Maurice Ravel

What is equally remarkable is the high quality of each of these compositions. There is no single work that could be described as less than successful, even among the early pieces, which bear many traces of Chabrier, Fauré and Satie. In the way he uses these influences rather than submitting to them, Ravel is immediately himself.

Art, for Ravel, was a fabulous construct which portrayed the spirit in a number of disguises. He was adept at assuming qualities he did not possess. His Spanish music – the Alborada del gracioso, the opera L’heure espagnole, the infamous Boléro (MD 3180) – is more Spanish than that of most Spanish composers. His assumption of classical disguise – Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Sonatine – shows a fascination with eighteenth-century musical forms. The tension between those forms and his idiosyncratic harmonic language was a source of energy and inspiration for him.

Above all, he was most at home in the fields of magic and mythology – Daphnis et Chloé, the Ma mère l’oye Suite (MD 3017) and Gaspard de la nuit (MD 3235). He had a great love of artifice and was quite pleased when his compositional method was compared to that of a jeweller. Perhaps his sensibility could express itself fully only in the world of the unreal. Yet he was an archetypal twentieth-century artist in the way he sought objective musical symbols, creating a world with its own laws and logic.