On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music RAVEL REKINDLED By John Simon Just as short stories lag in popularity behind novels, one-act operas trail well behind full-length ones. In the standard repertoire only Cav and Pag,...
...Gonzalve arrives, but is more interested in improvising celebratory love poems than in making love...
...The Previn has the added virtue of including a rousing rendering of the Rapsodie espagnole, likewise composed in 1907, the first of Ravel's orchestral masterpieces and a nice companion piece to the opera...
...Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle and Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias get an occasional mounting, too, with the latter's La Voix humaine sometimes heard in concert...
...Gonzalve's effusions are ironically musicalized...
...The unleashed merriment is still controlled by Ravel's taste and elegance as the motto from Boccaccio announces that, in The Spanish Hour, the muleteer will have his moment...
...when he describes the hours "bursting into bloom," the music features rich fioritura...
...On his next descent, Ramiro meditates on the charm of the chiming clocks that remind him of his mules' jingling bells, promptly evoked by the music...
...Indeed, the entire opera is suffused with music evoking the clockmaker's workshop with its sundry automata, to the point where it has been said that Ravel was more concerned about gizmos than about people...
...otherwise, except forminor cuts, the wordplay-filled text was not tampered with...
...While she romps upstairs with him, Gonzalve and Inigo soliloquize downstairs from their respective clocks...
...It concerns Concepcion, the bored young wife of the elderly watchmaker Torquemada, slyly named for the infamous inquisitor...
...Left alone downstairs at one stage, Ramiro, surrounded by all those hyperactive mechanisms, reflects on the most complicated one of them, woman, he bewares of touching...
...Most interesting is Stravinsky's famous reference to his friend as "a Swiss clockmaker," but the exact implications of the remark remain elusive...
...The Spanish Hour (or Spanish Time) is witty and piquant...
...On "toreador," the music launches into a parody of Carmen, the sliding horns rendered, as Maria Kardos-Morin puts it, by a "caricatural and formidable glissando for trombone and tuba...
...Never mind, the mail-carrying muleteer will come by her window punctually every morning and give her the time, among other things...
...Concepcion finally persuades him to hide in one of the clocks that Ramiro carries to her room with cheerful ease as she trails along...
...Its preoccupation with clocks and similar mechanisms would please his father...
...Eventually, he too will effortfully squeeze into the other clock to hide...
...François Hudry notes that Ravel "takes pleasure in juxtaposing the Debussy Pelléas style with the purest operetta," which would suggest Chabrier and Messager, though Ravel asserted his aim to be reviving Italian opera buffa...
...from her, he acquired his love of things Spanish...
...the composer's complex about his jockey-like silhouette...
...When he caught a performance of the mildly ribald one-act comedy L'Heure espagnole by the minor but sparkly poet-playwright Franc-Nohain (pen name of Maurice-Etienne Legrand), he dropped his work on Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell and switched to L'Heure...
...The five characters come down front and sum up their roles in the plot for the audience to Ravel's most ravishing music...
...The concluding quintet, the nearest thing to grand opera in L'Heure espagnole, is also the apotheosis of the habanera...
...his not always friendly rival Ravel set out to prove him wrong and eminently succeeded...
...No less satisfying is the complementarily available L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (DG 451 5 89...
...When the poet rhapsodizes about the clock dials, on the word "enamel," the music pulls out all the stops...
...Ravel was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 108 pounds, as Arbie Orenstein notes in his authoritative Ravel: Man and Musician...
...There is disagreement on whether the work is pure farce...
...Concepcion is impressed by Ramiro's merriment, modesty and muscles...
...The combined efforts of husband, wife and poet, with the music heaving along, fail to do the trick...
...Then there are Maurice Ravel's two delectable winners, L'Heure espagnole (1907-9) and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (1920-25), sporadically given in France but rarely elsewhere...
...When the muleteer offers to take both clocks upstairs simultaneously, she tells him to ascend this time "without a clock," and follows him...
...Ostensibly unable to make up her mind, she will steer Ramiro out of the way shuttling with one clock or the other...
...Let down by Inigo as well, Concepcion descends disgusted, and has something approaching a grand aria of rage...
...Then her other would-be lover, the fat banker Don Inigo Gomez, unexpectedly arrives with lustful designs now that hubby (he got him the job) is away...
...Gonzalve proving a dud upstairs, the exasperated woman has him carried down and the clock with Inigo carried up...
...It has been called Pucciniesque, and is certainly not lean...
...Torquemada, urged on by his wife, leaves, asking Ramiro to wait for his return...
...Torquemada returns, guesses what went on, and maneuvers the embarrassed Gonzalve and Inigo into buying the clocks they hid in...
...Debussy claimed there was no such thing as humorous music, only humorous texts...
...Ramiro, a handsome and virile muleteer shows up to have his watch repaired: His mules deliver the mail and he must be punctual...
...The new recording with André Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (DG 457 590), is paced slower than customary, but drags only in one place...
...The esteemed Jean Gallois writes, "Under the guise of an apparently farcical 'musical comedy,' we feel the beating of a heart that, bruised by the knocks of life, suffers from all that is not fundamentally genuine...
