Ravel at 150

In celebration of Maurice Ravel’s 150th anniversary in 2025, we explore the early influences that helped shape his iconic sound. From his Basque heritage and formative compositions to the profound impact of World War I on his music, this journey offers a deeper understanding of the experiences that defined the genius behind Boléro and beyond.

As British duo Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean fell to the ice in a dramatic finale, the crowds cheered, flags of all nationalities waved and everyone—including the 24 million Britons and others watching the televised broadcast of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia—knew that they just witnessed a pivotal moment in the history of figure skating. Scores from the judges confirmed it: they attained a perfect score of twelve 6.0 scores (and six 5.9s) from the for a single performance including six 6.0s for artistic merit—a feat that has since remained unbeaten.

Their self-choreographed routine to an abridged version of Maurice Ravel’s iconic Boléro had made the music synonymous with figure-skating, even going down as one of the top 10 moments in British sporting history almost 30 years later. Of the music and their choreography, Dean remarked, ‘at the time, [Boléro] was definitely the pinnacle. And a lot of people still hold that to be true of it as an artistic piece, a passionate and emotional piece.’

An introvert and connoisseur

Perched on the edge of Monfort-l’Amaury a small town 40km south-west of Paris is a quaint house in the shape of a narrowboat. Christened Le Belvédère, this was the house that French composer Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) had personally designed and lived in for the last sixteen years of his life. The rooms open onto a long narrow corridor, the walls are covered with dark patterned wallpaper, and on the walls hang framed art pieces, Asian prints and black stencils. In the living room, black and white tiles line the floor like a chessboard. 

A curious mix of trinkets—mechanical toys, a figurine of a Chinese man sticking out his tongue, coffee cups with holes and other eclectic oddities, many of which seem to be from China, Japan and Indonesia—are displayed on the tables and behind the glass-door cabinets. The walls of the piano room are painted a deep blue; on the 1893 brown Erard piano are two ornately-carved lamps placed with a symmetry so obsessive it looks almost deliberately measured.

The house overlooks a charming garden, styled with the Japanese aesthetic of restraint, a quiet beauty, and shakkei or borrowed scenery, where if one views the garden from the balcony, the view extends onward to the lush French valley behind it.

Spend enough time observing the house and you get a glimpse into the mind and soul of Ravel: an introvert with a connoisseur’s eye for beauty and detail, a conscientious person who arranges his belongings with the strictest precision, and a personality that is a mix of playful and serious, with a feeling for pathos.

The interior design and decorations of Le Belvédère are paralleled in his music: a love for foreign lands and music, fascination with all things Oriental and of the far East, and attention to the most minute of details.

The third piece from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite from tales collected by Charles Perralt (1628–1703), the tale tells of a beautiful princess cursed to be ugly by a wicked witch. She wanders around with her only companion, a green serpent, and is shipwrecked on a country inhabited by tiny porcelain people called ‘pagodes’. The music makes use of the pentatonic scale and oriental harmonies found in Chinese music.

A musical childhood

Russian composer and contemporary Igor Stravinsky famously labelled Ravel as ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’,¹  and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Ravel’s great great grand-father was a maître horloger (master clockmaker) hailing from near Geneva, and his Swiss-French father was an engineer/inventor who, at one point, attended the Geneva Conservatoire and won a first prize for piano, being in Ravel’s words, ‘far better trained in this art [music] than most amateurs’.²

Maurice Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure a few miles from the Spanish border. Even though his family moved to Paris while he was still a baby, Ravel came by his fascination with Spain naturally, for his mother was Basque. In his childhood years, Ravel’s mother would sing Spanish folk songs to him, and these were a later inspiration for his work. Spanish composer Manuel de Falla praised the authenticity of Spanishness in his music, 

One of Ravel’s favourite rhythms to use in his Spanish-tinged compositions was the habanera rhythm, which, along with sophisticated harmony and sensuality, pervades the piano part in this piece. 

