Ravel’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism

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Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel, one of France’s greatest composers. Ravel’s music is instantly recognizable for its otherworldly, colorful sound and inventive harmonies and orchestration.

Like his student and friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ravel was highly original yet eschewed the iconoclasm popular among many of his contemporaries. His music exhibits an emphasis on melody and use of traditional forms as well as a distinctly French sensibility.

Ravel’s links to the past are sometimes overlooked in light of his forward-looking harmonic language. He considered himself a French composer (despite his Basque heritage) and was steeped in France’s musical heritage. Le tombeau de Couperin, for example, hearkens back to the golden age of French music through the lens of Ravel’s unique idiom. Like his Classical and Baroque predecessors, Ravel was fond of antiquated dance forms, as evinced by works like Menuet antique, Pavane pour une infante défunte, Valses nobles et sentimentales, and La valse. His Trois chansons were inspired by sixteenth-century French chansons, particularly the music of Clément Jannequin. “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis” features red, white, and blue birds, an allusion to the French flag. More generally, Ravel’s music exhibits an ethos of elegance and restraint—Ravel characterizes the French musical character, with which he identifies, as “one of reserve” and “objectivity and clarity of design.”[1]

Ravel’s attitudes toward nationalism and “Frenchness” in music are interesting. He describes the creative process as “an interplay of national and individual consciousness” and praises Debussy for drawing on both:

His genius was obviously one of great individuality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution, expressing itself freely, yet always faithful to French tradition.[2]

He argues that composers should adhere to their respective national traditions:

In virtue of the indissoluble ties binding each to his respective national consciousness, it is, of course, inconceivable that either one [French or German] should be able to express himself adequately in the language of the other.

Nationalism, in his view, “does not deprive the composer either of his personal soul or of its individual expression, for each creative artist has within him laws peculiar to his own being.”[3] Far from constraining one’s individuality, it is “hybrids” who experience a loss of identity and individuality. For Ravel, this did not translate to a blanket condemnation of foreign influence: indeed, he was influenced by sources as diverse as jazz, the blues, Javanese gamelan, and Spanish and Basque folk music. What he condemns is stylistic incoherence and rootlessness. He considered his blues-inflected music to be essentially French in nature. This makes sense, in the same way that Led Zeppelin’s music owes more to Led Zeppelin than it does to the blues.

Ravel’s views bring to mind Johann Gottfried Herder’s pluralistic nationalism. If national and regional identities did not exist, “individual consciousness” would still engender some degree of variety, but a dimension of particularity would be lost. Global homogeneity is the enemy of true diversity. Artistic cross-pollination among nations is healthy but should not degenerate into mindless eclecticism or come at the expense of individual and national integrity.

In 1910, Ravel founded the Société musicale indépendante in reaction to the efforts of the Société nationale de musique to forbid the performance of German and Austrian music in the name of French nationalism. He warned that French music would suffer if French composers became a chauvinistic clique insulated from German influence. For this he was unjustly smeared by a Right-wing music critic as a Leftist internationalist.[4] But his opposition to the Société nationale de musique was motivated by artistic considerations; it was not a political statement. Moreover, Ravel announced his wish “to continue to ‘act as a Frenchman’ and to count [himself] ‘among those who intend never to forget that they are French.’”[5] When he received pushback, he was offended by how his “‘qualité de françois’ [Frenchness] had been called into question.”[6]

Describing Ravel as a “man of the right” is debatable. He hardly ever commented on politics. The little evidence of his views suggests that he had socialist sympathies.[7] An admirer of Baudelaire and a lifelong dandy, he was an aloof aesthete, self-contained and above the fray. He went as far as to decline all state honors, including the Légion d’honneur.

Having said that, Ravel’s views on the role of “national consciousness” in music have völkisch overtones, and his dandyish aloofness hints at an elitist sensibility. The dandy is a reactionary figure who emerges at the twilight of civilization and stands athwart “progress.” Baudelaire once quipped that “dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence.” Ravel was at least spiritually an artist of the right, if not overtly.

Notes

[1] “Une conférence de Maurice Ravel à Houston,” Revue de Musicologie (vol. 50, no. 129, Dec. 1964), pp. 214, 216.

[2] Ibid., p. 216.

[3] Ibid., p. 214.

[4] Steven Huebner, “Ravel’s Politics,” The Musical Quarterly (vol. 97, no. 1, Spring 2014), p. 80.

[5] Maurice Ravel, Letter to the Committee of the League for the Defence of French Music, Bibliothèque nationale de France, June 7, 1916.

[6] Huebner, p. 82.

[7] Ibid., p. 69.