There are four minutes of Ravel that I hope I never get over.
“Le Jardin Féerique,” usually translated as the enchanted or fairy garden, barely breathes into life as the apotheosis of the childhood stories that Ravel gathered under the title “Ma Mère l’Oye,” or “Mother Goose.” Ravel wrote nothing more magical, and perhaps nothing so moving.
It begins in a hushed, hesitant atmosphere, an ineffably fragile melody sighing to a gentle, poetic accompaniment. Soon, that gives way to a tender duet for solo violin and viola, a halo of woodwinds around them, the strum of a harp and the chime of a celesta behind. Slowly the music drifts upward, melting back into the initial melody as it gathers itself to end in incandescent, irresistible C major, percussion sparkling through the string canopy of your dreams.
“I so enjoy looking at the faces of the musicians when they’re producing all that sound,” the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen said in an interview. “It is just a deep, deep, deep, spiritual, sensual, tactile pleasure. I think every composer, deep down, would like to be able to do something like that.”
For many listeners, “Le Jardin Féerique” casts an unusual spell. Why?
Often said to be a childlike man himself, Ravel wrote the first of the “Ma Mère” pieces, “Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant,” in 1908, as a piano duet about Sleeping Beauty for two young children to whom he told fairy tales. In 1910, he added four more miniatures to make the children a suite, basing three of them on old stories that he quoted in the score, and ending with “Le Jardin Féerique,” which had no such story attached. By 1911, Ravel had orchestrated the suite, and the next year he elaborated it into a ballet as well, his musical garden blooming into a glade for Sleeping Beauty, who awakens at dawn, with Prince Charming close at hand.
Ravel wrote the “Pavane” soon after finishing “Gaspard de la Nuit,” his most formidable piano work, but virtuosity meant little to him here. “The idea of evoking in these pieces the poetry of childhood,” he reflected, “naturally led me to simplify my style and to refine my means of expression.” Tellingly, Ravel dedicated one copy of the score, as the scholar Emily Kilpatrick notes in a new book, to Erik Satie, who congratulated him after seeing the ballet for achieving “grandeur in simplicity.”
Ravel’s modern admirers applaud the same miracle. “I’m in awe of the immense simplicity of the writing,” said the composer George Benjamin, who has conducted the orchestral versions of “Ma Mère” for 40 years and has often played the duets with his friend Pierre-Laurent Aimard. “It’s very difficult to learn from that, because it’s almost unique in terms of the whole of 20th-century music, to achieve such beauty and depth of expression with such modest means.”
Like Benjamin, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who knows Ravel’s keyboard works as well as anybody, compared “Ma Mère” to the works of Mozart. “There are so few notes, and yet it’s so touching it moves you to tears,” Thibaudet said. “If there is a heaven for music,” he added specifically of “Le Jardin Féerique,” “this is part of it for sure.”
Conductors in general swoon for this music, but conductors whose tastes typically run to more difficult scores seem to fall for it particularly hard. And conductors who also compose seem to fall hardest. Rarely did Pierre Boulez show a softer side, for example, than in his recordings of this work in New York and Berlin.
“I deal with complexity quite a lot in my life as a musician,” said Salonen, who talks about “Ma Mère” with uncharacteristic emotion. “After having done ‘Gurrelieder’ six times, and ‘Gruppen,’ and this and that, you’re so used to dealing with these masses of notes, and a big chunk of the conductor’s brief is to organize all those notes into something which is cohesive and makes sense, and so on.”
But “Ma Mère,” he said, “is the complete opposite, where every note counts, every note has an eigenvalue which is like pure gold.”
Another wrinkle is that the simplicity of “Ma Mère” was, in its time, deceptively radical. Schoenberg was already dispensing with tonality, and yet Ravel was not just still working with the most basic musical building blocks of all, but also glorying in them.
“If you look at ‘Le Jardin Féerique,’ the first minute and a half or so is music without accidentals,” Salonen said. “It’s only the notes of a C-major scale. In the modernist playbook, the only way to do that would have been in a sort of ironical, sarcastic sense, like when Alban Berg puts a C-major chord in ‘Wozzeck’ when they start talking about money.”
He added: “It’s a lost world, in a way,” describing it as “just beauty in the best sense of the word.”
For the Ravel biographer Roger Nichols, “Le Jardin Féerique” is a piece of straightforward nostalgia, its blazing conclusion a memory of “unalloyed ecstasy” as a “grown man looks back to the time when he too could believe in a magic garden.” Four short bars convince me that it is also more complicated and even quite dark, giving us an invitation to reflect on our own feelings about childhood, and the unavoidable passing of time.
Those four bars come two-thirds of the way through, after the strings softly climb the steps of scales and Ravel melts his way toward the heavens. The music looks innocuous enough on the page — delicate chords in contrary motion, a few notes that take a second to resolve, not a flat or sharp in sight — but almost every time I listen to “Ma Mère,” I rewind to hear them over and over and over again, as if I cannot bear to let them end. Benjamin described this as an “absolutely fabulous, caressing cadence that is, of course, one of the great moments in music.” Salonen called them “the best four bars in one’s life.”
There are conductors on record who have made them glow with contentment or consolation, but to me, at least for the last few years, they have sounded more like a tearful, possibly regretful farewell. Perhaps it is no surprise that they have become all the more heartbreaking as my children have started to grow up, and have begun to see the world for what it really is. This is music of loss, as well as of love.
That it can be both at once is a mark of a great score. “Ultimately, there is something about the mystery and the mysterious beauty of it that we cannot really explain,” Salonen said. “But that’s why we have music, I guess.”
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