Ravel’s mother Marie Delouart was an illegitimate child of a fish-seller mother on the quay of the Nivelle River, herself an illegitimate child. Labelled kaskarotes, this group of fisherwomen were descended from gypsies who reached Basque country in the 17th century or earlier. These women ‘had a reputation for agility and were remarkable dancers of the fandango; […] were courageous in looking after their children and credited with exceptional physical powers.’³

Ravel’s relationship with his mother meant a lot more to him than he cared to admit: besides instilling in him a lifelong preoccupation with Spanish rhythms and music, she might also have been instrumental in shaping his fashion sense. Friends remarked that Ravel was always exquisitely dressed; this seems to have stemmed from his childhood where photos show the young Ravel in long hair and fine clothing.

Ravel’s father inspired in his son a love for things precise and mechanical. He would let Ravel tinker with his inventions and also take his young sons on tours of factories, where they admired the machinery: this carried over into Ravel’s impeccable music.

Ravel’s earliest piano lessons were from Henry Ghys, a friend of composer Emmanuel Charbrier, who remarked that the 7-year-old Ravel ‘appears intelligent’.⁴  At the age of 13, he began lessons in harmony and counterpoint by Charles-René, a pupil of Delibes. His childhood compositions were described by Charles-René as ‘works of real interest, already indicating his aspirations towards a style of original and highly condensed purity’.⁵

Seeing the world in a fair

In the years leading up to 1889, all of France was getting ready to open their doors to the world for the Exposition Universelle. Paris had hosted the World’s Fair before, but this one was to rival all others because it commemorated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, as well as showcased the best in arts, science and technology. Pulling out all the stops, France spent two years constructing the Eiffel Tower (the tallest structure in the world until it was overtaken by the Empire State Building in 1931) specially for the event.

The event was held from May to end-October 1889, and included a huge variety of foreign music from America, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Morocco, and Egypt among many others. It was during those months that the 14-year-old Ravel made the regular three-kilometre walk from his home on Rue Pigalle to spend time in the specially-erected pavilions on the Champ de Mars.

Among the most popular exhibits was a kampung of Java, its entrance marked by two pagoda-like structures. Tents sheltered a village where its Javanese inhabitants lived and carried on their daily activities, such as cooking, weaving, making batik and carving bamboo utensils. The heart of that kampung was an open-air pavilion where performances of traditional music and dance occurred daily.

Elsewhere on the Exposition grounds, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (of Flight of the Bumblebee fame) conducted orchestra concerts featuring the recent hits of his fellow Russian composers Glinka, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky, and The Mighty Five.

Like Ravel, many French composers did the same, expanding their knowledge of ‘world music’ and each absorbing the music in their own way. For Erik Satie, music of the Romanian gypsies surface in his Gnossiennes; for Saint-Saëns, his Egyptian piano concerto shows the influence of Spanish, Egyptian and gamelan music; and Debussy, whose Pagodes was the most direct result of the hours he famously spent watching bedayas dance and soaking in the music from the Javanese kampung.

From the Exposition Universelle, exoticism gained a foothold in Western European music and slowly undermined the traditional ‘Classical music’ vocabulary.⁶  As a result of all he had absorbed, Ravel’s music over the next decade and a half was imbued with the resonance of bells, exotic modes and a harmonic language that was colourful, picturesque, and pushed the boundaries further than his professors at the Paris Conservatoire would have liked. 

The symbolist poets and the ‘hooligans’

In the same year, in 1889, Ravel was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, in the composition and piano class. The general views on music were antiquated and steeped in the Romantic traditions of that time; although Ravel grew as an artist there, he did not particularly fancy or fit into the institution’s conservative ways.

Meanwhile, he was fascinated with the poetry of Poe, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, poets known for their symbolist poetry based on freestyle associations and impressions rather than logic or narrative. In exploring and developing a new harmonic language, he was one day rummaging through the bins of music scores at the shop of Durand and Lerolle when he came across some of Satie’s published scores. Highly impressed, he introduced Satie’s music to all his friends at the Conservatoire (to his professors’ disdain), and asked his father to take him to meet with Satie. The meeting took place at the Café Nouvelle Athènes, where Satie’s remarkable personality, wit and eccentricities left Ravel with a deep impression and lifelong admiration of him. 

Another life-changing experience was to take place five years later, at the premiere of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Upon hearing the music, Ravel was reportedly reduced to tears, saying that he only then ‘understood what music is’. Ravel left the conservatory in 1895 after failing to win a competitive medal for three consecutive years (as was the school’s requirement). His rebellious streak, along with his weak academics and different learning style, led to his departure. 

