Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Gaspard de la nuit
Ravel’s duality is nowhere more vividly exemplified
than in the two keyboard works of 1908. Ma Mère L’Oye for the piano, 4 hands,
and Gaspard de la nuit. Le jardin féerique, the final movement of Ma
Mère L’Oye, is the symbol of Ravel’s ideal world which reaches its
apotheosis in the final scene of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Gaspard de la nuit is,
for me, the greatest Decadent work of art, the acme of artistically ’rendered
sensation’ - It takes its inspiration and title from a collection of prose poems by
Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841), to which Ravel had been introduced by Ricardo Viñes. Like
his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, Bertrand was obsessed with the world of the
supernatural Gaspard de la nuit is a nickname for the Devil and thus was one of the
cult figures of the fashionable Satanism of the Symbolist artists. Such literary
inspiration is very ’romantic’, very Listian, but even though the three poems
chosen by Ravel are reproduced here, as they are in the score, there is no literal
following of the ’story-line’. Ondine, in fact, would seem to have been
prompted as much by Brugnot’s epigram as by Bertrand’s poem. Technically it is
inspired to an extraordinary degree by Liszt. I’m not going to give you a bar-by-bar
account but this is a work utterly suffused with Lisztian minutiae. Ondine suggests
Huysmans’ description of Gustave Moreau’s Salome: ’la déité symbolique de
I’indestructible Luxure ... la Beaute maudite’ - ’the symbolic incarnation
of L t... the accursed Beauty.’ Note the incredible moment at the end of the piece,
after all the ’batteries of alluring sense’, where the vague harmony finally
dissolves into pure C sharp major and the enticement is over. In Le Gibet grim
desolation is squarely confronted and the bell which tolls, unchanged, from start to
finish forces the listener to confront it. Le Gibet is one of the most riveting
artistic embodiments of that late 19th century syndrome ’ennui’, and what does
the rivetting are the repeated B flats insidiously gnawing away. ’Ennui’ had its
self-indulgent side, but notice here how, immediately after the more ’expanded’
tune, the desolation returns via the lowest piano tam-tam. The tolling bell acts as an
ostinato back-drop against which to deploy bizarre harmonic colours; these are themselves
’irradiated’ tonally by the B flats as well as ’fixed’ rhythmically -
in other words the bell is both a ’rhythm’ and an ’atmosphere’. The
deliberate monotony of this combined with the direction to use the una corda pedal
throughout apparently caused the faithful Ricardo Viñes for once to have misgivings and
he and Ravel seriously fell out over it. In Scarbo Ravel set out quite deliberately
to write the most difficult piano piece ever, something more difficult than Liszt or than
Balakirev’s Islarney. It is as though, by piling up such terrors for the
pianist, he would inculcate feelings of terror in the listener. Scarbo is a very
malignant piece, dark, relentless, and yet, like everything in this magnificent work,
lifted to a pitch of exaltation that assures its status as a masterpiece, perhaps the
masterpiece of 20th century piano music.
Paul Crossley
The three poems which inspired Ravel’s Gaspard
de la nuit. French original followed by English translation.
Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841)
Gaspard de la nuit:
Ondine
Je croyais entendre
Une vague harmonie enchanter mon sommeil,
Et près de moi s’épandre un murmure pareil
Aux chants entrecoupés d’une voix triste et tendre.
Ch. Brugnot - Les deux Génies.
-Ecoute! – Ecoute – C’est moi, c’est
Ondine
qui frôle de ces gouttes d’eau les losanges sonores
de ta fenêtre illuminée par les mornes rayons de la
lune; et voici, en robe de moire, la châtelaine
qui contemple à son balcon la belle nuit étoilée et
le beau lac endormi.
Chacque flot est un ondine qui nage dans le courant,
chaque courant est un sentier qui serpente vers mon
palais, et mon palais est bâti fluide, au fond du lac,
dans le triangle du feu, de la terre et de l’air.
Ecoute! – Ecoute! Mon père bat l’eau
coassante d’une branche d’aulne verte, et mes
soeurs
caressant de leurs bras d’ecume les fraîches îles
d’herbes, de nénuphars et de glaîeuls, ou se moquent
de saule caduc et barbu et qui pêche a la ligne.
Sa chanson murmurée, elle me supplia de recevoir
son anneau à mon doigt, pour ètre l’èpoux
d’une
Ondine, et de visiter avec elle son palais, pour être
le roi des lacs.
Et comme je luis répondais qui j’amais une mortelle,
boudeuse et dépitée, elle pleura quelques larmes,
poussa un éclat de rire, et s’èvanouit en giboulées
qui
ruisselérent blanches le long de mes vitraux bleus.
