http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_for_the_Left_Hand_(Ravel)
[edit] Structure
Ravel is quoted in one source as saying that piece is in only one movement (Daily Telegraph 11 July 1931 p. 364) and in another as saying the piece is divided into two movements linked together (Le Journal 14 January 1933, p. 328). According to Marie-Noelle Masson, the piece has a tripartite structure: Slow-Fast-Slow, instead of the usual Fast-Slow-Fast. Whatever the internal structure may be, the 18-19 minute piece negotiates several sections in various tempi and keys without pause. Towards the end of the piece, some of the music of the early slow sections is overlayed with the faster music, such that two tempi occur simultaneously.
The concerto begins with the double basses softly arpeggiating an ambiguous harmony (E-A-D-G). Although these notes are later given great structural weight, they are also the four open strings on the double bass, creating the illusion at the start that the orchestra is still tuning up. As is traditional in a concerto, the thematic material is presented first in the orchestra and then echoed by the piano. Not as traditional is the dramatic piano cadenza which first introduces the soloist and prefigures the piano's statement of the opening material. This material includes both an A and a B theme, though the B theme receives little exposure. An additional theme introduced at the beginning exhibits several similarities to the Dies Irae chant.
An excerpt from the faster section, sometimes referenced as the scherzo, is shown in the example. Throughout the piece, Ravel creates ambiguity between triple and duple rhythms. This example highlights one of the more glaring instances of this.
[edit] Reception and legacy
Although at first Wittgenstein did not take to its jazz-influenced rhythms and harmonies, he grew to like the piece. Ravel's other Piano Concerto in G Major is more widely known and played.
There are several other piano concertos for the left hand, including pieces by Benjamin Britten, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schmidt, and Sergei Prokofiev, many of them also commissioned by Wittgenstein.
[edit] References
- Kelly, Barbara. “Ravel, Maurice,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy, <http://grovemusic.com> (subscription access)
- Masson, Marie-Noëlle. “Ravel: Le Concerto pour la main gauche ou les Enjeuz d’un Néo-Classicisme,” Musurgia 5, no. 3-4 (1998): 37-52.
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=2636
Wittgenstein gave the premiere of Ravel's Left-Hand Concerto in Vienna just nine days before Marguerite Long introduced the G-major Concerto in Paris, with Ravel conducting.
Before Ravel put a note of this concerto on paper, he pored over the left-hand études of Saint-Saëns, Czerny, Alkan and Scriabin, and also Leopold Godowsky's left-hand transcriptions of the Chopin études. Shortly after he completed his two concertos, he remarked on them in the course of an interview with a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph of London:
It was an interesting experience to conceive and realize the two concertos at the same time. The first . . . is a concerto in the strict sense, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. . . . It uses effects borrowed from jazz, but only in moderation. The Concerto for Left Hand Alone is quite different, and has only one movement, with many jazz effects; the writing is not so simple. In a work of this sort it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands. For the same reason, I have resorted to a style that is much nearer to that of the more solemn kind of traditional concerto.
After an introductory section pervaded by this feeling , there comes an episode like an improvisation, which is followed by a jazz section. Only afterwards is one aware that the jazz episode is actually built up from the themes of the first section.
When Ravel completed this score, toward the end of 1930, he wrote on the cover "Musae mixatiae" ("Mixed muses"). His American biographer Arbie Orenstein does not hesitate to classify this concerto as “Ravel's most dramatic work, combining expansive lyricism, tormented jazz effects, a playful scherzo, and driving march rhythms, all of which are scaffolded into one movement of modest dimensions.”
After noting the "immensely difficult" writing for the solo instrument, "deriving ultimately from Liszt and the transcendental virtuosity in Gaspard de la nuit ," Mr. Orenstein observes that the Concerto
Has given rise to a number of psychological interpretations, among them the composer's premonition of his oncoming mental affliction or a commentary on the tragedy and uselessness of World War I. It seems to me to be rather a culmination of Ravel's longstanding preoccupation, one might say obsession, with the notion of death. . .. The motif of death recurs insistently in the composer's oeuvre. The tormented conclusion of La Valse and the Concerto for the Left Hand are but additional manifestations of this phenomenon." (From Ravel: Man and Musician, by Arbie Orenstein. Copyright © 1968, 1975 by Columbia University Press.)
