Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano

Description

The piano was Maurice Ravel’s primary instrument, and he left behind a body of works that has led him to be labeled one of the most important composers for piano and of 20th-century France. Born in 1875 in Ciboure, a coastal town close to the Spanish border, he would eventually spend most of his life living in or near Paris. Among friends, Ravel was well-known for his love of cats, his devotion to his friends (and especially to his mother), his engagement with his artistic milieu, and his sense of humor. Ravel passed away after an unsuccessful brain surgery in 1937, but his stature was firmly established by the time he completed his last solo piano work in 1917. This recording celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth with music written during the most productive period of his life.

Gaspard de la nuit
Written in 1908, Gaspard de la nuit is one of Ravel’s most romantic and virtuosic piano works, in which he draws on common themes across his compositions: water, bells, and the supernatural. Ravel selected three stories from Aloysius Bertrand’s 1842 volume of gothic supernatural poems of the same name to set to music. “Ondine” is a water nymph who falls in love with a human, only to be heartbroken when he chooses to leave her for another human. Ravel creates a watery texture on the piano through flowing thirty-second-note figures. Ondine’s voice comes through in the melody in the midst of this texture, as well as in one magical moment when the flowing water ceases for a few measures to reveal her voice alone. In Bertrand’s story, Ondine laughs and gracefully splashes as she leaves her human lover, and we hear this in undulating water motifs that bring the first movement to a close. The next movement, “Le Gibet,” depicts a gallows scene dominated by the city’s bells, to which Ravel gives the most prominent and continuous role: they sound consistently throughout, while the modal chords and melodies that surround the bells provide a haunting and grim soundscape. The final movement, “Scarbo,” sonifies the scurrilous activities of a goblin of the same name. Scarbo is quick and shapeshifting; he comes at night and taunts and terrifies whoever encounters him. In this movement, Ravel provides the listener with a sense of the goblin’s unpredictable movements through not only extensive rising and falling sixteenth-note figures, but also through irregular sixteenth-note pick-up figures and frequent tempo changes.

Menuet in C-sharp Minor & Sonatine
In 1897, Ravel was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire to study composition with André Gedalge and Gabriel Fauré. Between 1897 and 1905, Ravel honed his skills as a composer, drawing comparisons to Debussy, although he developed his own unique style while simultaneously surrounding himself with supporters who appreciated his music for its charm, wittiness, and independence from many musical norms. Ravel’s self-determination and unconventional nature were evident in his attempts between 1900 and 1905 to win the Prix de Rome. Ravel failed to win the prize in each of his attempts, in large part because he refused to follow the standard compositional rules required of competitors. Ravel completed his Menuet in C-sharp minor in 1904 and his Sonatine in 1905, both around the time of his final failed attempts to win this competition. The Sonatine, in particular, was completed, published, and premiered in the wake of what was then termed “l’Affaire Ravel,” a series of debates in the Parisian press concerning Ravel’s Prix de Rome attempts. The work itself is tightly constructed based on a cyclical design, and the pianistic writing, while consciously restrained, is effective and efficient.

Miroirs
Ravel composed the piano suite Miroirs in 1904 and 1905. Each piece reveals a distinctive soundscape. “Alborado del gracioso” depicts a Spanish landscape, a popular topic for French composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Musicologist Roger Nichols has pointed out the influence of Chabrier’s España on Ravel and evocatively written that Ravel “turns the keyboard instrument into a huge guitar.” “Un barque sur l’océan,” “Noctuelles,” and “Oiseaux tristes” all depict natural landscapes: the whip and whirl of watery waves, the fluttering wings of moths, and birdcalls in a nighttime forest, respectively. And the final movement, “La vallée des cloches,” features the ringing of bells in a French countryside village. Taken together, Ravel described these movements as “a collection of piano pieces which mark a rather considerable change in my harmonic evolution” that “disconcerted musicians who until then had been thoroughly accustomed to my style.” Indeed, many of these pieces involve harmonic adventurousness, repetition, and ostinato, although “Oiseaux tristes,” which Ravel considered the “most characteristic” of the set, has a “free structure” that was necessary to capture the variety of birdsongs in the forest.

