1893
Ballade de la Reine morte d’aimer is an early example of Ravel’s delight in rendering in music the precision of well-oiled mechanisms—here ‘les grosses cloches de Bohême / Et les cloches de Thulé’ which celebrate the ascent to heaven of the lovelorn queen’s spirit. It was not for nothing that Stravinsky dubbed Ravel the ‘Swiss watch-maker’.

1895
The lugubrious Un grand sommeil noir was composed in the wake of the composer’s expulsion from the Conservatoire after he had failed the harmony exam the month before and had also failed to pass the medical for military service due to his diminutive height (5’3). Verlaine’s melancholy is well captured by Ravel’s bank of repeated Gs in the low regions of the piano, and his hysteria is reflected in the wide vocal range of over two octaves.

1896
Sainte, a hymn to St Cecilia, was described by Mallarmé as ‘a little song-like poem written above all with music in mind.’ We learn in the first stanza that the saint is depicted in a stained glass window—the reason why Ravel deploys modal chords to suggest medieval church music. This plainsong-like atmosphere turns more lyrical at the mention of the angel’s harp, and the whole song breathes a religious radiance—a rare occurrence in Ravel’s music. D’Anne qui me jecta de la neige, the first of the Deux Épigrammes de Clément Marot, evokes the spirit of the 16th century by creating a dry harpsichord-like sonority and an accompaniment that is contained within the limited range of a seventeenth century instrument.

1898
The accompaniment of Chanson du rouet recalls Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, with the piano echoing the movement of the treadle and the wheel—but there the resemblance ends. Gretchen’s erotic outpouring is replaced by the domesticity of the girl in Leconte de Lisle’s poem who celebrates all that a spinning wheel can create until, in the final verse, she alludes to death and how the wheel will spin her shroud—which Ravel references by that Dies irae motif in the accompaniment. Emile Verhaeren’s Si morne! speaks of depression and the terrors of introspection and Ravel responds with a song with a range of almost two octaves that rises to a terrifying climax—quite unlike anything else in his mélodies.

1899
Three years after his first Marot setting, Ravel added D’Anne jouant de l’espinette without any slavish imitation of the timbre of the spinet. Ravel brought both songs to Fauré’s composition class at the Conservatoire.

1903
Manteau de fleurs was Ravel’s contribution to the volume of settings of poems by Paul Gravollet, commissioned by the publisher Hamelle—a hymn to the colour pink. The only white flower among this roseate riot of tulips, hyacinths, carnations, roses, peonies, gladioli and geraniums is the lily; and when the beautiful young woman passes among them, the flowers make a pink cloak for her. Ravel lavishes great care on this trifle with whole-tone chords and consecutive ninths, and later orchestrated it.

Ravel had been drawn to Shéhérazade as early as 1898 when, fascinated by A Thousand and One Nights, he decided to compose an opera on the theme. All that remains of that venture is the Overture which was premiered on 27 May 1899 when Ravel conducted the orchestra of the Société Nationale. Although the audience whistled and the critics were outraged, Ravel quickly threw off his disappointment and re-cycled some of the material when in 1903 he composed the orchestral song-cycle Shéhérazade, for which he also provided a piano version and, in 1911, an arrangement of L’indifférent for piano and flute. Asie apostrophises the East with all its exotic glories and wonders: minarets, turbans, calumets (a tobacco pipe with a bowl of clay and a long reed stem carved and ornamented with feathers), Cadis (Turkish, Arabian or Persian judges), assassins, executioners, scimitars and so on; La flûte enchantée is a beguiling song of thwarted love, of a slave-girl who does not dare to venture from the house for fear of waking her master and who, hearing her suitor’s melodies, can only dream of passion. But the most intriguing choice of text is L’indifférent, a poem about sexual ambiguity in which the female singer tries in vain to interest a young stranger in her hospitality. He shows no interest. His eyes are ‘soft like a girl’s’, and his hips ‘sway lightly in a languid feminine way’. The subtext is clear: the young man’s sexual orientation (gay) was also that of the poet Klingsor. And of Ravel? The composer left few clues to the nature of his own sexuality, but we know of his reputation as a young dandy, and it could well be that L’indifférent was conceived as a coded message. The Ravel scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux is more explicit. He suggests that the song, dedicated to Emma Bardac, was a warning to her: she had been Fauré’s mistress, had yet to become Debussy’s second wife, and was now turning her attentions to the young Ravel. The song warns her that she was wasting her time.

