Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer born in 1875 in the Basque village of Ciboure, near the Spanish border, and died in Paris in 1937. The son of a Swiss engineer and a Basque mother, he grew up in Paris surrounded by music and entered the Paris Conservatoire at fourteen, where he studied piano and later composition with Gabriel Fauré.

Ravel's student years were marked by his repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, culminating in a 1905 scandal when the jury excluded him from competing despite his already-public stature. The episode forced the resignation of the Conservatoire's director and helped open French institutions to a more modern aesthetic. By that time Ravel had already written the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899) and the string quartet of 1903.

Often grouped with Claude Debussy under the label of musical Impressionism, Ravel cultivated a sharper, more classically chiseled style of his own. His mature works include the piano cycles Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, the orchestral Rapsodie espagnole and La Valse, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé commissioned by Diaghilev, the opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges with a libretto by Colette, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

His best-known piece, Boléro, was written in 1928 as a ballet score for Ida Rubinstein and consists of a single melody repeated over an unchanging rhythm and steady crescendo. A frontal-lobe illness gradually robbed him of the ability to write music in his last years, and he died after unsuccessful brain surgery.

The name Maurice comes from the Late Latin Mauritius, from Maurus meaning a Moor. The cult of Saint Maurice spread the name across Frankish Gaul, and by the nineteenth century it was a comfortable bourgeois choice in France. He bore it as the signature of a meticulous craftsman.