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.”

Collaborating With Samuel Dushkin: “Dear Sam”

The Polish-born American violinist Samuel Dushkin (1891-1976) is widely known for his extensive collaborations with Igor Stravinsky. The two men were compatible friends from the very beginning and eventually embarked on a concert tour through Europe and the United States, which lasted for the better part of five years. Dushkin was said to have had a gentle, self-effacing, and considerate character, which sharply contrasted with Stravinsky’s fiercely dynamic, egotistical and combative demeanour. A biographer writes, “much of the success of the friendship must be attributed to the violinist’s wholly unaggressive nature, as well as to his rich sense of humour.”

Samuel Dushkin

Stravinsky and Dushkin first met in Paris in 1931, but both had been in town for some time already. Dushkin had studied at the Paris Conservatoire, taking violin lessons with Guillaume Remy and attending composition classes with Ganaye. He made his Paris début in 1918 and subsequently toured widely, giving many important first performances. One such premiere performance took place on 19 October 1924 in Amsterdam, as Pierre Monteux conducted the Concertgebouw, and Dushkin was the soloist in the orchestrated version of Ravel’s Tzigane. 

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) had been living in Paris since 1923. In 1931, Dushkin premiered the Stravinsky Violin Concerto after having collaborated closely with the composer. The concerto was a resounding success, and Dushkin was very much the man of the hour. Dushkin was clearly on a roll, and he followed up by commissioning a violin concerto from Martinů in early 1932. The two men became good friends, and on the occasion of a visit, Charlotte Martinů fell ill with double pneumonia and a high fever. Dushkin took charge and had her admitted to the American Hospital at Neuilly, probably saving her life.

Bohuslav writes, “that violinist, Dushkin, is an American and has a lot of connections, so he found some help for us. There’s such an organisation among Americans that takes care of artists when they’re ill. They arranged for us to take Charlotte to the hospital, and they’re going to pay for the hospital care and the entire stay and treatment! Dushkin really devoted himself to her. He saw that I wouldn’t make it on my own.”

Bohuslav and Charlotte Martinů

The friendship between Martinů and Dushkin, however, did not make for a smooth collaboration on the violin concerto. Dushkin had been a creative and technical consultant throughout the gestation of the Stravinsky concerto. He offered advice and suggestions to Stravinsky, who had no experience as a string player. Martinů, on the other hand, had formerly been a professional violinist, and he did not need much assistance. Still, Dushkin suggested countless amendments to the solo part of the concerto, and Martinů tried to please his famous soloist. Nonetheless, as late as February 1934, he admitted in a letter to his family that Dushkin was still dissatisfied and that further work was needed.

Both men eventually lost interest in the concerto, and the score was presumed lost. A Martinů biographer wrote in 1962, “from the beginning of the thirties dates an unfinished Violin Concerto for the American virtuoso Samuel Dushkin. I recall the frequent exchange of opinions between the two artists regarding various details in the concerto, which is apparently the reason for the composer not finishing it and the manuscript of which mysteriously disappeared.” However, the complete manuscript did, in fact, exist, and it did not disappear.

The concerto manuscript was not rediscovered until 1968, nine years after the composer’s death. It had probably been sent by Martinů to Boaz Piller, a bassoonist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a close personal friend of Martinů, Stravinsky, Bloch, and Casals, in 1937. Martinů had probably been looking to arouse the interest of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, but in the event, the manuscript was deposited by Piller into the archives of the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer in 1961.

Over the course of forty years, Moldenhauer had assembled an unparalleled collection of primary sources documenting the artistic thoughts and compositional process of celebrated and lesser-known figures of western music dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. This collection, now housed at Northwestern University, was consulted by musicologist Harry Halbreich in 1968 during his work on a catalogue of Martinů’s works. Finally rediscovered, the concerto was first performed in Chicago on 25 October 1973 under George Solti, with Josef Suk as the soloist. It was not a rousing success, as a critic wrote, “it isn’t hard to deduce why the composer never promoted performance or publication of this opus during his lifetime.”

