by James O'Leary
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors
in the Department of Music
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts
May 20,2004
Nothing happens in a vacuum, including theses.
First, I need to thank my friends who have endured ceaseless talk of Ravel,
Surrealism, and deadlines. Jacob, Lili, Laura, and Liz have not only offered brilliant
suggestions, but have also offered steadfast support (and a welcome willingness to
procrastinate at the drop of a hat).
Second, I must express sincere appreciation to Professor Hirsch, Professor Bloxam,
and Professor Newman who have spent so much time offering their invaluable
advice, be it on tackling Piano Concertos, pronouncing umlauts, or handling the
senior year jitters.
To my family, who hears it the least but deserves it the most, I owe undying gratitude.
They have made many sacrifices so I could attend Williams, and throughout my four
years they have been unshakably supportive and generous. Mom, Dad, Mike, Scottthank you.
Finally, I owe infinite gratitude to Professor Sheppard. Brilliant, kind, and inspiring,
Professor Sheppard has completely reshaped the way I hear music in just four fast
years, broadening my musical knowledge to include vastly different artistic
movements and a wide array of different cultures. He has burst my musical vacuum,
expanding my perspective to include a variety of music from Monteverdi to Joni
Mitchell to Messiaen-and of course, Ravel.
Furthermore, he has been incredibly generous with his advice, not only in advising
this thesis while on leave, but still somehow managing to sacrifice his time to offer
precious guidance about graduate school and senior year. I consider myself truly
lucky to have had the opportunity to work so closely with him.
Any insight contained in the following pages has its origins in his teaching. Of
course, any shortcomings are completely my own.
CHAPTER
I1
16
AMPUTATION:
SUBVERSION
OF FORMIN THE PIANO
CONCERTO
FOR THE LEFTHAND
CHAPTER
I11
38
A URINALIN THE SYMPHONY
HALL:SUBVERSION
OF GENREIN LA VALSE AND BOLERO
CHAPTER
IV
64
THECAT'SMOUAO/MOUAIN:
SUBVERSION
OF MIMESISIN L'ENFANT
ET LES SORTILEGES
CHAPTER
V
MUTETERROR:
SUBVERSION
OF INEFFIBILITY
CONFOUNDING
CONSCIENCE AND SINCERITY
The second half of Ravel's compositional career has not fared well with critics or
historians. Donald Ferguson, writing in 1935, two years before Ravel died, had this
to say about the composer's later works:
Gradually his strange balance of absorption and aloofness is overset by
a preponderance of the latter quality. In only one work, the
extraordinary ballet "Daphnis et Chloe" does the human element
maintain itself amid the artistic preoccupation of the composer. . . .
The general tendency seems to be to agree that in his later works Ravel
the stylist has almost obliterated Ravel the man. He has recently
turned (as in the violin-sonata, tinged with the colors rather than the
spirit of jazz) to an ultra-modern idiom which is apparently
unconvincingly handled.
'
Paul Henry Lang shares a similar opinion in his 1941 book Music in Western
Civilization:
Ravel . . . in his later years became a mere orchestrator handling his
many-headed orchestra with supreme skill but without much spiritual
conviction, and ended by orchestrating other composers' works
(Moussorgsky) or writing stunts appropriate for the modern cinema
theater orchestra (Bolero).
1
Donald N. Ferguson, A Short History of Music (New York: F.S. Crofts & Co., 1943), 487.
1
The charges are laid out here, as they have been since Ravel's lifetime: that he was a
heartless composer, one interested in craft above all and hopelessly uninspired in his
final years.
More recent opinions of the composer, while lacking the overtly
pejorative tone of the earlier reviews, tend to speak the same way. Mosco Carner
declared:
Ravel felt a strong resentment at losing his position among the leaders
of musical fashion and strove hard towards a transformation and even
a rejuvenation of his style and technical methods.
The results,
however, were not altogether convincing. Ravel had done his best
work before 1920. . .2
Similarly, Alec Herman wrote:
The music is both elaborately sophisticated and, in essence, simple.
Both passionate and chaste. A note of acerbity creeps in, as the
Satiean and Charbrier-like irony which had tempered the sensuousness
gains the upper hand. During the war years, Ravel creates a series of
experimental works.3
But Herman also offered an important qualification:
If Ravel seemed cold and aloof as a man, it must have been, not
because he felt too little, but because he felt too much.4
There is something intriguingly impassive about Ravel, especially in his music
after 1920. His music is somehow inexpressive, which these critics equate with
inhumanity or insensitivity. The meticulousness of Ravel's musical craft is often
interpreted as insincerity, as if technique and deep emotion cannot easily be wed.
Sincerity, it seems, must be accompanied by abandon; composure and grief are not a
2
Mosco Carner, "Music in the Mainland of Europe: 1918-1939" from The New Oxford History of
Music: The Modern Age 1890-1960, vol. 10 (London: New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 234.
Alec Harman, with Anthony Milner, Wilfrid Mellers, Man and His Music: the story of Musical
Experience in the West (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), 949.
Zbid., 950- 1.
convincing pair. Yet Claude Roland-Manuel, the often cryptic student, biographer,
and friend of the composer, recorded Ravel as saying:
I am sometimes credited with opinions which appear very
paradoxical concerning the falsity of art and the dangers of sincerity.
The fact is I refute simply and absolutely to confound the conscience
of the artist, which is one thing, with his sincerity, which is another.
Sincerity is of no value unless one's conscience helps make it
apparent. This conscience compels us to turn ourselves into good
craftsmen. My objective, therefore, is technical perfection. I can
strive unceasingly to this end since I am certain of never being able to
attain it. The important thing is to get nearer to it all the time.
Art, no doubt, has other efects, but the artist, in my opinion, should
have no other aim5
"Conscience" is a very odd word to use in this context. He could have said "taste,"
"correctness," or "control" and the passage would make sense, but "conscience"
seems to have other implications. Notice, too, that Ravel never admits insincerity. In
fact, according to his logic, if technical perfection makes the true feelings of the
composer come to light, then Ravel is, in effect, defending himself as an entirely
sincere artist. The difference between Ravel and expressionist writers is that the
passion one usually associates with more emotive compositions is allayed in Ravel,
made less pronounced and less obvious. As Vladirnir Jankkl6vitch described it, this is
"reticence in the face of the Appassionato," a characteristic of ~ ~ r n b o l i s m~ .a~v e l ' s
art is not about the tortured expression of an inner feeling, as in the manner of
Beethoven or Schumann, but rather the expression of exteriority.
The focus on the surface, the exterior, was formulated in his first decade of
composing. Many of the works from this period attempted to represent musically the
Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: London: Columbia University Press, 1975).
118.
Vladimir Jank61Cvitch, Music and the Inefable, trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 32
'
appearance of objects and people as he saw them: flittering moths (Noctuelles), clockshops (L'Heure espagnole), tolling bells (Le gibet), swirling water (Ondine), birds in
the sunrise (Daphnis et Chloe), and animal mannerisms (L'histoiries naturelles).
However, the Symbolism of Ravel is not simply a matter of musical imitation.
Symbolists seek to present the manner in which they perceive an external object
through art. It is not recording, but rather a subjective transcription. Beauty is not
skin deep; for the Symbolist it touches one's spirit. Edgar Allen Poe, on of Ravel's
literary heroes, proclaimed:
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and
the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the
Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to
attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement of the soul, which we
recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished
from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion,
which is the excitement of the heart.7
One such piece that appears to connect the inner soul with an outer object is his piano
set Miroirs (1906). It consists of musical representations of moths at night, sad birds,
a boat on the ocean, a jester dancing in the morning, and a valley resounding with the
chiming of bells. The collection itself serves as a mirror, for not only can one discern
external objects in the piece, but there is a sense in which the music reflects the
composer's inner state or personality. Thus the birds are personified as sad, the jester
can be at once the traditional extroverted show-off and at the same time the
introverted, pensive figure of the B section of the piece, and the ocean has its own
personality, at times placid and gentle, at times stormy and fierce.
The same
reflective nature of Symbolism can be discerned in other compositions, as in
L'Histoire naturelles (1906). In these pensive pieces, the objects depicted in the
7
Orenstein, 129.
music are not only personified, but rather as Emile Vuillermoz claims, like Miroirs,
they are projections of the composer himself:
When Ravel made one of those razor-edged remarks of which he alone
possessed the secret, he used to make a characteristic gesture: he put
his right hand quickly behind his back, described a sort of ironical
pirouette, cast down his mischievously sparkling eyes and let his voice
drop suddenly a fourth or fifth. In the Histoires naturelles and
L'Heuve espagnole one finds this characteristic intonation in all sorts
of places. It is Ravel's own voice, his pronunciation, his well-known
mannerisms, that have produced this quasi parlnndo melody."
The demands of depicting objects in the manner of L'Histoire naturelles and
Miroirs usually govern the composition of symbolist pieces more so than do the
traditional classical forms or traditional harmonic progressions. Arnold Schoenberg
claimed that such objects, be they sad birds or a sunrise, become musical structures in
themselves. He wrote:
It was the harmonies of Richard Wagner which had disrupted the logic
and constructive powers of harmony. One of the consequences of this
state of affairs was the use of what were called "impressionist"
harmonies such as we find in Debussy. Devoid of any constructive
significance, these harmonies are often used to produce effects of
"colour"; their object is to express atmosphere and pictorial images. In
this way, however, atmosphere and images, though of extra-musical
origin, do become constructive elements, and in the end take their
place among other musical f ~ n c t i o n s . ~
The ability to see a kind of ethics through objects outside oneself prevents the
Symbolists from becoming mere musical or literary photographers.
Baudelaire,
another of Ravel's literary heroes, pioneered the ability to see and record this worldly
morality :
It is in the poetry of Baudelaire and his aesthetic theories that the
desire to re-discover our lost unity with the world is most forcefully
Orenstein, 163
"tefan Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolisrrz. Trans b y Rollo Myers (London:
Eulenberg Books, 1976), 19.
revealed. By reviving the doctrine of Universal Resemblance, and the
correlation between all the psychic and physical phenomena in the
world. . . Baudelaire created his own theory of "Correspondences"
which he expounded in Les Fleurs de mal, and which was later
incorporated in the Ten Commandements of the Symbolist poets. The
doctrine of universal analogy linking all phenomena could have
restricted the role of the poet to that of a scribe recording certain
resemblances between things he happened to have noticed. But
Baudelaire escaped this limitation by allotting a very exalted place to
the creative imagination: . . . "It is imagination that has taught
mankind the moral significance of colour, outlines, sounds, and
scents.n10
Symbolists used symbols to connect worldly phenomenon with the inner state of the
artist.
Imagination and "correspondence" comprise the symbol, the most basic
component of the movement. The word on the page, the passage in the score, and the
blot of color on the canvas are not exact descriptions of an object, but rather a link
between the external world and the reader, viewer, or listener.
Sincerity, the direct, truthful connection between intent and art, is a difficult issue
because the aim of Ravel's early art was to filter what he saw in the world through a
personal lens, his own creative intellect and conscience.
Here, too, we can
understand why Ravel says "conscience" where others may have only said technique,
in that it is through intellectual study, not emotive outburst, that the Symbolists
convey their meaning.
The conscience, after all, is the psychological center for
control, it mitigates the desires of the id and the ego and forms a balance between the
two. Intellect and conscience filter an initial sensation received by the artist and
reform it into a product that carries with it moral suggestions and personality. As
lo
Ibid.,28-9.
Mallarm6 said, "A verse . . . must not consist of words, but of intentions; and all
words are unimportant when compared to sensations."ll
THESAVAGE EAR
Imbuing words, music, and art with morality and personality, however, is not
necessarily the same thing as being sincere. Can a piece, after numerous drafts, hours
of editing, and the painstaking processing for which Ravel was famous, be truly
sincere? Spontaneity, it would seem, is lost in this process. On the one hand he
claims to be sincere; what he says and what he envisions himself to be are very
closely related. At the same time, however, the rawness of the original idea is refined
through technique, like an impulse controlled by conscience, which, after all, often
serves to curb the rawness of the subconscious. With the decorum of the superego
present to filter out dccp-seated emotions that may arise in the artist, is it possible to
be truly sincere? Indeed, Ravel famously responded to a question about his artistic
sincerity by saying, "But doesn't it ever dawn on these people that I may be artificial
by nature?"12
Is it possible to be both "artificial by nature" and sincere? Not in Symbolism;
symbolists make connections between what is expressed and the persona of the
composer. Although the Symbolist symbol can contain within it many different ideas
at once, this is different from being insincere.
Being artificial, on the other hand,
implies disconnect between what is expressed and what actually is.
" Ibid.,
32.
M.D. Calvocoressi, Musicians' Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (London: Faber and
Faber Limited, 1933), 51.
12
The most intriguing difference between the Symbolists and Ravel's later period
lies not in the level of pure compositional technique, but in the level of symbolic
representation and correspondence.
In the art of Symbolists, there is always a
mediator between what Goethe called the "phenomenon" and the "image" of it. This
is either the symbol or the allegory, and in music these symbols take on many
different forms. Debussy, for instance, does not do much musical mimicking in
Prelude a la aprks-midi d'un Faun, but rather, through the undulating tritone in the
flute, the unsure ternary structure, and the thick, colorful harmonies, he seeks to
impart a subjective mood. This fits Symbolism, where a diminished seventh chord
does not simply signal suspense, but can suggest an erotic dream, a longing for
connection, and the uneasy state that lies between waking and sleeping all in the same
moment. A flute line is not simply a bird call; it is the evocation of an emotion, of a
breeze, of a ray of sun, of pan pipes-any
number of images or emotions that cannot
be rigidly defined. A problem with reading this kind of score arises out of a need to
find a connection, a mapping from x to y, but in reality the inability to do this is part
of the aesthetic: to guess, to make multiple connections, to say that the flute reminds
one of one thing while the person next to you believes it represents another. The
musical gestures here have the same function as Baudelaire's symbols: they facilitate
a correspondence, a linking between the psyche of the listener and the psyche to be
found in the external world, be it in nature, city life, or a foreign group of people.
By most accounts, though, Ravel's music became so polished and pared down in
the last decade of his career that he lost his connective or "corresponding" capability.
Critics and scholars who expect some kind of expressivity from Ravel and then
expect a psychological stimulation to be apparent in a piece are often at a loss. Those
who seek a link between expressivity and sincerity are looking in the wrong place;
there is a middle ground: psychology that remains somehow unexpressed but still
readable-and
with this we have arrived at Surrealism.
Ravel conveys psychology in a paradoxical manner. The ability to hear a state of
mind, a mental impulse, a fear, a longing, or a desire in this composer comes through
reading broken symbols, expressive gestures that convey an impossibility or convey
nothing at all. Take the visual arts, for example; what does it mean to show a woman
in the shape of a horse, as does Salvador Dali? What does Paul Delavaux express in
showing androgynous figures with ivy for hair walking in a gothic setting as in Call
of the Night? The art of Dali and the literature of Andre Breton both express the
absurd, and these images may give us a glimpse into the psychology of the creator,
but it remains distant, somehow disturbing, and inexpressive for us. It is the opposite
of Baudelaire; there is no correspondence between what is represented and the outside
world.
Surrealism, inexpressive psychology, is subjective to the point of being
dauntingly cryptic.
How then does one read this art? To seek an objective meaning in Surrealism is
often fruitless because many of these images are contradictory by nature; gleaning
some kind of narrative is often impossible or the narrative suggested is too absurd to
offer any insight.
What can be objectively interpreted in androgyny, beheaded
figures, and humans with inhuman heads, all of which appear quite often? These
images express liminality: not quite male, not quite female, not quite human, not quite
alive. It is not that the artist is expressing a liminal state, but the symbols themselves
are liminal. Reading this kind of poetry, viewing this kind of art, or listening to this
kind of music requires a knowledge not of symbols, but of the process of
symbolizing.
