Maurice Ravel

Early years and education

Early years, family background

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in March 1875 in Ciboure, a fishing village in southwestern France. Soon after his father, a Swiss civil engineer and inventor, and his Basque-Spanish mother moved the family to Paris. Maurice quickly took to music, encouraged by both parents: his father too had been a gifted young musician, and his mother sang him Basque and Spanish folk songs. At the age of seven Ravel had his first piano lesson with Henri Ghys, a friend of Emmanuel Chabrier. Five years later, he began studying harmony, counterpoint and composition with Charles-René, a pupil of Léo Delibes.

Education and the Société des Apaches

At fourteen, he gained admission to the Conservatoire de Paris, France’s premier music school. There he befriended one of his most important collaborators, the pianist Ricardo Viñes. Other classmates included George Enescu and Reynaldo Hahn. His piano teachers at the Conservatoire were Émile Descombes, one of Chopin’s last students, and Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot. Though a talented player, Ravel failed to progress to the advanced piano courses and focused instead on composition. He later studied with André Gedalge and Gabriel Fauré. Gedalge told his students, “Whatever sauce you put around the melody is a matter of taste. What is important is the melodic line, and this doesn’t vary.” Ravel’s music reflected this fundamental principle throughout his career, even when blurring the lines between harmony and melody. Later, he told Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of his few pupils, that there is “an implied melodic outline in all vital music.” 

His time at the Conservatoire was marked by frustration and scandal but also artistic discovery. Responding to one of Ravel’s first piano works, the Sérénade grotesque [1:24:07], a teacher said, “All this produces a most unusual impression. You must rein in your thoughts and take fewer liberties.” But, he added, “Maybe one day you will present us with a new style.” These words proved prophetic. 

Amid frustrations with the faculty, Ravel and Viñes formed a collective of avant-garde artists called “Les Apaches.” Self-styled “artistic outcasts,” these young mavericks were united in their passion for folksong, children’s music (later manifested in works such as Ma mère l’Oye [1:00:32] and L’Enfant et les sortilèges), Asian art, and Russian music. When the Exposition Universelle opened in Paris, Ravel was struck by performances of Russian works conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as Javanese gamelan ensembles. Above all, the group revered the iconoclastic Claude Debussy. The foremost musical exponent of French modernism at that time, Debussy caused a sensation with works like Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and his opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. Ravel attended every performance of Pelléas’ original run.

First masterpieces and the Prix de Rome

Fauré, to whom he later dedicated his String Quartet and Jeux d’eau, proved especially influential. One of Ravel’s first “hits,” the Pavane pour une infante défunte [1:15:41], emerged from these studies. Ravel composed it for Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, who hosted a popular salon for Parisian artists. He said the title recalled “a pavane that a little princess might have danced at the Spanish court.”

As the new century dawned, Ravel was expelled from the Conservatoire. He continued studying with Fauré; Jeux d’eau quickly followed. The score, replete with arcing arpeggios and cascading glissandi, illustrates the fountains of water evoked in sound. Jeux d’eau signaled an artistic breakthrough for the young composer. In a 1928 essay, Ravel himself reflected that Jeux d’eau “stands at the beginning of all the pianistic innovations that have been noted in my work.” 

Now in his twenties, Ravel undertook a years-long quest to win the Prix de Rome. This prestigious award included a stipend to study in Rome; past winners included Berlioz, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Debussy. Though favored to win, Ravel was eliminated in five consecutive attempts. After his final loss, a national scandal erupted when it emerged that only students of one of the jury members advanced to the final round. “L’Affaire Ravel” resulted in the early retirement of the Conservatoire director and his replacement by Fauré.

Following the Prix de Rome affair, Ravel took an extended vacation. In a letter home, he wrote, “During all of this time, I didn’t compose two measures, but I was storing up a host of impressions, and I expect this winter to be extraordinarily productive. I have never been so happy to be alive, and I firmly believe that joy is far more fertile than pain.” These words proved prescient, both for the productivity they heralded and for the First World War, which brought his most fecund decade to an end.

