Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 04/10/2004, uploaded on 01/13/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Maurice Ravel was still a student at the Paris Conservatoire when he composed Jeux d’eau in 1901, which he dedicated to his friend and teacher Gabriel Fauré. Ravel’s student days at the Conservatoire were less than ideal. Despite his talent and skill at composition, he failed to win any the school’s prizes, including five attempts at the prestigious Prix de Rome, the last of which resulted in Ravel leaving the school and engulfing it in a scandal that led to Fauré replacing Théodore Dubois as its director. Amid these struggles, however, Ravel produced the finest of his early compositions. The String Quartet in F—a modern staple of the repertoire and instigator of Ravel’s departure—the Pavane pour une infante défunte, the song cycle Shéhérazade, and the above mentioned work for piano.

Meaning “Play of Water” or “Fountains,” Jeux d’eau became not only a spring of inspiration for Ravel’s later music but one for other composers as well. Channeling the florid style of Franz Liszt, quite possibly that seen in his similarly named Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, Ravel unveiled a degree of tone-painting that so clearly evoked the sound and flow of water itself that even Claude Debussy was inspired by the brilliancy of Ravel’s writing, and was quick to incorporate it into his own music.

Ravel himself described Jeux d’eau in this manner: “It is at the origin of the pianistic novelties which one would notice in my work. This piece, inspired by the noise of water and by the musical sounds which make one hear the sprays water, the cascades, and the brooks, is based on two motives in the manner of the movement of a sonata—without, however, subjecting itself to the classical tonal plan.” Indeed, among the rippling and shimmering tones, one can discern the presence of two distinct themes and there is perhaps a semblance of sonata form in its structure. Yet, the form is too fluid to ever be reduced into the Classical formula, but instead rests upon nothing but the dichotomous principle of the sonata.     Joseph DuBose

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Jeux d'eau (Fountains)        Maurice Ravel

Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901) was dedicated to his teacher Gabriel Fauré, and is a brilliant musical description of the sights and sounds of fountains, waterfalls, and streams.

Ravel took the epigraph from Henri de Regnier's poem, "river god laughing, as the water tickles him." Ravel's skill in creating the impression of the movement of water employs the use of glissandos and major second chords making the piece seem as new today as when it was written over a hundred years ago.   Miyuki Otani

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.