Ravel

by Jean Echenoz

  In the days that follow, Ravel has no idea what to do. Nothing really tempts him, nothing worthwhile. He’s beginning to worry seriously about this when Ida Rubinstein14 proposes that he orchestrate a few pieces from Iberia, by Albéniz, to make a ballet she would dance herself. Now, Ida Rubinstein is wonderful, the kind of girl who goes lion-hunting in Africa when she’s bored, the kind who calls you in the middle of the night from Amsterdam to tell you just how elegantly, this morning, seen from the airplane flying her back from Bali, the sun was rising over the Acropolis, the kind who sails off on her yacht to go halfway around the globe accompanied by her monkeys and her tame panther, not ever forgetting her cloth-of-gold pajamas, her turbans topped with aigrettes, or her bejeweled boleros. Ida Rubinstein is very tall, very thin, very beautiful, very rich, one can refuse her nothing. And well there you have it. It’s a project. There’s always that.

  Ravel sets to work, seeming to enjoy it until the summer is in full swing: time to pay the long annual visit to the Basque country, to Saint-Jean-de-Luz near Ciboure where he was born, and spend time with his friends Gustave Samazeuilh and Marie Gaudin. Bulls, pelota and sea-bathing, Espelette peppers and the wine of Irouléguy, where Joaquin Nin15 takes him in his Hotchkiss. They stop over in Arcachon where, when night has fallen out on the boardwalk, Nin suggests to Ravel that there might be a problem with the rights in this Albéniz project because a certain Arbos seems to have already orchestrated those pieces. What the hell do I care, says Ravel curtly, and who’s this Arbos anyway? But he doesn’t seem as carefree about it as all that. Noticing his increasing anxiety about this, Nin inquires into the matter with the publisher. It becomes apparent that an impregnable network of agreements, contracts, signatures, and copyrights protects Iberia: no one except the aforementioned Arbos has the right to work on Albéniz.

  Ravel in a towering rage, frustrated and upset in Saint-Jean-de-Luz: My vacation is shot to hell, all these laws are idiotic, I need to work, I was enjoying orchestrating that, and besides—what am I going to tell Ida? She’ll be furious. In any case I’m returning to Paris tomorrow, I don’t want to miss July 14. Nin doesn’t believe a word of it, certain that Ravel will instead make a beeline for the publisher and Ida to try to work something out. Nin is mistaken. Whenever Bastille Day rolls around, Ravel gets as giddy as a schoolgirl, can’t possibly miss out on the least little street party. He scours all the neighborhoods of Paris, lingers at every terrace, where he loves to watch the couples dancing cheek-to-cheek under Chinese lanterns and listen to the orchestra, even when it’s just a single accordion.

  The next day, however, when Nin swings by his hotel to drive him to the station, he finds Ravel in a panic, not knowing which way to turn in the appalling disorder of his room. Shoes and suspenders, brushes and ties, toiletries and cigarette packs are in a jumble on his bed, while the train is leaving in fifteen minutes. Almost dressed, Ravel is determined to slick his hair back properly but Nin drags him firmly off to the car, along the way snatching up a few articles quickly stuffed into a suitcase. Arriving at the station just in time, he shoves Ravel onto the already moving train and, running alongside the car, sends the fortunately not too heavy suitcase flying through the window into his compartment.

  Then the crisis turns out to be simply a false alarm: the elderly Arbos, apprised of the situation, graciously makes it known that he will be honored to cede to the younger man whatever rights he would like. Which speaks, after the American tour, to the glory of the younger man who promptly—a younger man’s whim—drops the project. Time is pressing, however; the publisher involved needs a score for October. Fine, says Ravel: I’ll just take care of it on my own. Might as well compose something myself, I’ll be able to orchestrate my music faster than anyone else’s. Besides, it’s only a ballet, no need for form strictly speaking or development, practically no need to modulate either, just some rhythm and the orchestra. The music, this time, is of no great importance. All that’s left is to get on with it.