Surrealism drew its impetus from Dadaism, an art movement based on destroying
the associative power of the symbol as a means for linking the human mind to an
external concept. Dadaism and Surrealism are both a rejection of the idea that we can
somehow know the world around us through science and logic and a rejection of the
notion that art can reflect the world.13 This movement emerged out of World War I,
an absurd war in itself, fought very close to home in the name of abstract treaties and
pacts created very far away from the individual soldier. The reasons for fighting were
largely unknown to the average fighter, who, stationed in a muddy trench, knew only
that his enemy was on the other side, and that sooner or later he would have to go
over the cdgc and engage in deadly combat. Dadaism strove for a similar destruction
of the link between knowledge and the world around us; Dadaists destroyed the link
between the two-the
symbol.
The violence of Dadaism was somewhat softened in Surrealism, and proponents of
the latter did not seek to destroy the symbol, but rather detach it from its meaning. As
Stefan Jarocinski wrote, "Dada is a process of semantic destruction, but Surrealism is
a phenomenon of semantic dislocation and f i ~ s u r e . " ~Surrealists do not destroy
symbolic representation; they weaken it and point out how feeble it really is.
Surrealism flattens the Symbolist's multivalent, infinitely expanding symbol into a
l 3 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago:
London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 249.
l4 Ibid., 289.
flimsy concept that does a poor job of standing in the place of an idea. Surrealism
uses allegories, not symbols. In Goethe's terms:
The allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, and the
concept into an image, but in such a manner that the concept can only
be stated, confirmed, or expressed in the image in a way that is limited
and incomplete. The symbol transforms the phenomenon into an idea,
and the idea into an image, and does this in such a way that the idea in
the image has infinite repercussions, and remains intangible; even
when expressed in the language it will always remain unexpressed.15
The inflated symbol becomes the simpler allegory, and this is why Surrealism seems
so inexpressive at first glance, because the allegory is not meant to expand meaning
as a symbol does, but to stand in place of it. Traditional allegories do not appeal to
the psychological depths of the human mind, but to the intellect, as does an equation
where x=y; in the broadest sense, an allegory is an equivalent, and surrealism plays
off of something that should correspond to something else, but does not.
This
corrcspondence, though, would not be effective if it merely involved a deceptive
facade or mask. Apollinaire, an early Surrealist, did not attempt to revolutionize
theater, but to "renovate" it, to make it look and feel different in appearance and
structure:
In order to attempt if not a renovation of the theater, at least a personal
effort, I thought it necessary to go back to nature itself, but without
imitating it in the manner of photographs.
When man wanted to imitate walking he created the wheel, which
doesn't look like a leg. He made surrealism without even knowing
it. l6
Daniel Albright explains the difference very well:
A wheel isn't a symbol of a leg or an abstraction of a leg; instead, it is
a functional equivalent of a leg, an analogue. Biologists distinguish
homologues from analogues in the following way: a homologue is a
l5
l6
Jarocinski., 23.
Albright, 249. Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" in regards to the ballet Parade.
structural equivalent, while an analogue is a functional equivalent-an
elephant's trunk is a homologue of my nose, but an analogue of my
arm. For Apollinaire, traditional art has dealt, far too long, far too
laboriously, in the world of homologues, in which human beings are
represented by actors, or puppets, or shadows, or other simulacra of
human bodies. l7
It is not enough merely to mirror appearance, allegories in Symbolist art must mirror
function, and thus the attack that Surrealism mounts is on the functional level.
Just as Surrealism grew out of the inability to understand the absurdity of world,
attacking the intellectual allegory weakens the power of reason to discern what art is
actually saying. Realistic representation subverted, the psychological drives that are
often contrary to societal norms come to the fore. Shutting oneself off by exploding
the bridge that connects one to the world is not constraining for a Surrealist, it is
liberating. Subversion of symbol, according to a Surrealist, produces something even
more realistic than realism ever could, because the tyrannous, affected link that
ostensibly helps one interface with his or her surroundings has been severed. Breton,
too, believed that by attacking the symbol one actually attacks artifice, the f a ~ a d ethat
society has built up around "savage" man.
In fact, [Breton] believes that the artist's eye, freed from craft
training . . . can return to its "savagery" and see beyond
superficial-the visual and real-toward the deep, the "unreal";
paradoxically, "through the looking glass" of the visual lies
marvelous invisible. . .18
and
the
for
the
This passage is especially interesting in regards to Ravel's Miroirs and their power to
create Symbolist-like correspondence. It is through the mirroring that occurs when
one becomes closely acquainted with the surface of an object that one can see
Ibid., 250.
Jack Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing: 1919/39 (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 102.
l7
18
underlying psychological motives-"through"
signifying both "by means o f ' and
"beyond," both by gazing into it in the Symbolists' sense and breaking it in the
Surrealist manner.
In order to subvert a symbol, it must be readily apparent what the traditional,
"correct" function of that symbol would be so that the error can be seen. A melting
clock means nothing if one has never seen a clock, and thus does not know that the
clock is supposed to be rigid and inexorably tick away the hours. A surrealist both
sets up the mirror (a clock to represent time) and breaks it (the clocks are melting).
This is like a dream, an abstract representation culled from daily waking life,
displayed to the mind in a bizarre, symbolic manner:
In its efforts to render the dream concrete, Surrealist painting turned
from abstraction toward a plastic figuration that deviated from beauxarts academicism by techniques that recall the characteristics of
Freudain dream interpretation: distortion, bizarre juxtapositions, and
doubling of objects, and irrational arrangements or perspective,
lighting, and atmosphere. Such techniques could add to the element of
subversion that the Surrealists attributed to some painting.'9
Destruction of the academic, the intellectual, the linking power of a symbol gives one
the freedom to stare oneself in the face with no barriers. Without something to
mitigate the rawness of an emotion, to explain absurdity of a dream, one can,
according to Breton, "undermine the walls of the real that encircles us."20
How did Ravel crack his Miroir? He brought his Symbolist fascination with
surface and representation into the entirely different realm of Surrealism where
surfaces are subverted. Both movements strove somehow to access psychology and
internal motivations in art through the idea of representation or facade, Symbolism
l9
20
1bid.,142
Ibid.,95
through a new kind of qualitative (meaning both physical and essential)
representation and Surrealism by destroying that representation. In a similar manner,
Ravel himself embodied opposites: both sincere with a conscience and "artificial by
nature," the former controlling how he portrayed himself with a psychological figure,
the superego, and the latter relaying his true being through a lie.
Ravel, the aging Symbolist, pulled that movement through World War I.
Symbolism played on the surface with a description that revealed inner morality or
humanity through external reflection.
Roland-Manuel, who considered Ravel a
Symbolist, ends his essay about Ravel's artificiality with the following quote:
"Voluptuous soul," says the Socrates of Paul Valkry, "see here the
opposite of a dream, what is it, Phaedra, if not some other dream? . . .
Dream, dream but dream everything penetrated by symmetries,
everything order, everything acts and sequences! . . . Who knows what
august laws dream that they have seen clearly and that they are in
accord with the design to manifest to the mortals how the real, the
irreal and intelligible can melt and combine by the power of the
MUS~S?"~~
One dream in the passage is "penetrated by symmetries," well thought out and
articulated. Yet these dreams, these "august laws," themselves dream that they bring
the dreamer into contact with the forces of the psychosis (the "irreal") and the real
(the intelligible). This verges on Surrealism, which seeks a means for combining the
real and the dream, for making those two one in the same. Symbolism sets up dreams
permeated by symmetry, and Ravel, I argue, subverted that.
It is the purpose of this thesis to posit an idea of what Surrealist or Dadaist music
might be through example; to analyze in what ways Ravel was influenced by
21
Claude Roland-Manuel, from Philip Wade Russom, A Theory of Pitch Organization for the Early
Works of Maurice Ravel (Dissertation: Yale University, 1985), 203.
Surrealism by using the term in a mode similar to its artistic or literary meaning. To
call any composer's music Surreal, it is simply not enough to say that the music
mocks "art," nor is it enough to rely on the text of an opera or plot of a ballet to carry
the music in its claim to Surrealism. Surrealist music should function in the same
manner as in Surrealist art: attack, disrupt, subvert, and undermine, not on the level of
mere sound, but on the level of function. A goofy ditty that takes itself seriously, as
can be found in many Poulenc operas, is merely a joke. True Surrealist music must
undermine, it must take a form and ransack its traditional connotations, it must take a
genre and subvert the traditional way it is performed, and it must take a symbol or
mimetic gesture and make it absurd. We must at once know what the traditional
function of a piece should be, and we must see that function undermined. This thesis
strives to see music as a broken mirror, one that allows us to glimpse the composer,
his surroundings, and his world while at the same time undermining the f a ~ a d ethat is
presented to us in letters, through recollections, and in biographies. As a result, this
thesis seeks to subvert both traditional views of the composer and his music,
removing the veil of Symbolism that almost every critic places around the smartly
dressed, small dandy in order to reveal the inspiration of the insomniac, the
perfectionist, the bereft son, and, most tragically, the sick, dying artist who could hear
music in his head, could contemplate it, but gradually lost the ability to write it down
or express it.
AMPUTATION:
SUBVERSION
OF FORM
IN THE PIANO
CONCERTO
FOR THE LEFTHAND
(193 1)
WRITING
AGAINST THE PIANO
The Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is brutal. Harmonically, it stings: the rich
chords that govern much of the piece often give way to sharp and sometimes bitonal
dissonances, approached unprepared, and left unresolved. The melodies of the piece,
which are introduced in a nebulous jumble in the orchestral introduction, jam
irregularly together in the jazz-style section just before the return of the opening
theme. All of these layers of motives intractably unfold over an unrelenting military
march. Cacophony, irregularity, and incongruity make this piece seem violent, and
this hostility overflows and wraps ensemble and soloist in an unusually antagonistic
relationship.
It must be noted that although this style is unusual in Ravel, it is certainly not
unprecedented. For example, the jazzy section of L'Enfant et les Sortilkges (1925)
bitonally slams together two themes when the teacup and teapot together chastise the
bewildered boy. Frontispice (1919), the Sonate pour violin et violoncelle (1922), and
Chanson madkcasses (1926), all contain harsh dissonances and bitonality-even
more harsh, at times, than the most bizarre moments of the Concerto for the Left
Hand. Although it is certainly aggressive of the composer to write the return of the
aforementioned jazz melody out of synch with the obstinate march-like rhythm
underneath, one must concede that similar rhythmic disjunction is probably more
unsettling in Frontispice than in this concerto.
What is so singularly striking about the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is the
form. Although the form in Ravel's music may be disguised, it usually retains the
general character of the Classical model from which it is derived. In most cases the
conventional form provides a general structure around which the piece is built. For
example, in his more traditional Concerto in G (1930), Ravel follows a normal
sonata-allegro form. The Sonata-Allegro form used in the first movement of this
concerto is not exactly the same as a Classical double-exposition form, but even
though the more traditional form is obscured, the general dynamic of the doubleexposition is still there. For example, in the exposition, the orchestra presents the
melodic ideas that the piano uses to generate its solo.22 Presentation of melodic
material in the G major concerto may be split up between the piano and the orchestra,
but the control of the form, as in any traditional concerto, is left to the orchestra. In
other words, Ravel plays with the concerto form, but does not subvert it. Order reigns
in the G major concerto with the orchestra delineating each of the three main sections:
it introduces the exposition, it provides the melody (which the piano expands and
The normal double-exposition form to which I refer is based on the Sonata Allegro form. Like the
Sonata Allegro form, it has three main sections, the exposition, the development, and the
recapitulation, but the exposition occurs twice: once with the orchestra introducing the thematic
material and once with the piano replaying what the orchestra has just done and embellishing it. The
orchestra normally has four ritornelli: the first introduction that prepares the piano's first solo, one to
introduce the development, one at the recapitulation to prepare the second solo span, and a short one to
introduce the cadenza.
22
embellishes) that leads to the development, its trills prepare the piano's flourish
marking the transition to the recapitulation, which reaches its climax with the
entrance of the orchestra, thus announcing the return of the first theme.23 The
traditional pecking order of most concerti is clearly in place in the G major concerto:
the orchestra, as Joseph Kerman would say, "opens the shop in the morning and
closes it at night."24
In the Left Hand Concerto, the double-exposition so common in traditional
concerti is actually more apparent on the surface than in the G major concerto, but at
the same time it seems paradoxically more difficult to hear. Its layout is a crystal
clear double exposition, as if Ravel were consciously writing something that harkens
back to the traditional form. Although the superficial structure is obvious, there are
subtle subversions that make the piece feel radically different from traditional
classical concertos. The entrances of the piano and the orchestra are flipped around,
with the piano exploding at the outset of the A section. This may seem a trivial
change (it certainly does not do much to upset the general outline of the form), but it
has large ramifications for the drama of the work. For Ravel, the orderly banter that
characterized the Classical concertos becomes instead a vehement argument, with the
piano instigating and the orchestra getting the last, violent word.
The result is
strikingly untraditional in feel. This is not the normal "divertissement,""' as Ravel
was known to characterize traditional concerti. Form in the Left Hand Concerto is
23
For a clear diagram of the form in the first movement of the Concerto in G-major, see John Robert
Hanson, Macroform in Selected Twentieth Century Piano Concertos. (University of Rochester, 1977),
294-5.
24 Joseph Kerman, "Mozart's piano concertos and their audience" in On Mozart, ed. James M. Morris
(Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 159.
25
Claude Roland-Manuel, Maurice Ravel, tr. Cynthia Jolly (London: D. Dobson, 1947), 102.
not toyed with in the traditional sense, but rather it is like a fun-house mirror
distortion: one can readily apprehend what it should look like and feel like, making it
all the more surreal because its actual appearance is so radically different.
On paper, the form looks very familiar: after an introduction, there are three
sections where motives are presented, imitated, developed, and brought back again to
round out the piece and bring it to a close. Ravel never explicitly said that his
concerto was based on the traditional concerto form, but nevertheless, the Classical
three-part structure buttressed by two solos and dotted with orchestral ritornelli
governs his own analysis:
The [Piano Concerto for the Left Hand] begins with a slow
introduction, which stands in contrast to the powerful entrance of
theme one; this theme will later be offset by a second idea, marked
"espressivo," which is treated pianistically as though written for two
hands, with an accompaniment figure weaving about the melodic line.
The second part is a scherzo based upon two rhythmic themes. A
ncw clement suddenly appears in the middle, a sort of ostinato figure
extending over several measures which are indefinitely repeated but
constantly varied in their underlying harmony, over which
innumerable rhythmic patterns are introduced which become
increasingly compact. This pulsation increases in intensity and
frequency, and following a return of the scherzo, it leads to an
expanded reprise of the initial theme of the work and finally to a long
cadenza. . . 26
Despite the Sonata-Allegro outline implicit in the description, there are "new
elements" that "suddenly appear" to disrupt the structure; there are complications to
the traditional form: some of the themes that comprise the end of the scherzo section
are not new or drawn from the exposition, but rather are expansions of fragmentary
themes presented in the introduction. The development may draw the bulk of its
material from an unusual area (the introduction rather than the exposition), but it still
~ u o t e dfrom Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989), 397.
26
functions in the traditional way, reworking themes from the entire piece. Although
melodic fragments are presented in an unusual introductory section, this thematic
maneuvering between introduction and exposition alone does not subvert the form
much. Composers in all periods combine themes in unexpected ways and they still
manage to uphold their classical models-after
all, this is what Ravel did in the G
major concerto. Neither of these changes point to real subversion.
There is another deviation in the form that undermines, not the structural outline,
but rather the accustomed relationship between soloist and orchestra that exists in the
traditional double-exposition concerto. Ravel puts the piano in control, and this
changes the entire mood of the piece.
By subverting form in this way, he
simultaneously makes the listener recall the atmosphere of a normal concerto and
draws the listener's attention to the disparity between the tradition and the concerto at
hand.
