Some fun Ravel quotes

From the Roger Nichols biography, which I think is very complete (I can't read French, but M. Rosenthal wrote the definitive biography). - 'a curious fact has been revealed to me: namely that I possess a melodic tap in a place which you will allow me not to specify more clearly, and that from it music flows without any effort' and another aphorism: 'In short, I am haunted by the Mediocre and I am afraid' responding to a criticism of a Webern performance: 'They take the opportunity of expressing the wish that patriotism should be wary of wandering on to a terrain where there is nothing to conquer, but everything to lose.' - Biographer's note: 'Much has been made of his delight in solving problems and in working in 'artificial' styles, but it is important to bear in mind that these problems and styles were always of his own choosing; and if the problem proved intractable, then the sketches were destroyed or locked away or reused later.' [..] 'Here for once, beneath the velvet jacket and the bohemian whiskers, is the flash of steel, not unmixed with a certain peevishness; the tone of someone who, modesty and jokes aside, is absolutely aware of his own worth, as man and artist, albeit rather insistent on what he feels to be his due.' - About Sheherazade: 'Over twenty years later, he told his pupil Manuel Rosenthal, 'In some years from now, you will have learned everything about composition, but there is something that is impossible to keep, and that is the freshness of youth. And you have to regret it all your life.' And I said, "But about your own music, what would be the freshness of youth you have lost after a while?" And immediately he said, "Sheherezade. It's full of things that I am ashamed today to have written. But there is something in this composition that I have never found again.' [...] 'Not for the last time, Ravel seems to have been 'pushing the envelope.' The great majority of the hundred poems in Klingsor's collection give us a male narrator of openly heterosexual orientation, and both Chevillard and (in mentioning 'a Greek philosopher') Vuillermoz may simply have fallen for one of the many 'teases' Ravel posed in the course of his composing career. As to Ravel's own orientation, the evidence, as we shall see, is mixed, but hardly paints him as an 'indifferent.' The absence of any wife or petite amie decides nothing. At this stage in his career, he may simply have determined not to let anything stand in the way of his composing.' - Yeah. That was my phase in my early twenties. - Re: l'affaire Ravel. 'The sanest comment came from the Courrier de l'orchestre, which reckoned that for Ravel 'his talent does not need the consecration of the Prix de Rome.' 'Towards the end of his life, Ravel had a different explanation for the fracas, telling Manuel Rosenthal that Saint-Saens, presiding over the jury and with Ravel's chorus in front of him, had remarked to his eminent colleagues, including Lenepveu: 'But don't you see that this young man is making fun of us? Look at this passage: it's Lenepveu, and there, there's a bit of Saint-Saens and Reyer etc. He's thumbing his nose at the lot of us and he's certainly not going to get the Prix de Rome!" Rosenthal remembered that 'Ravel admired Saint-Saens and was really rather proud that Sain-Saens had spotted his joky insolence.' - Something for Lauren 👋: At the same time his instructions to Henriette Faure over the general character and colouring of 'La Vallee des cloches' were most precise: "Ravel was merciless about my playing of this piece, which he condemned as heavy and unvaried in timbre. At the opening, he tried to get me to play the carillon of double semiquavers in the right hand, and the more settled of the high octave bells that punctuate them in the left, on two very distinct levels. And the whole had to remain within a pianissimo which he could, in some mysterious way achieve without it sounding feeble. The insinuating character of the high left-hand octaves means that one mustn't use the wrist, which would only over-ink the sketch. The great, calm, lyrical outpouring [of the central section], on the other hand, requires a profound sonority and a legato that comes from a hand closely wedded to the keys, and from a weight of arm that one ideally gets from sitting rather low at the keyboard. Ravel, like Liszt indeed, used to sit low at the piano. Liszt in his day had made a low stool a profession of faith. 