From the white page to the staff paper: when Ravel got possession of Renard’s animals.
Abstract
In 1907 Maurice Ravel decided to convert into mélodies (typical French genre of songs) five prose works taken from the collection Les Histoires Naturelles written by Jules Renard; the musician’s aim was to say with music what the writer said with words, but from the work emerges a personal interpretation of the texts. This paper studies the musical adaptation of the stories through the analysis of the score and of the cultural context.
The little songs are a distillation of irony and refinement and, because of their apparently banal and prosaic content, they arose scandal at their first performance. Ravel’s animals do not display shallowness in order to outrage the audience, they aim to introduce a new idea of music indifferent to rhetoric and to inauthentic aspirations.Downloads
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