonally imaginative Menuet antique (1898) . As for Satie, he was an afterthought. True, there was a slight lessening of density in Ravel’s textures after the First World War, but nothing to suggest a Satiesque plainness. Stuckenschmidt finds, in Le Tombeau de Couperin, so drastic a trimming away of stylistic fat as to constitute a musical resolution, but to find historical relevance in that lovely work is surely to miss the point.

The most celebrated incident in Ravel’s life grew out of his long career as a student at the Conservatoire, where he competed repeatedly for the Prix de Rome. After losing three times, he was refused a chance to compete a fourth time, on the grounds that he had reached, but not passed, the age limit of thirty. Ravel was already on his way to becoming an eminent man and was in no mood for hanky-panky. In the scandal that followed, the director of the Conservatoire, Theodore Dubois, was deposed and replaced by Gabriel Fame.

A major participant in the row was Debussy, and because of his aid to Ravel, it has often been suggested that they were good triends. There was no reason that this should have been so. There was a significant age difference between the men, and besides that, they found themselves rivals. Debussy was as generous as he could or should have been. Ravel, for his part, repaid the courtesy by making a marvelous two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and they remained on generally good professional terms.

A variation in their development was that Debussy’s interior journey was endlessly slow. He was thirty-one before he got around to the String Quartet. Ten years later with Pelleas, his style was still in formation, with the result that virtually all of his best music was written after he was forty.

Ravel, on the other hand, was a genuine enfant terrible. In France, the stylistic developments of Fauré and Debussy had given him the opportunity to fall into a kind of music that he wrote well and with ease. The result is that more than half of his catalogue, including the most spectacular piano pieces, the Quartet, and the opera L’Heure espagnol, and the most brilliant orchestral music except for Bolero and La Valse, was all written before he was thirty-five. He wanted to do everything superbly well, and for him, “sincerity” evidently consisted in technical perfection. Writing to Honegger, he said: “I have written only one masterpiece. That is Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music.”

In works like Le Tombeau de Couperin, Valses nobles et sentimentales, and L’Enfant et les sortileges Ravel conveyed the most profound and deeply touching tender emotions. But in most of his music, the excitement and brilliance come first. And in some of his later music—the “blues” from the violin sonata, the tonally amorphous sections of Chansons madécasses—he appears to be following fashion instead of leading it. The sonata is a strong piece, and the blues from it survives the dating process very well—but it is dated, much more so than the other two movements. As for the G Major concerto, it is dated to the point of banality. Whether this is a tactical error or a symptom of the degenerative nervous disorder that ultimately killed the composer would be difficult to say, but when it was written it was already an academic exercise.

By the time of his death, Ravel had joined the “safe" moderns— Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Sibelius, the Stravinsky of Firebird—as a man who made the symphony orchestra sound marvelous and who could be listened to with pleasure by people of no highly cultivated taste. For a man whose major preoccupation was fashion, it must have been hard to take this unfair verdict of history while the music was still being written. The size of the royalty checks may have made it easier to bear.

Stuckenschmidt’s book, though it is the definitive biography and no doubt will be unchallenged for some time, reads like academic German in translation—as, of course, it is. It is relieved by marvelously witty excerpts from Ravel’s correspondence —most of them previously unpublished. Stuckenschunch’s in-depth analyses of every piece Ravel ever completed form an invaluable source of information and insight.

Illustrations for this issue are from Notan: The Dark Light Principle of Design, by Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Frey, American Book, Van Nostrand, Reinhold, a division of Litton Industries, New York, 1968.