-1st Mvt-
Ondine is arguably the most beautiful movement of Gaspard de la nuit; it is certainly the most colorful and sensuous. In the poem, Ondine is a mermaid who sings to a man, describing her fantastic world and trying at length to seduce him. The man, however, is married to a mortal, and when he explains this to Ondine she cries, laughs, then disappears as quickly as she first appeared. While this basic story forms the skeletal structure of Ravel’s music, there is far more to the poetry than a simple narrative. Words and phrases create impressions of darkness, mystery, and a magical world of water. Ravel's incorporates these themes as he follows the progression of the story, introducing and developing the setting and characters.
Just as the poem begins with “Listen! Listen!” and does not provide any introduction to explain what is going on, the music evolves out of nothingness, like something from a dream. Ravel begins the piece in ppp with a very fast and quiet repeating series of chords that becomes the central and driving rhythmic element of the work. These initial bars establish a quiet atmosphere of mystery, metrical elegance, and anticipation. The shimmering notes immediately draw one into “the beautiful starry night and the beautiful sleeping lake.”
The actual poetry begins in the third measure, where Ondine is first heard in a dreamy, song-like melody. When Ravel introduces her playfully amorous character, the melodic line conjures images of the mermaid calling “Listen! It is I, it is Ondine who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your window” from outside. The music “follows the actions and thoughts of the sprite-princess and sustain[s] the least inflection of her voice” (Long, 1973), and later becomes more complicated as Ondine’s song builds in strength and sensuality. For example, when Ravel repeats the melody, it is in broken chords rather than single notes, with more agitated accompaniment. In the third stanza of the poem, Ondine again calls “Listen! Listen!”-- the repetition creates urgency. Incidentally, the first three stanzas of the poem are in ABA form, which is also applicable to the musical organization: a theme (A), which goes through a development section (B), and the initial motifs are then repeated (A) (Bruhn, 1997).
Ravel changes the key and melodic line as Ondine offers her love to a married man and tension mounts. The music is more sinister, and for the first time the melody is sung in the lower, darker regions of the keyboard. There is unmistakable momentum as the music becomes more dance-like, and soon the playfulness disappears. A stormy romantic passage builds as she offers her hand in marriage. When the man rejects Ondine, water seems to crash everywhere as the pianist pounds over the keyboard. In the wake of this terrible climax, the music is softer and more fragile, eventually disintegrating into nothing more than a timid reflection of the melody. This is the nadir of the piece, showing Ondine alone with a mixture of childish disappointment and adult sadness-- “she wept some tears.” However, as she “uttered a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower,” the music blossoms into a coda of rapid arpeggios before trailing off like a
dream.
Ondine is difficult to play because it requires a good deal of strength to maintain a light touch. The pianist must create a supple and brilliant atmosphere, with subtly different touches for water that ripples, shines, shimmers, and cascades. At one point, the hands traverse practically the entire keyboard in a matter of seconds, yet even in this loud and fearsome passage the music must be flowing, like water. In addition, the rhythmic motif of chords is hard simply to play fast, but near impossible to play fast and quietly. While the pianist sweats over this technical challenge, the melody must sing out, which becomes difficult to maintain when the hands begin leaping around the keyboard. Still, despite the difficultly, the atmosphere must remain constant and vivid. The pianist must create a sparkling, nighttime atmosphere, like a prism suspended in rain and darkness.
-2nd Mvt-
Le Gibet is a picture of desolation and misery. It is a musical landscape of the singular, breath-taking image of a lonely corpse “reddened by the setting sun.” Bertrand’s poem is a series of contemplations of this image, all made with gloomy, hopeless resignation. Unlike Ondine, there is no story being told. Instead, the poem consists of five gruesome questions and a horrific answer. Le Gibet opens with a picture of a man who is “the hanged one,” yet who is still alive and “utters a sigh.” By the end of the poem, after the relentless series of disturbing questions, the man is certainly dead-- his emotions have expired, his spirit is extinguished, he is now a “corpse.” It is as though we, as readers, have witnessed “the unfolding of that moment between almost-no-life and definite death” (Bruhn, 1997).
Ravel devotes almost the entire focus of the composition to atmosphere. He does not try to recreate specific descriptions like “scarab beetles” and “sterile ivy.” Those images are incorporated into a larger theme based on the evocation of emotions rather than objects. The character of the poetry is introspective and cyclical, more observational than explanatory. Like the poetry, the music is an odyssey withone mournful, extended image. The whole movement consists of three relentlessly repeating motifs: a constant B-flat, a melodic chord progression, and a second, more singing melody. Pianist Vlado Perlemuter remarked that “you must not be afraid of making it sound monotonous”; in fact, monotony is an integral part of the music.