Le Gibet
Que vois-je remuer autour de ce Gibet? - Faust.
Ah! ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui
glapit, ou le pendu qui pousse un soupir sur la
fourche patibulaire?
Serait-ce quelque grillon qui chante tapi dans la
mousse et le lierre stérile dont par pitié se chausse
le bois?
Serait-ce quelque mouche en chasse sonnant du cor au
tour de ces oreilles sourdes à la fanfare des hallali?
Serait-ce quelque escarbot qui cueille en son vol
inégal un cheveu sanglant à son crâne chauve?
Ou bien serait-ce quelque araignée qui brode une demi-
aune de mousseline pour cravate à col étranglé?
C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville
sous
l’horizon, et la caracasse d’un pendu-que rougit
le
soleil couchant.
Scarbo
Il regarde sous le lit, dans la
cheminée, dans le bahut; - personne, il ne put
comprende par où il s’était introduit, par où il
s’était evade. - Hoffmann - Contes nocturnes.
Oh! Que de fois je l’ai entendu et vu, Scarbo,
lorsqu’à minuit la lune brille dans le ciel comme un
écu d’argent sur une bannière d’azur semée
d’abeilles d’or!
Que de fois j’ai entendu bourdonner son rire dans
l’ombre de mon alcôve, et grincer son ongle sur la
soie des courtines de mon lit!
Que de fois je l’ai vu descendre du plancher,
pirouetter sur un pied et rouler par la chambre
comme le fuseau tombe de la quenouille d’une
sorcière!
Le croyais-je alors évanoui? Le nain grandissait
entre la lune et moi comme le clocher d’une
cathédrale gothique, un grelot d’or en branle à son
bonnet pointu!
Mais bientôt son corps bleuissait, diaphane comme
la circe d’une bougie, son visage blémissait comme
la circe d’un lumignon, - et soudain ils
s’éteignait.
Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841)
Gaspard de la nuit:
Ondine
…I thought I heard
A vague harmony haunting my sleep,
A murmur spreading about me
Interspersed with songs of a sad and tender voice
Ch. Brugnot - Les deux Génies.
’Listen! Listen! It is I. It is Ondine
brushing with drops of water the resonant lozenges
of your window illuminated by the gloomy rays of the moon;
Behold too, the Chatelaine in watered-silk gown
Admiring from her balcony, the beautiful starlit night
And the beautiful sleeping lake.
Each wave is a water-sprite swimming in the current,
Each current a pathway snaking towards my palace,
My palace full of fluid, built at the bottom of the lake,
In a triangle of fire, earth and air.
Listen! Listen! My father beats the croaking water
With a green alder branch,
Whilst my sisters, with arms of foam,
Caress the cool islands of grass, of water-lilies,
And of gladioli, or mock the willow,
Bearded and decaying as he fishes.’
Her song thus murmured,
She implored me to have her ring on my finger,
So as to be husband to an Ondine,
To be able to accompany her to her palace
And be king of the lakes.
When I answered that I loved a mortal,
Sulky and put out, she shed a few tears,
Burst out laughing, and vanished in spray
Which trickled, clear down the length of my
Blue stained glass.
The Gallows
What do I see stirring round this gallows? - Faust
Ah! What do I hear?
Could it be the night wind howling,
Or the hanged man heaving a sigh
On the forked gibbet?
Could it be some cricket singing,
Crouched in the moss and sterile ice
With which, out of pity, the wood is shod?
Could it be some fly a-hunting,
Sounding the horn about those ears
Deaf to the fanfare of the kill?
Could it be some beetle who,
In his uneven flight, plucks a bloody hair
From his bald pate?
Or might it be some spider,
Embroidering a half-ell of muslin
As a cravat for that strangled neck?
It is the bell which tolls
At the walls of a town below the horizon,
As the carcass of a hanged man reddens
In the setting sun.
Scarbo
He looked under the bed, in the fireplace, in the cupboard
- no-one.
He could not understand where he was getting in, nor how he
was escaping.
Hoffmann - Contes nocturnes.
Oh! How many times have I heard and seen him -
Scarbo - at midnight when the moon shines in the sky
Like a silver coin on an azure banner studded with gold
bees?
How many times have I heard his laughter
Buzzing in the shadow of my alcove,
And his nail grating on the silk of my bed curtains?
How many times have I seen him come down from the rafters,
Pirouette on one foot and role across the room
Like the bobbin fallen from the distaff of a witch?
Was I then to believe him vanished?
The dwarf would grow bigger between the moon and me
Like the steeple of a Gothic cathedral,
A little gold bell swinging on his pointed cap.
Presently his body would become blue like the wax of a
candle,
His face wan like the wax of a taper
And all of a sudden he would snuff out.