Ravel met Debussy at around that time, the latter was twelve years his senior. Although they were never close, Debussy was always supportive of Ravel’s compositions. In 1900, Ravel and his friends formed a group and called themselves Les Apaches, or the hooligans. These were young men who thought of themselves as artistic outcasts, defenders of the artistic ideals and artists whom they considered were important, no matter what the public opinion was. The members faithfully attended contemporary music performances, were ardent fans of Debussy, Rameau and Chopin; Chinese art; the poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine; the art of Cézanne and Van Gogh; and met regularly on Saturday evenings for animated discussions on the state of the arts.

They had their own secret theme song (the opening of Borodin’s Second Symphony), each member had a nickname (Ravel’s was Rara), and there was even a phantom character invented by Ravel named ‘Gomez di Riquet’ in case anyone needed a pretext to leave a dull evening engagement. It was at these gatherings that Ravel first performed some of his music including Jeux d’eau and the Sonatine, and met like-minded men who would go on to be future collaborators and lifelong friends. 

Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau is evocative and fluid, inspired by Liszt’s depictions of fountains in his Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este. Vlado Perlemuter, a pianist who was there at the premiere, commented that the work ‘opens up new horizons in piano technique’, but most of the Paris Conservatoire’s faculty dismissed it—including Camille Saint-Saëns, who called it ‘total cacophony’.

Failed attempts at the Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was one of the most prestigious awards that an artist could win: instituted in 1663 under the direction of the king, France was to send their most promising artists, architects and composers to spend a period of time in Rome learning Classical art from the masters there, returning home to France to be key figures in arts and culture.

Taking part in the Prix de Rome was no mean feat: structured in two parts, participants had to prepare for a series of difficult tests with strict rules. The first round, concours d'essai, was a six-day exam in a cubicle that competitors were not allowed to leave or communicate with anyone. They had to compose a fugue for four mixed voices, as well as write a composition for choir and orchestra. Only those who successfully passed were allowed to go on to the concours définitif, the main competition that lasted 30-days long.

For concours définitif, participants had to write a lyrical work for two or three solo voices and orchestra, generally given the term ‘cantata’. The text to be set to music was also the subject of an annual poetry competition, where the themes were chosen year on year were a variation of mythology, history, legends or biblical stories.

Ravel had tried to compete for the prize every year between 1900 and 1903, but his attempts at winning the grand prize had been unsuccessful. By 1905, at the age of 30 and already having established a name for himself in the Parisian music scene, Ravel decided that he would try one last time. Therefore, it came as a rude shock when he was eliminated from the preliminary round. Many protested and challenged the result, including the public, the press and other composers, even those who had criticised his music. The then-director of Paris Conservatoire Theodore Dubois, known for his conservative views in music, reasoned that Ravel was kicked out because had won the second prize in the 1901 edition, and another member of the jury Charles Lenepveu was accused of blatant favouritism when only his students were selected (although he insisted it was pure coincidence) in the final round. This blew up into a national scandal, resulting in the early retirement of Dubois from the conservatory, replaced by Gabriel Fauré.

For a change of mood and to get away from the fiasco, Ravel’s friends Alfred and Misia Edwards invited him to join them on board their yacht for an extended vacation in Belgium, Holland and Germany. This was Ravel’s first trip overseas, where Ravel wrote that ‘During all of this time, I didn’t compose two measures, but I was storing up a host of impressions, and I expect this winter to be extraordinarily productive. I have never been so happy to be alive, and I firmly believe that joy is far more fertile than suffering.’⁷

The episode also marked a change in Ravel’s compositional outlook and life. He had had enough of writing dull music to fit certain academic styles, and passive-aggressive battles with juries. In a way, he was liberated from these, and was now free to compose however he liked. 

The next decade was filled with creative pursuits and rising fame. Ravel had accepted an exclusive contract with publisher Durand that came with an annuity, and this association was to be a close one that would last his lifetime. His music also began to be performed beyond Paris, then throughout western Europe, the USA, and even North Africa. Working with collaborators such as impresario Anton Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes (for which he created Daphnis et Chloé in 1912) also established his reputation as one of France’s leading composers.

