Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.
About Maurice Ravel in brief
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer. Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music and two operas. He wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit, is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé require skilful balance in performance. He was one of the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. His works survive only in fragmentary form; only a single movement of a sonata by Grieg and a single piece of piano music by Schumann survive in fragments of a piano movement by Schubert and Grieg. He died in Paris in 1937, aged 75. He had a son, Édouard, and a daughter, Léopolde. He also had a grandson, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, who was a composer and pianist. His father was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border.
His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid. Both Ravel’s parents were Roman Catholics; Marie was also something of a free-thinker, a trait inherited by her elder son. The family was not rich, but the family was comfortable, and the two boys had happy childhoods. In 1888 Ravel met the young pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became not only a lifelong friend of his but also one of his foremost interpreters of his work. Without Léo Deléo, he was a highly musical boy, he found that music was not, as in the case of so many others, the result of effort. Without Charles-René, Ravel found that being anything of a child prodigy was not a natural conception to him. There is no record that Ravel received any formal general schooling in his early years; his biographer Roger Nichols suggests that the boy may have been chiefly educated by his father. In 19th-century terms, Joseph had married beneath his status – Marie was illegitimate and barely literate – but the marriage was a happy one. Some of Joseph’s inventions were successful, including an early internal combustion engine and a notorious circus machine, the \”Whirlwind of Death\”, an automotive loop-the-loop that was a major attraction until a fatal accident in 1903.
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