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Maurice Ravel
French composer
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The best-known examples of Ravel music include: operas L'heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments); the ballets Daphnis et Chloé and Boléro; orchestral works such as Pavane pour un infante défunte (Pavan for a Dead Infanta), Rapsodie espagnole, and La Valse; piano music such as the impressionistic Jeux d'eaux, the suites Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, Valses nobles et sentimentales; and Le tombeau de Couperin (The Tomb of Couperin); chamber music; and songs.
Maurice Ravel,
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris.
Photo of Maurice Ravel at the piano, circa
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris.
Portrait of Maurice Ravel at the piano, around
Source: United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.
Ravel at the piano during his American tour. The woman sitting with him at the piano is the Canadian singer Éva Gauthier, who put on this soirée to celebrate Ravel's birthday (7 March ). Third from right (standing) is the conductor-composer Manoah Leide-Tedesco. At the far right is the American composer George Gershwin.
(PD image.)
A casual Maurice Ravel in his home in Montfort-l'Amaury in
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris.
Maurice Ravel on the balcony of his home at Montfort-l'Amaury (around )/
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris.
Maurice Joseph Ravel
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Portrait Of Maurice Ravel
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Choreographer Nijinsky And Composer
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Chloe Abandoned, Design For A Ballet
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Set Design For A Ballets Russes
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Set Design For Act II Of A Ballet
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Costume Design For A Ballets Russes
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Michel Fokine, Russian Ballet Dancer
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Set Design For A Ballets Russes #3
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Scenery And Costumes Of The Ballets #1
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Maurice Ravel
French composer (–)
"Ravel" redirects here. For other uses, see Ravel (disambiguation).
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March – 28 December ) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the s and s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé () require skilful balance in performance.
Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; ot .