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World premiere of an unpublished work by Maurice Ravel

World premiere of an unpublished work by Maurice Ravel

Interview with Mathias Auclair, Head of the Music Department of the French National Library. 

 

Recording Radio France 

The Radio France Montpellier Occitanie Festival, to be held from 8 to 20 July 2024, will include in its programme on July 9th the world premiere of a previously unpublished work by Maurice Ravel. We thought we knew everything about the composer of the famous Boléro, but a manuscript of an unpublished work had gone unnoticed. Amants qui suivez le chemin, for small orchestra and four-part mixed choir, will be heard for the very first time at the Corum/Opéra Berlioz.


Can you tell us the background to this discovery, how it was authenticated and the role of the BNF throughout the process?  


The Radio France Festival in Montpellier will perform the world premiere of an unheard piece by Maurice Ravel, which is quite exceptional. It was made possible by the discovery of the autograph manuscript of Amants qui suivez le chemin, a piece totally unknown to the Ravel specialists, absent from the repertoire and from Ravel's correspondence which was recently published. The National Library got the chance to unearth this piece in a bookseller's catalogue.

We delve into sales catalogues, booksellers catalogues, some collectors and composers come to us and suggest manuscripts, collections, and there, incidentally, this manuscript came to light.

We felt very strongly that it should enter the national collections because of its importance, its novelty, and not only did we acquire it but we also managed, thanks to Radio France which has been our partner for some years now, to set a performance of this work fairly quickly, at the Radio France Festival in Montpellier.


Can you outline your main assignments and the current issues of the music department at the National Library?


The French National Library has a Music department since 1942, but in fact it has had musical collections for much longer. The first important ones were established during the first quarter of the 18th century. So there has been an unnamed music department since around 1725. The music department was constituted in 1942 by the reunion of the opera's and conservatory's libraries into the National Library in order to form a coherent musical collection, available for musicologists, and eventually this origination led to the first assignments of the music department, focusing on musicology but also on the gathering of important sources about musical creation and musical life in France and everything that happened in terms of music in French soil, notably what came from foreign musicians, and, since music is universal, the collections of the music department are universal too. There are important manuscripts by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert… Nowadays, we still have this essential purpose of preserving sources, with the ambition of extending it to other realms of musical creation, whether music that is directly contemporary, with the idea that a good composer is not necessarily dead, and that the Library can have a relation with living composers, without having to canonize or legitimate them, simply by saying that our duty also extends to the contemporary heritage, just like there are museums of modern art, and also extends to other forms of music than the erudite ones. Music converses at the National Library just like it does in real life,

and the various currents of music must be represented at the Library just like they are in today's world.


Can you tell us a few words about Armand Silvestre's text and the writing of Ravel in this unheard piece?


Amants qui suivez le chemin is an early work of Maurice Ravel. We believe it was composed between 1900 and 1905, that is the period when Ravel attempts to win the Prix de Rome, and practices the typical composition of this scholarship, which is the cantata, a piece for choir and orchestra. So this is a cantata, and indeed Ravel will no longer compose this kind of work after 1905. It really denotes a particular moment of his life and creative period. There is another element that helps refine the dating a little bit better: there is a humming passage in this work, rather peculiar, which can remind of what Debussy did in Sirènes in 1902. We know Ravel loved this work and arranged it for two pianos, so we can imagine Debussy had some influence on Ravel in this piece. Therefore, suggesting a dating between 1902 and 1905 seems realistic and correct.


The text was written by Armand Silvestre and seems rather outdated nowadays. One could say Silvestre's poetry is generally outdated. In Fauré, for example, who put a lot of Silvestre's words into music, it is mostly the music that is appreciated, and not so much the lyrics. As for Ravel's work, it is from his early period. We are certainly eager to hear it in Montpellier in order to have a more precise idea of this music. We can already see that it is very well composed, for a modest orchestra. It does not use the great effects of Ravel's later orchestral music, but we can still expect this French style, very typical of the early 20th century, as well as a few Ravelian ideas that will undoubtedly spark interest in the piece and will hopefully encourage other ensembles to perform it again after the premiere in Montpellier.


The manuscript was authenticated by the expert who offered it for sale. His valuation could be enough because this expert is reputed among his peers. What confirms the authenticity of the manuscript, firstly, is the typical handwriting of the young Ravel, more meticulous than in his later works like the Boléro or La Valse, which we keep here in the National Library.

What is apparent in Ravel's manuscripts, in this one and the later ones, is an aesthetic taste for the manuscript itself. Rather like Debussy, Ravel has a very clean-cut image, always impeccably dressed. We can see it in Ravel's manuscripts. We can see a very disciplined personality, in search of aesthetics too. Let us not forget it is the age of Japonisme, with a taste for very simple and neat compositions. We can see it in Ravel's manuscripts. What makes musical manuscripts so captivating is that, just like in some literary ones, the personality of the composer transpires beyond all informations provided by the manuscript about the birth of the work. And God knows this one is interesting because it is not a final draft, but really a work in progress with compositional phases, scrapes and erasures. Undoubtedly this manuscript, after examination by the specialists of Maurice Ravel, will reveal all sorts of facts about Ravel between 1900 and 1905. And this is certainly what inspires us today: in 2024, when one thinks everything was already said about Maurice Ravel, when all his important works have supposedly been unveiled, there can pop up a new manuscript for sale in a bookseller's catalogue,a new piece which may soon be performed all around the world.

 


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