Gershwin’s Short Story

1924 was a hugely successful year for George Gershwin (1898-1937). The premiere of his Rhapsody in Blue had brought down the house, and the musical Lady Be Good! received a wonderfully successful launch. Dushkin was a close personal friend, and he decided to request a recital piece from Gershwin in late 1924. Gershwin was enthusiastic, and the two young men decided to collaborate.

Gershwin was still learning the craft of orchestration and was eager to explore the palette of colours available on instruments other than keyboards. In no time, Gershwin and Dushkin put together Short Story, taking as a starting point two short piano pieces that Gershwin had written a couple of years earlier but had not yet been published. The first piece features a languid and bluesy melody, while the second, more light-hearted syncopated tune, takes on the style of a ragtime. Dushkin and Gershwin premiered Short Story in 1925, and Dushkin programmed it often and recorded it in 1928.

William Schuman

In 1946, Samuel Dushkin approached William Schuman (1910-1992) for a violin concerto he hoped he would be able to premiere with Koussevitzky and the BSO. Once Schuman had completed the score, he sent it to Koussevitzky for review in late 1947. Unfortunately, Dushkin’s playing had significantly deteriorated over the years, and Koussevitzky told Schuman, “I will play it, but not with Dushkin. You must tell Dushkin.” This put Schuman in a rather tricky situation because Dushkin had already paid for the concerto and had exclusive rights to it for three years. Koussevitzky was not interested in legal niceties and said, “I don’t care what your agreement is. Take it away from him. We’ll give it to Isaac Stern and play it with the Boston Symphony.”

Schuman broke the news to Dushkin in a hotel bar, telling him that he could not go on with the Violin Concerto. “I know you were a great performer at one time, but no one is going to play it with you.” Apparently, Dushkin erupted in white-hot anger, snapping the stem of his martini glass in two.

William Schuman’s Violin Concerto

Schuman waited for three years, as Dushkin insisted on maintaining his exclusive right to the work. Finally the concerto was scheduled for performance on 10 February 1950 with Isaac Stern as the soloist and conductor Charles Munch. While the conductor loved the work, the composer accused Stern of not having grasped the intellectual underpinnings of the work and, therefore, of not presenting the concerto in its best light.

Schuman writes, “the inability of certain performers who are only conventional literature performers to come to grips with a new piece on its own terms, so Stern never understood it except superficially. He always thought the opening, which he used to sing, was frenetic, even though I want that to be broadly romantic…he would never play it that way.” Dushkin and Schuman did stay friends, and Schuman wrote at the premiere of the concerto’s final version in 1959, “I thought about you during the period of preparation and performance of the Concerto in Aspen. I cannot help but feel that somehow you would have been pleased.”

During his extensive performance career, Dushkin published many arrangements and transcriptions for violin and piano. They are published as the “Samuel Dushkin Repertoire,” and include arrangements of music by Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Albéniz and Wieniawski, and Reger. The Dushkin Repertoire also includes a compilation of arrangements by relatively unknown composers, including C. Artok, R. Felber, A. Sasonoff, and Paul Kirman. The Dushkin arrangements were eagerly taken up by a host of eminent violinists, and they are still part of today’s recital repertoire.

Ravel: Klavierkonzert D-Dur ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Jean-Efflam Bavouze...

Maurice Ravel: Klavierkonzert D-Dur ∙ »Konzert für die linke Hand« ∙ (Auftritt) 00:00 ∙ Lento – Andante – Allegro – Tempo 1o – Allegro 00:36 ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony ∙ Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Klavier ∙ Juraj Valčuha, Dirigent ∙ Alte Oper Frankfurt, 30. September 2016 ∙

Yuja Wang - Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

18,694 views Dec 23, 2023 PARIS PHILHARMONIC

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, M. 82 Yuja Wang, piano Klaus Mäkelä, conductor Orchestre de Paris Live from Grande salle Pierre Boulez - Philharmonie de Paris on 10/4/2023 Full Concert: https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/liv...

