Composer
Maurice Ravel
A meticulous orchestrator, often grouped with Debussy but far more precisely structured.
Maurice Ravel is closely associated with Impressionism and often mentioned in the same breath as Debussy, but his music tends to be far more precisely constructed - where Debussy favored harmonic haze, Ravel is famous for extraordinary structural clarity and, above all, for his command of orchestration, the craft of assigning musical material to specific instruments for maximum color and effect.
Life in brief
Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, in the Basque country of southwestern France, to a Basque mother and a Swiss engineer father; Spanish and Basque color runs through his music all his life. The family moved to Paris when he was a baby, and he studied at the Conservatoire.
He tried for the prestigious Prix de Rome five times without winning, and in 1905, by then already a recognized composer, he was eliminated in the preliminary round - a decision so widely seen as unjust that the scandal helped push the Conservatoire's director to resign. In the years before the First World War he wrote the ballet Daphnis et Chloé for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. During the war he served as a military truck driver, and afterward wrote Le Tombeau de Couperin, each movement dedicated to a friend killed in the fighting.
In 1928 he made a triumphant tour of the United States, where he fell for jazz and met George Gershwin. In his last years a neurological illness gradually robbed him of the ability to write music down, though his mind was still full of it. He died in Paris in 1937 after brain surgery. Private and dapper, he never married; Stravinsky reportedly called him "the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers."
Music and style
Ravel's music is precise, elegant, and brilliantly colored. He loved clear forms, dance rhythms (the waltz, the Spanish habanera, old French court dances), and a touch of irony. He often wrote first for piano and orchestrated later, and his orchestrations are studied as models of the craft: every instrument is placed exactly where it will sound best.
Boléro is his most famous demonstration of that skill: two contrasting melodies alternate over and over across roughly fifteen minutes, with almost nothing changing except which instruments are playing them and how loud the whole orchestra has grown, building steadily from a solitary flute and snare drum to the full ensemble. It's one of the starkest illustrations in the entire orchestral repertoire of orchestration alone driving a piece's impact - Ravel himself, a little ruefully, described it as orchestral texture "without music."
Key works
- Boléro (1928) - one tune, one rhythm, one enormous crescendo.
- Pavane pour une infante défunte ("Pavane for a Dead Princess") - originally for piano and later orchestrated, showing his gentler, more nostalgic side.
- Daphnis et Chloé (1912) - a ballet score whose "Daybreak" is one of the most glorious sunrises in music.
- Piano Concerto in G (1931) - sparkling and jazz-tinged, with a heartbreakingly simple slow movement.
- Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1930) - written for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who lost his right arm in the war.
- Orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1922) - the version almost everyone knows.
- La valse (1920) - a Viennese waltz that gradually spins out of control.
Legacy
Ravel wrote across a wide range of genres - piano music, chamber music, ballet, opera - but it's his ear for orchestral color that most defines his reputation today. Film composers and orchestrators still study his scores, and Boléro has become one of the most performed orchestral works of the 20th century.
Where to start listening: Boléro is impossible to miss once you know what to listen for; the Pavane is a quieter, more introspective alternative. Then try the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in G.