 

Turning point: the Great War

Ravel during the war

Ravel spent much of the summer of 1914 in a seaside resort town adjoining Ciboure. It was there that he heard the dreadful tolling of bells signaling that France had declared war on Germany. As the war unfolded, Ravel vacillated between depression and determination, “working,” he wrote, “with the lucidity of a madman” on his Piano Trio. Small, frail—he was 5’3” and several pounds below the army’s official weight limit—and nearly forty, he was rejected multiple times before successfully enlisting as a driver on the Western Front. 

During the war, he composed Le Tombeau de Couperin, a Baroque dance suite for piano dedicated to friends who died in combat. Though reflective, the music eschews excessive sentimentality. Ravel achieves this by largely avoiding overly somber harmonies and the lowest octaves of the piano; the latter reinforces the music’s lightness. Responding to criticisms of the suite’s tone, Ravel replied, “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.” 

The 1920's: Ravel at Montfort-L’Amaury

Ravel never fully recovered from the war. On Armistice Day he underwent lung surgery to treat an infection, and insomnia plagued him the rest of his life. To escape the bustle of Paris, Ravel retreated to the suburb of Montfort-L'Amaury with his Siamese cats, where he continued to compose and conduct but at a slower pace. Though he never completed another work for solo piano, these years produced remarkable works for orchestra. By the end of the 1920s he had completed his most famous composition, Boléro; the two piano concertos soon followed. His international concert tours were enthusiastically received, especially in the United States.

The last years and last works

In 1932, a blow to the head during a taxi accident accelerated what had been a slow cognitive decline. He composed few works following the accident, most of which were orchestrations of existing pieces. Due to his inability to write, he was fired from scoring a film based on Don Quixote; from this emerged the three-song set Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. “His final years were cruel,” reflected Stravinsky, “for he was gradually losing his memory and some of his coordinating powers, and he was … quite aware of it.” A failed brain surgery left Ravel in a coma, and he died three days after Christmas 1937.

Ravel’s music: reflections on a multi-faceted genius

The aphorism “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal,” often attributed to Stravinsky, is apt for Ravel. Possessed with the self-assuredness of his own style from a young age, he readily absorbed and acknowledged new influences. Spanish music, dance rhythms, and the Russian masters like Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky were lifelong sources of inspiration. His late works gleefully show the influence of American jazz.

Mozart he admired above all others, for his prodigious output as well as his balancing of classical symmetry with the element of surprise. He directed his students to look to Mozart for inspiration, though he was quick to recognize the importance of his contemporaries, including Debussy, Bartók, Puccini, and Schoenberg. He rejected the Beethovenian model of thematic development and called Wagner’s influence on French music “pernicious.”

Like many other great artists, he looked outside his own medium for guidance. During a tour of North America, Ravel told The New York Times that his “greatest teacher in composition was Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe, he added, “proved that art must strike a balance” between the extremes of emotion and intellect.

Compared to other composers of his stature, Ravel wrote fairly little. Mozart completed over 600 known works, Beethoven over 130 works with opus numbers, and Schubert penned 600 songs alone. Ravel composed a mere 85 or so works; some of these were abandoned or unfinished, while nearly half were orchestrations of earlier works. A perfectionist with an exacting vision for his art, Ravel labored over his pieces, often for months: he wrote of the second movement of his Piano Concerto in G, “That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

Ravel the orchestrator

This perfectionism explains both Ravel’s small œuvre and why so much of it consists of orchestrations; indeed, only a handful of his compositions, such as Rapsodie espagnole [1:03:30] and the two piano concertos, were conceived as concert works for symphony orchestra. Once Ravel was satisfied with a piece, he then attempted to squeeze as much creative juice from it as possible. Some of his most beautiful works for orchestra—Ma mère l’Oye, Pavane pour une infante défunte, “Une barque sur l'océan”—were born as intimate piano pieces. Some, like “Alborada del gracioso,” he mounted as orchestrated ballets.

