The Passion of The Passacaille Ravel Wag
The Passion of The Passacaille Ravel Wag
The Passion of The Passacaille Ravel Wag
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Cambridge Opera Journal, 25, 3, 285–318 6 Cambridge University Press, 2013
doi:10.1017/S095458671300013X
Abstract: Long considered to lie ‘light years’ apart, Ravel and Wagner actually have multiple
points of contact. Several appear in the comments Ravel made about the German composer
in his articles, interviews and correspondence. Another is a previously unrecognised allusion
to Parsifal in the Passacaille of Ravel’s Trio (1914), which he composed shortly after writing a
review of the opera’s premiere in Paris. Additional Wagnerisms can be located in Daphnis et
Chloé (1909–12) and L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1920–5). More broadly, Wagner plays a central
role in the ‘decadent dialectics’ of Ravel’s style.
Attempts to tell the history of French Wagnerism are typically centred around a
small group of events, texts and compositions. The main events are the debut of
Wagner’s music in Paris (orchestral excerpts in 1860 and an opera (Tannhäuser) in
1861), the opening of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus in 1876 (which precipitated
many pilgrimages by French composers and critics), and the premiere of Claude
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, which has often been considered the turning
point in the liberation of French opera from Wagnerian influence.1 The most
notable critical texts are Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner and Tannhäuser, which
appeared in the 1 April 1861 issue of the Revue européenne, and the short-lived Revue
wagnérienne (1885–8), to which Mallarmé, Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and
other prominent French literary figures contributed essays.2 Last but not least, the
most prominent examples of Wagnerian opera in France are Emmanuel Chabrier’s
Gwendoline (1885), Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal (1895) and Ernest Chausson’s Le Roi
Arthus (1895).3
1 Three classic texts provide further detail about these and other events in French Wagnerism:
Danièle Pistone, ‘Wagner à Paris (1839–1900)’, Revue internationale de musique française, 1 (1980),
7–84; Martine Kahane and Nicole Wild, Wagner et la France (Paris, 1983); Gerald D. Turbow,
‘Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France’, in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David
C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca, 1984), 134–66. A more recent, but equally valuable survey
is Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz, ‘Einleitung’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik,
Literatur, Kunst, Politik, ed. Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz (Leipzig, 1999), 9–31. Two
indispensable overviews of the debates surrounding the relation of Debussy’s Pelléas to Wagner
are Jann Pasler, ‘Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera’, 19th-
Century Music, 10 (1987), 243–64, and Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle:
Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (New York, 1999), 468–79.
2 Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, suivi de textes sur Richard Wagner par
Nerval, Gautier et Champfleury, with an introductory essay by Robert Kopp (Paris, 1994). A widely
available reprint of the journal is Revue wagnérienne, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1968).
3 The dates in parentheses are the dates the compositions were completed. All three operas re-
ceived their full premiere performances at the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium.
The premieres of Gwendoline and Fervaal occurred soon after their completion, while Le Roi
Arthus was first performed almost a decade later in 1903. Detailed considerations of these three
operas, their librettists and their composers appear in Huebner, French Opera, 255–85 (on
Gwendoline), 308–50 (on Fervaal ) and 351–92 (on Le Roi Arthus).
286 Michael J. Puri
If the name of Maurice Ravel ever arises within this standard narrative, it
appears in discussions of French musical parodies of Wagner.4 In addition to the
examples usually cited – Chabrier’s Souvenirs de Munich (1886), Gabriel Fauré and
André Messager’s Souvenirs de Bayreuth (about 1888), and ‘Golliwog’s Cake Walk’
from Debussy’s Children’s Corner (1908) – scholars will occasionally remember to
cite the ‘Fanfare’ that Ravel contributed to the collaboratively composed ballet
L’Éventail de Jeanne (1927).5
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Ex. 1: Ravel’s ‘Fanfare’ (bb. 15–21) from L’Éventail de Jeanne (for piano four-hands).
Should we seek a model for the Fanfare, ‘Golliwog’s Cake Walk’ immediately
comes to mind. Composed for the students of the ballet school run by Jeanne
Dubost, L’Éventail de Jeanne was supposed to animate the limbs of her young
ballerinas just as Debussy’s piece was supposed to animate the limbs of his daughter’s
golliwog doll.6 However, while the Cake Walk lampoons Tristan and its erotic
melodrama, the ‘Wagneramente’ episode in the Fanfare (Ex. 1) evokes a different
aspect of Wagner – namely, the brassy pomp that was well known from such
popular concert excerpts as the ‘Entry of the Guests’ from Tannhäuser and the
Wedding Music from Lohengrin. Ravel could easily have composed this passage
without writing ‘Wagneramente’ above it, but he would then have forfeited an
4 Even though Ravel’s comic opera, L’Heure espagnole (1907–9), is categorically different from the
parodies mentioned in this paragraph, its overt, tongue-in-cheek use of leitmotifs nevertheless
invites us to understand it as a parody of Wagnerian theory and practice. A rare but sophisticated
examination of this issue is Steven Huebner, ‘Laughter: In Ravel’s Time’, Cambridge Opera Journal,
18 (2006), 225–46, esp. 235–44. Huebner has also interpreted the desublimation of love in this
opera as a parody of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. See Huebner, ‘L’Heure espagnole: la grivoiserie
moderne de Ravel’, in Aspects de l’opéra français de Meyerbeer à Honegger, ed. Jean-Christophe
Branger and Vincent Giroud (Lyons, 2009), 193–213.
5 The other contributors to this one-act ballet were Pierre-Octave Ferroud, Jacques Ibert,
Roland-Manuel, Marcel Delannoy, Albert Roussel, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Georges
Auric and Florent Schmitt. According to the score for piano four-hands (Paris: Heugel, 1929;
plate no. 29811), the Fanfare is meant to be played at the opening of the ballet and repeated
notatim towards its middle, after Delannoy’s Bourrée and before Roussel’s Sarabande.
6 According to the programme included in the piano score, the ballerinas did not actually dance
to the introductory Fanfare during its first public performance at the Académie Nationale de
Musique (Paris Opéra) on 4 March 1929. Nevertheless, both the dance and the dancers are
present by implication: the Fanfare incorporates the ballet by framing it, while also calling the
fledgling ballerinas to order with its miniature reveille.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 287
opportunity to announce his intention both to enrich children’s music with some
adult irony and to participate in a vibrant and long-standing tradition of musical
parody. As Chabrier, Fauré, Messager and Debussy had already shown, few things
were more droll than to incorporate Wagnerian grandiosity into genres – social
dance, ballet, children’s music – that were so ill-suited to it.7
The humorous effect of both the Cake Walk and the Fanfare, however, is threat-
ened by their chronology; composed well after the heyday of French Wagnerism
(about 1880–1900), they would seem to lack the topicality on which parody often
feeds. Davinia Caddy has recently underscored a certain topicality to the Cake
Walk by demonstrating its involvement with contemporary trends in popular
French culture, including American band music, early film and the circus, as well
as the more obvious minstrelsy.8 Moreover, she makes a claim for its personal
relevance to Debussy, insofar as he would have identified with the clownish per-
former of the Cake Walk. Although Caddy does not draw the Wagnerian allusion
into her argument, we could easily do so by suggesting that the reference to
Tristan is the artist’s self-portrait as a young Wagnerite, especially since he knew
this opera so well.9 Debussy might even be cueing our response by incorporating
something like a laugh track into the score itself – namely, the pianissimo chuckling
that sounds after each statement of the Sehnsuchtsmotiv (Ex. 2).
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piano).
7 Lest we think that these parodies, as instances of ‘modernist cool’, have mastered the
Wagnerian legacy once and for all, Lawrence Kramer reminds us that ‘the force of symbolic
investiture has a way of reaffirming itself willy-nilly’. Kramer, ‘Enchantment and Modernity:
Wagner the Symptom’, in Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley, 2004), 114.
8 Davinia Caddy, ‘Parisian Cake Walks’, 19th-Century Music, 30 (2007), 288–317.
9 A detailed analytical study of Wagner’s influence on the French composer is Robin Holloway,
Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979), while a more focused, sketch-oriented study of this
phenomenon is Carolyn Abbate, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-Century Music,
5 (1981), 117–41. Towards the end of her essay, Abbate adduces a section from a preliminary
draft of Pelléas whose text setting seems to create an analogy between Golaud’s murder of
Pelléas and Wagner’s threat to Debussy as a young French composer at the fin de siècle (140).
In my reading of the Cake Walk, Debussy takes revenge on this earlier oppression by skewering
not only his symbolic father but also his former self.
288 Michael J. Puri
decades after Debussy had composed the Cake Walk, but there is also little evi-
dence of Ravel’s direct engagement with Wagner’s music.10 Further, its allusion
is neither as extensive nor as complex as the one in Debussy’s piece, and would
probably not even be recognisable without the label Ravel applied to it. Simply
put, the reference is too little and too late to be effective; if historians happen to
omit the Fanfare from their short list of French parodies of Wagner, we have little
reason to chide them for it.
