Maurice Ravel and the Poetics of Originality, 1907–14

ABSTRACT What does it mean to be an ‘original’ artist? In 1907, battling claims of dishonesty and plagiarism in the musical press, Maurice Ravel found himself uncomfortably preoccupied with that question. Compelled to a reckoning with the nature of ‘originality’ and ‘imitation’, Ravel turned to poetry and its discourses. This study contends that with Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, Ravel’s lifelong fascination with the musical past was refocused through a conscious investigation of artistic innovation and exchange. Tracing a line from his own Gaspard (1908) through the piano music and critical writings of the pre-war years, it teases out a crucial strand of historical and literary influence that is closely twined with Ravel’s lifelong devotion both to Bertrand’s near-exact contemporary Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire. In his negotiation of principle and practice, in words and in music, I explore Ravel’s emergent agency in the construction of his public persona.