In the first part of this two-part series, we explored the early musical influences and inspirations of Maurice Ravel and his music up till after the First World War. In this second part of the series, we find out more about his foray into the world of jazz and his last years as he was slowly robbed of life by a debilitating brain disease.

Hit by the jazz bug

In the post-World War One years, while jazz swept through the USA, some of it made its way across the Atlantic to Paris to great acclaim: racial prejudice was virtually non-existent, allowing black musicians a safe haven to play and compose music away from the injustices they felt at home. Their music was also given the respect as an art form that it was never accorded back in America. Meanwhile, Parisians were thrilled with this new form of music they were starting to hear in the small clubs in Montmartre.

The American singer Adelaide Hall and her English husband opened a jazz club in Paris; Josephine Baker went from the Plantation Club in Harlem to Paris; Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith arrived in Paris in 1924 and decided to stay too, opening the Chez Bricktop nightclub on 26 rue Pigalle two years later. Cole Porter set up a residence in Paris and frequented it, often trying out many of his songs there with British-born, half-American half-black music-hall singer Mabel Mercer.

Ravel was not immune to the charms of this new art form, letting himself be happily influenced by rhythms and harmonies, the most obvious of which manifested in the second movement of his Second Violin Sonata (1927), titled Blues.

In the music we hear flattened thirds and sevenths from jazz scales, syncopations, slides in the violin part that makes the music sound perfect for a lazy afternoon, with the piano plonking away in the manner of a honky-tonk. These idioms were the impressions of jazz that Ravel got from Paris; when the chance came for him to travel to America, he enthusiastically accepted, finally able to explore the land where jazz originated.

A European in North America

In 1928, Ravel embarked on a four-month tour of 25 cities in the USA and Canada. It was a packed itinerary, where he performed at the piano, conducted, as well as gave interviews, and was always enthusiastically received by the audience and the orchestras. Wanting to experience the music of America, he attended a performance of George Gershwin’s musical Funny Face among other things.

On the occasion of Ravel’s 53rd birthday, the Canadian mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier threw a party in his honour where he had the chance to meet Gershwin. Gershwin played a number of show tunes including The Man I Love as well as his Rhapsody in Blue for Ravel. Gauthier later wrote: ‘George that night surpassed himself, achieving astounding feats in rhythmic intricacies, so that even Ravel was dumbfounded.’¹

When Gershwin asked Ravel if he could study with him in Paris, Ravel reportedly declined, for fear that he might ‘lose that great melodic spontaneity and write bad Ravel’.² Ravel then referred him to seek out Nadia Boulanger who, a few months later in Paris, would also decline to teach Gershwin for fear of disturbing his natural musical talent.

During Ravel’s stay in New York, the two composers hung out and hit the jazz clubs frequently, from Harlem where they saw dancers do the lindy hop, to Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club, where they heard Duke Ellington and his orchestra play. Before he left to resume his tour in Kansas, Ravel also managed to hear the famous bandleader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in a recording session for the Victor label with the jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke.

In an article written that same month, he urged Americans to ‘Take Jazz Seriously!’: ‘You Americans take jazz too lightly. You seem to feel that it is cheap, vulgar, momentary. In my opinion it is bound to lead to the national music of the United States. Aside from it you have no veritable idiom as yet.’³ Gershwin and Ravel remained in contact after Ravel left the USA, a number of months later, Gershwin visited Paris for himself, inspiring his later composition, An American in Paris.

From New York to California, Canada to Texas, Ravel was overwhelmingly fascinated by jazz and Negro spirituals; the built-up cities, skyscrapers, and industrial machinery; the excellence of American orchestras; and the beauty of nature from the Grand Canyon to the Niagara Falls. The fascination, unfortunately, did not extend to the American cuisine, as he complained to French violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange that he was ‘dying of hunger’.⁴

The musical experiment – The creation of Boléro

Before Ravel left for his tour of the USA, his friend Ida Rubinstein, a Russian dancer who was previously in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, had asked him to orchestrate Iberia, a work for solo piano by Spanish composer Albeniz for her new ballet company. When that fell through, Ravel then had in mind to write a piece with Hispanic character for her. Rubinstein had already sketched out her choreography in mind: in a badly-lit tavern, with drinkers at tables talking among themselves along the walls, a gypsy woman begins dancing atop a large table. At first the patrons pay no attention, but as the music swells and her dancing builds up into a frenzy, they get up and surround the table, going wild around her as she finishes in an apotheosis.

Ravel’s gruelling tour of the United States left him inspired but exhausted, and inspiration for this ballet came to him while he was on holiday in Saint-Jean-de-Luz after his return from America. He was about to go for a swim when a theme came to him. Calling his friend Gustave Samazeuilh over to the piano, he poked out the melody with one finger, asking: “Don’t you think that has an insistent quality? I’m going to try to repeat it a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can.”⁵

For some time, Ravel had thought about building a work from repeating a single theme without any development, growing it only through instrumental timbres and harmonies. This was inspired in part by the machinery and factories that he saw as a boy from outings with his father as well as the industrial machinery that he saw in America, and his lifelong preoccupation for Spanish rhythms. The result of this experiment was Boléro, a 15-minute work written for a large orchestra based on the slow Spanish dance in triple meter.

