Seong-Jin Cho, piano

Program Notes – All Ravel

Sérénade grotesque

Sérénade grotesque
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées
Died December 28, 1937, Paris

Ravel entered the Paris Conservatory at age 14, intending to make his career as a pianist; composing was only a part of his curriculum. But in 1893, at age 18, he showed his harmony professor, Emile Pessard, a short piano piece he had just written, titled Serenade. Pessard sat down to play it, but after getting to the end of the first page, he suggested that Ravel play it himself. This the young man did, and quite well. Pessard felt that it was a strange piece, one in which Ravel seemed to be “riding fantasies,” and he advised his student to get better control of his ideas. Ravel chose not to publish this piece, though he came back to it 35 years later, in 1928, and changed its title to Sérénade grotesque. The piece would not be published or played in public until 1975, a century after Ravel’s birth.

Ravel freely admitted the influence of Emmanuel Chabrier on his Serenade, particularly Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque, which had been written only two years earlier, in 1891. Both pieces are short, brilliant, and fantastic in their ideas and impact. Ravel marks the beginning of his piece pizzicatissimo, as if the chords are to be played by pizzicato strings, and he also specifies that the performance should be Très rude. The Sérénade grotesque is quite brief–only about three minutes long–and it is full of energy, frequent tempo changes, and some sharply chromatic writing; at moments both hands play in treble clef, and at others both are in bass clef. Its effect is a little odd, and Pessard was probably correct that Ravel should get his ideas under control. But in this piece by the 18-year-old Ravel we may hear premonitions of his later “grotesque” writing, particularly the Scarbo movement of Gaspard de la Nuit.

Menuet antique

This music–so brief, so lovely–is the work of a boy. Ravel was only 20 when he composed it in November 1895. His friend, the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, gave the premiere at the Salle Erard on April 18, 1898, and the music was published later that year–Menuet antique was Ravel’s first published work. The composer retained his affection for this music: he performed it often, and thirty years later, in 1929, he orchestrated it.

The music may be described simply: it is a minuet in the expected 3/4 meter and ABA form. Its first section, marked “Majestically,” proceeds from the syncopations and slight dissonances of its opening to the poised main theme, which unfolds gracefully between the two hands. The central section, marked “gentle,” sings wistfully, almost nostalgically, and–in a very deft touch–the young composer subtly combines both his main themes before the return of the opening section. The music is beautifully written for the keyboard, and Ravel is scrupulous about indicating pedaling and dynamic markings.

What are we to make of the title? In what sense is this music “antique?” As a form, the minuet had been out of fashion for about a century when Ravel wrote this music. Perhaps it was that very sense of reaching out to a distant and vanished past that attracted the composer. What has been described as a “mock-archaic manner” was very much a part of Ravel’s aesthetic, as works like Daphnis and Chloé, Le tombeau de Couperin, and others remind us. The form of Menuet antique may be from the past, but
in the precision of the writing, attention to sound, and longing for an idealized order, this gentle little piece by a 20-year-old already suggests some of the characteristics of the composer Ravel would become.

Pavane pour une infante défunte

Ravel composed the Pavane pour une infante défunte (“Pavane for a Dead Princess”) for solo piano in 1899, when he was 24, and it became his first significant success. A pavane is an ancient dance of stately character and in duple meter, probably of Italian origin. There is an old custom that during periods of mourning in the Spanish court, a pavane might be danced before the funeral bier. Ravel may have been referring to this custom when he chose the title for this music, though he later admitted choosing it simply because he liked the sound of the words. He is quoted as saying: “Do not attach to the title any more importance than it has. Do not dramatize it. It is not a funeral lament for a dead child, but rather an evocation of the pavane which could have been danced by such a little princess as painted by Velazquez at the Spanish court.”

