Of those composers I most love, Ravel is the single one through whose sound I feel the man himself. The feeling can rise straight from a harmony hit in passing, evoking within a split second the vastly non-abstract realm of Paris before I was born: my heart beats in a salon faubourien during conversation with an artist I never met in a time that is not, and real tears well up for the unknown which is hyperfamiliar. Time and again this happens as I’m seated at the piano playing Ravel or hearing him in a concert hall. No other composer pulls quite the same trick.
_____________
A century ago (on the hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth) Ravel was born of solvent and understanding parents in the village of Ciboure near the Spanish frontier. These few facts color all that he became. His art straddled the border as it straddled centuries, being in texture as opulent as a tourist’s notion of Iberia, in shape as pristine as Rameau, in intent no less modern than ragas or group therapy, and in subject matter mostly anti-romantic. Listen again to Boléro. (“It’s my masterpiece,” said the composer. “Unfortunately it contains no music”) French logic drenched in Basque mystery.
Mysterious for its lack of mystery was his worldly life: he didn’t read much, didn’t carouse, had avuncular crushes and a juvenile taste for enamel toys, heavy spices, mother figures, Siamese cats. Beneath garish shirts lay bland discretion.
But the unknown is good press. (Which is why a Maurice Sachs, dilettantish and mediocre, still holds the boards in France: his death was a publicized enigma, like Poe’s, Lorca’s, Desnos’s.) The two most frequent questions about Ravel: Was he Jewish? Was he homosexual? (One assumes he couldn’t be both.) Nobody knows, so everyone cares. Beyond this—and beyond the details of his long, sad agony—the man was less absorbing than the artist. But the artist’s method has been finely documented. What to add? This musician, who over the years brought me more than any other, now leaves me at a loss. What we love we long to share but need to hoard.
_____________
What we learn as children we question without question.
That Ravel’s music was stand-offish, elegant, well made, and casual I took as fact like the Oedipus complex or Eliot’s genius, wondering uneasily why that special sound entered me like a heady draft of carnality throttling my Quaker frame to dwell on love and the pursuit of happiness.
It was the summer of 1936 that I first heard him, on the antimacassared upright in Oberlin. While kohlrabi fumes floated from the pantry, my cousin Kathleen performed the Sonatina which awakened me forever. Thinking the composer’s name was Reville, I could locate no more of his music.
By 1937 I knew the spelling plus every work on record. I’d even begun composing a bit of Ravel myself.
On December 28th, a Tuesday brimming with sunshine, Father (I still picture him there on the sofa) read aloud from the Chicago Tribune: “French Composer Dies.” (His name didn’t yet merit a headline.) Gershwin had gone that summer. Now this. Moved, I sat down and played the Pavane. “How obvious,” snorted a fourteen-year-old pal when I told him later.
_____________
Like Minerva he emerged full blown. Like Chopin he did not “advance,” have periods, grow more complex. He entered the world with the true artist’s faculty for self-appraisal and all his life wrote the same kind of music, consistently good. Goodness accounts, as with Chopin, for a proportionately short catalogue. Virginity accounts, as with Minerva, for concern about fertility through craft.
_____________
Unlike Chopin, he was no contrapuntalist. His canonic forays are abortive: those thousand examples of balanced clean lines are not counterpoints but harmonic shorthand. That Fugue in Le Tombeau de Couperin is idiosyncratic.
_____________
A nation’s music resembles its language in all respects, and since French is the only European tongue with no rhythm (no tonic accent), any metricalization of a French phrase in music can be construed as correct. Lacking natural pulse, all French music becomes Impressionist. French composers when they opt for rhythm exploit it squarely, like children. The spell of Boléro resides in its non-variety, its contrast with Gallic speech which inherently rejects hypnosis, as opposed to American speech which, like jazz, is pure monotony. (Not for nothing was hypnosis first documented by a Frenchman, Charcot. Where rhythm is a stranger, rhythm is a prophet.)
Boléro has nothing to do with French music, yet only a Frenchman could have composed it.
_____________
Ravel’s signatures are harmony and tune. His melodies are based on, and emerge from, chords. His identity (like Puccini’s) lies in long line.
_____________
Melody is horizontal. No matter how brief or fragmentary, melody necessarily unfolds, and so is experienced in time. Like sex and food, melody can be enjoyed in the Now. We react to a tune as it happens, although (unlike sex and food) we cannot judge the tune until it is over, whether the tune is three notes of Webern or three pages of liturgical chant.
Harmony is vertical. Harmony too may exist in Time (a single chord may be indefinitely sustained), although that is not its defining signal. (A shifting series or progression of chords is just that: chords, not chord—harmonies, not harmony.) Of course, a progression of simultaneous tunes—counterpoint, as it is named—produces at all moments harmony. that is, vertical noises that result from (but aren’t specifically the purpose of) the juxtaposition of moving lines; but these moments are actually points in space rather than in time: no sooner sounded than they perish, or are retained like anti-matter only in memory, in the past, while melody is experienced solely in the present, like a movie.
