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| In memoriam
Maurice Ravel 1875–1937
By M.-D. Calvocoressi
Writing on Ravel four-and-twenty years ago (Musical
Times, December 1913), I made a point of dealing with the question
of the artificiality of his art, which had been stirred ever since
the beginning of his career, and up to the present day has continued
to loom large in the critical judgements of both champions and censors.
It was skilfully set forth and wisely solved by Roland-Manuel, in
a brief essay of 1925 entitled ‘Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique
de l’imposture,’ the substance of which is incorporated
in his book of 1928, ‘Maurice Ravel et son oevre dramatique.’
But readers delving less deeply into the matter are liable to miss
the philosophy of it; and, retaining nothing but the label, loudly
proclaim that they have no use for imposture in art. Such was the
attitude of the judges who withheld the ‘Prix de Rome’
from him, and that of many French critics, long after his music
had ceased to be an object of censure in official circles; and it
is they alone who are to blame for the controversies that ensued,
which would have been thoroughly puerile but for the need to secure
a fair hearing for his music.
‘The artificiality of Ravel’s art [I wrote] is, in
a way, beyond question. One might indeed say that artificiality
is natural to him. He is sensitive enough, and thoroughly sincere;
but the subjects that appeal to his imagination are few, and perhaps
rather peculiar as a rule. It is a significant fact that the majority
of these should have tempted no other composer. Even when he happens
to select poetic subjects that other have treated, there are typical
differences in the mode of treatment [both these points I proceeded
to elaborate at some length]. The very deliberateness, the remorseless
limitations of the emotional range of his art might in a less
gifted composer be defects. In him they are part and parcel of
the artistic individuality. The absence of emotion is only apparent;
and although the emotion itself is subdued, and its expression
always toned down and restrained, many instances can be adduced
in which genuine feeling asserts itself under the industrious
show of impassivity, while elsewhere, the composer drops the mask
altogether.’
After 1913 the outward characteristics of Ravel’s style began
to change. He aimed more and more at simplification and thinning
out of texture, but never at the expense of complexity and subtlety.
(In this respect, it is interesting to mark Vaughan Williams’s
statement, in a note to the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post
of December 29, that ‘Ravel had urged him to make his music
complex but not complicated.’) This was the natural, and indeed
inevitable, thing for him to do. Most of his previous works had
marked, so to speak, a ne plus ultra in a given direction:
‘Gaspard de la Nuit’ (1908) in the matter of getting the
utmost out of the piano; ‘Valses nobles et sentimentales’
(1911) in that of complex, elliptical harmony; ‘Daphnis et
Chloé’ (1911) in that of mellow, highly variegated orchestral
profuseness; and ‘Trois poèmes de Mallarmé’
in that of recondite subtlety of expression. So nothing remained
for him but to attempt to maintain the same level of imagination
and style while renouncing most of the purely decorative and scintillating
elements, and submitting his materials to an ever increasingly rigorous
process of concentration and elimination. This he achieved to perfection
in his Duet for violin and ‘cello (1922). Another good, though
far less ambitious, example is the lovely ‘Forlane’ in
‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ (the ‘Tombeau’ is one
of the very few works he composed during the war years, after he
had finished, in 1915, his Piano Trio).
In other post-war works we see him simplifying the terms of his
problem rather than the methods of solving it: not only in ‘La
Valse,’ ‘Boléro,’ or ‘Don Quichotte à
Dulcinée’ – all of which, whatever their merits
may be, are of a more obvious kind than anything he had previously
written – but also in the Violin Sonata and the two piano concertos.
This tendency is apparent already in the splendid Piano Trio (begun
in 1914); and maybe the influence of a steadily growing interest
in the music of Saint-Saëns, which those of us who were in
close contact with Ravel had noticed gradually developing from 1910
or so onwards, had something to do with the opening of this unexpected
chapter in the history of Ravel’s evolution.
That this interest was not restricted to Saint-Saëns’s
technique is shown by a tribute he paid to him on the occasion of
his jubilee, in which the following remarks occur:
‘That perspicuity, that airiness in elegance, that dexterity
which are so characteristic of Saint-Saëns do not unnecessarily
connote shallowness or lack of vigour. Depth and spaciousness
exist in French music as well as in German: only, they are achieved
otherwise. Nobody could deny the nobility and loftiness of Saint-Saëns’s
best music. Maybe his art lacks the attractions of mystery and
of tender voluptuousness. Its clarity is not altogether exempt
from dryness. But has not this very defect often become a quality
with French artists – especially in the second half of the
18th century, that delightful period during which France, while
striving to copy Greek, Egyptian and Roman antiquity, showed herself
French to the core?’
Saint-Saëns’s influence is the only one which really
made itself felt upon Ravel after he had fully matured, except that
of jazz, not very strong, but manifest in parts of the Violin Sonata
and of ‘L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,’ that
charming fantastic opera in the music of which the older Ravel and
the newer join forces in perfect harmony.
Tragedy stepped in soon after the completion of the two concertos:
a nervous breakdown, partial loss of memory, incapacity to concentrate
and to co-ordinate. The terrible thing was Ravel’s being fully
conscious of his condition, and able to explain it to his friends
– detachedly, I was told, and as if he were speaking of some
other person. At the time he was stricken he had no plans for further
instrumental works, but was preparing a ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’
after Léon Delteil – for which, he told an interviewer,
it would be necessary for him to devise an entirely new form –
and thinking of an operetta on a subject by Bousquet ‘in which
he hoped to avoid imitating Offenbach, Chabrier and Messager.’
