Maurice Ravel

 

Young Maurice Ravel had to be bribed six sous an hour to practice the piano. This corruption paid off; Ravel grew up to become one of the leading composers of his generation, one of the two main figures (with Claude Debussy) in the musical Impressionist movement, and the producer of more than a dozen staples of the piano, chamber, and orchestral repertories. Ravel enrolled at the Paris Conservatory in 1889 at age 14 and remained there until 1905, studying traditional form and technique. Initially Ravel was a renegade, but by the time he turned 40, he would refashion himself as an eighteenth century composer employing twentieth century harmony. Despite his professional success, he nursed certain personal and public grudges for years. When the French government awarded him the Légion d'Honneur in 1919, Ravel rejected the decoration, still bitter that the state jurors had denied him the Prix de Rome three times in his conservatory days. Aside from ongoing success and occasional mild artistic scandal, Ravel led an uneventful life. Although certainly not friendless, he never married and lived as a semi-recluse at his forest retreat at Montfort-L'Amaury, near Paris. Sadly, Ravel ended up far more isolated than he could have wished. During the last five years of his life he suffered from aphasia, which made it impossible for him to compose, speak, or sign his name. He died at the end of 1937, at age 62, following unsuccessful surgery to relieve an obstructed vessel supplying blood to his brain. Ravel's earliest surviving compositions were influenced by the music of CÃsar Franck and Gabriel FaurÃ, the most innovative composers at hand. Jeux d'eau was the first work to crystallize Ravel's style, full of pianistic innovations also harking back to the virtuosic music of Franz Liszt. Despite carrying the Lisztian tradition into the twentieth century, Ravel is best known for his works in the Impressionist style, including the lush ballet Daphnis et ChloÃ, the sinister La Valse, and the innocently childlike and bittersweet Ma mere l'oye. Ravel also dallied with Spanish, Gypsy, and Basque rhythms and melodies. The most famous examples of this sun-splashed style are the brilliantly scored Rhapsodie espagnole and the infamous Boléro. In the 1920s Ravel also developed an interest in jazz and blues. This became most obvious in his Sonata for Violin and Cello, Sonata for Violin and Piano, and the two jazz-influenced piano concertos of 1931.