Ravel wrote something so difficult he couldn't even play it, and he even dared to criticize others' performances! Linda Carducci and John Banther dive into a work that challenges the most virtuosic of soloists, its frightening accompanying poetry, and what exactly makes it so difficult.
Show Notes
Performance of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit
Alice-Sara Ott
The Poetry by Aloysius Bertrand
These translations are from PoetryInTranslation.
Ondine
"...I thought I heard,
Enchanting sleep, some vague harmony,
As like murmurings rose, all about me,
Songs, weaving many a sad tender word."
Charles Brugnot, Les deux Génies.
— ‘Listen! — ‘Listen! — It is I, Ondine, who brushes with drops of water your window’s sonorous panes lit by the dim rays of the moon; and there, in her silk moiré dress, is the lady of the manor, who contemplates from her balcony, the beauty of the starry night, and of the slumbering lake.
Every wave’s an Ondine swimming the current, each current a path that winds towards my palace, and my palace is built of water, on the floor of the lake, in a triangle of fire, earth and air.
Listen! — Listen! — My father beats the frog-loud surface with a branch of green alder, and my sisters caress with arms of foam fresh islands of reeds, irises, water lilies, or laugh at the bearded weeping-willow fishing the stream.’
Murmuring her song, she begged me to set her ring on my finger, to wed an Ondine and visit her palace, there to be king of the lake.
But when I replied that I loved a mortal, sulking and disappointed, she wept a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in showers of water, streaming white down my stained-glass windows tinted with blue.
Le Gibet
"What do I see moving about the gibbet?"
Goethe
Ah! Could it be that I hear the cry of the nocturnal breeze, or the hanged man’s sigh from the sinister gallows-tree?
Could it be some lurking cricket that chirps in the sterile ivy and moss with which its wood is mercifully veiled?
Could it be some buzzing fly sounding its note round those deaf ears in a fanfare of halloos?
Could it be some beetle that plucks a blood-wet hair from his naked head, in its uneven flight?
Or some spider embroidering half-an-ell of muslin as a cravat for his broken neck?
It’s the bell that rings on the city wall, below the horizon, and below the carcass of the hanged man lit by the setting sun.
Scarbo
"He looked under the bed, in the sideboard,
in the hearth — no one there. He failed
to see how he had entered or escaped."
Hoffman, Night Pieces.
Oh! How often I’ve heard and seen Scarbo, when at midnight the moon shines in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees!
How often I’ve heard his murmur of laughter in the shadows of my alcove, and his nails squeak on the silk of the curtains round my bed!
How often I’ve seen him descend from the cornice, pirouette on one foot, and roll through the room like a spindle loosed from a witch’s distaff.
If I thought he’d grown faint, now the dwarf loomed between myself and the moon, like the bell-tower of a Gothic cathedral, the golden bell on his pointed cap ringing!
But soon his body turned blue, as diaphanous as the wax of a taper, his face turned pale as the wax of a candle – and he was suddenly extinguished.
Transcript
00:00:00
John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we're your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's Linda Carducci, and we're diving into one of the most difficult works in the entire piano repertoire, Gaspard de la nuit by Maurice Ravel. It's not just difficult, but the poems they are based on are quite a fright too. So, we explore some of that accompanying poetry, how Ravel creatively brings it to life in the music, and we talk about what exactly makes it so difficult.
Well, Linda, we probably could not have timed this recording of this work by Ravel any better. I mean, he turns 150 today, right? I mean, it's March 7th. We usually don't say when we record things, and we totally planned this, right? We can fib. This was totally planned, not fortuitous at all. But what a great time to talk about Ravel, and I think we're going to hear more Ravel throughout 2025 as we celebrate more of his 150th.
00:01:06
Linda Carducci: I'm thrilled because I've always been a Ravel fan. I think sometimes he's not played enough. His music is so inventive and innovative, not quite like Debussy, who was a contemporary, an older contemporary, but still, Ravel has a lot of value to be discovered.