To this day, one of Ravel’s hallmarks is his preternatural gift for orchestration. A contemporary critic wrote that “he is, with Stravinsky, the one man in the world who best knows the weight of a trombone-note, the harmonics of a cello or a pp tam-tam in the relationships of one orchestral group to another.” Key influences on Ravel’s technique include the scores of Rimsky-Korsakov (like Shéhérazade and Capriccio espagnol) and Richard Strauss (Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel); orchestration treatises by Rimsky-Korsakov, Berlioz, and Widor; and Liszt’s “dazzling orchestration” in works like Les Préludes [50:00], the first orchestral work performed as a “symphonic poem.” Inspired by Debussy’s Nocturnes, Ravel included a wordless chorus in his score for the 1912 ballet Daphnis et Chloé.

Sitting at the piano with a friend, Ravel pecked out a tune and asked, “Don’t you think this theme has an insistent quality? I’m going to try and repeat it a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can.” That simple phrase would become the main theme of his most famous work for orchestra, the 1928 masterpiece, Boléro. The seventeen-minute work consists wholly of one very long, gradual crescendo. As a snare drum repeats an ostinato rhythm over 160 times, Ravel repeats his “insistent” melody in a variety of instrument configurations. The music slowly builds in volume until collapsing in a raucous climax.

Since its premiere, Bolero has earned an estimated $100 million in royalties from live concerts, recordings, and its use in film, television, and commercials. Multiple parties have laid claim to a portion of those earnings, even after the work entered the public domain in 2016. In 2024, a French court dismissed claims by heirs of Alexandre Benois, a set designer for the Ballets Russes, that Benois had co-authored the work and was therefore entitled to a share of the proceeds. As a result of the suit’s dismissal, the work was allowed to remain in the public domain.

Ravel also arranged the works of other composers including Debussy, Erik Satie, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Robert Schumann. The most famous of these is undoubtedly Ravel’s 1922 ravishing orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Since its premiere, it has outstripped its source material in popularity.

Ravel at the piano

Though famed as a writer for orchestra, Ravel privileged the piano above all else. A pianist from a young age, he composed at the keyboard, and it is there that most of the fresh trends in his style emerged, from the blending of tonality and bitonality in Jeux d’eau to the jazzy strains of the Piano Concerto in G.  

Miroirs

Ravel wrote that Miroirs, his five-movement piano suite from 1905, “marked a rather considerable change in my harmonic evolution.” is dedicated to a member of Les Apaches. Bitonality, clashing rhythms, and frequent meter changes illustrate the erratic flight of moths in the opening “Noctuelles.” Like Jeux d’eau, “Une barque sur l’océan” evokes the movement of water. “Alborada del gracioso,” dedicated to Viñes, jangles with the mimicked sounds of Spanish guitars and castanets.

Ravel’s playing and the infamous Gaspard de la nuit

Throughout his career, responses to his piano playing were mixed; one reviewer quipped, “It is a tradition that composers play badly, and no one can complain that Ravel does not respect it.” His friends joked about his large “strangler’s thumbs.” Such limitations did not prevent him from composing some of the most virtuosic music in the piano repertoire, including the fiendishly difficult Gaspard de la nuit. “Ondine,” the opening of this three-movement work, contains over 10,000 notes in just over six minutes. “Scarbo,” the imposing finale, incorporates all 88 keys of the piano. 

The late piano concertos

Late in his career, Ravel turned at last to the concerto. The Piano Concerto in G perfectly encapsulates Ravel’s synthesis of ancient and modern. Adhering to the traditional three-movement concerto structure, Ravel turned to Mozart and Camille Saint-Saëns as models, especially in the slow second movement. Its vivacious outer movements reflect the influence of jazz and Basque folk song.

At the same time, Ravel received a commission to write another piano concerto. The commissioner, Paul Wittgenstein, was a pianist who had lost his right arm in the First World War. Before he began composing, Ravel studied several études for the left hand, including works by Chopin and Saint-Saëns. Like its twin, the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand contains influences of American jazz.

