On Ravel, and his eternal Miroirs
Maurice Ravel – Miroirs
Debussy’s music had divided the Parisian musical scene. Among his most vocal and dedicated supporters was a loosely defined circle of friends: artists, painters, poets and musicians, calling themselves the Apaches. Quite extraordinarily, the Apaches organised meetings at every single performance of the first run of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. They would ensure that each performance was met with a vigorous round of applause – and their strategy worked, eventually they tamed Debussy’s more hostile reviewers. At the same time they would organise soirées where they would share their many tastes, from Rameau to Chopin, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, oriental art and the music of the Russians.
Ravel finalised Miroirs in 1905. Each movementis is dedicated to one of his Apache friends: Viñes, Calvocoressi, Fargue, Sordes and Delage. Miroirs had a spectacular success with its first audiences. The premiere was given on 6th January by the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, and the pianist documents ‘un succés monstre’ ('a terrific success') in his diary. Viñes, considered to be the preferred pianist among young composers, had premiered important works by Debussy, Ravel and Cyril Scott .
The opening piece of Miroirs is entitled Noctuelles (Night moths). It is dedicated to one of his closest friends, a fellow Apache, poet Léon-Paul Fargue, and conjures up the following verses from Fargue’s opus:
Les noctuelles des hangars partent, d’un vol gauche
Cravater d’autre poutres
The nocturnal moths launch themselves clumsily from their barns,
To settle on other perches
Ravel recognises that our immediate perception of the natural world is that of an aggregation of disorder and fragmentary chaotic structures. Quite extraordinarily, the main motif captures the arbitrary and shapeless flight of the swarm int the fluttering wrist movements of the pianist, quivering above the keyboard surface. We experience a finely grained landscape of sounds, scattered with a multitude of tiny specks of dissonance. The sense of harmonic direction reveals this to be one of the most radical pieces in the collection. A mercurial middle section follows where the swarm of moths descend, falling to the ground, whilst a short-lived gloomy melody appears to rise out of a misty cloud of earthly vapours. The return to the main section Is suggested by the gradual awakening of the dormant insects . After a sudden, long crescendo towards the high register, the cluster of moths, becoming ever more animated, engulfs us once more, and the opening motif re-emerges out of this blazing stream of flying insects.
In the benchmark work of the set, Oiseux tristes (Sad Birds), Ravel paints the cries of solitary birds against the backdrop of a 'very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer'. Ravel further discusses the timbres and texture: 'the birds call on a high, rather strident level, with rapid arabesques, and by contrast, the sombre, stifling atmosphere of the forest on a lower level, rather heavy and muted, with a lot of pedal but not much more movement'. The piece was dedicated to Ricardo Viñes with a wry inscription by the composer: 'It was fun to inscribe to a pianist a piece that was not in the least pianistic'.
Une Barque sur l’Ocèan is the third and final canvas set within the confines of the natural world. A lonely boat is pitched against the immensity of a stormy ocean, a standard metaphor for Man confronting the vastness of an impersonal nature. Through great washes of pedal and arpeggios, Ravel reproduces the rising and falling of waves. The middle section sees a return to the initial stillness, this time transposed into a different key, perhaps an intimation that we have reached the eye of the storm.
About the fourth piece Ravel wrote to his friend, 'I understand your bafflement over how to translate the title "Alborada del gracioso"; precisely why I decided not to translate it. The fact is that the gracioso of Spanish comedy is a rather special character and one which, so far as I know, is not found in any other theatrical tradition. . . The simplest thing, I think, is to follow the title with the rough translation "Morning Song of the Clown" ("Aubade du bouffon"). That will be enough to explain the piece’s humoristic style'. The ardent love song of the jester is presented in the middle section – with its Moorish inflections, a melody tainted with both the passion of love and the pain of rejection. Some suggest that Sérénade from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit might be a direct source of inspiration – a story about a lady being unsuccessfully courted by a troubadour suitor.
Ravel’s fascination with Spanish music (perhaps only a natural predilection, given his hispanic heritage – his mother was Spanish) prompts him to transform the piano into a massive plucking stringed instrument. The keyboard is remodelled after a guitar, and a mosaic of variations of touch and pedal suggest a variety of percussion instruments. With its fast repeated notes and double glissandi, Alborada poses a transcendental challenge on modern pianos, features which were more practical, and easier to play on the pianos of Ravel’s days.
A landscape of bells and tintinnabulations engulfs the final act of Miroirs. Several bells appear in different registers of the piano, against the hint of a glockenspiel, marked as très doux et sans accentuation (very softly and without accentuations). The main challenge to the performer lies in creating the impression of distinctive bells and timbres within the scope of piano and mezzoforte dynamics. A long and generous melody marked largement chanté appears in the inner section. Henriette Faure, Ravel’s piano student tells us thet this section from La Vallée des Clôches is 'The great, calm, lyrical outpouring. . .[which] requires a profound sonority and a legato that comes from a hand closely wedded to the keys'. The closing scene of Miroirs sketches the opening suite of bells and chimes, this time with a suggestion of twilight gloom - the music ends with two strikes of a gong, one marked piano and the other pianissimo.
(copyright Cristian Sandrin, from Correspondances 2023)