While the Fanfare may constitute a weak attempt at parody, the general claim
that subtends it – namely, the incongruity between one repertoire and the other,
the text and its intertext – still holds. At the risk of overgeneralisation, we can
express this incongruity in a series of dichotomies: if Wagner’s music emphasises
gravity, profundity and interiority, Ravel’s inclines towards levity, simplicity and
exteriority; and if Wagner’s output embodies the expressivity, informality, monu-
mentality and chromaticism characteristic of Romanticism, Ravel’s oeuvre tends
towards the inexpressivity, formalism, miniaturism and diatonicism associated with
neo-classical Modernism.11 According to this scheme, both composers are totems
that, in their diametrical opposition, mark the boundaries of their respective his-
torical, cultural and aesthetic domains: the nineteenth century versus the twentieth
century, Romanticism versus Modernism, German versus French, and so forth.
It must have been this perception of absolute incompatibility that compelled
Arbie Orenstein to claim in his seminal biography Ravel: Man and Musician (1975)
that ‘the aesthetic distance’ between Ravel and Wagner ‘can perhaps be measured
only in terms of light-years’.12 We cannot dismiss this claim out of hand, since no
one has yet entertained the possibility of a direct and significant relation between
the two.13 However, if we ever wished to re-open this cold case, a good first step
would be to adopt a dialectical perspective – not to eliminate the difference
between the two composers, but to make it more productive.
10 As is well known, Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes describes him weeping at a performance of the
Tristan Prelude on 1 November 1896. In addition, the framing harmony in Ravel’s mélodie on
Roland de Marès’s ‘La ballade de la reine morte d’aimer’ – a poem about unrequited love in
a medieval era – is a half-diminished seventh chord in the same registral arrangement as the
famous Tristan chord. While they may be interesting in their own right, they do not necessarily
paint Ravel as a devoted Wagnerian.
11 A detailed, authoritative account of this movement is Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music from
the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Rochester, 1996).
12 Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York, 1991), 122. Orenstein pairs Wagner with
Beethoven in this comparison, but the relationship between Beethoven and Ravel is an entirely
different matter – one which I do not broach here. A standard life-and-works account in
German, Theo Hirsbrunner’s Maurice Ravel: Sein Leben, Sein Werk (Laaber, 1989), also claims that
French musical Wagnerism had ‘long been overcome’ [längst überwunden] by the time Ravel
began to compose in the 1890s (108).
13 Stephen Zank does make a link between Ravel and Wagner, insofar as the latter helped to
inspire French writers and composers to conceive of art synaesthetically; examples of such art
in Ravel include Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, according to Zank. Nonetheless, he explicitly
denies any direct influence of Wagner on Ravel, either aesthetically or musically. My contention
here, however, is that such an influence can be established. See Zank, Irony and Sound: The Music
of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, 2009), 223–67.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 289
The two essays Adorno wrote about Ravel are helpful in this regard. In the one
published in 1930, Adorno argues that the marked contrast between Wagner’s
music and Ravel’s qualifies the French composer as ‘the last anti-Wagnerian of a
situation in which the spell of Bayreuth had otherwise completely dissipated’.14
From a dialectical point of view, Ravel is not simply different from Wagner but
represents the antithesis that sprang from the Wagnerian thesis. Moreover, in the
context of the entire essay, which invests Ravel with an acute awareness of his
mortality and the passing of his generation, Adorno’s description of the composer
as the ‘last anti-Wagnerian’ suggests that Ravel may have had a nostalgic attach-
ment to both Wagner and French Wagnerism, two admittedly central and poten-
tially formative presences within his obsolescent world.15 Admittedly rather common
among French musicians of the fin de siècle, the anti-Wagnerian Wagnerian – the
Wagnerian malgré lui – had its most famous example in Nietzsche, and not only
because he ended his diatribe against the German composer in The Case of Wagner
by confessing feelings of ‘gratitude’ towards him.16
A dialectical perspective is even more explicit in the unpublished essay from
about 1928 in which Adorno invokes the notion of sexual desire to distinguish
Ravel’s music from other repertoires, especially Wagner’s; while the German
dwells on the lover’s alternation between frenzy and languor, the Frenchman
attends instead to the idealised image of the beloved. However, when making
this argument he describes Ravel as ‘Wagner’s last foe, since the latter’s concep-
tion of erotic music is so similar and yet so dangerously opposed to his own.’17
How, we may wonder, can the two conceptions be ‘so similar’ if they oppose
each other? And how can an opposition that helps to differentiate one conception
from another be ‘dangerous’? The solution to these riddles resides, once again, in
a dialectical, psychological and genealogical viewpoint. Born from the thetical
Other, the antithetical Self incurs a debt that it can never repay, but whose com-
pulsion to do so generates a variety of responses to its creditor, which should be
familiar to us from Bloomian and post-Bloomian theories of influence: rejection,
contradiction, assimilation, and parody, but never indifference. Thus strong oppo-
sition need not hold opponents ‘light-years’ apart, but can stimulate a fruitful
rapprochement.
This article seeks to perform a rapprochement between Ravel and Wagner in a
process that divides into three phases. First I analyse the comments Ravel made
about Wagner in his articles, interviews, and correspondence. Next, I bring to
14 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Ravel’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am
Main, 1982), 60–5, at 60. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
15 I discuss this essay at greater length in my ‘Adorno’s Ravel’, in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives
on the Composer, ed. Peter Kaminsky (Rochester, 2011), 111–41.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and
Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman (German orig. 1888; Cambridge, 2005),
262.
17 Adorno, ‘Ravel’, in Gesammelte Schriften vol. 18, Musikalische Schriften V, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and
Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 274.
290 Michael J. Puri
18 Classic examples of this literature, which is voluminous, include Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
Le Drame wagnérien (1894), Alfred Ernst, L’Art de Richard Wagner (1893), Edmond Hippeau,
Parsifal et l’Opéra wagnérien (1883), Adolphe Jullien, Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses œuvres (1886),
Maurice Kufferath, Parsifal de Richard Wagner (1890), Albert Lavignac, La Voyage artistique à
Bayreuth (1897), Catulle Mendès, Richard Wagner (1886), Émile de Saint-Auban, Un Pèlerinage à
Bayreuth (1892), Édouard Schuré, Le Drame musical (1886), Georges Servières, Richard Wagner jugé
en France (1887), and Albert Soubies, L’Œuvre dramatique de Wagner (1886).
19 ‘Il voudrait rouvrir nos frontières à ce même Wagner que nous y reconduisions, voilà peu
d’années, avec des cris de délivrance’. Louis Laloy, ‘Wagner et nos musiciens’, La Grande Revue,
54, 10 April 1909, 558.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 291
Laloy’s take on Lalo may not be wildly inaccurate, but it is wanting. Even if we
felt that it were merely par for the course amid the factious French music journal-
ism of that time, we should still acknowledge the considerable liability it creates
for the survey. Not only does it provide the basis for the ensuing discussion, but
it is also the sole source of Lalo’s arguments for everyone who did not have the
opportunity to read the original article.
If we look back at Lalo’s article, we discover a number of items that Laloy
failed to mention. For example, the debate about Debussy and Wagner was initiated
not by Lalo himself but rather by an unnamed German asserting in a letter that
contemporary French music, as represented by Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,
cannot rival Wagner’s contributions either in artistic power or in historical impor-
tance. Unlike his German correspondent, Lalo is not primarily concerned with
condemning Debussy and exalting Wagner but rather wishes to critique imita-
tion as a modus operandi for young composers, due to its tendency to make the
original trite and the spontaneous mechanical; he even states his position con-
cisely in the overview at the head of the article, which reads in part: ‘Wagnerian
imitation. Debussyian imitation. Disadvantages of both’ (emphasis mine).20 To his
mind, young composers have misunderstood the lesson to be learned from
Debussy’s ‘independent and original oeuvre’, which is supposed to inspire them
to ‘be themselves’ rather than to ‘be Debussy’.