The ballet Daphnis et Chloé, an ancient Greek pastoral realised by French writer Jacques Amyot (1513–93) was set to music by Ravel in what he called a ‘symphonie chorégraphique’ for orchestra and wordless chorus.

War and loss

The ‘suite of piano pieces’ he mentioned was Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite based on French Baroque dances in homage to 18th-century composer François Couperin. When Germany declared war on France in 1914, the 39-year-old Ravel was all of 161cm tall, and weighed 48kg. He was interested in fighting for his country in whatever capacity he was allowed to, secretly harbouring a wish that his light weight would increase his chances of being a pilot. However, the authorities remained unseduced by his physical charms; Ravel’s attempts to enlist were continually rejected as he was deemed physically unfit, his contribution was limited to caring for wounded soldiers in St-Jean-de-Luz.

Ravel’s wish came true three days after his 40th birthday in March 1915, when he was deemed fit enough enlist. Stravinsky recounted, ‘He looked rather pathetic in his uniform; so small, he was two or three inches smaller than I am…He drove a truck or ambulance in the war, as you know, and I admired him for it, because at his age and with his name he could have had an easier place—or done nothing.’⁹

The work was mundane at first, Ravel worked on vehicle maintenance and could even return home in the evenings. In a letter to composer Vaughan Williams, Ravel remarked ‘I am extremely busy doing nothing very important.’¹⁰ This was to be the case until 14 March 1916, a year later, when he was sent with feelings of relief and apprehension to support the troops at Verdun, where the Germans had launched a heavy attack a few weeks prior.

As a soldier, Ravel was put in charge of petrol supplies, made to drive a truck and asked to contribute to a camp concert. Even while in the battlefield he retained his curiosity and found humour in the most dire of situations. Letters from this period give us a glimpse of life. Ravel constantly asks about his friends and reassures his mother that he was in no danger, but a letter to army officer Major A. Blondel in May 1916 reveals otherwise:

From June, a series of medical conditions (cardiovascular atrophy, followed by dysentery and then a hernia) led him to be discharged from his duties; he was sent back to Paris at the end of October to recuperate. Upon his return, he found his mother seriously ill.

She died less than three months later, on 5 January 1917, leaving Ravel shocked and distraught, ‘sunk in a dumb stupor which resisted all expressions of sympathy…and whom nothing could console.’¹² Friends say that his mother’s death was a wound that never fully healed, but if anything, he threw himself into work, relying on his friends, brother, and innate Basque determination to get through.

He returned to work on the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin in June 1917, and completed it by November. What began as a homage to the golden age of French music and its most representative composer ended up as a double homage: each of the six movements was dedicated to a friend who ‘had died in all too great numbers’ during the war.

Despite its title, the music is neither funerary nor tragic—Ravel reportedly remarked that ‘the dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence’. Reflective and light-hearted, the music was meant to evoke the love of life and the memory of these men whose lives were cut short. Particularly of note is the dedication of the last movement to Joseph de Marliave, a musicologist and husband of his piano teacher at the Conservatoire, Marguerite Long. Marliave, captain of an infantry regiment, was killed in 1914, less than a month after war broke out. Marguerite Long had stopped playing the piano after her husband’s death; it was at Ravel’s persuasion that she started playing again and premiered the suite in 1919.

That same year, Ravel orchestrated four out of the six movements for orchestra in his quintessential style, omitting the Fugue and Toccata from deeming them ‘too pianistic’, and closing with the exuberant Rigaudon. The orchestral version casts a spotlight on the wind section, using their timbres in a colourful manner that further brings out the characters in the music.

In the years after World War I, while France was trying to rebuild itself, it experienced a social and cultural revolution. Heavily influenced by American culture, jazz and ‘flapper’ culture made its way to the streets and clubs of Paris. Prominent artists and writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald made their way across the Atlantic to settle in Paris, joining the scores of European artists such as Picasso and Matisse who were already there.

Read the second part of Unravelling Ravel and discover how the vibrant energy of jazz played a pivotal role in shaping Ravel's music in his later years.

For a spectacular evening of Ravel’s masterpieces and Rachmaninoff’s powerful compositions, join Behzod Abduraimov and Hans Graf with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra on April 11 & 12, 2025 at the Esplanade Concert Hall.