Maurice Ravel

The Basque coast

Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, a seaside village in the far southwest of France near the Spanish border. His mother was Basque; his father, a Swiss-born engineer who invented machines. The family soon moved to Paris, but the Spanish and Basque songs his mother sang stayed in his music all his life. His machine-loving father's influence, people say, also seeped into the precision of his music.

The Conservatoire and the Prix de Rome affair

As a teenager Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire to study piano and composition, becoming a pupil of Gabriel Fauré. Around then he began to make his name with the Pavane for a Dead Princess and the piano piece Jeux d'eau.

Yet he failed several times to win the Prix de Rome, the dream of young composers. In 1905, already a well-known composer, he was eliminated even in the preliminary round, and a scandal erupted. Accusations of unfair judging poured in, and in the end the director of the Conservatoire resigned.

From piano to orchestra

Ravel often wrote a piece for piano first and then orchestrated it, as with Mother Goose and Le Tombeau de Couperin. He understood exactly what sounds each instrument could make, and orchestrated other composers' music superbly too. His orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is performed today even more often than the original.

War

When the First World War broke out, Ravel, small and frail and at first rejected by the army, volunteered persistently until he went to the front as a military truck driver. During the war he lost close friends, and in 1917 his mother died. In those years he wrote the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, dedicating each movement to a friend killed in the war.

The house at Montfort-l'Amaury and America

In 1921 Ravel bought a house in Montfort-l'Amaury, a small village west of Paris. There, in small rooms crammed with mechanical toys and knick-knacks, he worked quietly. In 1928 he toured America for nearly four months, performing and conducting, and is said to have enjoyed listening to jazz. Boléro premiered that same year.

The left-hand concerto and the end

At the request of the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war, Ravel wrote a piano concerto for the left hand alone. Around the same time he completed a concerto for two hands. But from the early 1930s a brain illness deepened until, though music was in his head, he could no longer write it down. In 1937 he underwent surgery but never recovered, and died that December at sixty-two.

Music to hear on Pyeongeum

• Bolérothe fifteenth and final stop on our Music Journey, one melody grown by changing instruments.
• Pavane for a Dead Princess: the young Ravel's slow, elegant piano piece.

People around him

• Gabriel Fauréhis teacher at the Conservatoire, who respected his pupil's individuality.
• Ida Rubinsteinthe dancer who commissioned Boléro.
• Paul Wittgensteinthe pianist who carried on performing after losing an arm.