The forlorn atmosphere is maintained by a B-flat that sounds throughout the entire piece, like a perpetual sigh or ringing bell. Bells play a key role in Le Gibet. The musical landscape is reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe, whose poetry Ravel admired; in fact, Poe’s poem The Bells may have influenced this music (Larner, 1996). Siglind Bruhn finds that the B-flat bell is important because the “tolling constitutes the link among the different aspects embedded in the poem.” Though this B-flat theme is the most famous aspect of Le Gibet, all three motifs overlap and build off one another to create an indelible image.
Technical difficulties of Le Gibet are in the management of sound quality and voicing. Marguerite Long points out that independence of the hands and discrete differences between ppp and pp make the piece extremely challenging. The pianist must not only play quietly, but also be aware of subtle changes in sound and texture. Henri Gil-Marchex believes 27 different touches are necessary in Le Gibet (Bricard). A particularly difficult task is the maintenance of each musical line. For example, the B-flat is sometimes divided in octaves between hands, but it still must sound exactly the same as when played by only one hand. At other moments, different melodic lines are played simultaneously and must sound as completely independent voices. Another technical difficultly is the playing of extended chords. All the notes must be played in the same way and at the same time, and, because the music is slow and quiet, any notes depressed a half-second too late are obvious mistakes. Performing Le Gibet is like standing perfectly still so that even your breathing is imperceptible, only you must also always be looking at a single ghastly scene. When the music at last dies out, that ceaseless B-flat is the only sound that remains. It is like the corpse left hanging from the rope, and then the scene fades to black.
-3rd Mvt-
Scarbo: this is arguably the most famous movement from Gaspard de la nuit, the piece people talk about long after they have first heard the nightmarish music. Scarbo is truly the work that represents transcendental virtuosity. The music is unbelievably difficult and seems very advanced and dissonant for Ravel’s time. Literally every key of the piano is used. Furthermore, the virtuoso elements become a vehicle for conveying the poetry, which like the music is frenetic and bizarre, almost drugged-out. However, as Bertrand never abandons structure, Ravel manages to fit the shadows and dwarfs and hallucinatory images into a “tightly knit form [that] is comparable to the Chopin scherzi and ballades” (Dubbiosi 1967). The result is an intense and relentless journey that lies somewhere between a technical study and a psychotic episode.
In the poem, the narrator describes his fear of Scarbo, an evil dwarf who comes in the dead of night. Scarbo plays with the narrator’s mind: sometimes he dances, other times he hides and only makes noises, and then sometimes he appears and “grows between the moon and me like the belfry of a gothic cathedral.” At the end, as the insanity becomes unbearable, Scarbo disappears, “his face pales like the wax of a candle end--and suddenly he is extinguished.” Although the poem is short, there is grandeur in its horror, “a sense of awe, embodied in the image of the majestically high spire of a Gothic cathedral” (Bruhn, 1997).
Although the music is surreal, it is relatively simple to follow its relationship to the poetry. Scarbo consists of several motifs, each representing a theme or image from the poem. The piece begins with three ascending notes, uttered softly and deeply from the lower registers of the piano. This is like a “sneak preview,” like the trailer to a horror film (Bruhn, 1997). The three-note motif varies from a whisper to a romantic sweep, and representing the emotions of the narrator. At the end of the piece, this is played one last time in assertive left hand octaves before the music abruptly trails off, representing a sort of relief as Scarbo disappears. Likewise, a staccato and rhythmic theme is frantic and grotesque, like the dwarf’s jagged, uneven dancing. Another motif consists of broken octaves and is more mysterious; this represents suspense, like Scarbo hanging from the ceiling, unseen. Finally, there is a very intense, rhythmic progression of chords that interrupts the broken octaves and twice builds up to a climax, like a scream of awe and terror. Ravel, a brilliant orchestrator, wanted the piano to sound like “kettle drums” at this point, which creates a frightening effect (Perlemuter, 1988). Ravel also integrates and interchanges these motifs. For example, there is a strangely calm section in the middle of the piece, but its melody is actually a slower version of Scarbo’s “dancing” theme. In this way, Ravel creates anticipation, hinting that the dwarf is hiding, but not gone-- “Do I think him vanished then?”