No doubt he was on the right track. It is admissible that in instrumental
music and in song he had given all he had to give. But the more
one considers ‘L’Heure Espagnole,’ ‘Daphnis
et Chloé,’ and ‘L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,’
the more strongly one feels that his best chance of further progress
and renovation lay in the direction of music for the stage –
that he had barely begun to explore its possibilities, and given
us but a small fraction of what he would have been capable of giving.
But now that, alas! the time has come to take stock, there is no
reason to dwell on this point. Nor need we try to foretell what
the verdict of posterity will be. His music will surely fall into
place quite naturally, as it did within its own period despite the
controversial excesses that contributed so greatly to cloud the
issue.
In one or two of the obituary notices in the daily press, a tendency
to belittle him made itself felt. One, for instance, after saying
that he was ‘an intensely fascinating musician, inspired throughout
with the highest and most scrupulous ideals,’ ended with the
words: ‘The worst that can be said of him is that with all
his brilliant equipments, he had singularly little to tell us.’
This, of course, is legitimate criticism, but the two statements,
as they stand, are hard to reconcile: if a musician has singularly
little to tell us, how can he be found fascinating and inspired?
Elsewhere I read: ‘His two most famous piano pieces depict
fountains of water and a corpse hanging from a gibbet.’ Anybody
unacquainted with ‘Le Gibet’ (in ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’)
might, on the strength of this reference to it, imagine it to be
some kind of crudely and melodramatically descriptive counterpart
of the gallows episode in Strauss’s ‘Till Eulenspiegel,’
and not the lofty, meditative, profoundly impressive piece of pure
music it is. Is it, by the way, one of Ravel’s most famous?
With musicians, possibly – but certainly not with the public
at large, for the simple reason that it is hardly ever played. This
is, I think, a flagrant instance of unfair criticism.
In one description of Ravel the man, it was stated that he was
‘diffident in manner.’ The assertion will surely cause
all the people who knew him to gasp and rub their eyes: diffidence
in art or in life was utterly foreign to him. Indeed, one of the
first points that leaps to the mind was his invariable and perfect
aloofness (which may well have given rise to the mistake). I doubt
whether anyone but his close friends could have known the other
aspect of him – his warm-heartedness and fundamental ingenuousness.
And I think I may safely affirm that even they never saw a sign
of diffidence in him. When expressing his views on art or any other
matter, he was always definite and firm, and often trenchant. He
had the utmost confidence in his judgements – a confidence
rooted in that clear knowledge of himself to which I have already
alluded. And for that reason, although fond of explaining and discussing
music – his own included – with musicians, and willing
to hear what they had to say, he was disinclined to controversy
and would promptly let it drop.
He once told me: ‘I never release a work until I feel quite
certain that I have done my utmost, and could not in any way improve
one single detail in it.’ He could have said the same of his
opinions on the music of others: by the time he was prepared to
express them they were final so far as he, Maurice Ravel, was concerned.
His indifference to criticism was genuine and thorough. He regarded
himself as the best critic of his own work – quite rightly,
in a way, as I realized on so many occasions: as when he said to
me, ‘Le "Boléro," c’est dix-sept minutes
d’orchestre sans musique’; or, with reference to a couple
of bars in a piano piece, many years after its publication: ‘Çà,
çà, ne veut rien dire: c’est du bafouillage.’
What is more to the point: he regarded his music not as an embodiment
of the only desirable and right ideal, or even of any particular
ideal, but simply as the best he had to offer, to be taken or left.
In other words, he did not overrate his own importance. But I have
had an opportunity to realize to the full how abhorrent to him was
the notion that he might be suspected of underrating it. When he
came to England in 1928 to receive the honorary degree conferred
upon him by Oxford University, the Oxford University Press gave
a small informal lunch in his honour. At the end of it the host,
Hubert Foss, insisted that I should speak a few words. Taken aback,
and quite unprepared, I rose and tried hard to collect my wits as
I went along. Referring to the time when Ravel had borne with quiet
dignity the injustice of French musical officialdom, I happened
to say: ‘Il est d’ailleurs modeste.’ To my abashment
he interrupted me with: ‘Ah, çà, non! Je ne suis
pas modeste: je sais ce que je vaux’ – thereby unsaddling
me for good and all.
Many of my recollections of Ravel have found place in my book ‘Music
and Ballet.’ I did not feel like going through these records
while preparing this article, but I read afresh certain of his works,
and also a number of essays by other writers. In Guido Pannain’s
(in ‘Modern Composers’) I marked the following lines,
which may well serve as a conclusion:
‘The critics have turned him into a juggler who can produce
at will lyrical beauty and sentiment, who can parody sorrow out
of the exuberance of his own nature; a mountebank in a frock-coat,
persuasive, elusive, able to cheat you into furtive tears, and
quick to spin the tissue of professional lies. . . . They are
afraid or ashamed to admit the truth; that Ravel is at heart a
romantic. . . . He does not feign an unfelt emotion; rather he
delights in contemplating the spiritual ecstasy without entering
into it. He gives us no mere synthetic beauty, but a deep and
incontestable lyric feeling: the music is a reflected image of
an ideal figure of poetic imagination. He throws over the most
elementary musical statement a coloured veil which the physical
senses cannot analyse, but which delights the mind. In the full
noonday of his music there lurks a shadow, in every melody there
lies the whisper of hidden feeling.’
I do not know whether Ravel ever read that essay (which has not
been published in French). But I feel sure it would have pleased
and touched him more deeply than the many tributes which other admirers
have paid to the ‘Vaucanson-like[1] magic
of his art.’
Musical Times, January 1938
Notes
1. Vaucanson: like Maelzel, a famous manufacturer
of automatons.
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