The Pavane opens with the simple but haunting main theme. The piece is in rondo form, with the theme treated in three episodes, developed and harmonized differently each time. Ravel is said to have become tired of the Pavane’s great popularity, and he is known to have insisted that the music be played straight: without sentimentality or undue expression. This did not prevent his making the famous crack–after sitting through a dull performance of the Pavane–to the pianist: “I have written a pavane for a
deceased princess, not a deceased pavane for a princess.” In 1910, Ravel orchestrated the Pavane, and the music has become best known in this version, in which the opening statement is a famous solo for French horn.

Jeux d’eau

Ravel composed his Jeux d’eau in 1901, when he was still almost unknown. At that time, the 26-year-old composer had gained a slender reputation with a few brief piano pieces, but he was still enrolled in the Paris Conservatory as a student of Fauré and struggling to win that symbol of success for young French composers, the Prix de Rome. Ravel never won that prize, but his Jeux d’eau, one of his most dazzling and original pieces, brought him sudden fame.

This music is at once both a connection with the past and a departure toward the future. The connection with the past may at first seem an unlikely one: Franz Liszt. In 1877, while living in Rome, Liszt had composed a brief piano piece called Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, a depiction of the play of the water in the fountain of the estate where he was living. Ravel borrowed both the general conception of Liszt’s music and the first part of his title when he wrote Jeux d’eau (“Play of the Water”), but he achieved a range of sparkling color from the piano that Liszt never dreamed of.

In the score, Ravel prefaced the music with a quote from Henri de Regnier: “The river god laughs at the water as it caresses him.” One should take this as a general suggestion of spirit rather than as something the music sets out to depict literally–Ravel himself said that Jeux d’eau was “inspired by the bubbling of water and the musical sounds of fountains, waterfalls, and brooks.” In this music he achieves an enormous range of sounds that evoke sparkling waters: the very opening (which sounds bell-like because Ravel keeps it in the piano’s ringing high register) suggests a completely new sound-world from the piano, and Ravel contrasts this with a variety of sonorities, from delicate tracery cascading downward to thundering music that sweeps across the keyboard.

Sonatine

Ravel completed his polished and poised Sonatine in 1905, just as he was achieving―at the advanced age of 30―artistic maturity. Its creation coincided with a moment of controversy in Ravel’s slowly-developing career. During these same years he had completed his first major works to hold a place in the repertory―the String Quartet in F Major and the Introduction and Allegro―and at just this point the faculty of the Paris Conservatory denied him the highest prize available to a French music student, the Prix de Rome. It was a scandal: the Conservatory had refused its highest honor to a young composer who had already established an international reputation, and in the angry aftermath the director and several faculty members resigned. Ravel himself appears to have coasted untouched through this bitter moment―certainly there is no trace of external events in the Sonatine. He had in fact composed its first movement two years earlier, in 1903, intending to enter it in a competition sponsored by a music journal. The journal folded, and now Ravel returned to the Sonatine and completed it by writing two more movements.

The Sonatine has been much praised―and for good reason. One of the words used most frequently by critics for the Sonatine is “jewel-like,” and the music’s clarity, beauty, and delicacy make that description altogether apt. Its three movements span a total of only eleven minutes, but each of them is almost perfect in its control and clarity. Some of the music’s delicacy is the result of Ravel’s decision to set much of it in the piano’s high register: both hands are frequently written in the treble clef, and while the music can often be animated, it never loses its shimmering quality.

The Modéré is a miniature sonata-form movement. Its opening idea, marked “gentle and expressive,” barely has time to be stated before Ravel offers a more stately second subject. The interval of the falling fourth–the first thing one hears in this music―will figure importantly throughout all three movements of the Sonatine, sometimes to shape the themes, sometimes as part of the accompaniment, and sometimes in its inversion, as a fifth. Ravel calls for a repeat of the exposition, and the brief development builds to a climax he marks passioné before the recapitulation and a quiet close on a very brief coda. The middle movement is marked “Tempo of a Minuet,” and the music takes on some of the grace of that form, though this minuet is set in 3/8 rather than the expected 3/4 and there is no
trio section–at the center the tempo broadens slightly before a return of the opening dance. The concluding Animé is somewhat different in character from the first two movements: it is more consciously virtuosic, and it leaps to life with rippling, arpeggio-like figures that support the rhythmic main idea. This movement also is in a sort of sonata form, with a second subject in 5/4. Once again, Ravel’s working out of these ideas is very concise, and the music almost flies to its exultant conclusion.