Germaine Tailleferre

by Georg Predota, Interlude

“Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men”

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) was the sole female member of the intriguing group of young French composers eventually known as “Les Six.” Her association with “Les nouveaux jeunes” aside, Tailleferre was a prominent and prolific composer writing in a wide range of musical genres. Her memorable music for opera and ballet is augmented by piano concertos, symphonic works, solo piano pieces, music for small ensembles and well over 40 movie soundtracks. She left behind an extensive body of works representing almost 70 years of compositional engagement and over time forged a distinctive musical voice that valued clarity, spontaneity and charm. Tailleferre strongly believed that a composition would lack artistry if a listener couldn’t identify a composer’s style after three bars. “I write music because it amuses me,” Tailleferre suggested. “It’s not great music, I know, but it’s gay, light-hearted music which is sometimes compared with that of the “petits maîtres” of the 18th century. And that makes me very proud.”

Currently, Tailleferre is considered the “most important French woman composer of all time.” This appreciation, however, has only been forged during the 21st- century, and its cultural reinterpretation and revival of her music. Born Marcelle Taillefesse at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, her early years were marked by persistent struggles against her father. He considered music an unworthy pursuit, and a “woman studying music” he once remarked, “was no better than her becoming a streetwalker.” She eventually changed her name to spite her father, but never forgave him for his inflexible attitude towards her artistic gifts. Embittered, “she is said to have regarded his demise in 1916 as something of a relief.” Despites her father’s strong opposition, she began her study of piano and solfege at the Paris Conservatory in 1912, and immediately won various prizes in counterpoint and harmony. Tailleferre quickly caught the eyes of her fellow students Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honneger. Upon the publication of her first string quartet in 1918, she was welcomed as a major talent into the private musical club that eventually blossomed into “Les Six.”

Les Six © s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com

Tailleferre rubbed shoulders with the greatest creative minds of her time. She was a close friend of Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie, a favorite of Jean Cocteau and acquainted with Aaron Copland. Her circle of friends included Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, George Balanchine and Sergei Diaghilev, among numerous others. She once remarked that Picasso gave her the “best lesson in composition” she ever received as he told her to “constantly renew yourself; avoid using the recipes that you have already found.” Many of her most important works emerged during the 1920’s, including the First Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, the ballets Le marchand d’oiseaux and La nouvelle Cythère, which was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. These highly successful and critically acclaimed compositions were followed by the Concerto for Two Pianos, Chorus, Saxophones, and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the opera cycle Du style galant au style méchant, the operas Zoulaïna and Le marin de Bolivar, and La cantate de Narcisse, in collaboration with esteemed French poet Paul Valéry.

Wanting to breathe new life into her career, Tailleferre moved to New York in 1925. Leopold Stokowski, Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky, and Alfred Cortot performed her compositions, and her short-lived marriage to the New Yorker magazine artist Ralph Barton further enhanced her celebrity status. Musically reinvigorated and her marriage in tatters she returned to France, but World War II brought her once again to the United States. The war years severely stifled her musical creativity and productivity, and affected a fundamental cultural and artistic dislocation. Upon her return to France in 1946 Tailleferre continued to compose orchestral works, ballet and chamber music. However, most of these works were published posthumously with a substantial number of her compositions still unknown today. She nevertheless continued to compose until a few weeks before her death in 1983, and her last work Concerto de la fidelité pour coloratura soprano et orchestra premiered at the Paris Opera in 1982. Her music never failed to give voice to an extended French artistic tradition, and the seductive grace and charm of her work are perhaps best summed up by Cocteau’s famous assessment of Tailleferre “as the musical equivalent to painter Marie Laurencin.”

Playlist: Water Games

by Frances Wilson, Interlude

‘Water games’ is one translation of Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel, others being Fountains and Playing Water.

Shipwreck

Each is equally apt: in this piece Ravel brilliantly evokes “the splashing of water and by the musical sounds of fountains, cascades and rivulets” (Ravel) through shimmering figurations, cascading arpeggios and other fluid textures. It’s a masterpiece of Impressionism and was the well-spring for other water-inspired piano music by Ravel, namely Une barque sur l’océan from Miroirs and Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit. 