_____________
Debussy never, not once, even for violins, composed extended melody. His vocal writing, though tuneful, is glorified recitative, while the occasional grande ligne hints in his orchestral work are either cut short in mid-orgasm or exhaust themselves too soon for logic. (That brief outburst in Iberia’s middle movement brings no “expected” relief, merely dribbles off.) The Debussyan tunes which are lengthy, like the vast ending of La Mer or the soaring Études, are additive: literal repetitions piled up like pancakes.
Not that he couldn’t melodize, but he had other fish to fry. The music of Debussy, that famed roué, leads somewhere, but not to sex. The music of Ravel, that presumed abstainer, usually emulates carnal fulfillment.
We know of Debussy’s love-hate love of Wagner. But how did a non-linear type like him react to such limitless ropes of silk as Ravel wove for his dragonfly fiddles in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, or to the endless opening theme of Daphnis et Chloe, or to that unbroken languor of the solo flute? Do we admire in others what we too can do, or what we cannot?
Ravel and Debussy each had a strong personality and so were inimitable; but they were contemporaries, after all, bearing the same age relationship as Liszt to Franck, or as Copland to Barber. (Satie, whom we think of as Papa, actually lay between them like Lucky Pierre.) Once we agree it’s unfair to compare them, it’s fun to compare them.
_____________
Their color is abundant and varied, but always pure. The difference between French and German orchestration is that the former uses no doubling. Reinforcement, yes; but where in Strauss a string tune is thickened with winds or brass, in Ravel the fat is skimmed off and held in abeyance. This makes for what is known as transparent instrumentation, a sound paradoxically opulent and lean. By extension the sound applies to his piano solo and vocal works. Sumptuous bones.
_____________
Another unchallenged fact: Ravel’s taste, the good taste—son goût exquis—which we accept at face value along with his “sophisticated” wit.
What is taste (or wit, for that matter) in music? For programmatic pieces it can be defined, but can the definition be extended (like the orchestral transparency of his piano works) to abstract pieces?
If taste means decorum, boundary, mesure, then Ravel’s jeweled box holds jewels, Debussy’s jeweled box holds a heart. But to a Mahler that heart is candy, to a Puccini it’s gall.
Yes, he had taste. Like all Frenchmen Ravel was blinded by Poe whose essay, The Philosophy of Composition, influenced him (he claimed) more than any music; yet he never actually envisaged setting Poe’s fiction, as Debussy had planned with the House of Usher. Like all Frenchmen Ravel was approached by the gaudy Ida Rubinstein, whose spoken voice (that least musical of instruments, in contrast to the singing voice) was the requisite solo for the works she commissioned; yet he never succumbed to using that voice, as Debussy did in his Martyre.
Alone, subject matter determines taste in music. (Music without subject matter cannot be argued as tasteful or tasteless, there are no criteria.) Murder, war, and amorous passion being the texts for nine-tenths of lyric theater, and such texts being beyond taste, most opera is tasteless. Again, Ravel was tasteful there: his sonorous stories never grazed grown-up matters except in parody (licentious doings in L’Heure espagnole) or from a safe distance (slave revolt in Chansons madécasses). Otherwise he stayed close to home, which is to say, close to the non-sexual side of Colette. Nor did he ever, save for a brief minute in the early song Sainte on a poem of Mallarmé, musicalize even a quasi-religious verse: the gods forbid such breach of taste.
Yet who does not forget himself at L’Enfant et les sortilèges? Colette’s very stage directions are high poetry, and contribute to making this my single most preferred work of the century. Why? Because, despite its length, the quality of inspiration remains appropriately fevered while exploiting (no less adroitly than Bach’s passions and Wagner’s dramas do) each aspect of sonorous speech: instrumental opulence, both solo and orchestral, and vocal expertise, both solo and choral.
(Ravel and Colette, as inevitable a pair as Gilbert and Sullivan, scarcely knew each other.)
_____________
How unfair to accuse him of taste! To hear Daphnis et Chloé is to hear great art (despite the hideous Heavenly Choirs, so copied by soundtracks that we hear the original now as a copy), but to see the score is to blush. Each “telling” tune illustrates a mawkish stage direction: the violas pose a question to which the shepherd opens his arms, the harp sweeps upward as the lovers reunite, etc.—what we call Mickeymousing.
After Ravel’s death his brother, witnessing his first animated cartoon, declared, “That’s how L’Enfant et les sortilèges should be mounted,” a declaration echoed by many another tasteful Frenchman. (Disney is second to Poe on France’s short list of esteemed Americans.) L’Enfant should never be mounted in any form; like Saint Matthew Passion, the work’s tightness is too elaborately delicate to support visuals.
(As for wit, who can define wit either, as it relates to non-vocal music?)
_____________
Influences we avow are, of course, the conscious ones—those we’re sure don’t show. Once assimilated, the property becomes ours. Magnanimously we admit the theft, safely knowing that no one detects the original beneath our paint. (Unconscious influence alone is damning.) Thus Ravel announces Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Mozart as his progenitors. Who would guess it?
