Gaspard de la nuit (Gaspard of the Night) is one of the most difficult pieces in the piano repertoire—written by a composer who had achieved a certain level of proficiency on the instrument, then refused to practice except if he had to work up one of his own pieces for performance! Ravel’s inspiration was a book of poems by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), shown to him by pianist and first interpreter of many of his piano works, Ricardo Viñes. Originally published posthumously in 1842 and reissued in its third edition in 1895, Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, which he subtitled “Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot,” piqued Ravel’s already healthy interest in the macabre.

All during the summer of 1908 Ravel kept himself chained to his desk working on Gaspard even though all his friends had left for the country, and he finally he emerged with one of the most important works of post-Romantic piano literature. Viñes mastered Gaspard’s intricacies by January 9, 1909, when he played the premiere at a concert of the Société Nationale.

Ravel chose three of Bertrand’s poems, which he had printed in the score as prefaces to his atmospheric settings. Ondine carries on the line of Ravel’s other celebrated “water” pieces—Jeux d’eau and Une barque sur l’océan—with its iridescent flashes and murmuring waves. Ondine is the celebrated water sprite who falls in love with a mortal, is rejected, and returns beneath the waves. Though Ravel does not “narrate” the poem with his music, we surely hear Bertrand’s last line: “She, pouting, vexed, shed some tears, burst into laughter, and vanished in a sudden shower which trickled in white rivulets the length of my blue window panes.”

Le gibet (The gallows) is based on Bertrand’s eerie scene of a corpse hanging from the gibbet in the howling wind at sunset. Ravel’s ingenious construction, which required three rather than the normal two staves to notate, employs obsessively repeated octave B-flats—“a bell tolling from the walls of a town far away on the horizon”—to serve as an internal pedal around which the chromatic harmonies swell and ebb.

Scarbo is the malicious dwarf who is everywhere—“laughing in the shadow of my alcove, pirouetting on one foot and rolling across the floor like a bobbin from a witch’s distaff.” Here Ravel set out to compose music of “transcendent virtuosity,” which he intended “to be more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey.” The incessant repeated notes and the infamous runs in parallel seconds are only some of the fiendish challenges Ravel set out for the pianist. His witty conclusion aptly illustrates Bertrand’s closing phrase: “then suddenly he would vanish.”

—©Jane Vial Jaffe