Ravel’s exquisite escapism
Months ago, near the start of lockdown, I was listening to Ravel’s Mother Goose. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of the moment, that feeling of bewildered disconnection from the world, but when the music reached the final Apothéose, I found myself in the grip of uncontrollably intense emotion. Ravel’s music was an aching absolute of beauty, a place untrammelled by the pandemic or politics or any of the other maddening temporalities with which the real world was riven. Instead, the slow sarabande of Ravel’s music blossomed into that Jardin féerique, a place which was, for those magical three-and-a-half minutes, a realm more vivid than the brute facts of the latest case numbers or the cancellation of musical life as we knew it.
More vivid – but still exquisitely painful. How is it that Ravel’s majorkey beauteousness reduces us to weeping incapacity? Colette, writer and phenomenon of early 20th-century French culture, was the librettist for Ravel’s opera, L’enfant et les sortilèges.
She remembers hearing the score for the first time, sitting next to Ravel. ‘I heard the little drum accompanying the shepherd’s procession… The moonlight in the garden, the flight of the dragonflies and bats… “Isn’t it fun?,” Ravel would say. But I could feel a knot of tears tightening in my throat.’
What is it that made Colette so emotional, encountering these images of diorama-like playfulness, naivety and innocence in his 45-minute opera? There’s nothing that overtly tears at the
Ravel allows us into a magic garden of imagination that we never want to leave
heart strings in this music, nothing that sears or shocks or forces itself on your soul like, say, Richard Strauss, Mahler or Elgar.
Apart, that is, from its self-contained beauty. Music like the deceptively childlike but seriously grown-up universe of L’enfant et les sortilèges is a Ravelian conjuring trick, in which the problems of the real world are held at bay for as long as the music lasts. Bounded by the gorgeous spell of Ravel’s music, we are allowed into a magic garden of imagination that we never want to leave.
Colette’s tears – and all of our tears when we hear Ravel’s music – come from the appalling realisation that the world outside L’enfant et les sortilèges and Mother Goose, and everything else that he wrote, is full of homework and scolding parents, for the child in the opera, and governments, disease and conflict, for the rest of us. But deliciously and thankfully, none of that is there in Ravel’s music.
That’s why Ravel feels more and more essential to me in these weird and unsettling months. In his music, we escape into a world of magical musical manufacture so powerful that it seems to transcends worldly time, an enchanted garden in which it is always beautiful, in which it is always – Ravel. No wonder we want to stay there; no wonder our throats tighten with tears when we listen to his music.