A concert including music by France’s two greatest composers of the late 19th and early 20th century provides an opportunity for direct comparison. To the informed listener, the question implied in the title above may seem a pointless one. Even the music-lover who knows no more than each composer’s ‘greatest hits’ will probably think that it’s easy to tell Debussy and Ravel apart: what could be more contrasted than – say – the rapturous daydreaming of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and the brilliant, kinetic Bolero of Ravel, where the form is almost the only content?
And yet…when Ravel’s String Quartet was first performed, in 1904, it was criticised for being too much like Debussy’s Quartet of 1893, and until they got more familiar with the music, some casual listeners must have found themselves wondering which ‘side’ of the disc containing both quartets they had put on. Getting to know music is partly about recognising distinctive styles, and the beginner may have had the same experience with Mozart and Haydn, or even with Bach and Handel. Sometimes the shared musical characteristics of composers’ style, place or time seem to define a work more, until one listens carefully, than the individual voice of the composer.
This is particularly so when two major composers emerge one after the other, as was the case with Haydn and Mozart, and with Debussy and Ravel. Thirteen years younger than Debussy, Ravel was dogged throughout his early career by a ‘Debussy’ controversy – largely among the composers’ followers rather than between the men themselves – some accused Ravel of copying Debussy; his partisans tried to show Ravel had the idea first. But perhaps in the case of these two French composers there’s another problem, which is to do with what makes French music distinctive.
A delight in sound combinations for their own sake
As a champion of the music of a much earlier French composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau (an enthusiasm both Debussy and Ravel shared), I was surprised when a musically sensitive and knowledgeable friend, asked what he thought of an opéra-ballet by Rameau we had both heard performed, said he found the music rather bland! To me it seemed just the contrary, but I think he was listening through experience of German Romantic music, and Rameau’s music seemed to be ‘about’ music, rather than about human emotions. Rameau’s music shares with that of his fellow-Frenchmen Debussy and Ravel a delight in sound combinations for their own sake, and a kind of objectivity which could be called characteristic of the French sensibility.
Here we think we find what Debussy and Ravel have in common, and we call it ‘French impressionism’. In Debussy’s La Mer, or in many passages of Ravel’s major orchestral masterpiece the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, there seems to be representation of nature. The analogy is with painting, and such music seems to appeal to a visual counterpart, whereas German Romantic music is held to appeal to ‘the heart’. So whereas when we try to get to know a Beethoven, a Schubert, a Schumann, we scan their biographies for clues to their emotions, with Debussy or Ravel we are more interested in their interactions with other musicians, writers, or visual artists.
These Frenchmen seem to want to conceal their emotions from us, or to mystify us. Ravel obviously enjoyed the fact that when his Valses nobles et sentimentales were first performed, in a concert where the names of the composers were not given, hardly anyone attributed them to him. And Debussy enjoyed shocking his more hidebound contemporaries, filling in the time as a student before the professor arrived, by improvising ‘outrageous’ sequences of chords, or responding to the professor’s injunction to ‘modulate!’ by saying ‘why should I? I’m perfectly happy where I am!’ These gambits point away from the creator towards the music.
What’s in a title?
But at least we think we know what the music is ‘about’, because both Debussy and Ravel did a good trade in evocative titles. But these may be deflecting ruses as well. Did not Ravel say that he chose Pavane pour une infante défunte because he relished the nasal assonance of the words? And Erik Satie was poking affectionate fun at Debussy’s titles when he commented that, in ‘From dawn to midday on the sea’ from La Mer, he particularly enjoyed the bit at a quarter to eleven. These composers’ titles constantly remind us that they moved in a world of literary and artistic innovation; but the titles are a kind of parallel universe, partly necessary because the ‘old’ titles – sonata, symphony, tone-poem – no longer matched the music.
This is more true of Debussy than of Ravel. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is a seminal piece of Debussy’s partly because the poem by Mallarmé with which he linked his music was as novel and against-the-rules of literature as was Debussy’s of music. Ravel, on the other hand, was in a constant dialogue with the music of the past and the present: his Le Tombeau de Couperin is a very deliberate tribute to the Baroque forms of earlier French masters (whereas Debussy’s tributes to them are implicit); the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in G is partly modelled on Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet; the Violin Sonata and L’Enfant et les sortilèges allude to jazz and to music hall idioms. When Debussy makes such allusions, it is to make almost wry transformations of them into his own personal idiom – as in La plus que lente (the slow waltz), or ‘Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk’ from Children’s Corner.
Ravel sometimes seems to wear other styles as a mask – the Viennese waltz whirling into the destruction of the empire in which it flourished (La Valse) – or in the very titles: A la manière de Chabrier and …de Borodine. This was the man who guided visitors around his house at Montfort-l’Amaury, with its collection of miniature and exotic objects, proudly pointing to each room, with ‘In there, nothing but fake Chinese; in there, fake Japanese.’ Criticised for being artificial rather than natural, he protested ‘Doesn’t it occur to them that one can be artificial by nature?’ Ravel’s ultimate concern was beauty, achieved by perfection of means. Suffering from his terrible final disease, unable to write and almost to talk, his only words after experiencing a performance of his Daphnis et Chloé were ‘it is beautiful, after all’.
Yet there is something grandiloquent, even conventional in Ravel, perhaps especially in Daphnis. It was what led Satie to remark ‘Ravel has refused the Légion d’Honneur, but all his music accepts it’. This need not be a criticism. Ravel had reservations about the success of Bolero, but that doesn’t stop us enjoying it. As Jan Swafford has written, ‘Ravel is one of the most beloved of 20th century composers because he turned his genius and his patient labours not towards technical novelty but toward what worked: what sounded best from the instruments, what entertained, charmed, dazzled the ear and the imagination.’ Ravel used the novel harmonies, some of which he admittedly ‘got’ from Debussy, in traditional progressions, and sometimes traditional form as well.
‘...an intriguing mystery...’
Ravel’s personality is an intriguing mystery some of which he managed to conceal even from his closest friends. But his music, even when it moved with the times, away from ‘impressionism’, remains lucid and day-lit. The clear-eyed sexual cynicism of the opera L’Heure espagnole, the child’s eye of Colette through which Ravel diverts and touches us in L’Enfant et les sortilèges – these are a world apart from the misty, sotto voce confidences of the opera in which Debussy lifted Maeterlinck’s play to the summit of musical and dramatic art, Pelléas et Melisande. These are works that anyone who has enjoyed Debussy and Ravel in the concert hall should explore.
What the ear hears, and the more it hears it, is what enables us to tell these composers’ music apart. Technical explanations of the differences are for the musically trained, and need to be heard as well as read. When Pierre Boulez observed that Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun invented modern music, he was recognising that Debussy had learnt the traditions of the past, but taught himself to forget them. ‘Because I love music,’ Debussy said, ‘I try to free it from the barren traditions which stifle it.’ That’s why his music sounds unlike anything that preceded it – yet familiar, as well, because so many have followed his liberating example – even down to the composers of film music and commercial jingles.
But it isn’t because he’s a progressive, a revolutionary, that Debussy has his claim on our listening. Like Ravel, he has a claim on our sensibility, and attracts us first, perhaps, by delighting the ear. Once our attention is gained, we will notice that to move in this musical world feels different from following the musical ‘argument’ of a Beethoven or a Brahms. If we remain at a superficial level, we may find the music ‘bland’ – but I think most of us are beyond that point. We are ready to tell Debussy and Ravel apart – even to enjoy them where they are most together, because they have promoted through their art a distinct way of listening. Telling these composers apart is part of enjoying their special worlds.
First published in 2005