Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, in the French Basque country, in March 1875, the son of a Swiss engineer and a Basque mother. He studied piano from the age of seven and entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1889, where he was a student for fourteen years — much longer than the normal course — and where his attempts on the Prix de Rome (rejected five times, the 1905 refusal causing a public scandal) became a cause célèbre among supporters of the Conservatoire’s reform.

His mature works span a tighter dynamic range than Debussy’s but with an equally exact harmonic ear. The major piano works (*Jeux d’eau*, *Miroirs*, *Gaspard de la nuit*, *Le tombeau de Couperin*); the ballets *Daphnis et Chloé* (1912) and *Boléro* (1928); the song cycles (*Shéhérazade*, *Histoires naturelles*, *Trois poèmes de Mallarmé*, *Chansons madécasses*); the two piano concertos (one for the left hand, written for Paul Wittgenstein); and the chamber works including the String Quartet and the Piano Trio established him as the leading French composer of his generation alongside Debussy. He orchestrated Mussorgsky’s *Pictures at an Exhibition* in 1922.

Ravel was injured in a taxi accident in 1932 and developed a degenerative neurological condition — possibly Pick’s disease or corticobasal degeneration — that gradually robbed him of the ability to write down what he could still hear in his head. He died in Paris in December 1937 following exploratory brain surgery. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his orchestral, piano and song work.