Maurice Ravel Free Sheet Music, Program Notes, Recordings and Biography

The Swiss Watchmaker of Music

In the spring of 1905, the French musical world erupted in scandal. Maurice Ravel, by then a 30-year-old composer with a string of acclaimed works to his name, had entered the competition for the prestigious Prix de Rome for the fifth and final time. In a stunning decision, the jury eliminated him in the preliminary round. The public outcry was immediate and fierce. How could the composer of the String Quartet in F and the piano piece Jeux d'eau be deemed unworthy? The press dubbed it "The Ravel Affair," leading to a public petition, a heated debate in the papers, and ultimately, the resignation of the Paris Conservatoire's director. The incident perfectly illustrates Ravel’s position: he was an undisputed master, an innovator whose elegant modernism unnerved the conservative establishment. He was, as Igor Stravinsky would later call him, a "Swiss watchmaker," an artist of breathtaking precision whose intricate creations would change the course of music.

The Basque and the Parisian

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in the Basque fishing town of Ciboure in southwestern France, close to the Spanish border. His mother was of Basque heritage, and this connection to Spain would infuse his music with its distinctive rhythms and colors throughout his life. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Paris, where his father, a successful engineer and inventor, encouraged his son's artistic pursuits. Ravel began piano lessons at age seven and entered the Paris Conservatoire at fourteen.

At the Conservatoire, he was a student of the great composer Gabriel Fauré, who became a lifelong supporter. Ravel was not a traditional prodigy in the mold of Mozart; he was a slow, meticulous worker, obsessed with perfection of form and technical polish. His early works, like the Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), already showed his characteristic blend of classical clarity and modern harmonic language. He was often grouped with Claude Debussy as a leading figure of musical Impressionism. While they admired each other, they were not close, and their styles were distinct; Debussy was a true revolutionary who sought to dissolve form, while Ravel was a classicist at heart who preferred to pour his new harmonies into traditional structures.

A Master of Orchestral Color

After the scandal of the Prix de Rome, Ravel’s career flourished. He was a magician of the orchestra, able to conjure an astonishing array of timbres and textures. His ballet Daphnis et Chloé, commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, is a masterpiece of shimmering, sensuous orchestration. His Rapsodie espagnole and the tragic poem for orchestra, La Valse—a terrifying depiction of a Viennese ballroom spinning into the abyss of World War I—further cemented his status as a leading orchestral composer.

Perhaps his greatest feat of orchestration was a work he didn't even compose. In 1922, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned him to orchestrate Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. Ravel’s brilliant and colorful version became so universally popular that it has largely eclipsed the piano original, becoming a staple of the concert hall and a textbook example of masterful orchestration. His most famous original work, Boléro (1928), began as a simple experiment: a single, sinuous melody repeated over and over, passed between different instruments above an unchanging snare drum rhythm, building in a relentless crescendo for fifteen minutes. Ravel himself was dismissive of it, once calling it "a piece for orchestra without music," but its hypnotic power has made it one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music ever written.

The Great War and an International Celebrity

When World War I broke out, Ravel, despite being small in stature, was determined to serve his country and tried to join the air force. Rejected as a pilot, he eventually became an ambulance driver on the front lines near Verdun. The horrors of the war deeply affected him, and his mother's death in 1917 plunged him into a profound depression. During this period, he composed one of his most moving works, the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin. While modeled on a Baroque dance suite, each of its six movements was dedicated to a friend who had died in the war. It is a work not of overt grief, but of elegant, poignant remembrance.

In the 1920s, Ravel was an international star. He embarked on a highly successful four-month tour of the United States and Canada, where he was fascinated by American culture, particularly jazz. This influence can be heard clearly in his later works, especially the vibrant Piano Concerto in G Major and the Concerto for the Left Hand, written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war. While in New York, he met George Gershwin, whose music he deeply admired. When Gershwin asked for composition lessons, Ravel famously replied, "Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?"

Final Years and Tragic Silence

Ravel was a dapper, private, and intensely reserved man who never married and had a small circle of close friends. He lived just outside Paris in a villa at Montfort-l'Amaury, which he filled with trinkets and mechanical toys that reflected his love for the miniature and the precisely crafted.

In 1932, his life took a tragic turn. Following a taxi accident, he began to exhibit symptoms of a progressive neurological disorder, likely Pick's disease. The disease cruelly attacked the part of his brain that connected thought to action. He could still hear music perfectly in his head, he could judge and criticize it, but he became unable to write it down or play it. "I will never write my Jeanne d'Arc," he once said to a friend, "This opera is here, in my head. I hear it, but I will never write it. It's over. I can no longer write my music." After a failed brain surgery, Maurice Ravel died on December 28, 1937, his mind a silent prison for the beautiful music he could no longer set free.

Section 4: References and Further Reading

References and Further Reading

• Orenstein, Arbie. Ravel: Man and Musician. Dover Publications, 1991.

• Nichols, Roger. Ravel. Yale University Press, 2011.

• Mawer, Deborah, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ravel. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

• Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Ravel. Translated by Margaret Crosland, Grove Press, 1959.