There are three areas of technical concern in Scarbo: playing the notes, developing specific articulations for each motif, and, possibly more difficult than anything, the juxtaposition of very different articulations. Simply learning the notes is an accomplishment, for Scarbo demands speed, precision and agility. The pianist must cross and interlock hands, play multiple notes with the thumb, and perform similar acrobatics at a very high speed. However, the pianist cannot simply hit the right notes; the pianist must hit the right notes in the right way. For example, the initial sequence of repeated notes is very fast and therefore challenging to play. However, as Bruhn insightfully points out, “[t]he musical metaphor is that of trembling.”
Still, the most challenging aspect of Scarbo is adjusting to accommodate different articulations in virtually no time. As Marguerite Long said, “the performer must learn to cope with continued neuro-muscular equilibrium in the fingers.” At one moment, for instance in one of the “jumping chord” passages, the playing must be light and quick, with measured staccato. Then, a half-second later, the pianist must entirely adjust the volume and articulation to play pedaled broken octaves. Likewise, the atmosphere changes from frenzy to mystery. If the pianist can somehow master the transcendental virtuosity of Scarbo, the result is a captivating musical experience.
It is interesting to note that Scarbo ends much like Ondine begins, with fast and quiet notes played in the higher registers of the piano that seem to shimmer. This is further evidence of the cohesiveness of Gaspard de la nuit. Ondine and Scarbo have a mixture of darkness and color, a glittery effect. Ondine opens with a “beautiful starry night,” and Scarbo with “the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees.” The only movement that does not sparkle in the darkness is Le Gibet, but this is appropriate since it is the slow movement.
Ravel even provided explicit instructions for the work’s emotional interpretation: “With ‘Scarbo’ and ‘Ondine’... it is fitting to bestow them with the sentimentality of Liszt and Chopin, whereas ‘Le Gibet’ should be played uniformly throughout, implacably, terrifying by its even simplicity” (Dubbiosi, 1967). Gaspard de la nuit fits together brilliantly, and each movement is an impressive enough rendering of Bertrand’s prose that the poetry may as well have been based on the music, and not the other way around.
“Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.”
“My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words.”
-Maurice Ravel (Dubbiosi).
To listen to Ondine from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVL6oS30wFc&feature=channel_page
Ondine is arguably the most beautiful movement of Gaspard de la nuit; it is certainly the most colorful and sensuous. In the poem, Ondine is a mermaid who sings to a man, describing her fantastic world and trying at length to seduce him. The man, however, is married to a mortal, and when he explains this to Ondine she cries, laughs, then disappears as quickly as she first appeared. While this basic story forms the skeletal structure of Ravel’s music, there is far more to the poetry than a simple narrative. Words and phrases create impressions of darkness, mystery, and a magical world of water. Ravel's incorporates these themes as he follows the progression of the story, introducing and developing the setting and characters.
Just as the poem begins with “Listen! Listen!” and does not provide any introduction to explain what is going on, the music evolves out of nothingness, like something from a dream. Ravel begins the piece in ppp with a very fast and quiet repeating series of chords that becomes the central and driving rhythmic element of the work. These initial bars establish a quiet atmosphere of mystery, metrical elegance, and anticipation. The shimmering notes immediately draw one into “the beautiful starry night and the beautiful sleeping lake.”
The actual poetry begins in the third measure, where Ondine is first heard in a dreamy, song-like melody. When Ravel introduces her playfully amorous character, the melodic line conjures images of the mermaid calling “Listen! It is I, it is Ondine who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your window” from outside. The music “follows the actions and thoughts of the sprite-princess and sustain[s] the least inflection of her voice” (Long, 1973), and later becomes more complicated as Ondine’s song builds in strength and sensuality. For example, when Ravel repeats the melody, it is in broken chords rather than single notes, with more agitated accompaniment. In the third stanza of the poem, Ondine again calls “Listen! Listen!”-- the repetition creates urgency. Incidentally, the first three stanzas of the poem are in ABA form, which is also applicable to the musical organization: a theme (A), which goes through a development section (B), and the initial motifs are then repeated (A) (Bruhn, 1997).
Ravel changes the key and melodic line as Ondine offers her love to a married man and tension mounts. The music is more sinister, and for the first time the melody is sung in the lower, darker regions of the keyboard. There is unmistakable momentum as the music becomes more dance-like, and soon the playfulness disappears. A stormy romantic passage builds as she offers her hand in marriage. When the man rejects Ondine, water seems to crash everywhere as the pianist pounds over the keyboard. In the wake of this terrible climax, the music is softer and more fragile, eventually disintegrating into nothing more than a timid reflection of the melody. This is the nadir of the piece, showing Ondine alone with a mixture of childish disappointment and adult sadness-- “she wept some tears.” However, as she “uttered a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower,” the music blossoms into a coda of rapid arpeggios before trailing off like a
dream.
