The many masks of Ravel

Our image of Maurice Ravel is still partly obscured by mystery and intangibility, and by some lingering misunderstandings. This situation arises as a result of various factors: Ravel's own actions, his elusive blend of French, Basque and Spanish traits and the quirks of reception across the years (for instance, the emphasis on his undoubted skills of orchestration has to some extent down-played the actual substance of much of his orchestral music). Even in his lifetime, an interviewer for De Telegraaf exclaimed, literally and figuratively: ‘It is not easy to find the hiding place of Maurice Ravel.’

How then might we think about Ravel? He himself sometimes adopted the metaphor of masks, so popular in contemporary dramatic and balletic productions. Castigating the self-conscious academicism of Georges Witkowski, a pupil of d'Indy, he declared: ‘How far this repulsive intellectual logic is from sensibility! Nevertheless, behind this dour mask, one discerns a profound, vibrant musician at every moment.’ Among Ravel's early biographers, Vladimir Jankélévitch, especially, developed this image of masks in relation to the composer's compositional aesthetic: ‘Ravel is friend to trompe-l'œil, deceptions, merry-go-round horses and booby-traps; Ravel is masked.’

So what is the nature of the masks, or distorting mirrors, behind which we might seek Ravel? (In posing this question, we're aware of the impossibility of the quest: in peeling off one mask there is invariably another beneath; furthermore, the masks are so bound up with Ravel's identity that, at one level, they are part of him. No mask: no Ravel.)

Berlioz was no ordinary symphonist. In the course of his career he wrote four works that he himself categorized in that genre, but not one of these is traditional in either form or style. By far the most famous of the group is the Symphonie fantastique, a work whose curious autobiographical program and unusual orchestrational effects have kept it alive in the orchestral repertory ever since its première in 1830. The other three symphonies of Berlioz are less well known, but equally non-traditional. Harold en Italie makes use of a concerto-like solo viola to help depict recollections of Italy. Roméo et Juliette draws heavily on the use of solo and choral singing to reinterpret Shakespeare's drama. And the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale is clearly a work for concert band. In many ways these works are not symphonies at all – at least not when measured against the familiar German repertory of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Berlioz's symphonies frustrate and defy attempts at traditional generic classification by presenting listeners with an exceptional fusion of elements drawn from both opera and symphony. The result is something completely new – an unorthodox hybrid genre for which he coined the term “dramatic symphony.”

Symphonie fantastique (1830)

Berlioz's first symphony appeared only three years after the death of Beethoven – a fact that bears keeping in mind as one assesses the remarkable innovations in this work. What shocked and intrigued listeners at the première was the extremely detailed program that Berlioz attached to the work and distributed to the audience in the form of a printed leaflet. That a symphony could be inspired by a “poetic idea” was something Berlioz surely learned from Beethoven, whose Third and Fifth Symphonies he had heard in performance only two years earlier. But that a symphony could be so unreservedly autobiographical and self-confessional, in the manner of contemporary French and English literature (where novels of this type had been popular for some years), was fresh to music at that [53] time.

French musical exoticism in the nineteenth century

On 8 December 1844 Félicien David's symphonic ode Le Désert took Paris by storm. Although David had actually travelled to the Far East as a member of the Saint-Simonian expedition to find a female Messiah in 1833, it was his imaginative translation of his exotic musical souvenirs into an acceptable Westernised format which led to their success. In fact, had he incorporated melodic augmented seconds, rediscovered modes and Glinka's new whole-tone scale within his pot-pourri of melodrama, pedal-points, arabesques, conventional chromatic harmony and bombastic choruses in praise of Allah, all the clichés of nineteenth-century musical exoticism would have been present, leaving successors such as Bizet and Delibes with only the prospect of subtle refinement of his ideas. Even the perceptive Berlioz was bowled over by David's achievement, and surprisingly more by the musical qualities of Le Désert than by its then-novel pseudo-orientalism. ‘A great composer has just appeared; a masterpiece has been unveiled’, he enthusiastically exclaimed. ‘David writes like a master: his movements are carved out, developed, and transformed with as much tact as science and taste, and he is a great harmonist. His melody is always distinguished, and he orchestrates extraordinarily well.’ The same accolade would have been far more justifiable had it appeared after the first performance of Ravel's Shéhérazade songs in May 1904, and if he never passed judgement on David's ‘masterpiece’ and had little respect for Berlioz as a composer, Ravel knew better than anyone that authenticity was far less important than imagination and technique when it came to a successful exotic representation.

