Maurice Ravel - Miroirs, M.43 (Richter)

Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937)
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Miroirs, M.43 (1905)
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Sviatoslav Richter (1915 - 1997)
Recorded in 1965

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Miroirs is a five-movement suite for solo piano written by French composer Maurice Ravel between 1904 and 1905. First performed by Ricardo Viñes in 1906, Miroirs contains five movements, each dedicated to a fellow member of the French avant-garde artist group Les Apaches.

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Around 1900, Maurice Ravel joined a group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians referred to as Les Apaches or "hooligans", a term coined by Ricardo Viñes to refer to his band of "artistic outcasts". To pay tribute to his fellow artists, Ravel began composing Miroirs in 1904 and finished it the following year. It was first published by Eugène Demets in 1906.

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I. Noctuelles (0:00)

The first work in the Miroirs is ‘Noctuelles’ meaning night moths. It was dedicated
to the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and was inspired by his lines "The night moths in
their barns launch themselves clumsily into the air, going from one perch to
another". Ravel and Fargue were known to have socialised well into the early
hours of the morning and could be considered to be nocturnal like these moths

The notion of night in this work is not a Romanticised idea as in Chopin’s
Nocturnes but is rather, as Stuckenschmidt suggests, a social kind of evening;
the kind of evening Ravel would have enjoyed with his friends. He uses the
metaphor of the moths to describe himself and his associates. Stuckenschmidt
also suggests that Ravel’s idea of the night is closely related to Paul Verlaine’s
poem Un grand sommeil noir

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II. Oiseaux tristes (4:50)

‘Sad Birds’ in translation, the second work in the Miroirs was actually the first of
the five pieces to be written. Ravel was working on it when Ricardo Viňes told
him that Debussy was considering writing in such a free form that it would seem
improvised. Ravel welcomed this idea saying ‘I would really like to do something
to free myself from Jeux d’eau’. While he did not achieve this in ‘Noctuelles’ he certainly did in ‘Oiseaux tristes’. The work does in fact sound spontaneous and improvised and is Ravel’s response to Debussy’s notion of a structure that seems entirely to unfold according to its content.

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III. Une barque sur l'océan (8:28)

The third piece of the Miroirs and the next in order of composition was ‘Une
barque sur L’océan’ (A Boat on the Ocean). This work successfully develops the
scope of Jeux d’eau, which describes the splashings of a fountain, into a fullscale seascape. Like ‘Noctuelles’, it also develops the idea or technique of Impressionism. It was written in March 1905 at the same time as Debussy was working on La Mer and a few weeks before Ravel enjoyed a yacht cruise with some friends. As Ravel was not on speaking terms with Debussy at this time his
inspiration must have come from elsewhere, perhaps the harbour at St-Jean-deLuz, a place from his youth

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IV. Alborada del gracioso (14:07)

The fourth, most popular and most often performed of the Miroirs is ‘Alborada del
gracioso’. The work was dedicated to the writer and critic, M.D. Calvocoressi.
Perhaps this dedication is also ironic as this work, which is the most pianistic,
was dedicated to someone who described himself in the following words, ‘I was
(and have remained) a vile bungler at the piano’.

While each of the Miroirs is unique, the ‘Alborada’ seems the most removed from
the set, not least because it is the only one with a Spanish title. Firstly, it has a
human presence while the others deal with nature (‘Noctuelles’ deals with moths,
‘Oiseaux Tristes’ with birds and ‘Une Barque sur L’Océan’ with the ocean).
Secondly, it incorporates various Spanish elements drawn from several sources.

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V. La vallée des cloches (20:26)

The final piece in the set is ‘The Valley of the Bells’ and was, according to Robert
Casadesus, inspired by the sound of the bells in Paris at midday. Ravel had used bell sounds before in ‘Entre cloches’ one of two pieces for two pianos entitled Sites auriculaires written in 1897 and Nichols notes that the title and substance foreshadow ‘La vallée des cloches’. Debussy’s first attempt at imitating bells was in ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ from Images written in 1907 and he used them again three years later in the prelude ‘La Cathédral Engloutie’.

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Marguerite Long, an expert Ravel performer, explains the title Miroirs:
The title in itself is an aesthetic proposition. It underlies what the
Impressionists have amply proved – the pre-eminence of reflected light from
the direct image in the appeal to our sensibility and in the creation of an
illusion. These pieces are intensely descriptive and pictoral. They banish all
sentiment in expression but offer to the listener a number of refined sensory
elements which can be appreciated according to his imagination.