Ravel Ma mère l’oye
Martha Argerich & Daniel Barenboim
Musical Performance Duo 0Maurice Ravel’s beloved evocation of what he called the “poetry of childhood” in Ma mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”) is usually encountered in its orchestral guise, but the piece actually began in 1908 as a suite for piano duet, which is the version we hear in this performance by long-time friends Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim. Scenarios involving childlike fantasy form a recurring theme in Ravel’s oeuvre, and the fairy tales he selected from Charles Perrault’s 1697 anthology (and a few other French sources) offered the ideal spur to his imagination. The childless composer wrote the piano duet for two children he had befriended—their parents held a salon that attracted some of Paris’s most intriguing artistic figures—and took obvious joy in giving voice to such characters as Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Beauty and the Beast & Co. Yet, remarks Ravel’s biographer Gerald Larner, Ma mère l’Oye contains “at least as much adult nostalgia as childish joy.”
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Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Ma mère l’oye Five Children’s Pieces for Piano Duet (1910)
I. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane). Lent II. Petit Poucet ((Little Tom Thumb). Très modéré III. Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas). Mouvement de marche IV. Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast). Mouvement de Valse très modéré V. Le Jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden). Lent et grave |
Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Piano
Maurice Ravel had a special affinity for children, often finding their company more congenial than that of adults. Perhaps it was his small physical size. Perhaps it was the natural directness and spontaneity of children that appealed to him. But when Ravel was inspired by the worldview of a child it is always one that is remembered: the world we encounter in Ma Mère l’oye or in his enchanting opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges is one tinged with an adult sense of something precious that has been lost. “Ravel succeeded again and again, as perhaps no one else has but the Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen, in finding the rare language of fairy tales to build insubstantial bridges of fantasy between reality and imagination, and in understanding how to reconcile the highly sophisticated with the most naïve,” writes the composer’s biographer H. H. Stuckenschmidt.
Ma Mère l’Oye is dedicated to Jean and Mimie Godebski, the children of Ravel’s good friends Ida and Cipa Godebski, whom he looked after (along with their English governess) during the summer of 1908 while their parents were away. Apparently the first piece, “Pavane,” was composed at that time, but the remaining four were not written until 1910. Years later Mimie remembered, “Ravel used to tell me marvelous stories. I would sit on his knee and indefatigably he would begin ‘Once upon a time…’ And it was Laideronnette, Beauty and the Beast and above all the adventures of a poor mouse he had made up for me.” The composer hoped Mimie and her brother would give the first performance, but “the idea filled me with cold terror,” she recalled. “Despite lessons from Ravel I use to freeze to such an extent that the idea had to be abandoned.” The work premiered at the first concert given by the Société Musicale Indépendante on April 20, 1910 when it was played by 11-year-old Jeanne Leleu (later Prix de Rome winner and a professor at the Conservatoire) and Geneviève Durony, who was 14.
The suite takes its title from Charles Perrault, whose work also contributed headings to the first two pieces, “Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane) and “Petit Poucet” (Tom Thumb).
In the score for the second piece, Ravel included a quote from Perrault’s story: “He thought he would be able to find the path easily by means of the bread he had strewn wherever he walked. But he was quite surprised when he was unable to find a single crumb; the birds had come and eaten them all.” This sense of wandering is conveyed by the lines of meandering eighth notes in shifting meter.
“Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes” (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas, sometimes translated as Ugly Princess of the Pagodas) is based on the story The Green Serpent by the Countess d’Aulnoy, in which a princess is cursed with ugliness until she marries a large green snake – after which she is transformed into a beauty and the snake becomes a handsome prince. The quotation Ravel uses in the score describes Laideronnette in her bath being serenaded by “toy mandarins and mandarinesses… Some had theorbos made from walnut shells, some had viols made from almond shells; for the instruments had to be of a size appropriate to their own.”
The idea of love transforming ugliness into beauty is also central to the fourth piece, “Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête“ (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast), based on the story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. The beginning of the number with its slow, expressive waltz is so suggestive of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies that Ravel, perhaps impishly, said Satie was its “grand-papa.” But Beauty’s elegant waltz is confronted by the Beast’s growling in the bass line, which becomes more and more insistent until Beauty surrenders in a sweeping glissando.
The work concludes with “Le Jardin Féerique” (The Fairy Garden), an idea of Ravel’s own. Beginning with almost hymn-like solemnity, it grows increasingly ecstatic, tonally painting a picture of a truly wondrous, Edenic place.
—Paul Thomason
Notes originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the concert of Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim on December 23, 2017.
Piano
Daniel Barenboim
Martha Argerich
Audio Producer
Friedemann Engelbrecht
Sound
Julian Schwenkner
Video Technicians
Markus Genge
Piet Grotelüschen
Camera
Michael Boomers (DOP)
Thomas Falk
Winfried Hermann
Martin Roth
Volker Striemer
Jan Lehmann
Lighting Technician
Oliver Kühns
Editor
Peter Klum
Unit Manager
Valentina Schneck
Head of Production Salve TV
Karl-Martin Lötsch
UNITEL
Video Director
Eric Schulz
Producer
Magdalena Herbst
Production Manager
Franziska Pascher
Post-Production Manager
Roger Voß
A Production of UNITEL in cooperation with Pierre Boulez Saal.
© Unitel 2018. All rights reserved.
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