Eight of the Saddest Piano Concerto Slow Movements

by Emily E. Hogstad 

If you’re a classical music fan drawn to sad, slow movements in piano concertos, this is the list you’ve been looking for.

Whether it’s Chopin’s gentle melancholy, Ravel’s elegant wistfulness, or Rachmaninoff’s romantic despair, each of these slow movements paints a picture of a particular kind of sadness.

© chopinacademy.com

Although every ranking having to do with classical music is subjective, we numbered our picks anyway, from least sad to saddest. Find out which concerto we’ve dubbed the saddest at the end.

8. Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, Mov. 2  

Chopin wrote this concerto in 1830 when he was just twenty years old.

The inspiration behind this piece is unclear…but we know there was one.

Frédéric Chopin in 1849

In a letter, Chopin wrote a cryptic observation to his best friend (and potential crush or even lover) Tytus Woyciechowski:

“Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.”

It’s a mysterious confession. Some believe he’s referring to his other crush, singer Konstancja Gładkowska. Others wonder if he’s referring to Woyciechowski, with whom he exchanged a number of romantic letters as a young man.

Chopin wrote to Woyciechowski about the slow movement in particular:

“It is not meant to create a powerful effect; it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.”

The specific sadness of this music is a gentle, possibly flirtatious melancholy.

7. Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 3   

Brahms’s second piano concerto covers similar emotional territory to the Chopin Romance. Save for a brief stormy interlude in the centre of the movement, this is not overtly tragic music: it’s more brooding, repressed melancholy.

Johannes Brahms, ca 1875

The movement begins with a soulful cello solo (an idea that Brahms may have lifted from his dear friend Clara Wieck Schumann, who had included similar instrumentation in the piano concerto she’d written as a teenager decades earlier).

The final portion of the movement, where the cello returns again and moves with the piano through a number of keys together, is the absolute epitome of bittersweet regret.

6. Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3, Mov. 2   

Béla Bartók composed his third piano concerto in 1945 when he was 64 years old. He was terminally ill with leukaemia at the time.

That October, his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, was set to celebrate her 42nd birthday. He began working on a third piano concerto for her as a birthday present. He was hopeful that after his death, whenever it occurred, she could tour with it and make money.

Béla Bartók in the 1920s

Tragically, he died in late September, a month before her birthday. Fortunately, the piano concerto, save for the final seventeen measures, was completed.

The slow movement of this concerto feels like a hushed, tender, intimate goodbye. Regret and wistfulness are mixed in with profound gratitude.

5. Ravel: Piano Concerto, Mov. 2   

Ravel wrote of his piano concerto:

“My only wish…was to write a genuine concerto, that is, a brilliant work, clearly highlighting the soloist’s virtuosity, without seeking to show profundity. As a model, I took two musicians who, in my opinion, best illustrated this type of composition: Mozart and Saint-Saëns…”

Maurice Ravel

In particular, he looked to Mozart’s clarinet quintet for inspiration. That melody is an unusual twenty measures long. In his concerto, Ravel’s melody is an astonishing thirty-four.

“That flowing phrase!” he wrote later. “How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

This long melody calls to mind a long, wistful train of thought from the middle of the night, when nothing in the darkness interrupts the thought.

This music is sad in a restrained way. A listener can feel a great depth of sorrow hiding just beneath the surface.

4. Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Shostakovich wrote his second piano concerto for his pianist son Maxim’s nineteenth birthday in 1957. Maxim premiered it at his graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory that May.

Over the past few years, father and son had suffered a great deal together. In 1954, Maxim’s physicist mother, Nina, had died suddenly. Maxim was just sixteen. Shostakovich was forced to become a single father overnight: a role he was completely unprepared to play.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The slow movement of this concerto evokes emotions that a father and son might feel upon seeing a son graduate after the death of a beloved wife and mother: pride, yearning, and a sadness that is simultaneously quiet and deeply intimate.

3. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Mov. 2   

Mozart wrote his 23rd piano concerto in early 1786, two months before the premiere of one of his best-loved operas, The Marriage of Figaro.

