Maurice Ravel
French Impressionist craftsman of dazzling orchestral colour and precision
1875
1937
French
Impressionist
Boléro, Daphnis et Chloé, Piano Concerto in G
Early life
Maurice Ravel was born on 7 March 1875 in Ciboure, in the French Basque Country, and moved with his family to Paris in infancy. His father, a Swiss-born engineer with a love of music, encouraged both his sons' musical education. Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire at fourteen, studying piano with Charles de Bériot and composition with Gabriel Fauré, who proved a sympathetic and influential teacher. Despite his evident talent, Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome on multiple attempts — a controversy that in 1905 became a public scandal, ultimately contributing to Fauré's appointment as director of the Conservatoire.
Career and major works
Ravel's catalogue, though not large, is marked by an extraordinary consistency of quality and an obsessive attention to craftsmanship. His piano works include Jeux d'eau (1901), Miroirs (1905), Gaspard de la nuit (1908) — one of the most technically demanding works in the piano literature — and Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917). For orchestra, he composed the Rapsodie espagnole (1908), the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), La Valse (1920), and the Piano Concerto in G major (1931), which blends jazz and Basque folk elements. His orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1922) has largely supplanted the original piano version in popular esteem. Boléro (1928), a study in orchestral crescendo built on a single repeated melody, became his most famous work — a distinction he regarded with some ambivalence, calling it 'a piece for orchestra without music.'
Musical style and legacy
Ravel's music is characterised by meticulous craftsmanship, luminous orchestral colour, rhythmic precision, and a harmonic palette that extends tonality through added-note chords, modal inflections, and subtle bitonality. His art conceals art: beneath the polished surface lies music of deep feeling, rendered with a restraint that intensifies rather than diminishes its emotional power. His final years were blighted by a progressive neurological condition that gradually destroyed his ability to compose, write, and speak. He died in Paris on 28 December 1937, following unsuccessful brain surgery.