ΜΩΡΙΣ ΡΑΒΕΛ - ΡΙΚΑΡΝΤΟ ΒΙΝΙΕΣ 2

Ραβέλ -Βίνιες

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Benjamin Ivry: Maurice Ravel. A Life
Birth to Conservatory (1875-1899)
Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, a small village in the Basque region of France, separated from the city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz by the Nivelle River. The first thirty-five years of the life of his mother, Marie Delouart, are a near-total blank. She was apparently born in the Basque region and spent some time in Spain, where she met Ravel's father. Biographers found that locals of Saint-Jean-de-Luz did nor recall her being born there, and Manuel de Falla praised her knowledge of Spanish, which indicates that he did not take her to be a natural speaker of the language. But she would sing Spanish folk songs to Maurice, and these were a later inspiration for his work.
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Regional guides claim Ravel as a Basque composer, and he would frequently return to his birthplace in later life. The seven provinces of the region are shared between France and Spain (three in France and four in Spain), and Ravel was attached to his native land, with its majestic mountain scenery and wiry, tough peasants. The Basque region is known for the sport of pelota, bullfighting, and a tradition of witchcraft and demonology. In 1608 Pierre de Lancre, a judge from Bordeaux, was named by Henri IV to investigate the troubling abundance of witches that "contaminated" the Basque country. De Lancre's report revealed that sorceries were one way of expressing forbidden sexuality: the devil, when having sex with boys or girls, "took as much pleasure in sodomy as in the most ordered and natural voluptuousness." Male witnesses admitted performing sodomy "to please the devil," often with male relatives, one Basque man saying he did so "often in a passive way with [the Devil], often actively with other warlocks." Judges decided that the Basque witnesses did not really believe in the devil, but simply desired to commit adultery and sodomy, "and so they gathered, and the naughtiest one among them pretended to be Satan."
Ravel was very Basque in his use of sorcery as sexual camouflage, returning obsessively to the theme of witchcraft as a source of inspiration. In public and even among most of his friends, Ravel suppressed his sexual desires and used witchcraft as his forefathers had, as an emotional safety valve and a way of expressing forbidden feelings. So long as his parents lived, according to friends who were aware of Ravel's homosexuality, he could not permit himself to express his true nature.
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When he was twelve years old, Maurice met another youngster who would be a close friend, the pianist Ricardo Viñes. Later described by Francis Poulenc as a "strange hidalgo," Viñes was a brilliant keyboard artist, much interested in romantic literature; he lent Maurice books like Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit. Viñes described the young Ravel as looking "like a Florentine page, standing straight and stiff, with bangs and flowing black hair.... His delicate Basque face with its pure profile was graceful and thin atop his slender neck and narrow shoulders."
Ravel and Viñes spent hours leaning over the balcony of the Ravel family apartment on the rue Pigalle, overlooking a café where artists would gather and models would flirt with them. The boys tried to guess which model would wind up with which artist, and this early sexual sophistication belies the impression given in some biographies that Ravel was a lifelong innocent. Leaning over a balcony voyeuristically would become a typical Ravel pose, and a number of photos show the adult composer watching what is going on below, while keeping his distance from the action.
A portrait of Maurice from this time shows curly hair and large liquid eyes that might seem exaggerated if we did not know from photos that his eyes were indeed that liquidly expressive. Maurice was clearly considered the beauty of the family, taking after his mother; a portrait of Edouard, made about this time, shows a stolid, potato-faced youngster. Ravel's satisfaction in his own appearance would develop into time-consuming narcissism.
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Ravel drew some elements of his persona as dandy from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as translated by Baudelaire. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that Baudelaire's myth of the dandy conceals not homosexuality, but exhibitionism. Yet Oscar Wilde and other gay writers advanced a tradition of the androgynous dandy. The essayist Jules Lemaître noted, "The dandy has something against nature, something androgynous with which he can endlessly seduce."
Huysmans called another of Ravel's favorite books, the novel A rebours, "vaguely clerical, a bit pederastic," and its chief character, des Esseintes, a "Christian and pederast, impotent man and unbeliever." The effeminate des Esseintes provided a role model to a generation of aesthetes and dandies who, like him, retired to their neurotic collections of books and artworks. Viñes once referred to Ravel's "mixture of medieval Catholicism and satanic impiety," which is closer to a description of des Esseintes than to the agnostic Ravel.
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In autumn 1897, Ravel was offered a job teaching music in Tunisia, which he turned down in order to stay close to his family and friends. Not going to North Africa meant opportunities missed for personal development and for a full investigation of Arab themes. Ravel's fascination with such subjects was always at a remove. Undiluted experience with the Arab world might not have offered him the artificiality he craved.
One danger of real contacts with North Africa was illustrated by Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré's teacher, who was plagued by blackmailing letters from North African men he paid, apparently too little, for sex. Saint-Saëns received a series of such letters, like one in 1893 from a young Algierian named Victor Dumesnil: "Maybe there are pederasts of your kind in Paris whom you support with bits of bread, but it won't be the same with me.... You're a liar, a thief, and a pederast." Ravel would avoid this kind of experience, common at the time.
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The same year, 1898, saw his first work written for full orchestra, the overture, Shéhérazade. The 1001 Nights provided for the composer an atmosphere of Eastern sexual liberation, among other things. A number of stories in the collection joke about homosexuality, particularly the comic pederast Abu Nuwas, also one of the great Arab poets, while other characters like to "eat both figs and pomegranates," a metaphor for bisexuality. Gérard Pirlot has written about Sheherazade's essential "perversity," using words to achieve unconscious occult powers at night. Talking all night, Sheherezade saved herself and a king who was wounded by a wife's infidelity with a "well-hung black slave more viril than he," Pirlot explains, "on whom he projects fantasies of passive homosexuality." As for Ravel, he would tell friends, "I only begin to live at night," and as a nocturnal creature, he used music for some of the magical purposes Sheherezade aimed at with words. (…)
On March 5, 1898, Ravel had his public début as a composer with a performance of Sites Auriculaires at a concert sponsored by the Société Nationale de Musique. Reading from the score, the performers Viñes and Marthe Dron came to grief during the technically challenging Entre cloches section. Another significant premiere followed in April, when Viñes played the Menuet antique in a recital of new music. Fauré occasionally took his students along to posh salons, like that of Madame René de Saint-Marceaux, where Debussy, André Messager, and Vincent d'Indy were also present. Madame de Saint-Marceaux mused over the impassive Ravel in her diary: "Is he pleased to hear his music? You cannot tell. What an odd fellow." Ravel was once obliged to improvise at the piano when the American dancer Isadora Duncan performed, an experience he did not enjoy. In August 1898, Ravel wrote to Madame de Saint-Marceaux, referring to himself as a "musical Alcibiades." The French historian Henry Houssaye described Alcibiades as a lovely young man surrounded by perverse male friends who wanted to have sex with him, but he only accepted love from one man, Socrates. Ravel, in referring to himself as Alcibiades, or "Alkibiade," as he spelled it, did not specify who his Socrates was. But his favorite Du Dandysme et de George Brummel stated that dandies were "Androgynes of history, no longer of Fable, among whom Alcibiades was the most beautiful." (nytimes.com)

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Κουίζ: Ποιος είναι ο εικονιζόμενος ισπανός συνθέτης για τον οποίον οι φήμες λένε, και δυστυχώς σε πολλές περιπτώσεις είναι τα μόνα «ιστορικά ντοκουμέντα» που έχουμε στη διάθεσή μας, ότι υπήρξε το τρίτο πρόσωπο σε ένα σύντομο συναισθηματικό (και ερωτικό;) τρίγωνο με τον Ραβέλ και τον Βίνιες;