A listener can immediately hear the influence of opera here. It’s especially dramatic because the piano is alone when it enters with its atmospheric, aria-like, minor-key melody.

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Starting the movement with a solo part creates a kind of sudden, intense intimacy between the soloist, composer, and audience.

2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Mov. 2   

The orchestral introduction to this slow movement is loud and brutally unforgiving. The piano answers with a sense of quiet despair.

That conflict and dialogue create the narrative that drives the entire movement.

Beethoven in 1803

Three movements into their unnerving conversation, the piano takes over for a solo turn. We discover that the piano still has fight in it, with a series of loud ringing trills, before sinking back down into a whisper again.

When the orchestra returns, it is also quiet, witnessing the piano’s unraveling.

1. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Here it is: the saddest slow movement of a piano concerto: the Adagio sostenuto from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto.

This movement begins with slow, hushed chords in the strings, followed by a mournful chain of arpeggios in the piano.

The winds contribute hushed fragments of a heartbreaking theme to the steady accompaniment of the piano.

When the soloist and the orchestra players begin interacting with one another, it feels like a confessional conversation. The music conveys all kinds of sadness: grief, regret, yearning, and more, appearing in all different types of musical colours and textures.

Kubey-Rembrandt Studios: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1921

Rachmaninoff wrote his second piano concerto while coming out of a severe period of depression. For a while, he was seeing a therapist daily. It seems that writing this concerto helped him to process what he needed to.

His composing career continued for decades afterwards, and this work became one of the most beloved piano concertos ever written. It’s sad music…but it had a happy ending.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet - Ravel - Piano Concerto in G major

Maurice Ravel Piano Concerto in G major 1 Allegramente 2 Adagio assai 3 Presto Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester Philippe Jordan. conductor Live recording. London, Proms 2013

Which Composers Were Influenced by Jazz?

by Emily E. Hogstad  

Jazz, a catch-all term for a musical style that began to emerge from Black communities in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolutionized the international musical landscape around the turn of the century and beyond.

Jazz popularized musical ideas that would prove popular across multiple musical genres, including

• Syncopation (“the practice of displacing the beats or accents in music or a rhythm so that strong beats become weak and vice versa”)
• Swing (“to play music with an easy flowing but vigorous rhythm”)
• Blue notes (“a minor interval where a major would be expected”)
• Polyrhythm (“a rhythm which makes use of two or more different rhythms simultaneously”)

(All of those definitions come from Oxford Languages.)

© omniamericanfuture.org

Those four features are only scratching the surface of the traits that jazz provided to so-called “classical” composers, who, after the chaos of World War I, were looking for new musical languages to be inspired by.

Many of these composers drew profound inspiration from jazz and the blues, integrating elements of these genres into their own compositions.

Today, we’re looking at some prominent composers who incorporated jazzy influences into their works.

Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel in 1925

Maurice Ravel was a French composer celebrated for his precise compositional technique and innovative orchestrations. He was fascinated by jazz.

His Violin Sonata, which he wrote between 1923 and 1927, has an entire middle movement called “Blues.”

Ravel’s contemporary, African-American composer and bandleader W. C. Handy, nicknamed The Father of the Blues, performed in Paris in the mid-1920s.

Ravel and his violinist friend Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, who was the dedicatee of this sonata, heard Handy and became inspired by his musical language. 

Jazz continued to inspire Ravel, especially after he made a concert tour of America in 1928 and had the chance to hear more of it.

His 1931 Piano Concerto in G-major takes features of jazz, like syncopated rhythms and blue notes, and integrated them into the traditional concerto structure. The result was fresh, touching, and immediately engaging. 

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud (born in 1890) was another significant French composer who was influenced by jazz.

He heard his first jazz band – Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band – in London in 1920. He later wrote about them:

“Their constant use of syncopation in the melody was done with such contrapuntal freedom as to create the impression of an almost chaotic improvisation, whereas in fact, it was something remarkably precise.”

Later, in 1922, Milhaud took a trip to the United States and heard American jazz firsthand there.

Milhaud took these ideas and ran with them, composing his ballet La création du monde (The Creation of the World) between 1922 and 1923.

