'We have to let him know we're here': on writing a life for Maurice Ravel
This book began twenty-one years and half my life ago. I was 21, vaguely contemplating a PhD in French music, had never travelled to Europe. I cannot now remember what, or who, prompted me to send a fax (a fax!) to the Fondation Ravel in Montfort-l’Amaury, asking if they happened to have any work for a young Australian with high-school French. But a fax came back, churning out of the machine in my Dad’s office. Yes, I was welcome to come to Montfort: the Ravel museum had been closed for major renovations but was set to reopen at the end of the summer; I could help put it all back together, and some friends of the Fondation would be delighted to host me for a couple of months.
And so I took the train from the Gare Montparnasse to Montfort-l’Amaury. The friends of the Fondation turned out to be a truly remarkable elderly couple: he was an old aristocrat; she was half-American, from a family of oil magnates. Arnaud collected sixteenth-century editions of Vitruvius, and his slightly-better-than-usual lunchtime tipple was the 1982 Bordeaux. When he took me to restaurants in Paris – they had a flat on the rue de l’Université, in the 7e – he would simply ask the waiter, on arrival, for ‘a bottle of the best Bordeaux, s’il vous plaît…’ (The Quatuor Ysaÿe used to practice in the music room of that flat. Every time I hear the first Razumovsky quartet I can still see – and smell – that room, with its big, always-fresh vase of liliums.) Arnaud would tease me endlessly about being an ’uncultured Australian’, particularly when I wore anything that exposed my midriff. But I also remember sitting with him to watch the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the liberation of Paris, bereft of his usual irony, tearing up as he told me what it felt like to be eighteen years old in 1944, dancing on the roofs of cars jammed around the Arc de Triomphe.
In return for their hospitality, I worked part-time in Arnaud’s library, checking every detail on every card of his typewritten catalogue against the leather- and vellum-bound tomes. (This, I now realise, was unexpectedly useful preparation for dealing, later on, with the rows of pre-digital and equally idiosyncratic card catalogues at the Bibliothèque nationale.) But most days I spent at Le Belvédère, Ravel’s home from 1921 until his death. The major work of the renovation was done: the house had been gutted, repainted, rewired, replumbed. I had arrived just in time for the delightful task of putting it back together again. Box after box emerged from storage, all full of fascinating objects that needed to be unpacked and carefully replaced, according to positions meticulously notated in a series of scrappy, lined notebooks. We returned the silverware to neat rows on the shelves, the books to the library, the ornaments to the piano, the shaving equipment above the basin, the dressing gown behind the bathroom door. I remember tearing up when I unwrapped his glasses – they felt so fragile and so intimate – and, another day, giggling helplessly when the last layer of newspaper came away and I realised I was holding his chamber pot.
I swept floors, dusted books, scrubbed the sink and the toilet. Played the piano a lot. Sat on the balcony and talked to people, including a few older residents who could just remember calling out ‘Bonjour Monsieur Ravel!’ when they saw him working in his garden, seven decades earlier. I listened to L’Enfant et les sortilèges on a battered CD player, sitting on the floor of Ravel’s dining room, turning the pages of his copy of the piano score, borrowed from its proper place on his work desk. I learned Miroirs at his piano, played ‘La Vallée des cloches’ over and over again one wet afternoon, listening to how every bell sounded different on that lovely straight-strung Erard.
And then we were done, and the museum reopened. I kept cleaning, but started doing some of the tours too. Claude Moreau, the curator, would always pass the anglophone visitors to me; increasingly she pushed me to give the French tours too. My French got better, fast.
Claude was the patron saint of Le Belvédère. Then in her mid-seventies, she was small and stocky, her face soft and deeply lined, ‘une paysanne!’ (a peasant), she declared, and proud of it. She drove – somewhat haphazardly, it must be said – a little, beaten-up white Peugeot, uniquely recognisable in this chichi village of Volvos and BMWs: I vividly recall the driver of one such vehicle, attempting to turn the wrong way into the rue Maurice Ravel, winding down his window to instruct her to get her ‘rotten little car’ (‘votre voiture pourrie!’) out of his way.
Claude was passionately devoted to Ravel. Every morning, unlocking the doors and opening the shutters of Le Belvédère, she would call out ‘Salut, petit Maurice!’ (‘we have to let him know we’re here’, she’d add). Her house, at the bottom of the hill, was a treasure trove of Raveliana: scrapbooks of newspaper articles, CDs, books, pictures, objects akin to those Ravel had loved, even one of his doors. The door to the tiny steep staircase that led into the garden of Le Belvédère had needed replacing, so Claude took the old one home with her, restored it, mounted it on her wall and behind it painted a trompe l’œil image of the straight descending stair. She was certain that Ravel would have approved of this.