The music opens with a single, solo snare drum tapping out the rhythm (that he will have to play for 169 times during the entire 15-minute duration, gradually increasing in volume and intensity). Accompanied by the pizzicato from the lower strings, a flute introduces the main tune. Unwinding like a charmed snake, the melody is laid out in two sections, and passes on to other solo instruments first, and then larger sections as the music grows. Through all its repetitions, while the melody remains the same, only the instrumental colours, textures and intensity change, until it bursts forth triumphantly in E major, with the snare drum still beating out the same rhythm, the instruments still playing the same melody.

Perhaps the most remarkable and radical thing is how the music still seems to grow despite the complete absence of thematic development, something unheard of in Western classical music development up till that point. And just maybe, this was a foreshadow of the continuous looping techniques in minimalism that Steve Reich would popularise three decades later.

Boléro was given its first performance at the Paris Opéra on November 20, 1928. While the audience clapped, cheered and stamped their feet in approval, a woman was heard screaming: “Au fou, au fou!” (“The madman! The madman!”). When Ravel was told of this, he reportedly replied: “That lady… she understood.”

The hypnotic rhythms of Boléro spread far and wide: Ravel heard workmen whistling it when he walked past a construction site; separately, it spawned the 1934 film Bolero about a coal miner who dreamed of being a dancer, where Carole Lombard and George Raft danced what was possibly the most erotic dance sequence in pre-Code Hollywood to Ravel’s Boléro.

Ravel’s final triumphs – A symphony of influences

From 1926, Ravel had slowly begun to experience instances of confusion, insomnia, and intellectual inertia. His hands trembled, and he complained of “blunders in writing, irregular lines, and erasures.”⁶ This troubled Ravel as he was obsessively neat by nature, much preferring to re-write an entire page of manuscript rather than have a correction shown on the page. He had also suffered short spells of self-described ‘amnesia’, where he would end up disoriented and lost. These were the beginnings of aphasia that would progressively worsen till the end of his life.

At first, these incidents seemed to be infrequent enough for Ravel to undertake his tour of the USA (against his physician’s advice); the first major episode took place during a concert in November 1928. He was performing his Sonatine for piano, when friends say that he had a memory lapse in the first movement, and jumped straight to the finale.⁷

The next two years saw Ravel working concurrently on a few compositions: an opera-ballet Morgiane for Ida Rubinstein (which was apparently completed in his mind but had only written down fragmentary sketches); his Piano Concerto in G which he intended to write and then perform in a grand tour of North and South America, Europe, and even Japan and Java; and a Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a commission by Paul Wittgenstein (a pianist who had lost his right hand in World War I) that interrupted his work on the original Piano Concerto in G.

The influence of jazz that Ravel experienced was to show most glaringly in both piano concertos, which he started working on concurrently in 1929. The Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was completed first in 1930, and the Piano Concerto in G in the later part of 1931.

The crack of a whip opens the Piano Concerto in G, setting off a startled piccolo into action, accompanied by glittering figurations in the piano. The music is joyous and celebratory, as if setting the scene for Christmas day celebrations or a circus. The trumpet then joins in, its melody punctuated by offbeat accents from the brasses and other instruments. After the playful opening theme, the English horn gives us a glimpse of Spain, the piano imitating the languorous strumming of a Spanish guitar. The languor of the Spanish guitar soon becomes bluesy, laid-back jazz, first introduced by the clarinet and taken up by the rest of the orchestra—solos given to a muted trumpet and the high registers of the bassoon, material that would not sound out of place in Gershwin’s music.

The deep quietude of the central Adagio Assai is reminiscent of Satie’s contemplative Gymnopédies. It begins with a long solo for the piano, one of the most poignant, expressive melodies that Ravel wrote; but despite its spontaneous, improvised quality, Ravel admitted slaving over it ‘two measures at a time’ with the assistance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet for aesthetic purposes.⁸ Time seems to be suspended, yet, there is an undercurrent of impulse, caused by Ravel juxtaposing a 6/8 meter in the accompaniment with the melody in triple time. When the orchestra joins in, the piano relinquishes the melody to the woodwinds, then floats above while the English horn sings its melancholic melody.

The reverie is broken with a drum roll in the finale, taking us back to the sound world of the first movement: a whirlwind of unabashedly jazzy exclamations by the clarinet and trumpet, and use of sliding trombones while the piano darts nimbly around until it ends abruptly with four chords and a bang.

