The closure of Ravel’s house would be a disaster for music lovers

Even if my head tells me it’s rubbish, my heart clings to the notion of genius loci: the ancient belief that buildings and other places have presiding ‘spirits’, or at least an atmosphere that reflects what their stones have witnessed over the years. A couple of years ago I was privileged to be part of a choir singing in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. I’m not usually prone to hallucinations, but I could practically see the terrifying figure of Johann Sebastian Bach standing in front of us, shaking his bewigged head in horror at our intonation lapses. ‘What will survive of us is love,’ Philip Larkin wrote in one of his greatest poems. But in the case of musicians, what will survive is echoes – albeit silent ones, resonating in the minds of those performing the same music in the same venues, perhaps hundreds of years hence.

In this respect, the houses where composers were born, or where they lived and worked, are particularly interesting. When you visit the Red House in Aldeburgh and see the study in which Britten composed – staring across the windswept reed marshes to the sullen North Sea – you suddenly understand the astringent eerieness that permeates so much of his music. The Mendelssohn family mansion in Leipzig, by contrast, evokes civilised but utterly bourgeois values, solid and refined. Brinkwells, the thatched Sussex cottage where Elgar wrote his most autumnal works, is different again. You can well imagine the bipolar composer sensing the ghosts of dead friends haunting the surrounding trees. My favourite composer’s house, however, is Puccini’s birthplace in Lucca. There you really can experience ghosts, because in one of the rooms there is a continuous film-loop of ancient Puccini opera performances in which you can see, hear and feel the charisma of Freni and Callas, Björling and Gobbi reborn every day.

Ravel also has a beautiful museum dedicated to his memory. It is called Le Belvédère, and is perched just outside the little town of Montfort-l’amaury, south-west of Paris. He bought the boatshaped house in 1921, seeking a rural escape from Paris but not wanting to be too far from the action, and lived there till his death in 1937. Exquisite and eccentric, it contains mechanical toys, quirky furnishings, a delightfully stylised garden and an extraordinary sense of a miniature world only partly disclosing to outsiders the inner passions governing it.

In other words, it’s the perfect visual complement to the pieces Ravel wrote there, which included the opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, the two piano concertos, and Boléro, his most famous (though possibly worst) composition.

‘Le Belvédère! Bien grand nom pour une si petite maison où les objets à l’échelle semblaient jouets d’enfants,’ wrote the author Hélène Jourdan-morhange in 1939, and that feeling of a perfectly preserved child’s world strikes visitors still.

Or at least it did. But in February, according to an undisputed report in Le Figaro, the local council suddenly sacked the museum’s curator, a formidable dame who had worked there for 30 years and was a walking encyclopaedia of Ravel-lore. The council then closed the museum indefinitely, citing water damage. Nobody believes this is the whole story, especially coming after a series of disturbing incidents.

Last year, the council apparently prevented both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and French TV from filming there, and in January conductor Charles Dutoit and pianist Martha Argerich were unceremonially ejected from the museum by the local gendarmerie, apparently because a council official reported that the premises were being burgled.

Gosh, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Inspector Clouseau confronted La Argerich. The whole thing sounds like a Feydeau farce, but there’s actually nothing funny about this dishonouring of one of France’s greatest composers. The royalties from Boléro alone should have been sufficient to sustain, repair and staff Le Belvédère for centuries, but Ravel’s heirs squabbled over his millions for decades before channelling it into offshore tax havens. As a result (and in contrast to the Britten-pears Foundation, which supports a veritable industry of Britten performance and research as well as the Red House), not a penny of Ravel’s royalties goes into preserving his memory and his house.

The French government needs to step in. Imagine the outcry if Monet’s garden at Giverny were suddenly closed to the public.

Yet Ravel’s place in French music is as great as Monet’s in French painting. Admittedly, the French have always prized the visual arts over the aural, yet they have spent billions on building gigantic new music venues in Paris. Impressive though the Philharmonie, the Pompidou Centre and the Opéra Bastille are, they can’t be said to exude much genius loci, whereas tiny La Belvédère oozes it from every nook and cranny. Far be it for a mere Englishman to say this, but French national pride surely demands that La Belvédère be repaired and reopened immediately, with its curator restored to her former glory.

Imagine the outcry if Monet’s garden at Giverny were suddenly closed to the public