Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Gaspard de la nuit

Gaspard de la nuit is the title of a prose poem by French poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841). Although himself a minorum gentium artist, his chosen models, stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann and E.A. Poe – full of inexplicable phenomena from the threshold of dreams and reality – ensured a certain staying power to his “fantasies in the style of Rembrandt and Callot” (as stated by the subtitle to Gaspard). Ravel chose this text in 1908; it was to become one his greatest piano masterpieces.
Gaspard for the piano is a peculiar example of a tripartite programme suite. Its sections are united by the quasi-oneiric subject of the literary original on the one hand (each of the parts is preceded by a long fragment of the poem), and the theme or, more precisely, the leitmotif, highly modified at each appearance, on the other.
∙ Movement One – Ondine, maintained in C sharp major – is reminiscent at times, due to its broken, seemingly undulating chords, of another piano piece by Ravel, A Boat on the Ocean from the Mirrors cycle. This is certainly not a coincidence, since the siren, that first tempts the speaker of the literary text, only to disappear without trace in the rain streaming down the windowpane, is itself an evocation of an aquatic context. What could be a better imitation of water in piano music than broken chords “splattering” all over the keyboard?
∙ In Le Gibet (The Gallows), the description of the instrument of execution closes in Bertrand’s text with an image of a hanged man, decomposing in the sun, to the toll of funereal bells. By adopting the traditional association with graveyard matters, E flat minor, with an obsessive repetition of B flat (which “swings” from side to side somewhat like the poor body swaying in the wind), Ravel suggestively constructs an aura of the macabre that grown from line to line, from tone to tone. The composer did not miss the musical motif of The Gallows. The distant peal of bells resonates at a barely audible level of pianissimo possibile; from this acoustic background, tritone chords emerge to the fore in an eternal symbol of death.
∙ Scarbo (B major) is a surreal vision of a demoniac gnome. Its “interventions” in Ravel’s work always trigger repetitions in either the right or the left hand. Scarbo and Ondine are ultimately demanding for the performer. The constant fluctuations of various texture types, and the resulting variability of hand patterns makes Gaspard a work only attempted by pianists endowed with a truly circus-like skill as well as with the necessary feel of music.

Marcin Gmys