The Language of Enchantment: Childhood and Fairytale in the Music of Maurice Ravel Emily Alison Kilpatrick Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Elder Conservatorium of Music Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences The University of Adelaide April 2008 Introduction Prologue When Claude Moreau unlocks the doors of the Musée Maurice Ravel, she often calls out ‘Salut, petit Maurice!’. If you spend your working day in someone else’s house – sweep their floors, browse through their library, play their piano and scrub paint stains off their bathroom basin – you do begin to feel that you know them quite well. And sometimes you talk to them. Even if they’ve been dead since 1937. Le Belvédère, in which Ravel lived from 1921 until his death, does recall its owner with an immediacy that can be startling. The imprint of his personality is quickly discernible in the precisely arranged furnishings and objects that fill its small, oddly- shaped rooms. It is easy to imagine how Ravel used the space and how he moved about the house, because its construction and organisation compel the visitor into similar patterns of movement and interaction. There is a balcony perfectly shaped for sitting outside and talking, a balcony rail just the right height for leaning on and contemplating the view of the village and surrounding countryside. There is a flight of stairs so tiny that only a very small person could negotiate them in comfort. There is a separate, shadowy music room, placed at the end of the house, where one can move easily between desk and piano, and where the dark blue and black walls and small window contrast with the open, light-filled living spaces. There is a cagibi, a storeroom filled with books and papers, concealed behind a cupboard in the salon. Ravel’s dressing gown hangs in a closet, his shaving brush sits in the bathroom, and his spectacles are still in their holder on his desk. Meticulously conceived, constructed with painstaking attention to proportion and detail, and furnished with exquisite taste and many touches of humour and magical inspiration, the house can evoke Ravel’s music with revealing clarity. The fairytales of Perrault and d’Aulnoy on the library shelves recall Ma mère l’Oye, while the doll Adélaïde, posing languidly in her glass case, was made to commemorate the première of the ballet Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs. A painting of Daphnis and Chloé hangs 1 in the music room, and a tiny ship sailing on a papier-mâché sea is, of course, ‘Une Barque sur l’océan’. There is, too, a strong sense of a broader compositional aesthetic. Le Belvédère is turned away from the street, and its rooms all face onto the gentle hills of the Île de France. The concentrated interiors of the house are set in relief by the grand sunlit sweep of the landscape, a quality that recalls Ravel’s innate sense of form and construction: small, vital details are arranged so as to illuminate a ‘big picture’. The juxtaposition of diverse and unusual objects – the bizarre and the beautiful, the intriguing and the kitsch – typifies Ravel’s delight in the unexpected. The cagibi itself is typically Ravelian: beyond the sheer surprise of its presence, its open door also changes the shape of the salon; it shifts perspectives and angles, drawing the viewer in and promising hidden treasures. The diversity of inspiration – Chinese and Japanese ornaments and prints, Louis-Philippe engravings, faux Greek vases, a Moroccan tea service – is typical of a composer who wrote variously of Spain, Madagascar, the Orient, the France of Louis XIV and the Greece of antiquity. If the shepherds and shepherdesses, the nightingale and the Chinese tea-cups of L’Enfant et les sortilèges are all to be found in Le Belvédère, the rooms, like the episodes of the opera, are utterly individual in character and realisation, complete in themselves, but working within a harmonious and well-built whole. The genesis of this thesis was a period of residence in Ravel’s home village of Montfort l'Amaury, some fifty kilometres south-west of Paris in the département of Yvelines. In the summer of 2004, the Musée Ravel was in the final stages of a year-long renovation and restoration, in which I was a privileged participant. In the month before the museum reopened there was much to be done – cleaning and tidying the dusty, paint-splattered rooms and unpacking and carefully replacing the thousands of objects taken away for safekeeping and refurbishment. But there was also time to spend hours playing Ravel’s Érard piano, to lie on the floor reading his books or sit in his wicker chairs on the balcony in conversation with friends and colleagues. Although