The Young Alchemist (1893–1901): Forging a New Pianism
Early Experiments: Spanish Grotesques and Antique Dances (1893-1895)
Although Ravel’s compositional voice did not emerge fully formed, his earliest surviving works show a remarkably clear vision. The Sérénade grotesque of 1893, written when he was just 18, is a fascinating first draft of the Spanish idiom that would become a lifelong preoccupation. However, Ravel felt the work owed too much to the influence of Emmanuel Chabrier; it remained unpublished in his lifetime. This piece is, nevertheless, startlingly advanced for its time. It is filled with rhythmic and harmonic surprises, including dissonant chords and strange harmonies that clearly foreshadow his mature style. Most notably, its dry, arpeggiated chords and the audacious performance instruction ‘pizzicatissimo’ evoke the sound of a guitar. This is clearly a prototype for ‘Alborada del gracioso’, which would follow twelve years later.
Two years later, in the Menuet antique (1895), Ravel turned from Spanish caricature to French classicism. The first significant example of his neoclassical impulse, the work is a tribute to Chabrier. Dedicated to Ravel’s lifelong friend and foremost interpreter, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, it adheres to a traditional minuet-and-trio structure. This Classical scaffolding, though, supports a distinctly modern harmonic language. Written in the Aeolian mode on F-sharp, the piece blends the formal elegance of the Baroque with a melodic refinement and harmonic subtlety that are pure Ravel. This early fascination with the minuet form would echo throughout his career, reappearing in major works like the Sonatine and Le Tombeau de Couperin.
The First Masterpiece: Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899)
It was with the Pavane pour une infante défunte that Ravel achieved his first measure of fame. Commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac, this stately and melancholic piece captures a romanticised, archaic vision of the Spanish court. Its title, often mistranslated, does not refer to a specific deceased child. Rather, an ‘infante’ (or ‘infanta’ in Spanish) is a princess. The title, then, evokes the image of a princess in a bygone age, who might have danced to a pavane such as this.
The work’s structure is a clear rondo form (A-B-A-C-A), providing a familiar framework for its distinctive modal harmonies and gracefully arching melody. Despite its immense popularity, Ravel grew to dislike the piece, criticising what he saw as its overly conventional form. Nevertheless, its combination of formal restraint and poignant, nostalgic beauty established a key aspect of his aesthetic: the expression of deep feeling through cool, perfected surfaces.
Tempo
Ravel intended the piece to be played extremely slowly – more slowly than almost any modern interpretation, according to his biographer Benjamin Ivry. The critic Émile Vuillermoz complained that Ravel’s playing of the work was ‘unutterably slow’. Ravel, however, disliked the slow tempi adopted by many performers, and was not impressed by interpretations that plodded. After a performance by Charles Oulmont, Ravel mentioned to him that the piece was called ‘Pavane for a dead princess’, not ‘dead pavane for a princess’. When asked by the composer-conductor Manoah Leide-Tedesco how he arrived at the title Pavane pour une infante défunte, Ravel smiled coyly and replied: ‘Do not be surprised, that title has nothing to do with the composition. I simply liked the sound of those words and I put them there, c’est tout‘. Ravel also stated, however, that the piece depicted a pavane as it would be danced by an Infanta found in a painting by Diego Velázquez.
A New Sound for a New Century: The Revolution of Jeux d’eau (1901)
If the Pavane made Ravel known, Jeux d’eau made him a revolutionary. Composed in 1901 and dedicated to his teacher Gabriel Fauré, this work is a landmark in the history of piano literature. Ravel himself asserted that it was this piece, predating Debussy’s major impressionistic piano works, that ‘opens up new horizons in piano technique’ and initiated a new kind of piano writing. Inspired by Franz Liszt’s ‘Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’ (from Années de pèlerinage III, S. 163), Ravel sought to create a new musical language to depict the ‘sound of water and the musical sounds made by fountains, cascades, and streams’. He inscribed the score with a line from the poet Henri de Régnier: ‘Dieu fluvial riant de l′eau qui le chatouille’ (‘River god laughing at the water that tickles him’), a motto that captures the work’s playful, sensuous, and hedonistic spirit.
The piece’s innovations are threefold. First, it introduced a new pianistic texture, built on fast, shimmering, cascading piano figurations that evoke the physical permutations of water with unprecedented realism. Second, its harmonic language was groundbreaking, being built almost entirely on the sonority of major seventh and ninth chords, which float free from traditional functional harmony to become colours in their own right. Finally, and most remarkably, Ravel contained this ‘liquid poem’ within the rigorous framework of a classical sonata form. This fusion of a revolutionary sound world with a traditional structure is a perfect early example of the ‘mechanism of the dream’. Ravel did not abandon form to create atmosphere; he used form to distill it. With Jeux d’eau, Ravel did not just write a masterpiece; he forged a new language for the piano.