  Back in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, early in the morning, here he is about to leave for the beach with Samazeuilh. Wearing a golden-yellow bathrobe over a black bathing costume with shoulder straps and coiffed in a scarlet bathing cap, Ravel lingers a moment at the piano, playing a phrase over and over on the keyboard with one finger. Don’t you think this theme has something insistent about it? he asks Samazeuilh. Then off he goes to swim. After which, sitting on the sand in the July sunshine, he mentions that same phrase again. It would be good to make something out of it. He might, for example, try to repeat it a few times but without developing the phrase, just swelling the orchestra and graduating it as best and for as long as he can. Right? Who knows, he says, standing up to go for another swim, it might work as well as La Madelon.16 But it will work out a lot better, Maurice: it will work out a hundred thousand times better than La Madelon.

  The holidays are over. He’s sitting at his piano, home alone, a score in front of him, cigarette between his lips, hair as impeccably combed as ever. Under his dressing gown with its bright lapels and matching pocket handkerchief, he is wearing a gray-striped shirt and a bronze-colored tie. Positioned for a chord, his left hand rests on the keyboard while his right, armed with a metal mechanical pencil wedged between thumb and index, notes on the score what the left has just produced. As usual he is behind in his work and the telephone has just rung: the publisher reminding him once again to hurry. He must provide as soon as possible the rehearsal dates for this work-in-progress, which he has announced but about which nothing is known. Ravel smiles but it doesn’t show. All right, they want to rehearse, they’re really anxious to rehearse, well then fine, they’ll rehearse. Rehearse: Middle French rehercier, to repeat. They’ll get their fill and more, de la répétition.

  Then, as always when he is alone, he dines at the drop-leaf table, facing the wall. As he greedily eats his meat, his false teeth sound like castanets or a machine gun, the noise echoing in the confined space. As he eats he thinks about what he’s working on. He has always liked automatons and machines, visiting factories, industrial landscapes; he remembers those of Belgium and the Rhineland when he traveled through them on a river yacht more than twenty years ago: the cities bristling with chimneys, the furnace domes belching flames with blue and reddish-brown smoke, the foundry castles, the incandescent cathedrals, the symphonies of conveyor belts, whistles, and hammer-blows beneath the red sky.

  Perhaps he comes by it honestly, this taste for machinery, his father having sacrificed the trumpet and flute to an engineer’s career that led him to invent among other things a steam generator fueled by mineral oils and applied to locomotion, plus a machine gun, a supercharged two-stroke engine, a machine to manufacture paper bags, and a vehicle with which he devised an acrobatic act called the Whirlwind of Death. Anyway, there’s a factory that Ravel currently likes to look at, on the Vésinet road, right after the bridge at Rueil. It gives him ideas. So there it is: he is busy composing something based on the assembly line.

  Assembly and repetition: the composition is completed in October after a month of work hampered only by a splendid cold picked up on a trip through Spain, beneath the coconut palms of Malaga. He knows perfectly well what he has made: there’s no form, strictly speaking, no development or modulation, just some rhythm and arrangement. In short it’s a thing that self-destructs, a score without music, an orchestral factory without a purpose, a suicide whose weapon is the simple swelling of sound. Phrase run into the ground, thing without hope or promise: there, he says, is at least one piece Sunday orchestras won’t have the cheek to put on their programs. But none of that’s important: the thing was only made to be danced. The choreography, the lighting, the scenery will be what carry off the tedious repetitions of that phrase. After he has finished, when he passes the factory on the Vésinet road one day with his brother, Ravel says to him, you see, there it is, the Boléro plant.

  Well, things don’t go at all as planned. The first time it’s danced, it’s somewhat disconcerting but it wor
ks. Later on in the concert hall, however, is when it works terrifically. It works extraordinarily. This object without hope enjoys a triumph that stuns everyone, beginning with its creator. True, when an old lady in the audience complains loudly at the end of one of the first performances that he’s a madman, Ravel nods: There’s one of them at least who understands, he says, just to his brother. Eventually, this success will trouble him. That such a pessimistic project would meet with popular acclaim that is soon so universal and long-lasting that the piece becomes one of the world’s warhorses—well it’s enough to make one wonder but—above all—to go straight to the point. To those bold enough to ask him what he considers his masterpiece, he shoots back: It’s Boléro, what else; unfortunately, there’s no music in it.