1904-6
The Cinq mélodies populaires grecques were not published till 1907. The songs are: Le réveil de la mariée, in which a young Greek peasant awakens his bride by serenading her in front of her house to Ravel’s shimmering accompaniment; Là-bas, vers l’église, a moving song for all those Greek soldiers who perished in the War of Independence against the Turks; Quel galant m’est comparable, a Rabelaisian song of a virile peasant who hints to dame Vassiliki (the Madame of a bordello?) that pistols and sabres are not the only things that dangle beneath his belt …; Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques, with its beautiful melody sung by the lovelorn women as they gather aromatic resin from the Pistacia lentiscus, a shrub that flourishes mainly on the island of Chios; and Tout gai!, a setting of nonsense words to a rumbustious dance which alternates between 2/4 and 3/4 time.

1905
Ravel wrote the poem Noël des jouets, thus anticipating by a decade Debussy’s setting of his own Christmas poem, ‘Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maisons’. Ravel’s song is devoid of human feeling: the toys whizz and whirr and one is reminded again of the composer’s interest in machines—the clocks in L’heure espagnole and the brilliant way in which he animates inanimate objects in L’enfant et les sortilèges.

1906
Histoires naturelles, five settings of animal poems by Jules Renard, were premiered at a concert presented by the Société Nationale on 12 January 1907, with Ravel himself accompanying Jane Bathori. The evening was a fiasco. By attempting to shape the vocal line to render as closely as possible the natural rise and fall of Renard’s prose-poems, Ravel ignored the mute ‘e’, which had till then always been set by composers as a bona fide syllable. This break with tradition caused certain sections of the audience to whistle and jeer, but the artists persevered to the end and actually encored the final song of the set. The songs, in which the accompaniment plays the dominant and more pictorial role, are a delight. In Le paon, the vain peacock opens his tail to a contrary motion glissando on the black keys; the sound of the cricket in Le grillon is suggested by a rhythmic repetition of G sharp; Le cygne presents the swan gliding on Debussy-like ripples; in Le martin-pêcheur, we hear sliding sevenths alighting on a sustained chord in imitation of the dazzling kingfisher settling on the fishing rod; and the guinea-fowl of La pintade hammers out her strident cries to a succession of repeated notes.

1907
Vocalise-Etude en forme de Habanera, which was composed for a collection of vocalizes assembled by A L Hettich, who taught singing at the Conservatoire, has become much better known in the transcription for cello. Les grands vents venus d’outre-mer is a song about loneliness. The highly condensed music begins sombrely and rises to an agonized climax. Strikingly effective is the way in which ‘les adolescents amers’ remains unaccompanied. Sur l’herbe is Ravel’s second and final setting of Verlaine (‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit’ remains a fragment) and with its conversational tone and brilliant rendering of the inflections of spoken dialogue breathes the same world as the Histoires naturelles.

1909
Following the death of his father, Ravel made an arrangement of another Greek folksong: Tripatos. The word means ‘three steps’ in modern Greek and refers to the way in which the dance of that name is performed—starting with three steps forward followed by three steps back. Ravel set only the first two lines of a poem which describes a dying girl who says farewell to her father.

1910
In 1910, Ravel entered the folksong-setting competition of the Maison du Lied in Moscow. Each composer was asked to submit seven songs from seven different countries. Ravel enjoyed no success with his Chanson russe, Chanson flamande and Chanson écossaise, but won four prizes with the mock-tragic Chanson italienne, the pastoral Chanson française, the guitar-like accompaniment of Chanson espagnole and Chanson hébraïque, in which the haunting melody weaves its arabesque over one single sustained chord. The Chanson écossaise is a setting of Burns’s ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonie Doon’, a revised version of ‘Ye flowery banks o’ bonie Doon’ that the poet intended to be sung to a Strathspey reel.