00:01:23
John Banther: We're going to discover in this work Gaspard de la nuit, some pretty difficult things. This is in three movements, and each is based on a poem from Gaspard de la nuit, written in 1836 by Aloysius Bertrand. To translate, Linda, I guess it's like gaspar is French for Caspar, not the ghost, but rather an ancient Persian name for treasurer. So, like someone in charge of the night with this.
00:01:50
Linda Carducci: Yeah, that's right. So, gaspar in this sense is not really a proper noun, like a name like Caspar the Friendly Ghost. It's more of gaspar as an identification, a noun of a treasurer, a treasurer of the night, someone who holds the night's secrets. I think it's important to just keep thinking about night as we talk about this entire work because night overshadows it a little bit.
00:02:14
John Banther: This is a writer I'm not really familiar with at all, but from all of my reading and stuff on this, I think a quick comparison to maybe something more relatable to us would be like Edgar Allan Poe, creepy, macabre type elements.
00:02:31
Linda Carducci: Yes. Some of these were designed to be musings that occurred at night, musings about life and love. What is art? That's some of the things that were discovered within these poems. They're also somewhat based in the medieval time. So, that adds another little maybe layer of creepiness to them.
00:02:50
John Banther: Okay. I mean, a lot of those old fairy tales had pretty scary themes in them. This piece is scary for pianists. I read Linda on looking at piano forms. I've seen things like this piece is honestly insane. Another said, talking about the third movement, Scarbo is a nightmare. Then I found, I think it was like a 14- year- old, a teenager talking about their skills and what they play and basically asking, " Am I ready to play this?" One of the replies was no one is ready ever.
00:03:19
Linda Carducci: When someone compiles a list of the most difficult piano pieces of all time throughout history, this is going to be very near the top of the list, if not number one.
00:03:33
John Banther: We'll jump into the first movement now, Ondine. I think part of the magic of Ravel is his creative voicing, the harmonies, the way he's able to blur lines at times. Right from the start of this one, that's what we get. We get this ethereal sound that lures us in. Perhaps it is a water nymph visiting at night, and there's an accompanying poem. Maybe you can read some of this, Linda.
00:03:59
Linda Carducci: Sure. Listen. Listen. It is I, it is Ondine, who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your windows, lit by the gloomy rays of the moon. Here in gown of watered silk, the mistress of the Chateau gazes from her balcony on the beautiful starry night and the beautiful sleeping lake.
00:04:22
John Banther: The sound that we hear right from the beginning I think is ethereal because of just some things he's doing in the music. Well, he's doing an incredible amount of things in the music, but one thing we can look at in the beginning, he has a C sharp major chord that alternates with like a flattened sixth. What he's doing here, what it sounds like when he's alternating between these, it's giving it like a major chord and then an augmented chord sounds. The harmony is blurred in a way that feels like water rippling around.
00:04:53
Linda Carducci: By the way, this is a device that Ravel uses sometimes, not just in Gaspard de la nuit, but with his other work, augmented chords. It gives sometimes an exotic interesting sound.
00:05:04
John Banther: Yes. The theme that begins is underneath this, not just in volume, but also like in the register. It's literally below. Usually, the accompaniment is lower and the melody is higher, but it's flipped and it sounds like something beautiful underneath the surface of the water. He eventually transposes it to different places, brings it up higher, but it's all contained within like a perfect fifth too.
00:05:31
Linda Carducci: It's amazing. So, what are we hearing and what are we seeing? What world is Ravel creating with this? Is it really a water nymph that we're creating, or is it just our imagination that we think we see something underneath that water as the water ripples and there are different colors of it?
00:05:48
John Banther: Yeah, when you see something like a big shadowy figure and then it's actually like just hundreds of fish scattering in a different direction. I like that. Now the first movement has the longest poem with it too, but we're not going to go into the entire thing. We'll put a link on the show notes page. But Linda, what else is happening here within the music that is being brought out from the poem?
00:06:12
Linda Carducci: Well, he's creating a world of fantasy, of course. He's creating, based on one of the poems in this collection you and I were just talking about, a man who dreams. In his dream, he thinks he sees a water nymph underneath the surface and she's calling out to him. Now, a water nymph were minor female characters in ancient Greek folklore, and generally, they personified things in nature like water or forests or trees or something like that.
