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Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French composer and pianist of the impressionistic period, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. His piano, chamber-music and orchestral works have become staples of the concert repertoire.
Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses tonal color and variety of sound and instrumentation very effectively.
To the general public, Ravel is probably best known for his orchestral work, Boléro, which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music."
According to SACEM, Ravel's estate earns more royalties than that of any other French musician.
Ravel was born in Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, part of the French Basque region. His mother, Marie Delouart, was Basque, while his father, Joseph Ravel, was a Swiss inventor and industrialist. Some of the father's inventions were quite important, including an early internal-combustion engine and a notorious circus machine, the "Whirlwind of Death," an automotive loop-the-loop that was quite a hit in the early 1900s. After the family moved to Paris, Ravel's younger brother Edouard was born.
At age seven, young Maurice began piano lessons and, beginning five or six years later, began composing. His parents encouraged his musical pursuits and sent him to the Conservatoire de Paris, first as a preparatory student and eventually as a piano major. During his schooling in Paris, Ravel joined with a number of innovative young artists who referred to themselves as the "Apaches" (hooligans) because of their wild abandon. The group was well known for drunken revelries.
He studied music at the Conservatoire under Gabriel Fauré for a remarkable fourteen years. During his years at the Conservatoire, Ravel tried numerous times to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, but to no avail. After a scandal involving his loss of the prize in 1905 (to Victor Gallois — Ravel had been considered the favorite to win), Ravel left the Conservatoire. The incident —named the "Ravel Affair" by the Parisian press — also led to the resignation of the Conservatoire's director, Théodore Dubois.
While many critics claim Ravel was influenced by composer Claude Debussy, Ravel himself claimed he was much more influenced by Mozart and Couperin, whose compositions are much more structured and classical in form. Ravel and Debussy were, however, clearly the defining composers of the impressionist movement. Ravel was also highly influenced by music from around the world, including American jazz, Asian music, and traditional folk songs from across Europe. Ravel had left the Roman Catholic Church and was a self-declared atheist, although he was also a spiritualist like many skeptics of his generation. He disliked the overtly religious themes of other composers, and instead preferred to look to classical mythology for inspiration. In 1907, after the premiere of Histoires Naturelles, a controversy erupted. Pierre Lalo, music critic of Le Temps, criticised the work as a plagiarism of Debussy. However, criticism was quickly silenced after the Rhapsodie espagnole was received with such high critical acclaim.
In 1932 Ravel sustained an accidental blow to the head while riding in a taxi. The injury was considered minor, but soon thereafter he began to complain of aphasia-like symptoms similar to Pick's disease. He had begun work on music for a film version of Don Quixote (1933) featuring the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin and directed by G. W. Pabst. When Ravel became unable to compose, since he could not write down the musical ideas he heard in his mind, Pabst hired Jacques Ibert.
In late 1937 Ravel consented to brain surgery. One hemisphere of his brain was re-inflated with serous fluid. He awoke from the surgery, called for his brother Edouard, lapsed into a coma, and died shortly after. He is buried in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of northwest Paris.
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