Frenchpolish

From music of the past to jazz, from Spanish dance to kitchen crockery, Ravel took a remarkable range of influences as his inspiration and turned them into perfectly crafted masterpieces, writes Paul Riley

- Paul Riley

Describing an interview with the ever dapper Maurice Ravel, the American critic Olin Downes observed that ‘a hummingbird would have been maladroit in his company’! Like the man himself – exquisitely tailored – Ravel’s music betrays an artfulness that so often cultivates a surface simplicity while harbouring depths in no hurry to make themselves known.

‘Complexe mais pas compliqué’ was his motto – so, at any rate, declared Vaughan Williams, a sometime pupil – but there could be a fine line separating the ‘complex’ from the ‘complicated’. For Ravel, composing was about refining and eliminating – the devil always in the detail – and obsessed with the quest for ‘technical perfection’, he confided that striving ‘unceasingly to this end… I am certain of never being able to achieve it’. The ceaseless reinvention and renewal he discerned in Stravinsky was also an intrinsic part of Ravel’s psyche, and it nourished a world intrigued by exoticism: from fairytale enchantment to the ‘otherness’ (as he called it) of music from Russia and the East; from the reimagination of the past to jazz.

Ravel was born in 1875, the year that witnessed the premiere of Bizet’s Carmen. Appropriately so, for someone who would be obsessed with Spain and ‘espagnolerie’ all his life, and not just as an appropriation of a fashionable fad: his birthplace was Ciboure near the Spanish border, just across the water from Saint Jean-de-Luz; he was proud of his Basque heritage; he imbibed the Madrid of his mother’s youth through her songs and storytelling; and in his formative years he forged a close friendship with the brilliant young Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes. Together they helped distil what composer Manuel de Falla would call Ravel’s ‘subtly genuine Spanishness’ – a thread running from the Habanera