Laloy’s summary leads us to believe that Lalo condemned Debussy’s music,
praised Wagner to the skies, and lumped together all young French composers as
wayward Debussyists. On the contrary, Lalo does not subsume all of contem-
porary French music under the heading of Debussyism but instead leaves space
for ‘independents’ such as d’Indy, Dukas and Magnard. Further, he celebrates
the debut of Pelléas as a groundbreaking event in recent French musical history,
lauds Debussy for his sentiment poétique (poetic feeling or sensibility), admits the
potential for greatness in miniaturist art, and acknowledges the growing audience
for this work.21 Finally, he argues that, even if Pelléas had not catalysed anti-
Wagnerism in France, the French would have rejected Wagner anyway for the
many aspects of his music that dissonated with a contemporary national perspec-
tive, including an ‘aggressive philosophical Romanticism’, an excessive appeal to
complexity and profundity, and an overuse of symbolism. Although Lalo does
not recommend imitating either composer, the respective consequences of these
imitations differ, as he explains in the central passage of the article:
All imitators take the wrong path, but [the imitators of Debussy] are more assured to get
lost than the others, due to the exceptionality of their model. It is still conceivable to
imitate someone like Wagner [imiter un Wagner], who is immense and encompasses all music;
nevertheless, what has Wagnerian imitation produced? But it’s pure deviance to imitate
someone like Debussy [imiter un Debussy], who is narrow, subtle and rarefied. The art of
these young people can be reduced to the exploitation of certain trifling procedures, with
the result that it is becoming pettier and pettier. We almost wish [On souhaite presque] to
restore Wagnerian influence in France.22
This passage conveys two important aspects of Lalo’s argument that Laloy mis-
represents in his summary. Lalo does not actually say that one should imitate
Wagner and avoid imitating Debussy, but rather cites them in order to refer to
the imitability of the types they represent; in his understanding, composers such
as Wagner who draw upon a wide range of materials are easier to imitate than
those such as Debussy who are more selective. Lalo also emphasises that he is
not recommending to French composers that they write like Wagner: first, with
the rhetorical question, ‘what has Wagnerian imitation produced?’ (implicit response:
nothing of lasting value), and second, with the adverb ‘almost’, which appears in
the last sentence of the paragraph. Without this qualifier, Lalo would indeed be
guilty of the crime that Laloy accuses him to have committed – namely, to have
called for the restoration of French Wagnerism. With it, however, Lalo negates
this wish and thereby compels us to remember the reasons he has already given
for this negation: mere imitation is never artistically sufficient, rarely advisable
and usually sterile; Wagnerism is incompatible with French taste; a return to
Wagner is practically impossible and stylistically unthinkable in the wake of Pelléas.
Ironically, an error that Laloy makes in transcribing these passages – substituting
the conditional ‘would wish’ [souhaiterait] for the indicative ‘wish’ [souhaite] – only
ends up intensifying the negation of the wish by making it part of a contrafactual
statement.23
Laloy’s misreading of Lalo’s article testifies to the fervid pitch of French musical
politics during this era, as well as the tendency for its participants to retreat to their
respective trenches rather than explore more moderate positions.24 Just as impor-
tant, though, is the evidence it provides for the continuing ability of Wagner’s
name to provoke a defensive overreaction almost a decade after French Wagnerism
22 ‘Et tous les imitateurs font fausse route, mais ces imitateurs-là se perdent plus sûrement que les
autres, à cause de la singularité de leur modèle. Imiter un Wagner, immense, et qui concentrait
en lui la musique tout entière, cela se concevait encore; et pourtant qu’a produit l’imitation de
Wagner? Mais, imiter un Debussy, étroit et rare, c’est pure aberration. L’art de ces jeunes gens
se réduit à l’exploitation de quelques menus procédés; et cela devient de plus en plus petit, petit,
petit. On souhaite presque de restaurer en France l’influence wagnérienne’. Lalo, ‘La Musique’.
23 The full contrafactual proposition, followed by its factual refutation, would read something like
this: ‘If it were possible and desirable to do so, we would almost wish to restore Wagnerian
influence in France, but it is not, and so we do not wish this.’ Laloy also errs somewhat in
failing to recognise that Lalo’s description of Wagner as a ‘colossus’ is actually a tongue-in-
cheek reference back to his German correspondent’s adulatory description of Wagner’s operas
as ‘colossal art’ and ‘the work of a giant’.
24 A major account of actors and debates during this era is Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics
& Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999).
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 293
is supposed to have subsided. This, then, is the context in which Ravel makes his
first public statement about Wagner, a statement which attests to his allegiances
and those of contemporary French music at large.
(In truth, there would be much too much to say about it. Let’s first recognise in Wagner
what he was above all else: a magnificent musician.
It’s too late. After Nietzsche, Catulle Mendès, and Mr. Joséphin Péladan, we would
seem to be committing a paradox.
. . . The wish is unique? Hardly! I rediscovered it in an old article. There’s ‘Wagner’
instead of ‘Debussy’ and ‘Rossini’ instead of ‘Wagner’. It’s signed: Scudo.)26
Ravel’s text is so terse and cagey that we can barely discern the question it is
supposed to answer. Indeed, Ravel’s initial claim that there is ‘much too much
to say’ about Wagner and his legacy only manages to raise the text’s brevity into
further relief. Different from Wagner in so many respects, Ravel surprises us by
describing the German as a ‘magnificent musician’, so the little he says goes a
long way.27 But Ravel’s response is fundamentally a refusal to respond, which he
justifies with the following reasons: the matter is too big to grapple with in such
a limited space; the historical moment for such discussion has passed; and the
desire to restore Wagnerism in France is merely another instance of the perennial
attempt by critics to depreciate the present by invoking the past.
25 Ravel’s response appears in Louis Laloy, ‘Wagner et les musiciens d’aujourd’hui’, La Grande
Revue, 10 May 1909, 161.
26 Ravel’s general point is well taken, but it may not be factual, since I have not been able to locate
any article in which Scudo makes this specific claim. In his major article on Wagner – a review
of the premiere performance in Paris of the German’s music at three orchestral concerts
(25 January, 1 February and 8 February 1860) – he does not explicitly pit Wagner against
Rossini. See Paul Scudo, ‘Revue musicale. La musique de M. Richard Wagner’, Revue des Deux
Mondes, 26 (1860), 227–38.
27 It is probably not coincidental that Ravel is echoing Baudelaire, who also exclaims at the
beginning of his essay on Wagner and Tannhäuser that, having so much to say, he could not
possibly say it all. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s claim – which
clearly partakes of the aesthetic discourse of sublimity – might also help us understand the
philosophical resonance of Ravel’s response: ‘The message is clear: music infinitely overwhelms
the possibilities of writing’. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia
McCarren (Stanford, 1994), 4.
294 Michael J. Puri
to ask what they had to say about Wagner and how it might further illuminate
Ravel’s position.
The sequence Nietzsche–Mendès–Péladan is notable for comprising a variety
of attitudes towards Wagner. The most idolatrous of the three, Péladan expressed
his esteem for the German composer in an 1894 survey of his operas (Le Théâtre
complet de Wagner) and several instances of fiction (the plays Le Fils des étoiles and
Babylon, and the novels La Victoire du mari and Le Panthée, among others).28 Ravel
deflates this figure somewhat by referring to him as neither the famous ‘Péladan’
nor the self-proclaimed ‘Sâr Péladan’ but rather the more pedestrian ‘Mr. Joséphin
Péladan’, thereby placing him once again amid the multitude of ‘middling souls’
(âmes moyennes) from whom the self-appointed czar wished to distinguish himself.29
If this is what Ravel meant to do, why did he do it? At first, we may suppose that
he simply wanted to distance himself from Péladan due to the latter’s distasteful
idolatry of Wagner. However, it is also possible that Ravel disagreed with Péladan’s
specific understanding of Wagner’s contribution as an artist; the dramatist’s claim
in Le Théâtre complet that it is an ‘error and a lie’ to describe Wagner as ‘above all a
musician’ directly contradicts the composer’s assessment in the 1909 survey.30
Poet, playwright, critic and erstwhile husband of the fervent Wagnerian Judith
Gautier, Catulle Mendès may have been on Ravel’s mind for having fallen to his
death on a railroad track in February 1909. In comparison with Péladan, Mendès
was more ambivalent towards Wagner. While the tone of his 1886 monograph
Richard Wagner is generally celebratory, he nevertheless reminds us in the Preface
of the gratuitous cruelty of ‘Une capitulation’ (Wagner’s farce about the Franco-
Prussian war), lampoons the composer in the chapter titled ‘Épitre au roi de
Thuringe’, and, in the Epilogue, cautions young French composers against imitat-
ing Wagner’s essentially Germanic music.31
If Mendès harboured some ambivalence towards Wagner, Nietzsche swung
hard between extremes, transforming himself from an enthusiastic advocate in
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) to a scathing critic in The Case of
Wagner (1888) and other late writings. Yet, despite the near-hysterical denunciation
of Wagner in the latter – where he famously claims that Wagner is a ‘neurosis’
that has ‘made music sick’ – he also acknowledges the composer’s value.32
According to Nietzsche, if Wagner’s music is corrupt, at least it is thoroughly
and unabashedly so, and thus exemplifies ‘courage, will, conviction in corruption’
(emphasis his).33 In ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’ he also says that, as a pure expres-
sion of the ‘modern soul’ (âme moderne), Wagner’s music has been beneficial for
28 Péladan’s interest in Wagner is explored in Isabelle Cazeaux, ‘‘‘One does not defend the sun’’:
Some Notes on Péladan and Wagner’, in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry
Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates, in collaboration with Christopher
Hatch (New York, 1984), 93–101, as well as in Michel Cadot, ‘Un ardent wagnérien: Joséphin
Péladan (1858–1918)’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, 475–84.
29 Joséphin Péladan, Le Théâtre complet de Wagner (les XI opéras scène par scène), avec notes biographiques et
critiques (Paris, 1894), x.
30 Ibid., xxi.
31 Catulle Mendès, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886).
32 Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, 240.
