The 150th anniversary of the birth of the French composer Maurice Ravel was marked on 7 March 2025.
A bizarre, sexless man interested largely in his own privacy, he was the son of a father who, despite having won first prize for piano at the Geneva Conservatory, elected to make his living as a mechanical engineer of considerable ingenuity.

By the time Ravel was 20 he was a mere 1.5 metres tall and severely underweight. It has been said that his huge head made him look like a fledgling bird. To compensate, he grew a curled moustache and a full beard, always wore a three-piece suit and carried a swagger stick like an army officer. He was a demanding soul and contemptuous of people he felt did not measure up to his exacting standards.
He lived an intensely private life, never married and, despite his fairly large musical output, it is really only his songs that show anything of his true character.
He was not a cold-hearted man, but the only person he really loved was his mother. He was, by and large, indifferent to women, claiming that his only mistress was music.

So, what do we make of his music? In his early days Ravel said: ‘It was the clicking and roaring of my father’s machines which, with the Spanish folk songs sung to me by my mother, formed my first instruction in music!’ Like his father, he would become an ingenious engineer – in his case, an engineer of music. Together with his older compatriot, Claude Debussy, he was an innovator; a founder of what we call Musical Impressionism. He idolised Mozart and abhorred the Romantics, which is surprising since his music is almost entirely imaginary in essence.

As a student at the Paris Conservatoire Ravel did not cover himself in glory. At 25 he failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire scratched him from their rolls for never having won a prize there. However, he stayed close to one of his teachers, Gabriel Fauré, and through him was able to hobnob with the likes of Vincent d’Indy and Debussy. Although he did not enjoy teaching, he agreed to take on a few pupils he considered worthwhile, including Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Some years later George Gershwin asked him for lessons, but he turned him down on the basis that he considered that Gershwin had already mastered his art. For all his musical popularity, not everyone agrees on his worth. Colour and technique have been praised over content and a few years after Ravel died one critic even went so far as to write that the whole of his work was nothing more than ‘slick trash’.

For much of his life a question mark hovered over Ravel’s state of mind. When his piece Bolero appeared in 1928, when he was 53, people began to wonder if it was a symptom of some form of dementia.

‘Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it?’, he asked a friend, while playing it to him with one finger on the piano. ‘I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development, while gradually building it up with my very best orchestration.’

The result? A miracle of originality. Some believed his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand indicated that one side of the composer’s brain was not functioning. As we know, the work was in fact commissioned by the Austrian pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War 1. Ravel believed the music of a concerto should be light-hearted and brilliant and not aim at profundity or dramatic effects. This philosophy is also reflected in his only other piano concerto, the one in G major, of which the British music critic, Gerald Larner, wrote in 2009: ‘If that was the product of a sick brain there should be more of that sickness in the world.’
In fact, the suspicions about his mental state were not entirely unwarranted. By 1931 Ravel’s mental ability was indeed declining. A taxi accident in Paris left him unable to compose much and a summer holiday ended when he found he could no longer coordinate his movements while swimming. His health gradually declined and over the next six years he went downhill, a brain tumour was suspected and an exploratory operation was performed. While coming out of the anaesthetic he lapsed into a coma and died nine days later, aged 62. Modern science tells us now that Ravel in fact died of Pick’s Disease, a specific type of frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain disease that usually affects people under 65.

– Michael Morton-Evans

Listen to Ravel: Inventive Harmonies on Wednesday afternoons during March.