Miroirs

Ravel wrote the five-movement set of piano pieces entitled Miroirs in the years 1904-05, when he was 30 years old. The title Miroirs suggests that Ravel’s attempt here is to reflect an image, and each of the pieces that make up Miroirs piano suggests a “sound-picture” of its title.

The opening title, Noctuelles, translates as “Night Moths,” and the music suggests the fluttering, clumsy flight of moths. The music spills and swirls its way to a calmer center section before the moths resume flight, and the piece ends on delicate wisps of sound. The second piece, Oiseaux tristes (“Sad Birds”), was the first to be written. Ravel himself called this “the most typical in the collection” and described its content: “These are birds lost in the mazes of an extremely dark forest during the hottest hours of summer.” Repeated notes, exotic swirls of sound, and extensive use of rubato mark his portrait of the birds. Audiences may find the third piece, Une barque sur l’océan (“A Barque on the Ocean”), familiar, for Ravel orchestrated it shortly after publishing Miroirs. Here is one of Ravel’s most successful efforts at tone-painting: waves shimmer and fall, the wind whistles, and the boat glides and surges across the water. The fourth piece, Alborada del gracioso, is also well-known in its orchestral guise, though Ravel did not
orchestrate it until 1918. The title of this colorful music does not translate easily, and the English rendering “Morning Song of the Jester” is prosaic. Himself of Basque origins, Ravel had a special affection for Spanish music throughout his life, and the rhythmic vitality of Alborada shows this influence clearly. The final piece, La vallée des cloches (“The Valley of the Bells”), is a tone-painting of the sound of church bells. This movement is written on three staves, and Ravel―who said that the inspiration for this music
was the church bells of Paris that would ring out at noon–gives us a huge range of bell-sounds, from deep tolling bells to high bells that ring out brightly. Some sense of this music may be found in Ravel’s instructions to the pianist. He asks that the performance be “very gentle and without accents” and specifies twice that the playing should be très calme.

Gaspard de la nuit

Maurice Ravel had a lifelong fascination with magic and the macabre, and they shaped his music in different ways. While still a student at the Paris Conservatory, he fell in love with a curious book written 60 years earlier: Gaspard de la nuit, a collection of prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841). Bertrand said that these spooky tales from the middle ages were “after the manner of Callot and Rembrandt” (it was an engraving by Callot―“The Huntsman’s Funeral”―that inspired the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony), and Bertrand gave these tales a further whiff of brimstone by claiming that the manuscript had been delivered to him by a stranger: Gaspard himself, simply an alias for Satan.

Ravel composed his Gaspard de la nuit―a set of three pieces that blend magic, nightmare, and the grotesque―in 1908, at exactly the same time he was writing his collection of luminous fairyland pieces for children, Ma mère l’oye. Ravel’s completed work descends from a curiously mixed artistic ancestry: Bertrand’s prose-poems were originally inspired by the visual arts (paintings, etchings, and woodcuts), and in turn―his imagination enlivened by Bertrand’s literary images―Ravel composed what he called “three poems for piano.” This heterogeneous background makes itself felt in the music, for at its best Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit blends word, image, and sound.

Each of the three pieces in Gaspard de la nuit was inspired by a particular prose-poem, and Ravel included these in the score. But Gaspard de la nuit should not be understood as the attempt to recreate each tale in music; rather, these pieces evoke the particular mood inspired by Bertrand’s prose-poems. Still, there are moments of such detailed scene-painting that one imagines Ravel must have had specific lines in mind as he wrote.