Ravel's popular, if somewhat misleading, identification as an ‘impressionist’ composer depends on three categories of his achievement: orchestral music, piano music and vocal music, including operas as well as songs. His chamber music is of another stripe, revealing another all-important side of his musical persona: it is classically based absolute music, without ties to texts, literary references or descriptive titles. In this regard as in so many others, he is like Debussy, but, while Debussy's chamber music frames his career at beginning and end, Ravel's chamber music follows his career throughout, providing significant landmarks at different stages.

Ravel's chamber music, like his piano music, inclines to formal variety, yet always as concisely and precisely as the classical masters whom he so much admired. One never finds the formal adventurousness and only seldom the textural experimentation that characterise the musical ‘impressionism’ of his most radical piano works like Gaspard de la nuit. Yet the essential wholeness of Ravel's personal style is never in doubt; the highly individual melodic idiom and the integrity of his harmonic language are unified between the chamber music and all the other works, in continuous evolution from the beginning of his maturity to the end of his career.

Many celebrated authors, Rousseau and Chateaubriand among them, have written memoirs that became the crowning achievements of their literary careers. But such achievements have been rare among musicians, and it is surely Berlioz who gives us the first great example. Grétry preceded him, of course, by beginning to bring out memoirs (while he was still living) in 1791. Berlioz probably knew this book – an amalgamation of biographical matters and technical details – but his musical and literary skills were frankly superior to Grétry's. One of Berlioz's heroes, Carl Maria von Weber, also wrote a somewhat autobiographical novel, but Berlioz, though probably aware of its existence, could not have read the whole text, which was published only in German. So Berlioz was a pioneer, and a rather unique one at that, for most composers, when they felt the need to express something, usually expressed it in music. How is it that Berlioz did so in writing?

For this to have come about, it was surely necessary that Berlioz not be one of those children who, from earliest childhood, are destined for music either by family tradition or by recognition of extraordinary skill, and who are thus encouraged first and foremost to develop their musical talents at the expense of all others – something that, for such individuals, usually leads to underdeveloped literary skills and ineptitude in confronting the written word. Berlioz – son of a doctor, recipient of a bachelor's degree, medical student, and, from the moment of his arrival in Paris, companion to young people literally starved for literature – was in no way devoted solely to the cult of music.

We may well wonder which of his works Berlioz – and his contemporaries – understood as “religious.” In the eighteenth century, the phrase “religious music” would have been widely understood as indicating the repertories used in worship services by the Catholic Church and by the various Protestant denominations. It was certainly not music for the concert hall or opera house, since, as everyone knew, these were places of secular entertainment, where at times immodest socializing and even licentious behavior could easily be found. Furthermore, these secular venues were in those years developing the apparatus of the modern public concert scene: the musicians' pay derived from the take at the box office, and thus the audience's curiosity and approval needed to be repeatedly won through newspaper advertising and wall-sized placards, journalists' reviews, and word of mouth. Only one genre – the oratorio – crossed over between these sharply distinct cultural spheres; in the hands of Handel, Haydn, and, in France, Mondonville and Rigel, it brought Bible stories into the hurly-burly of public concert life.

But the oratorio prefigured larger changes within the musical life of the West. The increasing cultural importance of the concert hall and opera house in the decades around 1800 allowed composers and audiences to take more seriously the kinds of music that could be made there; and this frank, if by no means consistent, incursion of seriousness made those places as natural a home as the church for the occasional exploration of religious and other spiritual (philosophical, ideological) thought and imagery.