Ravel’s chamber music

Ravel published seven chamber compositions. The earliest of these, his String Quartet, was composed in the years immediately following his final departure from the Paris Conservatoire. Ravel modeled the work on Debussy’s string quartet. It is most famous for its jaunty second movement, which opens with gamelan-inspired plucked strings. Around this time, the Pleyel company commissioned Debussy to write a piece to show off its new chromatic harp. Érard, a rival harpmaker, responded by commissioning Ravel, who composed the brief Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet.

In the 1920s, Ravel composed the virtuosic Tzigane for Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi. This rhapsodic work was inspired by both Liszt and Hungarian folk music. Soon after its premiere, Ravel began orchestrating the piece. As with several pieces from the late 1920s, Ravel’s final chamber work, the Violin Sonata, was influenced by African American music; its middle movement, “Blues,” was a hit when Ravel performed the work in Chicago.

Ravel’s vocal music

Ravel’s music for voice—individual songs, miniature song cycles, and two one-act operas (L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges)—reinforce his penchant for compact musical structures. For Shéhérazade, his three-song cycle for soprano and orchestra, Ravel turned to the exotic poetry of Tristan Klingsor, a fellow member of Les Apaches. As with his instrumental work, the influence of folk musics runs through numerous songs including the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and the Deux mélodies hébraïques. 

Was Ravel a modernist or an Impressionist?

“Impressionism” has been a controversial term since its inception. Soon after Monet debuted his painting Impression, Sunrise in 1872, critics began using the term “Impressionism” as a slur. Critics soon applied the term to contemporary composers, most notably Debussy and Ravel, both of whom rejected it. Yet works like Jeux d’eau contain stylistic elements that could be called impressionistic. Ravel employed extended, ambiguous harmonies; shimmering timbres; and bitonality. When performing Jeux d’eau, the pianist Ricardo Viñes used the pedals liberally in the high registers “to bring out the hazy impression of vibrations in the air.” At the same time, Ravel’s music maintains the directness of melody in a way that eschews pure impressionism. To what extent Ravel can be called an “Impressionist” remains an open question. What seems certain is that by blending old forms and melodies with contemporary influences like jazz, Ravel created a distinctly modern musical voice.

Ravel’s influence on the 20th century

Though Ravel may not have held the same sway as predecessors such as Beethoven or Wagner, his life and music impacted contemporaries and successors. Ravel encouraged the next generation of French composers, including the irreverent coterie Les Six, even when they regarded him as old-fashioned. He was a visionary, recognizing the importance of controversial new works by composers such as Schoenberg and Bartók while mainstream critics denigrated them.

The unique extensions of piano technique in works like Jeux d’eau and Gaspard de la nuit, the innovations in orchestration, and his radical approach to harmony—an outgrowth of the famous opening bars of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—influenced composers across Europe and the United States. Through Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of Ravel’s pupils, fellow English composer Gustav Holst discovered his music; he called Ravel a “model of purity” on par with Haydn. 

Viñes wrote of Ravel, “He is, moreover, very complicated, there being in him a mixture of Middle Ages Catholicism and satanic impiety….” This contrast stands at the heart of Ravel’s continued appeal. He painted with a variety of musical colors and emotions, honoring the dead in one piece and journeying to a fairy garden in another. With his exacting blend of ancient and modern, from medieval church modes and Baroque dances to impressionist harmonies and jazz, Ravel created musical vistas at once familiar and mysterious, like an old friend who always has more secrets to reveal.