Ondine pictures the water sprite who tempts mortal man to her palace beneath the lake. Ravel’s shimmering music evokes the transparent, transitory surfaces of Bertrand’s text, the final line of which reads: “And when I told her that I was in love with a mortal
woman, she began to sulk in annoyance, shed a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower of spray which ran in pale drops down my blue window-panes.” It is impossible not to hear a conscious setting of these images over the closing moments of this
music, which vanishes as suddenly as the water sprite herself.

Le gibet (“The Gallows”) evokes quite a different world, and all commentators sense the influence of Poe here (during his American tour of 1928, Ravel made a point of visiting Poe’s house in Baltimore).Bertrand’s text begins with a question: “Ah, what do I hear? Is it the night wind howling, or the hanged man sighing on the gibbet?” He considers other possibilities, all of them horrible, and finally offers the answer: “It is the bell that sounds from the walls of a town beyond the horizon, and the corpse of a hanged man that glows red in the setting sun.” Muted throughout, this piece is built on a constantly repeated B-flat, whose irregular tolling echoes the sound of that bell.

The concluding Scarbo is a portrait of some bizarre creature―part dwarf, part rogue, part clown―who seems to hover just outside clear focus. The text concludes: “But soon his body would start to turn blue, as transparent as candle wax, his face would grow pale as the light from a candle-end–and suddenly he would begin to disappear.” With its torrents of sound, sudden stops, and the unexpected close, Ravel’s music suggests different appearances of this apparition.

It should be noted that Gaspard de la nuit is music of stupefying difficulty for the performer, and this was by design. Ravel consciously set out to write a work that he said would be more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, one of the great tests for pianists (alert listeners may detect hints of the beginning of Islamey in Scarbo, perhaps an act of homage on the part of Ravel). In his effort to write blisteringly difficult music for the pianist, Ravel succeeded brilliantly. From the complex (and finger-twisting) chords of Ondine through the dense textures of Le gibet (written on three staves) and the consecutive seconds of Scarbo, Gaspard de la nuit presents hurdles that make simply getting the notes almost impossible. And only then can the pianist set about creating the range of tone color, dynamics, and pacing that bring this evanescent music to life.

Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn

In early 1909 Jules Ecorcheville, editor of the journal Revue musicale de la S.I.M., wished to observe the centenary of the death of Joseph Haydn, who had died in May 1809. He asked a group of eight French composers to write a short piece based on the musical equivalents of the letters of Haydn’s last name, as determined by Ecorcheville:

H A Y D N

B A D D G

Two of those composers, Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré, declined the invitation (Saint-Saëns objected to Ecorcheville’s musical equivalents), but the remaining six composers each wrote a brief piece to honor that earlier master: Ravel, Debussy, d’Indy, Widor, Hahn, and Dukas. These were published in the Revue musicale, and on March 11, 1911, Ennemond Trillat gave the public premiere of all six at a concert of the Societé national at the Salle Pleyel.

Ravel sets his piece in a form that Haydn would have recognized, a minuet, but he abandons Haydn’s three-part form and instead composes a graceful little dance based on the five-note sequence. What makes his Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn so ingenious is that Ravel treats that sequence in a way that might have pleased Arnold Schoenberg: he gives us that five-note sequence forward, backward, and inverted, carefully pointing out these uses by writing Haydn’s name backwards and upside-down in the score as they appear. This makes the music sound terribly learned, and it is not. Instead, this graceful and affectionate gesture toward the music of Haydn is pure Ravel.