33 Ibid., 259.
296 Michael J. Puri
forcing him to confront modernity in its cultural decadence, and recognise himself
in his complicity as a fellow decadent – a self-accusation that presumably ac-
knowledges the hysteria in his own reaction against Wagner.34 Furthermore, he
supposes that Wagner’s diseased music is also effective as a ‘stimulus of life’ that
ultimately impels its subject to formulate healthier ideals over and against it.35
Nietzsche dubs his main counter-ideal ‘Mediterranean music’ and describes it as
‘a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a
bright flame, blazes into an unclouded sky!’36 Although, in The Case of Wagner, he
exalts Bizet’s Carmen as a prime example of this musical type, we can easily locate
other plausible candidates in early Ravel, including Jeux d’eau (1901), ‘Alborada
del gracioso’ from Miroirs (1905), the Introduction et allegro (1905) and ‘Feria’ from
Rapsodie espagnole (1907). However, in each of these instances anxious, melancholy
and chromatic strains, usually appearing in a piece’s interior, belie a gay façade;
this ‘decadent dialectics’ – a process of identity formation whereby decadence
and its opposite produce the one out of the other – appears equally in Nietzsche,
whose awareness of his own decadence not only spurs his hope for transcen-
dence, but also periodically returns to overcloud this hope.37
For both Nietzsche and Ravel, decadent and, by association, Wagnerian topics,
are not a thing of the past but an aspect of the present that continues to aid them
in their self-fashioning as thinkers and artists. This is probably the reason that
Nietzsche cannot seem to end The Case of Wagner, as is evident in its two Post-
scripts and an Epilogue; as cited previously, the ‘gratitude’ he expresses towards
Wagner in the final sentence of the Epilogue implicitly acknowledges an ongoing
debt that renders any conclusion merely provisional. If the motivation for this
polemic initially appeared to be the desire to pronounce the last word in Wagner
reception, it finishes by abandoning this goal and leaving room, instead, for the
endless ‘rumination’ he identifies elsewhere as essential to understanding his writ-
ings and, perhaps, all writing.38 If Nietzsche was not done with Wagner, we have
good reason to suspect that the thoughtful Ravel was not either. After all, this is
the same person who set great stock by the request of his composition teacher,
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols,
And Other Writings, 273. A recent account of European musical modernism whose notion of
decadence depends strongly on Nietzsche, Wagner and their relationship is Stephen Downes,
Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge,
2010).
35 Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, 241.
36 Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, 281.
37 For further discussion of decadent dialectics in Ravel, see Michael J. Puri, Ravel the Decadent:
Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (Oxford, 2011), 7. Three sources of recent scholarship which
helped to generate this concept are Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky,
‘Introduction’, in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable,
Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia, 1999), 1–34; Donald B. Kuspit, The
Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art (New York, 2000); and Charles
Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the
Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore, 2002).
38 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe
(Cambridge, 1997), 42.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 297
Fauré, to re-examine a piece by Ravel that he had just rejected, in the event that
he might have misjudged it.39
The other eleven responses to the survey, as well as Laloy’s summary com-
ments, provide a further context for interpreting Ravel’s contribution. The most
obvious difference between this submission and the others is its greater brevity;
the only other response that comes close to its seventy-four words is the single
paragraph by Raymond Bonheur, who uses 141 words merely to defer to Laloy’s
better judgement on the matter. This context therefore brings Ravel’s refusal to
answer the central question of the enquête into even sharper relief.
As for its content, Ravel’s response lies on the more positive end of the spec-
trum for declaring Wagner to have been a ‘magnificent musician’. More specifi-
cally, we can situate Ravel between two groups: one comprising Alfredo Casella
and Gustave Samazeuilh, both of whom uphold Wagner’s music as still worthy
of study, and another comprising Gabriel Dupont, Jean Huré and Laloy himself,
all of whom seek to balance its strengths (grandeur and orchestration) against its
weaknesses (ponderousness and obscurity); although Ravel gives Wagner higher
praise than anyone else, it is mitigated by his judgement about the belatedness of
this initiative (‘it’s too late’). At the other end of the spectrum, Florent Schmitt,
Albert Roussel and three other composers express nationalist and isolationist values
in rejecting Wagner and his influence on French music. Given the popularity and
predictability of this protectionist brand of patriotism, Ravel implicitly rejects it by
formulating his response as he did. At the same time, he preserves a measure of
openness towards Wagner and his legacy. Finally, Ravel stands out for being
the only one of the twelve respondents to demonstrate an awareness of Wagner’s
critical reception.
Wars of succession
Ravel’s career surged over the next five years (1909–14), during which time he
not only hit his stride as a creative artist but also recognised and embraced his
potential as an important historical actor. In June 1909 he accepted a prestigious
commission from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which were sensationally popular at
that time in Paris, and soon thereafter witnessed the premiere performance of
four of his major stage works: an opera (L’Heure espagnole) in 1911 and three
ballets (Ma Mère l’oye, Adélaı̈de, Daphnis et Chloé ) in the first half of 1912. He with-
drew from the Société Nationale and collaborated with other former students of
Fauré to found the Société Musicale Indépendante in 1910; as evidence for the
substantial rivalry of these two societies, the SMI produced thirty-nine concerts –
all brimming with premieres – to the SN’s forty-one during a period that stretched
from the debut of the SMI (20 April 1910) to the beginning of the First World
War (28 July 1914).40
39 This episode is reported in Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous: l’homme, l’ami, le musician
(Geneva, 1945), 56.
40 A thorough comparison of these two societies, as well as a complete listing of their
programmes, can be found in Michel Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à
1939 (Sprimont, 1997).
298 Michael J. Puri
Another testament to Ravel’s desire to play a more prominent role on the national
stage in these five years is his emergence as a music critic. Considering the attitude
he expressed towards this profession in Laloy’s survey, we might be surprised that
he would wish to become what he had previously seemed to despise.41 However,
we could also interpret this new career path more positively as the expression of a
desire to supplement his ongoing efforts to shape musical life in Paris as a com-
poser and concert programmer by articulating his point of view in a third form.
And whenever he wished, he could also use this medium to counter the opinions
of his opponents and to overturn any mistaken preconceptions his readers may
have held about him.
His crusade against the critics is a common element in these essays, continuing
almost without interruption from the 1909 enquête to his review of Stravinsky’s Le
Rossignol in 1914. The most forceful rebuke appears in an article he wrote about
Debussy’s orchestral Images and published in February 1913. He sets the tone by
placing at the head of the article an epigraph by the belletrist Antoine Bauderon
de Sénecé (1643–1737), who identifies the ‘jealousy which one feels towards the
moderns’ as ‘often the better part of the admiration which one shows for the
ancients’.42 Ravel then assigns persons to the three roles staked out in the epi-
graph: Wagner is the admirable ancient, Debussy the reviled modern, and Lalo
the jealous critic. Should the reader not recall the specific moment of Lalo’s
recent offence, Ravel pointedly cites the article that provoked Laloy’s survey.43
Although Ravel ultimately finds Debussy’s critics to have been unsuccessful in
their attacks on the composer, he still cannot refrain from putting them in their
place by describing them as ‘morose incompetents who have never felt the ardent
passion inspired by these landscapes and this picturesqueness [in the Images], and
who cannot discover the musical expression of that passion in a composition’.44
The critique that Ravel aims at Lalo and his ilk also involves refuting the oppo-
sition they wished to establish between Wagner and the Debussyists. In a review
of the Concerts Lamoureux from March 1912, Ravel not only avoids making any
negative comments about the German composer but also actually marvels at the
‘extraordinary spontaneity’ of his music, ‘which synthesized all the sensibility of
the nineteenth century’ and exerted a ‘powerful attraction’ upon its audience.45
Ravel then dovetails his discussion of Wagner into a history of recent French music.
41 In his essay on Wagner, Baudelaire rationalises this choice in a way that would also have suited
Ravel as a cerebral artist: ‘All the great poets naturally and fatally become critics. I feel sorry for
poets guided only by instinct; I find them incomplete’ [Tous les grands poètes deviennent
naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je plains les poètes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois
incomplets]. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 29.
42 Cited in Maurice Ravel, ‘À propos des Images de Claude Debussy’, Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui,
February 1913, 135, translated and republished as ‘Regarding Claude Debussy’s Images’ in
Maurice Ravel, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, ed. and trans. Arbie Orenstein
(Mineola, 2003), 366–8, at 366.