Maurice Ravel: timeline of key dates

• 1875: Ravel is born in Ciboure, a commune in southwest France near the Spanish border. Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler is born. Georges Bizet’s Carmen premieres; Bizet dies three months later. Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opéra, opens.
• 1876: premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony.
• 1882: Ravel has his first piano lesson. Richard Wagner premieres Parsifal, his final opera, at his Bayreuth Festival.
• 1883: Richard Wagner dies.
• 1886: the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first practical automobile, is patented and unveiled. It had a top speed of 16 km/h (10 mph). Franz Liszt dies. Premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Le Carnaval des animaux. Premiere of Mussorgsky’s five-act opera Khovanshchina; in 1913, Ravel and Igor Stravinsky create an arrangement at the request of ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev.
• 1888: Ravel meets the young pianist Ricardo Viñes. The pair become lifelong friends while studying at the Paris Conservatoire. Later, Viñes becomes one of the foremost interpreters of Ravel’s solo piano works.
• 1889: Ravel wins acceptance to the Paris Conservatoire. Ravel and Viñes see Rimsky-Korsakov conduct an all-Russian program at the Paris Exposition Universelle; Claude Debussy also attends. They hear Javanese gamelan music at this same festival; these compositions and styles influence their future works. Eiffel Tower completed.
• 1901: The Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the earliest phonograph manufacturers, is founded in the United States.
• 1902: Ricardo Viñes premieres Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and Pavane pour une infante défunte; the former is considered a landmark in the solo piano literature. Premiere of Debussy’s landmark opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Ravel attends all fourteen performances of its original run.
• 1903: Ravel completes his orchestral song cycle Shéhérazade and his sole String Quartet; Ravel models the structure of the quartet on Debussy’s string quartet from 1893. Enrico Caruso makes his debut with the Metropolitan Opera. Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz is born.
• 1904: Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini premieres at La Scala.
• 1905: Ravel fails to win the Prix de Rome for a fifth time; his loss becomes a national scandal. Richard Strauss’s scandalous opera Salome premieres in Dresden.
• 1906: Ricardo Viñes premieres Miroirs, a five-movement suite for solo piano. Each of the movements is dedicated to a member of Les Apaches. Dmitri Shostakovich is born.  Catastrophic San Francisco earthquake occurs.
• 1908: Premiere of the four-movement Rapsodie espagnole for orchestra. Ravel completes Gaspard de la nuit for solo piano. Charles Ives composes The Unanswered Question. Debussy’s La mer premieres. Olivier Messiaen is born. Conductor Herbert von Karajan is born. Pablo de Sarasate dies. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov dies.
• 1911: Premiere of L’heure espagnole, Ravel’s first opera. Legendary American blues musician Robert Johnson is born. Virtuoso theremin player Clara Rockmore is born. Composer Bernard Herrmann, most known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, is born. Gustav Mahler dies.
• 1912: Premiere of Daphnis et Chloé, Ravel’s longest work, after a commission from impresario Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes. Premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama Pierrot lunaire. Sinking of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.
• 1913: Premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
• 1914: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June precipitates the First World War, which begins one month later. Ravel attempts to enlist but is rejected due to his age and small stature.
• 1915: Ravel is finally accepted into the army and assigned to serve as a truck driver delivering supplies to the Western Front.
• 1916: In Paris, the  conservative musical faction including Saint-Saëns, d’Indy, and dozens of other composers form the jingoistic National League for the Defense of French Music; Ravel refuses to join.
• 1917: Ravel’s beloved mother dies. He falls into a “horrible despair,” and his friends must “try to distract a lost child who showed none of his feelings and whom nothing could console.” He completes Le Tombeau de Couperin, a six-movement Baroque dance suite dedicated to friends who died in combat.
• 1918: Claude Debussy dies of colon cancer, age 55. World War I ends on 11 November with the signing of the Armistice; that same day, Ravel undergoes surgery on his right lung.
• 1922: Completes his most popular orchestration, that of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
• 1925: L’enfant et les sortilèges, with a libretto by Colette, premieres at Opéra de Monte-Carlo; it was Ravel’s second opera.
• 1928: Boléro, one of Ravel’s most famous compositions, premieres at the Paris Opéra; it was originally composed to accompany dancer Ida Rubinstein.
• 1929: Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in World War 1, commissions the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
• 1932: Premiere performance of the Piano Concerto in G given in Paris in 1932 by the pianist Marguerite Long, with the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by the composer. Ravels sustains a head injury in a taxi accident. Though doctors did not consider the injury serious, it may have exacerbated an existing cerebral disorder. 
• 1933: Ravel completes his final original composition, the three-song Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany.
• 1937: following years of cognitive decline, Ravel undergoes surgery to treat his condition. Soon after, he lapses into a coma and dies on 28 December at the age of 62. George Gershwin dies of a brain tumor.