Biography

Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Bolero (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was the best known.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.

Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, 18 km from the Spanish border. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer. His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid. Maurice was particularly devoted to their mother; her Basque-Spanish heritage was a strong influence on his life and music. Among his earliest memories were folk songs she sang to him. The household was not rich, but the family was comfortable, and the two boys had happy childhood.

Ravel senior delighted in taking his sons to factories to see the latest mechanical devices, but he also had a keen interest in music and culture in general. In later life, Ravel recalled, "Throughout my childhood I was sensitive to music".
There is no record that Ravel received any formal general schooling in his early years. When the boy was seven, Ravel started piano lessons with Henri Ghys, a friend of Emmanuel Chabrier; five years later, in 1887, he began studying harmony, counterpoint and composition with Charles-René, a pupil of Léo Delibes. Without being anything of a child prodigy, he was a highly musical boy. Charles-René found that Ravel's conception of music was natural to him "and not, as in the case of so many others, the result of effort". Ravel's earliest known compositions date from this period: variations on a chorale by Schumann, variations on a theme by Grieg and a single movement of a piano sonata.

With the encouragement of his parents, Ravel applied for entry to France's most important musical college, the Conservatoire de Paris. In November 1889, playing music by Chopin, he passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano class run by Eugène Anthiome. Ravel won the first prize in the Conservatoire's piano competition in 1891, but otherwise he did not stand out as a student. Nevertheless, these years were a time of considerable advance in his development as a composer. The musicologist Arbie Orenstein writes that for Ravel the 1890s were a period "of immense growth ... from adolescence to maturity".

Ravel became interested in improvisation and composition after he became acquainted with the work of Erik Satie, a pioneer of musical impressionism and a very extravagant composer. Maurice's independent judgments clashed with the conservatism of the conservatoire's administration and Ravel was expelled from the institution, with the right to attend classes, but as a free student. Four times, from 1901 to 1905, Ravel unsuccessfully attempted to become a scholarship winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, the recipients of which were sent to the Italian capital for two years of training at the expense of the state. Failures at the competition reflected the reaction of official French musical circles to the obscure work of a composer who was rapidly gaining popularity. A campaign against the conservatoire's arbitrary behavior towards the musician was launched in the press. As a result of the scandal, the director of the conservatoire was dismissed and his place was taken by Maurice's teacher, Gabriel Fauré. Thanks to this scandal, the public became aware of Ravel's work, and his music was recognized in official musical circles. Ravel began composing at the insistence of his teacher Fauré. After graduating from the Conservatoire, Maurice Ravel became close to the famous Russian entrepreneur and organizer of the Russian Seasons, Sergei Diaghilev. He was specially commissioned by him to compose music for Mikhail Fokine's ballet “Daphnis and Chloe” (1912), the title role in which was performed by the great Russian dancer Vatslav Nijinsky. The composer's music was later used in the first Spanish ballet of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet company, “The Menins” by Léonide Massine (1916).

After the outbreak of the First World War, despite being officially exempted from military service, Ravel sought to join the active army. He joined the army as a volunteer and served as an ambulance driver from 1915 to 1917, but was demobilized due to nervous exhaustion and frostbitten feet. During the war years Ravel wrote the Piano Trio (1914), completed Three Songs (1916) and the piano suite “Le tombeau de Couperin” (1917), and in 1920, completed the choreographic poem “Waltz”, a tragic requiem for the cheerful and carefree pre-war era. In 1922, Ravel brilliantly orchestrated Modest Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

After the war, the composer continued his collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev. Concerts in the USA together with the Russian ballet significantly improved his financial situation. Among the creative impressions from this trip, an acquaintance with George Gershwin was particularly significant. In general, the fascination with jazz and blues music during the American tour was reflected in Ravel's music (for example, in the first movement of the ‘Concerto for Piano and Orchestra G-dur’ and the second movement of the ‘Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano’).
In 1929, the composer was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by Oxford University.

Ravel wrote the famous Bolero at the request of the Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein for her benefit performance. On November 22,  1928, the world heard for the first time one of the most iconic melodies of the 20^th century, familiar even to people far removed from classical music. It is a uniquely constructed work consisting of a chain of repeated melodies played by various solo instruments, including the rarely heard piccolo clarinet, oboe d'amour and saxophone. The performance lasts 15 minutes. The composer later treated the popularity of his work with irony. He once said to Gershwin: ‘Be careful, you'll end up writing Bolero.’

In the last years of his life Maurice Ravel wrote few pieces. In 1932, during a tour, he was in a car accident, in which he received a head injury. The last work of the seriously ill composer was ‘Three Songs’ for one of the first sound motion picture ‘Don Quixote’. They were written for the Russian singer Fyodor Chaliapin. However, music by Jacques Ibert was chosen for the film.

Because of the accident, the composer's health began to weaken. In 1933, doctors found he had a serious neurological disease.

In 1935, Ravel visited Morocco and saw the fascinating, fairytale world of Africa. On his way to France, he travelled through a number of cities in Spain, including Seville with its gardens, lively crowds and bullfighting.

The composer died on December 28, 1937 in Paris after an unsuccessful brain operation. He was buried in the cemetery of the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret.

https://biographe.ru/znamenitosti/moris-revel
https://proza.ru/2020/08/10/1847
https://dzen.ru/a/Xl4d1svrQnJKz45N
https://www.belcanto.ru/ravel.html
https://ria.ru/20150307/1051208269.html
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C,_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81