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Maurice Ravel
1875 – 1937
Ravel was one of the most complex of all composers. He was anti-Wagnerian, Impressionist and Neoclassicist all rolled into one.
Life and Music
- His Basque roots gave him a special affinity with Spanish colours and rhythms.
- His acute ability to re-engage sensations and memories from childhood resulted in music of playful innocence and unalloyed purity.
- Ravel's fascination with all things logical and mechanical was also a profound influence on the way he organised his own musical thinking.
- Although Ravel was by no means a prodigy in the Mendelssohn mould, by the time he was 14 he had won a place at the Paris Conservatoire.
- It was not until 1895 that his first work hit the printing presses: the indelible Menuet antique.
- Two years later he began studying with Gabriel Faure, yet although the latter was a most sympathetic teacher, Ravel's unorthodox style soon put him on a collision course with the notoriously conservative Director, Théodore Dubois.
- In 1905, the year Ravel was working on his remarkable Miroirs, he was disqualified from the preliminary round of the competition with the curt warning: "M Ravel may look upon us as old fogeys if he pleases, but he will not with impunity make fools out of us."
- There was a public outcry, dubbed the 'Ravel Affair' by the newspapers, and Dubois was forced to resign with Fauré duly taking his place. The resulting publicity did Ravel no harm at all and he soon found himself moving in fashionable circles, widely recognised as the natural successor to Debussy as France's most venerated young composer.
- Ravel's new celebrity status appears to have revitalised his creative energies, resulting in the most intensely productive period of his life. Over the next ten years he produced a steady stream of masterpieces that included Gaspard de la nuit and the Rapsodie espagnole.
- Just as Ravel was at the height of his powers and popularity, the outbreak of the First World War caused him such deep distress that a number of important projects never came to fruition.
- Following a successful American tour in 1928 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, Ravel emerged in a final blaze of glory with the two piano concertos and his final completed work, Don Quichotte a Dulcinee.
- The remainder of his life was plagued by a malfunction of the brain caused by Pick's disease which increasingly affected his speech and motoric impulses.
- After a final, unsuccessful operation in 1937, Maurice Ravel, France's most celebrated contemporary composer, passed away.
Did you know?
Ravel is probably most famous for his Boléro, which was used by skaters Torvill and Dean as the piece of music for their gold-medal winning ice dance at the Olympic Games in 1984.