So, here, this man, we think he's dreaming, thinks he sees a water nymph and she's trying to entrap him. She's flirtatious with him. She goes through all these different physical movements within the water to flirt with him. She's teasing him and she's seducing him. She then claims she loves him. She wants him to come to her water castle and she wants to give him her ring.
00:07:05
John Banther: Sounds nice.
00:07:05
Linda Carducci: It does, until he rejects her.
00:07:08
John Banther: Okay.
00:07:09
Linda Carducci: Then things turn a little turbulent because she doesn't take the rejection well or maybe she does. Maybe she's mocking him.
00:07:18
John Banther: Well, we will get to that rejection. It is such a moment in music, talking about the augmented aspects that he brings into this and other works, as you said. Part of it is also he's alternating between these two chords, but then he goes to more scale like passages that are like whole tone scales, where you're just going up in whole steps, not in major seconds or a minor second to build a major or minor scale. It's in whole tones. So, it's actually that familiar, I think, for us '90s TV dream sequence that is brought out for us.
One of the extraordinary moments, and I feel like we're going to say they're all extraordinary because they are, but there's this point in the music where you almost don't know what is going on. We talked about motion before, like parallel motion, things moving exactly in the same direction and by the same interval. There's contrary motion where they're moving in opposite directions. This is like the final boss of contrary motion. I don't even know exactly how you even practice this besides so slow, I could never even play it beyond one beat equals 40 or something or 20.
00:08:31
Linda Carducci: Yeah, you would have to.
00:08:34
John Banther: But also, Linda, this might sound familiar to people that like jazz, perhaps John Coltrane and Giant Steps. This was incredible. I'll play a little bit here from a video and I'll put it online too, where the notes are emphasized and you can hear pretty clearly what sounds like Giant Steps. That is so similar and familiar. I don't even know what to think of it.
00:09:15
Linda Carducci: It's really fascinating. In some ways, it's an homage to the greatness of what Ravel did here. You talked about these parallel arpeggios and this creates this turbulence in the water, this moving water. But I think what's interesting too is that Ravel just doesn't rest there. He gives us a melody within that. So, there's a melody in the treble that's played by the right hand, and it's played with the top finger of the right hand, what's known as the five, the five finger.
So, you're playing a melody in the top, but the rest of your right hand, the other four fingers are playing the arpeggio in parallel with the arpeggio of the left hand. You got to keep these things balanced in your mind. Plus, you have to remember voicing. You don't want necessarily all of them to be the same dynamic range. You might want the treble, the melody to be a little bit more prominent than the others things.
00:10:06
John Banther: I have a question on that because throughout this, one of the difficult things or what you're describing where you have to do so many things with your hands and so many things to keep track of going up and down the piano and with the different dynamics that are brought out like subito very quickly, I wonder how much of a sensitive touch does it even take to be able to move your hand one so quickly and then so softly on a key when necessary?
00:10:33
Linda Carducci: Yeah, very difficult because you're talking about control. So, if you're playing everything loud, say in your right hand, you can have a lot of power coming out of your arm and in fact your body, not just your fingers. But when you're playing something that requires maybe different dynamics within the same hand, then you have to have a little bit more power maybe in the melody, lessen it up a little bit on the fingers that are playing the supporting melody and supporting notes. So, yes, it requires a lot of finger control and arm control.
00:11:06
John Banther: I imagine also when you're playing something like this, you can't think about individual notes. You can't be thinking, " Oh, this note and then this note." No, because there are, from what I read, 10,000 notes in the first movement, 10, 000. You can't think about all those.
00:11:22
Linda Carducci: No, no, you can't. I mean, hopefully, you've practiced very hard. So, now it comes to you almost second nature.