It was because of Claude that Ravel became a real person to me. Not just because she would speak of him as though he’d just nipped down for a drink in the Place de l’Église, but because, through her, I felt I was kind of living in Le Belvédère too. I came from so far away, and I was so young. I did not have, I now realise, an intuitive sense of place, the native understanding that I see in some of my colleagues who grew up, live and work in the same landscapes as the artists whom they play and study. I had to learn what it felt like to inhabit these spaces.
It wasn’t just negotiating the same steep turns of the stairs, sitting on the same balcony, in the same chairs and gazing over the same view, playing the same piano, hearing French voices echoing down Ravel’s hall and in his garden. It was also the play of light on the wheat field on the hill across the way. It was the particular chime of the church bells, the texture of the stones in the ruins of the fifteenth-century castle on the hill above the house; the different birdsong and the spring of the grasses in the nearby forest of Rambouillet; the distance, on foot, to the next village. (Montfort was where I first saw deer and hare, and first stumbled into a bed of nettles.)
And it was Claude, cigarette in hand, leaning on Ravel’s balcony rail, bitching about snobbish locals; Claude’s kitchen, with the window opening directly onto the street, the big country sink, the plate of cheese on the benchtop, flies crawling over the cloche. It was Claude telling me stories about growing up in nearby Versailles (the working-class part, she would stress). She had been a dancer as a child, remembered dancing in a Ravel ballet aged six; still had a faint, lingering hope that maybe he might have been there and seen her. (It was 1936, the year before he died; she knew he almost certainly wasn’t.) For the first time, Ravel became not just a pile of scores but a presence, fallible, exasperating and rather comical, spoken of not just with reverence – there was that too, of course – but with affection, humour and the occasional eyeroll.
I never thought I’d write his biography, though. I went home, did the PhD, wrote a book on the operas and a few big articles; he permeated bits of the subsequent book on the mélodie, and then I reckoned I was done, more or less. But the publisher’s email came when the mélodie book was essentially finished and I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. I nearly said no, straight off. I’d never written a biography, never wanted to. I worried I was too deep in the musicological weeds, and too imbued by the memories of that summer to write a good life-and-works. I didn’t want to write a hagiography.
And yet… I like Ravel a lot. His friends adored him, even when he drove them nuts. He was the sort of man who had the sort of friends he could drive nuts. I thought about other things, too. Like the fact that there had been no English-language biography of Ravel written by a woman since 1940. That his two most influential anglophone biographers had both begun writing about him half a century ago. I wondered whether I did have something new to say. It would, perhaps, be a good test of my writing, a different kind of storytelling for a different kind of audience. It was late 2021, still pandemic time. Writing had become the act that was keeping me sane.
There was a new book out, a magnificent, comprehensive collection of all Ravel’s known letters and other writings. His words were suddenly richly and wholly available, an abundance no previous biographer had enjoyed. It was all there, the prosaic, the banal and mundane, the letters that hadn’t been nearly interesting or important enough to make their way into the earlier collections. Flicking through the volume again, I knew I wanted to quote Ravel, somewhere along the Mississippi in 1928, pestering his brother about buying a particular new vacuum cleaner for Le Belvédère. I wanted the letter he dashed off just before the première of the Rite of Spring, when he was helping Stravinsky sort out his accommodation, suggesting a hotel neighbouring his own apartment on the Avenue Carnot: ‘That way’, he added, ‘we can exchange “courtesies” from our balconies in our pyjamas’. I loved this. What better counterpart to that epoch-making première then two blokes saluting each other in their jammies the next morning, coffees in hand, just along from the Étoile? It was this quotidian voice that I realised I could try to capture, the cadence of the everyday. And I found this mattered to me because I had shared those cadences, in a vague and distant kind of way, for just a little while.
After that summer of 2004 ended, I stayed with Claude off and on for a few months in her marvellous, chaotic little house. Then I went home. For years afterwards, whenever I was in Paris I would trek out to Montfort-l’Amaury to see her, sometimes calling in advance, sometimes just turning up on her doorstep. I would cook for us and we would carry everything out to the garden and drink rosé under the apple tree. And then I moved to the UK, got married, had a baby. We crossed the Channel less often after that. We brought our daughter twice to Montfort, in toddlerhood, but increasingly life – school terms, a second child, a new job – got in the way. There was a new mayor in Montfort, some nasty local politics. Claude was pushed out of her beloved job at the Musée Ravel. She grew older; eventually her body, and then her mind, began to fail her.
Claude died in January 2024, in a nursing home close to Montfort. I was about to submit the final manuscript of the biography when the email came; the draft of the acknowledgements was open on my screen. I rewrote them. But I had already known what I was going to say: that if this book had one aim, it was to make Ravel feel alive for its readers, as Claude had brought him to life for me. We have to let him know we’re here.
The book is Maurice Ravel, published by Reaktion (London), available here and through all the usual sources.
