Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875-28 December 1937) was a Basque composer, pianist and conductor.
He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz.
He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music.
Many of his works exist in two
versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his
piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally
difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et
Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.
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Ravel was among the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.
Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ziburu, French Basque Country, near Biarritz. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border. His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque. Some of Joseph's inventions were successful, including an early internal combustion engine and a notorious circus machine, the Whirlwind of Death, an automotive loop-the-loop that was a major attraction until a fatal accident at Barnum and Bailey's Circus in 1903.
With the encouragement of his
parents, Ravel applied for entry to France's most important musical
college, the Conservatoire de Paris. In November 1889, playing music by
Chopin, he passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano
class run by Eugène Anthiome.
In 1897, he conducted the first performance of the Shéhérazade overture, which had a mixed reception, with boos mingling with applause from the audience, and unflattering reviews from the critics.
From the start of his career, Ravel appeared calmly indifferent to blame or praise. Those who knew him well believed that this was no pose but wholly genuine. The only opinion of his music that he truly valued was his own, perfectionist and severely self-critical.
Ravel, twelve years his junior, had known Debussy slightly since the 1890s, and their friendship, though never close, continued for more than ten years.
Debussy was widely held to be an impressionist composer -a label he intensely disliked. Many music lovers began to apply the same term to Ravel, and the works of the two composers were frequently taken as part of a single genre.
By the latter part of the 1900s Ravel had established a pattern of writing works for piano and subsequently arranging them for full orchestra. He was in general a slow and painstaking worker, and reworking his earlier piano compositions enabled him to increase the number of pieces published and performed. There appears to have been no mercenary motive for this; Ravel was known for his indifference to financial matters.
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The pieces that began as piano compositions and were then given orchestral dress were Pavane pour une infante défunte (1910), Une barque sur l'océan (1906), the Habanera section of Rapsodie espagnole (1907–08), Ma mère l'Oye (1908–10), Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), Alborada del gracioso (1918) and Le tombeau de Couperin (1914–17).
The last composition Ravel completed in the 1920s, Boléro, became his most famous. He was commissioned to provide a score for Ida Rubinstein's ballet company, and having been unable to secure the rights to orchestrate Albéniz's Iberia, he decided on an experiment in a very special and limited direction... a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music.
In 1937, Ravel began to suffer pain from his condition, and was examined by Clovis Vincent, a well-known Paris neurosurgeon. Vincent advised surgical treatment. He thought a tumour unlikely, and expected to find ventricular dilatation that surgery might prevent from progressing.
Ravel's brother Edouard accepted this advice; as Henson comments, the patient was in no state to express a considered view. After the operation there seemed to be an improvement in his condition, but it was short-lived, and he soon lapsed into a coma. He died on 28 December, at the age of 62.
On 30 December 1937, Ravel was interred next to his parents in a granite tomb at Levallois-Perret cemetery, in north-west Paris. He was an atheist and there was no religious ceremony.
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and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.
Maurice Ravel
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