The Unknown Ravel
Roger Nichols delves into the pages of a comprehensive new guide to discover some rare facts and intriguing insights into the often secretive French composer
Roger Nichols shares rare insights into the life and correspondence of the secretive French composer
Though one of the most important and popular composers of the last 150 years, this doesn’t mean Ravel is always easy to place, either as a man or as an artist. The man was at once shy and reclusive, though fully aware of his own gifts, and willing to be aggressive in his music’s defence. Some people found him cold and offhand; others profoundly treasured his friendship. Possibly for us, the most intriguing mystery concerns his sexuality. All we really know is that he was not gay and that he never married – he realised not only that marriage would entail an unacceptable intrusion on his working habits, but that those habits might prove equally unacceptable to a wife. As for the mysteries of his music, Ravel the artist, while giving interviewers intelligent answers about it, preferred to let it speak for itself.
Much is already known about his life, his friendships and the composition of some of his works of genius: Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Jeux d’eau, Gaspard de la nuit, Daphnis et Chloé, La valse, Boléro. But there is always room for more detail, and this has now been provided in abundance by Manuel Cornejo in his 2018 book Maurice Ravel: L’intégrale. In its 1,771 pages (in French) Cornejo gives us a more complete collection of Ravel’s correspondence than has ever been available, as well as new articles and interviews with those who knew the composer. From this cornucopia, here are five vignettes which cast a fascinating light on both Ravel the man and Ravel the musician…
Ravel the Teacher
Like most composers, Ravel did not only compose. In 1906, the 31 year-old was giving lessons to private pupils in a Paris flat. One of them, the American Frances Wilson-huard, commented in 1969 that obviously ‘teaching bored him, but one has to live!’ The lessons – in harmony, counterpoint and composition, to a group of four – took place ‘every Sunday morning in Thérèse Chaigneau’s drawing room’, as at the time Ravel was living with his parents. She remembers him (always the dandy) as ‘very small, sporting a long black beard and a purple
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Ravel claimed that the Russian composer Glinka created the beginning of Spain’s musical renaissance
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