00:11:29
John Banther: The opening theme does come back. It also sounds more like in a pleading sense, like now we're getting to that moment where you were describing. It sounds like she's in the final pleading or something to convince this man. I can read maybe the last two stances here of the poem that include this. She tries to persuade him to go with her. She finished her murmured song and begged me to put her ring on my finger, to be the husband of a water nymph and to come down with her to the palace as the king of the lakes. When I told her that I was in love with a mortal woman, she began to sulk in annoyance, shed a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower of spray, which ran in pale drops down my blue window panes. That is terrifying, isn't it?
00:12:22
Linda Carducci: It really is. You don't know what she's going to do. She's sulking in annoyance. She has been rejected. So, she's sulking and she's hurt. But in a split second is this wild, crazy laughter and this dramatic response. It makes you wonder, was she being serious with him all this time or was this just a joke she was playing on him?
00:12:43
John Banther: It's called a hobby, Linda. Can water nymphs not have hobbies?
00:12:46
Linda Carducci: Yes.
00:12:46
John Banther: I mean it really sounds like when that burst, it reminds me of something. I think it's in like the Little Mermaid, just this maniacal laugh and burst into the air and then down into the water. I would not be able to sleep after this if I was this person.
00:13:02
Linda Carducci: Ravel does it so dramatically too, doesn't it? All of a sudden, he just springs that on you.
00:13:06
John Banther: Yeah, and it's one of the effective uses of silence. It doesn't work unless you have this contrasting thing and then that silence and then the burst of laughter.
00:13:16
Linda Carducci: Yes, because preceding the burst are about... I think they're five measures of just very soft solo right- hand notes. You aren't quite sure what's going on with this. Why are we hearing this serenity, this peacefulness, all of a sudden just with one single note, very soft? You don't know what's coming. Then as you say, it's that silence. It's that peacefulness that bursts open, that gives you that element of surprise.
00:13:43
John Banther: Now, it was definitely this piece, I think, a surprise for whoever had to premiere it first. I mean, what would you even say when you look at this? I mean, how do you even premiere something like this?
00:13:56
Linda Carducci: Yes, Ravel, when he was writing this, before he wrote it, he was given this collection of Bertrand's prose poems that we're talking about here that are the source material. He read them and he thought they were fascinating. So, he chose three of them to put to music. He was a good pianist. In fact, he studied piano at the Paris Conservatory. So, he must've been pretty good and even won an award there. But by all accounts, he wasn't great and he couldn't play this. It's interesting you could write something that you can't play.
00:14:27
John Banther: Yeah. I mean, on one hand, if you're a pianist, is that a little embarrassing or something? Because I wonder sometimes when you see the music of Liszt or Chopin and they could play that music, but also when I listen to some Liszt after this, it almost sounds cute.
00:14:44
Linda Carducci: Yeah, I think he may have been influenced by Liszt, but he gave it to a friend of his, and the friend of his was the person who introduced Ravel to these prose poems of Bertrand in the first place. This pianist was pretty good. So, Ravel gave it to him as a friend of his, and this friend was the one who actually gave the premiere of Gaspard de la nuit, not Ravel himself. But the story I've heard is that after the premiere, Ravel was not happy with how this person interpreted it.
00:15:11
John Banther: I mean, I don't know what I would say if I played this thing and then Ravel was like, " Ah." Actually, I've had someone do that to me before, a composer. It was actually very funny.
00:15:19
Linda Carducci: Oh, really?
00:15:20
John Banther: That's a long story for another time. But I imagine I'd be like, " Well, lose my number next time. Don't ask me to play this. I spent two months learning this."
00:15:30
Linda Carducci: It also begs the question, John, if Ravel were living today and were able to hear all of the recordings that were made of Gaspard de la nuit and all of the performances, you go to the concerts and hear the pianists since his death play this, would he be happy with how they interpreted it?
00:15:45
John Banther: I think he'd have to be.
00:15:46
Linda Carducci: Yeah, I think so too.
00:15:48
John Banther: Now we go to the second movement, Le Gibet. Now I guess a little warning, we get pretty dark and morbid with this one. This is one of the more dark macabre pieces I think in music. Maybe there's no better way to get into this than just by reading the poem. Can you read this for us, Linda? All of these actually, they start with a little epitaph from something else, like a little line.