In preparation for the Concerto performance, Ravel practiced Chopin and Liszt etudes but when he realised that his illness prevented him from performing, he asked Marguerite Long to premiere the work while he conducted instead. Following the Parisian premiere of the Concerto in G on 14 January 1932, Ravel and Long undertook a tour of Western and Eastern Europe, performing the Concerto in twenty cities over three months, and sharing the stage with the likes of Malcolm Sargent and Wilhelm Furtwangler.⁹

The long goodbye

It was in the summer of 1932 that the signs of mental disorder became more apparent: Ravel was at a bullfight in San Sebastián with Edmond Gaudin when he began to hunt for something in his pockets, but was unable to explain what he was looking for until Edmond took a cigarette for himself, and Ravel grabbed it. A while later, Ravel, an experienced swimmer, was swimming in the bay when he suddenly found it impossible to coordinate his movements or find his way back. After being found by some anxious friends, he admitted sadly, ‘I can no longer swim’.

On 8 October 1932, Ravel was returning from the theatre in Paris after a night out when his taxi met with a violent collision with another vehicle at the intersection of rue d’Amsterdam and rue d’Athènes. The newspaper L’Écho de Paris reported that he was ‘thrown against the windows of the taxi and his head cut in several places by splinters of glass, especially his nose and the top of his head’¹⁰ leaving him in considerable pain. He described having ‘a bruised thorax and some facial wounds. And yet, I was unable to do anything but sleep and eat. There remains only an irrational fear of taxis, which I use only as a last resort.”¹¹

The doctor who examined and treated him estimated that he would recover in a month, but Ravel complained to his cousin that he was knocked out for three whole months, only resuming work with much difficulty. Ravel’s friend the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange described that his condition deteriorated ‘from month to month from that day on. Ravel tried everything … electricity, physiotherapy, acupuncture, psychotherapy’ and ‘the most unlikely regimes’ his friends suggested, but nothing seemed to work. He appeared exhausted, overworked, and found it unusually difficult to write—doctors cautioned of cerebral anemia, mental fatigue, as well as difficulty of speech, loss of memory and the inability to perform purposeful movements.

As much as he was fearful of the ominous developments his terminal illness would produce, he continued to live with as much normalcy as possible, conducting, recording, sitting on juries for music competitions, and composing. There was a youthful agility in his step, and his grooming was as meticulous as it always had been.

On November 23, 1933, Ravel conducted Boléro and the Piano Concerto in G Major with Marguerite Long as soloist—this was his final public performance. It must have been difficult for him, knowing his career was at an end: that same month, he met a friend and was excitedly telling her the outline of his opera Jeanne d’Arc that he was planning to write when he suddenly said,

During his lifetime, his preferred mode of correspondence was letter-writing, having written more than 2,500 letters to friends and family. One of his last known handwritten letters was to Marie Gaudin on 12 March 1934, and the heartbreaking text reads, ‘Write me sometimes. I will try to answer you although it costs me entire days of torture to do so: I began this letter over a week ago.’¹³

It must have been difficult for Ravel and his friends around him to reconcile the seemingly two different people within himself—the fastidious, dapper composer who tried to dress well and still heard music in his head; versus the man who had to re-learn the alphabet, forgotten how to notate a score, or play the piano.

At times, Ravel appeared blissfully oblivious to his surroundings or illness, but at other times he was painfully aware. Hélène Jourdan-Morhange recalls, ‘I can still see him at Montfort l’Amaury seated in an armchair on the famous balcony whose view he loved so much, with a distant forlorn gaze… I asked: “What are you doing there, dear Ravel?” He replied simply, “I am waiting.”’¹⁴

Even to the end of his life Ravel remained committed to his artistic pursuits, coaching Jacques Fevriér in the Left Hand Concerto, as well as Madeleine Grey and Francis Poulenc when they were to perform his last known work, Don Quichotte a Dulcinee. It was in the autumn of 1937 that Ravel’s health took a drastic turn for the worse. He was admitted into a clinic on 17 December, and after his close friends and brother conferred with the doctor, they decided to risk an exploratory brain surgery by celebrated surgeon Dr Clovis Vincent to see if there was a tumour causing problems. No tumours were found, and although Dr Vincent had succeeded in equalising the the level of his cerebral hemispheres, but he lapsed into a coma two days after the operation, and died on 28 December.

The composer who lived for his music

If there is no mention of a romance of any sort in Ravel’s private life, it is because he devoted his life to his fascination with impeccable clothing, beautiful things, and, towards the end of his life, his family of Siamese cats at Belvedere. The dominant woman in his life was his mother when she was alive, and he once made the statement that ‘Artists are not made for marriage. We are rarely normal, and our lives are even less so.’¹⁵ Further explaining it to another friend, he mentioned:

His Swiss-Basque heritage and Parisian life, his fascination with travel and exoticism, his keen observations of nature, fondness for animals and children: all these came forth in his music. A master orchestrator, he always strove for clarity, balance and good taste in his works, however different they were, bridging the gap between the worlds of impressionism (Jeux d’eau), neoclassicism (Le Tombeau de Couperin, Menuet Antique), modernism (Boléro, La Valse), refusing to be categorised. His music, like his life, was filled with contradictions: coolly detached yet emotional, playful but serious, mechanical but alive.

To the brilliant perfectionist born 150 years ago who gave precise, wonderfully colourful music such as this, joyeux anniversaire, Monsieur Ravel!

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.