Piano Trio (Ravel)
Encyclopedia
Maurice Ravel
's Trio
for piano
, violin
and cello
is a chamber work
composed in 1914. Dedicated to Ravel's counterpoint
teacher André Gedalge
, the trio was first performed in Paris
in January 1915, by Alfredo Casella
(piano), Gabriel Willaume (violin), and Louis Feuillard (cello). This piece requires a high level of virtuosity for all instruments and is regarded by some people as a technical masterpiece. A typical performance of the work lasts about 30 minutes.
, "I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes." During the summer of 1914, Ravel did his compositional work in the French
Basque commune of Saint-Jean-de-Luz
. Ravel was born across the bay in the Basque town of Ciboure
; his mother was Basque
, and he felt a deep identification with his Basque heritage. During the Trio's composition, Ravel was also working on a piano concerto
based on Basque themes entitled Zazpiak Bat (Basque
for "The Seven are One"
). Although eventually abandoned, this project left its mark on the Trio, particularly in the opening movement, which Ravel later noted was "Basque in colouring."
While initial progress on the Trio was slow, the outbreak of World War I
in August 1914 spurred on Ravel to finish the work so that he could enlist in the army. A few days after France’s entry into the war, Ravel wrote again to Maurice Delage: "Yes, I am working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman." By September he had finished it, writing to Igor Stravinsky
, "The idea that I should be leaving at once made me get through five months' work in five weeks! My Trio is finished." In October, he was accepted as a nurse's aide by the Army, and in March 1916 he became a volunteer truck driver for the 13th Artillery Regiment.
l approach to his writing: by making extensive use of the extreme ranges of each instrument, he created a texture of sound unusually rich for a chamber work. He liberally employed coloristic effects such as trills
, tremolo
s, harmonics, glissando
s, and arpeggio
s, thus demanding a high level of technical proficiency from all three musicians. Meanwhile, to achieve clarity in texture and to secure instrumental balance, Ravel frequently spaced the violin and cello lines two octave
s apart, with the right hand of the piano playing between them.
Inspiration for the musical content of the Trio came from a wide variety of sources, from Basque dance to Malaysian poetry. However, Ravel did not deviate from his usual predilection for traditional musical forms. The Trio follows the standard format for a four-movement classical work, with the outer movements in sonata form
flanking a scherzo and trio
and a slow movement. Nevertheless, Ravel manages to introduce his own innovations within this conventional framework.
, a Basque dance form. The movement is notated in 8/8 time, each bar being subdivided into a 3+2+3 rhythmic pattern. The influence of Zazpiak Bat is most obvious in the opening theme, whose rhythm is identical to that of the Zazpiak Bat main theme but with halved note values. Also notable is the melody's stepwise movement before followed by a leap of a fourth; the opening themes of the other three movements are similarly constructed (in the second and fourth movements, the jump is of a fifth).
Ravel employs sonata form in this movement, but not without introducing his own touches. The second theme is presented in the tonic A minor, and reappears untransposed in the recapitulation, but with different harmonies. To avoid overuse of the tonic key, Ravel ends the work in the relative key of C major. In the recapitulation, the appearance of the main theme in the piano is accompanied with a rhythmically modified version of the second theme in the strings. This juxtaposition of themes was a favourite device of Ravel's, who used it in other works as well (the Menuet antique
, the Menuet in Le Tombeau de Couperin
, etc.).
is a Malaysian verse form of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza are the first and third lines of the next. Most people do not believe that Ravel adhered completely to a musical adaptation of this form, but some, such as British scholar Brian Newbould
, claim that the name of the movement is literal. The piano opens with the spiky first theme, while the strings respond in double octaves with the smoother second theme. The movement is based on a traditional scherzo and trio A-B-A
form. He writes the trio theme in a completely different metre (4/2) from the scherzo (3/4), so that the two time signatures coexist for some time.
, a form with Baroque roots which involves a repeating bass line, in this case the opening eight-bar phrase. It builds singlemindedly to a powerful climax, and dies away.
poems), the piano presents the five-bar first theme. As in the first movement, irregular time signatures are again in use: the movement alternates between 5/4 and 7/4 time. As the most orchestral of the four movements, the Final exploits the resources of the three players to the utmost, and Ravel rounds off the entire work with a brilliant coda.
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
's Trio
Piano trio
A piano trio is a group of piano and two other instruments, usually a violin and a cello, or a piece of music written for such a group. It is one of the most common forms found in classical chamber music...
for piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
, violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
and cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
is a chamber work
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
composed in 1914. Dedicated to Ravel's counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
teacher André Gedalge
André Gedalge
André Gedalge , was an influential French composer and teacher.- Biography :André Gedalge was born at 75 rue des Saints-Pères, in Paris, where he first worked as a bookseller and editor specializing in livres de prix for public schools...
, the trio was first performed in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in January 1915, by Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...