It merged an orchestral chamber ensemble and a jazz band into a six-part ballet lasting around eighteen minutes, utilizing saxophones, trumpets, and a rhythm section. 

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky

Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, who left Russia for other continental European cities after the Russian Revolution, also drew inspiration from jazz.

He began in the mid-1910s with his “Ragtime for 11 instruments” and continued exploring jazz influences for decades to come.

His “Ebony Concerto” from 1945 is a quintessential example of his jazz-influenced work. It was commissioned by clarinettist and big band leader Woody Herman, who led the First Herd band.

The band wasn’t used to playing music in Stravinsky’s style. Herman remembered later:

“After the very first rehearsal, at which we were all so embarrassed we were nearly crying because nobody could read, he walked over and put his arm around me and said, ‘Ah, what a beautiful family you have.’”

They all soldiered on. Saxophonist Flip Philips remembered:

“During the rehearsal…there was a passage I had to play there and I was playing it soft, and Stravinsky said ‘Play it, here I am!’ and I blew it louder and he threw me a kiss!”

This concerto took elements of classical form (the piece can be classified as a modern tongue-in-cheek interpretation of a Baroque concerto grosso) and combined those elements with jazz idioms, employing syncopated rhythms and swing.

George Gershwin

George Gershwin

George Gershwin is one of the composers who, being American and a popular songwriter, was most comfortable with weaving jazz into his “classical” compositions.

His “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) for piano and orchestra is a landmark piece that blends the two genres.

The work’s famous opening clarinet glissando, lush harmonies, and rhythmic vitality are unmistakably inspired by the work of the era’s jazz bands.

Meanwhile, the use of the word Rhapsody (a type of free-flowing piece written by classical giants like Liszt, Dvořák, and Brahms), along with the concerto-like technical virtuosity required to play the solo part, paid tribute to influences from the “classical” world.

Gershwin’s ability to synthesise the improvisational spirit of jazz with classical structures turned him into one of the most successful jazz-inspired classical composers in the modern canon.

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland, 1946

Like Gershwin, Aaron Copland was American and incorporated jazz elements into many of his most popular works.

Copland’s “Music for the Theatre” (1925) and Piano Concerto are packed with jazz vibes.

In 1964, New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein programmed during one of his famous televised New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and had Copland join him onstage to perform the solo part.

It was a reunion of sorts. Years before this performance, conductor and soloist had briefly been lovers, and their long-standing friendship and chemistry are certainly obvious in their joint advocacy of this 1926 concerto! 

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Which brings us to Leonard Bernstein, a conductor, composer, and pianist who was deeply influenced by jazz.

His 1957 musical West Side Story employs jazzy rhythms and harmonies, particularly in songs like “Cool” and “Jet Song.”

His “Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs” (written in 1949 for The Herd bandleader Woody Herman, the commissioner of Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto”) is another notable example, composed for a jazz ensemble and incorporating elements of swing and blues. (Unfortunately, Herman never got a chance to perform it, as The Herd disbanded in 1946.)eonard Bernstein was an enthusiastic believer in the universality of music. His fascination with bridging gaps between styles and genres in his compositions (and indeed, over the course of his career) provides a fascinating lens with which to view this music – and the broader history of the intersection of “jazz” and “classical music.”

William Grant Still

William Grant Still

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that jazz is a genre pioneered by Black Americans, and yet the most famous composers of jazz- or blues-inspired classical music are all white.

For many decades, as evidenced by just one glance at the whiteness of the established canon, Black composers have had trouble having their work taken as seriously as white composers.

This changed somewhat after 2020, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

Time will tell if organizations are serious about championing incredible works that have been sidelined because of the race of their composers.

One Black composer who incorporated jazz elements into his classical compositions was William Grant Still, who was born in 1895.

His brilliant “Afro-American Symphony” from 1930 draws especially heavily on the musical language of the blues. 

Conclusion

Composers like Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and William Grant Still were all inspired by rhythms, harmonies, and improvisational spirit of jazz and the blues. And these are only the most famous of hundreds of composers who, in some way or another, weaved jazz into their music.