'If you sit too high,' he used to say to his pupils, 'even if you have the soul of an angel, nothing profound or expressive can be produced." - Re: criticism 'As a high-profile composer taking up his reviewer's pen, Ravel clearly felt the need to stake out his emotional and stylistic territory. Anyone wanting to know what made him tick could, and still can glean a great deal from the two opening paragraphs of his first review, as can anyone doubting his combative spirit: "It seems curious that musical criticism should so rarely be entrusted to those who practice this art. No doubt it is felt that these people have better things to do and that, apart from some brilliant exceptions, themselves works of art, a review, even a perspicacious one, is necessarily a lesser thing than a piece of music, however mediocre. It may also be feared that the professionals, impelled by feelings that are frequently honourable, cannot always judge with absolute independence and that their opinions may be tainted by strong feelings, to put it no lower. One must recognise nevertheless that the judgments of critics who are not composers are not always exempt from such strong feeling. Often in fact a vehement ardour in attack acts as an effective mask of an incompetence that might be inferred from an opinion more gently expressed." [...] 'Of Camille Erlanger's La sorciere, premiered at the Opera-Comique on 18 December [1912], Ravel politely makes clear that this kind of verisme, albeit suitable to the subject of the Inquisition, is not to his taste and that the composer could have done more with the Spanish and oriental atmosphere. Less politely, he criticises Erlanger's vocal writing, which "is of the most scabrous kind. True, this fault is not peculiar to this work, nor even to others by the same composer. You find it in almost all of the vocal writing of our age. It is the redoubtable influence of Wagner that is responsible for this kind of misunderstanding that affects most modern composers in their treatment of the most expressive of musical instruments... This wide-ranging declamation can be explained by the vigorous accents of the German language, and in particular by the idiom of Wagner. Applied to the French language, it becomes paradoxical. Comprehensibility, which is after all necessary in the theatre, cannot help but suffer." One feels rather sorry for Erlanger, since advice about Spanish atmosphere and word setting from the composer of L'heure espagnole could not really be brushed aside.' [...] 'Ravel continued his own reviewing activities in February [1913] with two articles expressing uninhibited enthusiasm. A performance of Chabrier's operetta Une education Manquee at Rouche's Theatre des Arts was likely to provoke this on all fronts. Ravel's remark in Comoedia illustre that, despite its never pretending to be other than an operetta, 'there is nevertheless more real music in this little piece than in many large operatic works' can only be read as another nail banged into Fervaal's coffin.' - Re: Daphnis et Chloe 'Karsavina, dancing the role of Chloe, remembered: "There was a dance in it for me in which the bars followed a capricious cadence of ever-changing rhythm. Fokine was too maddened, working against time, to give me much attention; on the morning of the performance the last act was not yet brought to an end. Ravel and I at the back of the stage went through - 1 2 3 - 1 2 3 4 5 - 1 2, till finally I could dismiss mathematics and follow the pattern of the music. It has to be said that, writing nearly twenty years later, Karsavina misremembered the details, which are in no way capricious, merely unusual, in that a 3/4 bar at 100bpm is followed by another at 72bpm, and so through the whole number (figs 133-8).' 'Ravel, understandably, was furious at having the expected four performances reduced to two. Roland-Manuel tells a story about him arriving late for the premiere: "The three knocks announcing the start had already sounded when we saw him arriving in his gala outfit, holding under his arm a long package done up in brown paper. As we were pressing him to take his place, he asked very deliberately which box Misia Sert was in. 'Haven't you got a box?' I asked. 'Yes,' he said, 'but I want to give Misia Sert something.' And while Nijinsky was making his stage entrance with his herd of goats, Ravel opened the package and present Mme Sert with a magnificent Chinese doll.' Roland-Manuel cites this as an example of Ravel, the supreme dandy, being detached from his own work. Or we could interpret it as a snub to Diaghilev. Or, even more elegantly, as both.' - The Alma Mahler quote; 'As a guest he was remarkably interesting. Food was still so scarce in that early postwar period that we mostly ate our frugal meals by ourselves, and I had occasion to study him at leisure. He was a narcissist. He came to breakfast rouged and perfumed, and he loved the bright satin robes that he wore in the morning. He related all things to his bodily and facial charms. Though short, he was so well-proportioned, with such elegance and such elastic mobility of figure, that he seemed quite beautiful.' - A technical question for a violinist friend: 'Regarding glissando chromatic scales, nothing of course is easier on a single string. The problem is that, in the high treble, it gets to sound a bit thin. Is the following possible? (I've deliberately chosen an example where neither the first nor last note is an open string)'