Valses nobles et sentimentales

In 1911, Ravel took time off from his work on the ballet Daphnis and Chloé to compose a very different sort of music, a set of eight waltzes for piano, which he called Valses nobles et sentimentales. The inspiration for these dances may at first seem an unlikely one for so French a composer, for Ravel wrote these waltzes as an act of homage to Franz Schubert. Schubert wrote an enormous amount of dance music for piano: waltzes, laendler, minuets, German dances, and so on. This music rarely appears on recital programs, but all piano students are familiar with it, and as a young man Ravel fell deeply in love with it. Among Schubert’s dances for piano are a set of Valses sentimentales composed in 1823 and a set of Valses nobles, from three years later, and these were the inspiration for Ravel’s own set of waltzes for piano: his title, he said, “sufficiently indicates my intention of writing a cycle of waltzes after the example of Schubert.” A decade later, Ravel would return to the Viennese waltz in his famous La valse, but his evocation of Vienna was darkly colored by the war. Here he sets out simply to evoke the gracious world of Vienna a century earlier.

The first performance of the piano version of Valses nobles et sentimentales was given by Louis Aubert in Paris on May 9, 1911, under unusual circumstances. The Societé Musicale Indépendente, which sponsored the concert, had decided that audiences and critics were prejudiced against certain composers and kinds of music. To circumvent these prejudices, all works on the program were performed without the composers’ names announced. While this may seem a good idea, it proved an uncomfortable experience for Ravel, who sat stoically while his friends seated around him made fun of the Valses. The audience’s attempt to guess the composer of this music may have been even more disconcerting to Ravel: guesses included not only Zoltán Kodály and Erik Satie, but also Mozart, Chopin,
Gounod, and even Wagner. The music, however, proved attractive enough that Ravel was encouraged to orchestrate it the following year as a ballet; titled Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, the ballet told of Adélaïde, her two suitors, and the flowers that symbolize their relationships. The orchestral version was premiered by Pierre Monteux in 1914.

These eight brief waltzes require little introduction. By turns languid, sparkling, lilting, and vivacious, they show a rhythmic sophistication and suppleness (as well as a harmonic language), far beyond Schubert, but they also capture much of the fun and spirit of Schubert’s waltzes. The graceful seventh waltz, which Ravel called the “most characteristic” of the set, may be familiar to audiences in Jascha Heifetz’s transcription for violin and piano–he often used it as an encore piece.

Ravel himself may best get at the flavor of this music in a light-hearted quotation from the novelist Henri de Régnier that he set at the top of the published score: “The delightful and always novel pleasure of a useless occupation.”

Prélude

In 1913 Gabriel Fauré asked Maurice Ravel to compose a short work for the sight-reading competition in the women’s division of the Paris Conservatory. The previous year had seen the premiere of what is perhaps Ravel’s greatest work, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, and now he produced something completely different for the competition. Ravel’s Prélude is only 27 measures long, it lasts just over a minute, and it is not particularly difficult for the pianist: in this music Ravel set out not to pose virtuoso hurdles but simply to test the ability to sight-read. He marks the score Very slow and very expressive (and with free rhythm). Along the way come enough “wrong” notes to ensure that a pianist is reading very carefully, but dynamics remain quiet throughout, and the music winds its way to a very gentle conclusion.

The Prélude may seem a very slight piece, but Ravel thought highly enough of it that he included it among the pieces he performed.

The winner of the 1913 sight-reading competition was the 15-year-old Jeanne Leleu. Three years earlier she had been one of the pianists at the premiere of Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye, and Ravel was so struck by her playing at the competition that he dedicated the Prélude to her. Leleu would go on to a distinguished career: she was only the third woman to win the Prix de Rome, and she taught at the Paris Conservatory for many years before her death in 1979.

À la manière de Chabrier

In Paris in December 1913 the Italian pianist-composer Alfredo Casella put on a concert of pastiches, witty reworkings of the style of the music of other composers, and one of the pieces Casella parodied was Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, which had been premiered only two years earlier. This was all done in a spirit of fun and affection, and Casella invited Ravel to contribute a couple of pastiches of his own. Ravel chose two of his favorite composers as subjects of pieces he called À la manière de…(“In the manner of…”).

