The artist’s self-image is often defined by opposition. That opposition can take the form of censorship, or perhaps a rival master. Art enthusiasts may think of the rivalries between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo, or Delacroix and Ingres. In the musical world of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, there were no fiercer adversaries than the French composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. It was perhaps a case of likes repelling. They were both small, dapper men who thrived on solitude. Both adored cats. This is not to mention the eerie similarities in their compositions, which critics often pointed out. Allegations of plagiarism were frequent; the critic Pierre Lalo, himself one of Ravel’s most ardent detractors, wrote: “M. Ravel has been reproached (more than he should) for resembling M. Debussy, and now it’s M. Debussy who starts to resemble M. Ravel.”
In her new biography of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), Emily Kilpatrick brings a legend of French music out of his older contemporary’s shadow, shedding light on the many influences that helped to mold him as an artist. Whether or not Ravel was guilty of plagiarism, he certainly saw no shame in borrowing a phrase here and there and tinkering with it to make something new. This adaptive tendency was no doubt inherited from his father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, a civil engineer and inventor who was an early pioneer of the automobile. The older Ravel belonged to that quintessentially nineteenth-century generation of optimists and innovators, men who believed in the boundless potential of science and machine. It was the age of Jules Verne, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, when newspaper headlines blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Kilpatrick observes that the young Maurice received from his father a cool and technically minded approach to composition; the composer himself remarked that the relentless, pounding beat of his late masterpiece Boléro (1928)was inspired by the steam engines his father operated.
It was to his mother, however, that Ravel owed his musical tendencies. Marie Ravel, née Delouart, had roots in the Basque country and spent her childhood in Spain. Considering himself Basque first and foremost, Ravel held his mother’s heritage in high esteem, and, as he grew older, his interest in Spanish and Basque culture developed into a mystical obsession. For all of his father’s influence on its mechanistic repetitiveness, Boléro is also in large part a tribute to his mother, and his four-part Rapsodie espagnole (1908) is wholly so.
Ravel grew up during the period of humiliation following his country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). In the ensuing years, Kilpatrick observes, questions of identity and nationality were omnipresent in French culture; Ravel’s personal obsession with these topics was perhaps amplified by his mixed heritage. Politics aside, Ravel’s tastes were eclectic and set him at odds with the academics of the Paris Conservatory, where he was educated. Following the lead of the acerbic Lalo, critics categorically dismissed his early works, such as Miroirs (1905) and Histoires naturelles (1906). It was then only natural for Ravel to fall in with his generation’s artistic radicals and provocateurs, yet the youthful composer was too much of an individualist to be taken in by them fully. He was a freethinker, an atheist, and a critic of the mannered elites who had spurned his music. He also had a keen sense of personal honor and decency: on finding out that his friend the socialist politician Paul Painlevé had hypocritically denied being a Freemason, he broke off their correspondence, stating, “I couldn’t care less whether he is a mason or not; it’s that he lied to me.” When the First World War broke out, he volunteered to serve as a truck driver close to the front, despite being almost forty years old.
Although he was a member of collegial artistic groups such as Les Apaches, formed in 1903, Ravel was an intensely private person, letting very few into his intimate circle of friends. The composer’s flamboyant attire and reluctance to marry have led to speculation about his sexuality, which Kilpatrick discusses but does not rule definitively on. What is certain is that Ravel was well-liked by those who knew him, despite his emotional aloofness and many eccentricities. Kilpatrick remarks that the memoirs of his friends were “flooded not just with respect and admiration but with profound tenderness and humor—although his vagaries could provoke amused bewilderment or unalloyed exasperation, too.” Ravel’s ability to make and keep strong connections with an intimate circle distinguishes him from his great counterpart Debussy. Ravel and Debussy had kept a brief but friendly correspondence early in the former’s career, and the members of Les Apaches frequently discussed and played Debussy’s music. Debussy, however, was deserted by most of his composer friends, including Ravel, when his scandalous affair with Emma Bardac drove his first wife, Lilly, to attempt suicide in 1904. Even after he had cut off ties, Ravel continued to admire Debussy’s art, arranging pieces such as his Sarabande, for orchestra.
Among his contemporaries, Ravel had no deeper admirer than the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who collaborated with him in the arrangement of Mussorgsky’s uncompleted opera Khovanshchina in 1913. Both composers were intrigued by an emerging school of musical thought headed by Schoenberg in Vienna that championed free atonality. Stravinsky employed harsh dissonances to great effect in his controversial ballet The Rite of Spring (1913), but Ravel did not abandon traditional tonality until his mature works, such as Chansons madécasses (Madagascan Songs, 1926).
Although Ravel was a maverick in the musical world, his music was always replete with a certain nostalgia for an idealized past. Ma mère l’Oye (1910), a collection of children’s pieces, is the most obvious example of Ravel’s musical naïveté; Daphnis et Chloé (1912), with its jarring scenes of Bacchic revelry, also exists within the realm of fable. Kilpatrick reports that in his conception of Daphnis, Ravel went against the choreographer Michel Fokine’s vision of historical verisimilitude, seeking out instead the Greece of his childhood dreams. Kilpatrick shows the extent to which Ravel, despite the occasional use of creative license, drew from history and art to inform his work; through his unique style of music, he excelled at suggesting a particular image in the mind’s eye. In the end, Kilpatrick’s engrossing study unravels the paradox of a man who was both patriot and provocateur, a rational materialist with a penchant for fantasy, standing not in Debussy’s Impressionistic shadow but firmly apart, building his own precisely crafted and utterly magical worlds.