00:16:13
Linda Carducci: Yes.
00:16:13
John Banther: This one is, " What do I see stirring around these gallows?" A quote of Faust and then Linda, it continues with-
00:16:20
Linda Carducci: Yes. Because by the way, the title Le Gibet of this movement refers to gallows.
00:16:24
John Banther: Right, yes.
00:16:25
Linda Carducci: Yeah. So, the poem says, " What is it, this uneasy sound in the dusk? Is it a screech of the north wind or does the hanged man on the gallows let out a sigh? Is it a cricket who sings lurking in the moss and ivy, which covers the forest floor out of pity? Is it some fly hunting raw flesh and sounding its horn around these ears which are deaf to the fanfare? Is it the scarab beetle in its uneven flight, picking a blood- soaked hair from that scalp? Or then is it a spider who embroiders a muslin tie, a shroud for the broken neck? No, it is the bell ringing by the walls of the city below the horizon and the carcass of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun."
00:17:17
John Banther: That is creepy. This is something for Halloween or something like that. It is a very intense source material. There's something he's also bringing out from that in a very creepy way, which I think you'll talk on in a second. But a question I have for you, Linda, playing piano, it says, I think, (foreign language) . It's muted the entire time.
00:17:42
Linda Carducci: Yes. Yeah, it is. It's very soft. It's not only soft, it's a slow tempo. So, the challenge for anybody performing this is to keep the momentum going. You don't want anything to pause or stop. He's telling a story here. So, you've got to keep the momentum going, but doing so softly and slowly is difficult.
00:18:02
John Banther: I think this is another aspect of virtuosity or high- level playing that not everyone seems to grab because the point is you try to make it look easy. Playing something slow and so steady and not moving and this movement, it's nearly as long or as long as the first, but you do not deviate from this sound and from this tempo. It's very meditative in a way too.
00:18:27
Linda Carducci: Yeah. It's almost like a dirge and funereal, which is in keeping with the subject matter of a dead man hanging in the gallows in a very parched desert. I think it's interesting too, when the poem that accompanies this keeps talking about, " What is this sound? Is it a beetle? Is it a north wind? What is this sound I'm hearing?" No, it's these bells that are tolling in the back, almost like a funeral.
00:18:55
John Banther: Those bells are these B flats that are played the entire time. This is another magic of Ravel. He does it in a way that is not fatiguing, it's not aggravating, it's not even drawing attention to itself so much. It is very still. Sometimes it's obscured or hidden in a different register too.
00:19:17
Linda Carducci: Yes, it's persistent. This brings me back to what you were saying earlier, John, that we might think of Edgar Allan Poe and some of the creepiness in atmosphere he created.
00:19:28
John Banther: Bells, I've also heard this like, it also sounds like maybe just the squeaking of a chain, something just creaking in the wind gently. This man, that's so creepy.
00:19:49
Linda Carducci: If you consider that as I was mentioning at the beginning, that the title of this is treasurer of the night or treasurer of the treasures or the images of the night. So, if we think of this entire work, not just this particular movement, the Gibet, but the entire work as having a theme of night or darkness. It certainly does in this one, certainly darkness, say a nighttime as a man has died and the setting sun is now red and darkening things and we see him parched. There is again this theme of darkness and night.
00:20:29
John Banther: The reddening setting sun, I think that's like an emotion, or at least I get when you see the sun and it's red and it's dark. The night is coming and you can't stop it. So, I get a feeling of that too. Something that he does here that is also difficult. He writes in three staves. So, there's like three lines of music. In piano, there's the usual two, the treble clef and then the bass clef. But then he adds another bass clef because you're playing really low on the piano and it's just easier to read that way. Oftentimes it's just like a pedal held out note. But in here, he also writes moving lines. When I look at the music, if I didn't know what it was, I would think, " Is this for two people to play? How do you do this?"
00:21:12
Linda Carducci: Yeah, right. Debussy did sometimes a very similar device. It almost brings to mind an orchestra. He's thinking, " Well, I'm not going to restrict it to just two registers. An orchestra can go louder, longer than, bigger than this. So, let's bring in something else."
