“My only mistress is music.” Maurice Ravel's declaration of absolute fidelity to his art echoes this unique composition, which Stravinsky famously called “the most perfect of all Swiss watchmakers.” It tells you a lot about your home that you need to know. This is a reference to the incredible complexity and perfect design of Ravel's music. Furthermore, this occupation, which shows the utmost loyalty to his art, is central to discussions of Ravel's creativity and individuality, and not only his sexuality, which is a subject of speculation.
Who was Ravel?
Music was Maurice Ravel's life, it was his passion, and he never cheapened it by creating a less-than-perfect score. Few of Ravel's works cannot be fully understood from a musical point of view or require reference to external circumstances to explain them. Recently, however, efforts have been made to trace the progress of the disease that led to the composer’s death in 1937 at the age of 62.
French author Jean Echenault was so fascinated by the subject that he published a novel about it in 2006. His Ravel is reminiscent of his studies at Le Belvedere, Ravel’s home in Montfort-l’Amaury, but is so flawed in biographical and musicological details that it hardly qualifies as fact or fiction. Not reliable.
What is Ravel’s best work?
Of course, even if there are signs of spiritual decline in works such as “Bolero” and “Left Hand Piano Concerto in D Major,” these two pieces remain among the greatest orchestral works in the 20th century repertoire. , is also the most commonly chosen subject. Neurological case studies – we should not shy away from learning about them. But anyone who risks linking, say, a repetition of Boléro with frontotemporal dementia, should be reasonably certain of that fact.
Though not forced, the calmly planned repetitive pattern of the bolero is actually an inspired solution to an occupational problem. After finding enough time to orchestrate a selection of Albéniz’s piano pieces for a Spanish-themed ballet score, Ravel discovered that the arrangement rights were reserved to his Spanish colleague Enrique Albos. I did. He panicked at first, but then came up with the idea of creating a score that would be completed faster than the orchestration exercises.
Bolero: “Hypnotic but calculating”
Once he had invented the appropriate Spanish-tinged melodic material, he quickly set to work. “Don’t you think there’s something nagging about this song?” he asked his friend, playing the piano with one finger. “I would like to repeat it several times without adding any development, and gradually build it up with the best orchestration.”
The bolero is not only hypnotic, but also has a calculated structure. If Ravel had ever shown compulsive repetitive behavior in everyday life, and he had not yet written three works (two piano concertos and a song by Don Quichotte) that do not betray such a thing. If so, there might be something to the bolero theory as dementia. . In fact, it’s as absurd as diagnosing today’s apparently even more obsessive minimalist composers with dementia.
How many piano concertos did Ravel write?
As for the “Left-Hand Piano Concerto,” it’s easy to dismiss the strangely persistent old theory that one side of the composer’s brain wasn’t working. Ravel composed this piece specifically for the left hand because it was commissioned by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I.
Some commentators claim to have found something sinister about this. Even if a piano concerto is written primarily for the bass part of a solo instrument, it will always produce a dark colored score, not just for the piano part. As the piece begins, with the bass notes of cello and bass, and a double bassoon solo, Ravel introduces the orchestra as, in a sense, also left-handed.
This is a performance of Yuja Wang’s Concerto in D major.
Indeed, Ravel is recorded as having expressed the opinion that “the music of a concerto should be light and brilliant, and should not aim for profound or dramatic effects.” But at about the same time he was working on the “light and wonderful” G major Piano Concerto (one of the greatest piano concertos of all time), and the professional in him knew he had to create something different. .
As he said, the G Major Concerto may be “more Ravel-like,” but the D Major Concerto is better than what pianists got from spiritually intact composers like Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, and Britten. It also proved to be a far greater contribution to Wittgenstein’s left-hand repertoire. .
Was Ravel gay?
There has been much speculation about Ravel’s personal life and sexuality. In fact, no evidence has been found to support a romantic or sexual relationship. Biographers and musicologists have variously speculated whether Ravel was homosexual, asexual, or simply not motivated by an intimate relationship with another person.
One of Lovell’s biographers, Irby Orenstein, suggests that Lovell was so focused on his work that he was unable or unwilling to develop close personal relationships. Masu. Another biographer, Benjamin Ivry, takes the view that Ravel may have been homosexual, based on his relationships, friendships, and associations with other artists. What is certainly true is that the composer admired and collaborated with various important figures of the Parisian avant-garde, including the poet Colette and the artists of the legendary Ballets Russes.
But ultimately, little is known about Ravel’s personal or spiritual life. His music is eloquent enough on its own without extraneous commentary.
What did Ravel do in World War I?
Of course, Ravel suffered mental and physical trauma severe enough to affect both his personality and his work. Perhaps we will never know what happened in his youth to convince him that, as he told pianist Marguerite Long, “love never exceeds licentiousness.” Dew.
On the other hand, we know about the danger, disease, and poverty he experienced as a soldier at Verdun in World War I. Couperin’s Tomb and Valse – the latter begins like a left-hand concerto in the darkest of darkness. The depth of the orchestra and the ending as harrowing as Bolero – the traces of that experience remain.
inconsolable sadness
Another misfortune during the war was the death of his mother in 1917, which left him with inconsolable grief. For Maurice, the conflict between his duty to be with his mother and his duty to take part in the defense of the fatherland in 1914, reflected in the piano trio, was perhaps the most intense psychological crisis of his life. Children and Children, which he began writing after her death, may be a confession of guilt and love.
But to see it that way is a kind of betrayal. Ravel devoted his life to creating music that excludes the self. He was no self-revealing Schumann or Janacek. He will deny his own inclinations, just as he did when he suppressed his natural “purity” to create the erotic atmosphere of Daphnis and Chloe.
He would have been horrified to think that signs of dementia were invading his work. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Or, as a music-savvy neurologist recently said of the G major piano concerto, “If it’s the product of a diseased brain, then there must be more of it in the world.”
Gerald Lerner