43 Ravel mistakenly dates the article to September 1908, but it was actually published in August.
44 Ravel, ‘Regarding Claude Debussy’s Images’, 368.
45 Ravel, ‘Concerts Lamoureux’, Revue musicale de la S.I.M., March 1912, 50–2, translated and
republished as ‘The Lamoureux Orchestra Concerts’ in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 344–7, at 345.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 299
Even today, when one hears the resounding Venusberg music [from Tannhäuser], which is
one of the most representative examples of Wagner’s art, it is understandable that after
this explosion of passionate joy and suffering, after this roaring outburst of pagan vitality,
the need must have been felt for a peaceful, even austere, retreat.46 In France, this medi-
tation produced various results: first, from the Franckist cloister, there emerged a solemn
procession of artists whose devotion to the will [la volonté ] has only grown stronger over
time. This was followed by a less organised group of young people with a fresh new spirit
who let their instinct sing freely; their sensibility sought to perceive its slightest external
manifestations profoundly, and with more subtlety than their predecessors.47
This passage might seem simply to narrate the succession from Wagner to Franck
to Debussy, but it is actually more polemical than that. Although Ravel acknowl-
edges that the Franckists preceded the Debussyists, he nevertheless puts them on
equal footing as part of the same ‘peaceful, even austere, retreat’ in France from
the ‘roaring outburst of pagan vitality’ in Wagner. This equivalence provides the
basis for a comparison in which one fares better than the other: while the Franckists
(read: d’Indy’s Société Nationale) are overly wilful and dogmatic in their approach
to art, the Debussyists (read: Ravel’s Société Musicale Indépendante) follow their
instincts, which allows them greater subtlety in their art. Both groups are post-
Wagnerian, but in this article the Debussyists arguably become the rightful heirs
of Wagner and the Romantic spirit that he embodies; the natural ‘spontaneity’ of
the latter resurfaces in the Debussyian ‘instinct’, not in the Franckist ‘will’. By
appropriating the inheritance that the Franckists claimed as their own, Ravel turns
the prevailing narrative upside-down.
Ravel expands upon this bold assertion in a January 1913 review of d’Indy’s
Fervaal, which had just been performed at the Paris Opéra. Although he complains
once again about the general tendency of critics to condemn new music for being
either too Wagnerian or not Wagnerian enough, he is nevertheless forced to agree
with the long-standing judgement that Fervaal is ‘entirely Wagnerian . . . by the very
essence of its music, by its theatrical scheme, its philosophy, the realisation of this
46 Three aspects of this sentence suggest Ravel’s familiarity with Baudelaire’s 1861 essay on
Tannhäuser. First, he invokes Tannhäuser as the quintessential Wagner opera. Next, he seems to
acknowledge Baudelaire’s testimony by referring to the audience’s astonishment at the Parisian
début of its music. Finally, his metaphorical language echoes Baudelaire’s: ‘Everything that
these words imply – will, desire, concentration, nervous intensity, explosion – are apparent and palpable
in his works. . . . I love this surfeit of health, these excesses of will that are inscribed in his works
like bitumen burning on the ground of a volcano’ [Tout ce qu’impliquent les mots: volonté, désir,
concentration, intensité nerveuse, explosion, se sent et se fait deviner dans ses œuvres. . . . J’aime ces
excès de santé, ces débordements de volonté que s’inscrivent dans les œuvres comme le bitume
enflammé dans le sol d’un volcan]. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 55. Baudelaire’s
take on Wagner, in turn, is based to some degree on Théophile Gautier’s review of the
performance of Tannhäuser at Wiesbaden, which appeared in the 29 September 1857 issue of
Le Moniteur. Gautier not only associates Wagner’s medievalism with German Romanticism,
but also calls him a ‘paroxyste’ (97) – an artist who seeks to maximise the intensity of his
expression. Gautier, ‘Sur Tannhäuser’, Le Moniteur, 29 September 1857, reprinted in ibid., 95–106.
47 Ravel, ‘The Lamoureux Orchestra Concerts’, 345. Translation slightly emended.
300 Michael J. Puri
philosophy, by the symbolic role of the characters and their obscure language’.48
Ravel recognises that the subject matter of Fervaal is well suited to a Wagnerian
treatment but still chides d’Indy for adopting these elements wholesale; con-
sequently, the libretto is overly laden with symbolism and the music is excessively
freighted with leitmotifs. Pressed to compare the Wagnerian original with the
d’Indyian copy, Ravel exalts the former and condemns the latter.
Wagner’s own work offers the most complete example of assimilation on the grandest
scale. Uniting the most diverse materials, this giant constructed a splendid and original
palace, whose dimensions were proportioned to his stature. Mr. d’Indy moved into this
grandiose edifice, carefully shutting its doors and windows. The fiery sun, which the archi-
tect allowed into his abode, was replaced by candles of exceptional clarity, but of less heat.
In this artificial light, objects become tarnished, taking on a moribund appearance. The
symbol of Fervaal proclaiming the victory of life and love while bearing a woman’s corpse
towards the heights is more significant than M. d’Indy intended it to be.49
Although the remaining paragraphs of Ravel’s review are devoted to praising vari-
ous aspects of Fervaal, they do little to offset this stinging critique, which is even
harsher than the comments he made earlier about the Franckists. D’Indy is no
longer the leader of a ‘solemn procession’ of composers in ‘austere retreat’ from
Wagner, but rather a squatter on Wagner’s estate who has violated this property
by transforming its ‘splendid palace’ into a musty sarcophagus. Once again, a
double negation embedded in this argument draws Ravel closer to Wagner; if
d’Indy opposes Wagner and Ravel opposes d’Indy – albeit in different ways –
then Ravel might actually share more with Wagner than the avowed Wagnerian
himself.
48 Maurice Ravel, ‘Fervaal, action musicale en trois actes et un prologue; poème et musique de
Vincent d’Indy’, Comœdia illustré, V, 20 January 1913, 361–4, translated and republished as
Ravel, ‘Fervaal ’, in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 358–61, at 358. A more nuanced reading than Ravel’s,
in which Fervaal emerges not as an imitation of Parsifal but rather as the original result of
d’Indy’s ‘Wagnerian struggle against Wagner’, is Anya Suschitzky, ‘Fervaal, Parsifal, and French
National Identity’, 19th-Century Music, 25 (2001–2), 237–65.
49 Ravel, ‘Fervaal ’, 359–60.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 301
50 Maurice Ravel, ‘Parsifal, drame sacré de Richard Wagner, version française d’Alfred Ernst.
Représenté pour la première fois le 1er Janvier 1914, au théâtre national de l’Opéra’, Comœdia
illustré, 6, 20 January 1914, 400–3, translated and republished as Ravel, ‘Parsifal ’, in Ravel,
A Ravel Reader, 376–9, at 376.
51 Arbie Orenstein helpfully reproduces the entire notice in Maurice Ravel, Lettres, écrits, entretiens,
ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris, 1989), 527–8.
52 Letter 136 in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 169–71.
302 Michael J. Puri
Wagner’s music in Paris after the end of the war, presumably in continued demon-
stration of his opposition to the League’s xenophobia and protectionism.53 At
first glance, we may think that Orenstein has made a leap of logic; not only did
either side fail to mention Wagner but also his music was not technically at issue
here, since it had already fallen into the public domain by 1916. On further
review, though, the implication seems more plausible, at least on the part of
the League, due to the explicit hostility towards Wagner that had been recently
expressed by some of the most prominent members of the group.54
Even if we were convinced that the League meant to condemn Wagner and
Ravel meant to defend him, we still have reason to believe that Ravel’s funda-
mental motivation was not a deep attachment to the German but rather an ongoing
involvement in the conflict between the SMI and the SN, whose members popu-
lated the ranks of the League, including Honorary President d’Indy. Indeed, just
two years earlier he had voiced complaints that resembled those of the League. In
a January 1914 review of Francesca da Rimini at the Opéra-Comique, Ravel scolds
the company for refusing two operas by Frenchmen – La Forêt bleue by Louis
Aubert (a fellow SMI member) and Eros vainqueur by Pierre de Bréville (an SN
member!) – before he launches into a critique of the opera by Franco Leoni, ‘an
Italian residing in London’. His grievance in this review is not only that the
French operas were more deserving of production than the Italian one (which
he pans as verismo hackwork), but also that the Opéra-Comique failed to fulfil its
obligation as a national theatre which ‘receives a government subsidy specifically
intended to promote works by French composers’.55 Although Ravel spends the
second half of the review praising the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and
the production of his La Vida breve at the Opéra-Comique, it does not fully dispel
the effect of the first half, which comes off as sharing more than a little with the
xenophobia and protectionism in the League’s notice.
Ravel’s apparent praise for Wagner is further eroded by direct criticism. One
object of this critique is Wagner’s orchestration, which, to Ravel’s ear, can some-
times sound like a less effective version of Meyerbeer’s ‘military music’.56 Another
is his vocal writing, whose awkward qualities and harsh accentuation not only
present a ‘dangerous example’ for other composers to follow but also seem to dis-
play ‘contempt’ for ‘the most expressive of sonorous instruments’.57 After having
53 Ibid., 171.
54 Examples include the League’s ‘Honorary President’ Camille Saint-Saëns, whose series of
articles condemning Wagner in Fall 1914 issues of L’Écho de Paris were collected and
republished as Germanophilie (Paris, 1916), and its Secretary Jean Poueigh (aka Octave Séré).
A recent overview of French attitudes towards Wagner during the war is Marion Schmid, ‘À bas
Wagner! The French Press Campaign against Wagner during World War I’, in French Music,
Culture, and National Identity, 77–91.