1913
The Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé were composed in Switzerland, where Ravel was assisting Stravinsky with the orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina. Soupir is dedicated to Stravinsky who had himself dedicated the last of his Japanese Lyrics to Ravel; the Russian composer was so impressed by the opening bars of Placet futile that he quoted them at the beginning of the Pastorale section of his Soldier’s Tale (1918); Surgi de la croupe et du bond, one of Mallarmé’s most difficult poems, was described by Ravel as ‘the strangest if not the most hermetic of the sonnets.’ However abstruse these poems might be on first reading, the themes are clear enough: ‘Soupir’ is a melancholy poem about autumn, ‘Placet futile’ wittily portrays a lovelorn abbot, who regrets that he will never appear naked on a Sèvre teacup and will never become the princess’s lapdog, let alone her lover; while ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ depicts the emptiness of a vase that contains no flowers.

1914
Ravel ended his folklore research in 1914 by harmonizing two songs for Alvina Alvi, a soprano at the St Petersburg Opera. Kaddisch, more liturgical chant than song, was traditionally sung by mourners to bewail the passing of a beloved relative. It has an Aramaic text, which Ravel accompanies with blocks of sustained chords that gradually gather in harmonic intensity. L’énigme éternelle sets a Yiddish folksong to a persistent rhythmic ostinato. Ravel later made an orchestral version of the Deux Mélodies Hébraïques, which were premiered by Madeleine Grey.

1914-1915
The Trois chansons pour chœur mixte sans accompagnement, which have words by the composer, were also adapted as solo songs from the original four-part a cappella. version. Nicolette tells of a young girl picking flowers in the countryside—she is frightened of the wolf, scorns her young suitor but willingly accepts an ugly old man when he offers her his money; Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis makes repeated reference to the war in the refrain (‘Mon ami z’il est à la guerre’); and in Ronde the old folk warn the young to keep out of the forest that teems with goblins and monsters. Ravel dedicated the songs to friends.

1923-24
To mark the 400th anniversary of Pierre de Ronsard’s birth in 1924, the editor of the Revue musicale commissioned nine composers to set a poem each that would appear in a special edition on 1 May 1924. Aubert, Caplet, Delage, Dukas, Fauré, Honegger, Ravel, Roland-Manuel and Roussel were all approached. Ravel chose Ronsard’s Ronsard à son âme, a reworking of Hadrian’s ‘Animula, vagula, blandula’, a poem dictated by the poet shortly before his death, probably of heart failure, in AD138 at age of 62. This syllabic setting is the simplest and sparest song that Ravel ever composed, a world away from the Mallarmé settings.

1925-6
The Chansons madécasses were commissioned by Mrs Elizabeth Coolidge, the American patron of the arts. Ravel chose three of the twelve prose poems which Parny claimed were translations from original Madagascan verse, although they were in fact the product of his own imagination, and set them to an accompaniment of ‘if possible’ flute, cello and piano. Thirteen years had passed since his Mallarmé songs, whose lushness and harmonic excesses were now pared down to leaner textures. The three instruments surround the voice which becomes, in effect, the fourth instrument of the quartet. The threatening cry of ‘Aoua!’ in the second song—a stroke of dramatic genius—was added by Ravel himself. He considered his cycle to be among his most important vocal works, and was particularly proud of the way a maximum of expression was achieved by such economy of means.

1927
Léon-Paul Fargues’s Rêves conjures up a dreamscape in which the poet looks back on his childhood and remembers running among ruins, loving glances and the blare of railways stations.

1932-3
Ravel’s final three songs, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, were his response to a commission to write a score for a film that Georg W Pabst was making for Chaliapin. Ravel failed to deliver in time, which meant that Jacques Ibert was eventually the fortunate composer. Ravel was never paid for his pains, but the songs are a delight, and have held the recital stage ever since Martial Singher premiered them on 1 December 1934. Ravel, with his Basque blood, used the Spanish idiom liberally throughout. In Chanson romanesque we hear the alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4 rhythm over a guitar-like accompaniment, which conjures up the quajira of Spanish folklore and gives the song a deliciously lilting quality; Chanson épique, with its 5/4 metre, is reminiscent of the zortzico and, with its organ-like harmonies, has a whiff of Catholic incense about it; while Chanson à boire is in the spirit of the jota, its strong cross-rhythms conveying the tipsiness of Morand’s text.

Richard Stokes © 2025