00:21:26
John Banther: It ends with the B- flats just ringing out in a very haunting Edgar Allan Poe way.
00:21:50
Linda Carducci: Yes. Almost like a quiet death, a funeral death saying the end is near. The end is near of this man. The end is near of this day. We were talking about it being very steady and slow, and the notes themselves are not quite as difficult. The hand movement is not quite as difficult as it was in the Ondine movement we just discussed, but it does require, as you say, a muted sound. So, that you have to have a very good hand control and you have to keep this continual onward movement going despite the fact that this is a very still landscape and there's a lack of action.
00:22:32
John Banther: For musicians, there's certain pieces that I have to play where you play every single beat and usually that's not good. You need some rest to either breathe or something. But there's times where in functions, I'll have to play something. You're playing the entire time like at a graduation, and it's oftentimes like a joke. Like before you start, you'll say, " Okay, everyone, see you on the other side of this." Because once you start, it cannot change. It cannot deviate. You cannot stop. It is all the way to the end. There are so many emotions you can experience when you are sitting there in that situation. But we will get into the final and nightmare inducing movement, Scarbo, right after this.
Now we get to the final movement, and one that I think really cements this as being a pretty intensely difficult work. It is called Scarbo. I'll read this epitaph and then maybe you can read the poem, Linda. I loved how you read the Gibet, but the epitaph says, " He looks under the bed in the chimney, in the cupboard, nobody. He could not understand how he got in or how he escaped." That comes from nocturnal tales by Hoffman.
00:23:48
Linda Carducci: Yes. The poem that goes along with this, again, written by Bertrand in his collection called Gaspard de la nuit, he wrote, " Oh, how often I have heard and seen him, Scarbo, when at midnight the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees? How often have I heard his laughter buzz in the shadow of my alcove and his fingernail grate on the silk of the curtains of my bed? How often have I seen him alight on the floor, pirouette on one foot and roll through the room like a spindle fallen from the wand of a sorceress?"
00:24:37
John Banther: I think fiendish is the word that comes to mind for me with this. It is a goblin running around.
00:24:43
Linda Carducci: Yes. What he's portraying here is an impish goblin that comes from folklore, and it's designed to be mischievous and bug you.
00:24:54
John Banther: Whatever happened to goblins? I feel like we just don't see them anymore.
00:24:56
Linda Carducci: You're right.
00:24:57
John Banther: What are goblins doing? But looking at some YouTube videos, there's plenty of people, pianists who talk about their interpretations of this. One that I've seen I think more than a couple of times is the opening couple of low notes, it's like the creaking of the door coming open. Then the repeated notes, it's that flittering goblin running around, rolling like a spindle or doing a pirouette, something like that.
00:25:22
Linda Carducci: Yes, that's right. I think Ravel so cleverly portrays that at the very beginning is very, very quiet, enough to bug you and wonder if something's going on or is it my imagination or is there somebody in here with me? He does that by repeating, I think it's a D sharp, if I'm not mistaken. I can't remember.
00:25:41
John Banther: Yes, it is a D sharp.
00:25:44
Linda Carducci: Plays that note incessantly, the same note over and over and over again, which is actually hard to do.
00:25:49
John Banther: It is.
00:25:49
Linda Carducci: Yeah, because you have to let the key release and come up before you can play it again, right? So sometimes you can't get your finger to work that fast. So, what you'll do is use different fingers.
00:26:06
John Banther: Even three fingers, and the way you're moving your hand is just a whole technique.
00:26:12
Linda Carducci: Yeah, to play a repeated note that quickly.
00:26:14
John Banther: So what are the especially difficult things here, Linda? I know there's the repeated note, which takes a lot of practice. There's videos just on how to play these repeated notes and how do you even approach them? Is it how fast you have to play? Is it the rhythms or is it the interpretation that you have to do or maybe it's a combination?
00:26:35
Linda Carducci: Yeah, there are actually a couple of things. By the way, playing anything on a black key is more difficult than playing it on a white key.
00:26:41
John Banther: Okay.
