Ravel

Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what is

deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of

centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver

temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and

the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary

times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for

color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high

tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote

gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in

courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose

in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius that

animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists,

born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the

pageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is as

though they faced the problems of composition with essentially the same

attitudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, like

the old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of life

itself. It is the work of men of the sort who crave primarily in all

conduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regard

all things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to the

making of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was

chiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic

sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whom

he is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and its

decencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the

grave, the poignant. The range of human passions is present in their

music, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, or

entertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming,

world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowed

forth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy,

they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said,

with Baudelaire:

"Sois sage, ô ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most

often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these

men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically

upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their

consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of

delicacy, of precision. Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this

character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her

letters and other arts, from the time of the Pléiade, to that of Charles

Louis Philippe and André Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult

not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not

to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only

the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism that Ravel and

Debussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of the

music that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is

subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative rôle

assigned to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music of

Haydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlist

his activity. It relies for its significance largely upon his

contribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer's

intention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning the

auditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of

fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by the

composer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener assume a

completely passive attitude. They had too great a love and respect of

their fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, had

confidence that they could comprehend all that the music intimated,

regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the music

written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more

passive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents,

the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the

larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the

intellectual game of the _leit-motif_ system was substituted for the

creative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier

strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative

imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour

Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic

participation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitement

steadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparable

indeed to the pictural art of Japan which it so often recalls. It is the

music of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, small

forms. It never insists. It only pricks. It instigates, begins, leaves

off, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need of

an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its

brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the

thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the

opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon

obscured memories and buried emotions. They are like the unsealing of

springs long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And for

a glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a passive receiver

into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They

have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et

Chloé" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelléas et Mélisande" that of

Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony.

Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been

profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them.

Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the

bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act

opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection

"Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "Ibéria" and in

some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their

respective works. Debussy writes "Homage à Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau de

Couperin." Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien"; Ravel

projects an oratorio, "Saint-François d'Assise." Ravel writes the

"Ondine" of the collection entitled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussy

follows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both,

during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to music

the lyrics of Mallarmé entitled "Soupir" and "Placet futile."

Nevertheless, this fact constitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of

Debussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made haste

to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel not

demonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct from

Debussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others

perhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct

development from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one might

with justice speak of a discipleship. But in the light of Ravel's actual

accomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of the

magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms,

from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral

poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to

year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has

driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by

the spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the

fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is

peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he

less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully

the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have

descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the

younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself

made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of

the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would

have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the

other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than

has his master, Gabriel Fauré. He is too sturdily set in his own

direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when

he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal

"Pavane pour une Infante défunte," he has maintained himself proudly

against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against

what is false and epicene in the artistic example of Fauré. Within their

common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has

done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classical

French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a

different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because

of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely

aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret

places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been

as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with

precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that

flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us

cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as

that of the middle section of "Ibéria," in which the very silence of the

night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh.

Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so

perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out

of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely

of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were,

in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw

reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of

sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire,

shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors of

the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the

melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church,

the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the

delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors.

For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Before

he spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed them

fully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And so

we perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. The

designs are the very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited.

The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out

of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter

never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a

representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few

artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear

self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not

the absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a

marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Ravel

dares, and dares continually; seeks passionately to bring his entire

body into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and

rigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. But

compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Ibéria" to perceive how

direct he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the

inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the

apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained,

perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive.

For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to

remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the

powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being

has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his

heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious

and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and

modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing

lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike

singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not

only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mère l'Oye," but also things as

quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as

"Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the

Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloé," has a pureness of

feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, this

directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms

and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of

the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from

Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness,

inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness,

a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to

"Pelléas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of

Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense

of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has

passed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of

life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering,

germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul.

There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel

has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an

instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in

the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem,

dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the

introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous

fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open

doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff

to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns

a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into

tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traüme!

Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"

Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great

ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show

us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer

than Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, with

his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there

is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's

music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet,

for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty

structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin,"

Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and

Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at

Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in

some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he

is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of

the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them

more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no other

instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the

transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous

to himself. There must be something in the character of the French

nation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and most

faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds him

in certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while the

power of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesque

preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts as "Gigues" and "Jeux"

and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed

his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical

evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared

to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism,

it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single

modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great

ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloé,"

with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild

ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure

espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le

Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the

piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the

age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and

rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of

Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and

unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the

field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords

grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet

on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even

bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the

composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and

all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The

humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel,

on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the

artist "à qui l'absence de sensibilité fait encore une personalité," as

one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those

unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality.

Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a

very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of

corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And

so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and

"Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol";

setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for

chant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical

and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the

season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote.

Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de

Regnier: "Le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation

inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la manière de," parodying

Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of

Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing

makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic

streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three

norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his

career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems

surely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year of

his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the

Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power

during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means

has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him.

The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The

instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and

even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as

ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the

most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished

by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer

to him in even more enthusiastic tone.