Ravel’s challenges and obsessions

An aesthetic of the challenge

While Ravel is renowned for his rigour and meticulousness in the composition process, he is also known for having enjoyed setting himself challenges. Far from restricting his inventiveness, constraints inspired him and pushed him to explore new musical paths: in his famous Bolero (1928), for example, he forced himself to maintain a stubbornly constant rhythm from beginning to end, without any modulation or melodic variation. Indeed—and this is only apparently paradoxical—constraint does not imprison, it liberates.

The philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, who devoted an entire book to Ravel, was one of the first to grasp the importance of constraints for the composer. He even went so far as to speak of an aesthetic of the challenge—a term that suggests a remarkable feat accomplished thanks to unshakeable willpower. And certainly, Ravel not only had the audacity necessary to face the obstacle, but also the perseverance and the love of effort required to overcome it.

According to Jankélévitch, Ravel believed that beauty lay in difficulty; that is why he strove to create exceptional, sometimes unrewarding, often disconcerting conditions. He created artificial obstacles, invented pointless prohibitions, imagined arbitrary imperatives. Jankélévitch liked to compare musicians to poets: just as the poet forces himself to speak in verse, the musician sets himself rules for writing a fugue, because constraint is above all a game for both. Each of Ravel’s works is thus a gamble, a challenge in which the creator seems to take pleasure in complicating his life. For example, as if to fully test his abilities as an artist, he voluntarily impoverished his language.

Self-imposed musical constraints

Among the restriction constraints that Ravel imposed on himself were those relating to the musical material. Thanks to Ravel’s ingenuity and skill, some of these impoverishments enriched his style more than a more abundant toolkit would have done. It is opulence through simplicity. Jankélévitch lists several examples. 

The “melodic poverty”, as in Bolero. Its counterpart is an extreme orchestral richness: to fill half an hour of music with a theme of sixteen bars and without any development or variation, Ravel only uses the diversity of instrumentation, that is to say, the addition of new timbres—flute, clarinet, oboe, oboe d’amore, trombone and saxophone—which the snare drum relentlessly punctuates with its haunting pulse.

The “harmonic poverty”, as in the melody for voice and piano Ronsard à son âme (1923-1924), which is written on a single stave and uses only perfect fifths. Or again, as in Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes, the third piece in the Ma Mère L’Oye cycle: for long passages, pianists play only on the black keys. 

Then there is the “polyphonic poverty”, as in the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1924-1927), where the scarcity of notes and the poverty of chords is compensated by the mobility of the two parts. 

Let us mention yet another challenge, the one that Ravel set himself when he decided to set some of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles to music: his spare prose—one would say minimalist today—seemed indeed the least suitable for musical illustration. 

Constraints for performers

While Ravel imposed constraints of “impoverishment” on himself, there are constraints that he imposed on his performers. In a little-known piece from his catalog, Frontispiece (1918), they are in abundance. The Concerto for the Left Hand, which will be discussed later, is written for five fingers, but Frontispiece requires five hands. And in addition, this very brief piano piece—a miniature that fits into fifteen measures—requires the presence of three pianists. In addition to the originality of being written for five hands, with the three pianists sharing two pianos, Frontispice has the distinctive feature of superimposing two different rhythmic indications: ternary, at 15/8 for piano 1; and binary, at 5/4 for piano 2. 

Frontispiece is also characterized by a gloomy, interior atmosphere, with a bass that remains stable, sinisterly repeating the same note. This trait is a constant in Ravel’s work. It intrigued Jankélévitch, who wondered about what he called an “obsession with the pedal”. Indeed, practically from his earliest works, Ravel makes use of this pedal, held or pulsed as in the Habanera (1895) from the diptych Sites auriculaires for two pianos, which he composed at the age of twenty. The same pedal can be found in Noctuelles, the first of the five pieces that make up the piano cycle Miroirs (1905); this insistent pedal—first on F, then on B-flat— even forms the basis of the central part.

Ravel’s obsession with the pedal and the virtuosity of constraint

This obsession with the pedal is fully expressed in “Gibet”, the second piece of the triptych Gaspard de la Nuit (1908), composed by Ravel after reading the collection of the same name by the Romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand.

“Gibet” is based on a bet that Ravel made to himself: to keep a pedal for fifty-two bars, for which Ravel specified that neither hastening nor slowing down was to be allowed until the end. These measures develop from a persistent pivot note—a funeral knell, implacable, around which enigmatic melodic fragments revolve, evoking the poem’s gloomy atmosphere. 

The last piece of the Gaspard de la Nuit triptych, “Scarbo”, which features a mischievous gnome, was also born out of a bet: Ravel had told his friend, the composer Maurice Delage, that he wanted to write a piano piece even more difficult to perform than Balakirev’s Islamey, which at the time was considered the pinnacle of virtuosity. Ravel outwits the Russian musician by scattering the ivory keys with devilishly tricky traps capable of destabilizing the most experienced of keyboard acrobats! This piece is a hellish scherzo punctuated by sudden rumblings and unexpected jolts, stunts, arpeggio bursts, muffled hammering, harsh dissonances, notes repeated frantically…

The left-handed masterpiece

Among the most striking examples of Ravel’s works born of constraint is, of course, the Concerto for the Left Hand. It was commissioned from Ravel by the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War. Jankélévitch wrote pleasantly of this concerto: “You are about to see, ladies and gentlemen, everything that a man can do with the five fingers of his left hand”. And he praised the genius of Ravel who, like Liszt, “through ingenious economy, by crossing his hands and alternating chords”, manages to give “orchestral volume to the sounds of the piano” and “achieves more with five fingers than others with all the voices of the orchestra”.

Ravel said that the constraint of writing for the left hand was a formidable one. Saint-Saëns had succeeded in the attempt with his Six Etudes for the Left Hand. For a concerto, the difficulty was much greater because it was necessary to manage to “maintain interest in a long-winded work with […] limited means”. However, Ravel added, “The fear of difficulty is never as keen as the pleasure of measuring oneself against it and, if possible, overcoming it. That is why I allowed myself to be tempted by Wittgenstein’s request that I write him a concerto, and I carried out my task quite cheerfully since it was over after a year, which for me is a minimum time frame”.

The Concerto for the Left Hand has been much discussed. The technical mastery required by the constraint of being played with the left hand alone was so great that many of Ravel’s contemporaries thought that Wittgenstein would have no successor. They were greatly mistaken: the work has become an essential showpiece, in the repertoire of countless pianists, from Samson François to Yuja Wang.