  Although he feels somewhat disdainful of the piece, that doesn’t mean anyone should take it lightly. The world must understand as well that one shouldn’t trifle with its tempo. When Toscanini conducts it after his own fashion, two times too fast and accelerando, Ravel goes to see him after the concert. That wasn’t my tempo, he points out to him coldly. Toscanini leans toward him, raising the eyebrows on that long façade he uses for a face, making it even longer. When I play that in your tempo, he says, it falls flat. Fine, replies Ravel, then don’t play it. But you don’t know a thing about your own music, bristles Toscanini’s mustache; it was the only way to put the piece over. When Ravel gets home, without speaking to anyone, he writes to Toscanini. No one knows what he told him in that letter.

  Well, he has just finished that little business in C major, which he doesn’t realize will be his crowning glory, when he’s invited to Oxford. So here he is emerging from the Sheldonian Theater into the courtyard of the Bodleian Library in frock coat and striped trousers, wing collar and tie, his patent-leather shoes without which he is nothing, draped in a toga with a cap on his head, laughing and standing as straight as possible. Hands closed into fists, his arms hanging alongside his short body, in the photo he looks a tiny bit silly. Eight years earlier, he’d made a huge to-do over refusing the Légion d’honneur but an honorary doctorate from Oxford University with a eulogy in Latin to top it off, that’s not something one turns down, plus it’s worth it just to set out again on a little trip through Spain to recuperate.

  One evening in his hotel, rather enjoying being in Saragossa, he is alone in his room, leaning back in his armchair in front of the open window. He has taken off his shoes and placed his bare feet on the guardrail. He contemplates those feet, at the end of which his ten toes move all on their own, wiggling among themselves as if signaling to him, sending him messages of solidarity. We are your toes, we are all here, we’re counting on you and you know you can also count on us the way you do on your fingers.

  He thinks he can count on them but two days later, attempting to play his Sonatine at the embassy in Madrid, he goes directly from the exposition to the coda of the finale, skipping the minuet movement. One may think what one likes of this incident. One may believe in a lapse of memory. One may suppose that it wearies him, having to play something more than twenty years old over and over forever. One may also imagine that, before a less-than-attentive audience, he prefers to rush through the performance. But one may also speculate that, for the first time in public, something really is going wrong.

  SEVEN

  TECHNIQUE NUMBER 2: While spending hours tossing and turning in bed, seek the best position, the ideal accommodation of the organism called Ravel to the piece of furniture called Ravel’s bed, the most even breathing, the perfect placement of the head upon the pillow, that state in which the body becomes confused with then fused with its couch, a fusion capable of opening one of the doors to sleep. From then on Ravel need only wait for the latter to come get him, watching for this arrival as if for an invited guest.

  Objection: on the one hand, as previously noted, it is this very waiting, this position as lookout and the alertness it entails—even if he tries to ignore them—that risk preventing him from sleeping. Moreover, once this position is found, the encouraging torpor that follows, holding out the dazzling prospect of sleep, frequently breaks down: a little short circuit or loose wire can turn up who knows where, and everything must be redone. Even worse, this fresh start now requires recovering a little lost ground, it’s discouraging; Ravel lights his bedside lamp, then a cigarette, which he stubs out after a few coughs only to light another one and it’s endless.

  He could perhaps try sleeping with someone, after all. At times sleep is easier when one is less lonely in a bed. He could always take a shot at that. But no, nothing doing. No one knows whether he ever loved, amorously, anyone—man or woman—at all. We do know that when he summoned the courage one day to propose marriage to a friend, she burst out laughing, exclaiming in front of everyone that he was crazy. We know that when he tried with Hélène, asking her in a roundabout way if she wouldn’t like to live in the country, she also declined the offer, although more gently. But when a third woman, as tall and imposing as he is short and slender, made him the same offer in the other direction, we also know that he was the one who laughed till he cried.

