For a composer who gave so much delight to so many, Ravel occupies a peculiar position in 20th-century music. Stravinsky’s famous description, ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’, still brings a chortle of recognition, though it might be better to think of him as a jeweller. In the words of one critic, writing in 1906, his music conceals tenderness ‘beneath a surface of flashing, kaleidoscopic precious stones’. Either way, he has probably been patronised by kind words more than any other great composer.
Some listeners, it is clear, never forgave him for not being Debussy. Even the famous piano concerto, premiered in 1932, five years before his death, was damned by Constant Lambert as being ‘in painfully good taste throughout’. Yet to hear that work now, when it is part of the standard repertoire, is to hear the clear voice of a master craftsman; one, admittedly, whose romantic leanings were mediated through a classical personality, but there is nothing unusual about that. Wasn’t Brahms described as a man who composed music out of a sense of regret that he hadn’t been born 20 years earlier? Ravel never sought to be another Debussy, who was, it must be acknowledged, the greater composer. As for Constant Lambert, where is he now?
Ravel was never shy of nailing his colours to the mast. Asked to comment on the future of the ballet, when the Ballets Russes had run its race, he thought that the art could have one ‘if there’s a return to the 18th century’. Fauré was his teacher, and Mozart his hero — you can hear it in the slow movement of the piano concerto — but this was no stick-in-the-mud, no matter what his contemporaries said about him.
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