Belle Époque and The Architects of Dreams: A Short Review on Maurice Ravel’s Early Works

Written by: AMF

This short review is dedicated to my dear friend, Irene, as well as a gratitude for her recent work of a beautiful yet sorrowful painting she gave me, “Pain of Existing”.

My work offers a short review of two important pieces from the early period of Maurice Ravel: “Pavane for a Dead Princess” and “String Quartet in F Major”. Both pieces belong to the years of his education at the Paris Conservatoire, before he left in 1905. At the conservatoire, then regarded as the most prestigious school of music in France, Ravel was trained within a world of discipline and structure. Its students (including Claude Debussy, who is often regarded as Ravel’s rival) were raised within the traditions of Western classical music: tonal harmony, counterpoint, sonata form, orchestration, and compositional techniques inherited from German-Italian traditions, each carrying its own established standards of “correctness.” 

France at the time was passing through a profound transformation in art, thought, and European cultural identity, a period often described as the Belle Époque: an age of elegance before the outbreak of World War I. In legal philosophy, for instance, as a field I personally study, figures such as Léon Duguit emerged as intellectual groundbreakers. Duguit introduced the concept of Solidarité Sociale as a distinctly French form of sociological jurisprudence, challenging the legal positivism that had long dominated French legal philosophy thought. A similar pattern appeared in music. France was beginning to free itself from the dominance of German musical traditions, particularly the immense shadow cast by Richard Wagner. It was from this atmosphere that Ravel (and Debussy) emerged. The foundations of French modernism were thus laid in a spirit of experimentation and resistance toward traditionalism. Art no longer needed to be realistic nor did it need to be correct. 

As a talented student, Ravel often unsettled his professors at the Paris Conservatoire with the wildness and eccentricity of his artistic imagination. That tension only deepened after Ravel and Debussy attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris, 1889. Two performances, in particular, profoundly altered Ravel’s understanding of music. 

The first was an orchestral performance by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose music overflowed with color and atmosphere, standing in sharp contrast to the French Romantic tradition of the late nineteenth century. The latter, proved even more revolutionary. Ravel himself struggled to identify what kind of music he was hearing: the sound of Javanese gamelan. Its sonorities resembled a drifting dreamscape, suspended and weightless, obeying none of the harmonic, melodic, or structural conventions taught in Western conservatories. 

For Ravel, these performances were like roses in the middle of a desert, a vision of music freed from limitation. From this sensibility emerged the defining traits of musical Impressionism, ambiguous harmonies, tones resembling pale-pastel colors, and an almost atmospheric sense of form. It was from this very vision that Ravel’s early works were born. Even within the paternalistic rigidity of the Paris Conservatoire, he quietly pushed against its boundaries. 

A “pavane” is a slow and graceful Spanish court dance from the Renaissance era. The phrase “Dead Princess”, often misunderstood as referring to an actual deceased princess, was instead intended to evoke a romantic nostalgia for the courts of old Spain. This aligns naturally with Ravel’s lifelong fascination with Spain, especially considering his mother’s Basque-Spanish heritage.

The music unfolds slowly and delicately, almost as though it was floating. The atmosphere of Javanese gamelan, while not adopted in a strict harmonic sense, remains deeply present. Here Ravel reveals the distinctly anti-German and anti-Wagnerian character of his musical temperament. To him, Wagner too often spoke with overwhelming force while neglecting the gentleness of a “princess’s” touch. Much of the work sounds transparent, light, blurred, even elusive, though beneath that surface lies remarkable complexity. Compared to Debussy whose music often feels fluid and spontaneous like shifting light upon water, Ravel appears far more architectural and precise. In Pavane for a Dead Princess, every phrase feels meticulously measured. That is why the work sounds at once serene and profoundly controlled.

Two years later, String Quartet in F Major was completed: Ravel’s first string quartet. This second work reveals his musical identity even more clearly than Pavane for a Dead Princess. Chaotic but harmonious, restless but carefully balanced. It is fascinating to imagine Ravel’s state of mind at the time, particularly his attempt to resist German Romanticism while simultaneously working within one of the most deeply German musical forms, the string quartet. Since the era of Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, the string quartet had occupied an almost sacred position within European music. Ravel’s achievement lies precisely here. He took that traditional form and transformed it into something unmistakably new and unmistakably French.

It was also because of this work that Ravel was often accused of imitating Claude Debussy. Admirers of both composers have long exchanged such accusations, even though little evidence suggests the kind of rivalry later critics imagined between them. Modern studies of music history (including those discussed by Jan Swafford in “Language of the Spirit”) show no serious indication of imitation in that sense.

The first movement of this quartet immediately reveals the dreamlike atmosphere so characteristic of Ravel. The music feels cool but rich-colored, perfectly aligned with the sensibilities of French Impressionism. Another remarkable feature of the opening movement lies in the way Ravel seems to dismantle and rearrange the four instruments themselves: at times they imitate one another, at times they clash in dissonance, and at another times they appear to move independently. Yet upon closer listening, Ravel’s brilliance as a musical architect becomes unmistakably clear.

The second movement opens with an energetic pizzicato rhythm. Here, the influence of Javanese gamelan once again becomes deeply apparent. The violin is transformed almost into a Gambang, while the cello occasionally resembles the resonance of a Gong, or even, at certain moments, the pulse-beat of a Kendang. The third movement restores the emotional atmosphere of the first. Some musicologists have even described its slow movement as the true emotional center of the quartet. Several passages shift into pentatonic scales before quietly returning to diatonic movement. Finally, in the fourth movement, a sense of unease begins to emerge. The energy intensifies, the rhythms sharpen, and the strings no longer seem to sing, but rather to scold. To me, the fourth movement feels at once sensual and deeply intellectual.

Perhaps this was inseparable from the period in which Ravel encountered the music of Igor Stravinsky among the eccentric French artistic circle known as Apaches. At the premiere of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps), the concert hall erupted into chaos and near-riot. Amidst the uproar stood Ravel himself, applauding with visible excitement while repeatedly exclaiming, “Genius! Genius!” It was at that very moment, Stravinsky later recalled, that he recognized Ravel as perhaps the only person in the hall who truly understood the work.

These two works are perhaps not Ravel’s greatest achievements, yet I believe they are among his most important. They stand as reflections of a decisive turning point in his artistic life, a proof that the rigid and paternalistic education of the Paris Conservatoire could be transformed into something entirely personal-restless-free within his music.

Long story short, near the end of his life, when Ravel had already grown old, he was once invited to attend an orchestral concert where several compositions were performed. Suffering from dementia, he listened in silence, astonished by the music unfolding before him before quietly asking, “whose music is this?”. He had forgotten that the composer of those works was himself. By then, the man who had once imagined entire worlds of sound could no longer recognize that those worlds had been created by his own hands. 

Seascape - Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1879