Their works stand as testaments to the magic that can happen when the unnecessary boundaries between classical and popular music melt away, creating exciting new varieties of music.

Maurice Ravel as a Young Man

by Siri Livingston  

Maurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875, at Ciboure, a little fishing village at the base of the Pyrénées near the French-Spanish border. Members of Ravel’s family on the paternal side had emigrated to Switzerland, and Stravinsky’s sharp but witty barb – that Ravel was “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers” in music and personality – led to a rather inaccurate association of Ravel with the Swiss by the general public. Indeed, Ravel had greater claims to Spanish roots than Swiss, his mother having spent her youth in Madrid, and his parents having met and fallen in love in Aranjuez, the romantic city known for its summer palace and gardens, as well as the concerto for guitar and orchestra, Concierto de Aranjuez.

Maurice Ravel

Shortly after Maurice was born, the family relocated to 40 rue des Martyrs, Montmartre, Paris. Soon, the happy couple had a second son, Edouard, of whom Ravel was deeply fond for his entire life. For, indeed, it was a happy little family – Ravel was exceptionally close to his mother, and Ravel’s father, a skilled engineer, was only too happy to encourage Ravel in his artistic pursuits. Edouard followed in his father’s footsteps and became an engineer, but on both sides of the family – the engineers and the artists – there seemed to be mutual interest and respect. Ravel noted in later years that his father had given him a strong amateur grounding in music and artistic taste, and in his music-related travels, Ravel was always sure to send news to his father and brother of any interesting technology he encountered.

In 1889, Ravel passed the entry exam to study piano at the Paris Conservatoire, and in the class of Eugène Anthiome met a key player in the story of his life and work. Ricardo Viñes, a young pianist who would one day become a leading interpreter of the music of Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla, became fast friends with the young Maurice, and a tradition was born: their mothers would chatter away in Spanish while the young boys played piano duets. It was to Viñes that Ravel’s Menuet antique was dedicated, and Viñes premiered it at the Salle Érard in 1898.

Maurice Ravel: Menuet antique 

On the whole, however, Ravel’s experience of the Conservatoire was not an entirely smooth one. He remained at the Conservatoire for fourteen years, an unusually long time. He was not one to seek academic distinction for its own sake, and his resistance to conventional ideas and the imposition of others upon his style created various difficulties in entering and competing in the illustrious Prix de Rome on numerous occasions.

While he did win prizes for piano and advanced to better classes in both piano and harmony, Ravel began to feel he had learnt what he could from the Conservatoire, and was expelled for this attitude in 1895 – the first of several expulsions for failure to adhere closely to the Conservatoire’s rigid rules. It was in studying with composer Gabriel Fauré that Ravel found a way of being at the Conservatoire that truly suited him, and the composer became a treasured friend and mentor when Ravel renewed his studies in 1898.

Maurice Ravel with Ricardo Viñes, 1901

In addition to Fauré, at a young age, Ravel had already identified three musical figures who were his greatest compositional inspirations: Emmanuel Chabrier, Erik Satie, and Mozart. In a lecture given in 1928, Ravel said of Satie:

“Satie possessed an extremely alert intelligence, keyed to inventiveness… [he] pointed the way with simplicity and ingenuity; but as soon as another musician followed his lead, Satie immediately changed his own direction and then, without hesitation, opened a fresh way to new fields or experiment… we have today… many a work which would not have existed had Satie not lived.”

Ravel’s next work to be premiered for the public was his Shéhérazade, an overture to a projected but abandoned opera, and his first work for orchestra. The work was not well received, and Ravel himself dismissed it as “clumsy hotch-potch.” His next serious commission has become one of Ravel’s best-known and beloved works: the Pavane pour une infante défunte. For solo piano and dedicated to his patron, the Princesse de Polignac, the piece is not, as many incorrectly assume, a pavan for a deceased child. Rather, the “enfant” here refers to “infanta,” or princess, and the “défunte” refers less to literal death than to a bygone age or the distant past. As such, the work is a kind of otherworldly, surreal imagining of the dance of a princess of a lost age, and Ravel often wittily chided pianists who played it too slowly by saying it was the princess, not the pavane itself, that was dead. The work is incredibly harmonically rich and showcases Ravel’s profound understanding of the timbral qualities of chord spacings at the piano. Its charm, carefully constructed inner voicings, and delicate interplay of line have made it an enjoyable and accessible challenge for generations of pianists.

