Modern Classical Music (c. 1900 - c. 1945), Music Biography

Ravel Remembered

Name: Ravel Remembered
Author: Roger Nichols
ISBN: 9780571149865

by Roger Nichols

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Overview

An enlightening collection of reminiscences on one of France's greatest composers.

Composers Remembered is an absorbing series of personal recollections and reminiscences of major composers from the seventeenth century to the present day. The memoirs of relatives, friends, and fellow musicians are gathered from letters, diaries, and published sources to give a unique overview of each composer's personality, life, and times. Each volume includes a chronology of related historical and cultural events that provocatively places the subject within the spirit of the times.

In Ravel Remembered, the composer of some of the best-loved music in the orchestral repertoire—including such favorites as La Valse, Daphnis and Chloe, and Boléro—is examined. The common view of Maurice Ravel as a cold and retiring personality was not supported by his friends, as Roger Nichols demonstrates. His book is a delightful mélange of illuminating accounts of the man and his music by those who knew him best, among them Stravinsky, Cocteau, Colette, Poulenc, and Manuel de Falla.
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Debussy Remembered and Mendelssohn Remembered (both forthcoming from Faber).

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was an intensely private man who revealed his true character only to intimate friends. Nichols, coauthor of The New Grove 20th Century French Masters, here assembles memoirs written by some of them: Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, Colette, Cocteau, pianist Marguerite Long, violinist Helene Jourdan-Morhange, among others. We learn little of Ravel's methods of composition, about which he was secretive, but we get to know the man a bit. He could be cold and sarcastic to strangers, but he was an affectionate and loyal friend, a humorous and fanciful companion whose charm, absentmindedness and childlike imagination endeared him to those who gained his trust. Much of the magic one feels in his music comes across in these reminiscences. A chronology of the composer's life and works is included, together with lists of contemporaneous events in history and the arts. Illustrations not seen by PW. (July)