00:26:42
Linda Carducci: Black keys are more slippery.
00:26:44
John Banther: Oh, because they're the lacquer or something.
00:26:47
Linda Carducci: I guess. Yeah.
00:26:48
John Banther: Okay.
00:26:48
Linda Carducci: They're smaller. So, Ravel didn't care. I guess he gave us that D sharp and had us play on that black key.
00:26:55
John Banther: Well, he's not playing it. Why does he care?
00:26:57
Linda Carducci: He's not playing it. But there are so many very difficult things. I'll just mention a couple of them. Those repeated notes, as we talked about, he's got lots of tremolos going on. He does have three staves, if I'm not mistaken, at some point. So, we've got different parts of the registers of the keyboard playing at the same time. Lots of skips, lots of jumps all over the keyboard as the goblin is flitting around. It's portrayed with your hands flitting all over the keyboard. There's lots of syncopation.
The rhythms are very hard. They're very complex rhythms. But I find even just the notes figuring out the notes that he wants you to play, because he's got double sharps all over the place. That's common in his stuff is double sharps. So, just even figuring that out and everything is moving at lightning fast pace, but then he's got also different dynamics. So, you might be playing very loud one moment and then split second, the goblin goes to a silence.
00:27:59
John Banther: Yeah. I definitely find the aspect of moving from very loud to very soft to be actually quite virtuosic, especially with these big chords on the piano. I remember in school, I had to take piano lessons like an undergrad. I think everyone did. Usually, they make the grad students teach you because they're just teaching non- majors. I remember at one point, I did not take it seriously because I didn't take it as seriously, but I had this teacher and she was showing me like... This something I was playing is very easy. No, louder, forte.
She's showing me how she's playing it, and she played it so loud and strong, it was startling me. We were sat at the same piano next to each other, and she's hammering on the piano. No, like this. Just the one note. Then I try to do it and it's like mezzo piano at best. I'm like, " My fingers hurt." I frustrated that teacher. But that's one of the things, when you have to move so quickly from one extreme to the other, particularly with the piano and how you bring these voices out in the chords, that's hard. That's unassumingly hard.
00:29:08
Linda Carducci: It really is. It requires control that we were talking about before with the Ondine and with Gibet too, control because playing loud does not necessarily mean you're playing loud from your finger. You're using your arm to produce that power and your body in some cases too. So, you say you're in this mode when you're playing Scarbo and then you have to shift immediately, almost like the Beethoven would do that with subito pianos. All of a sudden, you have to go down to pianissimo and then a sudden shift back up to fortissimo.
So, he's got these sudden shifts of dynamics going on all over the place, and sudden shifts of mood that define Scarbo, this little goblin who's bugging somebody. So, there are times it's very quiet and you think, " Gee, is he here? Is he in the room? I'm not sure. He might be in the corner there. He might be behind the door, or maybe he's behind the silk curtain there." And then all of a sudden he buzzes out and it's very loud. That's what Ravel was able to create throughout this whole thing.
00:30:09
John Banther: I mean, it's basically like your worst nightmare when you're watching TV alone and you think you see something out of the corner of your eye.
00:30:17
Linda Carducci: My favorite part of Scarbo is toward the end, he gets into this very dramatic passage where he's got these big chords that are moving up the keyboard in both hands. Then he got these fortissimo and these accents, almost like, " Ah, got you." Then it goes back down and it comes back up the keyboard again. Then he goes, " Dadun!" Again, he's scaring you.
00:30:43
John Banther: It really feels like he has these moments continuously where it's like building up to something and then he smashes it down and then it builds up again and then smashes it down, I guess, like the goblin over here. No, over here.
00:30:55
Linda Carducci: That's right. By the way, I will say that there were parts of Scarbo when I listened to it carefully that actually remind me of Ondine the water in that he's creating a seamless stream of music between right hand and left hand. So, it may be starting down in the bass, but it's streamless. Sometimes the hands are moving separately, but just this streamless flow of music that almost depicts water. There was a specific part in Scarbo that does remind me of Ondine, which is the water nymph.