While writing the Concerto in G Major-which
Concerto for the Left Hand-Ravel
he interrupted to write the
described these kinds of qualitative differences
between the two pieces in relation to their respective forms:
The first, [the Concerto in G Major,] which I propose to play
myself, is a concerto in the strict sense, written in the spirit of Mozart
and Saint-Saens. I believe that a concerto can be both gay and brilliant
without necessarily being profound or aiming at dramatic effects. It
has been said that the concertos of some great classical composers, far
from being written for the piano, have been written against it. And I
think that this criticism is quite justified.
At the beginning, I meant to call my work a 'divertissement,' but
afterwards considered that this was unnecessary, as the name Concerto
adequately describes the kind of music it contains . . .
The Concerto for the left hand alone is quite different, and has only
one movement with many jazz effects; the writing is not so simple. . . .
So I have used a style more in keeping with the consciously imposing
style of the traditional concerto.27
Notice how the composer seemingly contradicts himself: the Concerto in G Major is
"a concerto in the strict sense," while at the same time the Left Hand Concerto,
which, he says, is "quite different," is in "a style more in keeping with the
consciously imposing style of the traditional concerto." What is more traditional in
the G major concerto than the Left Hand Concerto is certainly not the formal outline,
it is the atmosphere. In the former concerto, by abandoning the double exposition,
the orchestra and soloist are free to trade ideas back and forth in more or less a
"genial transformation," which Kerman notes is one aspect of the traditional quality
of concerto discourse.28 The major implications of the form exist, but it is distant
enough from the original concerto model so that an immediate comparison is not
suggested. Kerman describes the nature of concerto dialogue as a sort of orderly
debate:
On the level of immediate exchange of musical themes and other
passages, we can speak of instantaneous response, rejoinder, repartee,
and more generally discursive engagement. But in other contexts-for
example, in the Socratic context-it is possible to think of beginning a
dialogue on the level of musical form. Involved here are concepts like
delayed response, recapitulation, and what can be called discursive
reengagement.29
Kerman links form to decorum in concerti. All of Kerman's descriptions of the
repartee in a concerto are variations on the idea of banter, and most of them do
convey an idea of basic disagreement, be it in legal terms (rejoinder), debate terms
(Socratic contexts), or other descriptive terms (immediate response, discursive
27
Roland-Manuel, 102.
Joseph Kerman, "Mozart's piano concertos and their audience," 155.
29 Zbid.,154.
28
engagement). These ideas are inseparable from "musical themes," and the word
"recapitulation" is especially wisely chosen because it refers to both argumentation
and musical style. In the Left Hand Concerto, Ravel retains what is antagonistic
about the double-exposition, and then he exaggerates it creating a Goyaesque
caricature of the Classical concerto. Traditional form, the one Ravel uses, is at its
most basic level about dialogue, and this dialogue is usually not entirely friendly.
The contention in the Left Hand Concerto, though, goes far beyond mere argument, it
becomes physical.
What keeps a classical concerto decorous, and what is lacking that makes the Left
Hand Concerto so unsettling?
Although the piano waxes passionate, it usually
remains restricted by the orchestra; Kerman suggests that the traditional form of a
concerto involves a balance of power. The Classical form evolves in such a way as to
keep the orchestra always in control, and no matter how virtuosic or explosive the
cadenza, the orchestra always "reassert[s] its hegemony over the formal process.
That hegemony has been challenged by the solo display."30 The soloist may be
outnumbered, and he or she hardly stands a chance of winning any argument, but by
the sheer flashiness of its playing he or she puts up a decent, valiant fight. Ravel puts
a different twist on this dynamic: the piano stops pulling punches and jumps to an
early lead. In the seemingly insignificant change of placing the piano entrance first,
he alters this defining aspect of the traditional concerto: decorum is dropped from the
start.31
Ibid., 156.
This pattern of the piano playing first is not unprecedented for Romantic composers like Beethoven
and Brahms, but Ravel himself was drawn to the more traditional style of Mozart for this concerto (see
30
31
There can be no doubt: when the piano enters in the Concerto for the Left Hand, it
is in charge. The uncertain instrumental mumbling of the introduction, the unclear
modality, and the vacillation between themes in the nether regions of the orchestra
that finally comes to rest on a weak secondary dominant is definitively resolved by
the bombastic, confident entrance of the piano:
Figure 2.1 Maurice Ravel Concerto pour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co., 1937), 4.
The soloist confidently moves the piece in a distinct direction from secondary
dominant to dominant to tonic and, according to Glenn Watkins, "asserts the power
and authority of the maimed protagonist."32
he pianist's opening bravura takes
charge over the form; it commands the listener's attention and expands a single theme
until it is long enough and clear enough to be picked up by the orchestra. Ravel's
soloist achieves what Kerman claims soloists have threatened for centuries: he has
upset the traditional balance of power; the orchestra's supremacy has been usurped.
page 20). The form, moreover, is so similar to the classical double exposition that one can certainly
hear the traditional style being reworked.
32 Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003) 99
The traditional aspects of form in the Left Hand Concerto are quite apparent, but
this change calls attention to who is really in charge. The pianist's and the orchestra's
respective roles in the argument become frighteningly reversed: from the piano's
opening virtuosity, the soloist no longer is an underdog, but instead, as the
development and recapitulation wear on, he or she must try to keep control as the
orchestra attempts to break free and show off. It is absurd. The soloist has taken on
an entire army of instrumentalists (and, even worse, an army with master-orchestrater
Ravel as General) literally single-handedly. This is a fight that simply cannot be
won; the sheer endurance needed to play the gentlest parts of the piano solo, not to
mention the bravura passages, is simply unsustainable. At the outset of the concerto,
the pianist's virtuosity is written with the left hand alone in mind, and according to
Vlado Perlemuter, some parts would be difficult to voice with two hands.33 However,
as the concerto moves on, Ravel begins to give the illusion of a two handed pianist
playing rather tenderly, and this gentle sound is in sharp contrast to the utter strain
involved in playing those sections. What sounds simple is actually overwrought, and
the endurance needed to sustain that level is taxing for any performer.
Additionally, the sheer power and volume behind the orchestra's rendition of the
exposition theme is striking-indeed,
it is in a very different style from most of the
music Ravel wrote. As the composer commented:
In a work of this sort, it is essential to avoid the impression of
insufficient weight in the sound-texture, as opposed to a solo part for
two hands. So I have used a style more in keeping with the
consciously imposing style of the traditional concert^.'^
33 Vlado Perlemuter, Htlkne Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel According to Ravel,tr. Frances Tanner, ed.
Harold Taylor (London: Kahn & Averill, l988), 84
34
Roland-Manuel, 102.
Ravel has certainly made his "weighty" music "imposing." The pianist pounds open
fifths in the lowest, most booming register of the keyboard; it plays sweeping
glissandi; and it has the added mass of the damper pedal to boost the effect. The
orchestra is brash, brassy, expansive, and dissonant, and it easily matches the piano's
dynamic force, lacking only (in the exposition, anyway) the passage virtuosity with
which the soloist opened.
Yet the orchestra does not win by volume and number alone. There is a much
more subversive way that the orchestra reasserts its dominance. It is an act of
ventriloquism, of stealing the soloist's idiom, Implicit in the traditional concerto
form is a difference in the nature of the compositional language used by ensemble and
pianist. As Kerman writes:
More fundamentally yet, the concerto agents or actors differ in the
participation in certain basic musical activities, for which my short
terms are discourse and display.
When musicians speak of
"discourse"-or
"logic," or even "music thinking" tout court-we are
referring to the ongoing play of musical material and rhetoric, musical
process, music's illusion of movement and import. . . .
Display, on the other hand, is a primal quality of music-making that
can exist at low levels of discourse. Display is playing loud and fast
and singing sexy; display can be extemporaneous, unpredictable, out
of control, refractory to analysis.35
Traditionally, discourse is the orchestra's game and display is the soloist's secret
weapon, and this concerto begins much the same way. By the end of the concerto,
though, both soloist and ensemble take on different styles. Take, for example, the
following section of the second solo span:
35
Joseph Kerman, "Mozart's piano concertos and their audience," 153.
Figure 2.1 Maurice Ravel Concerto pour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co., 1937), 36.
The display that marked the A section is now subdued, building themes out of a
rumbling bass much like the orchestra's introduction. It sounds well developed. It
sounds like two themes playing in gentle counterpoint. It sounds like discourse. As
suggested earlier, there is a strange disjunction between the sound of this passage and
the actual difficulty in playing it.
To sustain the two themes and the delicate
~ ~ pianist
arpeggios that give the impression of two hands is intensely d i f f i ~ u l t .The
sweats to pull off the keyboard trick that simply does not sound like a keyboard trick.
Discourse, it turns out, may actually be more difficult than display.
In contrast to the piano's (failed) attempt at discourse, the orchestra has quite the
opposite mode of conversing. Leading into the second solo span, for example, is a
passage that looks remarkably unorchestral:
Vlado Perlemuter, in Ravel According to Ravel as cited above, maintains that sections of the
concerto would actually be more difficult to play with two hands. The natural thickness of the thumb
allows the upper lines to be articulated quite easily, whereas the right hand would most likely play it
with the less forceful fifth finger or, if not, would at least crowd the left hand. However, Perlemuter
certainly could not have been referring to this section in which the fifth finger, at the bottom of the
arpeggio, must contend with the thumb and the flurry of the middle of the texture. This would
definitely be easier with both hands.
36
Figure 2.2 Maurice Ravel Concerto pour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co., 1937), 33.
One may expect something this arpeggiated to be given to an instrument that
normally plays such figures, like the harp. This is not the case:
Figure 2.4 Maurice Ravel Concerto pour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co., 1931), 86-7.
This is very flashy, pianistic writing, but it has been taken over by the string section.
In other words, roles have been further reversed: wild arpeggios, usually associated
with keyboard display, become the language of the orchestra. Another dazzling
hallmark of the solo piano, even in Mozart's concertos, are trills, yet these, too, are
stolen from the pianist's lexicon by the orchestra: 37
37
Joseph Kerrnan, "Mozart's piano concertos and their audience," 157
Figure 2.5 Maurice Ravel Concerto pour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co., 1937), 18
There is one final pianistic technique that plays a particularly important role in this
concerto: the glissando. In this piece, especially in the opening display mode that the
piano uses, the glissando becomes a means for delineating sections. Just before the
orchestra enters with the theme in the second half of the exposition, and again just
before the recapitulation begins, the pianist plays a glissando that announces where
the sections end. Like Alberich's Ring, this is the source of the pianist's power over
the minions in the orchestra; it is the glissando that clearly delineates each section and
directs the discourse. It is with the usurpation of this gesture that the soloist loses all
his power, enabling the orchestra to use its newfound power to close the Concerto:
Allegro
Figure 2.6 Maurice Ravel Concertopour la main gauche (Paris: Durand & Co.), 4.
This is nothing short of an orchestral rebellion. After the second solo span, the
orchestra conventionally uses a short ritornello to introduce a cadenza. This passage
does the opposite: it adds a snippet of the B section, only more raucously
orchestrated, and allows the piano one small truncated phrase before it brings the
piece to a startling, unexpected close with a stolen gesture.
The orchestra had previously taken the trill and the arpeggio, and it was able to
add more force to the thematic material with less effort than the lonely pianist could.
With the glissando gone, what does the piano have left? Nothing. The orchestra has
rendered this one-armed piano player useless; he lost one arm in battle, the other arm
to subverted discourse.
PHANTOM
LIMBS
Perhaps this seems too dramatic a description. Perhaps the idea that an aberration
of form could suggest such sadism is far-fetched. This interpretation may appear
especially bizarre when one considers that many scholars hear this piece as heroic.
Glenn Watkins, for example, hears the ending as a triumphant march:
In these closing pages Ravel's heady mixture coalesces in a triumphant
blaze that suggests the film footage of the victory march down the
c h a m p s - ~ l ~ s k eon
s 14 July 1919, which appeared in Gance's
J'accuse. There the wounded lead the parade as the army of the dead
march above, au dessus de la r n e ^ ~ e e . ~ ~
My amputee metaphor would perhaps even be darkly humorous if it were not for
the first performer. The original commissioner and soloist for the Piano Concerto for
the Left Hand, Paul Wittgenstein, was a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in
38 See Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 400.
World War I. Implying that a concerto amputates the soloist's one remaining arm
may seem a disgusting argument, yet violence, the soloist, and the Left Hand
Concerto, despite what some critics would like to believe, have always been linked to
one another. Marguerite Long, a close friend of Ravel, saw it as "apocalyptic."
Roland-Manuel, the composer's friend and first biographer, describes it as "the dying
grasp of a lost
As is noted in Ravel According to Ravel:
Paul Wittgenstein played the Concerto at the Saltzburg Festival in
1936, under the baton of Arthur Rodzinsky. The critics deplored the
brutal and violent character of the interpretation, with its excessive
contrasts conforming so little to the spirit of the work.40
Despite the fact that critics deplored Wittgenstein's brash interpretation, this concerto
is certainly a violent piece, even in Ravel's own description. It is not a unification of
orchestra and soloist, it is a battle. Ravel took the Classical banter mode of discourse
to a new extreme, and in writing "against" the piano he gave the piano-protagonist a
nearly impossible task: to control the entire course of this movement, with one arm
doing the work of two. To continue a quote from the composer cited earlier:
This pulsation increases in intensity and frequency, and following a
return of the scherzo, it leads to an expanded reprise of the initial
theme of the work and finally to a long cadenza, in which the theme of
the introduction and the various elements noted in the beginning of the
concerto contend with one another until they are brusquely interrupted
by a brutal c o n ~ l u s i o n . ~ ~
Ravel himself does not describe the end of the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in
triumphant, regal, polite terms, but rather he uses the Kermanesque language of
contention mixed with an unusual streak of violence. The composer, his biographer,
3g ~ i c h a e Russ,
l
"Ravel and the Orchestra" in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah
Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125.
40
Quoted from Vlado Perlemuter, HClbne Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel According to Ravel, tr. Frances
Tanner, ed. Harold Taylor (London: Kahn & Averill, 1988), 84.
41 See note 5.
one of his best friends, and the commissioner and soloist all saw the piece as brutal,
so perhaps Wittgenstein's performance was not as contrary to the intent as
aforementioned critics would suggest.
The battle motif spilled over into real life in a famous exchange between the
soloist and Ravel. Ravel, angry that Wittgenstein had altered passages, confronted
him about the changes. Wittgenstein retorted, "Performers must not be slaves," to
which Ravel responded, "Performers are slaves."42 Not only does antagonism
describe the discourse within the piece, but it also surrounds the very history of the
work-the
idea of the soloist threatening the sovereignty of the orchestra finds its
parallel in the performer seeking to free himself from the composer. The aggressive
atmosphere that pervades this concerto, an atmosphere which critics often refrain
from associating with Ravel in lieu of a more gallant reading of the ending is actually
inseparable from this piece.
Discourse within in the concerto and arguments outside it aside, the sight of the
wounded war veteran, the cruelty of the obvious amputation that the former concert
pianist Wittgenstein suffered is literally placed center stage. It is impressive to see a
two-handed concert pianist attempt this piece with one hand; it is something of a
marvel, a trick, as if the piano player were a daredevil performing a feat. However, it
is eerie to see an amputee play this piece, especially because there is a constant
illusion of two hands written into the music. The phantom limb sounds as if it were
playing so often that one cannot help but imagine it there from time to time. In other
words, Ravel makes constant reference to this disturbing image simply by
42
See note 15.
highlighting the disparity between what is seen and what is heard, and this disparity is
one that reminds the viewer of the War, the wound, and the cruelty involved in
severing a pianist from his livelihood, even if it did save his life. In a similar fashion,
the traditional concerto form itself becomes a phantom limb: its presence is constantly
felt holding control over the general structure and implying a balance of power that
places the orchestra in control. The subtle switch in exposition order makes the loss
of this decorum, and thus the subsequent unusually pointed quality of the discourse,
stand out all the more.