His influence on others? On Poulenc it is obvious, though no one ever points out the harmonic progression of three chords in Ravel’s L’Indifférent (1905), pilfered intact fifty years later to form the motto of Poulenc’s Carmélite opera. More interestingly, no one ever points out the cadenza for two clarinets in Ravel’s Rapsodie es-pagnole (1908), pilfered intact three years later to form the motto for Stravinsky’s Petroushka ballet. That bitonal Petroushka sound outlined Stravinsky’s harmony for the next decade, and by extension most Western music for the next half-century, yet the sound demonstrably stems from a few casual bars in the French musician’s pseudo-Spanish idiom.
_____________
He evolutionized keyboard virtuosity more than anyone since Liszt, yet his complete solo piano works fit comfortably into one evening’s program.
In his sixty-two years Ravel, who worked constantly, didn’t turn out more than eight hours’ worth of music, as contrasted to Debussy’s sixteen, Beethoven’s thirty, Wagner’s fifty, Bach’s seventy, Ives’s two thousand, or Webern’s two. Of those eight hours none is slipshod or routine. Not that he was a miniaturist, he was a perfectionist. So was Bach a perfectionist—different times, different mores—but a page of Ravel orchestration is twenty times busier than a page of Bach’s. (Still, since Stravinsky was twice as busy as Ravel, yet twice as prolific, we draw no conclusions.)
_____________
He was a classicist, yes, sometimes. in those square-structured suites, concertos, and pastiches with their recapitulations and so-called symmetrical melodies. (Symmetrical is a poor word, since time cannot have symmetry.) But so many other pieces are truly Impressionist—all of Gaspard de la mat, most of Miroirs, many of the straight orchestra numbers (though none of the thirty-three songs, curiously, since songs, being based on words, are by definition musically free). Such pieces are not so much heard as overheard, come upon, already transpiring before they start, evanescent. Made solely of middles, without beginnings or ends, they emerge from nowhere, from a mist, trouble us for a dazzling while, then without notice vanish, like Scarbo, fade like Ondine. Any of these sparklers could be convincing shorter or convincing longer for they have been spinning always, and will always continue, though only within human ear-shot for those fugitive minutes.
How to perform such pieces! Not, certainly, like the composer himself with 19th-century mushiness, sabotaging the perfect interplay of his puzzles. Vague sounds, to make their point, need precise rendition, just as white on a canvas needs additional pigments to have meaning as white. Play what you see, the notes will take care of themselves. Add no nuances, they are imbedded in the score—not, to be sure, as verbal indications but as notated musical calculations. (Yet my heart sinks regularly when baritones, reaching the closing bars of the air to Dulcinée, slow clown the meter along with the rhythm: Ravel scored a retard by elongating note values, not by writing the word retard.)
He needs no interpretation; he should be played like Bach, the way Gieseking played him. (Bach takes interpretation; he should be played like Ravel, the way Landowska played him.)
_____________
I have wanted to disqualify what is often claimed, and to add what is not often said. So I have not bothered to mention that Ravel was five feet tall, or that he never married. I used to know people whom Ravel knew well (soprano Madeleine Grey, violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, composer Roland-Manuel), but none ever revealed much about the man or about his musical attitudes. Today they are dead, Ravel is a hundred, and facts about him grow as unreachable as facts about Shakespeare.
Having touched on all variables of music as they pertained to Ravel, let me recall them quickly:
His rhythmic sense, characteristically French, is vague, except where consciously italicized.
He made no pretense at being a contrapuntalist, and his few stabs at canon (with the exception of the ecstatic false-fugue at the close of L’Enfant) are banal.
He was a harmonist born. His harmonies, both in their vertical selves and in sequence, contain the inevitability of greatness, are almost embarrassingly tactile, and are always recognizable as his despite their providing the unique base for all chordal progressions in pop music for fifty years.
His tunes, spun out for mile upon silver mile, locate him in a camp far from Beethoven or even Debussy who glued together (always ingeniously their truncated fragments.
His instrumental hues (again characteristically French) are unadulterated. But it the French have always been noted for economical means, which in turn are the roots of taste, no one has ever focused on taste in, say, Franck or Famé.
What is called Ravel’s wit is his removal, when choosing texts to set. from sober adult romance. (But is the anguished Trio witty? And who finally dares call if or any music anguished?)
The effects of his music, assumed to be restrained and upper class (so as to distinguish them easily from Debussy’s), are really non-intellectual and replete with voluptuous yearning. These effects were as fully realized in his earliest works as in his last in his Impressionist pieces as in his formal ones—the latter being, ironically, more “physical” than the former if only because (unlike Debussy) they relied on sonata form which is the standard musical emulation of sexual intercourse.
The more we know someone’s music, the more we know how it should not go. Distance is not imitated by softness. If, for example, the more impressionistic of Ravel’s piano pieces sound as though they were being eavesdropped upon—like something we become aware of as being whispered downstairs—then they must project. Projection comes through precision, the articulation of musical syntax which is always crystal clear on Ravel’s printed page.
_____________
Even without his music, the thought of him makes me feel good.
Nobody dislikes Ravel, and nobody disapproves. Can that be said of any other musician?
_____________
