MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)
Suite, MA MERE L’OIE (MOTHER GOOSE)
Composed: 1908-1910 (piano version); 1912 (final orchestral version)
Premiered: Paris, 1910 (piano duet); Paris, 1912 (ballet)
- Pavane de la belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty)
- Petit poucet (Little Tom Thumb)
- Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (Little Ugly Girl, Empress of the Pagodas)
- Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversation of Beauty and the Beast)
- Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden)
Mother Goose began as a collection of piano duets, written for Mimi and Jean, the two would-be prodigy children of Ravel’s friend, the artist Cyprian Godebski. Alas, the music was too difficult for them, so the first performance was placed in the hands (literally) of Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony, who were both nine. These must have been two formidable little girls, as the music is no easier than the rest of Ravel’s piano music. Interestingly, the solo piano version is not by Ravel at all; he commissioned the arrangement from one of his students. There are hints throughout the music that an orchestration was already in Ravel’s mind from the beginning; he was delighted to oblige—very quickly indeed—when the impresario Jacques Rouché asked him for a fairy-tale ballet in 1912.
The music is based on five fairy tales, three of them by Charles Perrault, the “French Grimm,” a favorite with Ravel since his own childhood.
Ravel included quotations from the original stories in the score, so the underlying program is easy to follow. The Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane is of that special Ravelian kind, unknown to any other musical tradition but his, and certainly nothing to do with the Elizabethan Pavan; like that other famous Ravel “pavane,” the one for the dead Infanta, it lives in its own world of half-dreamed elegance.
In Tom Thumb, the birds who ruin Tom’s (or rather, the oboe’s) entire day by eating the breadcrumbs he has laid as a trail to get him out of the woods are portrayed by the same woodwind figures and string harmonics that raise the dawn in Daphnis et Chloé.
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast includes another of Ravel’s musical gestures that has become a staple of Hollywood—the combined harp glissando and triangle “ting”—as Beauty accepts the Beast’s hand in marriage, turning him instantaneously into a handsome prince.
In 1889, the 14-year-old Ravel visited the Paris Exhibition, where he saw a Javanese gamelan ensemble making a sound that would come to fascinate composers as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, and (especially) Colin McPhee. That day, however, more eyes were drawn to the extremely rude young music student who berated the performers every time they stopped playing—Claude Debussy. Ravel looks back on this with the gentle pentatonic tinklings for the Princess of the Pagodas—who are not Chinese temples, but dwarves made of jewels. The Princess is a European royal child who has been transformed into a laideronette—an ugly little girl—by a witch. She meets a serpent, himself the bewitched King of the Pagodas, who retains his true form and marries her. This strange little story, redolent of the weirdest possible Jungian symbols, was drastically reworked as a ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas, by Benjamin Britten in 1957.
The Fairy Garden brings us another archetype—the Good Fairy, who applies the happily-ever-after formula to the future Prince and Princess Charming. Note the trademark long Ravel crescendo, which appears in one form or another from his earliest works to its apotheosis in Boléro.