Satie, Ravel, Poulenc, Vol. 4

Ravel (Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty) 

In this installment of Manuel Rosenthal's three-part musical memoir, he begins to recount his tutelage under the exacting but expansive Maurice Ravel. (Incidentally I wish to express my agreement with Rosenthal's outlying opinion of the opera L'enfant et les sortileges as Ravel's masterpiece.) Previous entry here.

II. Ravel

Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges suffered a fate similar to Parade: it was booed at the premiere in Monte Carlo, 1928, and at every subsequent performance over the next decade, often to such an extent that poor Ravel could barely hear the music.

Ravel was quoted by Roland-Manuel as saying L’enfant was like an American “musical.” Ravel was much impressed by what he knew of American musical comedy, which was quite different from French operetta. L’enfant is in fact a variety show, a sequence of lively short numbers, each different from the next and each one an important musical idea.

L’enfant is undoubtedly Ravel’s masterpiece; and its music reflects the simplicity and the sadness of childhood. Ravel tells us that a child looks at the adult world in a way we know nothing about. Everything is gigantic and wondrous to him. A child thinks only and always about freedom. A child is always dreaming. That is why he is in revolt against adults.

All his life Ravel remained a child. He never married, and didn’t have a family; he was deeply attached to his mother. Even physically he was like a child—short and slim, very small boned. Ravel was conscious of being small; he was not ashamed of it, but he always stood up very erect. Because of this people often thought he was pompous, which he was not! As soon as Ravel was in the company of children, no matter where, he would get down on the carpet and play with them. He was not like an uncle or a father, but more like another child, and the children were delighted!

Le Belvédère in Montfort-L'Amaury

Ravel’s house in Montfort-l’Amaury, “le Belvedere,” was very small. That’s why he had bought it. It was baldy built, and of no interest as design, except that the rooms were tiny. Ravel had decorated it himself, and in the way a child might decorate a house. When I wanted to give him something for his birthday, I always looked for a highly original toy, and he was always delighted.

Ravel heard my music when I was twenty years old, and he told me he wanted to teach me. He said, “I am not going to be indulgent with you. I know your music; it’s because I like it and because I think you are extremely gifted that I am offering my services. But don’t think for one moment that I am going to be indulgent with you.” Ravel insisted on my learning the basics of solfeggio, fugue, counterpoint, and so on. Many times when I had brought him my assignment he would tear it up without a word, looking me directly in the eye.

There were other composers around Ravel at this time—Roland-Manuel, Maurice Delage. They spent weekends with him, got ideas and hints, but I was his only real pupil. It is often written that George Gershwin and Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel, but this is not true. Vaughan Williams was already a famous composer when he modestly wrote Ravel, asking him for musical advice. Ravel was very flattered but he told him exactly what he told Gershwin—“I have nothing to teach you.”

Ravel was a stern, severe teacher. One day after he tore up a composition of mine, I was in tears. I said to myself, this is really too much, and I left without saying goodbye, slamming the door. Monfort-l’Amaury was about thirty miles from Paris, and Ravel’s house was two miles by mail coach from the train station. It was an old-style mail coach with horses, as in a Dickens novel. I sat in the back of the coach crying. It was pouring rain outside. Suddenly through the glass door I saw a shape, and thinking somebody wished to get in I opened the door and there was Ravel! He was wearing a suit and tie, with no raincoat, no umbrella, rain streaming down his face. And he said, “Why did you leave without saying goodbye to your teacher?”

Ravel believed that when you are learning you are just like a child; it is not the time for opinions or self-expression. When I was young I thought Massenet and Puccini were outdated and worthless. One day Ravel said, “You are absolutely wrong about Puccini, and I will show you why.” He shut the door, sat down at the piano, and for the next two hours he played all of Tosca by heart, explaining every passage. After that I knew it was a masterpiece. About Massenet—one day after lunch Ravel took me to the home of the harpist Carlos Salzedo, who was making an arrangement for harp, flute, and violin of Sonatine. Ravel didn’t approve, but he agreed to that to please his friend. After a few bars Ravel got so excited that he ran to the piano and played for Salzedo the beginning of the Sonatine. It sounded very robust, like Massenet. To me it sounded ridiculous. Afterwards I said to him, “Why did you do that? Now it sounds like Massenet.” And Ravel said, “What’s wrong with that? I dedicated my string quartet to Gabriel Fauré, but my real teacher was Massenet. I owe everything I know to him. His music so influenced Debussy and me that we shall always owe a debt to his genius.” After these remarks, I realized how much Massenet there is in Ravel’s and in Debussy’s music—even in Pelleas or L’enfant. I later found that Ravel knew all of Massenet by heart, even weaker operas, and the Suite for Orchestra. I remember a piece by Massenet written from Lecomte de Lisle’s Les Erinnyes, an air that was played only at the cafés. Oh, how Ravel loved that!

Ravel went less to cafés than to the nightclubs, because he loved jazz. As soon as he had finished whatever he had been working on, he would leave his country place and go to Paris for a bit of nightlife. Not for the sake of socializing, but because there he could find jazz. In almost every piece of his there is a jazz section. Ravel always said that jazz was the most important musical event of our time, one that had brought the most novelty into music. He loved the freedom of jazz—it was all done by intuition, by feeling.

When Ravel was still young he had begun to compose a four-act opera based on A. Ferdinand Herold’s French translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Versünkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell). He had already written a large part of it when his father, then sick and dying, said, “Maurice, I would like to see something of your work on the stage—this affair will take you too long.” So Ravel abandoned the opera and composed L’Heure Espagnol—but his father died before the premiere. Ravel was pleased with the music he had composed for the abandoned opera, which was about witchcraft and man-to-animal transformations. When he first thought about L’enfant he said, “I’m going to use parts of The Sunken Bell.” That was why he asked Colette to include certain incidents in her libretto, especially in the second part, in the garden scene, where the music seems to come from another world.

Marie-Thérèse Gauley in the title role of 'L'enfant' in 1926

Ravel had great sympathy for animals. He owned a couple of Siamese cats. I have a picture of Ravel taken in his garden with one of his cats, named “Mouni.” On the picture is written, “a Manuel Rosenthal, affecteusement, Maurice Ravel, et Mouni.” When he was composing the cat’s duet in L’enfant he wrote to his friends, saying, “Tell me, is it ‘menou’ or ‘mounou’?,” trying to get the exact sound of a cat in love. Ravle was also good at imitating bird songs. At Montfort he would walk for miles into the forest—he knew the forest very well—he would listen to the birds, and it amused him to imitate them. You hear them in the garden scene of L’enfant; he knew just how to reproduce them with flutes.

It was not until Ravel was writing L’enfant that I fully understood the life of a creator. He finished the work in Monte Carlo, just days before the opening. When it was finally completed he said to me, “You know, at night when I was walking along the sea, wondering whether something should be in B flat or B major, or how to choose a chord or guide a melodic line, I said to myself, Oh, I am tired of this! I would like to be finished with it, just sitting in a café at last, enjoying an aperitif, looking at the sea. And when I was finally through and could sit in a café having my aperitif, the taste of it was bitter! I was longing for the time I spent walking at night, thinking, should it be B flat or B major!”

Next: Ravel's cheerful equanimity about his mixed reputation, and the music he chose for his funeral.