There are many ways to interpret this violence. One could argue that it has to do
with the composer's own war experience. Certainly there is evidence for this line of
reasoning: the melodies in the concerto range from regal French dotted rhythms to a
march complete with snare drum, not to mention the fact that the amputee pianist who
cominissioned it was a Gcrman who had been an enemy of France a decade earlier.
Ravel had certainly used music for political ends in the past. He described the Piano
Trio (1914) as his substitute for actually fighting in the war:
I know only too well that in writing music I am working for my
country! At all events, I have been told it often enough in the last two
months to convince me; said in the first place to stop me volunteering,
and later to comfort me in my failure. But they can't stop me and they
can't comfort me. Must I before acting, wait, until a couple of uhlans
arrive in the as yet non-existent garden of my dream-villa at SaintJean-de-Luz? Well, I've written a trio, like poor Magnard, and that's
always a start.43
" ~ o l a n d - ~ a n u e Maurice
l,
Ravel, tr. Cynthia Jolly (London: D. Dobson, 1947), 76. Ravel eventually
did enlist in the army. As is evident in this letter, he desperately wanted to enlist in the army but he
was initially forbidden because he was underweight and generally not fit enough.
Perhaps Ravel portrays France versus Germany through the Left Hand Concerto. The
German soloist threatens the French orchestra's authority, and after a difficult battle,
the allies emerge victorious.
Perhaps, instead, we could hear an Oedipal dynamic involved in this piece.
Kerman describes the concerto soloist's virtuosity as adolescent or " r e g r e s s i ~ e . " ~ ~
With that description, that pianist is like a child testing his or her parents, and one
could say that the immature soloist finds himself rebelling against the orchestra's
authority.
Rather than working out in a classical Oedipal model where the
child/soloist becomes more or less comfortable (or perhaps resigned would be a better
word) to exist bound by authority, the orchestra becomes overly imperious. The
result is Kafkaesque, as in the strange short story The Judgment where the father not
only reasserts his authority over the seemingly disobedient son, but goes farther and
squelches the very existence of the child. A similar argument could be made for
L'Enfant et les Sortilkges: punishing a pianist for being soloistic is like chastising a
child for simply being a child. A dubious transgression is paid for in excessive,
violent atonement.
Any explicit links that may further validate these psychological interpretations,
though, were taken with the composer to the grave, and the readings end up
conflicting: in the analysis suggesting dubious transgression in stages of ascendancy,
the soloist is the victim of the imperious orchestra, and in the other war-related
interpretation it is the aggressor, rightfully put in his place. Arbie Orenstein likewise
finds such flat-footed attempts at psychological mapping through the piece
44
Kerman, 155.
ineffective, and he turns to an even broader idea present in both interpretations:
Orenstein focuses on death, substituting Freudian specificity with Jungian generality:
The Piano Concerto for the Left Hand has given rise to a number of
psychological interpretations, among them the composer's
premonition of his oncoming mental affliction or a commentary on the
tragedy and uselessness of World War I. It seems to me to be rather a
culmination of Ravel's longstanding preoccupation, one might say
obsession, with the notion of death. . . . The tormented conclusion of
La Valse and the Concerto for the Left Hand are but additional
manifestations of this phenomenon.45
A specific psychological interpretation that tries to pry into Ravel's heart via his work
does not suffice for another reason. Ravel was famously proud of having great
feeling, but rarely showing it. As Roland-Manuel said of the composer:
These mysterious powers of the soul, these secret resources of the
subconscious-the artist should feign to ignore that they exist rather
than beseech them to serve him. Heaven helps him who helps himself.
It is not up to him to regulate the course of the subterranean river
whose Alluvium furnished him with the primary medium of his art. . . .
Above all he wants to produce an effcct without revealing his labor.
He then abstains from appearing in his work, of coming between it and
us.46
By distorting the normal concerto form, Ravel cracks this surface of artifice and
invites a deeper psychological interpretation, although he remains aloof as to what
that interpretation should be. What is striking is not the psychological description
itself or a psychoanalysis of the composer, but rather that psychosis is so urgently
suggested. This may be the reason so many critics have interpreted this piece as
heroic. Gallant, uplifting endings are complete to themselves-they
are comfortable
because they end when the performance is over or they inspire an audience to ecstatic
action. Such a piece that is disturbing enough to be called "apocalyptic," a "dying
Ibid.,203.
Quoted from Phillip Wade Russom, A Theory of Pitch Organization for the early works of Maurice
Ravel (Thesis: Yale University, 1985), 196, 7.
45
46
grasp," or an amputation require the viewer to confront that aspect of the piece which
frightens them most. As James Joyce writes about terror:
Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the secret cause.47
Uniting the mind with the cause of terror-war,
rage, violence, oedipal struggle-
would be especially difficult for Europe when this piece was written, which was
rebounding from the first World War and reeling toward the second, all the while
attempting to forget the previous decade in cabarets and jazz.
These dark
interpretations do not conform to how the 1920s and earliest years of the 1930s
appeared on the surface, yet some people did see the sinister. Henri Prunikres wrote
after hearing Wittgenstein play the piece:
Even those, who, as I, admire all of Ravel's achievements, feel a
certain regret at so many Pyrrhic victories, and think still in all that the
author of Daphnis should indeed have been able to let us observe more
frequently what he was guarding in his heart, instead of accrediting the
legend that his brain alone invented these admirable sonorous
fantasmagorias. From the opening measures we are plunged into a
world in which Ravel has but rarely introduced
A subverted surface gives way to a multitude of psychological suggestions; with this
we have arrived at surrealism. Ravel has taken something that at first seems mundane
on the surface, subverted it, and shown there are darker motivations or, in James
Joyce's terms, "secret causes," that lie behind the logical discourse.
As Andrk
Breton, one of the most vocal of the Surrealists, wrote:
...the great value of these operations [such as automatic writing and
accounts of dreams] for surrealism lies in the possibility they have of
47
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: London: Victoria: Toronto:
Auckland: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1992), 221.
48 Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: London: Columbia University Press, 1975),
104.
yielding to the reader particular logical planes, precisely those in
which the logical faculty which is exercised in everything and for
everything in consciousness, does not act. What am I saying! Not
only do these logical planes remain unexplored, but further, we remain
as little informed as ever regarding the origin of the voice which it is
open to each one of us to hear, and which in the most singular fashion
talks to us of something different from what we believe we are
thinking, sometimes becoming solemn when we are most lighthearted, or talking nonsense when we are wretched.49
The widely divergent interpretations of this piece certainly suggest that there
is something speaking to us that differs from "what we believe we are
thinking." Along those lines, Max Ernst was famous for "bringing together
distant realities, and he enlarged the unexpected juxtapositions of his collages
in a series of astonishing canvases executed in a dry, modified realism."50
Realism for the twentieth century Surrealists was a relic of an earlier era, and
what could be more akin to this relic in music than classical double-exposition
form in a twentieth century concerto? What could be a more distant reality to
a piano concerto than an arm amputation?
49
Andr6 Breton, "Surrealism" in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson,
Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 611.
50 Matthew Gale, Dada & Surrealism (London: Phaidon Press, 19971, 221.
A URINAL
IN THE SYMPHONY
HALL:
SUBVERSION
OF SUBJECT IN LA VALSE(1920) AND BOLERO
(1928)
Francis Poulenc gives an account of the odd scene that transpired when Ravel
played Diaghilev the score of La Valse:
I was present at an extraordinary and historic scene in the apartment of
Misia Sert, who knew everybody and was Diaghilev's guardian angel,
when Ravel introduced La Valse to Diaghilev. . . . Diaghilev was to
put La Valse on with the Ballets Russes and Misia's husband, Jos6Maria Sert, was to be the designer.
Ravel arrived very simply, with his music under his arm, and
Diaghilev said to him, in that nasal voice of his: 'Well now, my dear
Ravel, how lucky we are to be hearing La Valse.' Now at the time I
knew Diaghilev very well.. . and I saw the false teeth begin to move,
then the monocle, I saw he was embarrassed, I saw he didn't like it and
was going to say 'No'. When Ravel had got to the end, Diaghilev said
something which I think is very true. He said 'Ravel, it is a
masterpiece . . . but it is not a ballet . . . It's the painting of a ballet.'
And I think that's the reason why no one has ever choreographed La
Valse s u c c e s s f u ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~
There is a paradox that immediately emerges: what is La Valse if it is not a ballet?
After all, it is certainly not the case that the score is undanceable-quite
5'
Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 117-8.
the contrary,
of Ravel's ballet scores, this at first seems to be one of the easiest to dance to.
Daphnis et Chloe (1912), as evocative as the score is, contains many rubato sections
with difficult time signatures, and Ade'lai'de, ou la langage des fleurs (1912), which
was taken from Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (191 1)' at first seems to be in regular %
time, but herniolas, displaced downbeats, and the nebulousness of the final waltz
create some difficulty. Ravel's vision of La Valse, which involved only one unit set
and one set of costumes, certainly lends itself to production-in
contrast, the scenery
alone in Ma Mere l'Oye (1910), which ranges from a magic garden to a dark forest to
Chinese tent, makes that score even less feasible in performance than La
Even Serge Lifar, a friend and biographer of Diaghilev, disagrees with the impresario,
calling La Valse "remarkably beautiful and eminently danceable."
53
~ p n Garafola
e
agrees:
[In his rejection of the ballet,] one also detects that streak of cruelty
that tinged so many of Diaghilev's relationships with "disloyal" or
discarded artists. For La Valse was very much a ballet, as Nijinska, in
a version choreographed in 1929 for Ida Rubenstein's company, and
Balanchine, in his 1951 work for the New York City Ballet, made
clear.54
In many senses, though, Diaghilev was right: La Valse is not really a ballet.
Although it is well known that Diaghilev and Ravel had a rocky relationship, there
may have been more to Diaghilev's rejection than mere vengeance.
Diaghilev did
not say that the music was uninspired or that the score was not danceable, but rather
that La Valse was "the painting of a ballet." Consider the plot that the composer
supplied with his score:
Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 509-10.
Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev: His Lge, his work his legend (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976),193.
j4Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Bullets Russes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
239.
j2
j3
Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly
distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees an immense hall
filled with a swirling throng.
The stage is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers
reaches its peak at the fortissimo.
An imperial court, about 1
This is an unusual scenario for a ballet, and it was not followed in the most successful
staging of La Valse by George Balanchine. First, Balanchine combined La Valse with
Ade'lai'de, producing a longer ballet in two halves that allowed him to create a
narrative.
Secondly, he added some general characters and a spotty plot: three
ominous, high-society women dressed all in black hover menacingly around the
ballroom as a woman in white gradually becomes adorned with similar black
garments and then dies.56
What is so striking about Ravel's version of La Valse is that there is no story and
no characters, but only gradual and dramatic revelation of a location.
For a
composition conceived as a theater piece, the paucity of plot in La Valse is striking,
and for a piece that is supposed to feature dancers, there is very little attention paid to
them in the composer's summary.
Moreover, any semblance of action that Ravel
suggests does not involve the dancers; they are trapped in a constant motion, a
perpetual waltz.
A static state of perpetual motion does not necessarily make for captivating
theater. Both times Bronislava Nijinska tried to stage the piece (in 1929 and 1930),
55 Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader, 5 11. It should be noted that although the printed versions of Ma
Me're 1'Oye and AddaYde are similar to their holograph versions, the holographs are far more detailed.
The holograph of La Valse has never been recovered. For more information, see Orenstein, A Ravel
Reader, 509.
56 ~ i c h a r d
Buckle and John Taras, George Balanchine: Ballet Master (London: Harnish Hamilton
LTD, 1988), 187-8.
she followed Ravel's description and focused on creating an experiential work, not a
plot-driven one:
[The first time she choreographed the piece,] the combination of
massive, baroque dkcor, glittering fantastic costume, and modernist
choreography proved visually and conceptually jarring. Nijinska
suggested to Rubinstein [who owned the company] that Benois [the
designer] redesign the ballet, but Rubinstein demurred. Two years
later, she asked both choreographer and designer to create a new
version, and Nijinska agreed. Although [Nijinska] was satisfied with
her own contribution, she recognized that the ballet as a whole was
unsuccessful.57
Both of Nijinska's productions are a strange mix of modernism, high baroque, and
ice-capades, focused mainly on spectacle, form, and d6cor-quite
different from the
Balanchine version, which tells a story.
What, then, is La Valse? What does it mean to be a "painting of a ballet"?
Ravel's conception of the piece does not directly involve the stage, but rather the
audience's ability to see it. There is no real story to speak of, no maiden in distress,
no languishing couples, no magic, no spells, and no sense of dramatic tragedy on the
part of the dancers. Obviously, the Balanchine version of the ballet does not only
differ in stage spectacle or program plot, it is an entirely different genre.
Balanchine's interpretation is more traditional in the sense that the dance evokes a
story and derives its meaning not only from mise-en-sckne, but also from the impact
of the events and the power of the plot. Ravel's description is the opposite: it is only
rnise-en-sckne. The dancing itself becomes not about representation of a story or
historical idea, but rather the dancers are present simply to evoke a dance in an era.
To the surprise of many listeners, Ravel claims:
57
Nancy Van Norman Baer, Bronislava Nijinska: A Dancer's Legacy (San Francisco: Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 61.
It doesn't have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and
it also doesn't have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the
course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle
between life and death. (The year of choreographic argument, 1855,
repudiates such an assumption.) I changed the original title "Wien" to
La Valse, which is more in keeping with the aesthetic nature of the
increasingly passionate and exhausting whirlwind of dancers, who are
overcome and exhilarated by nothing but 'the waltz.'58
He denies any extra-theatrical associations that would tempt a choreographer to relate
an aspect of contemporary society or particular human struggles in their dance. In a
1921 letter to his friend Ernest Ansermet he relays a similar complaint:
Don't forget to have the programs mention that this "choreographic
poem" is written for the stage. I believe it is necessary, judging from
the surprise which the concluding frenzy has evoked from some
listeners, and, above all, from the fantastic comments of several music
critics. Some situate this dance in Paris, on a volcano, about 1870,
others, in Vienna, before a buffet, in 1 9 1 9 . ~ ~
Again, Ravel seems to be skeptical of culling meanings from the action of the ballet,
claiming that critics wcre mistaking choreography that depicts a scene for
choreography that depicts a plot or a symbolic interplay of meanings. The piece, pace
the reviewers, is not a retelling of a story through dance.
What might it mean for a piece of music to be a "painting of a ballet"? A painting,
after all, is a static representation of an object that requires the viewer to look closely,
to analyze closely, to review in order to gain an appreciation or deeper understanding
of the whole. Diaghilev's description was apt: what happens on the stage is static,
much like a portrait or a sculpture rather than a drama. The waltzing couples are
58
Quoted from Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 423.
This article, written in 1922, is initialed "C. v. W and titled "The French Music Festival: An Interview
with Ravel."
59 ~ r b i Orenstein,
e
A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 212. Orenstein
explains the quote in that the volcano image in 1870 alludes to the Franco-Prussian war and that to
"dance before the buffet" in French is an idiomatic expression meaning that one has no food.
present from the beginning of the piece and there is no indication that they leave at
the end, and the scenery remains fixed throughout Ravel's entire "plot" summary.
The only aspect of this piece that changes is the audience's available perception of the
subject itself: "The clouds gradually scatter: one sees an immense hall filled with a
swirling throng." La Valse is like a kinetic sculpture whose constant whirling does
not change dramaticalIy over time, but develops its meaning through viewing,
studying, and internalizing the various parts until they coalesce for the observer into a
coherent whole.
The process of viewing and reviewing is not limited to the stage; Ravel's score is
written both to mirror the gradual illumination and growing perception of what is
described in the mise-en-sckne, and to provide an object that itself requires the
listener to pull together disparate parts into a complete work of art. Just as the stage
begins in obscurity, so does the first theme:
Bans
Ire Vom
DIY
2ds vom
DIY
Figure 3.1 Maurice Ravel La Valse (Paris: Durand & Co,, 1921), 2-3.
With the strings so thoroughly divided, the sound on any one note is diffused and
uncertain. The pedal point, too, is nebulous: it can be either an E or an F, and
although the basses accent their low E, the bassoons begin their melody on an F,
leaving the tonal center in constant doubt.
Gradually, as the section progresses, the orchestra settles down to an E. Many of
the themes that develop fully later on in the piece are briefly displayed in this section,
as though the listener were like a spectator in an art gallery who lets his or her eye
quickly travel the entire work before focusing on any one part for very long. Yet
these parts, as insignificant as they seem at the outset, become the fodder for entire
sections of music that appear later in the work.
For example, the theme from
rehearsal 19 is built of interrupted antecedent phrases. Finally, after delaying it,
Ravel introduces a concluding, consequent phrase, thus bringing this section to a
close.
Figure 3.2 Maurice Ravel La Valse (Paris: Durand & Co., 1921), 37-8.
This consequent phrase is never heard again in its entirety, but when the antecedent
phrase finally returns, it is abrupt, no more than a fragment, at the close of the entire
work:
Figure 3.3 Maurice Ravel La Valse (Paris: Durand & Co. , 1921), 124.
This type of repetition, of reviewing themes and ideas over and over again, is how the
entire piece is constructed. La Valse is not about the development of a specific set of
themes, but rather it follows the technique of Igor Stravinsky, taking small motives,
filling them out, and juxtaposing them against other motives in the piece, like an eye
first skimming a painting before focusing on any one specific part, as the following
table suggests.
At a certain point in the ballet, though, (rehearsal 54) the mode of interpretation
seems to change.
The composer, who had previously guided the listener in
deconstructing the waltz as a whole, now begins to join the various themes again,
quickly placing one right after the other in an increasingly frenzied finale. It is like
an M. C. Escher drawing, though, where each section of the drawing makes sense
alone, but the total picture becomes impossible when your eye scans the entire
drawing and tries to fit each piece together, like the waterfall that flows back on itself
or a staircase whose beginning meets its end.
Disorientation and fragmentation
become pronounced as the piece builds up to its finale. What starts as deconstruction
becomes nearly seasick as the manner of juxtaposition becomes frustrated:
vons
Altos
Figure 3.4 Maurice Ravel La Valse (Paris: Durand & Co., 1921), 122-3.
The final gesture, though, in the fervent recasting of themes that ends the piece,
brings the listener to a surprising conclusion. A piece that began with a gradual
development of motives results in the breakdown of the unifying theme altogether:
the waltzing halts in a sudden violent quadruplet, sans ralentir. In the final measure,
Ravel breaks the waltz.
With the waltz gone, what do we have left? The principle of traditional ballet was
subverted; perpetual motion in a prescribed pattern does not produce drama. La
Valse, it turns out, is a moving version of the tableau vivant set to dance music, the
sculpture or "painting" of a ballet.
The score, which began with the gradual
construction of a grand Viennese Waltz ends with a denial of that idea, a rejection of
triple meter and a violent close in four. The viewing and reviewing that Ravel guides
his reader through does not end with an appreciation of the piece as a whole, but
instead with confusion and denial of the art itself. It is a piece that denies genre, a
subversion of many forms; it is a ballet that questions ballet, a symphony envisioned
with dancers, a waltz that deconstructs waltzes.
"TRIUMPHOF THE MACHINE, THE VAST MONSTER"
Although it was his most famous and most popular piece, Ravel tried to distance
himself from Bolero. He issued an odd statement for the premiere of the ballet,
which he described later in a 1931 interview:
I am particularly desirous that there should be no misunderstanding
about this work. It constitutes an experiment in a very special and
limited direction, and should not be expected of aiming at achieving
anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does
achieve. Before its first performance, I issued a warning to the effect
that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and
consisting wholly of "orchestral tissue without musicn-of
very gradual crescendo.60
one long,
This statement would be strange enough if Ravel were admitting misgivings about the
music he had written, but he goes even further: he says that the piece consists of
"orchestral tissue without music.""
A similar conceptual problem arises with Bolero
that previously arose with La Valse: what did Ravel write if not music?
A first response may be to take the composer's description with a grain of salt, to
assume that to call his most popular tune mere "orchestral tissue" is modesty, selfdeprecation, or irony-all
of which would fit Ravel's personality.
Yet his
description, sounding scientific in its references to an "experiment" and echoing the
Italian Futurists, finds technological echoes elsewhere in recorded statements from
the composer in 1933:
My own Bolero owed its inception to a factory. Some day I should
likc to play it with a vast industrial works in the background. . . .
The ordinary, everyday sounds of our railways could be made into
works which tell of our progress, which would show how we had
overcome the obstacles of nature and permitted the ingenuity of man
to triumph.
But over all would be the triumph of the machine, the vast monster
that man has created to do his bidding. What a noble inspiration!
Surely one that will in future years be felt by hundreds of composers,
who will bring into being music that will faithfully and beautifully
reflect the spirit of the age in which machinery struggled to lighten the
burdens of man.62
Bolero is indeed inspired by machines, but in quite a startling way. It is not that
Bolero imitates the sounds of cogs or represents the motion of wheels and gadgets
aurally in the same way that Schubert represents a stream or Debussy represents an
Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 477.
For an extended discussion about automatism, the uncanny, and reanimation in Ravel, see Carolyn
Abbate, "Outside the Tomb" from In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
62 Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 399-400.
60
61
ocean-in
fact, the tension between the rigid, implacable bass rhythm and the
sinuous, rubato-like, passionate melody gives the piece much of its excitement. The
melody, however, sounds nothing like factory noise. Bolero is not imitative, but
rather it uses mechanistic methods in its composition. For example, Bolero uses
mechanical ideas in a different musical way than the typewriter of Parade or the
recorded sounds of musique concrkte compositions. In both cases, the artist subdues
the machine into acting in a very human manner, either by recasting the sound in a
human portrayal or structuring sound in an accepted artistic framework.
The
mechanical aspects seem filtered through human thought. Even Honegger's Pacific
231 (1923), which does have some mathematical processes that govern the
development of the score, is not quite the same as Bolero. In 1951 Honegger
described the work in a manner similar to the way Ravel describes his piece:
To tell the truth, in Pacqic I was on the trail of a very abstract and
quite ideal concept, by giving the impression of a mathematical
acceleration of rhythm, while the movement itself slowed. Musically,
I composed a sort of big, diversified chorale, strewn with counterpoint
in the manner of J. S. Bach. . . .
I first called this piece Mouvement Symphonique. On reflection, I
found that a bit colourless. Suddenly, a rather romantic idea crossed
my mind, and when the work was finished I wrote the title, Pacific
231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads and high speed (a
type unfortunately disappeared, alas, and sacrificed to electric
tra~tion).~~
The scientific, mathematical language that appears to have governed the composition
of this piece makes it appear much like Bolero, which also filters creative impulses
through an inorganic, scientific process. However, some sketches for Honegger's
piece appear in a movie score, La Roue, written in 1922, with such descriptors as
63
Arthur Honegger, IAm a Composer, trans.Wilson 0. Clough and Allan Arthur Willman (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1966), 101.
"locomotive" written over the staves."
In other words, Pacific 231, a precursor to
Bolero in many respects, is still conceived as an imitative piece. Bolero is the
opposite, it is human thought filtered through machine, not human thought depicting
machine. It is a tape loop, an unrelenting engine of a rhythm.
In Ravel's statement about machinery, there is a sudden change in the last
paragraph. He acknowledges that musique concr2te and the representation of factory
sound by music will probably occur, but he goes one step further: suddenly the artist
loses agency as Ravel personifies machinery. It is not that humans will feel the
triumph of their invention, it is that "machine, that vast monster" will triumph; it is
not man that invents to overcome hardship, but rather that industry itself benevolently
struggles to help man. Bolero is not art imitating machine, but rather the opposite: it
is a machine imitating art. It is formula music, a two-part theme that loops nine
times, a drum machine set to constantly pound out a triplet rhythm. The melody only
sounds rubato, but it is actually played strictly in time; it is an imitation of
improvisation. Heard in this vein, Ravel's description of "orchestral tissue without
music" becomes eerie: Bolero is an aural Frankenstein's monster, a being created
from the tissue of orchestra, given the voice of a Spanish tune, and pre-programmed
to sing perpetually its song. Thematically, melodically, and rhythmically it begins
where it ends; it comes into the world fully developed and leaves much the same way.
The drama in the score of Bolero does not arise from thematic development,
harmonic tension, or formal tinkering.
Bolero is carried forward solely by its
orchestration, the force and strength from each separate component part of the
64
Harry Halbreich, Arthur Honegger, trans Roger Nichols, ed. Reinhard G. Pauly (Portland: Amadeus
Press, 1999), 351.
ensemble, and through this gives the appearance of motion while actually standing
still: much like the dancers in La Valse, it is perpetual spinning in place, a kinetic
sculpture. However, it is as though the engine powering Bolero cannot withstand the
force that it
accumulate^!^
In the final moments of the piece, the mechanism begins
to overheat and collapse. The steady rhythm that underpins most of the piece literally
begins to split apart and buckle. Take, for instance, the scoring of the rhythm in the
woodwinds as the piece nears its conclusion:
Figure 3.5 Maurice Ravel, Bolero. ed Arbie Orenstein (London: Mainz: New York: Paris:
Tokyo: Ziirich: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd., 1994), 56.
In "Ballet and the apotheosis of the dance" from The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, Deborah
Mawer gives an in-depth account of how modality depicts a machine breaking in Bolero, dealing
mainly with accumulating tension between the largely diatonic bass and the increasingly Phrygian and
Lydian (in a bitonal context) melody. See Deborah Mawer, "Ballet and the apotheosis of the dance"
from The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
Again, we hear a restless motion that moves nowhere. This kind of uneasiness
increases until the engine, figuratively speaking, jumps its tracks by suddenly
modulating to E major. Deborah Mawer, in writing about the breakdown of the
machine, calls it a "crude transposition of the whole apparatus up a major third:
popular song technique gone-one-better."66
Figure 3.6 Maurice Ravel, Bolero, ed. Arbie Orenstein (London: Mainz: New York: Paris:
Tokyo: Zurich: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd., 1994), 64.
" Mawer,
160.
The buckling that happened in C major as shown above gains enough torque to move
the omnipresent G to G-sharp. When the machine is put on track again, the force is
too great to sustain: the brass play glaring glissandos with excessive vibrato added to
impart instability, percussion suddenly becomes more than a military drum and
timpani, now including crash cymbals, a bass drum, and a tam-tam. The entire piece,
as in La Valse, breaks down:
Figure 3.7 Maurice Ravel, Bolero, ed. Arbie Orenstein (London: Mainz: Paris: Tokyo: Ziirich:
Ernst Eulenburg Ltd., 1994), 67.
With the machine broken, what do we have left?
The ending is illogical because
it develops from nothing except for the inability of the piece to sustain itself or grow
any further (after all, even Ravel's orchestra only had a limited number of
instruments). It simply hits a brick wall. Like the framework of La Valse, the
structure of Bolero-an
inorganic mold that rigidly governs the piece-breaks,
and
what remains is puzzling: it is a piece that defies the normal conventions of
development. It is not a form of proto-minimalism, because that kind of music is
wholly dependent on subtle but constant change; it is perpetual motion in place. Ravel
himself denies that this piece is even music. It is an automatism, a factory object, a
piece out of place in a symphony hall.
THEFAILURE OF ART
It is curious that Ravel, a champion of classical form and decorum in his early
career, would so flagrantly flout it in these two pieces.
These works not only
explode musical form, but even more interestingly, resist entire genres: La Valse is
not really a ballet, Bolero, though successful as a dance, has a score that the composer
claims is not really music. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp released similar genre-breaking
paradoxes on the artistic world when he premiered his newest piece in his line of
ready-mades. It was called Fountain, but was nothing more than an overturned urinal
signed "R. Mutt." What seemed like a mere tongue-in-cheek, thumb at the nose
gesture raised serious questions about what constitutes art. As John Cage suggests:
The ready-mades transform our experience of art and reality so
fundamentally that it makes us wonder whether our own commonplace
reality is but an extension of Duchamp's challenge of the autonomy of
art.67
When Duchamp questions what constitutes art, he also casts other art forms into
doubt. If a urinal is art, can a toilet flush be music? Where does the barrier between
Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in transit (Berkeley: Los Angeles: London: University of
California Press, 1995), 75-6.
67
what constitutes art and what constitutes real life begin and end?
What do
specifically designated pieces of art do for the artist and the spectator?
Lawrence Kramer offers one answer to the question of the function of
designating specific pieces as art versus life. In discussing Daphnis et Chloe, Kramer
labels the dabs of exoticism that color Ravel's score "conspicuous sublimation":
[In Daphnis and Chloe] the elemental drives, the impulses of the body
in desire and the mind in fantasy, are both released and confined by
their artistic representation in Ravel's score . . . . In other, more
Freudian terms, Ravel's score is an exercise in sublimation. But this is
sublimation of a special kind: one that, like the late nineteenth-century
style of the leisure-class consumption described by Thorstein Veblen,
is meaningful only when it is observed. The drives appear to be free
only the better to serve the display of mastery and craftsmanship. This
is conspicuous sublimation.@
In other words, "conspicuous sublimation" is a sort of ostentatious framing of a
personal desire or drive. Creating "Greek" music with magical, modal, wordless
choirs and scenic orchestral effect distances something from an audience and frames
it for safe viewing. Art is a screen that makes the unconscious safe for viewing.
Daphnis et Chloe is often a very sexual story, and Benjamin Ivry has gone so far as to
label it a code for Ravel's hornosexual fantasies."
Although this is certainly
unsubstantiated (Ravel was very guarded about his personal life, especially in his
romantic interests), Ivry is correct in noting that a sexual tension does exist in the
score that, however, remains somewhat distant to the spectator because of the effect
of the stylistic frame. Daphnis and Chloe is explicit through code, a set of symbols
once removed from their actual meaning. La Valse and Bolero subvert that step; by
"
Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: Los Angeles: London:
University of California Press, 1995), 203.
69
Benjamin Ivry, Maurice Ravel: A Life (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000), 4.
providing an obvious crack for the code, they bring the audience closer to the
underlying tensions of the ballets.
The plot of Bolero, which was also a ballet (though, unlike La Valse the scenario
was not written by the composer), involves a Spanish woman seductively dancing
atop a table as onlookers ogle and join in. It contains the same degree of exoticism
and shielded sexuality as Dnphnis ef Chloe. La Valse, due to its title, has certain
connotations built in. Mosco Carner writes that the
charm, elegance, vivacity, and sophistication of [Strauss'] music
mirrored the glitter and joie de vivre of nineteenth century imperial
Vienna. It is music that no longer breathes the air of the country inns,
common city taverns and beer gardens, but reflects a society in which
Vienna's hedonistic spirit found its most articulate expression.70
In both La Valse and Bolero, Ravel makes these sublimating frames more than
conspicuous, he makes them flimsy. The waltz, the ballet, and the form are not only
obvious as framing devices in these two scores, but before the final double-bar, the
composer actually breaks them down right in front of the audience's eyes. This is the
tragedy of these two ballets, although many scholars claim that the tragedy is
historically rooted, despite the composer's clearest statements to the contrary. Glenn
Watkins, for example, argues:
Ravel's claim in 1922 that placing the story of his ballet in 1855
precluded the assignment of symbolic meaning to La Valse in the
present was a clear enough tactic, but in light of evidence, it does not
washS7'
70 MOSCO
Carner
and Max Schonherr, "Johann (Baptist) Strauss (ii)" from The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, vol 18, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1980),
210.
71 Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: Los Angeles:
London: University of California Press), 394.
Ravel's tragedy comes not from symbol-to-symbol assignment of meaning, but rather
he claims it comes from the failure to do so convincingly:
Some people have seen [La Valse] as a tragic affair; some have said
that it represented the end of the Second Empire, others said that it was
a postwar Vienna. They are wrong. Certainly, La Valse is tragic, but
in the Greek sense: it is a fatal spinning around, the expression of
vertigo and of the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of
paroxysm. La Valse is meant for the stage.. .72
It is the break down of "voluptuousness" as a shield, the "paroxysm" of a dance,
framed by a proscenium, that can no longer contain itself and its underlying motives.
The tragedy of La Valse and Bolero, therefore, is the failure of art.
With this, we have arrived at Dadaism. Surface here is not only subverted, it is
destroyed leaving the onlooker free to gaze on Bolero and La Valse for what they
truly are: a shattered veneer that covers deep drives, be they sexual, fear-driven, or
any other multitude of impulses that conspicuous sublimation mitigates and tames for
safe viewing. They are unlawful pieces, breaking the frames that contain them, akin
to Tristan Tzara's original desire for Dada literature:
There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the
work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced
for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which
laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy
seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the
crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way it is printed.
On the one hand, a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the
glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men.73
These pieces share Tzara's passionate, destructive, anarchic goals for art, along with
the rejuvenating features of a brave new world, as in Ravel's views of machines
Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 434.
Tristan Tzara, "Dadaism" from The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson,
Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965): 595.
72
73
improving and revolutionizing humankind. They also share some of the egotism, as
if the Dadaist leanings of Ravel's ballets reveal the psychosis that is the focus of
Surrealism. Arbie Orenstein once again tries to pin these emotions down in Ravel's
personal life; the pressure of the accumulated, unresolved themes becomes so great
that the piece breaks down, revealing personal strain in the composer's life:
Although La Valse carries on the tradition of the Valses nobles et
sentimenatles, the concluding passages open up a fresh dimension in
Ravel's art, that of tension bordering on the breaking point. It is
apparent that the disorientation of World War I and the composer's
personal grief following his mother's death have been sublimated in
this "fantastic and fatal whirling."74
Manuel Rosenthal, though, shies away from associating the torment of La Valse and
Bolero with specific incidents from the composer's life. He leaves association to a
very general level, focusing on death and anguish rather than biographical concerns:
La Valse has two things in it. One is a tribute to the genius of Johann
Strauss.. . . The other thing we find in La Valse is at the end-and long
before the end, from the start of the second half-a kind of anguish, a
very dramatic feeling of death. Instead of ending merely brilliantly, it
ends with a sort of cry from the whole orchestra. I think that in the
latter part of his life many of Ravel's compositions show that he had a
feeling for a dramatic death-the Bole'm, for instance.75
Although Ravel admits no exact personal connection, he does say the pieces are
tragic. They are tragic in a very specific manner, though: "in the Greek sense." James
Joyce in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, identifies what he feels to be the
power of Greek tragedy:
Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. . .
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind
74
Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: London: Columbia University Press, 1975),
189.
75 Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 62.
in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. . . .
The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking in two ways, towards
terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use
the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the
dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic,
desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something;
loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic
emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are
therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term)
is therefore static. . . .
Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion
which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or
ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, and
ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last
dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.76
Joyce's description of tragedy describes a hard-earned stasis. The ability to be
objective comes from having experienced two emotional extremes; from being pulled
in two directions at once, and from this constant tugging, becoming static again. A
feeling of objectivity, between "ideal pity" and "ideal terror," is found in Bolero and
La Valse: perpetual motion without movement. This was mirrored in the actual
choreography of Bolero:
. . .with an almost demonic indifference, Ida Rubenstein rotated
without halting, in this stereotyped rhythm, on an immense round
tavern table, whilst at her feet the men, expressing unleashed passion,
beat themselves until blood came. . .77
Here, the idea of stasis in motion, epitomized in the "indifferent" Rubenstein,
suggests both passion and violence-a
sort of sadistic infatuation with the "exotic"
dancer. Yet, she remains an object; one of the basic surrealist constructions is the
displacement of the human mind, the human body, by inorganic surrogates: the
7"ame~ Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin
Books, 1993), 221,2, 3.
77 Quoted from Mawer, 158. Originally from Willi Reich, 'In memoriam Maurice Ravel" from La
Revue musicale, 19, special issue (December 1938), 275.
flattening of the human and nonhuman onto a single involuntary plane of action.78
Carolyn Abbate, in her essay about automatism in Ravel, suggests that Ravel's
mechanical music literally compels the listener to look in two directions at once:
towards "the magical" and "the terrible."
By 1900, marionettes and automata, vast music boxes, and music
machines with their terrible hands are all Janus-faced, both magical
and terrible. . . . What remains unspoken is the degree to which
magical mechanisms, even within such pieces, continue to suggest
dystopias, and whether Ravel's music, with its fugitive melancholy,
acknowledges both faces on Janus's head.79
In addition to the idea of being "Janus-faced," there is also a duality of sentiment in
the writing of the passage: "magical mechanisms" that suggest utopias gone wrong;
"fugitive," but not absent, "melancholy."
Certainly, Ravel's pieces require one to
move two ways. The sensuality and sinuousness of the melody against the rigidity of
the rhythm in Bolero make one acknowledge both the passion of the song and the
inexorability of its seemingly ceaseless repetition.
La Valse, with its swooping
single-string melodies and nostalgic feel, is ultimately a piece of terror and
breakdown.
Additionally, Greek tragedy in Joyce's sense is not distanced observation, it is an
emotive process, pulling one's hair and gnashing one's teeth, that arrives eventually
at catharsis. Walter Pater views art in a similar fashion:
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. A counted
number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.
How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest
senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be
present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces
unite in their purest energy?
78
79
Albright, 272.
Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 215.
To burn always with this hard, gernlike flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life.80
Objectivity, the ability to "pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present
always at the focus," is achieved through personal experience, not merely the
observation of what others have gained-"the
fruit"-from
definition, too, is a paradoxical constancy in motion-after
gernlike flame"?
experience.
His
all, what is a "hard,
The description, which gives something as ephemeral as a
flickering flame the durable qualities of diamond, suggests that art allows one to
maintain intense ardor, not merely study it from afar. Sustaining that experience,
though, is done through study; the study of art allows passion to be made crystalclear.
Ravel's goals with Bolero and La Valse, therefore, are not merely historical
representation or even the representation of sexual desire: they too seek catharsis,
they too seek outpouring, they require an audience's emotional interaction that breaks
beyond what artistic decorum normally allows. Bolero does not merely represent sex,
it seeks out sensuality, which may explain the number of passionate scenes it
accompanies in movies or sensual dances it inspires, most notably that of the skating
duo Torvill and Dean. La Valse is not the depiction of mere tragic plot, but rather it
depicts the very feeling of spinning out of control: it is no accident that Ravel
pictured La Valse as continuous dancing. It is a piece that needs dancers, not ballet; it
needs them for their experience, not what they aim to represent. Additionally, the
properties of each piece seek to maintain that "gernlike flame" and perpetuate the
passion by self-conscious study. La Valse, after all, pulls itself apart and analyzes
Walter Pater, "The Renaissance," from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol2C, 7thed.,
ed M.H. Abrams (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 1643-4.
each component for the listener, and Bolero repeats itself; it is study by rote. Each
one ends with a question mark of sorts, a musical idea that not only is previously
absent in the piece, but also works against it: the sublimation that lends itself to
decorous art is not possible, and, as many scholars and listeners feel, there is a sense
of deep emotion or terror in both pieces that becomes readily apparent to the listener.
They are pulled in two directions at once: toward the terror of an introverted
insomniac who had just lived through the horrors of World War I, the death of his
mother, and severe illness that foreshadowed his death, and drawn toward the
enthusiastic, "bird-like" little man who planned his own surprise birthday party." La
Valse may seem Austrian and Bolero may sound Spanish, but they are Greek at heart.
8l
Larry Weinstein, Ravel's Brain, Rhombus Media, Bullfrog Films, inc., 2000, videocassette.
THECAT's MOUAO/ MOUAZN:
SUBVERSION
OF MIMESIS
IN L'ENFANT
ET LES SORTILEGES (1925)
CATCALLS
ON OPENING NIGHT
What does a musical cat sound like? How can music represent something like an
animal? Consider Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals ( 1886), for instance. Lions,
being the king of the forest, receive a sauntering march; swans receive gentle,
arpeggiated, graceful music; and squirrels-also
animal world-receive
called piano players in this particular
skittish scales and Czernyesque finger patterns.
In
Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (1936), the bird is a light, playful flute; the boy is a
"skipping" string section; the crotchety old grandfather is a bassoon; and the wolf is
an ominous horn section, which starts slow, and, as if sneaking, picks up rhythmic
intensity and increases in volume until it pounces with a cymbal roll. In all of these
pieces, the music imitates characteristic movements or noises with instruments: SaintSaens' elephants receive an uneven, bass-heavy, galumphing waltz with thick block
chords and a contrabass melody; his donkeys talk with a piano "hee-haw"-a
high
note followed by a long note, forcefully attacked with a quick upbeat. As a rule, birds
fly in the high registers with fast arpeggios or scales played on high-register
instruments; they sing in warbling runs, dotted with grace notes; cuckoos sing in
descending minor thirds; hens always peck with clumsy grace notes or sharp stabbed
blocks in the interval of a second; and swans are always graceful and contemplative,
representing their poised gliding through water. Ravel observed this conventional
musical lexicon for animal representation in his earlier works. L'Histoire naturelles
(1906), for example, contains many of the familiar characters from Saint-Saens and
Prokofiev, like the graceful swan and the pecking hen. The cuckoos in the clocks of
L'Heure Espagnol (1911) sing in warbling minor thirds amidst the sound of their
mechanics. The birds in the famous sunrise sequence of Daphnis et Chloe (1912) are
audible in the flutes and violins, even though they do not appear on stage.
As enjoyable as they are, all of these examples are really quite poor at animal
mimicry.
What exactly inspires an elephant to have loud, raucous chords
accompanying it? Does an elephant's walk actually make a noise other than the
sound of a large dead weight hitting solid surface? Why do hens peck in a minor
second-could
a piano player tap the soundboard of his or her instrument for a more
accurate representation? These examples are not interested in accuracy, but rather in
symbolic representation.
They transform a salient characteristic of one of these
animals into a musical depiction, which is generally contained within a normal
musical framework dictated by an underlying harmonic progression, rhythm, or
formal structure. Elephants get a slow, clumsy waltz, not because their movement
suggests a waltz in some way, but rather because the composer must contain their
musical mimesis within an accepted form, and the idea of a waltzing elephant is
charming.
The musical representation of animal sound provoked a strong response at the
premiere of L'Enfant et les Sortil2ges.
Nothing in the opera proved more
controversial than the duet for two cats that closes the first scene. What was so
upsetting about Ravel's cat duet? On paper, it seems merely another imitation of
animals over a familiar musical backdrop, in this case the classic love duet. As in
Mozart's "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni, the two lovers (here they are
cats), sing lines that answer one another in phrases that gradually decrease in length,
until finally-when
the woman gives herself over to the seduction-the
two sing
together. Rossini did nearly the same thing:
Figure 4.1 Giacomo Rossini, Duetto Buffo di due Gatti. ed. Carl Steuber (Milan: G. Ricordi & C.
Editori, 1970), 2.
In this duet, the two cats trade off 8-bar phrases, then they alternate almost every
measure, until by the end of the slow A section they sing together. In classic love-
duet fashion, the two cats then sing in thirds, and end the piece with a section of
ecstatic vocal display. Yet, other than the "miau" that comprises the singers' libretto,
what exactly is cat-like about Rossini? Do cats sing in 8-bar phrases? Do they meow
with passage work? Except for the first phrase, which could be said to vaguely
resemble a cat's meow, the humor of this piece seems to stem from the farcical idea
that two cats could sound like opera singers (or, perhaps, that opera singers, for all
their training and technique, sound remarkably like cats).
The harmony, the form,
and the melodies are all culled from conventional opera buffa, drawing far more from
the concert hall than the pet store.
Where Rossini's cats sing, Ravel's cats definitely meow:
Figure 4.2 Maurice Ravel, L'Enfant et Les Sortilbges (Paris: Durand & Co., 1925), 126.
With his sliding pitches, disjunct lines, and unusual orchestration, Ravel does not
create a recognizable line or tune, and there is not much musical texture to support
these sparse melodies.
In fact, the duet almost defies notation: pitches are only
approximately notated, the meter is constantly morphing to fit the melody line
, and ,, and the bizarre harmony which focuses on tri-tones defies a definite
2t3
between
3t2
key. In fact, what Ravel notates more exactly than pitch, meter, or rhythm is timbre.
He divides the strings with great precision, and each player is given subtle
instructions as to what sound quality each note should have, as in what string to play
a line on, seemingly random harmonics, and portamenti. Ravel uses just about every
reed he can muster, including bass clarinets and contrabassoon, not to play a melodic
line but to color it. The singers have specific instructions on how any given note
should sound, be it nasal, humming, or hissing.
What seemed to astound the first Parisian audiences was just how realistic the
sounds of these two faux-cats were. As H d h e Jourdan-Morhange recalls:
Only [Ravel] could have written the cats' duet in L'Enfant et les
sortileges with such accurate onomatopoeia. One day we were singing
this duet when the cat family, in some distress, walked into the room.
I must add that Ravel's cat imitations were exceptionally good!82
Ravel agonized over composing this scene, and worked on achieving this mimesis in
surprising detail. Colette de Jouvenal, the librettist, remembers receiving a letter
from him asking if it would be acceptable to replace the "Moua6" with "Mouain" and
vice versa.
The result, according to Roland-Manuel, was a startlingly realistic
musical representation of the sounds of two cats meowing in the twilight that outdid
any imitation that detractors or boisterous observers in the music hall could muster:
It is even claimed that the success of the work is due to the claque
which you employ to imitate the cat at the end of the first scene.
Therefore, I promise to imitate the cat the next time I go to hear
L'Enfant et les sortileges, but I will be less successful at it than your
music.83
Although it is certainly odd to think that Ravel would place purring patrons in the
theater, perhaps more startling still is that Roland-Manuel considers it an homage to
Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Faber, 1987), 129.
Arbie Orenstein, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), 270.
8z
83
his friend to meow-a
tribute to the composer's uncanny ability to imitate natural
sounds through orchestration. Therefore, when Parisian audiences booed they were
not saying that Ravel's portrayal of cats was unconvincing but rather the opposite: the
cats sounded too much like cats and not enough like Rossini or, for that matter, Ravel.
Roland-Manuel writes:
I spoke with Messager about his [negative] review. His opinion is
categorical: by removing every element of sensibility from your music,
you condemn yourself to composing nothing more than imitative
music, which in his view is intolerable. The serious error in his article,
in my view, is that he claims you sacrifice everything for some
orchestral effects, when it seems to me that L'Enfant is the least
orchestrated but the most orchestral work you have writtenE4
For Roland-Manuel, the composer's craft, the act of orchestration, paradoxically
disappears, although there is certainly a virtuosic orchestra in the theater. Somehow,
he claims that Ravel made the orchestra sound imitative without revealing what was
doing the imitating; he believed that Ravel walked a fine line between the realistic
and orchestral mimicry. Again, it is almost too real, effacing the orchestra as an
imitative device. There is no Rossini writing here, and according to Roland-Manuel,
also very little of Ravel.
Even within the world of the opera itself, this "realism" is acknowledged as
unusual. The child, accustomed to being chastised by angry household objects in his
own language, assumes the cat will talk to him. The cat replies with a humorous hiss
and a meow. The two cats proceed to sing, not a decorous love aria, but a duet
portraying two animals having sex-a
scandalous sight for any child. Roland-Manuel
referred to the opera as a "familiar cautionary tale for children," but by leaving the
84
Ibid.
traditional, "safe" manner of musical representation, perhaps it became too familiar
and too
TOOELOQUENT FOR THE "BRAINLESS"
What, though, would be more realistic to an audience's ears, Rossini's cats or
Ravel's cats? Ravel's may sound closer to reality, but they somehow seem less
convincing than Rossini's as an interpretation of cats. With Rossini, the audience is
willing to suspend their disbelief in order to acknowledge the humor of hearing cats
sing an aria. Anyone walking into a theater with Rossini's duet on the bill would let
the two singers pretend to be cats without questioning the obvious falsity. Ravel,
though, sets a trap for himself by writing realistic cat noises. Without the musical
buttress of a waltz or a traditional love-duet, Ravel's claim at reality is laid bare for
the listener, and although the impersonation is good, they arc certainly not cats nor
are they singing an aria. Instead, they are something that straddles that line. This
nervous realism is true in any theatrical experience; imagine an actor playing a sick
person onstage and having to cough after one of his or her lines.
comfortable to watch if the cough is fake-if
It is only
the actor is not really sick. As one
approaches too closely to realism, the willingness to suspend disbelief seems to
vanish and the inability to create an air-tight fictional world suddenly becomes more
obvious and creates too close a link between the audience's world and the stage.
There are many moments in the opera that seem to subvert theatrical realism by
undermining what the audience can disbelieve. For example, the decorous musical
accompaniment of Carnival of the Animals or Peter and the Wolf is present in the
85
Roland-Manuel, Maurice Ravel, ti-. Cynthia Jolly (London: D. Dobson, 1947), 92.
first half of the foxtrot for the English teapot and the Chinese teacup. As the song
progresses, though, the music suddenly becomes a little too bizarre, and each
character's music bitonally grates up against the other's. Too bizarre, also, are the
shepherds that jump off the wallpaper. Accompanied by the musical clichk of a
droning hurdy-gurdy fifth, they suddenly sing minor ninths against each other-a
dissonance that is jarring, a dissonance which distorts our ability to accept the fake
instruments they should be piping.Y6 he broken clock's music, too, which certainly
is a good representation of a disgruntled timepiece, almost becomes too frenetic. Just
as his music becomes a little too wild and disjointed, moving from lyrical phrase to
angry exhortation, his logic becomes too serious to be part of a child's fantasy:
Peut-2tre que, s'il ne m'eiit mutilie
Rien n'autrait jamais change'
Dans cette demeure.
Peut-2tre qy'aucun n'y fQt jamais
mort.. .
Si j'avais pu continuer de sonner,
Toutes pareilles les unes aux autres
Les heures!
Perhaps, if he hadn't mutilated me,
Nothing would ever have changed
In this house.
Perhaps no one would ever have
died.. .
If I had been able to go on striking
The hours,
One and all exactly alike!
A broken clock becomes more than parody performed by a singer who cannot keep
time, it becomes a death-threat from someone who sings like a loose cannon. The
squirrel, too, has a change in tone that seems somehow jarring. His first entrance is a
funny little syncopated scene dotted with the squirrelly "heu heu" as he discusses his
unhappy life as a pet in a cage. Abruptly, though, the squirrel becomes a freedom
fighter, totally out of place among the "brainless" animals. This is reflected in the
accompaniment, which contains one of the most interesting chord progressions in the
entire opera:
86
See Carolyn Abbate, "Outside the Tomb," In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001) 227-8.
Figure 43.3 Maurice Ravel, L'Enfant et les Sortil2ges (Paris: Durand & Co., 1925), 184-5.
The squirrel's d-sharp is the enharmonic equivalent to the e-flat tonic of the new key,
not the leading tone to the expected e-major chord. His note, in other words, begins
at odds within an inhospitable key (the leading tone being very unstable) and through
his persistence he finds himself liberated in the new tonality. That sort of eloquence
and sophistication is very unusual when placed against the earlier section of
humorous squirrel-mimicry.
The opera fails at achieving the correct balance of falsity to realism. For every
flute-like bird in the opera, there is a strangely eloquent squirrel; for every
arpeggiated nightingale, there is an insane clock. The jarring moments mentioned
acknowledge the world outside that of the opera. And there are still those strange
cats. Arthur Honegger, who, as a member of Les Six,was not always sympathetic to
Ravel, attempted to explain how the imitative nature of the cats' duet somehow
transcended pure transcription:
Ravel was not concerned with imitating the mewing of cats; but he has
so used it as to build up a melodic line deriving from it. In it is to be
found the whole crux of so-called "imitative" music.87
"So-called 'imitative' music" is an apt description; this music imitates on the surface,
but actually subverts this objective recording endeavor. Colette herself, when she
heard the opera, seemed to feel the same tension between the playful, objective
veneer of musical sortilkges and the deeply moving quality of Ravel's music:
The score of L'Enfant et les sortilkges is now famous. How can I
describe my emotion when, for the first time, I heard the little drum
accompanying the shepherd's procession? The moonlight in the
garden, the flight of the dragonflies and bats.. . "Isn't that fun?" Ravel
would say. But I could feel a knot of tears tightening in my throat.@
Ravel does more than merely acknowledge that external world as in Prokofiev's and
Saint-Saens' playfully imitative scores.
His imitations are not impressive
impersonations, but rather they sit unnervingly close to the world of human emotions.
In order to achieve this remarkable verisimilitude, Roland-Manuel naturally
assumes that the composer (who was something of a cat-enthusiast) went straight to
the most accurate real-life depiction of feline-vocalisms and notated them: "Certainly
87
Roland-Manuel, 95.
Nichols, 58.
Ravel spent a lot of time ruffling the fur of his two Siamese cats the better to notate
their purrings."89 his assumption implies that the composer's voice is somehow
limited, if not entirely eliminated, in notating animal noises. Ravel, in other words,
was an elaborate tape recorder. In this way, according to Carolyn Abbate, Ravel as a
composer is largely inhuman, and whatever glimpses we get of the subjectivity of the
composer are almost an accident. She claims that L'Enfant is a work of artifice that
conceals the composer and librettist in a facade of musical realism. By writing in this
manner of strict imitation, Ravel never lets his objectively imitative guard down.
Abbate claims:
[Ravel's] impassiveness, which for Jankklkvitch is projected in artifice
and musical mechanism, is itself along with those mechanisms "an
allegory, a significant figure, the exoteric appearance of a hidden
intention." But one should leave it alone, revere its elusiveness:
denying the automaton to find a "horrifying life-substance" [real life]
is cause for a panicked outcry,90
In other words, seeking Ravel himself in the score of L'Enfant is almost dangerous.
Any glimpses of the composer's own subjectivity would be like looking for the
proverbial "man behind the curtain," whose presence would not only be
disillusioning, but Abbate claims, would cause distress, as if the ineffable humanity
of a person is somehow too intense if it pierces through the affected facade.
Surprisingly, in writing the cat duet, Ravel did not transcribe one of his own pets
but rather used a friend's imitation of a cat:
~ i c h a r dLangham Smith, "Ravel's Operatic Spectacles: L'Heure and L'Enfant" in The Cambridge
Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203.
Abbate, 242.
89
Rather than notate his own Siamese cats, Ravel asked H6l&neJourdanMorhange to imitate their meows, and this marked the duet's point of
departure.91
In other words, what sounded to Roland-Manuel like a better imitation of cats than
any audience member could muster was not the notation of a real cat, but rather an
imitation of H&ne Jourdan-Morhange's imitation of cats. Odd, too, is JourdanMorhange's claim cited earlier that nobody was better at feline imitation than Ravel
considering she is the inspiration for those cats. In the very act of composition, Ravel
was subverting the mimetic tendency that so many critics hold as the hallmark of this
opera. What seems to be objective imitation of the real is actually quite a subjective
process; it is the transcription not of a sound, but of a performance. Considering that
Ravel's transcription of cat sounds was actually a transcription of an imitation of cats,
Abbate's unbreeched, objective world of unfiltered imitative fiction is breeched by
the presence of a very real, very subjective figure.
In this vein, there are several moments where Ravel actually allows the world of
the stage and the child's fantasy to intermingle with the world of the audience and the
real. Perhaps there is no more poignant example of the blend of reality and the
fictional world of a child's imagination than at the end of the opera. In the final
violent argument, the discourse of the animals gradually breaks down:
91
Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: London: Columbia University Press,
1975), 195.
Figure 4.4 Maurice Ravel, L'Enfant et les Sortiliges (Paris: Durand & Co., 1925), 199-200.
What started as a relatively orderly march against the child loses its ability to produce
coherent sound. The final unpitched slide creates cacophony, and the following
section involves the gradual rebuilding of the ability to produce coherent operaspeech. It begins as tentative spoken sentence fragments and gradually becomes a
sung cry to the mother; what begins as unfamiliar language in the world of an
opera-speech-becomes
familiar again when it is sung, mirroring the transformation
of the animals' words from onstage fantasy to onstage reality.
It is at this moment that the opera acknowledges fantasy and its bearing on real
life. Ravel both imitates animals through humans (by notating H&ne JourdanMorhange's imitation) and also imitates humans through animals (by having the
beasts cry "Maman"). It is a study of the capacity to imitate and the capacity to be
enchanted by imitation. The final moments of the opera place the animals back in
their fantasy-idiom of tightly constructed music (their chorale is a fugue), and
superimposed on that are the wandering, lazy oboes from the opera's quasi-recitative
opening in the "real" world of the child and the mother. The last bars of the opera
provide an acknowledgement that fiction, fantasy, and reality coexist.
Both the initial reactions to L'Enfant and the examples cited above seem to
suggest that, despite the realistic quality of the musical imitations and despite
Abbate's warnings, somehow the man behind the curtain was revealed in this work.
Ravel does not simply create an elaborate world of fiction populated by toys, china,
and animals, and the opera is not a closed system of imitation and facade. Instead, he
draws the world of the audience into the world contained within the proscenium and
the work becomes not only realistic, but actually human. These characters are not
mere Sortilkges. In fact, when the boy asks the cats if they are going to talk to him,
the libretto seems self-consciously to acknowledge the audience. Overwhelmed by
the onslaught of talking household objects, the little boy sees the cat and says "C'est
toi, Chat.? Que tu es grand et terrible! Tu parles aussi, sans doule" to which the Cat
replies with a hiss and a meow. The humor of the situation is its irony. The child is
just as bewildered as the audience by the animated objects, and expects the cats to
talk, too. Irony, though, is self-conscious; and by turning to the audience and winking
in this way, the librettist and composer acknowledge the falsity of their theatrical
world. They make the illusion flimsy; the man behind the curtain is not only present
at the performance, but he is hamming.
It is not only the libretto, but also the score itself that breaks the fourth wall and
acknowledges the flimsiness of the affected verisimilitude. Take, for instance, the
orchestration of the opening to the opera:
Figure 4.5 Maurice Ravel, LfEnfantet les Sortil2ges (Paris: Durand & Co., 1925), 1.
When the contrabass enters, an instruction above the staff indicates that the child
begins to sing sotto voce or to hum. The bass is an odd choice for an instrument here
since it must affect a sound in order to play the line. As the bass masks its identity by
pretending to be a violin, one can hear a parallel to the fifty-year-old composer
portraying the experiences of a child. In a similar vein, the orchestration for the
child's actual vocal entrance is somewhat odd:
2 Hautb
UEnlrnt
ICB
Figure 4.6 Maurice Ravel, L 'Ertfant et Les Sortil2ges (Paris: Durand & Co., 1925), 1.
As Roger Nichols points out, the child has an "adult quality" in that the vocal part is
written below the orchestra."
Ravel here seems to be impersonating and actively
calling our attention to the idea of imitation, in all its falsity, as a device for the
opera's composition.
There are passages in the opera that seem to mirror moments in Ravel's life. For
example, during his military service, Ravel wrote to a friend:
" Nichols,
124.
Undoubtedly, I will see things which will be more frightful and
repugnant [than this ruined city]; I don't believe I will ever experience
a more profound and stranger emotion, than this sort of mute terror.93
This letter is echoed in the stage direction that follows the battle-march section of the
opera where the animals gang up on the child. After the child and the squirrel are
both wounded, "profond silence, stupeur parmi les Bgtes" pervades the stage. What
does Ravel enact in the final portion of his opera if not the interplay of many worlds:
the world of spectacle, the world of reality, the world of impersonal imitation, the
world of subjective art, the world of children, and the world of war?
Abbate and Jank616vitch ally Ravel with a very Romantic notion of trying to
express something through symbol as a means for expressing what cannot be said
with any sense of exactitude. They argue that L'Enfant struggles with "ineffability,"
that somehow Ravel represents an idea of what life is that cannot be articulated in
words. This opera, though, subscribes to a slightly different aesthetic. Ravel is not
content with writing ineffable music, but instead he does the opposite: fantasy is
breeched, the dream is analyzed for what it is, and what seemed the inexpressible
aspect of dreams and the psyche speaks diegetically onstage. The world of fantasy
has poked into the world of the real, and what seems like a magical object on stage
has unnerving groundings in reality.
FAILURE OF CORRESPONDENCE
With this we have arrived at Surrealism. Imitation undermined, the audience is
free to gaze on the actors themselves, on the librettist, and on the composer. Not fully
willing to commit their suspension of disbelief, the spectator begins to notice things
that do not belong in a child's fantasy: the cruelty of the animals toward the child as
the fearful punishment of a child's tantrum. The child, in other words, is punished for
being childish with far more severity than the Mother's "to bed without supper, young
man." He is hailed as the harbinger of death by the clock, as the destroyer of dream
by the princess, and the kidnapper of queens by the dragonfly. Carving his name in a
tree brings blood to the forest; a tantrum brings exile. It is an absurd crime with an
equally absurd punishment-why
should a child, after all, be chastised to such an
extent for being a child?
Even more absurd than the punishment, though, are the punishers themselves. The
child's world, his reality, becomes foreign to him. It is either his fantasy that plays
itself out on the stage, or an actual transformation of his surroundings. Either way, it
is inherently surrealist. As Daniel Albright notes, there tends to be a mix of the
imaginary and the real in other sun-ealist operas, as in La nzarih de la Tour Ezffel
when the lion (a mirage to the characters on stage) eats the general (a real per~on)."~
Does this play with the functional ability of a Symbol? Yes, but what does it reveal?
La nzarie's de la Tour EifSel mocks representation, but steers relatively clear of the
realm of psychology. An opera that destroys symbol is Dadaist; an opera that uses a
fractured symbol to illuminate the nocturnal forces that at once confound and inspire
the human condition is Surrealist. Ravel's is the latter, it is an opera where mimesis
is eroded to reveal the performers, the librettist, and even the composer himself.
This may explain why this opera has received so many psychoanalytic
interpretations. Some of them are quite obvious: mother issues and immaturity get
" Daniel
Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literalure, and Other Arts (Chicago:
London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 283-5.
mapped onto Ravel via this opera quite frequently. Melanie Klein relates it to the
Oedipus complex, which in her view can consist of a symbolic attacking of the
mother and father as a united pair:
I will now examine more closely the details in which the child's
pleasure in destruction expresses itself. They seem to me to recall the
early infantile situation which in my most recent writings I have
described as being of a fundamental importance both for the neurosis
in boys and for their normal development. I refer back to the attack on
the mother's body and the father's penis in it. The squirrel in the cage
and the pendulum wrenched out of the clock are plain symbols of the
penis in the mother's body. The fact that it is the father's penis and
that it is in the act of coitus with the mother is indicated by the rent of
the wallpaper 'which separates Corydon from his Amaryllis', of which
it has been said that to the boy it has become 'a rent in the fabric of the
world'. Now what weapons does the child employ in his attack
against the united parents? The ink poured over the table, the emptied
kettle, from which a cloud of ashes and steam escapes, represent the
weapon which very little children have at their disposal: namely the
device of soiling with excrementVg5
Although this opera seems rife with opportunities to glean representations of child
psychology, that kind of reading does not quite seem to fit. One reason is that the
child's tantrum was like any child's tantrum in many respects, so a reading that
hinges on that event is using the most generic aspect of the story. Generality leads to
superficiality, and with this comes the main problem with the interpretation: such a
one-to-one correspondence of stage-event, poetic representation, or musical gesture
could provide a link to any number of external lenses. What about a Christian
interpretation, that the sinning child learns the golden rule and is forgiven and brought
back into the fold? In this case, the final scene would present a boy in his mother's
arms a la Madonna and child or Pieta.
Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis: 1921-1945 (London: Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1950),
228-9.
95
One cannot seek to make these symbolic correspondences in Surrealist art as one
could do with Symbolism. Surrealist art is an art about the failure of correspondence.
L'Enfant is an opera that, rather than connecting us to our surroundings, makes the
very idea of those connections false. What is revealed, then, is the disturbing lack of
order, the subterranean impulse, and the nonsensical. As Vladirnir Jank616vitch put
it:
The peacock who shrieks, the cat who meows, the frogs who croak,
the chittering of nocturnal insects, the swishing sounds of fireflies, the
cackling of pigeons and the chirp of June bugs make themselves heard,
here, in their brute t r u t h f u l n e ~ s . ~ ~
Roland-Manuel, hears this truthfulness, too, but unlike Klein it is not a truthfulness
that springs from understanding and science. Truth for him is not an illuminating of
the dark, but rather a plunging into it:
[L'Enfant]poses a set of delicate problems to the composer, producer,
scene-painter and dress-designer, and a solution is only really reached
in the music. Music may only part the gauze veils of fairyland a
fraction, but the attempt rivets our attention and everything else is a
dist~action.~~
For Roland-Manuel, who was so impressed by the accuracy of the cat duet, there is
something in this imitative music that both creates illusion and draws attention to the
disparity between that illusion and what lies beneath, hidden by "veils of fairyland."
Carolyn Abbate writes that "music is the audible trace of the gazing Child's passage
into the fictional world, into its textures. Music puts the listener there too."98 Yet her
concurrent claim that Ravel created an elaborate world of fiction while remaining
impassive himself seems more and more tenuous considering that each composer,
96
Vladimir JankClCvitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 34.
97 Roland-Manuel, 93.
" Abbate, 230
critic, and audience member cited here found an urge to seek psychology in the score.
Inexpressiveness and impassivity are entirely different, though. Letting things speak
in their "brute truthfulness" at the expense of a noticeably Ravelian passage does not
eliminate the composer. By drawing on more "realistic" sounds, he makes his stageworld surreal-animal
noises have no business in the Opera,
In this fake meow we can see the composer, quietly sitting next to his broken
symbol.
This disconnect between the onstage world and the child's ability to
understand it is a dramatization of our inability to give ourselves over to his cat
noises. It is a dramatization of the failure of symbol, the failure of the ability to
connect with the world in conventional ways. In this meow, we see the aloof little
man, hard-pressed to get a good night's sleep in the last half of his life, and at the end
living as a musical loner too innovative for the older generation, and too oldfashioned for the younger.
To label Ravel a Symbolist is inaccurate. After all, a composer whose pieces so
often adhere to classical forms such as the dance suite of Le Tombeau de Couperin,
the sonata form of the string quartet and the Sonatine, the double exposition form of
the Concerto for the Left Hand; a composer who adhered to tonality-often
functional-simply
times
does not resemble a composer like Debussy. "Neoclassical"
would describe Ravel just as well as "Symbolist." Certainly Debussy's and Ravel's
harmonies contain similar elements such as modal cadences, chord extensions, and
pedal tones, but there are also just as many differences. For example, Ravel often
uses authentic cadences or harmonies that actually function and provide harmonic
motion, even if it occurs over a long period of time. Additionally, Ravel did not
consider himself similar to his famous contemporary, but rather claimed that his art
was "opposite to that of Debussy's ~ y r n b o l i s m . " ~ ~
99
Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: London: Columbia University Press, 1975),
126.
To label Ravel a "transitional figure" or list him among "other European
composers," however, is also inadequate.loO Period labels may be problematic, and
although they sometimes invite over-generalization, they do help to identify certain
stylistic characteristics that a group of artists share. The category of "transitional
figure," though, is particularly unsuitable. It labels no aesthetic, no mode of thought,
no stylistic tendency, and lumps Ravel together with such disparate composers as
Bartdk, Strauss, and Mahler. "Symbolism," although not entirely accurate for Ravel
in his later years, at least describes some of Ravel's aesthetic qualities.
Yet to go to the opposite extreme and label Ravel a Surrealist does not quite fit,
either. The French avant-garde of the early 1920s was a hostile, exclusive, group,
especially toward Ravel. He was, to them, a relic of the past, a vestige of nalve
Impressionism or murky Symbolism, a gullible composer who believed that one
could actually make a connection to the world through art. His art, too, never took on
the blatantly sarcastic or bizarre tone that many Surrealist works embrace.
Ravel has to be placed somewhere in the middle, neither wholly in the Symbolist
nor wholly in the Surrealist movement, but instead as a unique bridge between the
two who felt influences from both styles. Placing him in a middle ground has a
historical precedent; after Ravel died, Cocteau softened his view toward Ravel on the
one hand, but still maintained that Ravel had done a disservice to the radical
movement on the other:
I00
For example, Robert Morgan lists Ravel in a chapter called "Other European Currents" which,
among others, discusses Italian Futurists, Sibelius, Rachmaninov, and Kodily. Additionally, Donald 3.
Grout and Claude V. Palisca list Ravel with Debussy, who was considered a "Transitional Figure" by
Morgan. See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern
Europe andAmerica (New York: London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 124-7 and Donald J.
Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, Sixth Edition (New York: London: W.W.
Norton and Company, 2001), 669-70.
I was unfair to Ravel and sometimes with that ferocity that comes of
youth. It had to be . . . I was fond of Ravel. But we had to get rid of
musical impressionism as soon as possible. Ravel had extracted all the
sparkle from that particular firework.lO'
There is some truth to this. Ravel was never as radical as any of the avant-garde, so
he was shunned by Les Six; he never expressed outright any violence towards art
itself, so he was not considered Dada; and he never explicitly claimed to reproduce
psychology on paper, so he was an unlikely candidate for Surrealism.
Ravel's
Surrealist tendencies did not stem from disgust with previous art movements, and
many Impressionistic aspects of his music survived until the end of his life. His
brand of Surrealism was born of distress, born of the inability to map the external
world of 1919 Europe into a coherent musical representation. Indeed, Ravel's rich
musical language, renowned for precision, eloquence, and vivid colors in
orchestration and harmony, failed him when he went to war. Following the war, his
compositions became more austere, more bleak, and less overtly descriptive. Often,
they are more abstract with such titles as Bolero, Tornbeau, Duo, Concerto, and
Valse-
all referring to musical forms, dances, or genres rather than to narratives or
images. While some of his late works do employ descriptive titles, such as Chansons
Madecasses or L'Enjant et les Sortile'ges, their compositional style is very different
from the pre-war era: expressionistic dissonance, bitonality, and a thinning of texture
predominate. Jankklkvitch, who argued that the traditional naming of Ravel as an
Impressionist was a misnomer, described him as an "inexpressive" composer:
The expressionist expressed sentiments having to do with sensation;
the impressionist takes note of his sensations about things; and
101
Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 104.
inexpressive music allows things themselves to speak, in their primal
rawness, without necessitating intermediaries of any kind.lo2
In light of many of the biographies written about Ravel that probe the psychology of
each of his pieces, this is an odd claim to make. For example, the falling fourth set to
the word "Maman" in L'Enfant and appearing also in Daphnis et Chloe and the
Sonatine, has prompted interpretations that speculate about Ravel's relationship with
his mother, his homosexuality, and various other aspects of his life.lo3
All too often, critics assume that symbols function normally in Ravel's music; too
often, a simple correspondence is found between the falling fourth and "mother" in
his pieces or between waltzes and historical representations of Austria or Germany.
Such psychological interpretation is misleading, not only because Ravel was
notoriously aloof regarding his personal life and relationships, but also because
searching for such flat-footed psychological links suggests that listening to his music
is akin to laying the composer on a leather couch and giving him inkblots to ponder.
It is actually the opposite: Ravel has created inkblots for us to contemplate.
Seeking a connection between symbol and psychology is especially misleading
when one remembers that Ravel claimed to be "artificial by nature." Ravel does not
express through symbol. Rather, he finds expression in the subversion of symbolic
representation-and
in form and genre-but
in a different manner than a Beethoven
or a Schubert. Their undermining of sonata form, for example, does not destroy it but
'02 Vladimir JankClCvitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 32.
lo3 In addition to the psychoanalytic or symbolic interpretations cited in Chapters 2-4, the two
examples specifically alluded to here can be found in Maurice Ravel, Sonatine for Solo Piano, ed.
Roger Nichols (London: Edition Peters, 1995), 5 and Benjamin Irvy, Maurice Ravel: A Life (New
York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000).
rather expands it, dresses it up, or hides it. Ravel makes these order-imposing devices
create chaos: the double-exposition form of the Left Hand Concerto, the 16-bar waltz,
the incessant dance, and the mimetic gesture all become bizarre under this
composer's control, and thus the orderly banter of piano and orchestra becomes
violent, the decorous, balanced waltz becomes a dangerously whirling merry-goround, the bolero rhythm becomes inhuman and mechanical, and the meow of a cat
becomes a human cry of anguish. It is through the destruction of symbol, not the
analysis of symbol, that we find Ravel in his music.
If any biographical or psychological link to this switch in aesthetics from
Symbolism to Surrealism is to be made, it must be one in which the idea of
representation through symbol, sound, or language lost viability for Ravel. We turn
to World War I.
"PROFOND
SILENCE. STUPEUR"
Ravel's war story is a bizarre one. First deemed unfit for battle because of his
small stature and unstable health, he began a mini-campaign, calling on as many
friends as he could to persuade the government to enlist him. They relented, and
although they would not let him fly a helicopter, they allowed him to drive a truck,
which he named Adelai'de after his ballet. The situation quickly became grim for
Ravel. He developed insomnia, he had to have surgery, and while at war, his mother
died. Terrible, too, was what he saw, described in a letter partially quoted earlier:
The other day, I was assigned one of those "interesting missions"
which you have told me you distrust. It consisted of going to X. . . .
Nothing troublesome happened to me. I did not need my helmet, my
gas mask remained in my pocket. I saw a hallucinating thing: a
nightmarish city, horribly deserted and mute. . . . Undoubtedly, I will
see things which will be more frightful and repugnant; I don't believe I
will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion, than this
sort of mute terror.lo4
His "mute terror" became internalized, and he stopped composing for months
following his discharge.
"Mute" is a word loaded with connotations for a musician. First, Ravel's reaction
to the desolation and devastation of the French skyline was not an expressionistic
scream, a poetic apostrophe, or a musical inspiration. This terror, this uncanny sight
of rubble and silence, this landscape of death, does quite the opposite: it stupefies the
composer. In the moments of life where a Beethoven or a Schumann would be
inspired to work out their grief through music and announce their emotion to their
audience, Ravel abandons art. Words and sounds-all
symbols-cannot
adequately
describe the view, and the effect is that rather than seek to connect his emotions
outward through an impressionistic link he severs communication, stops composing.
The city in ruins, the illness, and the death of his mother draw the already aloof
composer deeper into himself, and it is at this point in his life when his art begins to
change.
To call Ravel ineffable is to entirely miss his mode of expression; to say he is
inexpressive is only to glean half of his post-war aesthetic. Yes, there is a certain
sense in which Ravel is unreadable, but that does not make him inexpressive. His
deepest emotions are not expressed through symbol, but rather through the
withdrawing or attacking of that symbol. Daniel Albright explains:
104
Orenstein, 73.
[Surrealistic] music isn't expressionistic, but it is about expression: it
takes expressionistic devices and assays them into odd aesthetic
constructs. It inspects the musical signs for joy, sorrow, languor, and
so forth, and twists them into exotic curlicues. It cultivates a semantic
vertigo, since the signs it uses both mean and do not mean what they
seem to mean.lo5
How apt for Ravel, where silence is the most expressive tool he has to portray fear.
Paradoxical "mute expression" makes an appearance in Ravel's music, as discussed
in Chapter IV, in L'Enfant et les Sortil2ge. When the child is wounded by the
animals, after the giant unpitched scream, they all stand in horror at what they've
done, "profond silence, stupeur parmi les BZtes."
This quiet is profoundly
expressive.
The discovery of the composer, built on severed connections, is naturally tenuous:
we may not be able to say that passage A represents sadness over the loss of his
mother or that passage B stems from a struggle with his homosexuality, but we can
point to broader psychological concerns in the Jungian fashion: that passage A reeks
of death, and that passage B is like a bizarre nightmare. Roger Fry, in discussing a
Post-Impressionism exhibit, referred to some of the art as a grotesque experiment and
claimed that these artists were trying to "discover the visual language of
imagination." lo'
Surrealism does much the same thing; it tries to subvert the old
forms of expression in order to discover the language of the mind.
105
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago:
London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 291
lo6
Henri Dorm, Symbolist Art and Theories: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: Los Angeles: London:
University of California Press, 1994), 288.
One must wonder why Cocteau and his contemporaries were so hesitant to
embrace Ravel. True, his technique did not exhibit the unrefined automatism found
in the less polished works of some members of Les Six, but this problem was
overcome in the artistic sphere by Salvador Dali, who carried Surrealist art into the
realm of refined painting technique. Could Ravel have done the same with music?
More surprising still is that while historians have been able to see Dali as a
Surrealist painter despite Breton's objections, musicians have been hesitant to hear
the Surrealism in Ravel. Perhaps this is due to the fact that no viable definition of
musical Surrealism exists, and also because those composers who claimed to write in
a Surreal vein have been taken at their word. More aloof figures like Ravel have been
left in the mire of multitudinous movements that comprise the first quarter of the
twentieth century. Perhaps, though, Ravel himself has not been as silent as we
thought on the subject.
One afternoon in November 1933 Ravel's brother was going to
bring him to my studio around four o'clock. Andrk Breton and Paul
Eluard had asked me to do everything I could to persuade Ravel to
come to the offices of the review Minotaure on the rue Bo6tie so that
Dr. Lotte Wolff could take a print of his hands, with those of other
artists, to illustrate an article called 'Psychic Revelations of the hand'
which was to appear in the review at the beginning of 1934 . . . .
We took a taxi and in the cab he confided to me the emotion he
felt at the possibility of meeting Breton and Eluard in a few minutes'
time. He had been more passionately interested in the surrealist
movement than he had let on and he would have liked to know the
protagonists better. He said to me in a weary voice, "Now it's too
late."
We arrived at the offices and Lotte Wolff carefully took
Ravel's handprints, putting his hands first on a smoked plate, then on a
piece of white paper. Now came the moment for Ravel to sign his
name. When he was offered the pen he recoiled slightly and said, "I
can't sign, my brother will send you my signature tomorrow." Paul
Eluard said to me, much later when I recalled this awful moment, that
he had the impression of Ravel, so far behaving naturally if a little
distant, suddenly becoming frozen. 107
This passage brings us back to our opening question, whether Ravel's music is
inhuman and impassive or actually powerfully communicative. My answer: critics
have misread his silence. Never one to expound on himself or his problems, Ravel's
polite refusal of the pen is tragic in retrospect. Silence and politeness take the place
of blatant expression, and the small gestures of this small man conceal deep fear and
torment. Confronted with a reminder of his impeding death, he freezes, does not act.
It is inaction, but it is far more powerful and devastating than any action could be.
His music is similar: it is the song of a man whose lips are pressed together, refusing
to speak-emitting
107
Nichols, 171-3.
a silence that screams.
Abbate, Carolyn. In Search of Opera, Princeton Studies in Opera. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2001.
Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent :Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other
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