Fountain in Villa d’Este, Tivoli

But the forerunner of these pieces was undoubtedly Franz Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, which, like Jeux d’eau, evokes the sparkling play of fountains and the fluidity and brilliance of water. The Villa d’Este boasts an extraordinary system of fountains, with some fifty-one fountains and nymphaeums, 398 spouts, 364 water jets, 64 waterfalls, and 220 basins, fed by 875 metres of canals, channels and cascades, and all working entirely by the force of gravity, without pumps.

Reflections on water

Debussy was also a master of depicting water in music. Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water). Here Debussy imitates not just the sounds of water – droplets and burbles, splashes and raindrops – but also reflections, the pictures that float upon the surface.

n. The Lone Wreck, from The Tides by English composer William Baines, is a dramatic tone poem which paints a haunting picture of an abandoned ship deep in the ocean, complete with the calls of sea birds.

Night gondola in Venice, Italy

The Barcarolle, or “boat song”, inspired by the songs of Venetian gondoliers, seeks to portray the rocking motion of the sea and the rise and fall of waves. Chopin’s Barcarolle is perhaps the most famous work in this genre. Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondolier’s Song in f-sharp minor from his Songs Without Words is dark and atmospheric, suggesting nighttime on the Venetian lagoon.

Liszt was also adept at portraying the motion of the ocean. In his Legende No. 2, St. Francis of Paola walking on the waves, the waters roll and bubble beneath the saint’s feet as he crosses the Straits of Messina.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Britten transports us to more serene waters in Sailing from his Holiday Diary suite. The wind gets up in the middle section, tossing the boat about, before calm is restored.

Maurice Ravel La Valse

1,369,696 views Aug 14, 2010

Myung-Whun Chung Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Sir Stephen Hough: The Composer

by Georg Predota, Interlude

One of the most distinctive artists of his generation, Sir Stephen Hough combines an international career as a pianist with those of composer, writer, and painter. The first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001), Hough is a true renaissance man, exceedingly gifted as a pianist, educator, writer, painter, and composer.

Sir Stephen Hough

While his achievements as a pianist are well-known and documented, Hough is also a respected author with four books and hundreds of articles to his name. In addition, a solo exhibition of his paintings was presented in London in 2012. It’s hardly surprising that The Economist included him in the list of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”

In addition, Hough is also a published and frequently commissioned composer, having crafted works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord, and solo piano. He has received commissions from the Takács Quartet, the Cliburn, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and the Gilmore Foundation, among many others. 

First Compositions

According to his father, Hough had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. Be that as it may, singing was indeed his first form of musical expression, “especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home.” Hough sang hymns in primary school and church; later, he joined a choir in high school, and he joined the compulsory chorus at Julliard.

Hough started piano lessons at the age of six, and he began to compose at around the same time. He remembers writing a “Mass” in his teenage years, but Hough is generally dismissive of his juvenilia compositions. As he writes, “the Mass 

Transcriptions

Apparently, Hough composed a substantial number of works, but as he related in an interview, “mercifully, that pile of smudged sketches has disappeared.” These early efforts culminated in a viola sonata, the only early work that was actually published. However, for the next twenty odd years, Hough composed next to nothing, except an odd transcription or two. Hough related the story that after a recital in New York in the late 1990s, when he played his transcription of Rodger’s Carousel Waltz, he was chatting with the composer John Corigliano. 

Corigliano told Hough, “You should compose your own music. The only real difference between a transcription and writing your own pieces is using your themes rather than someone else’s.” This conversation became the starting point for a renewed engagement with compositions. Hough started to write little pieces for friends, and the bassoonist Graham Salvage from the Hallé Orchestra asked him to write a concerto. As Hough explained, “In a mad moment or reckless courage, I agreed to have a go and started sketching what eventually became The Loneliest Wilderness, my first serious piece in two decades.”

First Commissions

The Loneliest Wilderness was inspired by the poem “My Company” by Herbert Read (1893–1968), containing the following lines:

But, God! I know that I’ll stand
Someday in the loneliest wilderness,
Someday my heart will cry
For the soul that has been, but that now
Is scatter’d with the winds,
Deceased and devoid.