Ondine is difficult to play because it requires a good deal of strength to maintain a light touch. The pianist must create a supple and brilliant atmosphere, with subtly different touches for water that ripples, shines, shimmers, and cascades. At one point, the hands traverse practically the entire keyboard in a matter of seconds, yet even in this loud and fearsome passage the music must be flowing, like water. In addition, the rhythmic motif of chords is hard simply to play fast, but near impossible to play fast and quietly. While the pianist sweats over this technical challenge, the melody must sing out, which becomes difficult to maintain when the hands begin leaping around the keyboard. Still, despite the difficultly, the atmosphere must remain constant and vivid. The pianist must create a sparkling, nighttime atmosphere, like a prism suspended in rain and darkness.
-2nd Mvt-
Le Gibet is a picture of desolation and misery. It is a musical landscape of the singular, breath-taking image of a lonely corpse “reddened by the setting sun.” Bertrand’s poem is a series of contemplations of this image, all made with gloomy, hopeless resignation. Unlike Ondine, there is no story being told. Instead, the poem consists of five gruesome questions and a horrific answer. Le Gibet opens with a picture of a man who is “the hanged one,” yet who is still alive and “utters a sigh.” By the end of the poem, after the relentless series of disturbing questions, the man is certainly dead-- his emotions have expired, his spirit is extinguished, he is now a “corpse.” It is as though we, as readers, have witnessed “the unfolding of that moment between almost-no-life and definite death” (Bruhn, 1997).
Ravel devotes almost the entire focus of the composition to atmosphere. He does not try to recreate specific descriptions like “scarab beetles” and “sterile ivy.” Those images are incorporated into a larger theme based on the evocation of emotions rather than objects. The character of the poetry is introspective and cyclical, more observational than explanatory. Like the poetry, the music is an odyssey withone mournful, extended image. The whole movement consists of three relentlessly repeating motifs: a constant B-flat, a melodic chord progression, and a second, more singing melody. Pianist Vlado Perlemuter remarked that “you must not be afraid of making it sound monotonous”; in fact, monotony is an integral part of the music.
The forlorn atmosphere is maintained by a B-flat that sounds throughout the entire piece, like a perpetual sigh or ringing bell. Bells play a key role in Le Gibet. The musical landscape is reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe, whose poetry Ravel admired; in fact, Poe’s poem The Bells may have influenced this music (Larner, 1996). Siglind Bruhn finds that the B-flat bell is important because the “tolling constitutes the link among the different aspects embedded in the poem.” Though this B-flat theme is the most famous aspect of Le Gibet, all three motifs overlap and build off one another to create an indelible image.
Technical difficulties of Le Gibet are in the management of sound quality and voicing. Marguerite Long points out that independence of the hands and discrete differences between ppp and pp make the piece extremely challenging. The pianist must not only play quietly, but also be aware of subtle changes in sound and texture. Henri Gil-Marchex believes 27 different touches are necessary in Le Gibet (Bricard). A particularly difficult task is the maintenance of each musical line. For example, the B-flat is sometimes divided in octaves between hands, but it still must sound exactly the same as when played by only one hand. At other moments, different melodic lines are played simultaneously and must sound as completely independent voices. Another technical difficultly is the playing of extended chords. All the notes must be played in the same way and at the same time, and, because the music is slow and quiet, any notes depressed a half-second too late are obvious mistakes. Performing Le Gibet is like standing perfectly still so that even your breathing is imperceptible, only you must also always be looking at a single ghastly scene. When the music at last dies out, that ceaseless B-flat is the only sound that remains. It is like the corpse left hanging from the rope, and then the scene fades to black.
-3rd Mvt-
Scarbo: this is arguably the most famous movement from Gaspard de la nuit, the piece people talk about long after they have first heard the nightmarish music. Scarbo is truly the work that represents transcendental virtuosity. The music is unbelievably difficult and seems very advanced and dissonant for Ravel’s time. Literally every key of the piano is used. Furthermore, the virtuoso elements become a vehicle for conveying the poetry, which like the music is frenetic and bizarre, almost drugged-out. However, as Bertrand never abandons structure, Ravel manages to fit the shadows and dwarfs and hallucinatory images into a “tightly knit form [that] is comparable to the Chopin scherzi and ballades” (Dubbiosi 1967). The result is an intense and relentless journey that lies somewhere between a technical study and a psychotic episode.