...He even has a gossamery waltz tune that sits on him like a tutu on a hippo...
...Kindred in spirit, they are sufficiently different in tone, and the right joint length for a terse yet not skimpy evening...
...As Gonzalve emerges from his clock for the last time, he sings a very Carmenish seguedilla...
...And whenever the text indulges in wordplay, as in Gonzalve's Ton coeur ballant, ton coeur battant (Your dancing heart, your beating heart), the music turns similarly whimsical...
...When he disparages the poet's "ethereal pursuits," the orchestra, generally in charge of the melody, turns ethereal with a vengeance...
...By the time Maurice got around to complying, his father was gravely ill...
...Actually, they deserve regular productions as a diptych, to the assured delight of connoisseur and neophyte, young and old...
...The last is important, given several other very good CD versions, with the one on EMI offering Jeanne Duval, perhaps the greatest Concepcion, and André Cluytens' sprightly conducting...
...Bruno Maderna, on Stradivarius, conducts even better, and Armin Jordan, on Erato, has a strong, youthful cast...
...Ramiro, the happy lover, does it in a trice...
...This day, ironically, he is late setting out to regulate the town's clocks, whose overseer he is...
...In a closing quintet, the singers address the audience with the moral of the tale, derived from a line of Boccaccio's that inspired Franc-Nohain's play: "There comes a moment in the diversions of love when the muleteer has his turn...
...So now Concepcion won't have a clock in her bedroom...
...I do not recommend Ernest Ansermet's too operatic singers on Decca, or Lorin Maazel's excessively farcical version also on DG...
...The music for Inigo becomes even more playful as he tries to sugarcoat his lust by passing himself off as a petit farceur...
...This would damn the posturing Gonzalve, but Roger Nichols theorizes that Ravel "must have sympathized with the struggle of Gonzalve to transmit his passion through exceptionally refined sensibility...
...henever saw his son's first opera performed...
...When Concepcion drolly reduces her husband's grandinquisitorial name to the very French nickname, Totor, Torquemada explains it as "a diminutive full of charm," the word "diminutive" sung in charming falsetto...
...Ravel's father, a naturalized Swiss engineer, had urged his son to write operas, for it was in that genre that lucrative careers were being made...
...Finally, with a frolicsome rhyme, Vraiment cet homme a des biceps/Qui dépassent tous mes concepts (Truly, this man has biceps that surpass all my imagining), she makes her choice, instructing Ramiro to come up with her clockless...
...The returning husband easily gets him and Inigo to buy their clocks, but it is not nearly so easy to get Inigo out of his cage...
...Ramiro's embarrassment at being left alone with Concepcion introduces the Bizetesque habanera that will serve as his leitmotif...
...If he weren't a muleteer, he would enjoy settling down in such a workshop, with such a wife...
...In the standard repertoire only Cav and Pag, Puccini's Trittico, and Strauss' Salome and Elektro are in the running, and the last two are really evening-filling operas in extended one-act format...
...The outpouring is part of an analogy between a woman and clockwork...
...It has a fine cast, featuring Kimberly Berber's perky Concepcion, Kurt Ollmann's burnished Ramiro, John Mark Ainsley's unexaggerated Gonzalve, David Wilson Johnson's true bass as Inigo (so often sung less effectively by a baritone), and Georges Gautier's droll though unfarcical Torquemada...
...Inigo, inside the clock, contributes his cuckoo imitations, which the music has delicious fun with...
...Oddly, they are seldom performed together...
...So she keeps sending him to her upstairs bedroom carrying one of two identical grandfather clocks too heavy for her husband...
...Yet Kardos-Morin wonders: "Might there be in the character of Ramiro, the man of ideal physical aspect, and Concepcion in pursuit of amorous satisfaction, certain intersections with Ravel's intimate life, so concealed, so unknown, and rendered so arid by...
...This is the one day in the week she is alone and can receive the poet-scholar Gonzalve for a little amorous dalliance, and now Ramiro will hang around...
...We get ecstatic drumbeats, chattering castanets, skittering harp glissandos, melismatic vocalise, and tart echoes of the zarzuela...
...The Child and the Sorceries (or The Enchanted Child) is witty and poignant...
...By acquiring both, you can mount your own lovely double bill...
...Maurice, to be sure, was very much closer to his Basque mother than to his Savoyard father...
...But he, it seems, could not even extricate himself from his ticking cage, much less satisfy her, and is shipped down as well...
...Ravel set the scene specifically in 18thcentury Toledo...
...For example, Ramiro describes his watch as a family heirloom bequeathed by his toreador uncle, whose life it saved by deflecting a bull's horns...
...Ravel makes a point of having the singing embrace the accents and rhythms of the spoken language, a device he may have gleaned from Mussorgsky, whose The Wedding he invoked as his inspiration here...
...There are excellent notes by four annotators, each in a different language...
...When Concepcion greets Gonzalve's blithering arrival music with a passionate outcry, the poet reverts to the identical trivial tune...
...And the recorded sound could not be livelier...
...Concepcion is put out...
...Again, Torquemada's parting line, "Official time does not wait," is set with superb pseudosolemnity...
...its Spanish setting, his mother...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 13