Pavane pour un princesse défunte
Ravel wrote Pavane pour une princesse défunte in the summer of 1898. He was a frequent attendee of the salons, or social and artistic gatherings, of the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, otherwise known as Winnaretta Singer – an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune – who commissioned him to write the piece. Ravel was inspired by the Symbolist movement, the poets of which were often more interested in the sounds of words than their meanings, and he reported that he chose the piece’s title for the way that it sounded in French. Ravel’s close friend Viñes premiered the composition on April 5, 1902 alongside another of Ravel’s piano compositions, Jeux d’eau. Ravel considered the Pavane of little importance compared to Jeux d’eau, and was therefore disappointed when critics preferred his Pavane, describing it as “elegant and charming,” while they considered Jeux d’eau “cacophonic and overly complicated.” The piece’s success was a source of consternation for Ravel, as was the question that he consistently received about it: who was this dead princess?

Jeux d’eau
Completed in November 1901, this piece’s title might be in reference to Liszt’s Jeux d’eau à la villa d’Este, which seems especially probable given that when a performer asked Ravel how they should play the piece, he said, “like Liszt, of course.” The epigraph that Ravel included for the piece comes from Henri de Régnier’s “Fête d’eau”: “the River god laughing at the water that tickles him.” The fast fingerwork demanded by the piece was likely designed to be played on an Érard piano—Ravel’s favorite piano and one on which it was easier to play quickly. The pianistic writing for this piece was extremely innovative, something that Ravel realized and wanted to be given credit for. After Pierre Lalo gave Debussy credit for the kind of virtuosic and fluid piano writing that is featured in Jeux d’eau, Ravel wrote to him in 1906 to set the record straight: “my Jeux d’eau appeared at the beginning of 1902 and at that time Debussy had written only the three pieces for the piano (Pour le piano). I need hardly say to you that it is a work for which I have a fervent admiration, but from the pianistic standpoint it says nothing really new.”

Sérénade grotesque
Ravel composed Sérénade grotesque in 1893 when he was not yet twenty years old and a student at the Conservatoire. Despite being one of the earliest compositions, it encapsulates many of the musical features—ostinato, sevenths, modal rather than tonal composition—as well as the charm, grace, and surprise that characterize so much of Ravel’s music. Ravel tells us that he composed this piece during the time when he was a student of Émile Pessard, who described Ravel as “a rather good harmonist” who was “very gifted” but also “somewhat heedless.” Thus, Ravel’s rebellious attitude was apparent in these early years and emerges in some of the harmonic adventurousness of this early piece.

Menuet antique
In 1897 Ravel began to find success as a composer outside of the Conservatoire’s walls with one of his first compositions, the Menuet antique. It became his first published composition and was premiered in the same year by Viñes, who would premiere many of Debussy’s and Ravel’s compositions up until the First World War. The Menuet antique is one of numerous minuets that Ravel composed in his lifetime, and his fondness for the piece appears in his decision to orchestrate it in 1929 for a 1930 premiere with the Concerts Lamoureux—one of Paris’s famous orchestral concert series of the time.

Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn
Ravel’s continued interest in older musical styles and compositional strategies continued into the 1910s. In 1909, Ravel was one of a handful of French composers commissioned by the editor of the music magazine Revue Musicale S.I.M. to write pieces celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death of 18th-century Viennese composer Franz Joseph Haydn. The resulting piece, Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, features, like all the commissioned composers’ works, Haydn’s name in musical notes, determined by the editor to be spelled BADDG. Ravel met this challenge with aplomb, writing a piece in which this pattern appears not only in a straightforward manner, but also upside down and backwards.