(piano), Gabriel Willaume (violin), and Louis Feuillard (cello). This piece requires a high level of virtuosity for all instruments and is regarded by some people as a technical masterpiece. A typical performance of the work lasts about 30 minutes.
Composition
Ravel had been planning to write a trio for at least six years before beginning work in earnest in March 1914. At the outset, Ravel remarked to his pupil Maurice DelageMaurice Delage
Maurice Delage was a French composer and pianist.Delage was born and died in Paris. A student of Ravel and member of Les Apaches, he was influenced by travels to India and the East. Ravel's "La vallée des cloches" from Miroirs was dedicated to Delage.Delage's best known piece is Quatre poèmes...
, "I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes." During the summer of 1914, Ravel did his compositional work in the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Basque commune of Saint-Jean-de-Luz
Saint-Jean-de-Luz
Saint-Jean-de-Luz is a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France.Saint-Jean-de-Luz is part of the province Basque of Labourd and the Basque Eurocity Bayonne - San Sebastian .-Geography:...
. Ravel was born across the bay in the Basque town of Ciboure
Ciboure
Ciboure is a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France.It lies across the river Nivelle from the harbour of Saint-Jean-de-Luz....
; his mother was Basque
Basque people
The Basques as an ethnic group, primarily inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country , a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France.The Basques are known in the...
, and he felt a deep identification with his Basque heritage. During the Trio's composition, Ravel was also working on a piano concerto
Concerto
A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
based on Basque themes entitled Zazpiak Bat (Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
for "The Seven are One"
Zazpiak Bat
Zazpiak Bat is a motto attributed to Basque explorer Antoine-Thomson d'Abbadie in the nineteenth century, from the Basque words zazpiak meaning 'the seven' and bat meaning 'one', translates as "the seven [are] one" and refers to the seven Basque Country traditional provinces...
). Although eventually abandoned, this project left its mark on the Trio, particularly in the opening movement, which Ravel later noted was "Basque in colouring."
While initial progress on the Trio was slow, the outbreak of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
in August 1914 spurred on Ravel to finish the work so that he could enlist in the army. A few days after France’s entry into the war, Ravel wrote again to Maurice Delage: "Yes, I am working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman." By September he had finished it, writing to Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
, "The idea that I should be leaving at once made me get through five months' work in five weeks! My Trio is finished." In October, he was accepted as a nurse's aide by the Army, and in March 1916 he became a volunteer truck driver for the 13th Artillery Regiment.
Musical overview
In composing the Trio, Ravel was aware of the compositional difficulties posed by the genre: how to reconcile the contrasting sonorities of the piano and the string instruments, and how to achieve balance between the three instrumental voices – in particular, how to make that of the cello stand out from the others, which are more easily heard. In tackling the former problem, Ravel adopted an orchestraOrchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
l approach to his writing: by making extensive use of the extreme ranges of each instrument, he created a texture of sound unusually rich for a chamber work. He liberally employed coloristic effects such as trills
Trill (music)
The trill is a musical ornament consisting of a rapid alternation between two adjacent notes, usually a semitone or tone apart, which can be identified with the context of the trill....
, tremolo
Tremolo
Tremolo, or tremolando, is a musical term that describes various trembling effects, falling roughly into two types. The first is a rapid reiteration...
s, harmonics, glissando
Glissando
In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento...
s, and arpeggio
Arpeggio
An arpeggio is a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously...
s, thus demanding a high level of technical proficiency from all three musicians. Meanwhile, to achieve clarity in texture and to secure instrumental balance, Ravel frequently spaced the violin and cello lines two octave
Octave
In music, an octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with half or double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referred to as the "basic miracle of music", the use of which is "common in most musical systems"...
s apart, with the right hand of the piano playing between them.
Inspiration for the musical content of the Trio came from a wide variety of sources, from Basque dance to Malaysian poetry. However, Ravel did not deviate from his usual predilection for traditional musical forms. The Trio follows the standard format for a four-movement classical work, with the outer movements in sonata form
Sonata form
Sonata form is a large-scale musical structure used widely since the middle of the 18th century . While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement...
flanking a scherzo and trio
Scherzo
A scherzo is a piece of music, often a movement from a larger piece such as a symphony or a sonata. The scherzo's precise definition has varied over the years, but it often refers to a movement which replaces the minuet as the third movement in a four-movement work, such as a symphony, sonata, or...
and a slow movement. Nevertheless, Ravel manages to introduce his own innovations within this conventional framework.
Movements
The Trio is written in the key of A minor, and consists of four movements:- Modéré
- Pantoum (Assez vif)
- Passacaille (Très large)
- Final (Animé)
Modéré
According to Ravel, the first movement draws on the zortzikoZortziko
The zortziko is a dance rhythm that originates in the Basque Country. It is also used as an accompaniment rhythm for vocal melodies.The zortziko has a distinctive 5/8 time signature, consisting of three subdivisions of 1, 2, and 2 beats...