In the pavane we also see emergent preoccupations that were to be Ravel’s for the rest of his life – his enjoyment of old dance style and form, his fascination with the heritage of both Spain and France, and his deliberate assimilation of arcane soundworlds into his musical style. At the turn of the century, armed with a strong sense of his own musical interests and sensibility, Ravel was poised and ready to earn his lifelong stature as a great composer – but there were still some bumps in the road ahead…

Ravel at 150: A Legacy of Innovation

by Georg Predota 

Maurice Ravel

150 years ago, on 7 March 1875, the small village of Ciboure in the Basque region of France saw the birth of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Son of a Swiss engineer and a Basque mother, Ravel would become one of the most significant and innovative composers of the early 20th century, bridging the late Romantic tradition and the modernist impulses of his time.

Initially trained at the Paris Conservatoire, his music reflected a cosmopolitan sensibility, imbued with meticulous craftsmanship that earned him a reputation as a “musical jeweller.”

His oeuvre is characterised by its diversity and technical brilliance in a compositional style that often juxtaposes clarity and complexity. Revealing an almost obsessive attention to detail that frequently belies the effortless beauty of his melodies, Ravel’s music conveys a profound emotional restraint that often masks deeper sentiments beneath a polished surface.

As we celebrate his 150th birthday, we honour a composer whose masterful blend of innovation, emotional depth, and extraordinary craftsmanship forever shaped the landscape of classical music.

Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit 

Formative Years

“Throughout my childhood,” Maurice Ravel once said, “I was sensitive to music. My father, much better educated in this art than most amateurs are, knew how to develop my taste and to stimulate my enthusiasm at an early age.” Maurice was deeply devoted to his mother, and his earliest memories involved her singing folk songs to him. He did not receive any formal schooling at an early age, but the family’s small apartment in Paris did house a piano.

Encouraged by his father, Maurice began piano lessons with Henry Ghys and soon demonstrated an extraordinary ear, improvising and composing small pieces even before formal training fully took hold. His teacher later recalled that “his conception of music is natural to him and not, as in the case of so many others, the result of effort.” By age 14, Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire, initially as a piano student, but his true passion soon shifted toward composition.

Maurice Ravel: Shéhérazade 

Formal Education

Ravel and his parents

Ravel’s relationship with the Conservatoire, according to scholars, “was marked by his independent spirit and refusal to adhere to its rigid expectations.” The young student found his inspiration outside of formal education, particularly from the 1889 Paris Exhibition and the cultural atmosphere of the time.

During these formative years, Ravel befriended fellow student Ricardo Viñes, a Spanish pianist who introduced him to Iberian music and avant-garde ideas, further broadening his horizons. He explored a wide range of musical and literary influences, including the works of composers like Satie, Debussy, and Chabrier, as well as writers such as Poe and Mallarmé. In fact, Ravel became part of a creative group called “Les Apaches” (The Hooligans) in the early 1900s, which fostered collaboration among artists, musicians, and writers.

Maurice Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole 

First Performances

When Ravel conducted the first performance of his Shéhérazade overture in 1897, he was called a “mediocrely gifted debutant.” Two years later he composed his first piece to become widely known, the Pavane pour une infante défunte. One way or another, Ravel appeared calmly indifferent to blame or praise. The only opinion of his music that he truly valued was his own, as he was a “perfectionist and severely self-critical.”

Maurice Ravel’s Sheherazade

At age 20, as biographer Burnett James reports, “Ravel was self-possessed, a little aloof, intellectually biased, and given to mild banter. He dressed like a dandy and was meticulous about his appearance and demeanour.” He continued to struggle at the Conservatoire, failing to secure the Prix de Rome despite multiple attempts between 1901 and 1905. However, his time there under Gabriel Fauré’s tutelage “honed his craft and instilled a lifelong devotion to clarity and refinement.”