In the poem, the narrator describes his fear of Scarbo, an evil dwarf who comes in the dead of night. Scarbo plays with the narrator’s mind: sometimes he dances, other times he hides and only makes noises, and then sometimes he appears and “grows between the moon and me like the belfry of a gothic cathedral.” At the end, as the insanity becomes unbearable, Scarbo disappears, “his face pales like the wax of a candle end--and suddenly he is extinguished.” Although the poem is short, there is grandeur in its horror, “a sense of awe, embodied in the image of the majestically high spire of a Gothic cathedral” (Bruhn, 1997).
Although the music is surreal, it is relatively simple to follow its relationship to the poetry. Scarbo consists of several motifs, each representing a theme or image from the poem. The piece begins with three ascending notes, uttered softly and deeply from the lower registers of the piano. This is like a “sneak preview,” like the trailer to a horror film (Bruhn, 1997). The three-note motif varies from a whisper to a romantic sweep, and representing the emotions of the narrator. At the end of the piece, this is played one last time in assertive left hand octaves before the music abruptly trails off, representing a sort of relief as Scarbo disappears. Likewise, a staccato and rhythmic theme is frantic and grotesque, like the dwarf’s jagged, uneven dancing. Another motif consists of broken octaves and is more mysterious; this represents suspense, like Scarbo hanging from the ceiling, unseen. Finally, there is a very intense, rhythmic progression of chords that interrupts the broken octaves and twice builds up to a climax, like a scream of awe and terror. Ravel, a brilliant orchestrator, wanted the piano to sound like “kettle drums” at this point, which creates a frightening effect (Perlemuter, 1988). Ravel also integrates and interchanges these motifs. For example, there is a strangely calm section in the middle of the piece, but its melody is actually a slower version of Scarbo’s “dancing” theme. In this way, Ravel creates anticipation, hinting that the dwarf is hiding, but not gone-- “Do I think him vanished then?”
There are three areas of technical concern in Scarbo: playing the notes, developing specific articulations for each motif, and, possibly more difficult than anything, the juxtaposition of very different articulations. Simply learning the notes is an accomplishment, for Scarbo demands speed, precision and agility. The pianist must cross and interlock hands, play multiple notes with the thumb, and perform similar acrobatics at a very high speed. However, the pianist cannot simply hit the right notes; the pianist must hit the right notes in the right way. For example, the initial sequence of repeated notes is very fast and therefore challenging to play. However, as Bruhn insightfully points out, “[t]he musical metaphor is that of trembling.”
Still, the most challenging aspect of Scarbo is adjusting to accommodate different articulations in virtually no time. As Marguerite Long said, “the performer must learn to cope with continued neuro-muscular equilibrium in the fingers.” At one moment, for instance in one of the “jumping chord” passages, the playing must be light and quick, with measured staccato. Then, a half-second later, the pianist must entirely adjust the volume and articulation to play pedaled broken octaves. Likewise, the atmosphere changes from frenzy to mystery. If the pianist can somehow master the transcendental virtuosity of Scarbo, the result is a captivating musical experience.
It is interesting to note that Scarbo ends much like Ondine begins, with fast and quiet notes played in the higher registers of the piano that seem to shimmer. This is further evidence of the cohesiveness of Gaspard de la nuit. Ondine and Scarbo have a mixture of darkness and color, a glittery effect. Ondine opens with a “beautiful starry night,” and Scarbo with “the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees.” The only movement that does not sparkle in the darkness is Le Gibet, but this is appropriate since it is the slow movement.
Ravel even provided explicit instructions for the work’s emotional interpretation: “With ‘Scarbo’ and ‘Ondine’... it is fitting to bestow them with the sentimentality of Liszt and Chopin, whereas ‘Le Gibet’ should be played uniformly throughout, implacably, terrifying by its even simplicity” (Dubbiosi, 1967). Gaspard de la nuit fits together brilliantly, and each movement is an impressive enough rendering of Bertrand’s prose that the poetry may as well have been based on the music, and not the other way around.
“Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.”
“My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words.”
-Maurice Ravel (Dubbiosi).
To listen to Ondine from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVL6oS30wFc&feature=channel_page
It was written by Alexander Eccles, wasn't it?
ReplyDeleteIt's a nice paper.