, a Basque dance form. The movement is notated in 8/8 time, each bar being subdivided into a 3+2+3 rhythmic pattern. The influence of Zazpiak Bat is most obvious in the opening theme, whose rhythm is identical to that of the Zazpiak Bat main theme but with halved note values. Also notable is the melody's stepwise movement before followed by a leap of a fourth; the opening themes of the other three movements are similarly constructed (in the second and fourth movements, the jump is of a fifth).
Ravel employs sonata form in this movement, but not without introducing his own touches. The second theme is presented in the tonic A minor, and reappears untransposed in the recapitulation, but with different harmonies. To avoid overuse of the tonic key, Ravel ends the work in the relative key of C major. In the recapitulation, the appearance of the main theme in the piano is accompanied with a rhythmically modified version of the second theme in the strings. This juxtaposition of themes was a favourite device of Ravel's, who used it in other works as well (the Menuet antique
Menuet antique
Menuet antique is a piece for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel. The original piano version was written in 1895 and orchestrated by the composer in 1929...
, the Menuet in Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le tombeau de Couperin is a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917, in six movements. Each movement is dedicated to the memory of friends of the composer who had died fighting in World War I...
, etc.).
Pantoum: Assez vif
A pantoumPantoum
The pantoum is a form of poetry similar to a villanelle in that there are repeating lines throughout the poem. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues for any number of stanzas,...
is a Malaysian verse form of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza are the first and third lines of the next. Most people do not believe that Ravel adhered completely to a musical adaptation of this form, but some, such as British scholar Brian Newbould
Brian Newbould
Brian Newbould is a composer, conductor and author who has finished Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and more symphonic works and even extra symphonies. He was educated at Gravesend Grammar School.-References:...
, claim that the name of the movement is literal. The piano opens with the spiky first theme, while the strings respond in double octaves with the smoother second theme. The movement is based on a traditional scherzo and trio A-B-A
Ternary form
Ternary form, sometimes called song form, is a three-part musical form, usually schematicized as A-B-A. The first and third parts are musically identical, or very nearly so, while the second part in some way provides a contrast with them...
form. He writes the trio theme in a completely different metre (4/2) from the scherzo (3/4), so that the two time signatures coexist for some time.
Passacaille: Très large
The third movement is a passacagliaPassacaglia
The passacaglia is a musical form that originated in early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used by contemporary composers. It is usually of a serious character and is often, but not always, based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre....
, a form with Baroque roots which involves a repeating bass line, in this case the opening eight-bar phrase. It builds singlemindedly to a powerful climax, and dies away.
Final: Animé
Against a backdrop of violin arpeggio harmonics (previously used by Ravel in his MallarméStéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
poems), the piano presents the five-bar first theme. As in the first movement, irregular time signatures are again in use: the movement alternates between 5/4 and 7/4 time. As the most orchestral of the four movements, the Final exploits the resources of the three players to the utmost, and Ravel rounds off the entire work with a brilliant coda.
Trivia
- The first movement was used extensively as a soundtrackSoundtrackA soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
in the 1992 Claude SautetClaude SautetClaude Sautet was a French author and film director.-Biography:Born in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Claude Sautet first studied painting and sculpture before attending a film university in Paris where he began his career and later became a television producer...
-directed love triangleLove triangleA love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...
Un cœur en hiver (A Heart in Winter), starring Emmanuelle BéartEmmanuelle BéartEmmanuelle Béart is a French film actress, who has appeared in over 50 film and television productions since 1972. Béart won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources . She has been nominated a further seven times for Most Promising Actress and Best Actress.- Early...
, Daniel AuteuilDaniel AuteuilDaniel Auteuil is a French film, television and theatre actor.-Early life and education:He was born in Algiers, French Algeria.-Career:...
and André DussollierAndré DussollierAndré Dussollier is a French actor.-Filmography:* 1970 : Ils, directed by Jean-Daniel Simon* 1972 : Les Chemins de pierre, directed by Joseph Drimal...
. The music credits in the film are given to Maurice RavelMaurice RavelJoseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
.
External links
- Video recording of the Ravel Trio, 1st movement
- Video recording of the Ravel Trio, 2nd movement
- Video recording of the Ravel Trio, 3rd movement
- Video recording of the Ravel Trio, 4th movement
- Audio recording of Ravel's Piano Trio by the Claremont TrioClaremont TrioClaremont Trio is a piano trio composed of Juilliard School alumnae Emily Bruskin , Julia Bruskin , and Donna Kwong . The group was founded at Juilliard in 1999, and made its performance debut at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side...
from the Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumIsabella Stewart Gardner MuseumThe Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Fenway Court, as the museum was known during Isabella Stewart Gardner's lifetime, is a museum in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located within walking distance of the Museum of Fine Arts and near the Back Bay Fens...
in MP3MP3MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
format - Analysis of Ravel's Trio