The introductory section sets a very dark scene, with the contrabassoon given a prominence to which performers on that instrument are so unaccustomed that they sometimes refer to this passage as "one-fifth of our repertory." In his uniquely authoritative little book on the composer, Alexis Roland-Manuel, who was Ravel's pupil, friend and confidant for 26 years, did not offer as specific a psychological interpretation as Mr. Orenstein's, but wrote of the Concerto as a work of "tragic vehemence":
The fever and dash of this concerto give it the force of an incantation. . . . It reawakens the fantastic and clandestine inhabitants of Gaspard de la nuit, and even the poetic bestiary of the Histoires naturelles . . . The strict unity of the composition only makes the nervous character of the work more obvious, flooding the night-world with a weird light and providing the most clear-cut form for flamboyant poetry." (From Ravel, by Roland-Manuel, translated by Cynthian Jolly; published in paperback by Dover Publications, Inc., through arrangement with Dobson Books Ltd., London.)
http://website.lineone.net/~jdspiers/concerto1.htm
Concerto pour la main gauche en r?majeur
Ravel began work on the Concerto for the left hand (in D) in 1929, after receiving a commission from the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the Great War. (Britten, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss also wrote works for Wittgenstein [1887-1961], who was the brother of Ludwig Wittgenstein.) Ravel had already begun work on his (2-handed) Concerto en sol, but interrupted that to execute this commission, which was in the event finished in 1930 after nine months intensive work. The first performance was given in Vienna on 5 January 1932, by Wittgenstein and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Heger (but in the absence of the composer: it was just 9 days before the première of his Concerto en sol in Paris). (The Catalogue Durand, followed by other sources, e.g. Long [1971], gives the date of the first performance as 27 November 1931.) |
Ravel was not pleased with Wittgenstein's performance of the work when he heard it in Vienna later in 1932, and took particular exception to some "arrangements" which the pianist had made to the music. After the performance, he said to Wittgenstein: "Mais ce n'est pas cela du tout"; to which W. responded: "Je suis un vieux pianiste et cela ne sonne!". R.: "Je suis un vieil orchestrateur et cela sonne!" Ravel's anger led him oppose Wittgenstein's performance of the concerto in Paris, provoking a further written exchange between them. W.: "Les interprètes ne doivent pas être des esclaves". R.: "Les interprètes sont des esclaves!" (Long, [1971]). In a letter of 7 March 1932, Ravel sought an assurance that Wittgenstein would respect the score, asking for "un engagement formel de jouer désormais son oeuvre rigoureusement telle qu'elle est écrite" (quoted in Orenstein, [1989] p.466). Wittgenstein bluntly refused ( Orenstein, [1989] p.596), and declined to play in Paris under those conditions. However, by the following year an accommodation had been reached, and Ravel conducted Wittgenstein in a performance in Paris on 17 January 1933. It was only in 1937 (19 March) that the first "authentic" performance was given in Paris, with Jacques Février conducted by Charles Munch. Wittgenstein later described his reactions when Ravel had first played the concerto through to him at Le Belvédère: "He was not an outstanding pianist, and I wasn't overwhelmed by the composition. It always takes me a while to grow into a difficult work. I suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry, but I had never learned to pretend. Only much later, after I'd studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realise what a great work it was". (Quoted by Dubbiosi, [1967], p.132). |
Although Ravel did not acknowledge any specific programme for the concerto, its dramatic quality has lent itself to various extreme interpretations. Marcel Marnat describes it with expressions such as "le tourbillon militaire", "mise à mort", and "l'immolation" (Marnat, [1986] pp.655-656); and the pianist Margeurite Long wrote: "Tout ici est grandiose, monumental, à l'échelle des horizons flamboyants, des monstrueux holocaustes où se consument les corps et s'engloutit l'esprit, des vastes troupeaux humains grimaçants de souffrance et d'angoisse." (Long, [1971]). Some of these responses may be coloured by after-knowledge of the following decade. But Ravel himself would have been aware that his concerto was in some sense a legacy of a conflict which had cost his pianist an arm and in which he himself had fought on the opposite side.
| www.maurice-ravel.net |
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