Maurice Ravel

Browse piano sheets by Maurice Ravel on Zen Virtual Piano. Perhaps the highlights of Ravel’s career were his collaboration with the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he composed the masterpiece Daphnis et Chloé, and a series of piano masterworks, from the early Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and the Miroirs of 1905 to the formidable Gaspard de la nuit (1908) and Le Tombeau de Couperin. Titles like Jeux d’eau and Miroirs suggest piano pieces built around images. Le Tombeau de Couperin is a suite for solo piano composed between 1914 and 1917, in six movements based on those of a traditional Baroque suite. A Baroque suite form reused for a piano piece of 1914 to 1917 sets old and new in one frame. His melodies are almost always modal, based on the old Greek Phrygian and Dorian modes, and his harmonies often have a somewhat acid flavour. Modal melodies set against acid harmonies make a sound that is old in its scales and new in its colour. Yet Ravel was in no sense a revolutionary musician, being for the most part content to work within the established formal and harmonic conventions of his day, still firmly rooted in tonality. He wrote that Debussy’s “genius was obviously one of great individuality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution, expressing itself freely, yet always faithful to French tradition.” A composer content with established conventions who praised Debussy for creating his own laws shows an admiration that ran beyond his own method. Ravel was born in a village near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, in an artistic and cultivated family, and the young Maurice received every encouragement from his father when his talent for music became apparent at an early age. A cultivated household that encouraged him from the start stands in contrast with three failed attempts at the Prix de Rome. In 1889, at 14, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained until 1905. After three attempts he failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome for composition, the works he submitted being judged too “advanced” by ultraconservative members of the jury. A jury of ultraconservative members and a composer judged too advanced can be read as a clash of tastes more than of skill. He served for a short time in World War I as a truck driver at the front and was discharged from the army in 1917. In 1928 he embarked on a four months’ tour of Canada and the United States and, in the same year, visited England to receive an honorary degree of doctor of music from Oxford.

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