Maurice Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte 

International Reputation

By the early 20th century, Ravel had begun to distinguish himself in France with works like Jeux d’eau, a shimmering tour de force that showcased his innovative approach to texture and harmony. However, it was the premiere of his orchestral suite Daphnis et Chloé in 1912, commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, that marked a turning point. This lush, expansive work, with its vivid orchestration and rhythmic vitality, captivated audiences and critics alike, and cemented Ravel’s status as a master of colour and narrative in music.

Maurice Ravel as a soldier in 1916

According to Roland-Manuel, Ravel was working on a Piano Trio when World War I broke out. In fact, Ravel was working on a number of projects, including a piano concerto based on Basque themes, two operas, a symphonic poem, and two major piano works. However, his compositional activity slowed significantly during the war, which he spent as a truck driver and ambulance assistant near the Verdun front. Suffering from exhaustion, dysentery, and the devastating loss of his mother in 1917, the war years left an indelible mark on his music and his psyche.

Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé “Suite No. 2” 

After 1918

With the notable exception of Le Tombeau de Couperin, the effects of the war left a distinct toll on Ravel’s creativity. Amidst national and personal trauma, Ravel began to cloak his personal sorrow in refined artistry, which some commentators interpreted as a coping mechanism. Focusing on neoclassical restraint and dance forms, Ravel aimed for greater introspection and simplicity, as La Valse might well be read as a haunting commentary on a shattered Europe.

Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte

After Debussy’s death in 1918, Ravel was regarded as France’s leading composers. He was officially recognised by the French state but publicly refused the Légion d’Honneur in 1920. His new-found celebrity also alienated him from some of his colleagues, particularly from Satie and some members of Les Six. As Barbara Kelly writes, “Ravel emphasised his isolation by moving 50km west of Paris, where he lived with his cats and was looked after by his housekeeper until his final illness.”

Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin 

International Profile and Decline

Internationally, Ravel was celebrated as a modernist icon and he performed and lectured to packed houses in New York and Boston. American audiences were particularly enchanted by Boléro, which became a global sensation. His interactions with Stravinsky, Gershwin, and Vaughan William earned him accolades in England, Russia, and beyond, and his meticulous artistry and ability to fuse French elegance with universal appeal secured his place as a towering figure on the international musical landscape.

Maurice Ravel at the piano

By 1927, Ravel’s health had alarmingly deteriorated, and while he could still hear and compose music in his head, he gradually lost the ability to write it down. As he reported, “my mind is full of ideas, but when I want to write them down, they vanish.” Injured in a taxi accident in 1932, Ravel consulted a number of neurologists and underwent exploratory brain surgery. He died aged 62 in the early morning hours of 28 December 1937. The exact cause of Ravel’s death is still much debated, as are attempts to discover Ravel’s neurological decline in his later compositions.

Maurice Ravel: La Valse 

Legacy

Ravel’s legacy as a composer is a testament to his singular ability to synthesise tradition and innovation. His meticulous craftsmanship, often likened to that of a watchmaker, produced a body of work that balances classical forms with a modernist sensibility, pushing harmonic and technical boundaries while retaining elegant coherence. His mastery of orchestration became a benchmark for further explorations of colour and texture in film music and beyond.

Ravel’s grave

Beyond specific compositional techniques, Ravel’s frequently veiled profound sentiment and emotional restraint beneath a highly polished surface, “evoking the universal through the particular.” By using cross-cultural influences woven into a distinct French idiom, Ravel is lauded as a precursor of a globalised aesthetic subsequently emerging in composers like Messiaen and Takemitsu. In the 21st century, Ravel remains a towering figure whose contributions continue to inspire and challenge the boundaries of musical expression.

One of his closest friends, the exceptional pianist Marguerite Long famously wrote, “Maurice Ravel is reserved, sacred, and distant with unwelcome visitors, yet he was the surest, most delicate, and most faithful of friends. By his exterior appearance, his witticisms, and his love of paradoxes, he has often contributed to crediting the myth of spiritual indifference, but, in spite of these appearances, this great prisoner of perfection hid a sensitive and passionate soul.”