RAVEL 399 there was a tradition of women composers making songs their special preserve for the next hundred years. Puget composed more than 300 romances, many of which were also published in Germany and England. Most of her texts were written by the poet Gustave Lemoine whom she married in 1842. The subject matter of the songs ranges from genteel seduction in the guise of consolation (Appelle-moi ta mere—for baritone!) to Morte d'amour, a song adaptation of a true story about a jilt- ed girl who drowned herself in the Seine. Sometimes Puget can write reasonably interesting accom- paniments (as in Le postillon de Séville) but they are normally extremely simple, bordering on the banal. Her popular romance Mon rocher de Saint-Malo formed the basis for the first of the Embryons desséchés for piano (1913) by Erik Satic. RAVEL, Maurice (1875-1937) There has always been a tendency, on the part of their admirers, to make opponents of Ravel and Debussy. In the same way, we are sometimes asked to play the game of choosing between Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Britten and Tippett. In all these cases, two contemporaries, both with undeniable genius, attract adherents who fight for their idols at the expense of a so-called rival. The rest of the world may confuse the talents of men generally taken to be as indistinguishable as ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but these experts believe that they have every good reason to raise one above the other. Iti, of course, true that Debussy and Ravel were very different (in temperament, taste, and the direction of their talents), but the making of a competition between them is a waste of time: recital audiences delight in them both as great and indispensable song composers. Musical history is often as complicated as fugue, and the simultaneous existence of two such great subjects is an illustration of the richness of the contrapuntal fabric of French musical life at the turn of the century. Both composers had certain shared points of reference: they acknowledged the influence of Chabrier, for example, as well as the help and encouragement of Satie. It is true that we hear a Debussian flavour in some of Ravel’s music (how could it be otherwise?—he attended the first thirty performances of Pelléas e¢ Mélisande) but the opposite was also true. In a private letter to the critic Pierre Lalo, Ravel gently pointed out that before his piano piece Jeux d'eau (1901), Debussy had only published Pour le piano, which breaks no new ground, and that certain technical innovations exploited by Debussy in writing for the instrument were in fact Ravelian (as his 1895 Habanera confirms). Lalo indiscreetly published the letter, and this, combined with Ravel’: support for Debussy’s first wife at the time of the marriage break-up, strained the relationship between the two men after years of respectful coexistence (though more hostility emanated from Debussy than from Ravel). Ultimately we have to acknowledge Debussy was a greater composer with a wider emotion- al range; he had a larger catalogue of works, and his status as a pioncer and innovator is unique. But as Poulenc put it (according to an interview he once gave in America): ‘Some composers innove, but some great composers do not innove. Schubert does not innove. Wagner, Monteverdi, they innove Debussy innove; Ravel does not innove. It is not necessary that one innove” Google UN404 RAVEL with great tenacity, and it is easy to see why: the tunes are good ones, and the accompaniments are within the capabilities of most pianists. The catchy Le réveil de la maride (che printed title of Chanson de la marie is 2 mistake—it is the bridegroom who sings) is supported by a delicate shim- mer of sound: the moving La-bas, vers léglise, a funeral chant for war heroes, achieves a doleful grandeur with the greatest economy of means; Quel galant mest comparable? is a saucy song for a boastful Jack-the-lad whose pistols and sharp sabres are not all that hang below the belt—the cheeky interlude and postlude illustrate shameless flirting with ‘Dame Vasiliki’, a woman of experience who does not believe for a minute the outrageously insincere ‘Et c'est toi que j'aime’s Chanson des cucilleuses de lentisques is a song where the heavy swaying of the women’s bodies, as they work in the fields, is built into the music—performers come adrift when they turn the song into free recita- tive, and fail co observe minutely the composer's notated rhythms; Tout gai! (Be gay! according to the old-fashioned English translation, although nothing to do with what was once termed the Greck vice) is a rumbustious dance which alternates between 2/4 and 3/4 with the earthy simplicity of a real peasants’ knees-up. Ravel orchestrated the first and last of the set; in 1935, Manuel Rosenthal did the same for the remaining songs. A further item in this manner, Tripatos, was written in 1909 and published posthumously. ‘We now come to the most important, and the most individual, contribution that Ravel made to the song repertoire. These are the HISTOIRES NATURELLES (1906), five settings of the jewelled and pointed texts of