55 Maurice Ravel, ‘À l’Opéra-Comique: Francesca da Rimini et La Vie brève’, Comœdia illustré, VI, 20
January 1914, 390–1, translated and republished as ‘At the Opéra-Comique: Francesca da Rimini
and La Vida breve’, in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 372–5, at 372.
56 Quoted in André Révész, ‘The Great Musician Maurice Ravel Talks About his Art’, ABC de
Madrid, 1 May 1924, 19, translated and republished in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 431–5, at 432.
57 Maurice Ravel, ‘La Sorcière à l’Opéra-Comique, Théâtre des Arts: 3e Acte d’Idoménée, La Source
lointaine’, Comœdia illustré, V, 5 January 1913, 320–3, translated and republished as ‘The Witch at
the Opéra-Comique’ in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 353–7, at 354.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 303
taken Wagner to task in a review from 1914, Ravel makes a few concessions that
can only be described as grudging: any aspects of Wagner that seem objectionable
to him as a Frenchman might well be interpreted by a German as ‘virtues’; as an
instance of this vice-turned-virtue, Wagner’s typically Germanic ‘long-windedness’
is ‘never entirely without significance’.58
Thus the longer and more closely we examine Ravel’s utterances about Wagner,
the bleaker is the prospect for creating any genuine rapprochement between the
two. Nevertheless, a substantial possibility remains for casting Ravel’s attitude
towards Wagner in a positive light: Parsifal. As we will see, several moments in
Ravel’s music bear a striking affinity with aspects of Wagner’s last opera and
perhaps even testify to a direct influence that Ravel intended for his listeners to
recognise. First, however, we will examine the role that Parsifal played in Ravel’s
career as a critic.
attitudes that range from the adulation of Fauré and Carraud to the qualified
enthusiasm of Bruneau and Raymond Charpentier to the negativity of Adolphe
Boschot and Chantavoine. Although Chantavoine complains about various aspects
of Wagner’s music – it is dragging, overly repetitive and inconsistent in quality –
the most common object of criticism is the fundamental impropriety, above and
beyond the legal Convention, of any attempt to perform Parsifal outside of
Bayreuth. For both Hahn and Boschot it is a profanation that strips the opera of
its mystery and piety. Vuillermoz makes the same claim but in a more complex
manner. He acknowledges the inevitable loss of Parsifal ’s mystical aura upon being
transplanted to the Opéra, while simultaneously threatening to deflate this aura with
an apparently sarcastic reference to Mesmer’s theories of animal magnetism: ‘You
need so many climatic and atmospheric conditions, so many felicitous acquiescences
of a complicit nature for the mysterious fluid of the Beyond to propagate to our
nerves, for the air that we breathe suddenly to become a good conductor of the
natural electricity!’62
Like the article by his fellow Apache Vuillermoz, Ravel’s review of Parsifal,
which was published in Comœdia illustré on 20 January, also uses a bit of erudition
sarcastically to distinguish its point of view from that of cultish Wagnerians; even
after he admits never having been to Bayreuth, he is nevertheless happy to relay the
report that ‘Parsifal is performed there somewhat like the Eleusinian mysteries.’63 In
general, however, the article is quite positive. It divides into two parts: a historical
survey of Wagnerism and anti-Wagnerism in France, and a glowing review of
Parsifal ’s premiere at the Opéra. In the latter Ravel praises all the musicians –
the soloists, chorus, orchestra and conductor – but criticises the staging, which
he finds to be so conventional and literal that it detracts from the music’s tran-
scendent effect. He also steps beyond this production repeatedly to exalt Wagner
in various respects: ‘the genius of this great artist’ deserves recognition from
musicians and non-musicians alike; even if one were to separate Wagner’s music
from its accompanying texts (libretti, treatises, critical essays, etc.), it will still be
full of ‘charm and richness’; those, like Ravel, who opposed Wagnerian influence
in France, nevertheless cannot deny his ‘prodigious creativeness and profound
musicality’; in the case of Parsifal, the opera is ‘magic’, amounting to ‘four hours
of wonderful music’ whose highlights include the ‘marvelous Good Friday music’
and the ‘sublime’ redemption at the end.64
Once again, if we had not collated the comments Ravel actually made about
Wagner but merely relied on Orenstein’s claim that the two composers stood
‘light-years’ apart, we would probably be disoriented by Ravel’s effusive comments
about Parsifal. Roger Nichols, one of the few to have commented on this review,
wards off any potential disorientation by emphasising certain aspects of the first
half and downplaying the second. First, he argues that Ravel’s lengthy introduc-
tion about the history of Wagner in France makes it ‘obvious’ that the composer
was ‘not entirely comfortable’ in reviewing this music.65 He then gestures towards
the second half upon suggesting that Ravel’s ‘emotional reaction to Parsifal was
little different from that to the Tristan Prelude in 1896’, but he immediately over-
rides this suggestion by redirecting attention back to the first half.66 Here, Ravel
appears to be ‘convinced of the damage the Wagnerian influence had done to
French music’ and aware of the fact that ‘to him, technically and aesthetically,
Wagner had very little to say’.67
I do not dispute Nichols’s claim about Ravel’s discomfort. Indeed, the level of
equivocation in the first half of the review – as encapsulated in the oxymoronic
interjection ‘fortunately, alas!’ (heureusement, hélas!) that appears in the midst
of this section – borders on the extreme: Wagner’s vices may also be his virtues;
his music is both the instigator and the victim of the dilettantish commentary
(littérature) that surrounds it; musicians should have been the first to weigh in on
Wagner, but even if they had, they would not have recognised his worth; anti-
Wagnerism among the French was justified, but by now it has degenerated just
as much as Wagnerism; Parsifal is not as entertaining as Offenbach, but it is less
‘annoying’ than the Missa solemnis; and so forth.
Among Nichols’s claims, however, I am less satisfied with his conclusion that
‘technically and aesthetically, Wagner had very little to say’ to Ravel. I propose
instead that we interpret Ravel’s 1914 review of Parsifal as an expansion of the
first two sentences from his response to the 1909 enquête: the first half acknowl-
edges that there is ‘much too much to say’ about Wagner, while the second impels
us to ‘recognize in Wagner what he was above all else: a magnificent musician’. In
the first half, Ravel is not necessarily dismissing Wagnerian influence tout court, but
rather is criticising French imitation of Wagner; if only they had injected a goodly
amount of inspiration, lightness, levity and proportion into their ‘uninspired’,
‘heavy’, ‘sad’ and ‘disproportionate’ pieces, they would presumably have bene-
fited, rather than suffered, from this influence.68 Further, I do not think we need
to interpret the preamble in which Ravel provides a history of Wagner in France
and equivocates about his legacy as merely an indication of personal discomfort.
Rather, I would describe this section as a serious attempt by a critic deeply in-
vested in music and its reception history to lay some groundwork for any future
consideration of this phenomenon. In so doing he encounters an ambivalence
about the composer similar to that which many scholars still feel today. Moreover,
I find it more fruitful to attend closely to, rather than gloss over, the many posi-
tive comments Ravel makes about Wagner in this review, for, as we have seen,
they form part of a broader effort by Ravel to measure both the greatness and
the limitations of the German composer. Although Ravel’s ongoing feud with
d’Indy and the Société Nationale somewhat vitiates this effort, the following dis-
cussion of the ‘Passacaille’ from Ravel’s Trio seeks to redeem it.
69 Scott Messing has come to the same conclusion, although he does advance J.S. Bach’s Passacaglia
in C minor for organ as a somewhat plausible candidate. See Messing, Neoclassicism in Music, 50.
By calling the Passacaille another ‘Hommage à Rameau’, Vladimir Jankélévitch points towards
Debussy and his two medievalist sarabandes from Pour le piano and Images. See Jankélévitch,
Ravel (Paris, 1956), 44. In this essay I largely bypass the Debussyian middleman to focus on
a direct relation between Ravel and Wagner, who was the main musical inspiration for medie-
valism in Debussy, Satie and other fin-de-siècle composers.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 307
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context).
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Ex. 5: The Wehelaute from Wagner, Parsifal, Act I, ‘March to the Castle of the Grail’.
71 Ulrike Kienzle reminds us that Wagner’s Amfortas is ‘a perverted Christ figure’, since ‘he has
failed in his task of becoming a redeemer of the world’. See Kienzle, ‘Parsifal and Religion: A
Christian Music Drama?’, trans. Mary A. Cicora, in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed. William
Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, 2005), 94. The terms Heilandsklage and Wehelaute,
which have become standard for referring to these associative themes, originate in Hans von
Wolzogen, Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik des Parsifal, nebst einem Vorworte über den Sagenstoff
des Wagner’schen Dramas (Leipzig, 1882).