00:31:33
John Banther: Something that was surprising to me when I was reading about this and how people are approaching it, something I saw a couple of times is you don't need to do much. It sounds like with Ravel or something like this that feels in a way that you can really do a lot with or you have choices. People kept saying, " You just need to play what he wrote, and that's it." You don't have to add anything else to it. In fact, you do that, you end up possibly toppling the whole thing over.
00:32:01
Linda Carducci: Yes, that's true. I mean, assuming that you can play what he wrote, because it's very difficult. But if you can, you're right. There's no romanticization of this involved. There's no interpretation. We shouldn't approach this like we're playing a work of Chopin, for example, that does require some interpretation. This isn't romantic music. This is music that he wants you to just portray. I did read a critique once of someone playing this, and the critic criticized the player as injecting his personality too much and his own expression too much into the entire Gaspard de la nuit, instead of just letting the notes go, as Ravel wrote them, of course, follow Ravel's instructions because Ravel was very explicit in a lot of these instructions.
But yes, exactly, if you just play it as is, that will give you the desired effect. It's interesting, John, I think it's interesting that Ravel and his older contemporary Claude Debussy did not like the label of impressionist.
00:33:03
John Banther: Right. No, they didn't.
00:33:04
Linda Carducci: Yet there is some impressionistic elements in this entire work.
00:33:09
John Banther: Yeah, definitely. Especially I think the Ondine really fits that, but yeah, that's one he didn't quite like. Yeah, I just found it surprising that with Ravel, you just play what he wrote and you'll be set if you can play it. Now, the poem does come to an end with the goblin perhaps leaving or something. I'll read a bit of this. Did I think him vanished then? The dwarf appeared to stretch between the moon and myself like the steeple of a gothic cathedral, a golden bell wobbling on his pointed cap! But soon his body developed a bluish tint, translucent like the wax of a candle, his face blanched like melting wax, and suddenly his light went out.
So, this goblin, in the end, I guess, his light goes out. The goblin is gone, and these little moments that build up and collapse bring us all the way really to the end where it's like in the last minute we have a huge climax that... I don't want to say Musorgsky, but it reminds me of Musorgsky's writing. This big climax he has in the piano.
00:34:30
Linda Carducci: But I think it's fascinating, isn't it, that in this piece that is so dramatic has such dramatic back and forths and so many interesting dynamics that it ends in a whimper, very soft whimper.
00:34:44
John Banther: Yeah. I mean that the goblin is here and then the goblin is gone.
00:34:47
Linda Carducci: He's gone.
00:34:47
John Banther: Thinking of the door creaking open in the beginning, the door creaking closed, I mean also Michael Jackson thriller. That's how that opens and closes with a creaking door opening and closing. So, it's an idea you find in today's music and in Ravel's music and all the way, of course, and then in the words of Bertrand, which inspired this whole thing.
00:35:11
Linda Carducci: Yes. I'll tell you, if Ravel ever looked back and evaluated the music that he produced during his life, I hope he holds this as really probably one of the top, if not the top, because it's very, very inventive work.
00:35:27
John Banther: I don't know of any other piano works quite like this. Yeah, I listen to some Liszt. I think you mentioned also before you had written to me, Mephisto Waltz is by Liszt. I went and I listened to one and it's like, " This is so cute. I could play this." After hearing this, I could do this.
00:35:44
Linda Carducci: Yeah. It doesn't quite have the inventiveness, I don't think, or quite the programmatic quality that these works do of Ravel.
00:35:50
John Banther: Yeah. Well, Gaspard de la nuit, it is an incredible work. I mean, there are so many things to find within the poems that he used from Bertrand and little moments I think of inventiveness, especially with this goblin, which I don't know, the goblins have to have hobbies too.
00:36:10
Linda Carducci: Like the nymphs.
00:36:11
John Banther: Yes. But I really love this, and yeah, thank you so much, Linda, for especially sharing some pianistic insights for this that I wouldn't know.
00:36:20
Linda Carducci: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I will always be willing and happy to discuss Maurice Ravel.
00:36:27
John Banther: Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown.org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@weta. org. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.