Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/24/2010, uploaded on 04/25/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

When Maurice Ravel set out to compose his three-movement suite Gaspard de la Nuit, he remarked that his objective was to compose a piece of music more difficult than Mily Balakirev’s Islamey. To achieve this lavish technical display, Ravel looked to the florid style of Franz Liszt, which he had also done in his earlier Jeux d’eau of 1901. The suite was composed during 1908 and premiered on January 9, 1909 in Paris by Ricardo Viñes. Ravel based each of the suite’s movements on a poem by the French poet Aloysius Bertrand, whose work he had been introduced to by Viñes. Despite his early death and little success during his career, Bertrand became and inspiration for the early Symbolist poets, and his rather dark world echoed that of Edgar Allen Poe’s. The suite’s title, which Ravel borrowed from Bertrand, is an old French expression, derived from Persia, for the Devil.

In the second song, Le gibet, the tone turns darker still and macabre as the listener is presented with a desert scene and a man hanging limply from a gibbet. Bertrand’s disturbing and morose poem takes its cue from a legend also of devilish origin, namely, Faust, with the quote “Que vois-je remuer autour de ce Gibet?” (“What do I see stirring about that gibbet?”). The poet stands, like the listener, beholding the chilling scene and muses on the sound he hears—is it the grasshopper, the beetle, or the spider? It is none of these, but the far-off, eerie tolling of church bells. Ravel includes the bells in Le gibet with a persistent B-flat ostinato that both begins and ends the piece and is not absent from a single measure. Around this pedal point, dense textures capture the oppressive haze of the desert heat. Indeed, the florid style of Liszt is here seen in the consistent three staves Ravel was obliged to use to accurately convey his intentions. Finally, amidst the tolling church bells and textures of sound, a mournful melody arises to lament the unknown man’s dismal fate.        Joseph DuBose

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Le Gibet, from Gaspard de la Nuit

Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit was inspired by Ravel's reading of Symbolist poet Aloysius Bertrand's, "Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies a la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot," prose poems that express an infatuation with the bizarre and grotesque with decadent precision. Alfred Cortot called Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" (1908) among "the most astonishing examples of interpretive virtuosity ever contrived by the industry of composers."

In "Le Gibet," Ravel depicts a corpse swinging from the gallows, turning red in the setting sun. The repeated B-flats, toll disconsolately throughout. Ravel told his friend, composer Maurice Delage, that he wished to write something for piano that would be more difficult to play than Balakirev's "Islamey".   Inna Faliks