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 309
#˙ #œ œ œ œ w w
D [T] D T D T S D T
before giving way to a reprise of the A section (the march).72 Further com-
parison reveals other similarities: both have slow, processional tempi, with the
March marked ‘slow and solemn’ (langsam und feierlich) and the Passacaille set
to a ‘very broad’ (très large) quarter note ¼ 40; thematic pentatonicism is as
fundamental to the March (in its anticipation of the bell theme into which it
eventually flows) as it is to the Passacaille, and lends both an elemental and
primordial quality; the seemingly infinite, quintessentially Wagnerian cycling of
both the march and the Wehelaute themes back into themselves is matched by
the looping of the eight-bar passacaglia theme back into itself; in both pieces,
these circles are inscribed within a larger circuit that transports us from one
pole to its opposite – from the jaunty march to the anguished Wehelaute in the
Wagner piece, and from the sombre passacaglia theme to the similarly tortured
phrase 6 in the Ravel movement – and back again.73 Finally, as an instrumental
number, the March is well suited for emulation by an ensemble such as the
piano trio.
3. By assuming the March as its referent, the Passacaille is not only indebted to a specific
movement in Parsifal but pays homage to the opera as a whole.
One basis for this claim is the important role the March’s Wehelaute plays in
establishing the characteristic sound of the entire opera, as Robin Holloway
has persuasively argued.74 Another is the synecdochical relation of the March
to the overall plot of Parsifal. If we take the libretto at face value, the March
merely represents the journey that Parsifal and Gurnemanz make from the
72 Merely the arch-like Gestalt of the Passacaille would have brought Wagner to mind for many
listeners. Jules Champfleury and Hector Berlioz, who played an important role in the early
reception of Wagner in France, both noted his preference for this formal shape in their
responses to the 1860 premiere of his music in Paris. Berlioz, for example, described the
Lohengrin Prelude in a manner evocative of the Passacaille: ‘It’s actually a slow, immense
crescendo which, after having attained the highest degree of sonorous force, returns to its
point of departure, following the reverse path, and ends in an almost imperceptible, harmonious
murmur’ (C’est en réalité un immense crescendo lent, qui, après avoir atteint le dernier degré de
la force sonore, suivant la progression inverse, retourne au point d’où il était parti et finit dans
un murmure harmonieux presque imperceptible; Hector Berlioz, ‘Concerts de Richard Wagner,
la musique de l’avenir’, in A Travers chants, études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques (Paris,
1862), 291–303, at 296.) See also Jules Champfleury, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1860). Maurice
Kufferath borrows Berlioz’s resourceful technique of illustrating the musical Gestalt of the
Lohengrin Prelude in the text with a pair of angle brackets (< >), but he goes further to
apply it to the opening Prelude of Parsifal. He argues not only for an overall climax at the
Heilandsklage, but also for its autonomy as a piece of programme music, insofar as its motivic
sequence effectively summarises the plot of the entire opera. See Kufferath, Parsifal de Richard
Wagner. Légende-drama-partition (Paris, 1890), 224.
73 Baudelaire’s description of Wagner’s music as ‘prudently concatenated ’ can also be productively
applied to the Passacaille, whose phrases dovetail neatly into each other, despite the difference
in content from one to the next. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 47; emphasis his.
74 Robin Holloway, ‘Experiencing Music and Imagery in Parsifal ’, in Parsifal: Richard Wagner, ed.
Nicholas John, English National Opera Guide no. 34 (London, 1986), 23–41. After identifying
the Wehelaute as ‘the extraordinary sound that summons up Parsifal to anyone who has ever
heard it’ (32), he then chronicles the vicissitudes of this ‘central sonorous image’ across the
opera, concluding that it is ‘a sort of virus, that contaminates everything it touches, sates itself,
and works its way out’ (39). Gary Tomlinson, in turn, incorporates Holloway’s argument about
the Wehelaute into an even broader argument about commodity exchange in late capitalism in
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 136–9.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 311
forest surrounding the Castle to the Castle itself. However, in the sequence of
its associative themes – March, Wehelaute, Communion – the music marks the
stations of the hero’s journey, as well as our own. It carves a path that brings
us before the abject suffering of Amfortas, reveals it to be the human con-
dition, and inspires us to participate in the healing of this suffering and the
redemption of this sin. The Passacaille revises its putative model by omitting
the promise of redemption – possibly in order to fulfil it in the festive ‘Final’,
as I argue below.
Another way to relate the Passacaille to Parsifal is as a musical pendant to the
enthusiastic review he published in Comœdia illustré earlier that year. In this case
we can explain it as the recipient of various ideas he had had about the opera
but either did not fit into the review or occurred to him after he had completed
it. But we can also consider it to be the most direct way that one Tondichter could
pay homage to another: in tones, not words.
4. The Passacaille is not merely an homage to Parsifal, but also leads us on an imaginary
pilgrimage to Bayreuth.
Having admitted in his 1914 review that he had never actually been to Bayreuth,
Ravel creates the Passacaille as compensation and wish-fulfilment.75 According
to this fantastic scenario Ravel is Parsifal, Bayreuth is Monsalvat, and Wagner
is Amfortas lying at the centre of the Hall of the Grail Knights – an archetypal
figure who, like Tannhäuser and Tristan, has been wounded by desire.76 Ravel
would then have realised the cryptic remark with which Gurnemanz begins the
march by translating time into space – hence the ‘very broad’ (très large) stride
of every beat in the Passacaille.77 By the beginning of phrase 6 we can hear the
groans of Amfortas-Wagner, and by the beginning of phrase 7 our ears are
ringing with the climactic version of the secondary motive of the Passacaille,
whose dissonant harmonisation and gradual, three-octave descent bring to mind
Kundry’s scream.
5. The ultimate object of homage in the Passacaille is neither Parsifal nor the pilgrimage to
Bayreuth, but Wagner in his full, stereotypical glory.
No contemporary figure in fin-de-siècle Europe was more strongly associated with
the medieval and the legendary than Richard Wagner.78 Replete with Romantic
musical medievalisms (chant-like monophony, unmitigated parallel fifths, slow
tempo, lugubrious affect), the Passacaille has already manifested its Wagnerian
tendencies by the middle of its second phrase. Ravel’s handling of material in
the interior of the piece is also highly evocative of Wagner. While the first
appearance of the secondary motive in phrase 5 turns the music briefly towards
major, its recurrence brings a doleful chromaticism to phrase 6 and outright
anguish to phrase 7. The periodic return of a dirge within a slow, triple-meter
march is the hallmark of the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhäuser, whose recur-
ring B section laments the ‘burden of sin’ (der Sünden Last). The simultaneous
combination of the form of Tannhäuser with the sound of Parsifal elevates the
reference in the Passacaille beyond any particular opera, aiming instead at the
unique essence of Wagner’s contribution to Western music.79
Resonances with Parsifal also occur in music by Ravel that predates the Trio. A
clue can be found in a comment Vladimir Jankélévitch makes at the end of his
Ravel book about the final chorus in L’Enfant, which he finds to convey ‘the
supreme message of innocence: gracious redemption through pity, the infinite
value of a charitable impulse’.81 Jankélévitch does not mention Parsifal – and
probably never would, given his deep aversion to Wagner – but it is difficult not
to notice when its moral is being paraphrased, wittingly or no. In addition, the
connection he makes in the same paragraph between the chorus of L’Enfant and
the Daybreak (Lever du jour) from Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12) is productive for our
enquiry, insofar as it prompts us to ask a general question: if Daphnis resembles
L’Enfant, and L’Enfant resembles Parsifal, might Daphnis resemble Parsifal ? A
cursory comparison between the two reveals some rather conventional similarities:
both have a tripartite division, with Parsifal falling into three Acts and Daphnis into
three ‘parts’ ( parties), and both follow an ABA’ format in which the A’ section
returns to the same setting and cast of characters from which the B section
departed (Klingsor’s Castle in Parsifal, and the Pirates’ Camp in Daphnis).
A more unusual resemblance between Parsifal and Daphnis is their shared em-
plotment of nature’s reawakening at the beginning of the third and final part,
with the Good Friday Music (Karfreitagszauber) in Wagner’s opera corresponding to
the Daybreak in Ravel’s ballet. This observation brings us back to Jankélévitch’s
comment, which, in assimilating the Daybreak to the final chorus from L’Enfant,
also associates it with the Parsifalian message of the latter, ‘gracious redemp-
tion through pity’. In order to explore the possibility of a meaningful affiliation
between the Daybreak and the Good Friday Music – the famous excerpt from
Parsifal that Ravel proclaimed in his review to be ‘marvelous’ – I have juxtaposed
central passages from these pieces in Examples 7 and 8. As we can see, both
incorporate lush textures and soaring melodies into a major, triple-meter context,
as is common for pastoral music.82 In addition, both emphasise the second beat in
a manner evocative of the sarabande; while the dance’s calling card – the dotted
quarter note on beat two – only appears in the interior of the fourth and ninth
bars of the Daybreak excerpt, this rhythm has nevertheless been reverberating in
the listener’s inner ear since the tutti climax that began the movement (rehearsal
157) and spawned its primary theme, and will recur in even more dazzling fashion
at its conclusion (rehearsal 168).83
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definition so little Ravelian! By the same token, certain effects seem too easy to anticipate, such
as the interlude of the final tableau, this swarming and charming description of daybreak in
which groups of nine triplet quavers [in the piano-vocal reduction, not the orchestral score]
burble above a broad melody. It evokes Siegfried’s forest so indiscreetly that we actually
feel queasy when we do not hear the expected entrance of the Forest Bird’ [‘Telle effusion
mélodique, tel fragment expressif surprennent par leur facilité et leur ‘‘gemuth’’ [sic] si peu
raveliste par definition! Certains effets semblent également trop peu imprévus, tel l’interlude du
dernier tableau, cette grouillante et charmante description du lever du jour où gazouillent des
groupes de neuf triples croches au-dessus d’une large mélodie, et qui évoque si indiscrètement
la forêt de Siegfried qu’on éprouve un véritable malaise à ne pas entendre entrer le thème
attendu de l’Oiseau.’] Gauthier-Villars, Review of Daphnis et Chloé, in Collection des plus beaux
numéros de ‘Comœdia illustré’ et des programmes consacrés aux Ballets et Galas Russes, depuis le début à
Paris, 1909–1921, ed. Maurice de Brunoff and Jacques de Brunoff (Paris, c.1922), n.p.
