Ravel and Fauré: Musical Interactions

Linking Ravel’s and Fauré’s music is not easy, despite Ravel’s years in Fauré’s Conservatoire composition class: their music vividly reflects their different temperaments with different approaches to tonal structure, voice-leading and instrumentation. Ravel, later in life, stressed his indebtedness to his counterpoint teacher André Gedalge, reserving more general, albeit appreciative comment for Fauré. Nor was Ravel what might be seen as a “model” student in Fauré’s class: his creations often startled class and professor alike, over his two years as an active participant followed by three as an auditor. Nevertheless, copious documentation attests to Fauré’s unswerving support for Ravel, often behind the scenes, during and after those years. Ravel’s later writings reciprocally offer insights into what interested him in Fauré’s music.
Despite the contrasts, traceable musical links between Ravel and Fauré are strong enough to suggest not just a teacher-pupil influence but a musical imprint of each on the other, a reciprocity easily accounted for by the strong character of Ravel’s music. The two composers’ continuing professional relationship can be gleaned in part from Fauré’s appointment of Ravel as a Conservatoire examiner in 1906 (three years after Ravel had been dismissed as a student from the same Conservatoire!), and in Fauré’s ensuing presidency of the SMI, of which Ravel was a co-founder. Some of Fauré’s and Ravel’s most important premières also shared concert programmes between 1906 and 1915. Reciprocal compositional interactions can be adduced on various levels. Immediately audible are some apparent – and remarkable – musical citations of Fauré in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Ma mère l’Oye, and of Ravel in Fauré’s later piano works. On a deeper level is how both composers relate voice, text and piano, illustrated here from Fauré’s Clair de lune and Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, with reference to Ravel’s 1922 article “Les mélodies de Gabriel Fauré.” A final cross-reference links Fauré’s late song cycle Mirages (1919) to both Debussy and Ravel, partly through the poems’ author: herself a musician, Renée de Brimont can be read as having devised the eponymous poetry collection with subtle references to all three composers.