Death of Ravel

Eight years ago, at a Philharmonic- Symphony concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, Arturo Toscanini introduced to the U. S. an unpretentious composition by a celebrated French composer. The piece was called Bolero. Performed previously in Paris, it was not considered one of its composer's masterpieces, and Maestro Toscanini had programmed it inconspicuously as an hors d'oeuvre to solider stuff. To the surprise of conductor and orchestra. the staid audience stomped, clapped and howled its approval. Within the next three years approximately 500 performances of the work were given by U. S. symphony orchestras, thousands more by every conceivable combination of instruments, from jazz bands to harmonica ensembles. Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths gaped incredulously as this symphonic work began to outsell their own best sellers. U. S. lowbrows who had never heard of shy, hermit-like French Impressionist Maurice Ravel sang, hummed, whistled and danced to his Bolero.

Last week, while erstwhile Bolero fans occupied themselves with other fads & fancies, the music world mourned the death of Composer Ravel, most noted French musician of his generation. It was not as the concocter of that booming bit of cafe music that Ravel drew this world-wide homage, but as the composer of two operas, numerous songs and chamber music works, and of a half-dozen suites and tone poems (Daphnis et Chloe, La Valse, Rhapsodic Espagnole, Alborada del Gracioso, Ma Mere I 'Oye, Le Tombeau de Couperin, et al.) which have long ornamented the symphonic programs of three continents. A miraculous orchestrator and an adept at poetic description in sound, fastidious, precise-minded Ravel had, following the death of Claude Debussy, succeeded to the place of No. 1 Impressionist composer. Born in 1875 in a Pyrenees town, of a Basque mother and a French-Jewish-Swiss father, Ravel kept all through life an affection for Spanish folk music, allowed its idioms to influence many of his compositions. Despite a reputation for extreme diligence at the Paris Conservatoire, where he matriculated in 1889, he quickly became known as an iconoclast, scandalized students and teachers by playing the works of then unrespectable modernist composers during school hours. Refusal of academicians to admit him as a contestant for the Prix de Rome in 1905 started a row resulting in the resignation of the Conservatoire's Director FranQois Theodore Dubois.

An unfounded impression that Ravel was a hairy-chested radical persisted among conservative French critics for years, despite the fact that his music was the last word in elegance and refinement. Unprolific and self-restricted to the smaller forms of composition (he never wrote a symphony), Ravel managed a fairly steady output of clean-cut, impeccably styled works which was interrupted only by the outbreak of the War. Frail, diminutive Ravel served as an ambulance driver; later his health collapsed under the strain. After the War he bought himself a secluded villa in the country outside Paris, where he spent most of his remaining years.

A musical impressionist like Debussy, Paul Dukas and Jacques Ibert, Ravel worked with combinations of tone as impressionist painters did with blurred combinations of color, got nebulous and exotic effects from his orchestra. He was an eclectic, often deliberately imitated the idioms of exotic or historic peoples, dishing them up in his own particular French sauce. Thus his opera L'Heure Espagnole and his descriptive orchestral works Bolero, Alborada del Gracioso and Rhapsodic Espagnole are built up of Spanish idioms; his La Valse has a Viennese, his Le Tombeau de Couperin an early 18th-Century flavor. A movement in Ma Mere I'Oye reflects Oriental idioms; a violin sonata is based on American "blues." Though a brilliant orchestrator and a resourceful stylist, he was not a great originator.

Once when someone asked him if it were not necessary for a composer to be sincere. Ravel answered: 'I don't particularly care about this 'sincerity.' I try to make art." He had a little story about how he had worked for four years on a certain sonata and had spent three of the four taking out unnecessary notes.

In 1928 dapper, long-nosed, quick-moving little Ravel visited the U. S. to conduct some of his own compositions with Walter Damrosch's New York Symphony and other U. S. orchestras. Shy, almost hysterically affable as a conductor, he seemed continuously surprised and pleased that his music sounded so well. Once he lost his place in the middle of his own La Valse and had to be pulled through by the orchestra.

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