Ravel and authority: the Conservatoire and the Prix de Rome

Ravel informed Cipa Godebski in Spring 1914: ‘I am transcribing a Forlane by Couperin. I will see about getting it danced at the Vatican by Mistinguett and Colette Willy in drag.’ This excerpt reveals Ravel's decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the establishment which was so marked during his early career and which he directs here towards the Church and hostile critics. Klingsor noted that the young Ravel was ‘given to mocking but [was] secretly set in his purposes’, while Cortot recalled ‘a deliberately sarcastic, argumentative and aloof young man, who used to read Mallarmé and visit Erik Satie’. Both these descriptions touch on crucial aspects of Ravel's character: a conflict between ‘individual consciousness’ and conformity. Ravel's sense of direction was already well developed from his days at the Conservatoire. He had willingly succumbed to the influence of Poe and Mallarmé, and his musical tastes included Chabrier and the anti-establishment figure, Satie. Much to the frustration of some of his teachers, Ravel was only teachable on his own terms. Reports from Bériot, his piano teacher, indicate an untameable temperament which is ‘not always with full control’ and ‘needs to be held in check’, and even the sympathetic Fauré damns with faint praise, stating that he was, in time, ‘less exclusively attracted than before by pursuit of the excessive’.

Ravel, that master of tender irony, has left in his wake two supreme ironies: of being viewed as archetypally French, and of his musical forms often being viewed as conventional. French though he was, his temperament, humour, expression and technique are all distinct from French habits and stand out, by their incisiveness and bursts of raw sensuality, even from his contemporaries Fauré and Debussy. Besides the technical daring inherited from his Swiss-born engineer-inventor father, the foreign element that most strongly colours Ravel's character and music is the Basque-Spanish heritage of his mother. In a letter of 1911 to Joaquín Turina, written from Spain, Ravel signs himself off, ‘A thousand friendly greetings from your (or my) motherland’, and his letters from the Basque region or to relatives there are peppered with Basque phrases as well as Basque forms of place names.

Viñes and the early piano music

Ravel's closest and most influential childhood friendship, from the age of thirteen, was with Ricardo Viñes. A month older than Ravel, Viñes arrived from Barcelona with his mother in 1887 to study in Bériot's Conservatoire class (which Ravel joined in 1889); apparently it was the two mothers who first met, in 1888, with Mme Ravel delighted to discover a fellow-Spanish-speaker. In their teenage years, Viñes introduced Ravel to the prose poems of Gaspard de la nuit and then, in 1907, introduced him to Manuel de Falla (just before Ravel repaid Viñes handsomely for that introduction to Gaspard); above all, it was Viñes whose brilliant and subtle piano playing first brought a whole series of piano masterworks to the public.

When Berlioz's Grand Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes appeared at the end of 1843, the work was already known to the readers of the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, for it had been published there as “De l'instrumentation” – sixteen feuilletons that appeared from 21 November 1841 to 17 July 1842. In this series, whose “heroes” are the instruments of the orchestra, Berlioz considers that aspect of musical composition in which he had proven to be particularly inventive. The works that he had already written – three symphonies, the Requiem, Benvenuto Cellini – demonstrated the essence of what he brought to the art of instrumentation. In fact his interest in the subject seems to have been born with his very first musical impressions, if we are to believe his early letters, his first articles, and especially his Mémoires.

Beyond his own taste and intuition, what kind of guidance could be found, in the eighteen-twenties, by a young composer who was fascinated by the alchemy of the orchestra? “My two masters [Lesueur and Reicha] taught me absolutely nothing about instrumentation,” writes Berlioz in chapter 13 of the Mémoires:

Ravel and the critics

roger nichols

Like most composers, Ravel had his staunch defenders and his virulent opponents as well as one or two critics (in many ways the most interesting for us) who tried to take each of his works on its merits.

Of his defenders, the eldest was Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars, 1859–1931) who, despite his love ofWagner, had also been one of the few early champions of Debussy’s L’Après-midi. If he was caustic over the early overture Shéhérazade, this was no more than Ravel came to be himself, and his willingness to praise the ‘orchestre de rêve’ of Daphnis may have been due in part to his pleasure in seeing fulfilled his prophecy of 1899 that Ravel might ‘become something if not someone in about ten years, if he works hard’.

Ravel’s remaining supporters were men nearer his own age. Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) had been a fellow student at the Conservatoire and, as a brilliant teacher of musical technique, naturally recognised Ravel’s abilities in this area and regarded him as one of France’s leading composers. Of L’Heure espagnole, Koechlin claimed that it was the work of a Japanese sculptor in ivory ‘with the impeccable sureness of his accurate line and his ironic, intimate view of objects’.4 Another friend, M.-D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944), one of the ‘Apaches’ and the dedicatee of ‘Alborada del gracioso’, became the chief music critic of Comoedia illustré. Even though he liked to think of himself as unusually objective, his unwavering support of Ravel prompted Debussy to dub him a ‘valet de chambre’

It has been well said that the pervasive elegance in the music of Berlioz is a reflection of his cultivated mind. Genius, it is true, can create masterpieces without the aid of intellect and general culture. But their presence does no harm; they develop that second-level simplicity which, when allied to conciseness, yields elegance. In every art one can distinguish those masters who have been men of thought from those in whom native gift has reigned alone. Turner and Daumier in painting, Schubert and Brahms in music come to mind as projecting the artistic power in its first simplicity. That characteristic implies no limitation of sensibility or technique.

The other category – take for examples Delacroix and Schumann – is the one to which Berlioz belongs. His uncommon upbringing ensured that he would have the self-awareness and detachment of the highly literate. It proved a source of imaginative richness in his music and of spiritual distress in his life.

As he makes a point of telling us in his Mémoires, Berlioz was reared in the Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church. His mother was a believer, his father an eighteenth-century “encyclopedist”; that is to say a man of advanced ideas, for whom religion had a much attenuated meaning. As a physician he rejoiced in the progress of science and passed on to his son his own broad curiosity about it. Scientific method implied an a priori rejection of the supernatural and a steady skepticism.

In the reminiscences of Berlioz which he addressed to Eduard Hanslick in the Revue et Gazette musicale ten years after the composer's death, Stephen Heller recalled his friend's response to a performance of Beethoven's E-Minor Quartet (the second “Rasumovsky”), which they attended together in the eighteen-sixties:

To that anecdote we may add Berlioz's account of a rehearsal of a late Beethoven quartet, perhaps Op. 127, which was in the repertory of the Bohrer Quartet when they played in Paris in February and March 1830:

Titles, cycles, collections

On the face of it, Berlioz is a composer for whom genre was a secondary issue. Working within a genre creates definite expectations, but Berlioz – unlike Monpou and Niedermeyer in their romances, Haydn and even Beethoven in their symphonies, Auber and Meyerbeer in their operas – seems to have preferred not to operate in this way. Berlioz's overtures, among his most popular and readily understood works, do adhere to expected outlines, but his symphonies evoke the theatre, his operas pay only nominal tribute to established categories, and his liturgical compositions (the Messe solennelle, Requiem, and Te Deum) present generically conventional surfaces which prove, on closer examination, to be deceptive.

Berlioz implicitly acknowledged a difficulty by providing generic subtitles for otherwise purely descriptive titles. At the time of their composition, the Épisode de la vie d'un artiste, Harold en Italie, Roméo et Juliette, La Damnation de Faust, and L'Enfance du Christ were the sole occupants of their generic categories – respectively Fantastic Symphony (Symphonie fantastique en cinq parties), Symphony in Four Movements with a Solo Viola (Symphonie en quatre parties avec un alto principal), Dramatic Symphony (Symphonie dramatique), Dramatic Legend (Légende dramatique), and Sacred Trilogy (Trilogie sacrée). Despite such specificity, however, Berlioz could not always avoid misunderstanding. If the subtitle for Harold en Italie tells us that in this symphony there is more than a trace of the concerto, terms such as “dramatic legend” convey little about genre: some contemporaries mistakenly alluded to the Damnation as a symphony, for example, but Berlioz would not accept the designation “Symphonic legend.”

“Impact” – the forceful contact or collision of one body against another – is a particularly appropriate word to describe Hector Berlioz's effect upon his contemporaries, whether the composers of his own or of the next generation, the public, or colleagues in the press. Many in France acknowledged the genius of Berlioz the musician, but in his own time true appreciation of his achievement tended to reside mainly with a few ardent admirers, for Berlioz cultivated a style that was so distinctive, subjective, and exploratory that general audiences did not embrace the bulk of his works.

In 1870, only a year after his death, a youthful Adolphe Jullien stressed the personal character of Berlioz's music by characterizing the man and his art as one and the same: “he acts, he thinks, he lives in his works. Each page of his music is made in his own image.” Younger composers, intent on building their careers, tended to avoid the risky course of adopting wholesale his innovations and individual style. In 1871 Georges Bizet expressed both the deep admiration and the wariness symptomatic of his generation's attitude toward Berlioz as a model: