He entered the Paris Conservatoire's composition prize five times and lost five times. The last rejection became a national scandal and cost the director his job.
Ravel was born in 1875 in a small town on the French-Spanish border, to a Basque mother raised in Madrid and a Swiss engineer father. Both left marks: he wrote Spanish subjects all his life, and all his life was told he wrote too precisely.
He began piano at seven and entered the Paris Conservatoire at fourteen. What followed is a famous embarrassment in French music — he entered the Prix de Rome five times and lost five times. By the 1905 attempt he was already known for Jeux d'eau and the String Quartet, yet he was cut in the first round while every finalist turned out to be a pupil of one juror. The press would not let it go and the director was forced to resign.
He never held a teaching post or an orchestral position, living on his works and his performances. In the First World War he was thirty-nine, barely over five feet, and underweight; rejected repeatedly for service, he eventually pulled strings to drive a truck at the front. His mother died while he served, and for several years afterwards he could barely write.
He never married and had no known partner, living in a small house of his own design outside Paris, filled with mechanical toys and ornaments. He liked cats and kept several Siamese; the opera he wrote with Colette contains a duet for two cats, sung entirely in meows.
A road accident in 1932 was followed by a slow loss of speech and writing — the music was still in his head and he could no longer set it down or explain it. He underwent brain surgery in 1937, never regained consciousness, and died at sixty-two.
Ravel's music has a wiped-clean sound: every layer's volume and placement has been worked out, so bass, harmony and melody each keep their own height and never smear together. Both were French, but where Debussy mixes the paint, Ravel lays the colours out in separate cells.
The second mark is that he uses chords as colour rather than as grammar. A chord may arrive not to lead anywhere but for the colour of that instant, which is why the music often feels as though it stays put and is lovely anyway.
The third is how rarely he fills the texture. Melodies are frequently single lines held up by a fixed rhythmic pattern underneath, with a lot of air in between. The slow pieces show it most: the gaps are written, not omitted.
He is not a composer who wins by volume — the dynamic marks in his scores are mostly small ones. What there is to hear is the layering, not the effort.
