Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
French, of paternal Swiss and maternal Basque descent Ravel combined skill in orchestration with meticulous technical command of harmonic resources writing in an attractive musical idiom that was entirely his own, in spite of contemporary com-parisons with Debussy, a composer his senior by some twenty years.
Jeux d’eau (Fountains) Ravel himself was a good pianist. His music for the piano includes composition in his own nostalgic archaic style, such as the Pavane and the Menuet antique, as well as the more complex textures of pieces such as Jeux’eau, Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, with its sinister connotations. The Sonatina is in Ravel’s neo-classical style and Le tombeau de Couperin is in the form of a Baroque dance suite. Jeux d’eau is a piece for solo piano by the French Impressionistic composer, Maurice Ravel. The title often translations to “Fountains”, “Water Games”, and “Playing water”, however the piece, a virtuosic tone-poem is inspired by Franz Liszt (Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este), and also as Ravel explained:
Jeux d’eau, appearing in 1901, is at the origin of the pianistic novelties which one would notices in my work. This piece, inspired by the noise of water and by the musical sounds which make one hear the sprays water, the cascades, and the brooks, is based on to motives in the manner of the movement of a sonata- without, however, subjecting itself to the classical tonal plan.
This work is considered one of the first examples of “musical impressionism” among Ravel’s compositions. At the time of writing this work, Ravel was a student under Gabriel Faure to whom it is dedicated. Ricardo Vines was the first to publicly perform the work in 1902, although it had been privately performed for the Apaches previously. Written on the manyscript by Ravel and often included on published editions, is “Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille… - Henri de Regnier” which is English editions is translated to “River god laughing as the water tickles him…”’...
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