it is now a museum, Le Belvédère was once a home, and it stills feels like one. It is situated in a village left largely unchanged by the passage of three-quarters of a turbulent century, where you can still drink a coffee or a kir at the same café Ravel used to visit, by the church in the central Place de la Libération (in Ravel’s time Place de l’Église), where 2 you can take the walks Ravel took into the forest of Rambouillet or around the neighbouring villages, and where the names on the register of the local school are, for the most part, the same as those of a century ago. Ravel’s presence is easily sensed in Le Belvédère, in part because there are so many records of his life there. There are letters, such as that written to his friend Cipa Godebski a year after his ‘installation’: I can put all of you up, you know. I even think you will inaugurate the bathroom. An attempt was made yesterday, and I saw blackish water flowing delightfully in the bathtub. You can see that I’m not hiding the attractions.1 There are photographs of Ravel leaning on the balcony rail, talking to his cats, walking in the forest, weeding the garden, and enjoying meals and conversation with his friends. There are stories of him inventing cocktails for his guests, displaying newly acquired trinkets and enjoying furious arguments with his housekeeper Mme Revelot. Le Belvédère and the memories it holds bear witness to a side of Ravel’s personality frequently overlooked in appraisals of his life and work. His fragile health, his lifelong bachelorhood and his periods of creative frustration may sketch a picture of a lonely man, inept and unfulfilled in his personal relationships. Yet there are few composers of whom friends and acquaintances wrote with such love, such warmth and, perhaps most tellingly, such humour. Depressed Ravel may have been at times, awkward, demanding and restless he undoubtedly was – but this was also a man who carved star-shaped holes in his bedroom door, so that he would wake each morning to find golden sun-stars on his floor. Childhood and fairytales Carefully placed inside a yellow box in the library of Le Belvédère is a ‘Lilliput [Post-]Card’ (about the size of a business card) inscribed in the hand of a very young child: ‘Monsieur Ravel’ on one side, and ‘Merci mon grand ami – Giselle’ on the other. The card is a simple and touching testimony to Ravel’s natural affinity with children, and his love of the accoutrements, occupations and fantasies of childhood. There are many toys and games in Le Belvédère, together with objects whose appeal is frankly 1 In Arbie Orenstein (ed.), A Ravel Reader: Letters, articles, interviews (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), p. 221. 3 childish: a strange, Chinese jack-in-the-box whose ‘Jack’ sticks his tongue out, and a pair of beautifully painted cups and saucers with holes in the bottom (in which Ravel liked to offer tea to his startled friends). Ravel shared an ease of communication with children that many of his friends remarked upon. There are still a few Montfortois who proudly say that when they were three or four or five years old Monsieur Ravel stopped to speak to them in the street. One day a group of children came and knocked on the door of Le Belvédère – ‘Maître, give us a song!’ – and he good-naturedly obliged.2 Several of his friends recalled that on more than one occasion he disappeared during a long and formal dinner and was later found in the nursery, playing with the children of the house.3 All of these anecdotes stress Ravel’s lack of condescension: he was direct, straightforward and honest, and he addressed children with a gentle seriousness, entering easily into their activities and conversation. Many of Ravel’s interactions with children were based around his talent as a teller of stories. As Mimi Godebska recalled: There are few of my childhood memories in which Ravel does not find a place. Of all my parents’ friends I had a predilection for Ravel because he used to tell me stories that I loved. I used to climb on his knee and indefatigably he would begin, ‘Once upon a time…’ And it would be Laideronnette or La Belle et la Bête or, especially, the adventures of a poor mouse that he made up for me. I used to laugh uproariously at these and then feel guilty because they were really very sad.4 Ravel’s duet suite Ma mère l'Oye was born of his role as favourite babysitter and indefatigable storyteller to Mimi and her brother Jean, to whom he would dedicate the work.5 Looking after the children for several days in September 1908, he wrote to their mother: 2 Recounted by Claude Moreau and Marie-Huguette Hadrot (in conversation with the author, July 2004).