À la manière de Borodin is a short waltz in the style of that Russian master, but À la manière de Chabrier is more complex in a sort of double pastiche. In this piece Ravel tried to imagine how Chabrier would have written a pastiche on Siebel’s aria “Faites-lui mes aveux” from Act III of Gounod’s Faust, and so in a sense that aria is twice-imagined here. One would have to know both Gounod’s aria and the features of Gounod’s style that Ravel parodies to fully understand this piece. It is an affectionate piece of music, and it is a miniature in less than two minutes.

Le tombeau de Couperin

Two events combined to help produce Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s last large-scale work for piano. In the second decade of the twentieth century, well before the beginning of the neo-classical movement, Ravel found himself increasingly drawn to the music of France’s past. He embarked on
a lengthy study of 18th-century French keyboard music, going so far as to transcribe one of the keyboard pieces of François Couperin, and he planned to write a collection of his own piano pieces in the manner of the 18th-century French clavecinists. His working title for this piece was Suite française.

The other force was less benign. In the summer of 1914, World War I exploded across Europe and, after the guns destroyed the old certainties that summer, Western Civilization would never be the same. Ravel was one of the few composers in history to serve in the military.

Driven by patriotism and a sense of the moment, he enlisted in the French army and at age 40 drove ambulances carrying wounded back from the front. For a nature as sensitive as Ravel’s, the experience was devastating, and compounding his misery, his mother died while he was gone.

Under these conditions, what had begun as the Suite française evolved into something quite different. During the years 1914-17 Ravel composed a suite of six movements for piano and dedicated each movement to a different friend who had been killed in the war. He gave the piece a title that reflects both its homage to the past and the dark moment of its creation: Le tombeau de Couperin, or “The Tomb of Couperin.” Ravel creates a consciously antiquarian sound in this music: each of the six movements is in a baroque form, and Ravel sets out to make the modern piano mimic the jangling, plangent sound of the harpsichord. A bittersweet flavor runs throughout Le tombeau: several of the movements may be in dance forms, but here they dance with a gravity that springs from war and loss. Marguerite Long gave the first performance in Paris on April 11, 1919, five months to the day after the Armistice that brought the war to its close. Later that year Ravel orchestrated four of the movements, and Le tombeau de Couperin has become more familiar in this orchestral version than in its original form.

The opening Prélude is full of busy energy, whirling along a constant murmur of sixteenth-notes. Against this rush of quiet motion Ravel sets what are essentially fragments of themes, full of mordents, turns, and other decorations characteristic of eighteenth-century music. The Fugue, at a moderate tempo, is quite subdued. Its subject, only three measures long, is of narrow compass (most of this fugue is written with both hands in the treble clef), and Ravel extends it quietly (the dynamic never rises above mezzo-forte) before the music fades delicately into silence. A forlane was originally a lively dance believed to be of Italian creation, and Ravel’s Forlane dances with somber dignity along a springing 6/8 meter. Nominally in E minor, this music is riddled with accidentals, and its pungent harmonies echo the clang of the harpsichord.

A rigaudon was a lively folk-dance in duple meter and short phrases, thought to be originally from Provence. Ravel’s Rigaudon―marked Very fast―bursts to life on a bright flourish in C major, followed instantly by the propulsive dance. Its central episode slips into C minor, but the opening section soon returns in all its energy and the movement races to its close on the opening flourish. The Menuet is built on a long and expressive main theme. Ravel marks the center section Musette (an old dance accompanied by bagpipe), and the sustained chorale-like theme here echoes some of that antique sound.

The concluding Toccata is easily the most brilliant, and most difficult, movement in the suite―and the one that moves farthest away from an atmosphere of mourning. As its name implies, a toccata is intended to demonstrate a player’s touch, and this Toccata whips along its 2/4 meter on the steady pound of repeated notes. Against this driving energy, Ravel sets a dancing opening theme and a more wistful second subject, but the steady rhythms finally drive the Toccata to an exciting close, which–if it does not banish the air of stately mourning that surrounds Le tombeau de Couperin–at least rounds it off in brilliant fashion.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger.