Ravel's Politics

Abstract

In memoirs that tell of her studies and visits with Maurice Ravel, the pianist Henriette Faure gave a chapter to “Les Affaires Ravel,” three incidents in his life that spawned a flurry of press attention and notoriety, on a par, she writes, with the controversy surrounding Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal. She discusses his elimination after the preliminary round of the 1905 concours for the Prix de Rome; the derision with which Histoires naturelles was received by some in 1907; and his rejection of the ruban of the Légion d'honneur in 1920.1 Recalling the last event, Faure describes a newsreel reporting Ravel's refusal to be decorated that caused a sensation during an intermission at an Opéra performance, as well as lively debates among Conservatoire students about his actions. Although her comparison to the crucibles experienced by Flaubert and Baudelaire seems somewhat overblown, these episodes in Ravel's life have always assumed a prominent place in biographical writing, undoubtedly because in some measure, they conform to an attractive narrative archetype pitting the independent, brilliant, and uncompromising artist against a dull and thick establishment. Or almost. By the time of the Légion d'honneur incident, some may indeed have thought that the “establishment” had met its comeuppance in the disdain of the now successful, yet still iconoclastic, composer. But for many, Ravel actually was the establishment by this time. Witness Erik Satie's famous squib about Ravel refusing the ruban even though “all of his music accepts it.”2 Or Jean Cocteau's derision in the preface to Le Coq et l'arlequin (1918) of composers who practice “paradox and eclecticism” and who manifest “a smile and withered elegance.”3 Ravel goes unnamed in Cocteau's tract, but almost certainly not unheeded.