Joseph-Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937)
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, France on March 7, 1875. His mother, Marie Delouart, was Basque, while his father, Joseph Ravel, was a Swiss inventor and industrialist. Among his father's inventions was an early internal-combustion engine.
The family moved to Paris when Maurice was three months old. At age seven, he began piano lessons and soon after began composing. His parents encouraged his musical pursuits and sent him to the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of 14, first as a preparatory student and eventually as a piano major. During his schooling in Paris, Ravel joined with a number of innovative young artists who referred to themselves as the "Apaches" (hooligans) because of their wild abandon.
He studied music at the Conservatoire under Gabriel Fauré for fourteen years. During his years at the Conservatoire, Ravel tried numerous times to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, but to no avail. After a scandal involving his loss of the prize in 1905, Ravel left the Conservatoire.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Ravel (together with Debussy) created a style of music partly inspired by the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet. As a result, France became one of the most exciting musical countries in the world.
Ravel worked with Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes, who staged Ma Mère l'Oye and Daphnis et Chloé. The latter was commissioned by Diaghilev with the lead danced by Vaslav Nijinsky.
Then, at about the same time that Debussy died in 1918, Ravel's own styles changed quite dramatically. His music became generally sparer in tone and more abstract in character, much closer to the neo-classical styles of Stravinsky and other composers of the period. Like them, Ravel used early jazz harmonies and rhythms to color his musical works. Throughout his changing styles, however, Ravel remained a master of orchestral and piano writing, with a harmonic style, or musical language, instantly recognizable as his own.
Stravinsky once described Ravel as "the Swiss watchmaker" of music, because of Ravel's painstaking attention to detail. Ravel had even developed his own method of composing. He perfected small, self-contained "blocks" of music, then assembled them into larger, more complex structures.
In 1921, the French government finally decided to recognize Ravel's achievements by awarding him the much-prized Légion d'Honneur. Unfortunately, the award was announced publicly before Ravel himself had been informed of the decision and he promptly declined the award. Instead he retired to the French countryside where he continued to write music. During this time, Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write La Valse (1920), originally named Wien (Vienna). Ravel was so hurt by the fact that Diaghilev never actually used the composition that when the two men met again in 1925, Ravel refused to shake Diaghilev's hand.
Although Ravel traveled abroad in his youth, it was not until he was in his fifties that he ventured across the Atlantic. In 1928, Ravel began a piano tour in America. His four-month tour of the U.S. was an enormous success: his numerous concerts and piano recitals received an enthusiastic reception, and he was introduced to celebrities from the worlds of art and show business. He also traveled as far west as San Francisco, where he had the opportunity to conduct a concert of his orchestral music.
In 1931, Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate. He also met George Gershwin, and the two became friends. Ravel's admiration of American jazz led him to include some jazz elements in a few of his later compositions, especially the piano concertos.
Ravel began to show signs of neurological problems in 1927, and over the next few years he suffered from minor muscle problems, aphasia, and dementia. In 1932 after a car crash, his symptoms began to worsen and affect his work. He had begun work on music for a film version of Don Quixote (1933) featuring the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin and directed by G. W. Pabst, but he was unable to complete it as he eventually lost all ability to communicate either through speech, reading, or writing. Ravel consented to brain surgery to correct the aphasia but on December 28, 1937, he died in Paris after the brain surgery was unsuccessful. He is buried in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of northwest Paris.
