Ravel (1875-1937) Miroirs (1904-5)
1st performance Ricardo Viñes 1906
Noctuelles ("Night Moths"), dedicated to Léon-Paul Fargue and inspired by his lines ‘Les noctuelles des hangars parent, d’un vol gauche, Cravater d’autres pouters’ (The night moths in
their barns launch themselves clumsily into the air, going from one perch to another).
Oiseaux tristes ("Sad Birds"), dedicated to Ricardo Viñes. The idea for the melodic kernel of the piece came when Ravel was in the forest at Fontainbleau. Vuillermoz explains:
He was staying with friends and one morning he heard a blackbird whistling a tune and was enchanted by its elegant, melancholy arabesque. He had merely to transcribe this tune accurately, without changing a note, to produce the limpid, poetic piece which spiritualises the nostalgic call of this French brother of the Forest Bird in Siegfried. (Quoted in Nichols 1995: 6)
Une barque sur l'océan ("A boat on the Ocean"), dedicated to Paul Sordes This work successfully develops the scope of Jeux d’eau, which describes the splashings of a fountain, into a full scale
seascape.
Alborada del gracioso ("The Comedian's Aubade"), dedicated to M. D. Calvocoressi, provider of the text to Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and someone who described himself in the following words, ‘I was (and have remained) a vile bungler at the piano’. The most popular and most often performed of the Miroirs.
Alborada literally means a song of the dawn and is a type of serenade originating from the mountain region of Galicia in Northern Spain, while gracioso is a character in Spanish comedy, a jester. Ravel wrote a letter to Ferdinand Sinzig of Steinway and Sons in New York in which he spoke about this title:
I understand your bafflement over how to translate the title ‘Alborada del gracioso’. That is precisely why I decided not to translate it. The fact is that the gracioso of Spanish comedy is a rather special character and one which, so far as I know, is not found in any other theatrical tradition. We do have an equivalent, though, in the French theatre: Beaumarchais’s Figaro. But he is more philosophical, less well-meaning than his Spanish ancestor. The simplest thing, I think, is to follow the title with the rough translation ‘Morning Song of the Clown’. That will be enough to explain the humoristic style of this piece.
La vallée des cloches ("The Valley of Bells"), dedicated to Maurice Delage, Ravel's first pupil, and according to Robert Casadesus, inspired by the sound of the bells in Paris at midday.
These five piano pieces draw on a wide range of sources and conventions across nearly two centuries - a fascinating meshing of historical and contemporary influences that range from Mozart to Chabrier and Fauré. The pieces are also interestingly and very personally related to their cultural and social contexts, in that each individual piece was dedicated to a member of the Apaches, a group of young artists and intellectuals residing in Paris of whom Ravel was himself one.
The name, like the term impressionism, was initially given as a derogatory description of its members. The group started around 1902 when Paul Sordes, a painter and music-lover, began inviting a small group of his friends to his studio on Saturdays. Among these were his brother,Charles Sordes, the poets Tristan Klingsor and Léon-Paul Fargue, the painters Edouard Benedictus and Séguy, Charles Guérin, the critic M.D. Calvocoressi and, of course, Ravel.
They were soon joined by the musician Maurice Delage, who became Ravel’s student and most intimate friend; Ricardo Vines, the Spanish pianist and Ravel’s childhood friend, and the conductor D.E. Inghgelbrecht. Also members of Les Apaches were Lucien Garban, Marcel Chadeigne, the decorator Georges Mouveau and the designer Pivet.
Every Saturday the group met and, in Léon-Paul Fargue’s words: ‘We all read or played whatever we had recently written or composed, in the most friendly atmosphere I have ever experienced’. At Sordes’ house it was necessary to stop playing at around one in the morning as the neighbours complained about the noise. Thus in 1904 the group moved their meetings to Delage’s summer-house which was separated from other homes so they could make music all night long.