I know that I’ll wander with a cry:
‘O beautiful men, O men I loved,
O whither are you gone, my company?’

The work is based on two main musical ideas: the interval of a descending fourth and a rising chain of thirds. Introvert and restrained, this musical oration has a strong Jewish flavour to it, taking its inspiration from “the heart-breaking regret of an army officer as he looks back at the loss of the company of soldiers under his command.” 

Takács Quartet

Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No. 1

Dedicated to the Takács Quartet, Hough’s first string quartet premiered in December 2021. As it was commissioned as a companion piece to works by Ravel and Dutilleux, the composer set out to explore “not so much what united their musical language, but what was absent from them.” Although there are no quotes or direct references to the composers of Les Six, as captioned in the subtitle, the composer imagines unspecified places and memory where meetings might have taken place.

This string quartet “evokes a flavour more than a style,” according to Hough, “but a flavour rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.”

Sonatas and Beyond

Stephen Hough’s Broken Branches

The term “Sonata” had a multiplicity of meanings over the years, but for Hough “it has kept its wordlessness and its seriousness; a sonata, regardless of form, is a statement of unity, if not uniformity.” And although the composer is wary of words or descriptions attached to them, he argues that “music is neither a thought nor an emotion nor a person, but very much its own entity. His sonata “Broken Branches,” is an oblique tribute to Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, and a passage from Scripture: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Cut off from me you can do nothing.”

The sonata is constructed of sixteen small and inconclusive sections, like branches from a single tree. “Broken branches” functions in three ways; fragments of fragility, related in theme but incomplete and damaged.” The work seems to grow naturally out of Hough’s style of playing, and it opens with a “Prelude” and ends with a “Postlude” of identical music, but the anguish of the opening G-sharp minor becomes a glowing G major at the end. “Branches beginning life anew in a new spring.” The climax of this sonata is a section called “non credo,” based on “material from the Credo of my Missa Mirabilis, which explores issues of doubt and despair in the context of the concrete affirmations of the Nicene Creed.” 

A Statement of Faith

Stephen Hough joined the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 19, and he considered becoming a priest, in particular joining the Franciscan Order. Hough has extensively written about his homosexuality and its relationship with music and his religion. As he wrote, “Catholicism is still home for me. And despite everything, I haven’t found anything that suits me better.” Hough is attracted to the idea that Catholicism doesn’t emphasise rich and powerful people, but embraces poverty and simplicity. “Christianity celebrates what is ultimately important about being human—community, and concern for the widows, the prisoners, the prostitutes, people who are outcasts. I find that very attractive.”

The Missa Mirabilis is connected with a highly personal experience. Hough had been working on the piece for about one year when he had a serious car accident, overturning his car on the motorway at 80 mph. “I stepped out of the one untouched door in my completely mangled car,” he remembers, “with my Mass manuscript and my body intact, then wrote part of the “Agnus Dei” in St. Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan. I was conscious, as I was somersaulting with screeching metallic acrobatics on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear the music on which I’d been working so intensely in the days before. Someone had other ideas.” 

The Partita was commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for Albert Cano Smit in 2019. As Hough explains, “composing four sonatas of a serious, intense character, I wanted to write something different – something brighter, something more celebratory, more nostalgic.” Scored in five movements, the outer movements “Overture” and “Toccata” are inspired by the world of a grand cathedral organ. The short three inner movements, “Capriccio,” and “Canción y Danza I & II,” are based on the interval of a fifth and partially represent an explicit homage to Federico Mompou.

Stephen Hough’s Fanfare Toccata

In 2002, Hough was commissioned to write a work for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, performed by all 30 competitors. Hough took his inspiration from a variety of toccatas he had learned over the years, including Scarlatti, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, Prokofiev and Samuel Barber. This inspiration accounted for the fanfare flourish complemented by a deeply romantic tune. It really does speak well of Hough’s composition that all 30 competitors have decided to make the Fanfare Toccata a part of their regular recital repertoire.