  We know that young Rosenthal found him, one time, in a brasserie at the Porte Champerret, where Ravel seemed to be on excellent or at least quite familiar terms with a group of whores who’d set up headquarters there. We know that this same Rosenthal was able to overhear a telephone call between Ravel and one of the girls, who was very upset that he preferred giving Rosenthal his lesson to sharing a little of his bed with her. We know that one day, taking leave of Leyritz, Ravel mentioned casually that he was off to the brothel, but perhaps he was joking about it. So we know few things, although we can assume some of them, including this taste—perhaps for lack of anything better—for brief encounters. In short we know nothing, practically nothing except that one day, when Marguerite Long17 encourages him to marry, he addresses the subject of love for once—and once and for all: this feeling, in his opinion, never rises above licentiousness.

  Let’s drop the subject. Everything went so well last year at Oxford with his honorary doctorate that he is invited back to England. Ravel arrives there at almost the same time as Wittgenstein, who comes in from Austria to receive a doctorate as well but in his case from Cambridge and in philosophy. While it’s highly unlikely that Ravel ever met Ludwig Wittgenstein, at least he crosses his path, since three weeks later, it’s in Vienna that he becomes acquainted with his older brother. The pianist Paul Wittgenstein, made prisoner in Russia, deported to Siberia, returned from the front minus his right arm. Undiscouraged by that loss, he has logically devoted himself to what has been written so far for the left hand alone. Since this repertoire is limited, however—Reger, Saint-Saëns, Schubert transcribed by Liszt, and Bach by Brahms—he has decided to commission pieces for that hand from a few composers of his day. As it happens, Ravel runs into him at a concert, at which Paul Wittgenstein plays something by Richard Strauss conceived especially for the left hand. Paul Wittgenstein: rather a good pianist; the beefy, pretty face of an old young man, albeit a bit impassive; not bad but nowhere near as handsome as his brother. They say hello, delighted to meet you, and leave it at that.

  Back in France, things aren’t going very well. Ravel is still smoking too much, still as bored as ever, still sleeping as poorly as usual, once again always dead tired, constantly tormented by chronic swollen glands and other minor problems. Above all, after the strange business of Boléro, he doesn’t much know what to do with himself anymore. True, he does have some vague projects brewing, an old idea about a concerto but it’s rather traditional, a few idle thoughts about Jeanne d’Arc18 but they’re tiresome, some attempts at orchestration but they go nowhere, a stab at dusting off Le Roi malgré lui but—enough said. Better to go off on holiday again, spend the whole summer in the Basque country and think about other things.

  And at the end of the summer, while he is on his balcony reading the not so glad tidings in Le Populaire, a note from Wittgenstein arrives commissioning a
concerto for his remaining hand. That’s when no one knows what gets into Ravel: he doesn’t just accept the commission—instead of writing one concerto, he undertakes in secret to compose two at the same time, one for the left hand in D major and another in G that will finally realize one of his longtime projects. While one will be for Wittgenstein, the other will be for him, no one but him, and besides, he thinks, he’ll play it himself. Until that day, one after the other, he has produced only single specimens; this is the first time that he intends to give birth, simultaneously, to twins.

  But they will be heterozygotic twins, sharing only a birthday, nothing in the way of resemblance. He begins by sketching out his Piano Concerto in G major, then sets it aside to complete his commission. Once the question of the left hand has been rather swiftly settled, in a logical nine months, he turns back to the other work but this time things do not run smoothly. He’s hung up, has heaps of trouble, just can’t figure out how to finish it. It’s complicated, after all, a delicate proposition, given that the concerto wasn’t conceived for the piano but against it. Fine, he tells Zogheb: Since I can’t manage to finish this thing for two hands, I’ve decided not to sleep, I mean not even for one second, you understand. I won’t rest until this work is finished—be it in this world or the next.