Jules Renard, and a fitting continuation of the grand tradition of animal music from French composers which goes back to Rameau and Janequin and continues to Poulenc, and beyond. Today, it seems difficult to understand the scandal that the first performance of this music provoked. Much of this was to do with the composer's decision to import the mute ‘e’ of spoken Frency into sung music. All serious French mélodies up to this point had honoured the prosodic tradition that even if certain word-endings were not spoken in everyday speech, they were to be sung, or at least allowed for in the scanning and setting of texts. Because Renard’s pieces are prose rather than poet- ry (and because they would certainly be read aloud with none of the mute ‘e's sounding), Ravel was bold enough to translate this into song—to the horror of even old friends, like Fauré. The resule is disarmingly natural and casual: the poet's observations are voiced in the most spontaneous way. It is as if Ravel himself is speaking to us, and the piano’ purpose is to heighten that speech, under- lining the wry humour of the commentary, and assisting the singer to cross a magical threshold when the music unexpectedly plunges into some of the most poetic moments that this composer ever created. And yet, some of the most uncomfortable minutes I ever spent on a concert platform were with these songs some twenty years ago—during a performance in Spoleto where this music provoked a disturbance in the theatre. The music requires ears that can appreciate voice and piano asa single descriptive entity; the lack of discernible vocal melody seemed to be taken as a personal affront by the Italian audience who, in the absence of Italian opera, would have much preferred lieder. (The centuries-old split between French and Italian musical taste is still apparent.) Each of the animals in this masterpiece is astonishingly evoked in the opening bars of the accom- paniment, The pomposity of the self-regarding peacock (Le paon—Handelian dotted rhythms); the fastidious cricket (Le grillon—delicately oscillating semiquavers); the languidly gliding swan (Le eygne—liquid sepruplets in an impressionistic haze which links, somewhat ironically, these vain royal birds with Debussy. king of composers: there is also a suggestion, in the shape of the melody, oistzes y GoogleRAVEL 405 of Le cygne by Saint-Saéns); the kingfisher, stunningly beautiful as it sits on a branch (Le martin- picheur—a prophecy of Messiaen’s music of stasis, where magical chord sequences are suspended in time); the querulous guinea fowl (La pintade—hammered repeated notes which pierce the air like the bird’s cry): all these animals are introduced to us by piano music which is both complex and immediate, sophisticated, yet conceived with the gimlet eye of a devoted naturalist. This distillation of the essence of a song into its piano writing could not have been bettered by Schubert. And there is something else which places Ravel in the same league as the great lieder composers (where Debussy also belongs): with each poet whom he tackles, he changes something of his musical char- acter. Thus, in the misrores narurettes, he becomes a precise observer of nature because Renard leads him in that direction. The voice keeps its analytical cool throughout (except when imitating the cries of peacock and guinea fowl). The drama of the cycle centres in the piano where, in each of these magical songs, there isa least one moment where Ravel produces an extra-special effect. In Le ‘paon, who else would have depicted the dazzling spectacle of an opening peacock tail by means of a contrary motion glissando on the black keys, a kaleidoscope of notes to summon up a kaleido- scope of colour? Sometimes it is the postludes which make us catch our breath: in Le grillon, the clock-like whirrings and meticulous machinations of the insect (whom Renard depicts as an anally retentive fuss-pot) are counterbalanced by a coda (‘Dans la campagne muette, les peupliers se dressent commes des doigts en Pair et désignent la lune’) which seems to emerge from the depths of the earth, dissolving the tension, and suffusing the picture with a peace redolent of a fragrant countryside bathed in moonlight. The next postlude works in the opposite direction. At the end of Le cygne we have had enough of the creature's beauty and grace; indeed Ravel, rather wickedly, builds this up as an impressionistic cliché, only to knock the whole picture into perspective with a wry sentence which reveals the swan as greedy, self-serving, and overweight. Le martin-pécheur (marked ‘On ne peut plus lent’—one cannot be slower) is a sacred moment, above all for its remarkable depiction of the true nature-lover's humility (and ability to be utcerly still) when confronted by the majestic beauties of creatures in the wild. The fishing rod which the bird takes to be the branch of a tree, and on which he perches for a few awe-inspiring moments, seems to have been invented to appeal to Ravel: it successfully appears to be something which it is not. The composer seems as thrilled by the idea of a real bird on a false branch, as much as he would have adored a clockwork bird in a real tree. La pintadeis the hardest of the songs for the pianist; its most engaging innovation is a musical depiction of the Doppler effect. After the bird has gone away, and all creatures breathe a sigh of relief, it returns in a vireuoso flurry of repeated piano notes; these start softly at the top of the stave as the guinea fowl’s cry is heard in the distance, and descend in pitch as the troublesome creature gets nearer—similar to an approaching ambulance, and not nearly as reassuring. This song is a real tour de force, and a vivid and peremptory end to the cycle. It is inevitable that these settings should be compared to Chabrier’s farmyard songs. Ravel’s are greater mélodies of course—they are more profound, and much more clever. If they lack Chabrier's good nature, and his love for whatever meets his gaze, we cannot castigate one composer for not being another, although we can fantasize about what we should have had if Ravel, lonely and com- plex, had been given Chabrier’ openness of heart. The songs annoyed Debussy, a sign of a real part- ing of the ways; he reproved the critic Louis Laloy for favourably comparing this cycle to nts y GOogle UN406 RAVEL Mussorgsky’s wueseay cycle, and dismissed Ravel’s songs as Americanisms, ‘conjuring tricks', empty of real emotion. But he would have been incapable of the crystalline detachment which is the glory of this music, and which, like the later songs of Fauré, is capable of moving us intensely precisely because of its aristocratic pudeur. This music is inimitable precisely because it is the reflection of a personality unlike any other in French musical history. Ravel would never again attempt anything like these songs. Two further single items date from 1907. Les grands vents venus d outre-mer was Ravel's only setting of his friend Henri de Régnier, the poet who had inspired Jeux d'eau, and who provided the superscription to that work for piano, in his own hand, on Ravel's manuscript. The song belongs to that handful of works (such as Si morne! and Un grand sommeil noir) where the composer allows his depressive side to surface. Alan Hollinghurst recently used this poem to preface his novel The folding star—a tale of hopeless homo- sexual love for a young man played out on a colourless Belgian background. Like the other ‘confes- sional’ songs of Ravel, the music begins in sombre manner and rises to an agitated state of anguish. ‘The effect is masterful and bleak. The depiction of the dead clock (‘Thorloge est morte’) is typical of the composer: whirring demisemiquavers give way to lugubrious triplets with an offbeat accent in the right hand, like machinery going terribly wrong. Like the crucial passage of rejection in Lindifférent, mention of the ‘adolescents amers’ is mournfully unaccompanied; this is altogether the music of a loner. Completely different is Sur Uherbe, Ravel's second setting of Verlaine and an important addition to the significanc body of Verlaine songs by great composers, With Fauré and Debussy we have a number of songs which describe the dreamy, other-worldly side of che Fétes galantes. Like Debussy's second set of these poems (1904), Ravel exploits something more sinister than the idylls of elegant courtship. Sur Uherbe stars a pair of old roués, an abbé and a marquis, whose ‘noirceur’, we are some- how led to believe, could lead to a sequel straight from the pages of the marquis de Sade. Ravel, so diffident in writing about love, seems to find no difficulty in writing about sexual licence—further proof of this was Lheure espagnole, which took a long time to reach the stage because of its risqué plot. Here we have Verlaine, well known for the catholicity of his sexual tastes, hinting at an open- air partouze. The composer relishes the chance faithfully to transcribe the notes of the soifége in such a way as to suggest wandering fingers (one for each note mounting the stave, faute de mieus), as well as a conversation which switches mercurially becween the men and the girls who make half-hearted attempts to protect their honour. The final “Hé! bonsoir la Lune!’ (which gives a certain dignity to ‘mooning’) swoons with delight, and takes us back to the nocturnal atmosphere which closes Le grillon. ; Further essays in folksong setting date from 1910. The background story to the four cxavrs porutaines is rather a bizarre one, in that Ravel, at the height of his fame, and while he was com- posing Daphnis et Chloé, was not ashamed to enter a competition for songs of this type run by the Maison du Lied in Moscow. (We are reminded that Ravel was never wealthy, and often shore of money.) He won in four categories out of seven, and these songs were duly published. They are use- fal recital items, but seem diluted Ravel, less individual by far than the Greek songs. Chanson expag- nnole has women saying farewell to their men going co war—the all-purpose Iberian style at the com- poser’s command throughout his career was later to yield more memorable songs; Chanson frangaise is a delicate bergerette in neo-classical style; the verismo Chanson italienne is oddly ambiguous—one inte y GOOgle