MAURICE RAVEL

A Basque Baby With Parisian Plans

I was born on 7 March 1875 in Ciboure, in the Basque region of France, to a Basque mother and a Swiss-born father who was an engineer and inventor. My family moved to Paris about three months later, so I always say I was a Parisian who happened to arrive by way of the Basque coast. I entered the Paris Conservatoire in November 1889, and in 1895 I was expelled, which is not what parents hope for when they pay for music lessons. I came back in 1897 and studied composition with Gabriel Fauré, who understood me far better than my earlier teachers had.

How to Become Famous by Losing

In 1899 I wrote Pavane pour une infante défunte for piano, a slow and graceful piece that people still love, and I orchestrated it in 1910. In 1905 I was eliminated in the first round of the Prix de Rome, a famous competition for young composers. The press made such a fuss that it became a public scandal called "l'affaire Ravel", and I got more attention from losing than most people get from winning. By 1912 the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev had commissioned my ballet Daphnis et Chloé, so I think the scandal did me no harm.

A Man of Paris, Then of the Countryside

Paris was my city, and it was where the concert halls, the dancers and the people who commissioned music all were. In May 1921 I moved to a house called Le Belvédère in Montfort-l'Amaury, west of Paris, and I lived there for the rest of my life. In 1922 I orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which was a bit like being handed a pencil sketch and asked to paint it in full color. In 1928 I toured North America and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, which was quite a lot of travelling and honor for someone who liked his quiet house.

The Piece That Wouldn't Stop Repeating

The work you are most likely to know is Bolero, which the dancer Ida Rubinstein commissioned for her ballet company. It began as a plan to orchestrate pieces from Albéniz's Iberia, but it turned into something quite different, and it was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 22 November 1928. It lasts about fifteen minutes, and in that time one simple melody comes back again and again while more and more instruments join in and the volume slowly grows. I described it myself as "orchestral tissue without music", and I was only half joking, because the whole piece is really one long, patient build-up.

Lorries, Bachelorhood and Missing Symphonies

In March 1915 I joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver, which is not a job people expect from a composer. I never married, and my music was always the main companion in my life. I also wrote no symphonies and no church music, which are the two things many composers feel they must do sooner or later. I preferred to follow my own path, and I think the music is better for it.

When the Words Slipped Away

In October 1932 I was hit on the head in a taxi accident, and afterwards I began to have trouble with speech. Nobody knows exactly what illness I had, and doctors have suggested several different ones since. In 1937 I had brain surgery performed by the neurosurgeon Clovis Vincent. I died in Paris on 28 December 1937, at the age of 62.

What Stayed Behind

I wrote the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. I dedicated my Piano Concerto in G to Marguerite Long, so both of my piano concertos came out of friendships with real performers. Pianists, orchestras and dancers still play my music all over the world. And Bolero, the piece I called tissue without music, has turned out to be one of the pieces people know best.

A Gift for Your Ears

What I want to give you is the pleasure of listening closely, because I built my music with great care, down to the smallest detail. Listen to how each instrument gets its moment, and how a single color can change the mood of a whole passage. You don't need to know anything about classical music for this, because curiosity is enough. Start with Bolero, settle into your chair, and let the music slowly build up around you.