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Program NotesSonata, Piano and Violin (1927) MAURICE RAVEL Nobody ever composed or polished with more care or a higher standard of aesthetic excellence than Maurice Ravel. Every piece he carried all the way through publication and public performance received his constant and most intense attention. The Sonata for Piano and Violin in three movements, though worked upon at a difficult time in the composer's life, maintained his standards--but that required innumerable delays and recasting. Thus, a work begun in 1923 and promised to both publisher and entrepreneur of London's Aeolian Hall in 1924 failed to see the light of day until 1927. Performers, critics, and public alike testified that they thought it worth the wait. World War I cleaved Ravel's adult life in half. His compositions attained acclaim from late 1893 through 1914, after which he entered the French Army as an ambulance driver. Illness plagued him almost immediately from the armistice of 1918 until his last composition of 1933, and continued to grow ever more debilitating, leading to his final somnolence and death in 1937. Problems he felt able to solve with relative ease during the pre-war period tended to give him a great deal of difficulty after the war--and this seems especially true in the case of the Sonata in question. An extremely irritating creative block struck Ravel at just this time, and did not abate until 1926, only to return again and again for the rest of his life. After completing fifty-six compositions in the antebellum period, this last phase of his life saw only fifteen brought to fruition. The Great War affected Ravel in several other ways as well. His attitude toward musical texture changes from lush and thick to spare and ascetic; his form names change from colorful to abstract, while his formal shapes turn a bit more unpredictable than heretofore; bitonality, harsh dissonance or unresolved friction, jazz sonorities, folk-like modalities, and all-but-incompatible metric interconnecting relationships increase exponentially in these later works. At first, audiences reacted to the post-war works with confusion and disappointment, but by 1925 Ravel's new language had been absorbed and accepted. One must admit, at the same time, that these last works have never achieved the universal popularity of their predecessors. Only Bolero (appreciated for all the wrong reasons) and the two piano concertos of 1929-1931 can claim equivalent popularity and number of performances with such favorites as Daphnis et Chloé, Jeux d’eau, Quatour, Sonatine, Shéhérazade or the Rapsodie espagnole. Ravel refused to talk about his experiences during the war, but from what we know about it, he saw many things almost too terrible to imagine, and suffered exposure, frostbite, and other difficult-to-categorize maladies. Near the fighting front at Verdun, the dead and wounded dropped all about him, and it has always seemed amazing that Ravel escaped without a scratch. After the war, the composer dedicated the messages of several works to the horror of war and the fervent hope that such a tragedy never be repeated. La valse, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Piano Concerto for the left hand all testify directly to this concern. And the increased use of obvious jazz and other "American” effects testify to his appreciation of the American Expeditionary Force that turned the stalemate between the Anglo-French alliance and the Teutonic horde into a victory for the former. Ravel had always been interested in making subcutaneous socio-political statements in his music, and his war experience brought this interest almost totally to the surface. The Sonata has few of the obvious programmatic qualities of the work of this period, save perhaps for the "Blues" movement. It seems to me that the composer tries to combine elements of all the musical and other issues that mean anything to him in this piece. Its textures exhibit a complexity rare in his abstract music, and its motives, while not handled intricately, undergo developmental processes of extreme subtlety. Ideas in the first two movements recur in the finale in a way reminiscent of 19th-century cyclic compositions usually as distant from Ravel's compositional methods as possible. A technique traceable to the Berlioz generation, in which a melody recurs at the same pitch as before, but with so new a harmonization that one hears it functioning in a key different from the one in which it first appeared, occurs in a few rare spots before the war, most notably in Valses nobles (second movement) and the Piano Trio (first movement), but now happens again and again in this Sonata. It would reach a climax in the ultimate anti-World-War-I piece, Concerto pour la main gauche, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, whose right arm had been blown off in the war, where a "blues" theme in C, harmonized first in C, holds its position while the accompaniment goes on to A, F#, D, and B major modes, respectively. Nothing quite so systematic happens in the Sonata, a work that evades easy analysis. Few Ravel pieces demand the attention of the listener to a myriad of nuances that seem to support the structure of the music so intensely as the Sonata. The Allegretto notated in 6/8 begins with a long, rambling, unaccompanied lyrical idea in the right hand of the piano that sounds just like one of those Gedalge fugue subjects that tortured generations of students at the Paris Conservatory. When the violin answers the subject, it seems to follow the rules by beginning a fifth above the piano; but, while the first seven notes follow the general contour of the opening melody, all the intervals have been altered in a way gross enough to violate the loosest conception of a tonal answer. After that, the violin part goes its own way, totally free -- not quite ignoring the subject, but paying little attention to its tonal and directional implications. The counterpoint against this in the right hand tends to restrict itself to a Bb pedal in two octaves, and later three. When the left hand enters, it outlines a typical horn-call melody, but of course in the most wrong tonal framework. Hardly has the work started, than the violin outlines a G minor triad while the left hand outlines an F# minor-major fanfare, and the right hand seems to be stating material in Bb major. The combination of these three ideas interacts like a Blues progression in G major, with the Bb as a blue third, and the F-natural as a blue seventh, and the spacing totally unlike anything that stems from the blue sources. All of this seems pretty mysterious, and yet all of this occupies merely the first half-minute of the work. It took me long study of the score and many listenings to recordings to even begin to understand the complex design of this work, and I believe that the essence of it still remains uncovered. Every time I hear it, I think I hear a new clue to this essence which will throw everything else I thought into the garbage. But when I check this new insight against the score, it dissolves and the "Ravel sonata frustration" returns. Ravel scholar Arbie Orenstein thinks that the Sonata represents a transition between two styles, and is somehow incomplete. Others think that Ravel's declining powers or his creative block prevented him from executing this piece correctly. I remain convinced that the piece works extremely well, and that my inability to grasp its message is my fault, not Ravel's. But even that may be a measure of my faith in a composer whose work I love so deeply, rather than a true evaluation of the work. Life and art present problems every second, and we only solve a small fraction of them...but that is what makes it all so much fun. Some things resist solution, like Einstein's grand unified theory of forces, squaring the circle, who wrote the works of Shakespeare, and Ravel's Violin Sonata. It is nice to know, however, that somebody out there seeks solutions to them all. I for one wish them all the very best of fortune. Joel Sheveloff |