Valses nobles et sentimentales
Valses nobles et sentimentales, completed and premiered in 1911, takes the listener through a series of eight waltzes that Ravel said were “in imitation of Schubert”—an early nineteenth-century composer who had published two sets of waltzes in 1823, one entitled Valses nobles and the other Valses sentimentales. Ravel included a quotation in the score from a novel written by his friend Henri de Régnier, indicating that one way of understanding these pieces was through “the delicious and always new pleasure of a useless occupation.” The waltzes in Valses nobles et sentimentales vary in terms of melody, tempo, and mood, although each exhibits the graceful three-quarter time characteristic of this dance and a fair amount of dissonance. The piece was premiered by Louis Aubert in May 1911 at a concert hosted by a new musical organization—the Société Musicale Indépendante, which had been formed by a cohort of young composers, including Ravel, who were tired of being left out of the concerts hosted by the Société national de musique. The concert in which Valses nobles was premiered demonstrates some of their light-hearted and inventive programming choices. The pieces performed were anonymous, and audience members were given slips of paper on which to guess the author of each. According to Ravel, Valses nobles et sentimentales was performed “amid protestations and boos” and the audience correctly guessed that he was the author only “by a slight majority.” Although to many familiar with Ravel today this piece sounds very much like Ravel, we should keep in mind that the piece Ravel wrote just prior to this one—Gaspard de la nuit—was really quite different in style, approach, harmony, and narrative. In Ravel’s words, “The virtuosity which forms the basis of Gaspard de la nuit gives way to a markedly clearer kind of writing [in Valses nobles et sentimentales], which crystallizes the harmony and sharpens the profile of the music.”

Prélude
The Prélude is a standalone composition written in 1913 for the sight-reading portion of the annual concours, or competitions, for female piano students at the Paris Conservatoire. Ravel delivered a piece that is deceptively simple on the surface yet presented a distinct challenge for the young women who played it. Jeanne Leleu, who had been one of the two children to premiere Ravel’s Ma Mère L’Oye, or Mother Goose Suite, for piano four-hands, won the competition and Ravel presented her with the honor of dedicating this short and charming piece to her.

A la manière…de Borodin
A la manière…de Chabrier
Alfredo Casella asked his friend Ravel to write two pieces “in the manner of” composers of Ravel’s choice for his second volume of musical tributes. Ravel’s selections reflect his longstanding fondness for two nineteenth-century composers: Alexander Borodin and Emmanuel Chabrier. The theme for Borodin’s Second Symphony, for example, had been a favorite piece of Ravel’s social group from his young adulthood, so much so that a theme from this symphony became their “calling card” that they whistled to each other while walking through Paris together. But for his À la manière de…. Borodin, Ravel chose to reference the composer’s Petite suite and his Second String Quartet. In both pieces, Ravel brings forth characteristic aspects of these composers’ musical styles: for Borodin, “chromatic harmonies over ostinato pedals,” as Roger Nichols has pointed out, and for Chabrier, arpeggiated ornamental figures and melodies in octaves. Both short compositions were premiered by Casella at a Société musical indépendante concert on December 10, 1913.

Le Tombeau de Couperin
Ravel wrote Le Tombeau de Couperin between 1914 and 1917, over the course of several years filled with strife—not only his war service as a truck driver during World War I, but also the death of his mother. He dedicated each of the six movements of the piano suite to men who had died during the war. The premiere of the piece by Ravel’s friend Marguerite Long, who lost her husband in the first weeks of World War I, further suggests this reading since Ravel waited more than a year until Long was ready to premiere it. Thinking about the piece as a musical monument to mourning also makes sense given the piece’s title – tombeau not only means tomb in French but is also a musical genre that features music written to commemorate a musician’s death – and the funerary urn on the score’s title page drawn by Ravel. Each of the movements is named after movements of a Baroque suite. Ravel extends this neoclassicism to the music, much of which references 18th-century genres and styles with modernist dressing in the form of 7ths, 9ths, and 11ths. The “Forlane” movement is a case in point: Ravel quotes a “Forlane” from Couperin’s Concerts Royaux to which he adds dissonance and rhythmic alterations. Although Long’s premiere of the piece in 1919 was successful, some of Ravel’s contemporaries questioned the generally happy affect of the pieces, dedicated as they were to dead soldiers. However, Long defended his choices, saying that, in the piece “the grace of movement and the love of life possessed by these young men reign supreme.”
Jillian Rogers © 2025