The Passion of the Passacaille: Ravel, Wagner, Parsifal 315
“”
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Ex. 9: The Median cadence (bb. 32–5) in the ‘Danse religieuse’ from Ravel, Daphnis et
Chloé.
The most striking element shared between Examples 7 and 8, however, is the
use of the same half-diminished seventh chord on E# to interrupt the flow of the
music – a gesture of negation that epitomises the Wagnerian sound from Tristan
on.84 The dissonance and chromaticism of this chord in both contexts help to
represent the sudden intrusion of a painful memory into consciousness. In Parsifal
it marks Gurnemanz’s recollection of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday,85 and
in Daphnis it marks the hero’s recollection of Chloe’s violent abduction by the
pirates, both of which are soon mitigated by subsequent events: Gurnemanz’s
narrative about Christ’s redemption of humanity through his self-sacrifice, and
Chloe’s reunion with Daphnis.86 However, from a broader symbolic perspective –
one which implicates the listener as a sympathetic participant – the chordal intru-
sion can feel to us as if we were suddenly recalling, and even re-experiencing, the
original fall from grace.87 Accordingly, the resumption of the D major music soon
thereafter feels like the miraculous restoration of paradise – or, to quote Jankélé-
vitch, a ‘gracious redemption’. This interpretation also calls to our attention the
similarity of the Grail motive to the median cadence in the opening ‘Danse reli-
gieuse’ of Daphnis (Ex. 9); the fact that it attains the pure diatonicism of the
Dresdener Amen in its final bars only sweetens the achievement. Instead of over-
looking this similarity or dismissing it as mere coincidence, we can now appreciate
it as a potential invitation by Ravel to view the ballet through the lens of Parsifal.
84 The Good Friday Music takes place in two keys: B major and D major, respectively. I chose
to excerpt the latter because, in comparison to the former, it is more similar to the passage
from Daphnis in four respects: tonally (both are in D major), harmonically (their punctuating
dissonances are identical), formally (both are reprises), and rhythmically (they progress quickly
to their dissonant harmonies, unlike the passage in B major).
85 The dotted rhythm in the timpani that follows in the wake of the dissonant harmony on E# is
presumably a reference to the ‘Figure of Pain’ (Schmerzensfigur) at the centre of the Communion
theme. The percussive motif appeared at the end of the Act III Prelude (apparently to quash
the Prophecy Motif and its promise of salvation), while the Figur sounded most recently at
Parsifal’s previous outburst (‘O Wehe! Des höchsten Schmerzentags!’) during the Good Friday
Music.
86 The half-diminished seventh chord is, after all, the harmony that sets their Love Theme – in
homage to Tristan, perhaps – and the one based on E# appears in the middle (bb. 17–18) of the
ballet’s Introduction.
87 By imputing a musical dimension to Gurnemanz’s narrative about Good Friday as a ‘day of
pain’ (Schmerzentag), I part ways with Alain Patrick Olivier, who finds no representation of pain
in the music during this episode in Parsifal. See Olivier, ‘Commentaire musical et littéraire’, in
Parsifal, Wagner, L’avant-scène opéra, 213 (Paris, 2003), 82.
316 Michael J. Puri
antithesis is the moment of transition between the Passacaille and the Final, when
the dark night of the former gives way to the ethereal dawn music that begins the
latter. One way to understand this transition is as a musical re-enactment of the
historical reaction that Ravel asserted in his March 1912 concert review, where
he described post-Romantic French composers as beating a ‘peaceful retreat’
from Wagner and his violent expressivity. Along similar lines, the playful opening
measures of the Final make it an excellent candidate for Nietzsche’s ‘Mediterra-
nean music’, which, as previously discussed, he conceived to be the antidote to
Wagner’s operas: a ‘mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial
art that, like a bright flame, blazes into an unclouded sky!’
The qualities of Nietzsche’s ‘Mediterranean music’ turn our thoughts once
again to the dandy. This character first makes its presence felt in the Trio at the
end of the first movement, where he pronounces his ‘last word’ with a surprising
swerve into a C Lydian, ‘distant’ (lointain) pianissimo version of the primary theme
in the coda. The subsequent three movements, in turn, showcase the ‘dandy’s
interruption’ at the level of the suite, with the penitent and anguished Passacaille
interrupting the ‘mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled’ tenor of its surround-
ing movements, the Pantoum and the Final. As with all dialectical instances of
this trope, however, the section that follows the interruption as its conclusion
and resolution actually contains the seeds of its own undoing. In advancing from
the Passacaille into the Final we have not transcended Wagnerism but exchanged
one of its modes for another. To appropriate, once again, the language Ravel
applied to Wagner in the March 1912 concert review, the ‘passionate suffering’ in
the middle of the Passacaille is followed by the ‘passionate joy’ of the climactic
secondary theme in the Final. Admittedly, the theme does not sound like some-
thing Wagner would have composed. Nevertheless, with its high, fortissimo trills
in the strings, thunderous pianism and Fauvist harmonic juxtapositions, it is a
‘roaring outburst of pagan vitality’ that can stand toe to toe with any comparable
passage in Wagner. After all, it is a virtual facsimile of the climactic theme from
one of the shining examples of pagan vitality in French musical Modernism –
namely, the bacchanale that ends Daphnis.
that Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes envisioned for their artistic enterprise;91 with
regard to the Trio, the Parisian premiere of Parsifal, which Ravel reviewed enthu-
siastically for Comœdia illustré, took place right before he began to compose the
piece.
These two circumstantial reasons may be compelling, but they only paint part
of the picture. Instead, I prefer to view Ravel’s musical and critical engagement
with Wagner around 1909 as the consequence of a surge in professional ambition,
which also manifested itself in his assumption of new identities as a concert
reviewer and organiser. Moreover, it promised to mitigate the perception that he
could only compose small-scale, unserious works.92 Even more fundamental, it
helped to fulfil his ardent desire for continual growth as an artist. As he argued
in his 1928 lecture titled ‘Contemporary Music’, exposure to external influences,
especially those originating outside one’s national music, expands the ‘horizon of
the aspiring artist’ by providing new means of ‘emotional expression’ and paths
for creative exploration.93 He mentions Wagner as a central case but, to our
surprise, casts him as the recipient of influence (by Liszt) rather than its source.
Although Ravel may well have intended this comment simultaneously to rattle
the common sense of his audience and take the German down a peg or two, I
would rather interpret it as an attempt to bring out the softer side of Wagner. By
this I mean that we view Wagner neither as a ‘giant’ living in the ‘palace’ of his
Valhalla-like oeuvre, nor as a transcendent genius – isolated in his originality,
untouched by worldly considerations, and unbending in purpose, hammering out
leitmotivic music in his study just like Siegfried reforging the shattered Nothung
in his cave – but rather as an impressionable artist of his time who was shaped by
his contemporaries just as much as he shaped them. It is also primarily a softer,
Parsifalian aspect of Wagner’s ‘emotional expression’ that filters into Ravel’s work,
as exemplified by the heartbreaking sounds of suffering in the Passacaille and the
heartwarming hymn to redemption in the Daybreak. But the softest touch of
all may have been Ravel’s, who wove Wagnerian strands so dexterously into his
music that, for the past one hundred years, no one has been the wiser.
91 For further discussion of the relation between the collaborative ideal of the Ballets Russes and
Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, see Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York, 1989), 45.
92 Pierre Lalo, in particular, harped on these points. Although it postdates the composition of
Daphnis, his review of the 19 May 1911 premiere of L’Heure espagnole is highly apropos here; in it
he describes the opera as the Ring cycle ‘viewed through a microscope’. For a useful survey of
attitudes towards Ravel in the press of his time, see Christian Goubault, La Critique musicale dans
la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva, 1984), 400–8.
93 Ravel, ‘Contemporary Music’, 44.