Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist, and conductor. Who lived from March 7, 1875, until December 28, 1937.
He is frequently lumped into the “Impressionist” category, along with his older contemporaries. Claude Debussy, despite their mutual rejection of the label. Ravel was considered the best-living French composer in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ravel came from a musical family and studied at France’s top music school, the Paris Conservatoire where he received an unfavorable reception from the traditional establishment.
After dropping out of music school, Ravel became a composer, forging a distinctive sound that fused modernism, baroque, neoclassicism, and even jazz in his later pieces.
Like in his most famous work, Boléro (1928), where repetition takes the place of growth, he enjoyed tinkering with musical structure.
Ravel, renowned for his orchestration skills, wrote various orchestral arrangements of the piano music of other composers; his 1922 arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is particularly well-known.
Ravel, a meticulous worker, wrote fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries because of his glacial pace.
Although he did not compose symphonies or sacred music, many of his works, including piano pieces, chamber music, two piano concertos, music for ballet, two operas, and eight song cycles, have found their way into concert halls worldwide.
There are often both piano and orchestral scores available for his pieces. His piano pieces like Gaspard de la nuit (1908) and orchestral pieces like Daphnis et Chloé (1912) are challenging and call for expert musicianship to execute successfully.
Ravel was one of the first composers to see how recording may help spread his work to new listeners. Even though he could have been more skilled as a pianist or conductor, he began participating in recordings of his compositions in the 1920s and oversaw the recording of others.
What about Maurice Ravel last years before death?
Ravel began composing two piano concertos in the early 1930s. First, he finished the Left Hand Piano Concerto in D Major.
Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned this work after losing his right arm in World War II. Because of the technical difficulties involved.
Ravel was inspired to create the piece: “In a work of this generous, it is essential to give a feeling of a texture no thinner than that of an element written for both hands.”
Since Ravel’s left-hand skills were inadequate, he demonstrated the piece using both hands. At first, Wittgenstein was unimpressed, but after considering it, he came to view it as a masterpiece.
He gave the world premiere in Vienna in January 1932, and the following year, with Ravel at the helm, he performed it in Paris.
Reviewer Henry Prunières remarked, “From the opening measures, we are immersed into a world in which Ravel has only rarely introduced us.”
What exactly happened to Maurice Ravel?
Exactly one year later, the Piano Concerto in G major was finished. The soloist Marguerite Long and Ravel’s composition received rave reviews after the January 1932 premiere. However, Ravel’s conduct was criticized.
The concerto’s dedicatee, Long, performed it in over twenty European cities under Ravel’s baton. The two had intended to record it together but during the sessions.
Ravel limited his role to that of a supervisor while Pedro de Freitas Branco took the helm. Ravel had a knock to the head in a taxi accident in October of 1932.
Initial assessments to the contrary, neurologist R. A. Henson concluded in 1988 research published in the British Medical Journal that the damage may have aggravated a preexisting cerebral disease.
Concerned acquaintances noticed Ravel’s developing forgetfulness as early as 1927, and within a year of the injury, he began exhibiting symptoms consistent with aphasia.
After the accident, he could not finish the score for the film Don Quixote 1933 that he had started working on before it. Instead, Jacques Ibert did most of the work on the score.
Don Quichotte à Dulcinée is a collection of three songs by Ravel written for baritone and orchestra that were composed specifically for the film.
Ravel holds the original copy of the orchestral music, with assisted transcription from Lucien Garban and Manuel Rosenthal.
What was Maurice Ravel last words?
After this, Ravel stopped composing entirely. The cause of his ailment is a mystery at this time. The likelihood of a tumor has been discounted in favor of frontotemporal dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, according to the experts.
Ravel was physically and socially active until his final months, even though he could not produce music or perform. Henson explains that Ravel kept his ability to replay sounds and music mentally.
In 1937, Ravel experienced agony due to his ailment and visited renowned Paris neurosurgeon Clovis Vincent for help. Vincent recommended surgery as a means of care.
He discounted the possibility of a tumor and prepared himself for the discovery of ventricular dilatation, the progression of which could be halted by surgery.
Edouard Ravel, Ravel’s brother, took this advice to heart because, as Henson points out, Ravel himself was in no condition to offer a reasoned opinion.
When did Maurice Ravel pass away?
His condition looked to improve after the operation, but it was only temporary, and he quickly fell into a coma. On 28 December, at age 62, he passed away.
Ravel was laid to rest on 30 December 1937 in a granite tomb at the Levallois-Perret cemetery in northwest Paris, adjacent to his parents. He didn’t believe in God. Thus there was no ritual.
